The Jordan Harbinger Show - 990: Jonathan Haidt | How Gen Z Became the Anxious Generation

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

Jonathan Haidt is here to talk about his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. What We Discuss with Jonathan Haidt: Social media and smartphones have drastically altered childhood since the early 2010s, leading to increased rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide among teens, especially girls. Virtual interactions on social media are disembodied, shallow, and can spread mental health issues among susceptible teens. Prestige biased learning causes teens to emulate influencers, even those promoting unhealthy behaviors. Smartphones and social media also enable sexual predators to easily target children online. Overprotection in the real world and underprotection online are both mistakes that need to be reversed. Parents have allowed kids too much unsupervised screen time while restricting their independence and free play in the physical world out of exaggerated fears. Schools and parents need to set clear boundaries around technology use. No smartphones before high school, no social media until age 16, and phone-free schools from bell to bell are key norms to establish. The longer parents delay introducing these technologies, the better. Although the situation is serious, positive change is possible when parents, educators, and lawmakers work together. Parents can start by giving kids more independence and free play time offline, schools can go phone-free, and governments can pass laws to make online spaces safer for kids. With collective action, we can restore a healthier childhood for the next generation. Small steps like "Free Play Fridays" for neighborhood kids can make a difference right away. By coming together to solve this, we can ensure today's youth have the space to develop into competent, well-adjusted adults. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/990 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. As soon as girls transferred their socialize onto social media, which was said to connect them, you can connect to your friends. As soon as they did, they got much lonelier because the connections are shallow. And the same thing for the boys. As soon as they moved from other kinds of video games and hanging out as you did to sitting alone playing multiplayer video games, they got lonelier. And so, yes, it connects you to everyone in the world,

except the people around you, and that means you get lonelier. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional money laundering expert, hacker, real-life pirate, special operator, or tech luminary. And if you're new to the show or you're looking for a way to tell your friends about the show. I suggest our

episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation and cyber warfare, AI, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, Jonathan Haidt returns. He's a social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at the New York University Stern School a business. He studies psychology of morality, moral emotions, and also social media and how it rots your brain. We're going to dive into the science of social media and what it actually does to our brains, especially to Gen Z, the first to have a phone-based childhood, as he's coined it.

Turns out, we're just not evolved to deal with the social consequences of social media. And that burden is largely falling on young people who are suffering from social and sleep deprivation and mental illness, even as their brains are being hijacked by this technology. There's a whole lot to unpack here. It is a fascinating conversation. We use just about every single minute that we had. Here we go with Jonathan Haidt. I'm glad to have you back on the show.

And since we did an episode, which, I mean, what was that? Like five years ago? This is probably about the coddling the American mind. I don't think I'm not even sure what year it was. Yeah, it was a while ago. So that was 2018. Yeah, of 2018. Pre-kids, pre-pandemic for this guy.

The problem of kids and phones since then and social media has gotten at least a hundred times worse, if not in order of magnitude above that. And as a newish parent of young kids, two and four, this is really one of those things that keeps me up at night, not just for them, but because I'm 44, and I can also feel my own sanity slowly being sucked away by this device in my pocket. And I can't imagine growing up

where this is just like a part of your identity almost or an extension of your body. So I would say that since 2018, things have gotten maybe two or three or four times worse, But what's changed is that in 2017, we didn't know what was going on. We didn't know what it was. And I would say the evidence, the analysis, our ability to understand what these devices are doing for us, that's what has increased so greatly. Before the pandemic, you know, Gene Twenge and Greg Lukianoff and I and Lenore Skenezy, we were all saying what kids really need is more time outside unsupervised and less time sitting home on screens. And we said that this is part of the reason why rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide are going. This is 2019. So then COVID comes in and confuses everybody. It's hard to see what's going on.

Kids mental health is clearly really bad. And what does it the kids get? The exact opposite of what they need. They get no more time outside. You know, even you can't go outside and play with a friend. You know, you might, you can't throw a ball because there might be germs on the ball. So sit inside and be on your screen all the time, on your screen for school, on your screen for

friendship. So things were bad in 2019. And then they got worse during COVID. And now that COVID's gone, they haven't gotten better. So the lines keep going up. And I think what I'm arguing in the book in The Anxious Generation is that now we know, we didn't know in 2012 when we were letting our kids up, but now we know we've overprotected our kids in the real world and we've underprotected them online. And we have to reverse both of those mistakes. Yeah, that's interesting about the protection levels

online and offline. Gen Z, is it fair to say they've grown up with social media? It sounds like hyperbole because social media is, well, it's not that new, right? No, that's right. There are two phases of social media. So, I mean, even the millennials, they had AOL and they had things in the 90s, but those weren't social media of the sort of super viral kind we know. The early phase is 2003 to about 2009. That's when you get MySpace and Facebook. And they're not super viral. They're actually called social networking systems. And it's all about you connect to people. We all thought, oh, you know, that's pretty good to connect people. But in 2009, things really change. You get the like button and the retweet button. You know, all of a sudden,

the platforms are not about, hey, you connect with me. It's, I put this thing out there, and it goes in their timeline, and it tries to get a reaction. And if I do get a reaction, then they retweet it, they share it. And I can go viral. And so it's after this point that social media really becomes incredibly destructive. It's all about mob dynamics, going viral. And that, I think, is when social media becomes very harmful to democracy. And that's what got me into this issue originally. What's it doing to democracy? And that's also what made it really, really, bad for teens because it's not about connecting. Like the telephone connected teens, that was great. But this is the platforms they change. We now call them social media platforms. You stand on it and you perform at people. That's not connecting. That's managing your brand. And it's a terrible thing to do to middle school kids. Yeah. Look, as somebody who has to do that for themselves at age 44, it's one of the aspects of this job or whatever that I hate the most, which is one reason why my Instagram people go, why don't you post more? Because then I have to manage more stuff. I'll post like once a year, some big thing, you know, and there was a billboard in Times Square

with my face on it because the company that runs my podcast network went public. And I was like, all right, fine, I'll take a photo of that and put it on Instagram and I'll get comments from friends and total strangers. And I'll answer all of them and it'll take me a few days, which is essentially kind of wasted time. But it's a celebration thing, whatever. But I'm not going to post next week. Like, here's a burger I ate. Ah, it's so delicious. And you see, that's right. You see that because those people are desperate for content. You're right, the seedling of this, man, and I don't expect you to remember this.

MySpace was for teenagers and young adults, but you would add your friends there. And then it would be like, you should add these girls that I met at this lake, and you'd be like, okay, and then you'd all make plans to hang out. And then it became like, wow, this is a really good place

to promote my band. And then bands started using it, and there were band pages. And it was like, your band's going to be here, your band's going to be there. And that was sort of... That all sounds good still.

It worked, but that was the genesis of one to many, Right? Because it was like, oh, well, now our band posts this and we might answer some fan messages that are like, we love you. And you're like, yeah, we love you too. That's it. Right.

But then they're posting photos from their show. And it's like, oh, I missed that show. I got to go to the next one. Still kind of wholesome because you're talking about an event that gets people together. It's your art. And then it was like, dot, dot, dot, dot, here's a burger. Or like, dot, dot, dot, dot, here's me jumping on a table full of food as a prank, hilarious. And now it's on TikTok.

and it really, it came at us fast. I mean, it was not long before people were like, what's the most outrageous thing I can post, whether it's text or video? That's right. One point I'd like to make about that story that you told is that we adults, we have many uses for this stuff, and we use it, we have jobs, we have reasons to network,

it's useful for us to meet strangers sometimes. So when we think of these things as tools that adults can use to meet their goals, well, that's great. And, you know, the way you use Instagram very minimally, it doesn't invade your life. So my iPhone, when I bought my first iPhone in 2008, it was amazing. It was just a digital Swiss Army knife. And I pulled it out if I wanted a map or if I wanted music or if I wanted, you know, a flashlight.

It had a flashlight on it. So, you know, my phone was no problem. It didn't take over me. It was my tool. And when we use social media like that, that's great. But what happened after 2009 is in 2008, there was no app store, no other companies. companies were trying to get to you. There were no push notifications. So your phone was just a tool. 2009, social media gets super viral. You get the app store in 2008, 2009, the app stores come in.

Now you get hundreds and then thousands and now millions of companies are now competing to grab your child's attention with push notifications. So the iPhone is no longer, the phone is no longer just a tool you pull out when you want. It's not a servant anymore. It becomes a master, at least for those who don't fight back for those who leave notifications on. And almost all of my students leave notifications on for every app. It's not part of the culture to turn off everything. They should turn off almost everything. Otherwise, it becomes your master. And that's where we are. I will tell you, few things enrage me more than when my watch vibrates because I get a text. And it's like, you know, my best friend is like, just checking in you. And I'm like, I want to take this thing off and throw

it because it breaks my focus in whatever I'm doing. Because it's normally, it's just 99.9.9% of the time on Do Not Disturb. and occasionally I take it off that by accident or something by restarting it. Oh, okay. Right. But otherwise it's off. And I can't rep my mind around people who have like an email notification that blings every time they get a new email. I'm just thinking, holy crap.

These are the last people I want to be able to reach me are spammers. That's right. And that's where it really, the absurdity of it really struck me is that when I discovered that my students, I teach a course here at NYU Stern called flourishing. It's a positive psychology course. And I work with the students to regain control of their attention. We use ancient wisdom and modern psychology to help them improve themselves and live a better life.

And one of the most astonishing things I learned when I started doing this is that almost all of them, they get a notification every time an email comes in, as you say. And I tell them, okay, take out your phone. Let's turn off the notifications for that. Let's turn off the notifications for every news service. Every news service. You do not need breaking news. You do not need to know if somebody's getting a divorce in Hollywood.

or just, you know, sign up for the one daily email if you want from a newspaper. You'll get all the top stories every day. But it's just part of the culture of young people that interruptions are okay, because there might be something good. Right. This is what Cal Newport calls the any benefit philosophy. I mean, I might miss something if I turn it off, and you don't think about the costs of giving up all of your attention to your phone. Right. It's really incredible. And I thought, when I was reading your book, I thought, okay, is this mostly an American thing, or is this like a thing wherever people, people have social media. Has Europe somehow avoided this nonsense? Because I know that part of the reason kids are on their phone so much is we have 24-hour cable news in the United States and it makes

crime seem like it's like anybody out there is going to kid and chop them into little pieces because we needed something to play at 3 o'clock in the morning on CNN. And that sort of deadly combination has kept kids inside and online kind of terminally. But Europe has less of that nonsense, right? So hold on. So let's go through this. So your theory. is plausible that America is unique in many ways, and we have a different media system, we have more crime. So yes, all of that stuff is plausible. But what I've done with my research partner, Zach Roush, if listeners, if you go to our substack, afterbabel.com, it's free to sign up, Zach has gone through many parts of the world. We began with the anglosphere. So it turns out,

when you look at the mental health stats, when you graph out, we've got all these beautiful and horrifying graphs. You graph out levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide. And you graph not in the U.S., and they all do hockey stick up around 2012. 2012. In America, go to Canada. Same thing. And they don't have much crime there. Go to Australia, New Zealand, the UK. I mean, New Zealand, there's no kidnapping. There's no crime, practically. But their girls started checking into psychiatric courts the same time as our girls. Yikes. So, you know, whatever theory you want to have about what's weird about America, fine, but it's not going to explain why the same thing happened all over the anglosphere. Yeah, I wondered if the stats bore this out, and apparently they

don't, because you're saying this happened all over the place, and it doesn't surprise me, right? I just, I want to counteract the narrative that I hear a lot of older men say when I talk about this, and they're like, ah, our youth are just getting really soft. And it's like, well, okay, so either global youth is getting soft, maybe there's something to that, or something is being beamed into their heads all the time that we didn't have when you were growing up and riding your bike all day and your mom just wanted you home before the streetlights came on, which is like our rule, basically be home before it's literally dark. Yeah. So first, I think it, you know, it always pays to think about each hypothesis, might it be true? And the idea that adults have always said that

kids these days are soft, there's some truth to that. Every generation thinks the one after it is soft. And especially those generations who've lived through hardship, they are tougher. And they were successful and they made a better world for their kids. So yeah, their kids are softer. I'm a lot softer than my parents were and they're softer than their parents were. So part of that is just modernity and progress and rising wealth. You certainly can't blame the kids for that. No. Now, is that all it is? Is that all it is? No, because how do you make anyone strong? How do you make any kid tough? Only by letting them out, letting them have adventures, letting them have misadventures, letting them get lost and frightened, and then they figure out their way home. Maybe they ask someone for direct

and they find their way home. And then they learn, hey, I can go out. And even if I get lost, I know how to deal with that. So yes, kids these days are much softer, but it certainly isn't their fault. It's the overprotection side. So we have only ourselves to blame for the overprotection and for the softness. Then you add on to that because the overprotection began really in the 90s heavily. But mental health didn't decline in the 90s. And it didn't decline in the 2000s. So the millennials, and I guess you're sort of borderline. You're Gen X. I know. It's so depressing. I was born in February of 1980, so it's like, everyone's like, you're Gen X, and I'm like, oh, okay. No, you're right on the border. Just as I'm right on the

border of, I'm technically a baby boomer, but I'm 1963. So it was like the second to last year. So we're both at the very end of our generations. But the point is, Gen X actually had the worst mental health of any generation in a long time. They had high rates of depression, anxiety, and certainly suicide, actually. And there's other reasons for that, I think, involving leaded gas, which is an interesting story, but I'll leave that one aside. In any case, My point is that the mental health of teenagers was not declining in the 90s and 2000s. It was actually getting a little better.

And then all of a sudden, all hell breaks loose in the early 2010s. So that's the period that I call the great rewiring of childhood. Because in 2010, only about 20% of American teens, less than that, had a smartphone. iPhone comes out in 2007, but most teens don't have one in 2010.

By 2015, the great majority do. And it's not just a smartphone. It's a smartphone with high-speed internet, which wasn't as common in 2010, with a front-facing camera, which comes out in 2010, with Instagram, which comes out in 2010. So as a kid's going through puberty,

imagine a 13-year-old girl going through puberty, you know, in the late 2000s, you know, 2007, 8, 9, she's on a flip phone communicating with her friends. There's not much social media. I mean, she could do Facebook on her dad's computer in the living of if she wanted to,

but she can't be on Facebook nine hours a day. It's just not possible. So she's out with her friends. And then you imagine the same girl if she was born six years later, you know, going through puberty at 2015, everyone's on Instagram for hours each day. That's where they hang out. They literally don't go over at each other's houses anymore. And for the boys, it's even worse because the boys are now on all these amazing multiplayer video games, which are brilliant and gorgeous and exciting.

I understand. But for a boy, if you want to play with your friends, you can't go to their house. You have to go home alone so that you can put on your headset, your control, or your screen, and then you can play the multiplayer video games. So that's why I say childhood had a recognizably human form in 2010. We could look at the way kids were, you could say, oh, that's a human childhood. By 2015, we can't say that anymore. I remember this switch in many ways because when I was in high school, it would be like, all right, we're going to Ryan's house for a land party.

Have your mom drive over. You've got to bring your monitor, which was not a flat screen. You've got to bring your tower computer. Ryan has a ton of Ethernet cables, so don't worry about that. to make sure that you got an Ethernet card in your computer. And you would go in there and some poor kid's mom would be like, oh gosh, it's going to be one of those nights. And you'd have 12 dudes in there in every room in the house

with wires everywhere, tripping all over the place. That is brilliant. Just reeks of Cheetos in Mountain Dew. And you're yelling at each other and, you know, and it's just hilarious and ridiculous. And then to do that same thing a decade later, you're at home covered in your own Cheeto dust. maybe you have a voice headset to talk to random strangers that are children in Alabama

when you're an adult in California, creepy, but that's a different thing. And then when you're done, you don't feel like you hung out with anybody. You don't have a stronger bond with borrowed cello 79 on Xbox. You know, like, you're just sitting in your own stank at home and you realize your life sucks. I mean, even if you're a happy person, you feel gross after something like that. That's right. There's so much from what you just said. Let me just unpack a few things. One is what you described

is a recognizably boy thing to do. Like, hey, let's carry these heavy things over. It's technology. We're going to hook them up. We're going to be together. We're going to yell at each other. We're going to insult each other. We're going to question each other's manhood. It's all in good fun. We're going to eat. And you were learning tech skills. You actually were learning about hardware and Ethernet cables, all that. So everything you said is really, really healthy. And I wish to God boys could do that today. what happens if boys want to get together today? As you said, you have to go sit alone. But also, you don't learn anything about tech computers, programming, anything.

The platforms are so beautiful, so perfect, you don't get to go into the guts of them and modify them. So kids who are heavily online now aren't learning anything useful. They're not learning how to program or anything. That's the first thing. Second thing, again, the way you described it, it's very physical. And childhood is physical. You know, we're physical creatures. We need a lot of physical play and movement.

when it's all online, you get very, very little of that. Another is the conflicts. You get boys especially, you get into conflicts, and it's actually kind of part of the fun because you get in conflict, but then you develop your conflict resolution skills. On Fortnite or any other video game, there can be no conflicts.

I mean, obviously the whole game is a game of conflict. But nobody can say, hey, that's out of bounds. No, it isn't. Yes, it is. Like, you can't argue over the rules because the platform does all of the judging, all of the refereeing, so you lose some of the most nutritious parts of boyhood play when you move it online. And then the last point I'll make is when I think back

on my best childhood memories, they're almost always with my best friend, Krister. He lived a half mile away. We'd get together it. We'd get into trouble. We do all sorts of things every afternoon. We have a lot of adventures, including some stupid things that were kind of dangerous, but man, were they thrilling? Oh, yeah. Boy, were they memorable. Like you, I'm curious, you know, members of Gen Z, who are now 28, the oldest of them, you know, in 40 years, are they going to get together with their friends and say, hey, do you remember battle number 27,486 where you were trapped behind that staircase and I had a sneak up on the guy? Like, no, that's not going to be a memory. No, I just recently, a friend of mine moved to New Zealand who grew up next door to me and he was

traveling through this airport and he was like, hey, remember that time? We filled a coffee can with sawdust and gasoline and lit it on fire and then I tried to blow it out and he burned his eyebrows I was off. And I was like, oh my God, I know we thought you were blind because he basically had like sunburned, half degree burns all over his face. And he never forgot that. I never forgot that. It was just, and it was one story like that after another and nonstop hilarity because all this kid and I did were stay outside, go home and eat and then sneak back out of the house. I'm going to Jonah's house and we would be running around the neighborhood at 9 p.m. just absolute shenanigans that would get you shot nowadays. And we did that every day.

That's right, because we're primates and we wanted to just do monkeying around. And so, again, that's why I say that was a recognized be human childhood. Kids actually need risk. This is an important point in chapter three and four of the book, is that kids actually need to take risks, and they will unless you stop them. So once a kid learns how to ride a bicycle, he's going to then try to ride super fast. And it's thrilling and scary. I mean, you remember that feeling from childhood of going over the edge of a steep hill? It's frightening.

But you do it, and then at the bottom you have this exultation. You do that a few hundred times, that sort of thing. That's what makes you tougher. So, you know, when older men say, oh, kids these days are soft, well, yeah, because we didn't let them do that. We didn't let them have thrills. And so I'd like to give your listeners, especially those who are parents, the word thrills.

Thills are biologically important. Kids need thrills. And a thrill is a mix of fear and novelty, and you're not sure you can do it, and you try it anyway, and you do it. And whether you succeed or fail, either way, you. you grow. So we've got to give our kids back thrills. And to do that, we have to back off. We have just get the hell back and give them space. You know, obviously, we might not make sure they don't get hit by cars. If they're riding a bicycle, they should wear a helmet. There's all sorts of

things we need to do for physical safety. But we have to accept that falling down on your bike and scraping your knee and possibly even breaking an arm, like the risk of breaking an arm actually is necessary. One of the most surprising graphs in the book is when we found data on hospital admissions for fractures. So the CDC tracks who's going to hospitals and for what. That way they can pick up if there's some sudden trend. And so they have all this data on who's admitted to hospitals for broken arms and legs, you know, broken bones. Before 2010, it was overwhelmingly teenage boys. Oh my gosh. They were the most likely by far to be hospitalized for broken bones. Yeah. And it is declining from the 90s through 2010. It is declining. I mean, we're spending more time

online. So it is going down. But after 2010, it goes down really steeply, so steeply that, Today, a 15-year-old boy is less likely to be hospitalized for a broken bone than his father or his grandfather. Old men, middle-aged men, are going to hospitals at slightly higher rates than teenage boys. Because teenage boys aren't doing anything. They're not even lifting monitors over to their friend's house. They're just using a joystick. Wow. I almost misunderstood what you'd said.

I thought you meant grandfathers when they were the same age or admitted to hospital. You mean actual... Today. So somebody like me is just more active than somebody. who's 16 years old. You are doing more things that could break a bone than your children will, your sons will, when they're teenagers, if we keep going the way we're going. That's, well, I don't even know what to make of that because you don't want to say, wow, it's so sad that kids are breaking less bones, but it's sad that they're not doing anything. I mean, that's,

that's, of course, terrible. I'm very interested in the social aspects of this as well, because I know kids look to examples of other people in their community, whatever that might mean, to learn things, to achieve status. But Instagram and social media kind of hijack that pathway, I would imagine. Exactly. And they replace those, the example of, like, the cool kid down the block that shot BB guns and, like, made bombs and jumped his bike off a ramp. We all had that kid.

Yeah. And my mom would be like, you can hang out with Jack, but if he does something really, you know, come on home. And you're like, okay, once Jack is on one, you got to leave once he breaks out the beer. But, like, it replaces, social media replaces those examples with weirdo, influencers and like tacky internet wannabe celebrities like me. It's not good for the kids. I know that. I can tell. That's right. So one feature of my work is I always like to take an evolutionary view as well as an anthropological view, as well as a sociological view. I would try to put together all the different disciplines. And in evolutionary thinking, there's a really important line of work on social learning, on how it is that humans became cultural creatures. And so here I'm drawing on my friend Joe Henrik at Harvard. He and his advisors were some of the real pioneers. in figuring out what has evolution given us to speed up our learning? Because once we became

cultural creatures, the person who wins is not necessarily the biggest and strongest. It's actually the person who learns the best. And if you can learn from the best role models and the best lessons, you will end up being a better hunter than some guy who's bigger and stronger than you. So we have all this stuff, all these shortcuts to learning. And one of them is called prestige-biased learning. That is, you don't just copy what people around you are doing randomly. You look and see who's the cool kid. Who's the one that everyone's looking up to? I'm going to lock onto him and I'm going to copy him. And if that's a kid in your neighborhood, of course, this is why parents don't want you to hang out with that kid because he's a bad role model. But we're exposed

to lots of older kids, lots of young adults, lots of adults. All of them were looking at as potential role models. And so what happened in the Great Rewiring is when you're on a flip phone, you're not like copying role model, you're just texting your friend. But when you're on a smartphone, And now you're spending five hours a day on social media, which is what kids today spend, including TikTok and YouTube. Wow. Because a lot of it's watching videos. But there you go.

Videos are really powerful sources of socialization information. So you take this ancient, evolved mechanism for prestige bias learning. You move it to your online community and what's waiting for you there? A literal number, a number telling you exactly how ranking this person is. And so it's like, we can't be any more explicit. We're going to tell you who the high value role models are. Oh, and then that means more of you will copy her. Oh, and now she has 3,300 million followers.

So, you know, all the young girls are copying the same role model. So, yeah, this is a terrible, terrible way to raise kids. Girls are more susceptible to it than boys because they spend more time on social media. Girls are also more open to each other. They're more influenced and influencible. They're more connected. Boys are a little bit more, literally on the spectrum, boys are a little bit more lower and empathizing, higher and systemizing, so they're not quite as affected by each other.

And this, I think, is one of the reasons why the mental health collapse of girls is very, very sudden right around 2012, 2013. Boys are down a lot too, but it's more gradual. It's not like they turned a corner in one year. It was gradual.

You know what won't fuck up your kids? The fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week,

it's because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at six minute networking.com. I know networks is like a dirty word. It makes people feel schmoozy. This is decidedly non-smusy. It's also non-chrindexam.

and vary down to earth. No awkward strategies or cheesy tactics. These are just practical exercises that will make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer. And six minutes a day is all it takes. And many, many, many of the guests on the show, already subscribe and contribute to the course in some way. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at six minute networking.com. Now, back to Jonathan Haidt. Do we have any data or maybe just insight as to how interacting virtually has how does it affect kids' abilities socially? Because it seems kind of obvious to me

that reading a string of emojis instead of seeing someone's face and body language and actual words, that that would eventually over time cause problems in reading those expressions, reading the room, reading the body language and real life interactions. Even if you're interacting on video, right,

you're only seeing someone's face, you're not seeing their whole body. And more importantly, this is sort of, I don't know if this matters at all, but we're not in the same context, right? You're at home, I think, maybe. I'm in my office at NYU. Thank you for painting the wall purple in expectation of this interview. It's very on brand. I appreciate that. But you're in your office and I'm in my studio. So we don't really have like a shared space. And I'm not even sure how much that matters, but I feel like it must at some level. It sure does. So there's so many examples. So in the book, I go through why it is that virtual experiences are not as good as real life experiences. The first reason is that they're disembodied, which is what you're talking about here. Our bodies, we're not connected by our bodies. Yes, here on this video call, I'm looking at you, so we do at least see our facial expressions.

But I had a really interesting experience two weeks ago. I gave a talk in Dallas, and it was a bunch of people from Texas. And over the course of the two hours I was with them, three people touched my arm. Like, we're talking. You know, sometimes you reach out, you say, oh, yeah, you know, I don't mean. You know, it's just part of conversation is you touch people. And I realized I have not been touched by anyone in years, even before COVID. Like in New York and maybe in California, there's just a much more like, oh, you know, we shouldn't touch anyone.

That could be sexual. But it was so human. It was actually, I loved it. I loved it. Like, oh, yeah, this is what life used to be like. When you're talking to people, sometimes you touch them. And we're also paranoid now. Like, oh, my God, if you pose for a photo with a woman and you put your arm around or, I mean, who knows what could happen. So like, oh, no, let's, you know, in photos, let's just stand next to each other and not touch. So there's a loss of humanity that has come about. And virtual interactions are never going to regain that. Of course, the goggles are going to make things look more. but it's not going to compensate. Humans are physical, social creatures, and especially for children, they need millions of experiences, millions of interactions in order to tune up. I don't have data for you to show

that their social development has been compromised. I was looking, I can't find any clear studies with a clear test. Sure. But man, this is what everyone says, that it's just hard to get the boys especially, it's hard to get them to look you in the eye when they talk to you.

Social deprivation, they're connected to everybody in the world except really the people who are in the room with them at that particular time, which I always found ironic and weird. And it drives me nuts. My wife and I both, we get annoyed with each other because if I'm talking to her and she's texting someone, I'm like, I'm in front of you. And same thing with me. You know, if I'm on Reddit or texting someone, she's like, hello, let me know when you're done. And it is a peeve.

And we try to, of course, accommodate that like, oh, yeah, sorry, I'm in real life. But kids kind of don't feel the need to even really do that because they've grown up immersed in this. It's the norm, that's right. So there's a word that's very helpful here for listeners and for married couples and parents, which is continuous partial attention. And so if, you know, you're busy, you're doing something, but you also are kind of talking and she's fully present because she's not doing continuous partial attention, but you are, then she feels snubbed and vice versa. It goes back and forth, and we end up feeling more distant from each other. And this, I think, can help us understand why as soon as girls transferred their socialize onto social media, which was said to connect them. You can, you know, connect to your friends. As soon as they did, they got much lonelier because the connections are shallow. And the same thing for the boys. As soon as they moved from other kinds of video games and hanging out as you did to sitting alone playing multiplayer video games, as soon as they did that, they got lonelier. And so, yes, it connects you to everyone of the world, except the people around you, and that means you get lonelier. Sleep deprivation is also, I mean, that's something I dealt with in high school. School start,

when I was a kid, I feel like I had to get up at around six for school, which for a teenager is just looking back. I'm like, what? Why do you, why do they torture us? It was literally just torture. I know. And we had homework till 11 p.m. And now, I would imagine kids probably also have a same ton of homework, but then they go on social media, lay in bed.

And if I do that as an adult who knows that I have to get up in the morning for something important, I can't sleep to like one o'clock in the morning. I could only imagine kids who do that and then have to get up in five hours. And they do that seven days a week, you know, five days a week. That's right. It's not healthy. That's right. I often find the assumption that kids these days have much more homework.

they don't. Homework has not gone up in a long time. Really? Okay. What's gone up is the amount of time they're spending on screens for leisure. The most recent Gallup survey found it's about nine hours a day is what they're spending. This does not count school. This does not count homework. They're spending nine hours a day on their screens. A lot of those video consumption, video games, TikTok, Instagram, a YouTube. But if you're spending nine hours a day on your screen for leisure, there's just not much time left in your day. So kids aren't getting more homework,

But they're having trouble doing it because there's no time in their day. They have to spend so much time servicing their social network connections. They have to keep up on what the latest TikTok video is because people will be talking about that tomorrow online. So they feel trapped. And yes, sleep suffers. So parents, one of the most important things you can do is establish the rule very, very early on. Whatever policy you decide about screens and computers, you have to have a very clear rule. All screens come out of the bedroom if you ever allow them at all. They must be out of the bedroom by 9 o'clock or 10 o'clock at night. Pick a time. stick to it. I think there's a lot of good reasons to have a computer in your house in the living room or the kitchen. There are a lot of reasons why it's good for kids to be able to have access to a computer. But it's when they can take it into their bedroom. That's where a lot of the bad stuff happens. That's where they end up getting into conversations with strange men who have very evil designs on them. So that's what you really want to avoid is the effect of these screens, especially just before they go to bed. We did an episode with Matthew Walker on Sleep, Episode 126. He talks about car accidents and teens. It's like the leading cause of car accidents from teens is not drinking. It's being... Oh, it's texting? No, it's being chronically

tired and literally falling asleep because you stayed up till 11 doing homework and or on Instagram and then you got up at six for swim, five for swim practice and you've been doing that for months on end. And then you go out on Friday with your friends and you're driving and you literally fall asleep. And that happened to me. I fell asleep and I on I 75 as a teenager and I hit the rumble strip that goes and I woke up and I remember thinking I'm dreaming that I'm driving and I was like I'm actually driving thank God no other cars on the road didn't hit anything I unrolled the window so that I had ice this is Michigan in like January I unrolled the window so I had just ice cold air I still pulled over at one of those 24 hour like diners and just slept for 20 minutes in the parking lot because

I'm like I'm going to die if I continue being that tired because of school is absolutely insane And social media is, of course, making that worse. Yeah, but it's not because of school. Right. It's not, for you, maybe it was. For you, it was. Yeah. No, but for today, the kids are so tired because they're spending nine hours a day on screen leisure

activities. Absolutely terrible. It's kind of like giving yourself a maximum dose of ADHD during school, especially with all the push notifications and all that stuff. I can only imagine, I don't understand how phone-free schools is not mandatory across the United States. I don't understand. Thank you.

Yes. That's the easiest of them. So actually, why don't I, why don't I just, put in here the four norms that can solve this, because one of them is that. So, you know, after I spend a lot of time in the book laying out, what is childhood, how do we ruin it, how do we take it away, what are the phones doing to our kids? What are the many pathways by which social media is harming girls? What are the many pathways by which online life is harming boys? After all that, it's a kind of a depressing, dark book. But then the last quarter,

the last part, is all about how, you know what, we can actually solve this immediately. Well, I mean, within a couple years, we can actually solve this because everyone is fed up. everyone is sick of this. The parents are sick of this. The teachers can't stand being phone police. And Gen Z themselves, the young people, they see it. They're not in denial. They really see what this is doing to them, but they're trapped. So how do you get out of a trap? And so what I suggest in the book is four norms that will break us out of collective action problems. So in order, I'll just list them first. No smartphone before high school. Just give a flip phone or a phone watch. No social media till 16. We should raise the age. But even if we don't raise the age legally, just parents should not put them on till 16. phone-free schools and far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. So to go back to now your point about phone-free schools, the phones are the greatest distraction device ever invented in human history. We shouldn't be giving them to 10, 11, 12, 13-year-olds, frankly, and if we do, we certainly shouldn't let them have them in class. Most American schools

say they ban phones. What they mean is, and this is what my kids found in New York City Public Schools, the rule is you're not allowed to take your phone out during class. You have to hide it in a book or pretend you need to go to the bathroom if you want to do your texting. But the teachers are so sick of being phone police, a lot of them just give up, in which case you actually can just sit there in the back row on your phone and nothing's going to happen because the teachers are all exhausted. They're overworked. They can't handle this. And a lot of them give up, understandably. That gets filed under not my freaking job, I think, is making sure that Angela in the back puts her phone away for the 30th time during math class. It's like,

you know what? Be dumb. I don't care. That's right. So there is no, no, no reason for kids to have the ability to text during class. There are some parents who desperately want it, and that's why the schools don't ban it, because whenever they try to say, you know, we're going to go to phone lockers or we're going to, some parents freak out and say, what if there's an emergency? What if there's a school shooter? I need to be in touch with my child all the time. And this is part of the problem. Those parents are part of the problem. They're overprotecting their kid, not letting the kid have any independence, and they're stopping the school from going phone free. So what I'm advocating, parents, if you're listening to this, if you have kids, especially in elementary school or middle school, and even high school, if your school doesn't use phone lockers or yonder pouches, it's not phone free. If your kids are allowed to look at their phone between classes or at lunch, it's not phone free because they're doing that instead of talking to other kids. At lunch, when they should be interacting, they're not, they're on their phones. So please get together with some other parents and talk to the head of your school and say, please, can we go phone free? Let's give our kids.

six hours a day, seven hours a day to detox, to actually have eye contact, to listen to the teacher, to listen to each other. So that has to happen this year. Twenty-24, by the end of 2022, I think we need almost all schools K-12 to commit to go phone-free. I love this idea. I can't even imagine sending a kid to a school where everyone's on their phone. It seems like what's the point. My cousins are all teachers. I'm so curious. I'm going to ask them what the phone situation is in their schools in Detroit. I can only imagine. Oh, hey, so if you don't mind, I'd like to put out, like not a meme, but I'd like to put out a request there, and I hope this will circulate. Sure.

For parents who have a choice, you know, we're talking about, especially parents for shopping for private schools, you know, wealthier parents. For parents who have a choice of where to send their kids, I hope that you will ask, whatever school you're considering, I hope you will ask, are you phone free? And make it clear that you will not send your child to a school that is not phone free. Yeah, I love that. I think, I almost didn't think to ask that because I assumed schools would be phone free. Because how can you not? And the answer is we've given up and don't care. I'm also curious.

I've done a show with Anna Lemke on dopamine episode 9.51. Wonderful. Yes. She's very, very sharp and funny. I'm curious, I know how social media sort of interacts with dopamine, getting likes on photos, or not getting them. And then you crave that dopamine hit looking at other things on social media. So it's like slot machine gambling, which, of course, adds to the addictive part.

I am wondering, though, does social media affect boys and girls in the same way? You mentioned that girls were more susceptible to this, so the degree is different. I'm guessing maybe it's also a different kind of girls deal with body image maybe more than guys do, although that's probably changing with all the steroid guys and stuff too. No, that's right. So there are some very deep average differences between boys and girls, not so much an ability, but in interest. When you look at what boys choose to do together versus girls, if they're free to choose what they want,

they make very different choices on average with lots of overlap. Boys would prefer to form teams for coalitional competition, sports, games. Girls tend more to talk in pairs, and a lot of what they talk about is social relationships, who said what about whom, who's going out with whom. Girls have a better mental map of the social space. And so when the possibility of talking and finding out who said what about whom all the time for free comes up, girls are more attracted to it, they spend more time on it. And girls also are much more subject to insecurity about their looks because society, and not just society, their fellow students are judging them in part on their looks, much more so than boys. It's so sad when I see,

and I hear these stories, my wonderful, sprightly, funny 11-year-old, you know, she got on Instagram. Now, all she does all day is take pictures of herself and pose and work on her hair and her skin. You know, you've got 11, 12-year-old girls going into Sephora to buy skincare products, expensive skin care products. It's insane. That is insane. Girls are just much more vulnerable to being manipulated on social media. Boys have different problems. Everybody hates social. being left out. Everybody is subject to sex distortion. Oh, although girls are much more subject to extortion than boys. Because there's a book American Girls, and I've heard this a number of times,

boys will pressure girls for a photo of their breasts or their genitals or something like that. And they'll sometimes send a penis picture of themselves. Because for boys, if that gets out, it's kind, you know, it's not as humiliating. There's Joe Dick. That's hilarious. You're such a loser. That's right. The end. But once a girl does it, once a girl reciprocates, now she can be shamed. I mean, it's much harder for a girl. Yeah. So for all these reasons, you know, and also just, yeah, you know, sexual predation. I mean, there are young boys also get approached by sex criminals, but it's just much more for girls.

So for all these reasons, girls are just getting hit much harder on social media than boys are. And the data is part of the story of the book. The evidence for causation, the evidence that social media is harming girls is pretty clear, the causal evidence. For boys, it's less clear. I think it is harming many of them, but I can't prove it as much. there's a special link between girls and social media. They also use different platforms seemingly. Like guys are on Xbox live yelling at each other.

And women tend to be on these photo apps like Instagram where there's edited photos and DMs coming in like you're ugly, kill yourself. You know, you hear about this stuff. I know horrible stuff from strangers. Yeah. Yeah, stuff from strangers. They're spending nine hours a day on this platform, which is like a full-time job in addition to being a student at a high school, which I don't even understand how that would work.

but people being social comparison machines, I mean, that's hard for adults. There's this anecdote from Julia Roberts. I don't know if you've seen this. Oh, yes, I keep going. I think I did it. Essentially, girls are subjected, and boys, for that matter,

are subjected to more bullying in a week than anybody else could be bullied in a lifetime because people can access you at home while you're in bed. And to that point, Julia Roberts had taken this photo with, I think it was like her niece or something, and they were playing cards in the morning.

And Julia Roberts' sister, or whoever took this photo, They're just sitting there, and they're kind of like smiling at the camera. And Julia Roberts said, the comments were so terrible. It was like Julia Roberts looks like crap. Well, she's an old hag now. Look at this, and all this just terrible stuff. And she said she didn't want to let it get to her, but it still got to her.

This is an A-list celebrity, a movie star, who's been in tabloids for decades. A whole fabricated story is written about how, whatever thing about her. And the comments on an Instagram photo still hurt her feelings. and then she leaves us with this really haunting thought about how, how would this have made me feel if I was a 13 or 14 year old girl, if this is how it made me feel when I'm a celebrity who spent most of my life in the limelight. And I'm paraphrasing, but it's like, wow, that's a really good point. This is somebody with media handlers, you know,

what about a 12-year-old who's subjected to worse? Someone on my team had found that post and they showed it to me. It was very, very powerful. And I think you and I feel the same way because there's something about, you know, you can think you're tough. But when someone attacks your reputation, it's very different from anything else. Because what we really are afraid of is social isolation, socially being ostracized. In the ancient world where they didn't have lots of good prisons to hold people, the main punishment was banishment.

You are out of society. You know, we're not going to kill you, but you have to leave Roman society and go live on this little island and go live in this place. You can't have human contact with all. Like that is social death. And your reputation is damaged. And so I'm the same way. I've tried to follow the rule, and I've heard this from many people. Just don't look at the comments.

I use Twitter as a tool. So hard. But I can't help it. Like, I want to know. Like, how did this post do? What are people saying about it? So I do sometimes check the comments. And, you know, sometimes people say nasty things about me.

And if it's one random comment, it doesn't really usually get to me. But if it's like a bunch, then I was like, oh, no, like, is something starting? Like, here we go again. Yeah. So there's something about the threat of social isolation that gets you, even if you are tough and strong. reputation is different. And for kids, for middle school kids, it's everything. And that, I think, is why the suicide rate is up so much for the younger kids. It is very clear that girls use social media

for, I think you call it relational combat. So boys might pile on each other. We used to have fights and stuff. And then you'd kind of forget about it a couple weeks later. But girls tend to specifically attack social status. And the example in your book where there was a chat group called Everyone in the Class but Mary, my heart just broke for this little girl. who's like, poor Mary, that's right. Poor Mary. She's just being ostracized. The term for it in psychology is relational aggression.

I wouldn't call it relational combat because that seems more direct, open, out in public. Boys will enjoy different kinds of combat. Girls don't enjoy combat, but it's relational aggression. And the finding from what was her name, a psychologist in the 80s and 90s, was that when you look at total aggression, if you just look at physical,

boys are more aggressive. They're more likely to threaten to punch each other, beat each other up. But once you bring in relational aggression as well, and you look at the total, boys and girls are sort of equally aggressive. And for girls, seventh grade is the peak year of relational aggression and bullying. Seventh grade is terrible. So my God, please people, let's get this nonsense out of middle school. Let's at least let kids get through early puberty. Let them get through six, seventh, and eighth grade. Do not give them a smartphone before high school. Do not let them get on Instagram and Snapchat and all these other programs when they're 11, 12, 13 years old. Just delay that stuff into well into high school. You spoke earlier about sexual predation online. It really does seem like a kid having a phone. There's just a little access portal for pedophiles to your daughter or son's bedroom at that point.

And I tried this a while ago because I was curious to how bad this problem was. And parents, go ahead and replicate this. Set up an Instagram account and put like little girl stuff on it. Put toys, Barbies, little whatever, clothes, whatever. You don't need to take pictures of kids or use kids faces or whatever, just four little posts and make it look like it's a little girl's profile, just check the DMs a couple of weeks later. You will be absolutely horrified with what is in there. Oh my God. I'm going to try that.

Try it. You'll get some anecdotes for your next book because I will tell you the stuff you'll see in there. There'll be a couple of people that are like, check out our new toys because they're just spamming. But there'll be people that are like, oh, do you ever run outside in the sprinkler? And I'm like, I know where this is going. the guy wants a swimsuit photo from like an eight-year-old or whatever. It's so gross.

And you report it in Instagram's like, we didn't do anything because this doesn't violate community guidelines. And I'm like, no one with a brain has read this. No, that's right. What you're describing here is exactly what a former Facebook employee, Arturo Bejar, found that his daughter, when his daughter got on Instagram to promote her hobby of restoring old cars with her father,

she started getting approached by strange men. And she tried to report it. But because the approach wasn't harassment, wasn't aggressive. There was no way, I mean, she tried to report it, but they wouldn't take it. And so Arturo then went to management and said, hey, look, we have a problem. We could fix this, but let's just give them a way to report an inappropriate contact. It doesn't have to be harassment. It just has to be let a child report an inappropriate contact. So he asked them to do that. They didn't do it. They still haven't done it. So this is why I do think, you know, it's not as though

they don't know. Nobody was trying to hurt children. None of this was intentional. But there's so much that they could do to protect children. They do some easy things. It's not that they're doing nothing, but they do easy things. They do little things. But they're not going to do anything that is going to ultimately lead to kicking off a lot of people or losing a lot of underage users. Yeah. I mean, when you can monetize those people and sort of have plausible deniability as to the harm that's taking place, it's just that's such a bad set of incentives for these platforms. That's right. So let me add another point about this story about sexual approaches to children. So one of the reasons we freaked out in the 90s and started locking up our kids, not letting them outside, is we were afraid not just of kidnapping, but of sexual predators.

And some of those stories were real. There were some institutions, you know, the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church. There were places where there was sexual predation and it was covered up, and that was horrible. So there was some real stuff. And there was also a lot of fake stuff that wasn't real. Like daycares were not sexually molesting four-year-olds. That just was not happening. Right, the satanic panic you're referring to? Yeah, exactly. That was all nonsense. That was all. So my point is, there were some sexual predators, and I shouldn't minimize that. I mean, they're still around there now, out now. But we freaked out about it in the 90s. And what we're learning now, the Wall Street Journal has been covering this, is that the sexual predators, they've moved largely onto Instagram and a few other platforms because it's really dangerous to try to stalk a kid on a playground. I mean, you could end up in jail. So just go on Instagram where you can, you know, if you approach a thousand little girls, one of them will send you a sprinkler photo. Yep. That's the one who doesn't have parental supervision because she was able to take a sprinkler photo of herself and said it to you and nobody was like, what are you doing? Why are you taking a photo of yourself when you're outside and your bathing suit? You're nine years old. That's the victim that you go for. And it's really terrifying. I've told this story on the show a zillion times, so I won't go into detail here. But back in the 90s when I was on AOL, I wanted to meet women and one of the guys at work. I worked with a bunch of adults in Detroit at a security company. I was like the web guy and a driver. And they were like, you should make an account on. On AOL or whatever, as a girl, you'll see what all the guys are saying, and then you'll be able to stand out.

And I was like, this is genius. And what happened instead? Sure, I got a little like, hey, what's up? And I was like, okay, just don't start with, hey, what's up, and you're going to stand out. But what I also got was, and this is a 15-year-old girl. Like, you could make AOL say, like, I'm 15, and I live in Troy, Michigan, or whatever. And all these older guys were sending, like, you couldn't really send photos or anything, but they would send creepy messages. They would send, like, here's a bunch of dashes and an at symbol.

This is a rose for you. And I was like, what is this? So I printed it out, and I took it to work. And I said, look at these losers hitting on this girl who's 14. This guy's 38. And my boss was like, hey, I know you think this is a laugh. This guy's actually a predator. We need to call the FBI.

So they had relations with the FBI, Detroit office. And I remember them being like, whoa, this is not just like a funny thing happening to you on AOL. We need to get these guys. And they were looking for people who had poor parental supervision, especially as far as the internet. And one of the ways that we were able to get this guy, one of the guys, arrested, was I told him that I was going on vacation with my family to Toledo, Ohio, which is just across the state line in Michigan. Oh, wow. To bring FBI jurisdiction into play. Yeah.

Because they were having trouble figuring out because AOL is like HQ's in Virginia, but the server was in Southfield, Michigan. And I was in, like, they were just like, ah, how do we handle this? So they were like, we need federal jurisdiction. Here's how we do it. So lured that guy. And his whole thing was, oh, your family's taking you on vacation. but your parents are going out all day without you. Let's do a photo shoot in my hotel in Toledo at the same time.

This guy was a really, like, he planned it out. This was like, what's that guy, Chris Hansen or whatever? Where he's like, have a seat right there. You came over for this. It was really that. But they were counting on that. It wasn't like, I'll pick you up and talk to your parents and I'll convince them that this is okay.

It was like, tell me when your parents are going to be gone. And only now that I'm older do I fully compute really what this, how kind of like targeted this really? this really was. So was he put in jail? Like, did this lead to a... He was arrested, but I don't know much more beyond that. I would assume by the time you're getting arrested by local authorities with the FBI right there that you are in trouble.

Because, you know, federal prosecutors have a pretty good conviction rate. And I had reams of chat transcripts from this guy, emails, DMs. They were called instant messages. Wow, good for you for taking that risk and just dealing with this guy. Wow, you really did a public service. Because each of these guys is reaching out to hundreds or thousands of girls. and there are, you know, who knows how many, but I'm sure it's thousands or tens of thousands of these guys. So again, we have overprotected our children in the real world. We've underprotected them online. Both were mistakes. We've got to undo that. But that's an amazing story, Jordan. Thank you. I will tell that story, if you don't mind. I'll tell that as a story from you elsewhere.

You know what's great for your brain? Supporting the fine products and services that support this show. That's just science, folks. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support. our amazing sponsors, all of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at Jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code. Email me, Jordan at Jordanharbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you. Yes, it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Jonathan Haidt. The sort of sad ending would be right after that I remember thinking, got that guy off the streets, you know, but then, like,

I had 400 other messages from other people in chat rooms, probably within weeks. And I remember handing over chat transcripts to agents that were from DC office while using facts. Wow. Because they were like, we got to take these over. And it was just like, there's a never-ending well of literally local Detroit metro or whatever suburban area predators. Imagine if every geo, and of course every metro area has hundreds of these guys. That's right.

Because when you're young, you think, like, oh, pedophiles, there's like one in the state of Michigan and they're going to catch him. No, there's like 10,000 in the southeast tri-county area or something. It's just absolutely insane because, as we've learned on this show about pedophilia, a lot of people who victimize children, they're not even attracted to children. They just like to hurt people. Oh, my God. Which is way scarier somehow. Oh, geez. I've seen because there's been more attention to CSAM, child sexual abuse material, I think it is.

Yeah. And reading stories about these sex stories. one of which they, once they got the girl to send her a nude, they revealed that they were not a young boy as she thought, but it was a group of men. And now they had power over her, and they forced her to humiliate herself, and they forced her to carve one of their names in her thigh with a knife and do it on camera. And they forced her to take her pet hamster and cut off his head in front of the camera. Oh, that's awful. And then they told her now, for the last thing, we want you to kill yourself on camera. Oh, no. And at that point, she finally got over her

shame and told her mother, and so she was saved. But it's just so sick. That is so safe. And most people are decent, but the internet allows the small percentage of sickos to reach lots and lots of children. You mentioned another terrifying phenomenon in the book, which is mental illness, almost being contagious via social media. I know that's not quite the right terminology, but I'd love to know, you mentioned Tourette's was one of the examples. Yeah. So especially as one of the things teens are really wrestling with this identity. You don't think about your identity when you're six and seven years old, but that's one of the developmental challenges. I mean, Eric Erickson and his stages of development, it was teen's identity is one of the tasks. So who am I? And the internet overall is

wonderful. Social media in particular can put you into communities that are about identity. And this is where Tumblr actually becomes quite important. I didn't know this when I was writing the book. I learned it since. Facebook and most of the platforms connect you based on who you know and who they know, it's social network. Tumblr connected kids around a common interest, so a rock band, a sport, a hobby, and over time, a mental illness. So you'd have a common group around depression

or anxiety or eating disorders. So now you're really talking and sharing with people who have a common interest in a particular mental illness. And we know that emotions are contagious. That's very, very clear. This is older work by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, that when you look at networks of adults,

if one adult gets depressed, their friends are at slightly increased risk of depression. And amazingly, they're friends' friends, right, slightly increased risk of depression. So happiness, sadness, these all spread through social networks, and they spread more from women than from men. That is, women share more, they're more open about their emotions, and they're more receptive, they're more open and empathic. So girls and women are just much more vulnerable to stuff traveling through social networks once you super-connect people in the early 2010s.

And so I think that's one of the reasons why self-harm anxiety and depression all have this hockey stick shape. In 2010, when they weren't on Instagram or other platforms, it wasn't spreading like wildfire. And by 2015, they were all connected. And so if you've got algorithms picking out the most successful posts, well, those are from the most extreme people. So this is thought to be one reason why there was such an upturn in anxiety and depression, anxiety disorder is depression. TikTok Tourette's is the most interesting one that kids, especially, girls were coming out with what looked kind of like Tourette's syndrome. But with Tourette's syndrome, people will sometimes shout out something. They'll make all kinds of jerking movements,

but they're distinctive to them. They're not copying each other. They're one person will shout out a particular word. And in this case, because in English, a young English woman was shouting out the word beans and she was a very popular influencer on this TikTok Tourette's, what it wasn't called that, but you know, on this interest group on TikTok. So girls all over the world were starting to copy her, including shouting out the word beans. So, it wasn't real Tourette's, but it actually was a movement disorder. They would jerk and twitch. They weren't faking it. They were susceptible to it. Interesting. People say, oh, it's so great that social media allows people to connect with people over mental health issues. I mean, yeah, if you had groups run by

psychiatrists, I think that would be pretty good. But if they're run by other people who are competing to get followers, I don't think that's a good thing. Plenty of people have these disorders for real, but it seems like if you're just mimicking the symptoms because of the influence of social media, maybe you start just thinking, oh, it's hilarious when we all yell beans. It's like a thing our friend's circle does. And then you just keep doing it. It's like, well, at what point are you giving yourself some version of Tourette's? Of course, you don't really have it because I think people are born with that. Is that correct? Well, it is, it definitely is a brain disorder involving the basal ganglia. I don't know if it's genetic or something that comes out in development. But yeah, it's not something

that you're going to truly catch as an adult if you didn't have it earlier, but I don't know a lot more about it than that. The scary ones are anorexia and a lot of the eating disorders being kind of contagious because that can kill you, as most of us are aware. Well, that's right. So anorexia, I mean, again, the Wall Street Journal has really been on this. They did like you, they created a bunch of accounts on TikTok and Instagram of girls who, I think they expressed like some fake girls who expressed some interest in exercise or food and health. or maybe, I don't know if they even said dieting. And so first you get a lot of like workout videos and all sorts of things. But yes, they said that it very quickly migrated to the algorithm feeding them. The corpse bride diet was one. And it shows, you know, there are some influencers who are, they're skeletons.

I mean, they're on the verge of death. But if that's what's prestigious and you have prestige bias learning, then some girls are going to lock onto that and say, that's what I want to be. So once again, I'm very reluctant to tell adults what to do. I have some libertarian leanings. I don't want the government saying what adults can and cannot watch. But my God, I want the government to help me prevent companies from getting to my children without my knowledge or permission. Right. You know, we parents, we have a choice. Either you lock your kid away and never let them get to a browser.

Like, you're going to grow up with no internet. Or if I let you on the internet, well, then, you know, you can get anywhere. There's no age gating. There's no way to stop a kid. You know, you can try to put on controls and things on the browser. but the government set this problem up when it set the law that there's no age verification. It's 13, but the companies don't have to check any IDs or anything. So the government set this problem up. Then it gave immunity to those companies and said, you can show whatever you want to the kids and their families can't sue you because it's Section 230. So the government set this problem up for us. Again, not intentionally, but that's what happened in the 90s. And they really need to fix it. Congress really needs to fix it. They need to start passing the Kids Online Safety Act,

which would at least make, they would do a lot of things to make the time online safer. And I think the most important thing they can do is fix the bill that said the companies are not responsible for checking age. That as long as they don't know a kid is under 13, they get off scot-free. That has to change. Yeah, because there's nothing preventing a kid from just clicking a checkbox that says they're 13 or older, right? That's the whole verification process. Exactly.

That's right. You know, on Porn Hub anywhere. The kids can go anywhere, and they do. So, you know, kids are going to see hardcore porn. I don't know what it was like when you were young, but, you know, porn was like a beautiful naked woman. It's like a magazine that had been crumpled eight billion times that you found in the woods. Exactly. That's right. I remember that magazine. But it was not hardcore. We didn't get to see anal sex and things like that. Whereas, you know, now every 10-year-old, I mean, they're going to see it at some point and it's going to be really graphic. It's crazy that kids' first exposure to intimacy with another person is going to be like something like that. It's just how do you not have a

skewed perception of relationships if you're being bombarded with that. And we wonder why a lot of young women don't want to date or get married. I mean, it doesn't look, this whole sex thing doesn't look very attractive. No, certainly doesn't. I suppose the prescription for fixing a lot of this contagion is getting off social media, especially if you have, one of the examples you gave was multiple personality disorder. I think it's called DID. And that was also contagious. Again, wrong terminology. but yeah, dissociative identity disorder, yeah, where you think that you have multiple personalities living in the same person. And that's a real thing. I mean, there are people who have it. I'm not. We have listeners that have it for sure. Right. But if you put your 12, 13, 14 year old kid on social media,

they might end up there and they might then say, oh, you know, you might have DID if you have these symptoms or for any disorder, they'll list the symptoms. And a lot of the markets are, oh, yeah, I have that. I have that. So again, it's just they're not made for children. They're not appropriate for children. These are adult activities. And so I think we just need to change our thinking about social media technology and children. We need to give them back normal, healthy human childhood. I can see how kids would find something like that and think I have. I mean, that's me on WebMD, right? I have this headache, but it's sort of in the back of my head. Dot, dot, dot. It must be this super rare kind of brain tumor. And my wife's like, you're kidding, right? It's literally like one in a million people have that. I'm like, well, you know, mom always said I was one in a million. It could be that. Got to go get a brain scan. You know, it's just 10 minutes later after I drink a glass of water. It's fine. Yeah, I mean, I understand how a kid could get sucked into something like this, especially with that sort of like status-based or what was it called? Again, prestige-based learning. Prestige-biased learning. Prestige-biased learning. Yeah, that just, that's one of the reasons I try not to do really dumb

stuff or talk about really dumb stuff on this podcast. You know, at some point, if I'm all like, hey, here's this dumb thing I did, or try this drug without a doctor's supervision. It's like, some kid is going to try that thinking like, well, Jordan's not a dumbass, and he did it. And the truth is, I am a dumbass, and you shouldn't listen to me. Yes, kids don't fill a coffee can with sawdust and gasoline and light it on fire. That's right. And if you do, don't try to blow it out. Have your friend do it, which is what I did.

And that's how he lost his eyebrows. As we wrap here, I'd love to review your rules for kids and phones and maybe some of the ideas that you have, you know, phone-free schools. I'd love to hear about that, and especially the stuff that's actionable for parents would be really good. Yeah, sure. So first, let me say parents should go to Anxiousgeneration.com. It's a beautiful new website that this amazing company built for me and click on Take Action. We have all kinds of suggestions for parents, for teachers. We have letters you can send to your kids' school asking them to go phone-free. So we have a lot of resources there, Anxiousgeneration.com. Now, the site is also focused on the four norms, so I'll repeat them again.

No smartphones before high school. Just give them a flip phone or a phone watch, but don't give them a smartphone until ninth grade or later. And that's just in the USA. In Europe, the grades don't split that way so that a lot of Europeans are going for 16 as the age for smartphones. But in the U.S., let's just set the norm at high school. The second is no social media till 16. Now, this one's going to be harder unless we get help from the government, which is going to take a very, very long time. But some state governments like Florida just passed a law saying that you have to be 16 to open a social media account. without your parents' knowledge or permission. If you're 14 or 15, then you can get your parents to approve it. And if so, then you can join. That's very exciting because for the first time in history, the social media companies are going to have to figure out a way for kids to get parental permission, which I think is a game changer. So I'm very excited about that. The third is phone-free schools. And that means from bell to bell, from when you walk into school to when you walk out, the phones are locked away in a phone lock or yonder pouch. Kids say it takes them 10 or 20 minutes. Like first 10 or 20 minutes, they're still just thinking about their phones and the drama that was going on.

But by the end of first period, they're no longer thinking about it and they're actually paying attention to each other. So phone-free schools are magical. No school that I've been able to find. No school regrets it. They all say, wow, kids are laughing. They're talking to each other. There are fewer behavior problems. There's none of the crazy drama.

So phone-free schools, that's the easiest thing we can do. We can do it this year. We can do it by September. Every school should go phone-free by this September. And then the fourth is the first is that. the hardest one. It's far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. And this one's harder because it's also a collective action problem. You don't want to be the only one to let your kid out. Otherwise, you could get arrested. People, neighbors, if you let your eight-year-old walk

three blocks to a store, and I hear this story all the time, you know, because I'm urging people, let your kids do errands. But some neighbor will call the police. And once the police get involved, then they're going to refer it to child protective services. And before you know it, you could be accused of child neglect because you let your eight-year-old walk three blocks. What if she was a So this is insane. Crime is way down and today's parents grew up, well, older parents at least, grew up in a much more dangerous time. What I'm getting at is the issue is our own anxiety. This is the hard one because we're all anxious about letting our kids out. But if we do it together, if we do it at the same time, then it becomes normal and the kids are playing with each other.

So my advice would be, oh, please go to letgrow.org. It's a group I founded with Lenore Skenezy and Peter Gray. we advocate for giving kids more freedom and independence, which is what they need to become competent and healthy adults. So overcoming our own anxieties, here's a simple little norm. Free play Fridays. So don't schedule any piano lessons on Friday. If your kids in elementary and middle school,

no after-school activities on Friday, that's the day that you and five or ten other families, you all just kind of agree loosely. On Fridays, the kids, they start at one of our houses. They hang out there. They can go to someone else's. house if they want, they can go to the park. They stay together. They have to look out for each other, and that's crucial. But Friday is the best day to plan on this because the kids are likely to have

so much fun that they're going to say, hey, what are you guys doing tomorrow? And then they could get together tomorrow. That's what you want. You want the kids choosing their own activities, enforcing rules, laughing, taking some risks together. That is an incredibly healthy childhood. We've got to give that back to kids. Burn those eyebrows off, kids. Yes. If that's the worst thing that happens to you, what's worth. I know. That's true. Jonathan Haidt, thank you very much. Super interesting topic. And I wish you luck in your mission to spread awareness about this. It's a, you're fighting a bit of an uphill battle, right? The government's not helping you out. But it seems like a lot of people are receptive. It's a downhill. No, this is downhill skiing. There's no opposition. I mean, I'm in an argument with a few other researchers. But I'm not finding any opposition anywhere. Republicans, Democrats, men, women, grandparents, parents, and Gen Z. Everyone agrees. This is a mess. Everybody wants to change. I mean, not literally everybody. But so, no. No, actually, this is the easiest effort at social change I've ever been involved in. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show to sink your teeth into,

here's a trailer for another episode that I think you might enjoy. There is a new economy of prestige, and in the new economy of prestige, enabled by social media on college campuses, the more you call someone out for racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, you get a point. Every time you do that, you get a point. So every time you accuse some, it doesn't matter if it's true. Doesn't matter if you destroy that, it doesn't matter. If you call someone out, you get a point.

And so you have sub-communities in some universities that are playing this game with horrible external results for everyone else. But if the leadership stands up against it, they will be accused of all kinds of bigotry and sensitivity. So they almost never do. In a victimhood culture, you get prestige either by being a victim, so you emphasize how much you've been victimized, or by standing up for victims and attacking their oppressors. So when you get people in those movements who are, especially there are a lot of white people in those movements, they tend to be doing that predictive protectiveness thing. You're on camera all the time.

And even if you're not literally on camera, the current generation, because they were raised in the age of social media, they self-censor as though they were on camera. And so why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but you do not notice the log in your own? I mean, come on. You know, the ancients, and here's Buddha saying it's the same. thing. It's easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one's own faults. And on campus, we're telling kids forget thousands of years of wisdom. Look at life through the lens of oppression and domination and violence. Everything is against you. Right. Do the opposite. But you can't

teach that book might trigger someone. What kind of world would you rather live in? One in which everyone is polite because they're afraid of offending or one in which people will sometimes say things that they think are true, even if they're offensive. For more with Professor Haidt, including how the concepts of safe spaces and trigger warnings are making our society less safe and less prepared for the real world, and what we should be doing instead

to prepare ourselves and our kids for reality. Check out episode 90 right here on the Jordan Harbinger show. It's increasingly clear that quantity has really trumped quantity with social media. Shallow relationships leave teens feeling hollow. You're just getting a blast of people that you barely know. parasycial relationship, and that's if you're lucky, right? Otherwise, you're just looking at

random people you don't know and will never meet. And it doesn't help that companies actually gamify these apps. There are loot boxes and different stickers and streaks you can earn for continually using these apps. So you're gamified and almost manipulated into consistently giving in to the temptation to use these things that are bad for you. In the book, John tells the story of his daughter who asked him to take the iPad away from her because she couldn't stop playing it. And I've had a similar experience with my son who said, can you take this away from me? I don't know how to stop.

And he's not running a slot machine game. He's playing some game where you match tiles. I mean, it was really just a hard thing for him to stop doing it. It's a little bit terrifying, candidly. Before mobile phones, kids could not take the screens that they were kind of hooked on with them to school or around to their friends' house. So there was an inbuilt limit how much screen time kids could actually get. But now that's just no longer the case.

I also found it quite interesting how media can skis. skew perceptions so much. The media, this 24-hour news cycle, has us looking at skewed perceptions of crime, thinking that things are worse than they ever were because they need to show something on that news channel about what's going on and even better if it grabs your attention. Here's a live police chase. Whereas now, frankly, if you live in the United States, there's almost never been a better time to be alive, especially with respect to crime. We're doing a show actually on birth control, and a lot of young women are deciding not to use birth control because of influencers on social media hawking alternative health nonsense.

And one of the reasons that they're citing is that, oh, it has extreme side effects. By the way, these are super rare side effects, like two out of three and 10,000 people. But those side effects seem like they happen to everyone on social media because we are only hearing the extreme outlier version. So cognitive bias, like the availability heuristic, that stuff kicks in. And it seems like, oh my gosh, if you take birth control, you're just a coin flip away from becoming infertile or getting cysts on your uterus or whatever. Again, I'm doing a whole show entirely about birth control because I'm so tired of the misinformation evolved here when it comes to

the health and well-being of half the population. Our wives and daughters and sisters, if you got any of those. And what I appreciated about Jonathan's book was that there's a lot of solutions on how to fix this. If you're a parent, if you're an educator, a member of government in a position to do something about this, there are a lot of suggestions that are quite detailed on how this can actually be solved. We are not at the mercy of these devices and these companies. We really aren't. At least we shouldn't be. All things Jonathan Haight will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com, transcripts included. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. And if you buy books from our

authors, please use the links in the show notes. That does help support the show. Also, we've just revamped our newsletter, We BitWiser. You can check it out at Jordan Harbinger.com slash news. We give you something specific, practical, that has an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes. That's the goal. Jordan Harbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget, six-minute networking over at six-minute networking.com. And we've got our subreddit. If you're a Reddit or search for Jordan Harbinger, you'll find our subreddit. There are a lot of people discussing episodes. I pop in with Gabriel from time to time. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in

Association with Podcast 1. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace, Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who has kids who are overusing social media, you know, an educator who wants to put a stop to the crazy brain rot that kids are suffering from, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast.

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