The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - How Screens and Other Technologies Are Damaging the Mental Health of Our Children with Jonathan Haidt

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. Haidt is the author of multiple books including the forthcoming, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

live from the table the official podcast of the world-famous Comedy Cellar, coming at you on SiriusXM 99. Raw Comedy, formerly Raw Dog, also available as a podcast and on YouTube. This is Dan Natterman. I am a regular comedian here at the Comedy Cellar. I'm here with Noam Dorman, the owner, the proprietor of the world-famous, ever-expanding Comedy Cellar. Some have called it the Mecca of Comedy. Who called it that?

Well, Eric Newman calls it that. Does he really? When he's on stage, he says, you're at the Mecca of Comedy. Okay. We also have Perry L. Ashenbrand with us. That's controversial these days, right? Yes.

To be the Mecca of anything. There were no Muslims on the show. A little more political than we want to get. Perry L. Ashenbrand is here. She's our producer. And she's our booker. And she's an on-air personality, and she is Noam's foil of sorts,

bringing a more liberal point of view. Not anymore. She barely brings, what do you mean not anymore? Not. Not as Israel's attack. She barely brings it in. Anyway, we have Jonathan Haidt, who's an eminent psychology professor,

who will be joining us in a few minutes. But before that, we can discuss—well, I opened for Howie Mandela last weekend, if we want to discuss that. Sure, what happened? Where is he on Israel? He didn't mention it. Also because our drivers, I suspect, were of Arab derivation. And so that might have been what prevented anybody from talking, you know, in the car

on the way to the gigs. I mean... That's sensitive of you. I would have taken the same approach. Can't you guys put up the... No, was it like on Spinal Tap? You don't remember? Did you see Spinal Tap?

Where the chauffeur is talking to them. The chauffeur is talking to them. The chauffeur is talking to them. And they're just going, okay, uh-huh. And they're rolling up the window as they're doing it, rolling up the divider as the chauffeur is trying to engage them in conversation. Yeah, so you should have done. Well, we didn't have that. It was like an escalator.

They didn't have that. Okay. I don't think people do limousines anymore. Usually it's like- No, but they have it. I think they do put dividers in SUVs. Well, we didn't have it. In any case...

That happened to me. I was in a car with Judy Gold and I told her not to talk about politics or anti-Semitism because our driver... Let me just tell the listeners

to hang in there. We are going to have John Hyten. And of course, she started screaming about anti-Semitism. Yes, I can say that. I think was the name of her book. Correct.

She's living that out in real life. Well, the only thing I'll say about opening for Harry Mandel is, you know, I used to say to myself, you know, being an opener, that's the greatest gig ever because it's so easy and there's no pressure. But I find I get really anxious because, well, first of all, I'm always anxious. But I'm even more than normal because it's like they're there for him. And so I feel like they're going to just not, they're going to resent me as soon as I get on stage. Because, like, you know, the announcer says, are you ready for an evening with Howard Mandel?

Woo! But first. And then I go on. And they're nice. And they don't seem to be at all upset by the fact that I'm taking up 25 minutes of their time. But I always feel that they will. And so I get anxious because I don't need. But I've asked you this so many times after you do it and you see time and time again

that it's not true and they're happy to see you and they love you and they think you're so funny. Time and time again, I don't have cancer, but every time I go to the doctor, I think this is it. No, Dan's right. Nobody wants to see the opener. That's not true. I think in comedy, it's, I think in comedy, it's a lot less true than it is in music.

Because in comedy, in music typically, at least the shows I've seen, the opener is like. They're funny. It's funny. The comics are funny that open for big name comics. And hopefully the big name comic chooses somebody that they think their audience will like. That's right. I think my problem is that, and I guess I'm not that representative.

No. There's never a show, almost never a show that I go to that isn't longer than I want it to be. That's every time you leave the house. So like anytime I go to a Broadway show, no matter how great it is, I'd be very happy if the intermission had leave the house. So like anytime I go to a Broadway show, no matter how great it is, I'd be very happy if the intermission had been the end.

And except for a few amazing concerts I've seen over the years that I really hung on till the end. So if I'm going to see a headlining comedian, I know they're going to do about an hour. Yeah, they do about an hour. But an hour is not that much time compared to a Broadway show, which is going to be two and a half hours.

Right, but an hour is as much time as I really want to be there. You're not representative. I'm adding up the openness like this. There's two openness. I'm like, oh, fuck. I'm going to be here for two hours. It doesn't matter how funny you are. You're not representative.

I don't think you're representative. Let's ask Max, who's a younger guy and a comedy fan, I guess. Well, he's also a comic. Oh, Max, you do comedy? Yeah. Max is our sound person. Engineer. Sound engineer, whatever you want to call him.

She's correct. She finds a politically correct woke problem with everything. Apparently, you don't call them sound people anymore. They're sound engineers. Well, I mean, you know. Send your letters. Sound dude. Yeah. engineers well i mean oh sorry send your letters um sound dude yeah what uh what is your take on what gnome is saying do you are you a consumer of comedy you do comedy but do you consume it yeah i like comedy i i would like the opener i like the whole show on that but i agree with gnome

with uh probably any other any other like a musical or anything else i would want things to be shorter like a movie but yeah stand-up's the one thing where I would like... Well, because again, he was only doing an hour. Now, Louis, I opened for him and he did longer. So, you know, he might have done an hour. When I went to Chicago and you and Vecchione opened for Louis, right? Yeah. And it was great.

Everybody loved it. You guys are not representative. We live in this world. We see comedy all the time. People are coming out. They usually, you know. It has nothing to do with that. No, it has everything to do with that.

No, I just, I said it's any kind of show. For you, though, because you live outside. You live in the entertainment industry. You watch the best comedians every night. It's not just comedy. It's movies. It's Broadway shows. It's... Noam has a short attention night. It's not just comedy. It's movies. It's Broadway shows. It's...

Noam has a short attention span. It's... Not if he's on stage playing music. He doesn't, right? Things are longer than they need to be. You don't like to leave the house. Anyway, I do think there's... In addition to what you're saying,

and I don't think you're representative of most people, because I think an hour... I think most people... Look, the people that come here to the cellar, it's an hour and a half show. Correct? Yeah. You know, in a nightclub, it's not as bad for me because you have somebody waiting on you, you get something to eat.

But like the whole ordeal of going to like Madison Square Garden and the getting there and the tickets and going through the metal, it's such a fucking ordeal. I can't, I'm already wanting to come home by the time I sit down. Well, you're obviously an extreme case of homebody-ness. It's not to be home. You guys are putting thoughts. It's not to be home. So where do you want to be?

Home. No, I'm happy to be at the Olive Tree. I'm happy to be at Friends House. I'm happy to be at dinner. I don't mind going to dinner. I just don't want to see an. I'm happy to be at dinner. I don't mind going to dinner. I just, I don't want to see an opener, that's all. I went home one night, and my wife is up

in bed. She's reading. She says, how was the show? I said, the show was great. I'm looking at her. My wife is beautiful and sexy, and I went, honey, you want to? She didn't want to, but this was her excuse. She goes, Howie, it's 1.30 in the morning. You know what I wanted to say? What time does your vagina close?

Why don't you just lower your panties so I can read the hours and I will never be late again. I told that on the Tonight Show and I was so afraid to go home because I know that she had watched it. But I went home. Let me tell you how funny and beautiful the girl I married is. She answers the door with a note on her pants.

You know what it said? Back in 20. Can we talk about Israel now? Yes, let's. Well, do you have anything new to discuss? Well, yeah. Except that you said to me, maybe it was a week ago, maybe it was two weeks ago, you're now on Twitter, somewhat active on Twitter,

and you said to me, it's a bad habit, I'm not going to do it anymore, and you're still doing it. Yeah, it's making me sick. And people are coming at you obviously very hard on Twitter because that's what people do on Twitter. Not too hard, not too hard. I think somebody's what people do on Twitter. Not too hard. Not too hard. I think somebody called you.

I mean, they're pretty harsh. But what I have noticed, and this is not the first time I've noticed this because I've dealt with this when I got a lot of hate mail when Louis was the hot issue. People will come at you very hard. And then if you don't react in kind, if you say something,

you know, reasonable and measured, and maybe a little joke, slightly joking, but just they get it. You can see it. Next day I say, I'm sorry.

I, you know, you're right. I shouldn't have come at you like that way. You know, like they, they, they will back down and then they'll say, I'm sorry. You're right. I shouldn't have come at you like that way. They will back down.

And then they'll... And they'll get into the human being on the other side. Yeah, yeah. Because now it's easier for me to do that because I actually don't stake out. I'm not posting outrageous material on Twitter. I'm not posting these memes about how... the Palestinians are or displaying a lack of care. There are people who are so harsh that I don't think there's any way back from that. But I think when I caused them to actually say, wait a second, did you hear what I said?

Did you listen to what I said? They realize, I don't really have that much on him. Like, I know he disagrees with me, but he didn't say anything terrible for the most part.

So, but the Twitter thing is getting to me. And like, just before we started, there's this new thing there with the Gray Zone, Aaron Maté,

who we had on as a member of the Gray Zone. And there, I don't know's this new thing there with the gray zone. Aaron Mate, who we had on, is a member of the gray zone. And there—I don't know if this speaks for Aaron yet, but I fear that it does. They are all in on this notion that Israel killed these people. That it was friendly fire on October 7th. And they speak in a fuzzy way. Do they mean two people? And, you know, of course, friendly fire is always a possibility. Would it shock me if some people were killed in friendly fire when the soldiers came in to try to protect the kibbutz? Well, of course, you know, this happens all the time. Traditionally under the law, the people are still guilty of the murder, even if they're killed with friendly fire because they brought that situation to bear.

But there really is no evidence of – there's no proof of any friendly fire casualties. It does seem like maybe one or two people may have died from friendly fire. And that's nothing for Israel to be ashamed of. That's not like – that doesn't let Hamas off the hook in any way. But as I've said for many years already, but it's just getting worse, the big – the thing that really worries me about our current climate hasn't been free speech. It's the cancer of conspiracy theories. Yes. They're everywhere.

And they are not sufficiently stigmatized such that some of the most important figures allow them to be spun out without really challenging them. Now, I've had people on here who I think have, you know, played with conspiracy theories. But then I have my homework. I'm ready to challenge them. I want to expose that they're conspiracy theories, but a lot of shows now I see on, or I hear on podcasts,

they just let these guys come out there and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they're not challenged, and they spread into the bloodstream, and nobody knows what to believe anymore. Tucker Carlson is saying that, you know, we have dead aliens, and we're studying their weapon systems in the American government. He's really saying this.

And that aliens from other planets are killing cattle and we need to – men should be tanning their balls for more testosterone. Are you serious? That's the one that got you. That's the only one which is sort of... That's the one which is sort of plausible. We're one degree of separation from Tucker via our friend

Michael. Who? Michael Moynihan. Oh yeah, we should be able to get Tucker. We should try to get... I don't know. And then JFK Jr. says that COVID was engineered to avoid Ashkenazi Jews. And then of course there's all the, there's all the quasi true stuff. Like, yes, it's true.

There, the vaccines weren't as effective as we were told. Yes. Mask mandates aren't as effective as we were told. Yes. The lockdowns probably might've been a bad idea, at least it, or at least definitely went on too long. There's all sorts of these facts.

And you know, I was always open to these facts that I just mentioned now, all through in COVID. I was always someone who was like, well, let's consider it. But it goes to like masks don't work. The vaccine doesn't work.

Which is, you know, which seems to me to be crazy talk. And we see it now with Israel as well. And what don't we see it with? Ukraine has all these conspiracies. There's bioweapons labs in

Ukraine, apparently. And Nazis and... You know, Michael Shermer might be a good guess. He wrote a book about why people believe weird things. Oh, yeah. I'd love to have where he explored, you know, what you're discussing, why conspiracy theories exist and why people feel the need to believe conspiracy theories. And then Brett Weinstein. And he said that 9-11 was an inside job or he he clearly alludes to it without, um, but some people are, and maybe Tucker's in this category,

maybe Rhett Weinstein is as well. Some people just, they know, uh, a, uh, a good hook when they see one and they know that conspiracy theories are a nice way to get a lot of followers, maybe sell a lot of books. And so, you know, one wonders whether Tucker really believes what he's saying. Well, I mean, I said this before, that used to be you'd get the news, the Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, whatever it is, and then as you were checking out of the supermarket,

there'd be the National Enquirer and tablets like that. And from time to time, the National Enquirer would break some actual news, but you knew that if it was the National Enquirer, you took it with a huge grain of salt because... Except for the people that were regular readers of the National Enquirer, unless they were just reading it

because they thought it was good fiction. Yeah. But now, the stories that used to be in the National Enquirer have jumped the shark into the new media, which has no... There's no categories. Like you don't know people. Brett Weinstein is a famous evolutionary biologist. And he was the guy at, what's the name of the university? He was the guy who got on the other end of that sit-in at the university

where he wouldn't play along with the, where they wanted to have no white people in the school one day or whatever it is. So he was a good guy, and he was kind of— Evergreen state college. Evergreen. And he was kind of a good hero for people like me. But he's also the guy now spouting out all this nonsense. And I think it's damaging the country. By the way. It is damaging the country.

I think that this is also what you're seeing on Twitter. Yeah, but you believe it too. You're the one that Kentucky Fried Chicken is not real chicken. Okay. And anything you see in a meme, you believe. There's no accountability for anything. You can say whatever you believe. There's no accountability for anything. You can say whatever you want. And I think that people just hide behind their screens

and they just move on because it's also very trendy. You feel like, oh, I'm going to chime in here even when you have no idea what you're talking about. Now, we're going to have Dave Smith in a few days. Where is he at? Is he into conspiracies? Well, he tweeted some stuff, and we'll discuss it with him. That seems to indicate that he may be into certain conspiracies.

Something about JFK and the magic bullet. He tweeted, I think I sent you. Okay. Now, the JFK, like Paul McCartney being dead, the JFK is one of these conspiracies that I would put slightly outside the other conspiracies because so many serious people, including Lyndon Johnson, have believed that there could be more to that story. And there is so many weird facts about that. About what? About the way Kennedy died. Well, there's two aspects to that.

One is, was there another shooter? That's one aspect of it. And the other aspect of it is, did Oswald act alone? Was he under orders from the CIA or the KGB? So in terms of there being another shooter, I think that's probably the more far-fetched of the two conspiracies. For some reason, it's never interested me.

I don't know anything about it, but go ahead. And then the other one is, who gave Oswald the orders or did he act alone? That's the second aspect of it. Dave tweeted about the first aspect of it. The magic bullet. The magic bullet theory. Robert Kennedy, Dave Smith,

reposted a tweet by Robert Kennedy. And just because you repost something, I don't know if that means you endorse it, but... Usually. Robert Kennedy Jr Dave Smith reposted a tweet by Robert Kennedy. And just because you repost something, I don't know if that means you endorse it. But usually Robert Kennedy Jr. said the magic bully bullet theory is now dead. This preposterous construction has served as the mainstay of the theory that a single shooter murdered JFK. So Robert Kennedy coming out against the idea that a single shooter murdered JFK. Dave Smith reposted it. We'll certainly discuss that. Wait, so he's saying that it was not a single shooter murder JFK. Dave Smith reposed it. We'll certainly discuss that. Wait, so he's saying that it was not a single shooter?

Robert Kennedy is saying it. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. What Dave Smith is saying, I have no idea. But there was a book that came out like 15 years ago already or maybe more that was supposed to be the definitive research on the Kennedy thing that concluded once again that Oswald acted alone. People love a good conspiracy theory, too. I think that's a lot of what's going on.

It's a lot of fun. I mean, I would have liked there to be a second gunman. That would have been damn interesting. That's what's going on with Israel, too, though, is that usually these things are something that happens to somebody far away in a land you've never been to. It's some story, and there's a narrative, right narrative right like you understand life in terms of a narrative there's

a bad guy and there's a good guy and then there's an underdog and everything else all the facts especially now that don't fit that storyline don't really matter that much say it again. Yeah. I'm not going. Why? Were you not listening? Don't doubt. The main reason conspiracy theories don't generally hold is because large numbers of people can't keep a secret. The amount of people that would have to keep a secret for these theories to be valid is just untenable. Yeah, of course.

That's why I don't believe them. I don't believe the Kennedy conspiracy theory for that reason. What about Epstein? That's also we've gone back and forth on that. I don't believe that one either. That's one that I really don't believe and I know a lot of people believe that one. I do not believe Epstein was murdered

in prison. 100% was murdered. I do not believe that. Of course you believe that. I have a lot of good company in that belief. Well, I have a lot of good company in that belief. Well, you have a lot of company. And I believe, the other one I don't believe is that Jussie Smollett made up his... So with Epstein,

first of all, I know it's ridiculous that the camera wasn't working. Yeah. But if I told you how many times in my own business life when we needed the camera, it wasn't working, you would just freak out. It's such a common thing to have a half-assed organization that's just not on top of these things. But obviously, there's way more cameras in that prison than just the ones in his room. Every single person that comes in and out of the prison is on camera. They checked it. It seems implausible to me that he was murdered.

There would have been screaming. He would have put up a fight. How do you know there wasn't, though? Well, that's the answer to every conspiracy. How do you know? You could come up with anything your imagination comes up with and say, how do you know that wasn't, though. Well, that's the answer to every conspiracy. How do you know? You could come up with anything your imagination comes up with and say, how do you know that didn't happen? There are people that believe the Clintons gave the order,

to add another outlandish layer to that. Well, I also have another... I think Jonathan is here. There's another thing about the whole Epstein thing that I believe. I don't have any basis for this except certain common sense, which is that I know that Epstein

was into young girls. He was an ephebophile, right? But... Ephebophile? As opposed to a pedophile. But I don't think that there's any evidence that those people who joined him on his island shared his sickness or would have done such a thing openly.

I feel much more likely when they were on his island, they were hooked up with grown-up sexual dalliances. I certainly expect Bill Clinton to have done that. And so therefore, the whole idea that they'd have him murdered. Bill Clinton, he didn't have Monica Lewinsky murdered. Why would he have Epstein murdered? No, no, no, but Epstein provided numerous young girls. It wasn't like you went there and there was adult women to this island. There were a bunch of teenage

girls there. No, you don't know that. Jonathan, you want to join a conversation like that? We have with us and we're privileged to have with us. This is his second day. He was here with us years ago. But then he became

famous right when you were visiting us. And then he became like kind of... Turn him up, okay? I think you kind of became famous right when you were visiting us. We made him famous. And then we couldn't get him back. Nobody knew who I was until I appeared on... Is your mic working? Is his mic working? I don't know.

Let's see. Is it? Turn him up. Turn him up, Max. Also, I have a little... I have like a weird thing on my vocal cords, so I have to speak not too loud. Yeah, and I'm deaf, so I need you nice and loud. Okay, but...

In any case, Jonathan Haidt... Is that a polyp? Haidt. I corrected case, Jonathan Haidt. Is that a polyp? Haidt. Jonathan Haidt. Sorry, sorry. Yes. Jonathan Haidt. It's a little polyp.

Yeah, it's a little nodule, they say. Can I tell you one story before you introduce him because you'll like this? So years ago, Amy Schumer had, I think, a nodule. So she asked me for, this was before she was super famous, so she's already a little famous. She asked me for the name because I've was super famous, so she's already a little famous. She asked me for the name because I've been a musician. I knew so many singers. Do you know anybody,

like who's the best doctor for these nodules? So I sent her the name of the doctor. Dr. Nodale. And that day, literally that next day, that was the doctor that killed Joan Rivers. Joan Rivers died in a mishap. Okay, go ahead.

Yes, Jonathan Haidt. And speaking of which, he's taller than I remembered. What are you, like 6'3"? 6'2". Shrinking, now 6'1". But you have room to shrink. I don't. Jonathan Haidt is with us. He is a social psychologist, a professor at New York University,

and author of several books, including The Righteous Mind, The Coddling of the American Mind, and his latest tome, The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewinding of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Welcome, Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan Haidt. Thank you, gentlemen. And who am I talking to here? Periel. Oh, Periel. Oh, very good.

Hello, Periel. You've been gone a long time. You know, we don't have Calabria with us anymore. Yes, Calabria's gone. So, all right, I'm a parent. I have an 11-year-old, a 10-year-old, and a 6-year-old. And your boy is? My boy is 17.

My daughter is 14. I don't know your daughter. And you won't. So rather than ask you questions, why don't you tell us what is top on your mind on your book and what we need to know for all these parents raising kids now? Because this issue scares the hell out of me. to realize human children need to grow up playing. You know, for 50, 70 million years, primate babies played. That's what we do to wire up our brains. Until about 2010, then we stopped that. We began cutting down on it in the 90s, overprotecting.

But in 2010, when a millennial kid traded in her flip phone for a smartphone and then went through puberty on Instagram. She became the very first member of Gen Z. Because if you go through puberty on social media, especially if you're a girl, it's going to mess with your development. It's going to mess with your identity, your sexual identity. And so Gen Z is just really different from the millennials. And what we have to do is restore the play-based childhoods.

That's really what the book is about, how we got into this mess. And then some pretty simple things we can do to end the phone-based childhood and give kids back a play-based childhood. Can I just ask, before we get into that, was there a similar mental health crisis when the TV generation came along? No, there wasn't. There wasn't. And it turns out, so this is part of the reason I think we've been so slow to act here, is that we're in the boy who cried wolf. And every time a new technology comes in and young people embrace it, older people say, oh my God, it's going to destroy them. It's the work of the devil, you know, comic books and video games and television, all that. And because none of those were true, many researchers now say, oh, this is just another

moral panic. And like, oh, you know, the data is kind of ambiguous. Like, no, nothing's going on there, they say. But what I've learned is that television, while it did make us passive, you sat there and you were passive, but it was a large screen compared to what we have now. You usually watched it with other kids, your siblings or friends, so there was some social element. And a television can't train you the way an animal trainer trains a dog. Whereas once we gave kids the touchscreen, now you have this behaviorist psychology cycle where the kid sees something, they touch something, they get a reward. They see something, they touch something, they get a reward. That's how you train a dog to do circus tricks in an hour.

And that's what social media is able to do to our kids. So I have two questions about that. But first I just want to say I coined a name for the argument you just made many years ago. I call it the Elvis argument. All right. Lay it out. And the argument is always been, yes, in the 50s, when parents were

freaking out about Elvis, they were wrong. That doesn't mean I'm wrong when I don't want my kid to see simulated intercourse on MTV today. Just because it's been wrong in the past, it's tempting to say, oh, that's what they all said. But you still have to show that it's wrong today.

And it's sloppy thinking. That boy who cried wolf is a good enough name for that. Anyway, so I call it the Elvis heart. So in my mind, because I can attach it to each of my children, there's the lack of play mental atmosphere, indoctrination of my daughter, who's already post-pubescent, who's, she's already past the age of playing. You know, she's at the age where she'd be hanging out with her friends. How old is she? She's 11, but she's about to be 12, a little bit of an early bloomer.

They still play. They still play a lot in middle school. But not, but she's not running around in the backyard playing. Maybe she would be. She could be. But they are definitely in different places. And I remember in the book, you said something about boys have failure to launch.

Right. So, well, I mean, I'll ask you, are they all the same thing or are there two separate problems here? Because what my daughter seems to be going through is what seems to me will follow her through adulthood. This kind of, you know, young girls in their 20s

are also very badly affected by this stuff. That's right, that's right. So what we have to see is this is a complete rewiring of childhood. This is not like we changed one thing. And so that's what I call it in the book is the great rewiring of childhood.

And it happened between 2010 and 2015. It was the most rapid change in human consciousness in human history. And it had different effects on average on boys and girls. So for girls, there's lots of evidence. I review lots of evidence that social media is the main culprit. Now, there's a lot more going on. But social media harms girls in about seven different ways. So for some girls, they end up getting bullied.

And if you are shamed on social media, it's so much more painful to have everyone talking about you than it was, you know, in the old days when it was seven people talking about you. You know, in one story I read, you know, an Instagram group was formed, everybody but Cheryl. Like, you know, everyone in the grade forms this group to exclude this one kid. And I guarantee you, that kid was thinking about suicide. That's almost the definition. When you feel social death, for a 12-year-old, social death is much worse than physical death, because physical death is an end of suffering, but social death is the most powerful suffering, and it goes on and on. And that's just one harm method. Then there's the self-comparison, there's the perfectionism, which hits a lot of girls. There's the beauty standards that are impossible. So girls are really getting slaughtered

by social media in about seven different ways. Boys, it was a lot harder to understand because I thought, well, maybe it's video games. And the evidence on video games is very mixed. Some studies show some benefits for moderate use. Some show some harm. So it took us longer to figure out. This is work I did with Zach Rausch, my research assistant. And we really went deep into what's happening to boys. And the bottom line for boys is that boys really need rough and tumble play more than girls. Boys are nonconformist. They're physical. They can't sit still as much. They're more likely to have ADHD. They mature slower. So for all these reasons, boys need more recess. They need more running around time. Now, we began to crack down on that in the 70s and 80s, especially in the 80s after one of the Nation at Risk report. I forget which report. There were some major reports saying,

oh my God, we're falling behind Singapore. Kids need to, you know, kids need to do homework all the time. So we began cutting recess, lengthening the school year. For a variety of reasons, boys began kind of withdrawing from, you know, from the real world, from school. Because just at that time, home computers came in, and it was boys, not girls, who were interested in that. And video games come in, again, boys, not girls. And then the internet comes in, and that too is mostly boys, not girls, until the internet gets super social with Facebook and all those things. Then we even out everybody's online all the time. So anyway,

just to keep it short, the problem for boys is not social media specifically or video games specifically. It's that they have withdrawn from the real world to such an extent that they don't develop social skills. They don't develop executive control world to such an extent that they don't develop social skills. They don't develop executive control, the ability to focus. They don't develop ambition. And sex is so easy with incredible resolution online. And it's so hard in real life with girls who are anxious and politicized and fragile. So, you know, it's a whole mess.

And it's going to be very hard to see how boys and girls and men and women get together in the future. Because of porn. Well, porn pulls away the boys. The boys then don't ever cultivate any skills that would make a woman respond to them. You know, I talk with my students at NYU, and I think it seems universally the case that on dating apps, you know, the young men are the ones who really need boot camp. They really need to learn some basic things. Do you tell your students to go downtown? What do you mean by that? Sexually speaking.

I think we're not quite at that level of advice in my class, but I'll take that into consideration. And you know, he doesn't have any excuse of being raised on screens. He actually did have a child that he still excuse of being raised on screens. Go ahead. He actually did have a childhood. He still doesn't know what to say. Go ahead.

But, yeah, so we have to see that, you know, it used to be that to get sex, a boy had to develop some skills of approaching girls. And it was really scary. I mean, you probably remember what it was like, like, you know, stupid high school dances. Like, it's incredibly awkward. But you get up the guts to approach a girl. And now they don't have a chance to learn that. In fact, they say, I would never dream of approaching a girl in public. That's creepy and you could be reported for that. Everything goes through the apps.

And the dating app, that's got to be terrifying because you put yourself out there and if you don't get picked, your self-esteem is crushed. And by the way, in my experience, the dating app only gives you superficial things to go on. So of course, the girl's going to choose the guy who has the best picture. But in real life, that melts away pretty quickly. And you would see couples forming that you wouldn't expect because they meet each other. They get to know each other. If I can make a case for online, some guys are terrible in person i'll put myself in that category but really can shine bright like the sun via text messaging uh because i have a joke about that

which i won't talk about but but um you know i think this this gives a chance to some of the more maybe the more shy kids i think i would have done much better with girls had texting been around and had Facebook been around when I was in college. It seems like it would allow you to use your strength, which is humor, and that's true. But what emerges when you put a bunch of young men and women together on this is a kind of a marketplace where the women are mostly looking for a few traits. There's, you know, well-educated, high income. They care a lot about looks, as the men do. And so the market is such that a small number of men get all the responses, and they can have

sex with two different women a day every day, whereas the great majority of men get no responses whatsoever. But that sort of was the case anyway. No, it was not. It was never that the top five guys could literally have 14 women a week, but now they could. And it was never the case that the bottom 80% could have like one date a year. So it really is distorted in a way that is incredibly discouraging to

boys. And if you want to understand the incel phenomena, these young men, you know, men going their own way. I lived it for quite a few years. All right. Well, so what do you, I mean, yeah, what do you, you lived it even when you were young before the internet? Well, I was in college. I was a virgin until the age of 22, I believe it was. And even then, it was a professional woman. So I didn't have any sex, real sex, until 27, believe it or not.

No, he's not a therapist. He's a psychologist. I'm just giving you some background. But anyway, but again, I think I had nowhere to go but up. I mean, the internet could have only helped me. I mean, how do you get worse than that, right? Maybe you're saying I'm an extreme case, I'm an outlier, and I don't figure in the statistics, which may be the case.

Well, because when you're on the internet, everything is quantified, and you know that you're a complete loser on the internet for most of the boys. Because if you, you know, it's one thing if's one thing, how many times did you approach a woman? Like once a week, once a month? Never. I was too scared. Right. So your batting average was-

Same amount of time I swung at the ball in Little League. Right. Okay. So now imagine that you took 500 swings a day and you missed every one day after day. That would have been worse. That would have been worse. And that is worse. So it's just much more discouraging for boys.

Now for girls, it's not good for women either. I mean, the internet, it enables just so much harassment, so many perverts. I mean, it's one thing if you're an adult woman and you kind of expect that you should be able to handle that, although you shouldn't have to face it. But there was recently a report by a guy who worked at Facebook, Antonio Bejar. His 14-year-old daughter started an Instagram page because she was fixing up old cars with him. And they thought that was cool. They put it online. They got a good response. But it turns out that she would constantly be approached by creeps and perverts. And there was no way to report that on Facebook, on Instagram. And Bejar then wrote a memo to

Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri laying out exactly what was happening. Here's what we need to do. If we could just have a button to report this inappropriate approach, we could get data on it and we could discourage it. And they got the memo and they did nothing. So these sites, they've known for a long time that girls are really being chewed up here, and they just haven't done anything. Also, eating disorders, right? Yet another one. That's right. There are so many different avenues of harm. So when does this all cross the line, despite the First Amendment, into a product which is

dangerous that needs to be regulated by the government in your mind? Oh, it crossed that line long ago. Although, because the scientific evidence wasn't so clear even five years ago, I understand why we didn't act. I have many libertarian tendencies. I signed that Westminster Declaration opposing censorship on the internet, because I don't think we should be thinking about the internet as a free speech thing where regulation is stopping some people from saying some things. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about are architectural features and age-gating, age limits. So just as we don't let 12-year-olds hang out in bars or strip clubs

or we don't let them sign up for skydiving or base jumping, there's all kinds of things we don't let companies do to children, especially without their parents' knowledge or consent. Yet somehow we've thought, well, kids are going to get onto porn, so let them go to Pornhub when they're 11. Let them learn about anal sex before they ever kissed anyone. They ask them, how old are you? No, actually, they don't even.

Some of the sites do say, you know, you have to be 18. Are you 18? Yes. But some don't even ask. It's crazy. It's insane. It's crazy. How do you technologically prevent an underage person from going on a porn site? What's the technology that you would need to use?

That's right. So we will eventually need to age-gate. We either need to age-gate the internet or we need to keep kids off until they're 18. Now, I don't want that latter one to be the case, but we're going to have to get serious about age-gating. And what I propose in the book is a very simple solution. It's not perfect, but it causes no trouble for anyone whatsoever. It's very simple.

It's device-based authentication. I didn't invent this. I'm just channeling it. Basically, if you're a parent now and you want to keep your kid off of these bad sites, good luck. There's very little you can do. But what if you could give your kid a phone where either you set a switch in software or it was in hardware, basically saying, you know, I'm a minor. And so when the kid tries to go using her phone, using her computer, using her iPad, whatever it is, when she tries to go to either PornHub or Instagram or anywhere, and she's 12, the site can check the machine,

because there's all kinds of communication between the site and the machine. The site can check, oh, this is an underage phone. Oh, it's a device-based. Device-based. Now, here's an idea. Maybe you have, like, you know, a retinal scan and every... Well, that gets into, I guess, issues of privacy. But, like, you know, like, if you're

21, you know, you can... The internet knows who you are. Like, a face... Yeah, those things are technically possible. Then that gets creepy, and then you get into all kinds of privacy issues. So, I use Google Family Link on my phone, and that's pretty good. I can shut down a lot of things. I can see exactly what the kids are looking at.

I can schedule it. It's not as good as I'd like it to be. Wait, does this work on Apple, or is this for Android? I have Android. It might work on Apple as well. I don't know. Apple does give us some things in Google. Right.

So Apple and Google, I think, are at least trying to help us as parents. But I do know that in a certain way, it's futile. If she gets it in her head that she's going to want, she's going to go to some kid's house, they're going to have some computer. Right. That's the problem too, is that, you know, you're not always with them, right? And so they go to somebody's house and that person has an older sibling or who knows what,

and it's impossible. So now there's a whole other thing that's worrying me now. And by the way, I do want to say that my kids have gotten an enormous amount good from screens.

It's like how aggregate statistics and economics can mask things. So if the suicide rates are going up, the phones are obviously bad, but that doesn't mean that every kid is getting bad things from screens. Like my son, Manny, he's all into chat GPT and he's back and forth with it and it's no question in my mind, it's enriching for him and he's learning from it and his imagination is is kicking in so there but my daughter i say she gets nothing good from screens she's on tiktok and the stuff that she's looking at is superficial but what i'm worried about now and this overlaps with the political climate is this indoctrination that's right this bin laden thing scared me i don't know what she'sctrination. That's right. This bin Laden thing scared me.

I don't know what she's seeing about Hamas. That's right. There's conspiracy theories going around now that Hamas didn't even actually kill these people. It's a false flag operation. And, you know, I don't know how to prevent her from seeing that stuff. I don't know what to do. So I think we have to because the, so if you think about

when kids are most impressionable, when is the brain wiring up? And the brain is changing very rapidly in the first two years of life, but it's really basic stuff like walking and talking and vision in the first few years. And then it kind of slows down

and it doesn't really grow. And then, you know, and then you hit puberty and then you get, it begins wiring up as rewiring for the adult pattern from more from the back of the brain the frontal cortex is the last part to wire up so you know early puberty the first half of puberty is the worst possible time to expose your kid to bad influences and what do we do we say okay you know you're about to hit puberty you're

10 or 11 that's what we do in this country here here you go. Here's a device, and you can take it into your bedroom, and you can fall down into the rabbit hole. And not all kids will fall down, but 10, 20% will. And can you imagine a consumer product? I suppose there was a toy or a candy bar that really damaged 10 or 20% of our kids. We'd never allow that to happen, but that's what's happening. So how long should you wait to get your kid a phone? So, okay, so let me bring up the key idea here, which is why we, the key idea of the book is that we're all stuck in a, in many collective action problems. So I could answer that question from an individual point of view, and I would say, you know, probably 18. Like, you know, at 18, you're more mature, you know, you could, you could handle, you're more mature. You can handle this. But the reason why everyone gives their

kid a phone at 11 is because she says, Dad, everyone else has a phone, and I'm being left out. And so what I'm trying to do in the book is solve the collective action problem. And so I'm trying to give some just very clear norms. These are not the ideal, but they are norms that would make things so much better. So there are four of them. They're very simple. The first is no smartphone till high school. Just give them a flip phone. Flip phones are for communication. That's all they can do, text and phone. So flip phones are okay. But nobody give your kid a smartphone till high school. If we could all do that, then, you know. But you can't enforce that legally, so then how do you? No, it's a norm.

And it doesn't have to be 100%. If we can get 70% to not give, then what are they going to do? Mom, you have to give me a phone. 30% of the kids have one. Like, no, that's not a good enough argument. So that would take the pressure off parents. Now, how do you propose to make this norm, bring this norm, you know, make it a reality? I mean, your book, I'm sure, is selling well, but most people are not going to read the book.

So I'm in the enviable position that I don't have to persuade people of something. It's not like I'm going to try to say, oh, you know, I have to persuade people that, you know, cigarettes are bad or something when they don't believe it. Almost everybody sees the problem. All the teachers, almost all the parents, all the psychiatrists, psychologists, sports coaches, principals, everybody sees the problem. They just don't. They need a coordination system. They need a clear norm. And so I'm hopeful that when my book comes out March 26th, it'll say, look, let's understand what's going on with our kids' brains.

Let's understand why we all hate this, but yet we're stuck in it. And let's break the hell out of this. Can you convince parents and Periel that their kids are not going to get kidnapped and abducted every time they leave the house? I had a little argument with some parents recently because I was prepared to let my daughter get on a train and maybe make her way from Grand Central to the Comedy Cellar because I didn't at that age. I can track her on her phone because I want her to begin to be independent. Exactly. In four years. To take control of her ability to do things, not be scared.

That's right. When I was her age, when there were no phones, I'd say, okay. And there was a lot more crime. And a lot more crime. It was much more dangerous. Drunk drivers, perverts. It was much more dangerous in the 70s when we were growing up. Yeah.

And they'll be fine. Yep. And they will be. But look at her face. Can you tell me why? How old are your kids, Ariel? I have when we were growing up. Yeah. And they'll be fine. Yep. And they will be. But look at her face. Can you tell me why? How old are your kids, Ariel? I have one and he's 10. Okay.

Do you let him out? Can he walk around without an adult chaperone? No. In the city? Yeah. No. Where do you live? On the Upper West Side.

Would you let him walk two blocks to a... No. Why not? What's going to happen? Well, right now there is a mentally unstable homeless man that lives on our corner. How many children get attacked by homeless people? Have you ever heard of that? For some reason, I don't know why, but for some reason homeless people, you know,

they don't seem to attack children. Well, it's not, I mean, first of all, you might be right, but I grew up in Queens. She's backfilling the reason. It's not because of the homeless guy. No, I'm just... No, he asked me why. When we were in Maine, you wouldn't let him walk by himself to the arcade

in one of the safest neighborhoods on God's earth. I mean, if you ever read any Stephen King novels, Maine is the worst place. No, I wouldn't. Yeah, why not? Because I'm scared something bad is going to happen to me. That's right. We're all scared something bad will happen.

That's why. Right. But do you think that sending a 12-year-old on grants to make her way, snake her way from Grand Central? Oh, yeah. That is a great thing to do. That is a great thing to do. So, look, let me give you the stats on kidnapping. Kidnapping is almost unheard of in this country. The number of kids who are kidnapped, it's almost always by the non-custodial parent,

if there's a divorce. So if you look at the number of true kidnappings, like the FBI reports, like abducted by a stranger, it's around 100 a year. And a third of them are never reported missing because it's throwaway kids. It's kids who don't have married parents, who don't have parents. So kidnapping is zero points. It's not an issue in the United States. In Latin America, there are many countries

where you would have to do that. America's not such a place. But how would you feel about Perriel instructing the child on the proper use of a firearm? No, it's... Listen, he talks... Maybe it's not rational. I mean, maybe it's really... But it's dangerous because he talks in the book,

I'll let him speak for himself, about failure to launch. And as soon as I read that, I'm like, yeah, this is... I could see this happening to my kids because they're just... They're like being raised in a Skinner box. There is no world in which you can convince me that a 12-year-old girl is not—that it's completely safe to let her— Nothing is completely safe, of course.

Finish the sentence. Would you let a 12-year-old girl walk 12 blocks on the Upper West Side? By herself or with friends? No, by herself. Would you let a 12-year-old girl walk 12 blocks on the Upper West Side? By herself or her friends? No, by herself. Would you let a 12-year-old girl walk by herself? What time? 4 o'clock in the afternoon. You're not sure? Why aren't you sure?

But just this— Think about what you're saying here. All the way up to 12, your child needs a chaperone to walk in a very safe neighborhood in daylight. And when you were 12, when you were 10, you weren't able to walk outside? No. By myself? We used to go trick or treat.

In fifth grade? No way. Wait, how old are you? I'm in my 40s, but I grew up in Queens in like the 80s and 90s. Kids were not, when I was a little bit older than that, like when I was like 15, I was taking the subway by myself from Queens into Manhattan.

But I think there's a very big difference between 15 and 12. Yeah, and when we were growing up, you know, I mean, kids would, you'd walk around in your neighborhood. Kids who grew up in New York were out playing stickball in the street when they were eight, nine, 10.

So it was much more dangerous. When I grew up in New York were out playing stickball in the street when they were eight, nine, ten. So it was much more dangerous. When I grew up on 100th Street, I had to walk to PS75, which is on 96th Street. In second grade, I was walking by myself. But it was even worse than that because at lunchtime,

you could just leave the school and go to Broadway and get lunch by yourself in the second grade. And you learn to be self-supervising all around the world. right around age seven, that's when you send a cow down to the river with a boy,

you know, with a seven-year-old boy. I mean, at seven, kids can take on responsibility, and that's how they gradually learn to become self-supervising. And if you want to have a democracy, it's all about self-governance. How are we going to learn to be self-governing if we never let our kids be self-governing? I don't think that Periel is listening, so I think you need to tell her what pernicious

effects this is going to have on her child that she is being this protective. There's another side of the ledger, what you're risking. Okay, but I think that what you said really resonated. I mean, the kid's already a little off. When he's 18 and he gets a phone, he can go walk around by himself. But at 12? Okay. But actually, so, okay.

So, wait, just to be clear, you know, my book and my story is not just about phones and technology. There's two parts of the story. There's the decline of play-based childhood because kids must be out playing and it must be unsupervised. Not must, but it's much more nutritious, much better for them. We do that a lot. They're unsupervised. No adult, because if there's an adult around, the adult won't be able to restrain herself. I push you to do that.

I push you and, you know, we're friends. I always say, let them just, they're arguing. Let them argue. Yes, exactly. They'll be fine. But we do. We send them outside. They're in the backyards for hours by themselves.

That's great. That's great. That's true. Go ahead. Don't take all the credit for that. Okay, let them continue. Go ahead. But so kids need a lot of independence in order to learn to be independent.

And that's one of the reasons that our kids are so anxious is that we deprive them of play. And there's all kinds of interesting research showing that kids actually need risk and thrills. They need to be afraid. And you can see this in kids. If you ever take your kids to Coney Island, you know, there's all these different gradations of scary rides, and they're all talking with each other like, oh, I'm going to try the Thunderbolt today. No way. Oh my God, that is too scary. But then they kind of do, and then they come out ecstatic, and then they can go for something even riskier. And when kids learn to skateboard, you know, they learn to balance, but then what

do they do? Once you can skateboard down a hill, you skateboard down the stairs. Kids are dosing themselves with risk. That's how humans wire up and develop skills. What we said to kids beginning in the 90s was, how about if you never develop skills? How about if we just keep you, we'll treat you like veal, we'll feed you well, we'll worry a lot about the vegetables you're eating, but we're not going to give you what you need. Oh, and by the way, here, here's a device. You can watch anal sex all day long. I mean, you know, it's like, it's insane what we've done to childhood. Well, by the way, Noam reprimanded me for bringing up going downtown. This guy's talking about anal sex.

So, um, all right. Well, this, this, this worries me very much. By the way, I don't know if this is, um, allowed, allowed, if what I'm about to say, which is off topic, is allowed, but you tell me if you want. When you talked about this social pressure, to me, peer pressure, it's been something I've been thinking about for many, many years now. And I give a little example, and it ties in with what's going on now with Israel. For many, many years, I had friends who say they're center-left and friends who say they're center-right. And I personally say, really, what's the difference?

Like, you need a magnifying glass to understand what they really disagree about. I think the minimum wage should be $13. No, $12.50. No, center-left, center-right. But what I noticed about them is if they felt they were center-left, it was very difficult for them to say anything publicly that might sound like they were pro-Israel. Not that they—privately they would. But how long ago was this that you noticed this?

I noticed this four or five years ago. Yeah, right. Okay. But really now. Yeah. And I would say, stop calling yourself center-left because all you're doing is buying into this peer pressure. I said, I consider myself center-right. We don't really disagree on policies, but I don't give a shit what they think about me. And what we're seeing now, I know quite a few pretty influential Jewish columnists,

and I know what they're saying and how they feel about what's going on. They will not write wholehearted columns now talking about what's going on in the way that they feel about it. I believe because the peer pressure is getting the better of them. Yeah, that's right. And this is very dangerous for the Jewish people, actually. That's right. And this is very dangerous for the Jewish people, actually. That's right. It's incredibly dangerous.

So, you know, as a social psychologist, I think primarily about how we're affecting each other. And we all understand what peer pressure is, and we all understand, you know, journalists,

I think, are generally pretty brave people, much braver than professors. They write things. Those things are sometimes unpopular, and then people say bad things about them. That's always been the case.

But now let's go back to 2009 when Twitter adds the retweet button and Facebook adds the like button and the share button. Before 2009, the internet was not super viral. But with those innovations in 2009, the internet becomes super duper viral. But with those innovations in 2009, the internet becomes super-duper viral. Before then we called these things social networking systems because you could use them to connect with people. After that we called them social media platforms because everyone is standing on their platform shouting, attacking, shaming. And so 2009 is when the internet really changes in a really, really sick way. Before then the internet, we all thought it was going to be great for democracy, it's going to be this amazing thing.

And it was an amazing thing, it really was. But it's the move to virality that changed everything. And so to go back to your example, suppose you're a colonist before 2009, you write something, and then people write in angry letters, maybe they do a blog post about how terrible you are, maybe. But by 2013, now Twitter has become basically a little like machine gun shooting darts that everybody has a gun, everybody can shoot anybody. And if you're on the left, what they shoot you with is the word racist or sexist or whatever, homophobic

or transphobic. So people on the left, center left or far left, they cannot say anything. They cannot dissent about even a little bit on matters related to race, gender, immigration, a few other hot-button topics, because they will be like shot full of darts. It's really, really painful. And so that is what I think led to the spectacular collapse of courage among leaders in all of our epistemic institutions. Epistemic just meaning knowledge-creating. know, we're not necessarily known for courage. I mean, there were some really courageous ones in the 60s. But man, it's been unbelievable to me the way students can do the most outrageous violations of basic academic norms. They can shout down,

you know, they can threaten, they can intimidate, and nothing happens to them. The presidents won't do anything. There's been a spectacular collapse of courage. Journalists are less so. The journalists still do take risks, but they are too, like what happened in the New York Times with Barry Weiss, you know. So, yes, it's the change in the media environment, and especially Twitter and other things like it, that have really changed the way we interact with each other and that have led to much, much greater conformity pressure. That's what I was getting back to, is peer pressure, conformity pressure, was your point. Yeah.

I mean, I had a little experience with it when I had my whole controversy when Louis came back. I don't know, like 20, 30 people were tweeting at me, and I really did feel like the whole world was coming down on me. It was jarring. And imagine if you're 12 and that happens. Yes, exactly, exactly. Or 16.

Yeah. But I'm talking about adults now. Right, I understand. But you're a grown-up who has a whole world around you. You are secure. You're safe. Twitter, I don't think, is necessarily a plate. I could be wrong, but I think younger kids generally are not on Twitter.

No, but Instagram and- Yeah, that's right. All this happens on Instagram as well. Instagram is the big one. And TikTok is the worst in terms of what they see. Instagram is the worst in terms of the social dynamics and the bullying. I just get the feeling that back in the old days, if somebody was going to write a column that was going to be a little controversial, they weren't up nights like, oh, God, what's going to happen? Like you say, some letter, somebody will complain about it, and then I'll go back to work the next day. And also, we've talked about this before, it was a newspaper. It would go in the garbage, and the half-life was very quick. If you even wanted to find it again, you had to go to the

library, get the microfiche. So it disappeared. Now you can just bring it up. So it's forever. So you can really hang it around somebody. Well, like Shane Gillis, when he was hired for SNL, they dug deep into all his podcasts and his tweets. And they found tweets

on, I think, Trevor Noah when he was hired. And they found tweets on, I think, Trevor Noah when he was hired. Well, look what he said six years ago. He tweeted something about this or that. About the Jews. I think it was about Jews. But anyway, and Gillis ended up getting unhired from SNL as a result of old...

It's called Griebens Archaeology. He did. Griebens Archaeology. So, before we go, also sort of on Israel, on the commentary podcast, what's his name? Abe Greenwald. I don't know if you'll listen to it. It's a pretty good commentary podcast. He engaged in a little pop psychology trying to understand why it is that people seemed to be taking Hamas' side.

Yeah. What did he say? He quoted something from Cormac McCarthy. Have you ever read any Cormac McCarthy? All the Pretty Horses. Have you read it? Mm-hmm. Well, just to say, I started reading some of his books.

It's the most challenging literature I've ever read in my life. Every paragraph has a word I need to look up. And my vocabulary is not the best, but it's not bad. But anyway, it's kind of worth the effort. But there's a quote here. It says, the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror that men will not speak against it. Did I read that right? The wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror, that men will not speak against it, that men have just enough stomach for small evils, and only these will they oppose. Which I took to mean that when you do something that horrible, and somehow, like, you know, you hear about where women who are beaten, I've heard it described, they say, well, if he would do something that awful to me, he must love me because...

Oh, yeah. No, no, this is all bullshit. This is all bullshit, right? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it sounds good. Yeah, and it's couched in language that you have to strain to understand. No, I don't think that's right at all.

No, I think if you want to understand why Hamas is so popular, I mean, right, if it was the Palestinian cause, maybe you could understand, but it's literally Hamas for a lot of them. What you have to understand, I believe, is the way that reality has fragmented so much. There is no shared reality. Within each bubble, because the technology allows us to have these really intense bubbles that shape everything you think, within these intense bubbles, within many of them, they came pre-structured with this idea, this morality. In The Coddling the American Mind, we called it common enemy identity politics, the idea that the world is divided into groups.

These groups can be ranked in terms of power. That means that anyone who's high is bad because they are oppressors, and anyone who's low is good because they are victims, heroically resisting. So if many young people, especially at Ivy League schools, the most elite schools, this is the rule, less elite schools or schools in the South, the social sciences. They come believing that they sort of grafted onto the lens of their eyes is a filter that looks at everything in terms of groups and oppressors oppressed. So that's why you saw the celebrations on October 7th and 8th because people said, this is what decolonization looks like. Finally, the powerless are fighting back against the powerful. Also, there's an American sickness, which is because of our terrible history of slavery and racism, that has come to define the moral struggle for the left. And many concepts that made sense in the Jim Crow South, like structural racism, oh yeah, I mean, that's exactly what it was. Those concepts have been

incorporated into progressive thought. So they see everything in terms of structural this, structural that, oppressors, everything's black and white. And they've assimilated the Israel-Palestine issue to, you know, Jews are white, even though most of them are actually from the Middle East in Israel. And the Palestinians are people of color. So once you have these crude categories, they don't see human beings. They don't see babies. They don't see toddlers being shot in front of their parents.

They don't see parents being shot in front of their children. They don't see that. Or if they do, they just sort of, somehow they're able to look past it. So I think we have to understand the power of a group to shape your perception of reality

was always powerful. And once everyone got online, it became a hundred times more powerful. Yeah. And you're seeing real, we talked about it on the show before, real dehumanization of the kind that I've never seen before in my life, where it was just never considered acceptable and polite company. If somebody said, but you do have a problem with the fact that babies were dismembered, any decent person, even if it was just for appearances, would say, of course I'm against the babies being killed. But now they're saying, I'm not talking about that.

Or that didn't happen. Or it didn't happen. But even if they admit it happened, it's like, yeah, well, whatever. I'm not going to tell you I'm against that. That's right. I want to talk. That's right. And they're not worried about how that looks any longer.

And you begin to get a little flavor of how these horrible things happened in the past. Like we can't comprehend, how did the Holocaust happen? And it's a cliche, dehumanization. But now say, oh, that's actually what it looks like. Yeah, no, that's right. No, I have to say, I mean, I'm very patriotic. I love this country. My mother

always told me that America is the promised land for the Jews more than Israel. America is a philo-Semitic country. Jews are the most popular religious group in the country. If you look at the average, if you survey Americans, Jews are very well liked and respected. And so until a month or two ago, I thought, well, you know, of course it can't happen here. I mean, America is so different. America is, you know, we don't—so I was very, very confident as a Jew in America that it could never happen here. And what has scared the hell out of me is the survey data showing that the great majority of Americans agree with me on that, if they're over 30. But as you go down, the millennials and then especially Gen Z, they are evenly divided between Hamas and Israel,

evenly divided. It's not to say that half of them support Hamas. I'm just saying, you know, many of them are in the middle, they don't know. But the number who support, and it was one of the surveys, it wasn't the Palestinians, it was Hamas. You know, which side do you tend to take? More Hamas or Israel? And for Gen Z, it's actually even. So that scared the hell out of me, that it's just a matter of time before the consensus that has supported Jews and Koreans and all kinds of immigrants in this country, that consensus might be going away. If we can't stop what's happening to Gen Z,

if this is going to continue for the next generation as well, we're in big trouble here. Yeah, they define everything as these shallow things punching up and punching down, black people. There was a real price to be paid for abandoning the very elegant and self-evident proposition that all men are created equal and that you can't judge people by the color of their skin, the content of their character.

That's now considered racist. This was really, this held us all together. Yeah, that's right. And now it morphed into you can't judge us by the color of their skin, but we're punching up so we can judge you by the color of their skin. And that was always dangerous for the Jews. I mean, it was, you know, we talked about it. Anyway.

All right. Any last? Go ahead. Can I just say, because I started my list of four things and maybe some of you are thinking like, we got sidetracked on the first one. Please do. Flip phone?

Yeah. So the way to break these collective action traps is rule number one, nobody give a smartphone before high school, just give a flip phone. Rule number two, no social media till 16. They can have most of the internet, but why do they need an account on Instagram, TikTok?

Now, what if it's just their friends who can? But it just grows on from there. I mean, they can text each other. There's all kinds of ways they can communicate without having something that gives you a feed that is algorithmically guided and generated. Don't expose kids to an algorithmic feed run by AI until they're 16 at minimum.

And again, 18 would be better, but I'm just saying, let's just have a norm of 16. That is really doable. That's the second rule. I'm taking notes. Third rule is really simple, phone-free schools. The research is really clear. If a kid has a phone in his pocket, he cannot not look at

it. I can't either. But it's much harder for them because if anyone is texting or posting, then they all have to. Otherwise, they're out of the loop and they'll be embarrassed at lunch when everyone's talking about the thing that everyone was talking about during math class. So phone-free schools is a must. Every school in the country needs to just say, come to school, put your phone in a special phone locker or in a yonder pouch, which is not quite as effective, but still pretty good. That's the third rule, phone-free schools. That's a must. We have to do that this year. Is that not the case now? Are kids bringing their phones into classrooms? Most 70% of schools say that they ban phones. What they mean is they have a rule, as my kids school,

you can't take your phone out during class. So it's like, you know, you have a- But it's in the pocket. It's in your pocket, right. So it's like, you know, in a drug treatment facility, you have, you know,

you are not allowed to shoot up while you're here. Now you can keep your, you know, your heroin in your pocket, but you can't take it out. But cannot the, I mean, if the kid takes out the phone and the kid is reprimanded,

that's not it, that's not sufficient? But it's because they're not going to get reprimanded because the teachers are exhausted. Most of them give up. It's impossible. Yeah, it's impossible. The teachers give up because they have enough to do. You'd need a full-time phone police person hanging out in the back three rows. So it just doesn't work.

And then, like, you can't really check making them keep it in their locker either, right? No, that's right. Yeah. Keeping your backpack with a strict enforcement policy is better than nothing, but it's not nearly as good as a phone locker or a yonder pouch. So that's the third rule.

And then the fourth rule is far more unsupervised play and childhood exploration. And in the book, I talk a lot about my collaboration with Lenore Skenazy. We co-founded an organization called Let Grow with Peter Gray and Daniel Shookman. And we have some very simple solutions. One of them is called Play Club.

It's so simple. The school just says, okay, Perrie, would you allow your daughter? Son. Your son, sorry, your son to stay at 3 o'clock on Fridays. Instead of coming home or going to some organized activity, he just hangs out with other kids on the playground. And there's an adult not there on the playground, but just inside. They can get there. Yes. Exactly. So the school playground is the only place, really, that parents almost universally

would trust their kids to be self-supervising. So what if every school, especially elementary schools and middle schools, say, free play Friday know we have play club on friday we have somebody who's close by and just you know you sign up so it has the thing is it has to be regular kids like so they know oh yeah i'm gonna see these 12 kids yeah yeah sure boy is that fun when you have a group that meets up to play without adults that's fun so there's all kinds of things we can do with no screens exactly exactly it has to be no screens. That's right. Otherwise, they sit there on their screen. Yeah.

And when schools go phone-free, they all say the same thing. It's the most amazing thing. Kids in the hallway are laughing and talking. They're not silent. They're not silent looking at their phones in between classes or at lunch. So I'm going to actually take you up on the flip phone thing. I have a group of our entire fourth grade. None of the kids have phones yet.

And there's been, there are some pretty like big, like tech people who are parents. And there's been this big push of like, let's make a deal for nobody to get phones until they're 16. And I am going to bring this and I will report back to you.

Okay. Wait until 16 is going to be too much to ask in this. That's why I'm saying just high school. I think high school is the clear dividing line. Now that's great if they want to go until 16, that's great. But I think to make a commitment to high school is at least more doable.

But no, fine, I shouldn't say that. But you said no phones, flip phones only for anybody below 16, right? I didn't say that. I said no smartphone before high school. No smartphone. No, I think parents would be wise to go to 16. But the rule that we can all commit to

is just nothing before high school. So anyway, so those four rules, those are just norms that if most people follow them, even if half the people follow them, it's going to be so much easier for the rest of us who want to delay entry. Now, I've been doing something. She and I had a fight about it, and then she cheated.

But we've taken vacations. Our family's together. We go to Maine. And my rule in every – now, this is speaking from privilege because we're fortunate enough to be able to take vacations, right? But whenever I take a vacation, I do not allow the kids to bring any screens. And so we have like two weeks in Maine. There are no, they can watch TV at night, like I said, because TV is social.

Yeah, that's right. But they're not allowed to spend time on their screen. That's great. And what do they do? Do they like the policy or hate it? They squirm for a day and then they get used to it. Right. And do you see them doing things

that they wouldn't do if they had their screens? Like do they become more inventive? Just more present. And I will make one recommendation. I bought all my kids Amazon Kindles to read on. Yeah, I mean, that's okay. Because that's really just a book, I think. And that solved a lot

because they don't have the excuse of wanting to do it. Kindle is a great thing for kids because if they're interested and you touch the word, it gives you the meaning of the word. And I know that I depend on that. My vocabulary has really improved since I got a Kindle.

And I like the fact that my kids have that. And they can carry basically unlimited books at one time. That's great. I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, I'm going to start recommending. And you can't do anything on a Kindle but read. Right.

Right, maybe I should get him a Kindle. Yeah. So I... I mean, but Noam brought up the point that some screens are good. You're reading books. What about YouTube videos that are educational?

Yeah. Right, but so what we have to focus on is not screens necessarily, not just screens. It's when are we exposing kids to things that are rewarding or punishing, using algorithms, training them with rapid fire stuff. So YouTube, a lot of good stuff on YouTube, but kids can go down rabbit holes there. But YouTube videos are longer than TikTok videos.

TikTok is the worst because TikTok- Not YouTube shorts, though. Well, YouTube, that's right. Yeah, that's right. So it's the short duration. That's what fragments attention. That's what allows for the behaviorist conditioning. So keep your kids the hell away from any sort of short form video. YouTube Shorts are even, I've understood very recently, even more dangerous than TikTok.

Oh, why is that? I haven't seen them. Apparently, I just learned this the other day because they're uploaded so quickly, it's very difficult for YouTube to take them down and they're intentionally tagged with like inappropriate material for children. And there is this aspect too, that you have to know your own child, right? Like, and cause I do, I do see differences between my kids.

By the way, I'm not particularly worried about video games. My young kid plays Fortnite a lot. I'm not that worried about it. Video games is a little bit different. Almost all kids, almost all boys play video games. They love them. They generally have positive things to say about them, whereas girls on social media are very negative.

They don't think social media is very good. The problem with video games, there's two main problems. One is just the opportunity cost. So because these games are so amazing, they're not like the games you and I played when we were kids, like Pong or whatever. Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong, yeah, or Pac-Man. These are incredible immersive games. So they suck boys in.

And if your son is spending three or four hours a day on these games Which many do that means they're not doing a lot of anything else. That's basically their childhood is video games The other problem is that somewhere between about five and ten percent depending on how strict you want to be on the criteria Are addicted or at least it's called problematic use. It's called internet gaming disorder in one classification and This means that the they're on it so much, it's changing their dopamine neurons because they're constantly rewarded. And when you trigger dopamine often over time, the brain down-regulates those receptors to balance it out. So once your brain is adapted to the constant high level of dopamine, now when you're not playing

video games, you have too little dopamine. Everything is boring and unpleasant, and you're irritable, and you have conflicts with your family, you have too little dopamine. Everything is boring and unpleasant and you're irritable and you have conflicts with your family. Is that the same for porn? Well, porn, I mean, I don't know. They don't... No, is it like when you're a real person compared to the...

Yeah, except that I think, I don't know. I don't think boys are on porn four hours a day, but they are on video games four hours a day. But yes, porn does the same thing. Yeah, it desensitizes you to having sex with a real person. That's been well documented. That's right.

That's right. That's right. So with porn, the research is much trickier because you can't really do porn research on 14-year-old boys. So it's only with young men that they do it. By the way, you've dropped on us a lot of stuff about serious gender differences. Girls don't play video games. He's fearless. Girls don't watch porn. He didn't say that. Yeah, he He's fearless. Girls don't watch porn. He didn't say that.

Yeah, he did. He said girls don't watch porn. Are you getting any blowback from saying these things? You mean that there are gender differences? That there are differences, and profound ones, according to what she— I mean, I never even thought about girls in video games, but I guess they don't play video games. Well, no, they do play them, but not nearly as much. Not nearly—they're almost never addicted.

It's a 5-to-1 ratio of addicts. It's 5-to-1 boys. Now, what's going on there? not nearly as much. Not nearly. They're almost never addicted. It's five to one ratio of addicts. It's five to one boys. Now, what's going on there? Same thing with porn. What's going on? The porn we understand why that would be, I think. But why aren't girls into video games? So one thing I say in the book, and this actually I did think about whether I'm going to be attacked for saying it.

There are differences in the basic social needs of boys and girls and men and women, and it boils down to we all have needs for communion and for agency, but girls have stronger needs for communion, connecting, being part of a group, belonging, and boys have stronger needs for agency, meaning making things happen,

building something and then blowing it up, being effective in fighting a team, so team sports. So because of those differences, the tech companies know, ooh, if we want to get girls, let's talk about them being connected and this will connect you, and they take over girls' social lives about connection. Boys want to do rough and tumble play, but the world is saying, no, you can't. Oh, Fortnite, it's all rough and tumble play virtual. Now, you don't actually get scared. I watch my son jump out of a plane every eight minutes. I don't know how long a game takes. They jump out of a plane, they surf on bombs, they throw... But it's fun. But it's not like... When you look at what happens in the military,

I'm just saying the way that men get bonded together from facing real danger is extraordinary. And the way that boys get bonded together because they've, you know, played Fortnite a thousand times, I believe is trivial. Now I'm sure I'll get attacked for that because there are many boys who say

that their best relations are from Fortnite and they're probably right because they don't have the option of real-life packs. Yeah, he probably plays too much, but he's having fun. He's getting good hand-eye coordination for sure. He should hit that guitar a little harder. He talks to people.

I'm in the room with him always, so I see what's going on. Okay, but how many hours a day, and is it seven days a week? It could be seven days a week, but on school days, it's not that much. On the weekends, sometimes it goes on too long, especially in the wintertime. When the weather is warmer, we're outside.

Who does he talk to? Other kids. Were you that way with the guitar when you were little? The way he is with Fortnite? Maybe. Maybe a little bit, but no. See, I don't let him do anything

online that lets him talk to other people alright we can talk there we have to go anyway alright

thank you Jonathan Height The Anxious Generation How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic

Amanda Lewis I thought it was already out it's not out until March 26 that's right March 26 March 26 and can March 26th.

And can you pre-order it now on Amazon? Yes, please do pre-order it on Amazon. Pre-order it on Amazon.com. Okay, thank you very much, everybody. Good night. Thank you.