The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Conversation with Jonathan Haidt — The Kids Are Not Alright

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

Jonathan Haidt, a professor of ethical leadership and bestselling author, joins Scott to discuss his latest book, “The Anxious Generation: How The Great Rewiring Of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic Of Mental Illness.” We hear about how nations have ended up in this situation and the reforms he’s outlined for leaders and parents.  Follow Jonathan on X, @jonhaidt. Scott opens with his lesson on crisis management.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Episode 293. Route 293 is a highway located in orange county new york in 1993 the film jurassic park was released true story me and my buddy were masturbating to some hardcore dinosaur pornography unfortunately my mother saw us got it mother saw us go, go! porn, history, dinosaurs. The last one was a lie. Just really, I'm not that into dinosaurs. Anyways, in today's episode, we speak with Jonathan Haidt, my colleague at NYU Stern, where he serves as the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership. Professor Haidt is a role model for me. He's fearless, just does the work, a beautiful writer.

It's weird. I think as you mature, you get a little bit, one of the things you realize is, or maybe you're just a better person as you get older, or maybe I've become less of an asshole, is I'm generally happy for people to recognize the type of success that I aspire to and haven't yet achieved. Jonathan is having just so much impact on a ground level for really important things around cancel culture, addiction to technology, the impact that social media is having on our kids. I would argue that Jonathan is the most influential scholar in the world right now. Anyways, we discussed with Jonathan the research from his book, including how we've ended up in this situation and what leaders, parents, and companies can do about it. His book is called The Anxious Generation, How the Great

Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Okay, what's happening? The dog is back in London. That's right, back in the UK. I just asked our nanny, is that a hate crime calling someone a nanny? Are they what, some sort of domestic engineer or something now? Anyways, I just asked her to make tea. It's rude. You come into UK. I do not drink tea. And I come back into UK airspace and boom, tea and biscuits, please. I eat these things called McVittles, McVitties, biscuits. Oh, my God. That shit is genius.

I mean, OK, whatever. The economy here hasn't grown in five years. Seven to ten of IPOs are below their offering price. But God, they make a good, just a great fucking cookie. Anyways, a lot going on. The DOJ is suing Apple. Adam Neumann made a $500 million bid to buy back WeWork. Trump's true social went public under the ticker of DJT.

Walmart is trying to reach affluent customers. And Boeing's CEO will step down by the end of 2024. That's going on. The news, it just keeps on coming. Boeing has obviously been in the news the past several months after there's been countless malfunctions with their planes, the big one being when a door flew off an Alaska Airlines plane mid-flight back in January. That reminds me of, you know, that great notion or that great saying that when God closes

a window, he opens a door, said Boeing. Get it? Anyways, so in addition to CEO Dave Calhoun handing over the reins, board chair Larry Kellner will not be running for re-election, and Stan Deal, who leads the $180,000? I have 300 kids. They pay $7,000 to take my class. That's $ go. It has the kind of design aesthetic of where you would go to get your second round of chemotherapy. I mean, it's really weird. We overhaul or revamp the business school every seven or eight years, and literally, it looks like a hospital. Anyways, that's neither here nor there. So, let me give you $178,000 with a value here. We do a course or a session on crisis management. There are only three things to remember. One, acknowledge the problem. Two, you know, we fucked up. This door came flying off or, you know, whatever. We've had problems

with the 737 MAX, including some tragic accidents. This is unacceptable. This is a problem. Acknowledge it. Don't try and cover it up. Don't try and make excuses. Rationalize it. This is unacceptable. This is a problem. Acknowledge it. Don't try and cover it up. Don't try and make excuses. Rationalize it. This is what's happened, and it's unacceptable, too. The top guy or gal has to take responsibility. Airlines are usually very good at this. Airlines are used to crisis management because there are crises on a regular basis in aviation, fewer and fewer, and I'll come back to that. And then third, and this is the hard part, you got to overcorrect. You got to overcorrect. Americans in the West love to forgive and you got to show you're serious about it. Typically, real scandal is not about what happens. It's not about the actual infraction. It's about

how you handle it. It's about a willingness to admit what happened. Remember all the bullshit with Tiger Woods because he kept slowballing it? It's not really a crisis, but think about what's going on. Well, I guess it's a crisis for her, but think about what's going on, well, I guess it's a crisis for her, but think of what's going on with Kate Middleton. She's a 42-year-old woman battling cancer. That is awful. She deserves privacy, except she's not going to get it.

She chose to marry into royalty, which means that if she disappears, there's going to be a lot of conjecture and who really fucked up there was the palace comms people who don't understand crisis management. This is a crisis. I don't even know her actual name, but Kate is very sick or has to have surgery, has to be out of the public eye. But to think that there wasn't going to begin a frenzy around this was just naive and stupid. They should have come out right away, acknowledged the issue, have her deliver it, she's done that, and then, I guess it's impossible to overcorrect here, but basically it poured a couple million gallons of oil

into Prudhomme Bay or whatever it was called, Prudhomme Bay, up in Alaska, a huge environmental disaster. The thing that got everyone just batshit angry beyond the environmental impact was the CEO wasn't delivering the news. It was some head of comms, and they kept slowballing the goddamn thing. They kept saying, oh, this was a minor infraction.

You want to know who is the ultimate case of crisis management that you'll learn if you go to business school? Tylenol. There was a tragic incident. I think it was in Napier, Illinois. Is that right? Anyways, essentially, somebody had tampered with Tylenol bottles and put cyanide in a bottle, and somebody took the cyanide, dropped dead, and then the poor folks who went, who obviously had to deal with this situation, then went home after they went to the morgue, after identifying the person, went back to their house, took more Tylenol and dropped dead. What did Tylenol do? What would the temptation be? The temptation would be to use terms like isolated incident, and to talk about how this was a bad actor and that they didn't need to be

worried. Instead, they said, we're going to clear overnight, literally overnight, every bottle on every shelf of Tylenol because J&J's core attribute of being in the business they're in, providing healthcare and products that are very important in people's lives is trust. That cost a lot of money. They took an earnings hit that quarter, but they came back even stronger. They overcorrected. They overcorrected. And a lot of good firms do the same thing. There's a lot of cases where people overcorrect, but Boeing is attempting, I think, I think to overcorrect. And overcorrect they need to do. Their stock is at 189 as we record this podcast. That's down 50%. The stock has been halved in the last five years. And also Boeing is kind of a national treasure. They're kind of the old school Microsoft in the sense that they're in Seattle and they sort

of set the tone or really indicated how superior technologically America was. And then you combine it with manufacturing and technology and boom, you have the best commercial jetliner in the world. And the reality is it no longer is. That Airbus, the consortium of European companies, now has a superior plane. And this has cut the stock in half, and they needed to overcorrect. They fired the CEO, or the CEO's leaving. Could he have fixed it? We don't know. He's only been there since 2019, in which in the world of manufacturing commercial aircraft is probably not enough time to turn around the culture. But here's the thing. CEOs are constantly in the right place at the right time and get very lucky a lot. They make three to four hundred times the average worker's salary. And in this instance, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they need to overcorrect here. And I think it's

great that he's stepping down as well as the board chair. They need to send a signal to their workforce, to their customers and to investors and to the marketplace that this shit is unacceptable and they are going to overcorrect. Now, what's the learning here? Is it about how to manage your stock price in a crisis?

No. The learning here is how to manage a crisis in your own life. And this is where I have really fucked up. And that is when someone important to me in my life is upset or angry at me, my initial reflex response was to get back in their face. You weren't nice to my parents. They came for graduation or they came down for the weekend or they're staying with us and you weren't nice to them or you didn't spend any time with my dad. And I'd immediately kind of rear up and go, well, you know, your dad doesn't like me. I don't like him, which is not true. I love my in-laws. And then kind of go on the offense. Well, how much time have you spent with

my mom, right? That is not the right thing to do. Here's the crisis. It's not about whether or not you spent enough time with your girlfriend's parents. It's about whether she's upset about it or he's upset about it. And if they are, that's all you need is that they're upset and you care about this person. You don't want them to be upset because here's the thing. This is what people want. They want you to provide evidence to their life. I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a good friend or a good spouse. And this is what it means. It means you provide, you're there. You notice their life. You notice their achievements. You notice their sadness. You notice when they say something funny and you laugh out loud. When something wonderful happens to them, you notice them and you call them. You give evidence to their life. And that's what we want in a partner. We want someone that sees our life, that makes it real. I still have this. Nothing good ever really happens to me.

What do I mean by that? Until the age of 40, anytime anything good happened to me, right? I made the baseball team in high school. I got my first job at Morgan Stanley. I got my first bonus. I got into Berkeley for graduate school. I got engaged. Anything that happened to me that was good, like I'm in the paper, I'd call my mom. And my mom would just bask in it. She would provide evidence of my success

or my achievement. And it was easy to call your mom. Your mom never gets sick of hearing you boast about how good things are going in your life. She'd provide evidence to my life. And the thing is, now that she's not there, it's really strange as if nothing really good happens to me. Now, what do I mean by that? Of course day and said, hey, one of the kids' father wants to take us to a Tottenham game because he listens to your podcast. And I could tell he was impressed by that. He's giving, you know, evidence or notice to my life, if you will. But that's your job. That's your job as a friend. That's your job actually as a boss. That's your job as a girlfriend or a spouse. You want to notice their life. You want to give evidence to them. You want to notice their life. You want to give evidence to them. You want to listen to them. And you don't get into immediately an argument around whether

they have license to be upset or not. You don't want to be walked all over. It's okay to point out some things. I'm sorry I haven't been feeling well or whatever it might be, or I think you're being unreasonable. Okay, fine. But first, your reaction should be, this person is upset. That's the issue. And I don't want them to be upset. So by virtue of the fact that they're upset and it's a function somewhat or wholly based on my actions, I'm going to're here. I am going to take responsibility. That was my decision or lack thereof. That was me. And then three, overcorrect. Okay, you're upset. That's all I need to know. That was me. That was my decision. And I will reach out and maybe go golfing with your dad or something, although I don't golf. But that's the key, right? At the end, it doesn't matter how fucking amazing your life is. If there's no one there to take notice, if there's no one there to

give testament that this is what happened, these are the good things that happened in your life, these are the bad things that happened in your life, and I noticed and I was emotionally invested in them, then you haven't lived a life. You've just been an organism. Give evidence. Provide notice. Notice when people do good things. Acknowledge the issue. Take responsibility. Overcorrect. Give evidence to the life of the people who matter to you. We'll be right back for our conversation with Jonathan Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU Stern School of Business and the author of several books, including his latest, The Anxious Generation. Jonathan, where does this podcast find you? It finds me in my office at Stern.

You can see from the purple wall behind me. So I won't say I'm jealous or envious, but I'm like massive jealous and envious. I think you're arguably the most influential scholar in the world right now. Do go on, as you would say. I mean, to resist Professor Haidt is futile right now. You are literally everywhere. I mean, you're in my Instagram feed. All these famous people are talking about you. I see you on Joe Rogan, which is obviously, you know, I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing, but I know it's mostly a good thing. Congratulations. You're everywhere. Well, thank you. I think I can explain it like this. Over my life, as I've picked stocks to invest in, if I simply always did the

opposite of what I actually did, I would be a much richer man. I have no ability to pick stocks. But when it comes to picking academic topics to study, because I have a kind of an intuitive sense that the world's going to hell for this reason, I'm going to dig in here and I want to look and I want to trace this out. I have a pretty good track record of that. Looking at polarization, looking at emotions like moral disgust, and looking at the over protection of kids and the coddling the American mind. And now what I'm finding is even though a lot of that other stuff had culture war overtones and there was always a left-right dimension, now I've hit on a topic which everyone is seeing, everyone is concerned about, Republicans,

Democrats, anyone with children has seen it. And so I find I don't have to persuade people. I just walk in and people say, thank you. Yes. Tell me, what do we do? What's going on? So yeah, I think I'm really riding. I just, I came along with this at the right time. The world's going to hell, our kids are in big trouble, and I hope, I think, my book, The Anxious Generation, is the clearest and fullest statement of what happened. Yeah, you described it. I read on, I think, one of your feeds that you're pushing out open doors. So, let's talk about this. When you say The Anxious Generation, you're talking about Gen Z. You explain in the book how this generation is the first generation to go through puberty with a, and you say this, open quote, portal in their pockets that can take them into an alternative universe that's exciting, addictive, unstable, and unsuitable for adolescents. Why do you highlight puberty specifically? For a couple of reasons. One is what the data shows us is that millennials are actually doing okay. So if you were born in, you know, millennial generation goes from 1981 to 1995. If you were born in 1992, 93, you're a late millennial.

Odds are you don't have issues with anxiety. Your people in that year generally have pretty good mental health. But if you were born on the other side of the divide, 1996 and later, so if you're born, say, 1998, 1999, you have a much higher likelihood of having depression or anxiety disorders. And what I've come to believe, and here I'm drawing on, Gene Twenge was one of the first to call attention to this, the millennials are okay because they didn't get smartphones and Instagram and social media until they were largely done with puberty. They got it in late high school or college and they're fine. It's the kids who got it in middle

school. It's middle school is the beginning of puberty. In puberty, your brain is rewiring very rapidly. It's a period of very rapid brain change. And that's exactly when we should be helping kids to make it through. That's when other cultures have initiation rights and they bring kids into the knowledge of what they need to do as adults. But we give them TikTok and say, here, here, kid, your brain's about to start rewiring. Let's have random weirdos on the internet selected by algorithm for their extremity. Let's have them do the socialization for us. And that's why I think kids who go through puberty on social media, that's where the damage is greatest. Can these things be undone or is it that this neurosis or anxiety or desperate need for affirmation, does it get cemented? I mean, is it especially dangerous to be exposing

them to this at this sort of formative point in their lives? Well, it is. So the period from around age eight or nine through about 15, 16 might be a sensitive period for cultural learning. It's a time when things you learn really stick. That's true for language. If you move to a different country and you're exposed to a language before puberty, you'll speak it like a native speaker. But if you don't move there until you're 14 or 15, you probably will never speak like a native speaker. So there are sensitive periods. But with that said, I don't want parents whose kids are older Gen Z, I don't want them to despair. Because with the brain, very little is ever set in cement.

It can be easier or harder to change, but it can still be changed. And so I teach a course called Flourishing, a positive psychology course. It's 35, mostly sophomores. They're 19 years old, and a lot of them have anxiety issues. Most of them spend several hours every day on social media. And we get amazing results just by working through how do you get control of your life? How do you regain control of your attention? How do you take that last hour before you close your eyes and make it something that's going to recharge you, not that's going to just keep you up on what so-and-so is saying about so-and-so? And so by working on their morning routine, their evening routine,

and especially by shutting down almost all notifications. I tell them you can leave on five, Uber and Lyft, probably you want to leave those on, you want to know if the car is coming, but you don't need breaking news alerts about somebody getting a divorce from somebody else. That's just not something that is worth you giving away your attention to. So anyway, my point is there's a lot we can do for young, and they want to do it. A lot we can do to help them regain control of their attention and improve their moods. You talk about specific foundational harms, or four of them, of a phone-based childhood. Sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Walk us through each of those, and if you could stack rank them, what are you most concerned about? Well, sort of the biggest and most obvious one that hits everybody is what's called in economics

the opportunity cost. And so this is kind of like the foundation of the foundations. The opportunity cost is everything that you give up when you commit to something else. So recent Gallup data shows that American teens spend five hours a day just on social media, mostly TikTok and YouTube. You add in all the other stuff they're doing on screens, video games, all that, you're up to eight, nine, 10 hours is where the estimates are. This is the average. And if you can imagine, anybody listening to this program, imagine that you suddenly started spending 10 hours a day on anything. That pushes out everything else. There really isn't room. There's no room for books. There's not much room for talking to friends. You have to do it all through the app.

So I think of the four foundational harms, I think the biggest one is social deprivation. Kids really, really need to be spending a lot of time with other kids and with adults, but they need to be developing their social skills. That's gotten crushed. Once they move on to phones, you see it in the data, time with friends plunges in the 2010s. Young people used to spend a lot more time with their friends than their parents did, but now they spend only a little more time with their friends than their parents do. Something's really wrong there. Now you might say, oh, well, you know, sure, but they're spending all this time online together. No, no, it does not substitute. It's asynchronous. It's performative. It's one to many. So I think the most important one is the social deprivation. The second one, which is

also very serious and just really the easiest, is sleep deprivation. Sleep is so important for all of us. In fact, if I could go back in time, I think that, you know, I'm 60 and I never needed a lot of sleep, but I kind of skimped on it because I was so psyched, like, oh, I can, you know, I can have a longer workday and don't only need to sleep, you know, four or five hours a day. But now it looks like when you are sleep deprived, it has long-term effects on your brain and your memory. Certainly for teenagers, they're going to be in a better mood, less anxious. They'll be better at social relationships if they get a good night's sleep.

But when kids bring a device into bed with them, and many of them do, the last thing they do before they close their eyes is check their mentions, check their texts. So these things disrupt sleep. Very briefly, the third one is attention fragmentation. And we all experienced that. You and I have our frontal cortices, you know, the frontal cortex developed. I think we're about the same age. Ours developed in the 70s. Now, yeah, there was, you know, too much drugs and alcohol and drunk driving. There were all sorts of bad things then. But we got to develop normal executive function. That is, you make a goal, and then you set out to achieve the goal, and then you do it. You stay on task. You learn to focus. And that ability really gets locked in in puberty. But if you're constantly being interrupted, and kids get,

one study recently found, 257 notifications a day on average. If you're constantly getting pinged and distracted, even while you're talking to people, even while you're trying to do your homework, you never develop the capacity to stay on task. So attention fragmentation, even if it doesn't make them depressed, it's going to make them less successful in life, poorer, they won't make as much money, and just unable to achieve things. And then finally, the fourth is addiction. Now, there's a debate in the academic literature whether it's truly an addiction like cocaine or heroin. And it certainly is chemically not exactly like cocaine and heroin, but behaviorally, it's very much the same as gambling. If you can call gambling an addiction, and many do,

I think social media and video games become an addiction. Now, the research is actually pretty clear. It's not the majority who are addicted in that sense, or let's call it a behavioral addiction. The research uses the term problematic use. What percent develop problematic use, a sort of a compulsive use that's interfering with their ability in other life areas, like friendships, the ability to get schoolwork done. And so the numbers generally show anywhere from two or three percent heavily addicted or intense dependency to around 10 or 15 percent problematic use. That's a lot of kids. There's no other consumer product where we said, well, it's not necessarily an addiction, but it's going to kind of damage the life prospects of 10 or 15% of our kids.

We would never let them use it. But this one we do. One of the things I love about your work and I think is a decent description of insight or even genius is you'll say something and it seems so obvious, but at the same time, you weren't thinking about it. And I had one of those realizations reading your work about this book where you said that online we have these friend groups that have very low cost or easy entry and then low cost exit. Whereas when we grew up, you had high barriers or high cost entry and then high cost exit. And it just reminded me, when we were kids, we kind of slowly but surely shaped the people we were hanging out with. And then we just hung out with them all the time. We had our crew.

And some of us didn't like each other, or some of us liked each other more. But you got into trouble together, and that was your crew. And I just look back on that friend group I had in junior high school and high school, and it played such an enormous role. I just got lucky. Every one of my crew was going to college, so that meant I was going to college. But speak more about the importance of kind of your crew or your posse and the difference between developing them or having them online versus offline. So we are a tribal species. This is a major theme of my own research, which I cover in my book,

The Righteous Mind. We evolved to live in small groups. These small groups hang together, especially when they're in competition with other groups. This is why sports is so much fun. Remind me, Scott, what athletics you did in high school? I did everything in high school, but not very well. And then I rode crew in college. Okay. But you were on teams and I assume a lot of your friends and your crew was overlapped with your sports activities, right? A hundred percent. Yeah. So especially for boys, girls tend to have more intense pairs. Girls do a lot in pairs and smaller groups. When you let kids do whatever they want, boys tend to form larger groups.

And then part of what they do in those larger groups is compete with other groups. And that can sometimes even escalate to violence. But usually it's more sports, it's ribbing, it's competition. That's incredibly helpful. We're a tribal species and the crew you were describing, it's like, this is junior tribalism. This is master those skills. And as you said, an important part of it is that you don't necessarily like everyone in the crew. You could have tensions with someone and you learn to live with it because you can't just press a button and expel them. And it takes a lot of time. This develops over years. And so you wouldn't just burn your bridges. You wouldn't just quit because it's going to take you years. You may never get another crew. Contrast that with what Gen Z has gone through. We don't let them out very

much. So they don't get to hang out with other kids very much. For boys, if they really enjoy playing video games, the video games are amazing. But for boys, they can't go over to each other's houses if they want to play video games. They literally have to go home to their own house and sit alone with their headset, their controller, their screen if they want to play with other boys. So over and over again, this could be a major theme of our conversation today, the internet has made almost everything that kids need to do super easy to do, low cost, easy, low embarrassment. And in the process, you don't have to exert much effort. You don't learn any

skills. You don't develop abilities that transfer outside of that closed digital world. Talk about the decline of free play. So that's the other half of this. My basic argument in the book is that humans had a play-based childhood for hundreds of millions of years because we're mammals, and that's what mammals do. So play is extremely important for brain development, for developing skills.

That's why animals play. That's why they take risks. That's why human children seek out risk. So we must have play and risk and thrill and excitement. Boys especially need rough and tumble play, physical play, wrestling, things like that. And we had that until the 1980s or 90s. You and I grew up during a giant crime wave. There were risks. There were drunk drivers. But kids still played outside, got into trouble, and learned to get out of trouble. In the 90s, we freaked out about child abduction. We started focusing much more on the competition in our economy to get into a good college. Childhood became, as it is in East Asia, childhood becomes test prep for some circles of

Americans. We lose the interest in free play. Kids get less and less recess. We think they need more math, less recess. That was wrong. So for a whole variety of reasons, we greatly cut down on what kids really desperately need, which is unsupervised free play, where they will learn how to make rules, norms, develop relationships, manage relationships. We cut down on all of that. And the millennials were victims of that. The millennials, the older millennials had free range childhoods generally, but if you're born in the early 90s, you probably had some restrictions. Even still, they didn't get particularly depressed. It's only

when the second piece comes in, which is the phone-based childhood. And that just sweeps in, in the blink of an eye. It wasn't there in 2008, 2009, in the the phone-based childhood. And that just sweeps in in the blink of an eye. It wasn't there in 2008, 2009, in the first years of the iPhone. But by 2015, most kids have a smartphone, not a flip phone. And so what I'm calling in the book, the great rewiring of childhood, it has a backstory in the 80s and 90s about the loss of play, but the peak of the action is 2010 to 2015. That's the period when human childhood, not just in our country, but in many developed countries, human childhood leaves the real world and comes to take place primarily through phones and other digital devices. In the book, you mentioned or you referenced French sociologist Emile Durkheim. I'm not sure if I'm saying that correctly. Favorite thinker of all time. That's so interesting. Really, that says a lot when you say that. But the concept you highlight is anomie, I'm not sure, or normalness in English. Say more about this research and how it helps illustrate some of the things that you're discussing?

So the reason I'm so grateful to Durkheim, I never took a sociology course in college. And then in graduate school at Penn, I took one course on criminology. It was just, I don't know why I picked that course. But the professor assigned Emil Durkheim's classic text, Suicide, where Durkheim had studied suicide statistics in Europe in like the 1890s when they were just beginning to gather statistics. And he observed certain patterns. And he observed that people who are tightly bound into communities like Orthodox Jews, religious Catholics, they had much lower levels of suicide, whereas people who had a lot of freedom, especially in the Protestant countries, they were more likely to feel disoriented not tied in not connected uh and they were more likely to suffer from enemy or normlessness uh it's not a good feeling of freedom to be freed from social

norms it's disorienting and so this was just a revelation to me that to see that actually you know freedom isn't like of course we need freedom in many ways, but we don't need the maximum freedom possible. We actually need to be bound into flourish. And so Durkheim has just helped me see that a lot of what we're doing is we're trying to create groups. That's what religion is for, he said. That's why we love sports teams and sports and sports super fandom. And it really helped me to see that the digital world has atomized everything. It's split everything. It's allowed

me to see that even television used to be social because you sit there, you watch it with your sisters or brothers, you fight, you argue, you eat food, you talk about it. But now kids, even if they go over to each other's houses, they might be sitting separate on their separate screens watching separate videos. So Durkheim really allowed me to see atomization, splitting, the loss of meaning. And this is something you see in the data. This is the saddest part of all the graphs. I've got like 30 graphs in the book. There are several graphs of what young people say in response to questions. One of them is a statement, sometimes I feel my life has no meaning. Do you agree with that? Disagree with it? And for all these questions, or sometimes I think I'm no good at all.

And on all these questions, the lines were pretty flat in the 2000s and pretty low. Most students don't agree with that. But all of a sudden, around 2012, 2013, all of those lines go up. As soon as our kids moved their social lives online, they began to wallow in despair, disconnection, anomie, normlessness, depression, and suicide. It's, I mean, it's just, I think of this, we don't like to, it's especially rough, I think, on adolescence, but I wonder, and I'm curious if you feel this way, I don't like to admit that a lot of the things you're talking about have impacted me. Tell me more about which ones did you recognize in yourself? Well, I don't like to admit this, but my mental health, when I think about any mental

health episodes I've had in the last three years, half of them have been triggered by something online, by a total stranger. Someone comes after me for some of my work or tries to discredit me, and I don't even know if it's a bot. And a bunch of people who, for whatever reason, agree know, agree or don't feel good about me weigh in. And it just triggers a downward spiral. And I think a lot of times that successful people and men who have some weird notion of masculinity and success and like to think that we're immune from these types of body blows. You know, I think about how much it's impacted me, and then I think about my kids and the fact that they haven't built up scar tissue, or they have no real just how damaging this is. But what's interesting is the contrast. And you talk about this. One of the things you said that I just thought was so illuminating, you said we're overprotecting our children offline and underprotecting them online. So I'll pick up first your point about how vulnerable we all are to someone saying something about us on social media. So I love Stoicism. I use Stoicism in my flourishing class. Marcus Aurelius has some great quotes about that. Why do you make yourself vulnerable to whatever

anybody would say about you? Many of us like to think that we're tough, and maybe you're physically strong. Maybe you can handle a lot of physical pain. But even the ancients, the Roman times, when their reputation was sullied, that's painful of the most painful things that humans can go through. And that very often leads to thoughts about suicide. We just naturally think about, well, let me just vanish. Let me disappear. This is unbearable. Nobody likes me. So this is true for adults. And these were Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of the Roman Empire. He was subject to these feelings. Now let's look at 11, 12, 13-year-old girls and boys. They're coming out of childhood. They have to renegotiate their status. Who's cool? Who's attractive? Who's high? Who's low? And kids always did that, but in the slow, local way that you and I were talking about before. Now you suddenly, it's like you supercharge it. It's like you say,

let's take all the difficult parts of middle school. Let's multiply all the bad parts by 10. And this is going to take up almost all of your life. Most of your time in middle school will be spent not having fun, not learning in class. It's going to be spent managing your brand. You are going to be desperately, desperately managing your brand. One false move and you're down. These are natural, normal psychological processes that these platforms have knowingly hacked. And there are quotes from some of the early people at Facebook and elsewhere, you know, that these were hackers' tricks to play on our insecurities. See what someone said about you. Click here. So yeah, we all care about our

reputations and social media makes us all live on thin ice. It's not a happy way to live. We'll be right back. One of the things you do in the book, and I think the thing that's getting arguably the most play is you've outlined a series of pretty actionable solutions. Speak to those, Jonathan. Yeah. So I'm not doing that stuff about how to make the time less toxic. What I'm saying is the reason why our 10 and 11-year-olds have iPhones is only because everybody else gave their kids an iPhone. We're all in a trap. And this is called a collective action problem or a commons dilemma in the social trap. And this is called a collective action problem or a commons dilemma in the social sciences. And they're very hard to get out of as individuals, because if you say, nope, sorry, I read this book by John Haidt, and I'm not giving you a phone

until you're 97, or I'm not going to give you a smartphone until you're in high school, Haidt says, well, if your kid is the only one without a smartphone and the only one without social media, then yeah, your kid will be isolated. It's going to be tough. And so the solutions that I propose are all things we can do together to liberate our kids from the social action problems. Very briefly, four steps, four norms. No smartphone before high school, just give them a flip phone. The millennials were fine with flip phones. Two is no social media until 16. Social media is just not suitable for minors, frankly. It certainly isn't suitable in early puberty. Let them get most of the way through puberty before you invite them to stick their head in a toilet bowl and flush every day forever and ever. Third norm is phone-free schools. The phone is the greatest

distraction device ever invented. Kids text during class. They watch videos during class. They watch porn during class. It's completely insane that there are schools in this country, namely most of them, almost all of them, that allow kids to keep their phones in their pockets during the day. And they just say, don't take it out during class. But they do take it out during class. So the phones need to be locked up in a phone locker or yonder pouch first thing. They get them back at the end. They have six hours, seven hours a day to listen to their teachers, talk to each other, make jokes, flirt, have fun. That's the third norm, phone preschools. And the fourth norm is far more free play, independence, and responsibility in the real world. This is the harder one because we have

to overcome our own anxieties. But if we're going to take away the phones from, especially in middle school, if we're going to reduce their time on screens, we have to give them something to do. And the healthiest thing they can do is hang out, play with each other unsupervised. Let them learn how to work out conflicts and choose activities. If we do those, I'm confident that we would see these lines, these incredibly surging lines of anxiety and depression. They just go up, up, up. They never go down since 2012. If we do these four things, I'm pretty confident we're going to see those lines come down. We're going to actually reverse the mental health epidemic. Do you feel like you've gotten any traction? Do you think it's realistic to think we might have this outbreak of schools banning phones?

Do you think it's a real possibility? Oh, it's happening. It's absolutely happening. So, in fact, this is the easiest one to do because this is one where schools can just make the decision themselves or boards of education for school districts can make the decision themselves. All the principals hate the phones. All the teachers hate the phones. It's making their lives miserable. It's interfering with learning. So they principals hate the phones. All the teachers hate the phones. It's making their lives miserable. It's interfering with learning. So they want to do it. I say, well,

why don't you do it? They always say the same thing, because some of the parents will freak out. They feel they have a right to communicate with their child during math class all the time. So it's just overcoming parental objection. But now that more parents are seeing the problem, now that we're past COVID, now we can see the mess is not because of COVID. It was baked in before COVID. COVID actually didn't have a long-lasting impact. Now that parents are turning and supporting this, and the research is getting stronger and stronger,

and it's clear that there are learning deficits now around the world, not just in the US, now the appetite has turned and many schools are banning phones. The UK just mandated phone-free schools throughout the school day, throughout England and other parts of the UK. Australia has done it.

Florida just did it a couple of days ago. DeSantis signed the bill, I think it was yesterday. So this is happening. This will improve educational outcomes. And guess what? The kids love it. Some of them objected first. But what they're most afraid of isn't being off social media. It's being off social media when everyone else is on. Jonathan Haidt is a Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business. His research focuses on moral and political psychology, as described in his book,

The Righteous Mind. His latest book, The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, is out now. He joins us from New York University. Professor Haidt,

I look forward to seeing you. All of your colleagues are just so proud of you. Anyways, congratulations on everything, Jonathan. Thanks so much, Scott. It's always fun to talk with you. I of your colleagues are just so proud of you. Anyways, congratulations on everything, Jonathan. Thanks so much, Scott. It's always fun to talk with you. I really appreciate your work and your friendship. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director.

Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod on the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice as read by George Hahn and on Monday with our weekly market show.