The Rich Roll Podcast - The Social Reckoning: Frances Haugen On What Facebook Knew & Why She Came Forward

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

Frances Haugen is the Facebook whistleblower whose story inspired Aaron Sorkin’s new film The Social Reckoning. This compilation revisits my 2023 conversation with Frances, then turns to Jonathan Haidt, Max Fisher, and former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy. We discuss the falseness of the free speech vs. safety binary, the run-up to January 6, what smartphones are doing to kids, and how to reclaim our boredom. Years later, these ills have only grown worse, which is why these conversations still matter. Enjoy! Show notes + MOREWatch on YouTubeNewsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: TORRAS: Get 15% off the TORRAS Q3 Air Pro case with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://torraslife.com/products/iphone-17-pro-max-case-ostand-q3-air-pro  Rivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉🏼https://stories.rivian.com/richroll  Go Brewing: Get 50% OFF your first subscription order to Go Brewing’s Beer Club👉🏼https://www.gobrewing.com/richroll50 Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors  Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In 2023, Facebook whistleblower Francis Howgan joined me on this podcast for for an illuminating conversation about the role Facebook, as well as algorithmically driven social media platforms generally, have played in degrading mental health and accelerating social divisiveness. That episode was extremely popular, nearing a million views on YouTube alone. And now, Howgan's story is the subject of the social reckoning.

My name is Francis Howgan. I used to work for Facebook. Just released major motion picture, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter behind many amazing films and television shows, including the West Wing, and the social network. This movie's predecessor and personally one of my favorite films of all time.

I have plenty of thoughts about Sorkin's rendering of Hogan's story to the big screen, mainly that it's fairly stagnant, and so the film isn't exactly revelatory, in my opinion. Nonetheless, Sorkin does provide a workman-like version of what went down at Facebook between 2019 and 2021 to elicit the role that Facebook played

in degrading mental health, amplifying misinformation, and radicalizing millions of Americans, as well as the role that Howgan and Jeff Horowitz at The Wall Street Journal played in bringing these facts to light. The company's leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram saver,

but won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people. And so apropos to the social reckoning returning this discourse, to the center of the frame, it felt worthwhile to myself re-engage with this discourse by resharing the majority of my 2023 conversation with Francis Howgan, as well as excerpts from my conversations with Jonathan Haidt from 2024, Max Fisher from 2022, and former Surgeon General Vivek Murty from 2025, all of which are on this very subject. of social media and the impact that it is having on all of us.

Because the ills of our algorithmically driven information interfaces have only grown worse. Well, let's walk through the history of this a little bit for people that aren't super familiar with your arc and begin with why you even joined Facebook to begin with. Like what was attractive about going to work at Facebook? Because at the time, it wasn't that long ago. It was 2019, right? There was already a lot of stuff alarming things about Facebook at the time that for the sort of uneducated person about your life would make one think like,

well, why did she even go there? So back in my late 20s, early 30s, so I went into the hospital in 2014. So I was 29 years old. And my health had been declining for a couple of years. So I went from being able to ride 125 miles on a bike in a day to being in a wheelchair in two and a half years. And so I hired an assistant who was a friend of my younger brothers. And he became like essential to my recovery. And in 2016, Bernie Sanders lost the primary. And my friend, like he, he, he kind of like fell into the dark corners of the internet. He began to have a lot of conspiratorial thinking. And I remember how painful it was. Like when the Facebook recruiter reached out to me in like late 2018, early 2019, and was like, hey, do you want to work at Facebook?

I said the only thing I would work on is misinformation. Because like watching him divorce himself from our shared reality was just excruciating for me. How deep did it go for him? He ended up moving to Indiana with some people who I think are questionable. And it's interesting, like the thing that saved him was he met a nice girl. And he, like, started going to church again. And, like, he's fine today. But, like, you know, he was definitely running with some people who have some pretty extreme political beliefs.

So that experience with that close friend was a motivating factor in you being interested in, in the possibility of participating in the solution. Like, Facebook's not going away. Yeah. If you're inside that machine, perhaps you can pull some levers and write the ship. It's also one of these things where, like, I talk about in the book, the idea, and I'm not trying to brag here. Like, the idea that we have hundreds, hundreds of people in the world who understand really how these algorithmic systems work. You know, when the person said, like, hey, we do have a job for you, you could do civic misinformation.

it put me in like a really hard place because on one side like I had felt like this really intense loss and and it scared me right like he was a smart college educated funny insightful empathetic person and he still like spiraled off enough that like we would have fights over like does george soros run the world economy right like like stuff that any reasonable person would be like no he does not you know there's no space lasers like you know like you know there's no No lizard people. I'm envisioning the comments on YouTube below this video. There's going to be a bunch of people who might disagree with you.

Yeah. Yeah. Good. We should have a conversation. We should have software that it facilitates conversations. I'm not screaming at each other. But so I felt that on one side, you know, if you know that you're in a small group of people who can do something. And that thing could actually impact a lot of people's lives.

And you don't want to do it. how do you navigate, like, feeling like you have an obligation to at least do a tour of duty? And so, like, I never thought that, like, I was the only one I could save the day. But it was like, you know, there's a relatively small number of people. I'm not going to go work in Washington. We're like, I'm not going to move there. But I'm willing to do, you know, two years, three years and work on this problem. And then I could say I at least did my part.

And I ended up there. And it was just so much worse than I had any idea it could be. Because like I said before, I had never really thought about the international implications of Facebook. Like, I didn't even think I was going to work on the international stuff. I thought I was going to work on the United States. And so it spiraled very quickly. So walk me through the progressive disillusionment, you know, in specific terms. Like, what did you encounter?

So I showed up and, you know, it was like a couple of different levels of where I was like, something is profoundly wrong. So, like, on the organizational level, You know, like I said, like you mentioned, I have an MBA from Harvard. I show up. With a focus on organizational structures. Like, that's your jam. Organizational help.

Yeah. I, have you ever seen the TV show Silicon Valley? Yeah. So I can't, I failed to watch all of season one because it's not a comedy. It's a documentary. Right. Right. Like, there's a lot of things they play for last, or I'm like, oh, I watched that happen.

That is not nearly as funny as you think it is. But the, but yeah, so I really hear about how organizations function. And I show up and they tell me the very first week, so they put me in this boot camp for product managers and for people who are not familiar with technology or how like software is written. You know, you have software engineers and you have people who work with the software engineers whose job is to kind of articulate what is the problem we're trying to solve and kind of segment that problem. and the solution to the problem into like the actual discrete set of steps where like we're going to solve this then we're solve this and we're solve this and we're solve this and together we're going to ladder up to thing we're trying to accomplish and so I show up and they say hey you know you think you know how to do your job but Facebook is enough different than how other tech companies work that we have learned if we don't put you on this two week boot camp the chance that you're just going to like burn out and fail in the next six months is too high so for the next two weeks we're going to teach you how to Facebook And I get like maybe four days into this boot camp. And my manager's like, hey, we don't have time for you to go to boot camp. You need to come and give us the plan for what we're going to do with civic misinformation for the next six months.

So I've just come to the company. That's red flag number one. Red flag number one, right? I've just come to the company. I know nothing about Facebook's problems. My teammates have never worked in this space. Right. So three of my only three engineers are front end engineers.

So that's like people who figure out how to lay out the buttons and plummet all together so the information goes to the right places. My data scientist is new to the company. My engineering managers knew the company. We have no idea what's going on. But we are expected to come up with a plan in the next like five days that we're going to present to like all the leadership of the safety team. So that's the first red flag. Second red flag is I hadn't really thought. So one, I had not thought about the idea of Facebook being the internet.

But I hadn't really thought about the implications of, you know, when the internet comes to. to a new place, how does that change the place? Right? Like when we got the, like in the United States, when we got the internet, it started in the 80s, right? And you know, it started a few Ivy League schools, a few departments. You know, it progressively flowed down a gradient of privilege. You know, went out to more and more universities. It went out beyond the universities into the public, you know, on and on and on. But it took, you know, a solid 20 years. And what's happening in a lot of other countries is like people are becoming literate to use Facebook, right? That one of the first experiences I had was we were supposed to sit down and come up with how we were going to measure

success. And we had a hard problem because we were specifically not working on third party fact checking. So that's like people who do like say this is not true. Like we were going to work anywhere in the world where there were not fact checkers, which is actually most of the world. Facebook mostly goes and does that like after the fact clean up in like the United States and Europe. And so someone suggested, well, what if we looked at expressions of doubt? So like if you see something that looks off and you make a comment saying, I don't think that's true. Or I think that's misinformation. You know, we could count up those and if the number went down, we were doing a good job.

And one of our researchers said, you know, that sounds really obvious. Like that sounds like it would be a thing that would work, except for when we went in and did interviews in India, people are coming online so fast that when we talk to people with master's degrees, these are smart, educated people, they say things like, why would someone put something fake on the internet? That sounds like a lot of work. And so just imagine I'm in this context. So smart people who are getting onboarded onto the internet through the lens of Facebook and basically Facebook only without adequate discernment tools to understand, to be internet literate. I can't imagine though, even in the best circumstances that deploying human resources to, you know, to handle this job is ever going to be successful.

It's an impossible task to do it that way. And I think the problem that comes up is is the context in which this debate is framed, which is one of free speech versus safety. And a big part of what you talk about is the falseness of that binary. So it's really interesting. Like that, that I think is the thing that keeps us from moving forward in the United States is that, you know, enough Facebook executives have gone in front of Congress and said, oh, everything you're talking about is so sad. But, you know, it's this fundamental divide between free speech and safety. Or like Mark Zuckerberg has gone on podcasts like this and said, you know, I've really grown in the last few years because I've realized when you stand up for what you believe in, you know, it can be really hard. and I'm a defender of free speech.

You know, the thing that's frustrating for me is, is, you know, this question of, you nailed it earlier. When we have, when we prioritize content from our family and friends, you spend a little bit less time on Facebook. You know, your family and friends are not quite as exciting as whatever that magical post is the algorithm found for you, right? Or really tantalizing content keeps you on there a little bit longer, but also has more violence or misinformation.

having systems where we say, hey, you have to actually just be public about everything, like, about what's happening on your systems, then you can begin putting pressure on things, having protests, having boycotts, having divestment campaigns. And that provides a counterweighting balance beyond just profit and loss. Because right now, you know, like we talked about cutting the resher chains, you know, saying, hey, you know, if it gets more than a couple hops away, you have to start over, happy and pasted, say whatever you want, but you have to do it, not just your instinct. You know, right now, you know, that's not a huge hit to profit. It's maybe 0.1.2%.

But right now, there's no number value placed on reducing misinformation by 30%. You know, we don't have to quantify that as a societal cost. Right. And it is, it is amazing how much energy there is, this free speech argument given that these are private entities. Yeah. And there's the town square argument, but that feels very porous to me. That it just, it just feels like.

We're trying to document it all right now, but it's looking like they censored my book on Facebook. Oh, really? Yeah. Like they, my publisher usually can mark up, like the buy button, all the other books they sell. Yeah. And mine violated the commerce policy.

How so? because it's from me. Yeah, because as a data scientist, you're going to want to know, like, who's buying the book, where are they buying it, and what platforms are they using to purchase it from? And if you're not seeing any traffic coming from Facebook,

that's a pretty clear indication that they're throttling you. You know, this question, I have a lot of empathy for the idea of the town square, right? They are the primary place where people communicate. And in the United States, like I actually really dislike it when more societal elites say, like, does Facebook matter? Because, like, there is a huge fraction of the American populace that still uses Facebook

as their primary way of communicating with each other. And so I have empathy on the question of, like, what should you be allowed to take down or not? But for context, today, we don't get to see what they take down. Right. There's no transparency on how any of these censorship systems work. Right. We don't get to see what posts are being left up or taken down.

Hmm. That's so interesting. So on the one hand, we have evidence or a sense that you're being throttled on Facebook in terms of the word getting out about the book. At least the buy button. We don't know beyond that. Yeah. No, you can't get that buy button up there. And then on the other hand, and I have to believe this is a direct response to your work and the fact that the book has just come out, I think it was, was it yesterday or maybe even today, Facebook announced all these parental controls. Oh, really? Did you see this? No, I haven't seen it. Meta just announced they're adding new safeguards and monitoring tools for teens across its social platforms. Parental controls on Messenger, suggestions for teens to step away from Facebook after 20 minutes and nudges

urging young Night Owl Instagramers to stop scrolling. So this is good. This is positive change. The timing is interesting. Yeah. This is, these ideas are not new. These are, these are ideas that you've spoken about and suggested. It's just interesting that they're happening at this moment. The thing that interested me so much was after I came out, they doubled the amount they spent on safety. Like they came out and they said, we've heard the criticism. We're going to spend twice as much on safety.

And then in the last six months, you know, after Elon Musk showed that you could lose 75% of your employees and there were no consequences. you know, Mark himself came out and said, you know, Elon really said an example. Like, we can have a year of efficiency and fire 20,000 people. And I find it really funny that the thing that is making them start thinking, or at least publicly making gestures towards doing more safety is I started being noisier again. Yeah, and Elon's cuts involved the safety teams, right? The safety teams got cut. But they did the same thing at Facebook.

They did. I've had, some of my favorite researchers are no longer at the company, and it wasn't because it was their choice. So when they talk about these large investments that they're making in safety, then how does that match up against the layoffs or what does that actually mean? Well, if you'll notice, like, a lot of those changes are relatively superficial, right? There's no way that took more than 10 or 20 engineers to build, right? And the second thing is we don't actually know the efficacy of any of those interventions. Like imagine a world where Facebook said, hey, we know that sleep deprivation is the single largest danger from our products for kids. So sleep deprivation for those who have not dug into the literature.

It puts kids at big risks of academic deficits, which stays with them for the rest of their life. It puts them at higher risk for mental health issues, not just depression and anxiety, but also things like bipolar or schizophrenia. Increases the rates of substance use, uppers because they're tired, downers because they're depressed. And rates of death from accidents. It's like not just automotive accidents, but like all cause accident rates. You know, Facebook could come out and say, we acknowledge what a large role

will be playing kids' lives. We're going to start publishing a very simple set of data each week. It's going to take us 15 minutes to do, like once, and after that, I'll just update over time. I'm going to say how many kids are online at 10, 11, midnight, 1, 2, 3 a.m.

And we're going to do it every week. If they were doing that, if they were really serious about these problems, you know, it doesn't violate anyone's privacy, but we'd be able to see, did those numbers move when they launched those things? And as long as they refused to release even basic data, like we should consider all of these moves marketing.

Otherwise, we're just taking them at their word. Well, it's also things like Antigone Davis came and talked to Facebook. I think the week before I, excuse me, talked to the Senate, the week before I came out. And she bragged about how Facebook took seriously the issues around body image. And they had a little thing that would pop up if they thought someone was at risk for an eating disorder.

And like I intentionally, you know, took pictures of the dashboard that showed how often that triggered. And so globally, it was triggering a couple hundred times a day. Right. So it's one of these things where if you're going to get up there and brag about how serious you take this problem and then do an intervention that touches me,

maybe 1% of kids affected. Like, we shouldn't give you too much credit. What do you make of Elon's Twitter? I think his efforts around subscription models is super interesting. So for context for people, if Facebook had had a subscription model back in 2010, you know, we probably would have never diverged from that version of Facebook. You know, the version of Facebook in 2010 was about our family. It was about our friends.

It was much more human-scaled because there wasn't, but because. it's an advertising supported business model, they had an economic incentive to get us to view more and more and more content. And I'm very interested in how his subscription experiment will play out

because it is having the side effect of it is the level of conversation is definitely not as rich as it used to be. And the fact that he biases towards subscribers has distorts that again. But the flip side it is, I like where the incentives are aligned.

Like, but the secondary thing is it also creates a larger buried entry for accounts. Like you have to pay, you know, $8 a month for that account. Right. So on the one hand, you know, political dissidents in non-democratic regions who need a level of anonymity and access are going to have a more difficult time. Exactly. You know, getting the word out in the way that they need to.

On the other hand, I like the subscription model, and it makes one wonder what would have happened if at the onset or the inception of the internet that that became the primary model as opposed to an advertising model, the internet would be completely different. Very different. And we would have a better incentive structure

that would not have created a lot of the problems that we're contending with today. And I don't know how you unravel such a massive knot. I mean, advertising is how this whole operation functions. But to the extent that, and it's hard to reverse engineer it, once that's out of the bag, how do you go to subscription? Totally. You capture a small percentage of the audience that's interested in that.

But I guess with a large time horizon here, maybe that can tip in the right direction. And to give your listeners context, like right now in the United States or the United States in Canada, the average user on Facebook generates for Facebook $55 per quarter. So I always ask people, like, would you be willing to spend, you know, $200, $250 a year on Facebook. And it's interesting, most people claim they would not, but Facebook has run experiments where they bribe people not to use Facebook. And people actually value Facebook a lot more than like $20 a month.

It's fascinating to see that kind of cognitive dissonance. And when you say Facebook, are you including Instagram, WhatsApp? Yeah. Yeah. But what's interesting is that's $55 per user in the United States and Canada. It's only 1450 in Europe. It's 450 in Asia, and it's 250 in the rest of the world. And so it's one of these interesting things around, you know, I think it'll be super interesting

to see how things play out as we see the demographic changes in the United States. Because if more and more young people leave Facebook, you know, as those things change, the place that Facebook makes its money from is the United States. And so they'll be left with these users that are long. locked in because, you know, it is the internet in their countries, but Facebook doesn't generate how much revenue from them. All right. Well, let's go back to you as a whistleblower walking up, you know, walking towards this, you know, Rubicon moment where you decide you're going to share what's happening. So you're becoming progressively disillusioned. Was there a certain inflection point

where you decided, I just can't, I have to go public with what I'm discovering here? When we reached December of 2020. So this is about a month after the U.S. 2020 election. When Facebook dissolved the team I was on, so they dissolved a team called Civic Integrity, I saw that it was time that Facebook could not heal itself. And what is your sense of why they made that choice? I think part of it was that, you know,

they made good investment decisions over a long period of time. Like it was the only part of Facebook.com that was growing was a civic integrity team. But the problem was, you know, as the team grew, I think they just accumulated more and more liabilities for the company because they, it went from having an amorphous problem to having a concrete problem. You know, every time a researcher did a project, now there was a record that Facebook knew these, there were problems here. And they weren't willing, like, you have to remember, Facebook can't change the circumstances of their external constraints, unilaterally.

Like Facebook can't come out and say, hey, all software, all social platforms need to be transparent in the following ways so that we can do the right thing. Or at least they didn't think they could do that. And so as they accumulated more and more of this documentation, I think it was just creating conflict for the company because they weren't willing to actually go and address those problems. Right. So they're getting a sense of just how broad and complex the problem is. Yeah. And there's a lot of documents piling up accounting for that. And without solutions, maybe better to just go, la, la, la, la, I don't, I don't, you know, it's better to not see.

Well, it's not a question of there weren't solutions. Like, over and over again, solutions were being proposed. But each of those solutions, you know, would hurt profitability by 0.1%. You know, if you, if you stack together the 30 most important things, 50 most important things, you know, Facebook might be 5% less profitable. But they also have like 35% profit margins. So it's this question of. where does that trade-off of cost come from? Right.

So if you go from 35 to 33, is that really a problem if we're actually addressing these social issues? Yeah. If you could save the lives of 100,000 people in some country where Facebook is the internet, is that worth 0.1% of profit, 0.2% of profit.

And part of what you reveal in disclosing the documentation that you collected was that Zuckerberg himself refused to, to address these major problems despite a lot of well-documented pleas from employees. One of the stories I tell them there is to kind of benchmark how Mark views himself within the company, or at least how he portrays how he views himself, which is in the spring of 2019, the president of India began making a lot of comments about Muslims that are considered red flag. for ethnic violence. You know, he was comparing them to rodents, other kinds of vermin,

which is like a classic kind of step on the dehumanization kind of ladder. And people started, and so people start having conversations about, you know, what should, if he started calling for violence against Muslims, you know, what should Facebook's policy be around that kind of violence incitement. And a task force of, you know, 30 people with, you know, deep expertise in these issues from all over the company, you know, from every single part, slice of the company that would be affected, you know, from communications to the ads team to the social cohesion team, which is like the genocide team, you know, all over, got together and did a task force for months to figure out what should Facebook's approach be to this?

should it happen. And Mark came in, looked at the work of this group of 30 people and said, I can write a better policy and wrote one over the weekend. And when they announced it on Monday, or Tuesday, the policy was, we will not touch the speech from politicians. And the problem was he had never consulted the advertising team or the misinformation team. And so he didn't know, that Facebook didn't know who the politicians were in the world. Right. So it was, it was a, It was a wrongheaded decision and ill-informed at the time. And he didn't consult the teams that actually knew what were going on, which speaks to a larger issue around control and authority within Facebook.

Like Mark, great question. Mark sits on, what, like 54% of the voting stock or something like that? So Facebook buys back a huge amount of shares every quarter. And it was like 53-ish when I came out. And at least the last time I checked was up to 55. So like every, every, you know, court it goes up a little bit. Right.

And so it's, and it's structured such that there's all these different classes of stock, right? Yeah. But he's always sort of notching up his voting rights shares so that he can exert, basically, you know, authoritarian control. Yeah, unilateral control over the company, which is problematic, right? Yeah, the, I'm the CEO, bitch. Yeah, that was specific. business card. Yeah. So he's the chairman of the board, which means that he is also his own boss, because he's the CEO. At Microsoft, you know, one of the inflection moments when Microsoft started being a little bit more of a pro-social actor was when Bill Gates stopped being allowed to be both the chairman of the board and the CEO. And so these questions around, you know, one of the things I learned in business school was this idea that that we think of corporations as these mona, like bohemian. You know, they, they're eternal.

They've never changed. They have all this power. But the reality is, like, even what we conceptualize as a corporation has changed over time. And there are checks and balances on those corporations, even if they don't necessarily take into consideration enough social costs. In the case of Facebook, all those checks and balances are gone, right? Because he controls the majority of voting shares, it doesn't matter that over and over again And, you know, 80% of all the non-management votes say things like, you know, we need to look at the costs of Facebook.

You know, we need to do a security audit. You know, we should have only one class of votes because, like, you know, you shouldn't be allowed to demand to be CEO forever. It doesn't matter because he has that, you know, outsized influence of the company. And what is the composition of the board? Does he have objective feedback? Is there anyone who's in his ear who's pushing back on what it is that he wants to do? Not really. Like, if you really aren't anywhere near Mark, if you're critical.

So this is yet another in a string of events and incidents that tiptoe you towards the edge of the cliff here. So when they announced they were going to dissolve civic integrity, that was the moment where I was like, oh, they've given up on the playbook. you know, very clearly someone had come in and guided them and said, hey, if you want to change the course of Facebook, this is how you do it. When they told us, you know, your team is so valuable, we're going to integrate it into other parts of the company. That was the moment for me where I was like, Facebook can only save itself if it gets help. Like, it's not going to be able to do this alone. And so that was the moment where I knew that I was going to have to figure out how to do something.

And the dissolution, I have to believe on some level, because, it came in the aftermath of the election, it feels like, well, the heat's kind of off because we're now on the other side of the election. Yeah, there wasn't blood on the States. The pressure wasn't as intense as it was leading up to the election. I think what's so interesting about it is, you know, so the fear at Facebook was genuinely that there was going to be violence in the United States and then around to the election. And I think Facebook kind of felt like, oh, good, we dodged the bullet.

Like, the situation was resolved. There's no future danger. but that meant that when the buildup to January 6th happened, there was now no longer like a single person whose responsibility was to raise their hand and say, hey, you know, maybe we should turn back on the safety systems that were on for the election.

So what's your sense of Facebook's culpability in the January 6 events? So when you look at how the movement that culminated in the riots at the Capitol, you know, it's very interesting in how those, those, social movements grew because it wasn't like a broad organic swell. It was a very, very small number of people inviting hundreds or thousands of people to these groups that they didn't know.

Right. There were people who were very actively understanding what the weak points were in Facebook and then going out there and spam friending hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people or making lots of twin accounts so they could do it over and over again. And I think there's real questions around, you know, even in, I'll give an example of a safety feature that might have changed how some people made decisions. When you sit in interviews with the people who got arrested at the Capitol, they say things like, I thought it was real, right? When I looked on my Facebook feed, all I saw was that there was a coup and that I, a patriot, needed to come save the country. part of why that was happening was if you have a post and every time there's a comment on it, it goes to the top of the feed.

Very rapidly, you can have a feed that gets completely swarmed with this kind of mass panic. And one of the things that was on January before the election in 2020 was if you had a Facebook group that had too many calls for violence, they would do things like say, hey, you need to appoint your own moderators. Which sounds like, well, what's that going to do? Like, aren't they just going to prove all their own posts? It turns out getting people to care about a group enough that they are willing to volunteer to do tedious work like that, you automatically kind of rate limit that group. Or they said things like if there's too many calls for violence, we'll turn off commenting. Right. Now that means those posts don't go up to your top of your feed a hundred times.

And so there's things where, you know, the heat could have been turned down on Facebook for the, you know, six weeks, eight weeks before January 6th. This episode is brought to you by Taurus, which is a brand new sponsor. I'm really excited to tell you about. They are the mobile phone accessory company for outdoor explorations because, let's be honest, you guys. When you're out there alone blazing a trail, your phone really isn't just a phone. It's like an appendage. It's your safety tether, your map, your car. camera. The real cost of dropping it isn't necessarily the screen. It's the low-grade worry that you carry with you the whole way. And that's exactly what Taurus built the Q3 Air Pro to eliminate, which is this case that you see right here. They developed it with legendary climber Tommy

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Stories.rivian.com slash rich roll. You make this decision, well, you get in touch with this writer for the Wall Street Journal. Or he had reached out to me. He reached out to you. And that initiates kind of the momentum behind this. And ultimately, you know, you decide to trust him and he becomes your sort of co-collaborator in all of this. And you make the decision that the government entity with whom you're going to share all of this was the SEC, which I think. is interesting. Like, I think most people would think, why didn't you go to the DOJ?

So in the United States, there's only two organizations that have whistleblower protections. So one is the SEC and one is the FTC. The DOJ doesn't have, by default, whistleblower protections. And so usually the way you do is you go to the SEC, you go whistleblower protections, and then they work with, say, the FBI or the DOJ. And reflecting back upon that moment and seeing those Wall Street Journal articles and watching the 60 Minutes interview. part of me was like, yeah. It's not like this was, it's shocking that an insider came out and said it, but what you were actually revealing wasn't all that surprising to me, but it seemed like it was to a lot of people.

And the point that got the most attention was the impact of Instagram on teenage girls, which was only one of kind of many revelations and, perhaps maybe not even in the top three of the most cataclysmic things that you were sharing. Part of why the revelations around teen mental health were so resonant is people are really seeing the magnitude of the harm today. And I think, you know, you're saying before, like people had brought this up before. When you have, it was kind of like a tobacco moment that prior to when the tobacco whistleblower came out, you know, scientists had known for a couple decades, like cigarettes caused cancer. The thing they didn't know was that the tobacco companies knew that. Knew that. Had documentation to that effect, right?

Yeah. Yeah, that's the big differentiator there. You said recently, you told the Sunday Times that tens of millions of people will die if social media isn't overhauled. So what do you, that's a, I mean, that's obviously a headline-grabbing quote. What do you mean by that? So when I joined Facebook, and I want to fully admit I'm in the same pool as lots and lots of other technologists that went down this road. When I joined Facebook, I had not really thought about the implications of Facebook being the Internet for some of the most vulnerable places in the world. So Facebook, you know, surveyed the scene in the late 2000s early teens and said, hey, we came to prominence because we killed MySpace. You know, we came into prominence because we killed Friendster. You know, these were social networks for those of your listeners that are too young to remember the glory days of the early 2000s.

You know, these were the social networks that people were on in 2003. You know, we came to prominence because we surprised those legacy networks. You know, we don't know what corner of the world, the thing that will come from will surprise us. So we're going to go in other countries and say, if you use Facebook, we'll pay for your data. if you use anything else on the open web, you're going to pay for yourself. So de facto, that means the translation to that is that for gigantic swaths of the developing world, Facebook is the internet. It is the primary interface, if not the only interface by which people are interacting with each other online, which creates a tremendous amount of power. And with that

power comes responsibility. It should. A big part of your work has been kind of pulling the covers on the lack of responsibility or the gaps in, you know, what should have, could have been done. Unquestionably. And one of the things that I want to be clear is this book isn't actually just about Facebook. It is about opaque systems that are in similar positions because we're actually seeing now TikTok and notice TikTok came from the only corner of the world where Facebook couldn't play, right? Like, it came from China. I thought when I came out that we had five years before there it would be violence caused by TikTok because video takes more bandwidth, you need a nicer phone. And within a year after I came out, there was violence in Kenya around the elections that was

fanned by TikTok. And if you look at the drivers, you know, they're actually related. So I talked to someone at TikTok and they said, when the violence was taking place, there were no moderators at TikTok that spoke Swahili. And that is the recurring theme. Right. So for Facebook, they went into these vulnerable places. places in the world. They prevented an organic internet from forming. So an internet that was based

in companies that were local, that spoke the local language, that understood the local culture, that had vested interest in the success of those countries. They came in and displaced that, but made sure it didn't get to grow up. But then they had these systems where because the algorithms give more distribution to more extreme content, you know, if you start a fight in a post, you're going to get much, much more distribution than someone who does a calm response. You know, Facebook has set up a system where unless you are actively kind of turning the knobs, or this is the same for TikTok. TikTok's even worse because they push things towards being hyperviral.

Unless you have people in there going in there and kind of blunting the sharpest edges, you can have systems that fan ethnic violence. And we've now seen that for Facebook twice, Myanmar and Ethiopia, and smaller incidences in places like Sri Lanka. When we talk about the tools that are available currently for purposes of staving off misinformation, disinformation for combating violence, et cetera, that is incited online,

what are those tools? We have content moderators, and we have the ability to toggle the algorithm. Is that still the case? Like, what does that landscape look like? I'd say we actually have a third one also, which is you can make intentional choices about how your products are designed. So, like, if we were to roll back in time to 2010, right? So in 2010, Facebook had a feed.

You know, you still, it looked quite similar to what it does today. But that feed was not algorithmic. It was chronological. And because of that, you couldn't have mega groups. Like, you couldn't have a group that had five million people in it. Because to have a group with five million people, that could be. group might make 5,000 pieces of content a day. You have to have an algorithm that will cherry pick out 10 things to show you, right? You know, we can make choices around, do we want

social media that's about our friends and family? Do we want a social media that prioritizes choices we make? So I'll give you an example. This doesn't even touch the algorithm, or it does a little bit, but it's more like a product design choice. You know, Facebook has done experiments where they say, hey, let's divide all the content on Facebook into two pools. One is content you consented to. So this is the friends and family you picked, the pages you followed, the groups you actually joined. And one pool is content you did not consent to.

So this is someone invited you to a group. Facebook started putting content from that group into your feed for 30 days. You wrote, that's misinformation on a post and a comment. And they said, ooh, you like it. And they made you a member of that group. Or your friend commented on something and now the post shows up in your feed. If you just say, hey, we're going to give priority the content that you selected, that you consented to, over content you didn't consent to, you get less misinformation, less violence, unless hate speech. Like, your friends and family aren't the problem.

Right, but you get less engagement and you get lower, you get lower revenue because you're not able to serve up as many ads. And so the incentive structure is upside down. And a big part of your work in the book is talking about the importance of changing those incentives in partnership or in lockstep with the urgency around transparency. So right now, we have laws that say, you know, if you're a private company, you're publicly traded, you have to report your profit and your loss. You know, how much money did you spend your expenses to get that profit? You don't have to report the consequences of your products, right? one of the major ways in which our economy is changing, and we have to talk about this because it's only get more and more dramatic,

is it used to be 50 years ago, 100 years ago. Most of our economy was run by systems where you could buy the product and you could take it apart. You know, you could test it for does it have lead in it or heavy metals? You could put sensors outside the factory and see what kind of pollution is being imposed on society. We are moving now onto opaque systems where the important choices of the park consequences happen behind a curtain. You know, they, they live on data centers. Facebook has to report the profit and loss, but no one actually gets to see how Facebook is functioning.

And I'll give you kind of an example to give a sense of why the world has changed so much. And I talk about this some in the book. You know, if I know this is going to feel like a reach, you and I could sit down and spend three weeks and I could teach you enough coding that you could ask meaningful questions about Google. You know, like, you could ask questions about what does Google distribute, what seems to be, like, what their preferences are, that kind of thing. Because we all see basically the same version of Google. If you want to do that same level of, like, accountability 101, we would have to recruit 20,000 people and convince them to install software on their computers or their phones to send us what they saw. You know, it's a much, much harder problem.

And so the kinds of laws that I think really shift the playing field, you know you're saying change comes not like from Washington, it comes to Washington. You know, for things like cars, and I talk about this in the book, by the time we met our watershed moment in the mid-60s, so like the fatality rates on cars have been going down for years, in the 60s they started going up again.

You know, there were 100,000 automotive engineers who could confirm what unsafe at any speed was saying. or there was an insurance industry that didn't want to pay out claims, and so they would spend money on research so that they could say, no, it was actually the automotive company's fault. Or there were lawyers who had been looking for victims and could give you representative data. You know, if we wanted to enable an ecosystem like that that could go and begin challenging these opaque systems, we would need to pass laws that say, hey, we need a baseline level of transparency.

Like you can't hide information on like how many kids are, you know, binge watching YouTube at 2A. You can't hide information on how many kids are getting overexposed to self-harm content. Because even just a little bit of transparency, can be privacy protected data, aggregate data. Suddenly, moms can organize. Suddenly parents can make different decisions about what products they let their kids use. You know, advertisers can say, I'm not willing to invest in your product. But we can't do any of those things without baseline data. In addition to being called a crisis actor, the other criticisms that were levied at you were,

there's a bunch of them, but one was, you weren't high enough up, up. You were never in the room. You're not in the C-suite. You don't really know what was happening at the highest level. And, you know, Mark, right after everything was made public, kind of came out and said, she's mischaracterizing everything. She doesn't really understand what's happening. I take this personally.

was sort of an emotional appeal. Yeah. So part of, I totally anticipated that that would be said about me. And so one of the things I did was I didn't just get the documents. I got all the comments on all the documents. So you could see Facebook employees talking about each of these documents in real time. So you could see that people didn't believe that these were crazy, that they thought these were true. And one of the things I really hope is going to happen is Harvard is right now releasing the documents.

I hope when, like, so like there's, you know, if there's, you know, tens of researchers that have access right now, hopefully in the future, like the public will be able to access most of them. You know, the thing that is, is sad for me about how things rolled out, like we had to do it this way because we needed to protect people's privacy. You know, if you could see the names on the comments, you could see the names on the documents, like who wrote what? I think the disclosures are 10 to 20 percent more scary. Because right now, when you read through them, you occasionally see things and you're like, that can't be right. Like, there's no way that could be true. And if you could see the thread of like this person said this and this and this and they've been at Facebook for 10 years, you would be like, oh, this is actually much more scary than I thought it was. What would be an example of that? I think just things around things like the algorithms, like the idea that there are biases and what gets distributed and that, you know, these things don't have, they don't have to operate this way, but they are. operating this way into a really extreme extent. And to have the comments in the documents also... Or stuff about things like cartels operating on the platforms in Mexico

or the terrorism things or how Facebook's like censorship systems take down counterterrorism content. Like there's just a bunch of stuff along those lines. And the comments validate the legitimacy of the documents. To have those comments on there makes one realize like, oh, this is a real document, and there were multiple people engaged in discussing the ramifications. Or I'll give me another example. There are documents criticizing that they have brought multiple safety interventions and that, say, the policy team has intervened to protect the speech of certain political actors.

Right. Like, there were things brought forward that would have made things safer. Would not have cherry-picked. Like, they weren't picking ideas that were good or bad. It was just changing how the system was tuned. and that, you know, the policy team would intervene because it would have implications for certain actors. One of the things that comes across in the book and when I listen to you speak is that you're not attempting to vilify Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg. Like, you're, it's quite the opposite, actually. Like, you seem to have a lot of empathy and compassion for not just that organization, but for the people that work there in the position. that they're in. And I think that's interesting.

I think it would be easy to just point fingers and create villains. So what is your perspective on Mark? Oh, you know, Mark is so interesting. So think about it like, you know, what were you like when you were 19 years old? I was a knucklehead. I was a drunken, out of control.

Yeah. disaster. I was a disaster when I was 19. You know, a lot of, and a lot of 19 year olds are disasters. Like, Mark has had to be the CEO since he was 19, right? Like, he's, he has been surrounded by people. Remember, he's had control of all the votes since he was 19. So everyone around him, he just decide if they're around him because he's in control. And, and, you know, I became who I am today because I made lots of mistakes and I got lots of feedback and I had to live with consequences of my actions. And Marcus had very little of that feedback cycle. And I really worry about, you know, what life has he ended up in because I, you know, he's going on podcasts and saying things like when I wake up in the morning, it feels like, and I look at my phone.

Like I look at my email, it feels like I'm getting punched in the face. You know, like how, like if that's not a cry for help, like I don't, I'm not really sure what it is. And it's one of these things where, you know, he's the last of the original big tech CEOs that's still in charge of his own company. And I think part of that is that he lives in an echo chamber. You know, he lives on an estate in Hawaii half the year. The other half of the year, he's at Facebook. Like, he can't go out anywhere in the Bay Area without people grimacing at him. You know, like it's not like, if I had crossed Twitter, the Elon Musk fan boys would have come from.

me. But like there are no Mark Zuckerberg fanboys. But you have said that under certain circumstances, you would go back and work at Facebook. Yeah, we can't give up on Facebook. Right. Like I think the most important, the most important work I could do is if they actually wanted to fix it, is like work on like how do we, how do we make sure it can function safely, you know, in the places where it is the internet. Because I think there are strategies where even if you, even if you didn't want, to necessarily do it the way I would suggest doing it, which is like, let's go in there and add the friction, like add the intentionality around sharing, that kind of thing. You know, even if you did want to keep a content moderation strategy, you know,

beginning to work on decentralized content moderation. Like, imagine if, like, there's a scholar named Ethan Zuckerman at UMass and Hersch, who talks about the idea that right now we are subjects of a king on our social platforms. You know, we can follow the laws. We can not follow the laws. We can go to another place. But we're not citizens. You know, in a democracy, you know, it's not just that we have rights.

We have responsibilities. You know, we do jury duty. We have other obligations to our communities. You know, you know, there's a way that we could be scaling up even the current ways of doing safety into these places, but we'd have to say you have to do some of the labor, too. Well, we're in a bit of a chaos adolescence phase right now with the emergency. of all of these smaller kind of Twitter analogs and the emergence of the substackification of journalism.

And I feel like we're sort of trying to find our feet in all of this, but it's a little strange right now. If you were designing the ultimate social network for the future, what else would be built into that? So I think it's always important to, people talk about social media as a thing. like it's really kind of two two main worlds it's it's broadcast social media it's like Twitter you speak on Twitter not because you care about um or like TikTok for example

creators create on TikTok not because they're trying to reach grandma is because they're trying to reach as many people as possible and so they'll repost their videos onto YouTube or onto Instagram and people watch TikTok not to follow any particular person but to see what's Be entertained. Yeah, be entertained. But on places like Facebook, it's personal social media. Like you post your baby photo, not because you want a random person to see it. You want grandma to see it. And so we, I think we always have to be a little bit careful when we say, like, what would the ideal social media be? Because this is a question of ideal for what. And I think in the case of personal social media, I really like human-scale personal media. It's like my, or social media. Like my primary social media right now was about to. to hold it my phone, but my phone is not here. I, I, my, is signal. It's like a group chat. You know, I have maybe 50 group chats.

They have different themes. Like I have one called Doom News. And it's like about war and destruction, you know, global warming and all those things. And people spread news on those themes. Versus like ones that are like your local pub. They're like one of my friends hosts for, you know, 40 of us or something.

Uh-huh. And, and this is this question. of like what do we want to get from social media? We want connection. We want to have a lens on the world. We want to stay in touch with people. And we don't need to have half a million person groups to do that. And so I think for me, good social media is at the scale that the institutions that humans have evolved over time can function at. So like we have the concept of a dinner party. We have the concept of a cocktail party. We have the concept of a church parish. of a university. Like, these are concepts of communication, like a convention, right? We have scale that goes up to maybe 25,000 people. Beyond that, it gets a lot more complicated. Like, you do have to have these much longer conversations about governance. Yeah. And I think most of the things that we want to get out of social media can be accomplished in communities that have less than 25,000 people. Yeah, it's interesting, though. When I hear you saying that, the missing piece for me,

as somebody who creates on the internet and has built a career premised upon this free distribution model and access to lots of people and this whole influence or economy that's kind of emerged from it is the democratization of the voice

which has its positives and negatives. But I think you could still host content. So something like YouTube, you host the content and this question of where people discuss the content, you know, do you have, half a million person groups. And what kinds of information end up propagating in a world where you have a megaphone that goes to a million people versus a megaphone that goes to 25,000 people? Right.

Depth versus breadth. Because like when you have a 25,000 person community, like you can have like a Discord server and you don't need an algorithm. Like humans mediate what information you receive. Once you get above that, you know, you end up in a, you know, when you have a single channel, you know, like a Facebook group that has one stream. and as half a million people, the only way you can actually navigate that content is with an algorithm. Yeah.

And now you have to have conversations around, what are my rights to resetting that algorithm? What are my rights to seeing that algorithm? You know, that kind of thing. As a data scientist, a lot of people, you hear a lot of people saying, well, we don't even know how these algorithms work. Is that true?

Oh, yeah. What parts of it do you understand and which parts of it allude even someone like yourself? So it's one of these things where, you know, This is a very young field. Like, this is one of these things where I talk about in the book. And we can design a system and say, this is the data we put into it. Like, we can describe that.

We can see it. And we can, you know, when Elon published the algorithm, like, he can see what provisions it says. But the problem is that all these things work together in ways that are unexpected. Like, no one at Facebook, when they made the shift from saying, can we keep you on the platform as long as possible to, can we get you to react as much as possible? no one said, I think this is going to lead to more extreme content. Like no one, no one's set out to do that. And I want to validate the things that Facebook has said. You know, they say, we don't recognize these allegations.

We would never intend to do that. I don't think they did. But the problem is that when they learned, there were these side effects. And right now, the only people who get to ask questions about could there be side effects are the people inside the companies. You know, people who have a vested interest in, not knowing, you know, when they learned that there were these consequences, and to be clear, like, the shift was big enough that, like, the CEO of BuzzFeed wrote to Facebook and said, I think something's broken.

Jonah Peretti? I don't remember which, which genera. It would have been in, like, 2018 or 2019, so I don't know which, which era that is. Yeah, that's, it's, it's wild. Yeah. And it's getting wilder, right? Like when we think about what went down in terms of election interference in 2016 and in 2020, it feels kind of very, you know, kind of not that big of a deal in consideration with what we're contending as we, you know, as we, you know,

careen towards the 2024 election. Everything is now suddenly, infinitely more complicated due to the release of these various LLM. the rapid growth of generative AI, deep fake technology, like the tools that are now available on the disinformation battlefield are just extraordinarily powerful. So how do you think about how those tools are going to be deployed and what we can expect as we move towards November? So I think there's two areas that we need to really pay attention to.

So one is, you know, when Marks, When Elon Musk fired a lot of his safety teams, it really shifted the information environment. So one of my, my husband and I like to watch YouTube together because we're nerdy. And there's a guy named Peter Zihand who follows a lot of the politics in Russia. And he was talking about how it used to be one of his best data sources was Twitter. And when Elon came in, he ended up blocking a lot of people who were in Russia. But he also, like, because he fired the teams that were looking for the coordinated behavior, you can really obviously tell the trolls on both sides of the conflict now just outweigh the real voices.

And so one is we are investing less in catching bad actors. But the second is the way the tools have changed what's even possible with misinformation. So for context for people, one of the ways we used to catch those bots or like catch the networks of people who were pushing. an information operation was we look for a repetition. So, you know, there's always this interesting trade-off between how much distribution can you do and how much unique content can you do, right? So if you really don't want to get caught, you write a different thing every time. Before the large language models came out, you were limited.

You know, you weren't going to reach a ton of people if every single thing you posted was unique. So you could start looking and saying, interesting, you keep sharing the same links or this group of people keep saying very, very similar things, or maybe even the same thing. Right. And it becomes clear that this is a bot farm. Yeah. Right. Or like China was particularly egregious at this because they would do things like they would have brigades of tens of thousands of people who would just like flood the common threads on dissidents' posts with like just the Chinese flag. You know, like if you can tell this is all the same thing. When you start having large language models, it's now possible to go and generate tens of thousands of unique pieces.

of content that all basically say the same thing, but say it in slightly different ways. And that makes it a lot harder to see that coordination. Or, for example, you know, part of what makes misinformation so pernicious is consensus reality is like a channel. You know, there's not like a huge continuum of what you can talk about. There's like, you know, we can sit and come to a view of like reality if we talk long enough. When it comes to misinformation, it can play in the entire field of ideas. And whatever is like the most seductive or like most incendiary on the algorithm,

that's the thing that gets distributed. In a world with large language models, you can generate 10,000 different variations and send them to lots of different nooks and figure out what meme, like what idea is most seductive. And that just supercharges what can be done with a misinformation campaign.

It's terrifying. It is. And that doesn't even get into all the deep fake stuff when you can mock somebody's voice or their likeness in a compelling way that's indistinguishable from reality, then our footing in what is real and what isn't real vanishes. And things get really scary. Part of why I think we need to step away from content moderation as the solution, or like censorship as the solution, is it presumes that we can go in there and establish true and false. right? A different approach is to come in and say, hey, you know, information operations promoting

lies is much more dangerous than most things. It is very hard if you are in information operation operative to have a robust real set of relationships with people. Like one of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of how would you catch a fake person? Like how do you catch someone who is behaving in an in authentic way. And so if you are really acutely modeling and saying, hey, you have friends. You have a family. You have people you regularly interact with who interact with you back. We can tell you are an organic human.

If you have a fake human, you know, it's like an LLM, they can try to guess what do real people look like, but they're not going to be perfect. And if your whole network uses the same assumptions, now your network will stand out as being a clump of people who act in a slightly anomalous way. Yeah, I like that. I mean, the idea being traditionally, if you wanted to see whether someone's a real person, go to their Twitter account. Oh, they just created the account last week. They don't, you know, they don't follow anybody that I know or none of their followers or anybody that I know. This all seems manufactured. You can kind of get to the bottom of it pretty quickly. What you're saying is create a matrix of credibility that establishes this person as real with a history of, you know, deep relationships and interactions with other credible people that over time establishes somebody as a worthy distributor of information. Yeah, this person looks like they're a real person. They're having real conversations. And even if I disagree with them, the idea that they are a real person means they are less dangerous than they are part of an officer.

But at the same time, it's like, we're having a conversation about just trying to figure out who's a real person or not. Like, it's insane. Right? Yeah. It's, we are living, and this is part of why we have to start having more transparency, because we have tools where we can start saying, hey, we got to move this ball down the field. But there is no economic incentive today to do those things on their own. This episode is brought to you by go brewing. All is beer season.

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how these systems work, right? Like, I should have the right to know I am not allowed to sell my book on Facebook, right? We, the public, should be able to see what content gets taken down. Right now, the only avenues that we have are you can appeal to the Facebook oversight board, but it disappears into a black hole, right? Things can really change if we have transparency. And so we need to first work on how do we make that a bipartisan issue, that we cannot have. an information environment that is run by a private company in the dark and have a democracy. And the second thing is like, so how might we actually do that? So, um, face, uh, Europe passed a law called the Digital Services Act last year. Um, I talk about it in the book, um, that basically,

it sounds, it sounds pretty blah. It's like, you know, if you know there's a risk to your platform, you got to tell us about it. Like, we know you get to operate behind the curtain, but we can't see. we'll never catch up with you unless you tell us what you already know. You have to tell us what your plan is for reducing that risk, and you need to give us enough data that we can see that you're making progress. And if we ask you a question, you have to give us an answer. And if we don't comply. So I think it's like 10% of global revenues.

Oh, wow. That's the penalty. Like it's a real one. Though when you have a 35% profit margin, it's possible Facebook would come out and say, we are now 25% possible. It's just a business expense. Right. What is your sense of the viability of something like that passing in the United States? You know, it's interesting.

If you had asked me two months ago, I would have given you a much more negative answer. But the Surgeon General came out with their advisory, you know, about a month ago. And just for context, for listeners, there's been like under 15 Surgeon General advisories since the 60s. You know, there are things like cigarettes cause cancer, seatbelts, safe lives. breastfeeding is good for babies, like stuff that we kind of take as, duh, statements day. But there was ambiguity before those advisories came out. And historically, when an advisory has come out within two to three years after an advisory, something happens on average.

And so I think there's a good chance that something's going to happen around kids. And my hope is that we can scaffold towards a broader transparency law from there. What do you mean something's going to happen around kids? Meaning there will be like a sort of political will to do something because of our shared concern of how these things are impacting young people. Are impacting mental health of kids, yeah. Talk a little bit about, you know, how to get people engaged and active around these issues and where they can plug that enthusiasm.

You know, I think it's interesting. Like, I had an interview like two weeks ago with a relatively young woman. She's like in her 20s. And it kind of felt like I had stumbled into a therapy session. Like I spent like a solid 20 minutes of that interview just trying to convince her that there's hope, right? That they think she can be done. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. She's like, how is there any chance we're ever going to stop these giant corporations? And one of the things I pointed out to her was, you know, I think the first, the first step is that we have to believe that change could be possible. And the thing I told her was like, you know, one of the first quotes in the book is from a guy named Bachlov Havel, who wrote The Power of the Powerless. So for those of you who are not Cold War Studies minors, I'm old enough to remember. Yeah. In the Soviet Union, you know, if we had gone to anywhere in the Soviet Union in 1960 and said, will the Soviet Union fall? No one would have said that.

They'd be like, there's this like iron, iron grip. And he said, you know, there's this, this, you know, you can feel like there's no potential to change because the Soviet Union figured out a way to glue things, like to make them stuck. You know, instead of being a totalitarian state where they just ruled by force, he said they're opposed to totalitarian state. You know, they rule by ideology that if you cross the ideology, the ideology just heals around you. So in a system where if you are powerful or you're powerless, if you speak out, the system just heals around you and shunts you to the side, you know, what is left? Like what is your power? What is your agency? What is your power left? And he says, you know, you start by valuing yourself and saying, I am a human being and I have dignity. You know, I think if we started more conversations on social media just from that simple of a lens, like saying, you know, right now Facebook is not really. really indicating they value our dignity. You know, what would, what would social media look like if it did, it did look like they valued our autonomy and our choices?

You know, for example, you mentioned Netflix. When I was sick, I watched a lot of, um, really depressing Netflix. And I think I didn't even realize that I had like gotten into the darker depths of, of the catalog. Like the true crime, Dahmer stuff. Oh, no. Like, like, I don't know, moody Scandinavian dramas, you know, like, you know, like, You can be real dour on Netflix if you want to be.

Scandy crime. Yeah. I like it. But when I started getting better, you know, I'd open up Netflix and I'd be like, nothing appeals to me on Netflix. Like I try to search for comedies. I try to see for anything. If Netflix only knew that I feel better now. Yeah, exactly. You're thinking like, I need to fix this algorithm. Well, I didn't even think about it until I moved in with some new people during COVID. So I moved to Puerto Rico and moved in some new people. They had their own Netflix account. And it was delightful. Like there was all this wonderful stuff on.

Netflix. But I hadn't even realized that I had gotten into a corner of the algorithm, right? Like, like, imagine a world where... And you of all people. Yeah. It's interesting. So imagine, you know, imagine we said, hey, step one, I matter as a human. I have dignity. I deserve to be treated with respect. You can imagine things like, you know, maybe we should have the right to reset algorithms. You know, you shouldn't have to give up all your watch history and all your, like, ratings. Like, like, I have a watch list of stuff I want to watch in the future. Should I have to walk away from my data in order to get the algorithm to reset? And this becomes, like, a really big deal when it comes to kids,

because, like, when I've talked to therapists about kids with saying eating disorder or who have been self-harming, you know, kids are forced to choose between their pasts, you know, all their friends, all these moments of their life they've documented, and an algorithm that threatens their future. That's really interesting. it seems like an easy fix. Sure. You would be able to do that because imagine the young person or anybody who's contending with some kind of mental health issue, eating disorder or otherwise.

They realize they need to get well. They engage in some kind of recovery process. They're getting better. But when they open up their app, they're getting exposed to the same content that fed that, you know, maladaptive behavior pattern. That's not great. Yeah. And so they're faced with the choice. It's that whole thing of like, it's on the user.

Yeah. Right. And so what? They have to delete their account or unfriend everybody in order to reset it when there could be some healthier tools. A happy medium. Yeah. And I think that's like the recurrent theme that I want people to walk away from is that we have been sold by the social media companies that there are only these very stark absolutes like extremes. And there could be like happy mediums, you know, things where we say, you know, let's design to put control back in the user's hands.

or to make patterns that were invisible visible. And that's not enough. Like we need companies to have to pay for social costs too. But they're like really easy for steps. So the second thing is, you know, we've started from change is possible. I matter. I deserve to be respected to, you know, taking care of other people, right? Like coming in saying if you have, and this is part of what Valkov-Hopkel talked about,

He said, you know, start just by saying, I refuse to let you humiliate me. I refuse to let you devalue me. Second is, I'm going to care for my friends and family. Right. Like, I'm going to also remind them, they matter. You know, I think until we get social media that is safer, we have to start saying, I'm going to, we need to redefine some of the rituals of what it means to care for each other. You know, talk to your parents, talk to your kids, talk to your friends and family about

how they use social media, right? How would you feel if you found out your friend died because they were getting sucked down a rabbit hole of despair and you didn't know, right? And I think it's just one of these interesting things where like, I don't know, maybe I'm like a radical and I'm like, what if we said, hey, I'll show you my Instagram feed if you show me yours.

Right. Right? Like maybe I'm a radicalism because I'm like, what if we just tried it? You know, like what, how would the world change? Yeah. So in the interim, while we're wrestling with all, of these problems existential and practical, like what are some best practices around how to interface

with these tools? Like we need to understand just how powerful they are, how addictive they are, the many pitfalls and risks of engaging with them. But they are part of our lives and our identity. And we're not going to, nobody's going to become a Luddite or, you know, delete their account. I mean, some people may delete their accounts. But for the most part, these are things we have to figure out some kind of healthy symbiosis with. Yeah. And I want to acknowledge, like, you know, when I talk about this idea of like, I would work at Facebook because we can't leave people behind, right? You know, there's people who, from Facebook is the internet. The flip side of that is there's lots of people in

the United States who don't have the luxury of getting to do a lot of socializing in person. You know, socializing in person costs money. You need to get there. Maybe you have to buy food to be in the space. Maybe there's other things. We keep devaluing, getting rid of the public spaces where we could interact with each other. You know, people don't join bowling leagues anymore or garden clubs, that kind of thing. And so there's a bunch of people whom, even in the United States, we need to not leave behind. But the next thing I would say is, I saw this app recently on when I was, you know, my book tour a couple weeks ago that I loved, which was it just, when you open any social media account, it tells you how many times you've opened

it today. And a little thing goes across the screen very slowly that counts down like five, four, three, two, one. And then asks you, do you really want to open Instagram? I do really want to open YouTube. And I love that idea of just giving people a pause, a little friction. A little friction. Because one thing that people do is they use these as like digital pacifiers. You know, you're feeling a little anxious, you're feeling a little uncomfortable instead of sitting and just enjoying the silence or like watching the scenery go by in your Uber or whatever. You know, I, we pull out our phones and we just, we immediately dive in. Any kind of moment of intentionality gives you a chance to make more of a real choice. What is that app called? You know, I, I, I have my phone for me.

We'll figure it out. We'll put it in the show notes. I like that idea. I haven't heard of that. I've heard of other sort of apps that you can put on your phone that you can set hours where certain apps don't work, et cetera. I think it's important to reclaim our boredom. If we want to be able to express ourselves creatively and do our best thinking and be able to respond to the world around us and be available for the people we care about, we have to reprioritize the importance of rumination and quietude and those moments. And I'm as guilty as anybody, you know, I'll fill every opportunity, you know, standing in line or what have you to check the phone and, you know, lose myself a little bit. I'm like, I'm powerless. You know, it's really hard. I have a

lot of compassion for people that are suffering and feel powerless to, you know, make any kind of adaptive behavior change around these things. I think there's some other low-hanging fruit. It's like charge phones, not in the bedroom. That's a tough one. You know, kids charge their phones in the parents bedroom. Yeah. Adults should. Once the cat's out of the bag, as somebody with a bunch of kids, like, it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle in that one. Well, that's why the kids' phones can charge in your room, but like your phone could charge in the kitchen or something. You know, you can buy an alarm clock for 10 bucks. It will wake you up in the morning. That's one of those ones that I'm really, I need to do it, right? Like, my vice is I do them scroll late at night,

and my husband totally calls me out on it. And so I need to start charging the phone in the kitchen probably. In 2019, it seemed pretty clear that the phones are doing a number on the kids. There was an academic debate. I couldn't prove it, but I was making the case along with Gene Twangy. And then COVID came in and confused us all for several years. What kids really needed before COVID was a lot less time on their screens and a lot more time outside playing with each other.

And then COVID came in. and what American kids and kids all over the world got was the opposite. A lot more time on their screens, a lot less time playing with other kids face-to-face. And it became clear by 22, 23, the kids are really a mess. I mean, the mental health is horrific. But what Gene Twanky had shown, what I've been showing, is that COVID actually didn't make things a lot worse. It's been getting worse and worse since 2012.

Something happened in the early 2010s. Mental health fell off a cliff for those born after 1996, not for those before. And what we're trying to figure out is what on earth happened and how do we roll it back? So what did? There was this period of time between 2010 and 2015 that created this inflection point that is impacting most profoundly Gen Z. So walk us through what those inflection points were. So I'll start in the 1990s because that's when most of us got our first look at the internet. And it was marvelous. It was miraculous. It was miraculous. You know, it was as if, if God came to Earth and said, would you like to know everything instantly all the time? And we're like, yes. And so, you know, I certainly was a techno-optimist.

I first used, I guess, Alta Vista in 1994. In the 90s, we thought that the technology, the Internet was going to knock down tyrants, going to be the best friends of democracy. So most of us are very positive about these developments, and it really was amazing. And then we get the early social media, you know, 2003, 2004, MySpace, Facebook. they're connecting people. It's all so amazing. You get Uber and Amazon, totally amazing. 2007, the iPhone comes out, and it's not at all harmful. It's a digital Swiss army knife. You pull it out when you need a tool. So everything's great until 2010 or so. The mental health of teenagers is fine. It's stable. It's actually getting a little better in some ways compared to Gen X.

And then between 2010 and 2015, everything changes. The technological environment changes. and with it the mental health. And what we can discuss later of the evidence on whether it's causal, but at least it's incredibly well correlated. What you have to see is that in 2010, of course kids are on their phones all the time. We all talked about how they're always texting, but that's what they could do.

They could text and they could call. That's what a flip phone does. That's it. They didn't have high-speed internet, they didn't have front-facing cameras, they didn't have Instagram. They just use their phones to connect. It's okay.

Over the next five years, that's when everybody flips over to a smartphone. So by 2015, 70% of American kids are now on a smartphone, mostly an iPhone. Most of the girls have Instagram, front-facing camera, high-speed internet, unrestricted data plan. And so now you could be online literally all day. Today, like in 2024, about half of American kids say that they are online almost all the time. This is what's so devastating. Puberty is this really important period of child development in which the brain is rewiring based on input it's getting.

And all around the world, adult societies help their kids through that transition. How does a boy become a man? How does a girl become a woman? And what we did in the early 2010s is we said, how about if we don't help you with that at all? How about if we give you a device, which will take up all of your attention, like everything that isn't nailed down to something, it's going to go to your phone? and a lot of that attention is going to be to random weirdos on the internet who are selected by an algorithm because of how extreme their performance is as voted by other random weirdos on the internet.

How about if we let that socialize you? So in all these ways, going through puberty in, say, 2005, like a millennial, versus 2015, like Gen Z, made all the difference in the world, and I believe that's what has caused, there are many causes, but that's the biggest single cause, of the gigantic increases in anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide. that are the characteristics of Gen Z. Yeah, on top of that, you have things like the like button

and the onset of these algorithms that continue to kind of fragment us and atomize our news feeds. And the App Store, which opens up the iPhone to an entire universe of new possibilities where billions of dollars are poured into apps designed specifically to hijack our dopamine system and addict us. And when you have a young brain that's going through puberty, I mean, what is going on neurologically that makes a human being at that age more vulnerable to the lures and the wiles

of what one can find on the iPhone and what is the kind of permanent damage or what can be undone and not undone? Right. So in the book in chapter two and three, I spent a lot of time going into what childhood is. A human child that is this amazing evolutionary adaptation. It's different from any other species. All mammals have comparatively large brains compared to other attacks. And all mammals wire up those brains with play.

Play is a really important part of being a mammal. And really sociable mammals like monkeys and dogs and humans, they have to play a lot more to develop the social skills. So the human brain actually grows very fast in utero, of course, and then it continues to grow very fast with the first few years. But it reaches 90% of its adult size by the age of six.

So after that, it's not like, you know, oh, I want my child's brain to grow larger. No, it's not going to grow much larger. It's rather, the brain grows this huge profusion of neurons and synapses that it doesn't need. It's just like, let's make a lot of them. And then from age six to around age 18, 20, sort of the ending part of puberty,

the name of the game is not growth. it's more pruning and trimming. Let's delete stuff. And the stuff that remains, we're going to wire up more tightly and we're going to put a myel and sheath, a kind of a fatty substance around them to make them insulated. So if you think about it, more like, let's pull all the supplies up there in the head by age six.

And then let's turn the child loose. That's when kids really want to go out and play. That's when they can take on all kinds of responsibilities. They can take care of the farm animals. They can go on errands. We're going to send them out into the world. and what they're doing is they're going to be telling the experience will tell the brain what's useful, what do we keep, what do we trim away? The period of fastest trimming is during puberty.

So, you know, from 6 to 10, 11, they're playing, they're mastering physical skills, their brain is tuning up. But once puberty starts, then it really accelerates. And it's not just like basic skills, like how do I, you know, run away from a predator or it's all about identity. Who am I? What do I do? What's my role here? how to be a good member of my society, what's prestigious, what's shameful. So it's really advanced social development.

And social development is neurological development. It all has to be based in the brain. So if we think about puberty, especially early puberty, let's say age is like 10 to 14, that I think is the most vulnerable age, especially for girls. Boys start puberty a little bit later. That's the period we should be most careful about what our children's experiences. And unfortunately, it's exactly the period in America now and Britain, other places, where we give them their first smartphone around age 10 or 11. Middle school is now dominated by smartphones.

During class, it's dominated by smartphones. The kids are on. They're texting. And so in so many ways, we have abdicated our responsibility to help our kids tune up their brains. We've turned it all over to the phone. In this thesis around this great rewiring, like what are the, I mean, you've identified. kind of four key harms that are at play here. Yeah.

Yes. So this started off. I was going to be focusing, I thought, on social media and girls, because that's where the data is clearest. But as the story unfolded, as I went more into childhood, I realized, I need a separate chapter for girls. I need a separate chapter for boys. But there's a bunch of things that are hitting everyone, and adults as well.

So I ended up calling the four foundational harms. They are social deprivation, sleep deprivation. sleep deprivation, cognitive fragmentation, and addiction. So just very briefly, American kids now spend five hours a day just on social media. That's mostly TikTok, YouTube shorts. It's the short videos. Also longer videos on YouTube, and it's also Instagram and a bunch of other things. So five hours just on social media.

And then another three to five hours, depending on the study, another three to five hours on other screen-based activities. And none of this includes homework. This is all just leisure. So, you know, eight to ten hours a day on their devices, that pushes out almost everything else, or at least it minimizes. Think of all the good things you did as a kid. Or think of all the things you'd want for your children today. Would you want them to have any hobbies? Would you want them to read books?

Would you want them to go play outside? Like, everything that you could want for your kid, cut it by 90% because they have to spend all this time servicing their network connections and keeping up with what's on TikTok. So you cut out all that stuff, what really matters. So the two that are foundational, the two that just we know are. just really important for mental health and for child development are time with other kids and sleep. Like, who could argue with this? And the data on social deprivation is just stunning. A couple of my favorite graphs in the book, favorite, in that they're kind of horrible, but they're dramatic. One is the amount of time that Americans spend with each other. So these are studies, the American time use survey, I think it's called.

They ask people to fill in detailed records, what were you doing at this time, this time, this time. And when you look just at time outside of work and school, how much time are you spending with your friends? And for older people, you know, in their 30s or beyond, it's less than an hour a day because people are busy, they're married. But for teenagers, it was always like two and a half. It was a lot. They spent a lot of time with their friends. Like, you know, you and me, after school, you're just out with your friends. So that begins dropping in the 90s and 2000s.

As kids get more, you know, television time and more internet time, it is dropping. But when you hit 2010-2012, it plummets. It falls really fast. And one shocking finding is that, you know, for the older generations, you see it drop with COVID. Like you see it goes from like, you know, 40 minutes to 20 minutes. Like we really were locked away. You really see a drop. But for teenagers, what you see is the drop from 2019 to 2020, after COVID restrictions, was no steeper than the drop from 2018 to 2019. Oh, that's interesting. In other words, they were already socially distancing. so fast since 2012 that COVID didn't even speed it up. Wow. And on the addiction piece, if there's one thing we've all learned, like I'm in recovery, I'm part of that community. But I think now that everyone has a smartphone, I think everybody has a better understanding of what the feeling of addiction is because we all have that pull or that lure. We, you know, we can't put it down. Whenever we're bored, we just can't help but look at it. But what is particular to

the pubescent mind when all that myelination is occurring and those neurons are trying to figure out where to connect. When you introduce this thing that really does, you know, hijack that dopamine system, what is it doing to that process of the developing brain? That's right. One of the revelations that, you know, Francis Hogan brought out thousands of pages, you know, screenshots of internal Facebook communications. And one was a seminar or a document or something prepared by some Facebook staff for other Facebook staff on teen brain development. And it goes into how the emotion centers are very active and those are developing early in puberty, but the prefrontal cortex is much later. And so there's this period, which is really the sweet spot for social media,

which is especially teenage girls, you know, 13 to 17, very, very heavy users. There's a sweet spot for them in which the emotions are intense and the social concerns are intense. They really want to know what people think about them, but they don't have much self-control. They don't have the ability to say, no, I need to do my homework. I'm not going to check Instagram right now. And so they know that's the vulnerability, and then they go for it. Again, they're not trying to harm kids, but they are trying to win the race to keep their attention. So for all these reasons, this is why I say one of the most important things we can do is raise the age at which anyone can open a social media account.

I think it should be 18 in terms of health, but my goal is to give us clear norms that we could reach. So I say 16. If I said 18, I don't think we could achieve it, but 16, I think is achievable. So nobody should be on, no kids should be on social media until they're 16. Let's talk a little bit more about the differences between boys and girls. You have all these graphs throughout the book, many of which are just hockey sticks, basically. But not in every case, but I would say in the vast majority of the cases, throughout all of these graphs, it's much more extreme in the case of young girls than it is with boys.

Yeah. In part, there's a very deep psychological difference. This is described by Simon Baron Cohn, one of the leading autism researchers, that boys are a little bit more over on the spectrum towards autism. In uteral, we all start off as female fetuses with female bodies and female brains. And then when testosterone is triggered around the 10th week of gestation, you get the testes are activated, you get a little testosterone. The body begins changing over the male pattern, and the brain begins changing over to the male pattern. And the male pattern is higher on systemizing. lower on empathizing. This is just on average, there are lots of exceptions, but boys are shifted over a little, you know, they're more likely to like reading subway maps and computer programming and things that are high systemizing. Boys will grow up to read popular mechanics. Whereas girls are a little lower on systemizing, higher on empathizing. They care more about what's happening to other people. They remember more about, oh, how's your sister? Last time you told me that, you know, that she had appendicitis. They think about who's related to who and how. So girls are a little more socially aware. And so if some girls are sharing their anxiety, their depression, that's incredibly contagious. It literally will make other girls directly, more likely to be depressed and anxious. And it also conveys a subtle message of valorization that it is prestigious to do this. It is rewarding. If you do this, you get so much support.

And the more you do it, the more support you get. So that's why I think, I can't prove this. But I do think that we often see this big jump between 2012 and 2013 for the girls. And I think it's because that's when they hyper-connected, and that's when they began sharing contagious emotions. Also, I would imagine just the sort of low-hanging fruit, obvious thing around knowing what everybody in your friend group is doing all the time. And, you know, 24-7, feedback on where you stand within that group dynamic.

And if you're not invited to the party, being able to see, you know, what's happening at the party in real time, well, you sit at home. That's right. And good, because this gives me an opportunity to talk about Snapchat, which I don't talk much about, but I'm going to start. My daughter is 14. She really wants Snapchat. I didn't let her have Instagram in middle school. And that she's actually fine with. She could see that, as she put it, the girls on Instagram are stupid. She said that to me in seventh grade, like she could see what it's doing to girls. But she wants Snapchat because that's what they all use. You could just do it all with texting, but they're all on Snapchat. And so I wasn't sure what to say about Snapchat. I had a strong. since, first, we don't have nearly as much research on it as we do about Facebook and Instagram, which have been around longer and are more widely used to be. I had the general sense that Snapchat wasn't so bad because it's mostly just texting, texting with photos.

How bad could that be? My views about Snapchat are getting more negative as I think about a few features. One is the heat map, as you were describing, the ability to see where everyone is, so boy, do you feel left out. Someone was just telling me, you know, his son threw a party, and, you promised it'll be only be about 15, 20 kids. Two or 300 showed up because once they could see that everyone was there, everyone went. So this sort of mob dynamics, it's desperate fear to not be left out. So that's bad. Another thing that's really bad about Snapchat is the streaks. That I think the company should be ashamed of. They claim that they are trying to help kids, they're helping them connect. The streaks, which is where, you know, they'll tell you, oh, you know, you have a two-day

streak with this person. Don't break the streak. You better send them something today. So you have all these kids who have other things to do in their life, they have to service their Snapchat streaks. They have to post and post and post and post, not because they really want to, but in order to keep the street. That's an example of a feature that is only done to addict and compel them to stay on.

It is an evil feature. Snapchat should be ashamed of itself. It should drop that feature. It's just bad for kids. That's one. Just this morning I read another article. The Wall Street Journal has been great on this on really tracking down

what the social media companies are doing to our kids. a feature I didn't know about. They now show you everyone's social world like a solar system. Have you heard of this? Do you know about this? I hadn't heard about it either until this Wall Street Journal article this morning.

So apparently, so if you are a paying subscriber, apparently you can pay $4 a month to get the premium service. If you're a paying subscriber, then it shows you your social universe. Like here's you. Here are the people who are closest to you.

As we calculate based on your communication, we can see this person is your mercury. They're the closest to you. And this other person, oh, you know, She's, you know, Neptune. Okay, so you get to see that for yourself. You get to see it for everyone else. And so you can see that this person that you thought was your best friend, actually, you know, it's Maria who's her Mercury and I'm her Mars.

Like, I'm out where Mars is. Like, wait, what's going on? And so this is a cruel, cruel feature. I mean, I cannot believe that they do this to kids. I had never heard of that. Yeah, I hadn't either. I think it might be a new feature. That feels pretty pretty vicious.

Yeah. Oh, it's horrible. So, you know, I think Snapchat has a lot to answer for. I have not picked on them until now, but I'm going to start picking on them. I really think that they're doing bad things to our kids. You know, this is sort of like the last third of your book, all of these solutions that we should be talking about and enacting to counteract what we're seeing. So talk a little bit about what those solutions are. And I mean, you're optimistic about this. I am. I am optimistic that we can change. And I think that because most people want to change, because these four norms that I propose are actually pretty. easy to do if we all do them together. So I think we can do it even if we never get any help from Congress. And here's why. So the first norm is no smartphone before high school because the parents are all in a trap. The reason why you give your kid a phone when she's 10 or 11 is because she says,

mom, everyone else has a phone and I'm left out if I don't have one. I'm alone. So that really breaks everyone's heart. We give in because everyone else gave in. So, but if we can set a clear norm, how about if we just don't give a smartphone till high school? Let's rip this nonsense out of middle school. Give them a flip phone. That's okay. Because I understand you need to be able to text them about pickup or about after school activities. I'm not saying go back to the way you and I were raised when we didn't have phones on us all the time.

But the flip phones didn't seem to have harmed the millennials. So give them a flip phone or a phone watch, just like an Apple watch. A lot of parents are telling me they're having good results there. So that's the first norm. That would at least let the kids get through early puberty before. for moving their entire lives online. But that's still on some level an individual action item. It's a decision made by the parents, not by systems.

Well, that's right. That's right. But this one, like, I don't think it would make any sense to have a law saying you can't give, you know, if you want your kid to have a smartphone. You can't, like, in Britain they're talking about that. There's some proposal for that, but that we could never do that in America. And I wouldn't want us to. So that can be done as long as, I mean, it would be helpful if the school gave guidance. And we'll get to that in a moment.

So no smartphone until 14. no social media till 16. And that's what the new Florida law does, which I think is fantastic. That was the original law was just you can't open a social media account until you're 16. There was pushback. There's a libertarian argument that, you know, who are you to tell me how I can raise my kids, which is fine with me. Florida law does allow 14 and 15-year-olds to open an account if they have their parents' explicit permission.

And I'm excited to see if that law forces the companies to finally develop a parental permission format. At present, kids can go anywhere, porn hub anywhere, no parental permission, no age verification, nothing. And that law is relatively toothless until there are protocols set up on the tech platforms themselves, right, to verify identity? Yes, that's right. But we have to force them to do it because they desperately don't want to. It's going to be hard for them. They're going to lose a lot of customers. Their user base will plummet because a lot of them are bots. They're not real people anyway. A lot of them are children. So, anyway, the second norm, no social media until 16. The third is phone-free school. You know, you might tell your kid, no, I want you to lock your phone in your locker and not have it on you during class. But if everyone else is texting, then you have to be texting, otherwise you're left out.

That seems like the first order of business. It's the easiest. And perhaps the easiest one to implement. It is. It's the one I'm most excited about because that's the one that I think we're going to achieve this year, like literally in 2024. If you're listening to this podcast, if your kids go to a school where they're allowed to keep their phone in their pocket, please contact the head of the school and say, please make the school phone free. Our kids' education is plummeting. They're literally getting stupider since 2012. After decades and decades of

progress going up, academic scores are dropping, not because it, well, COVID, yes, but it started after 2012. It's the phones. And I can tell you, the principals all hate the phones. The school, the teachers all hate the phones. They just can't lock them up because some parents freak out and yell at them. But if we can get more parents saying, please, give my child six hours a day where they can attend to the teacher and to the other children, because otherwise they come into school and they're just on their phones. Like they're on phones during class, they're on their phone between classes, they're on their phones at lunch. Like, it's insane. Why bother going to school? So phone-free schools, that's a must. It's easy. There's no obstacle to it. There's no cost.

I mean, it costs a little bit to buy phone lockers, but that's it. So that's the most powerful one that we can do right away. The final one is the hardest. The final one is the hardest. The final one is we have to give our kids far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. We have to give them back a normal human childhood where they have some independence to make small mistakes and take small risks. If we're going to cut back on screen time by, you know, let's say 80 or 90 percent for middle school kids is my hope. I just made up that number. I should be more precise. But, you know, we have to get rid of most of the screen use at least through middle school and elementary school. We have to, we have to, you

to then give them not just something to do, we have to restore to them what a normal childhood is, which is a lot of independent play. And we have to give them chores and responsibilities. I mean, running errands, going to the store, these are great things to do. Kids today feel useless. This comes up in a lot of surveys. They say, my life has no purpose. Sometimes I feel useless. Sometimes I feel I'm no good at all. All of this starts really in 2012, 2013, and the more we let our kids be part of the family, do some jobs, run errands, the more they'll feel useful. So those four reforms, if we do those, I think we will not roll it back all the way, but I think we will, for the first time, see these rising curves. They're going to turn around. They're going to drop. The suicide rate will drop. The depression rate will drop.

Again, I can't say it's going to go back to where it was in 2010. But I think we can really bring it down. And so far, it's done nothing but rise. On the subject of collective action, what is your sense of where the tech companies are right now? I know that you've spoken to Mark Zuckerberg, and they may say one thing, do another, I don't know. But do you think that there is hope for some version of reformation here? Well, you know, I think, I mean, META has shown no inclination to reform, despite getting whistleblower reports, or internal reports, I should say, about dangers and threats. nobody set out to harm children I think some of these leaders

still may believe they might believe the skeptics there are some professors that are in a debate with so Mark Zuckerberg points to their work whenever like on the Senate stand he points to their work saying well the scientific consensus it's just like the cigarette thing yeah exactly that's right

that's right because there are some conflicting studies that he can point to but I don't know whether he believes that it's harmless or not I don't know but my sense is that because they are lock in a collective action problem. Any one of them that does the right thing

is going to lose all their underage users. Huge numbers of users are under 13. And any company does the right thing, they're gone. They have to kick them off. And then they're just going to go to TikTok and other companies that won't do the right thing. So I do not see any hope for reform from the social media companies

or the gaming companies until they are forced by legislation or lawsuits. This is my hope. Congress stupidly grant them immunity from lawsuits. for what they publish back in 1997 or six whenever the Communications Decency Act was passed. So we can't sue them for what they show to our kids. But those laws have been interpreted, as I understand it, really broadly, so that parents can't really sue even for design choices the platforms made,

like streaks, for example. There's no reason for streaks. That's not a First Amendment issue. It's a trick they did to addict our kids, and parents have not yet been able to sue, but there's a huge number of cases moving through, refining the legal theory for why these platforms should actually be responsible for damaging kids,

or at least for keeping them off. So if these suits succeed, they're going to be much larger than the tobacco settlement. This is many more kids, many more people, than tobacco ever affected. So, you know, these suits could be gigantic, and that would have an effect. In Congress, there is the Kids Online Safety Act.

There is one act that it doesn't delay social media, which is the most important thing, but it does make their time online less toxic. It sets more things to private. It makes it harder for men to contact girls and young children. It does a lot of good things. So COSA needs to be passed, and that is bipartisan. And that's actually one encouraging sign is that almost all this stuff is totally bipartisan. This is the one thing that talk about cohesion. This might be the one thing that saves America.

No, you're right. We need a common enemy. We're all coming together and agree. Social media can be the common enemy that binds us together. The irony of that. That's right. What's unwinding us is actually going to come all the way back around and bring us back together again. Like if you could go inside of these app companies, whether it's Instagram or TikTok, like, which ones are the worst?

You talked about streaks with Snapchat. Like what are the ones that you think are doing the most damage, particularly to young girls? And if you could unwind some of the features on these apps, like which would be the ones that you would. would like to see go first? Is it the like button? Is it the algorithm, the follower account? Where's the harm? Like, where's the locus of the harm? So the total tonnage of damage is going to be a function of the total hours spent times the perniciousness of those hours. It's the number of hours. So Netflix, huge numbers of hours times the perniciousness. Very, very low perniciousness for Netflix. Whereas TikTok, huge number of hours and the most pernicious thing, I mean, you know,

Hardcore porn. There are some other things that are worse. But I think TikTok is the worst of the worst. Instagram, I believe, was the worst for girls because of the incredible amount of social comparison to other girls' perfect lives, carefully edited and run through filters. So those are the two that I think have done the most damage to girls. And then, you know, video games are harming boys, but it's not like the game is harming them. It's more the opportunity cost to taking them out of life, the things they don't do. the most important thing I think that we could possibly do is not tinker with algorithms, not tinker with like buttons. It's just delay. Let kids get through early puberty. That's what we have to do. Early puberty, and even the skeptic, even the people I debate with, there's a group in Britain, even they found they have a publication showing that at least the correlation between harm and social media use is largest between 11 and 13 for girls. Like even they find it. So can't we all

agree that the existing current age of 13, which is way too low, can't we at least all agree that it should be enforced? Like, why are 10-year-olds on Pornhub? Why are 11-year-old girls living on Instagram? We do agree. The only people who are not agreeing are the tech companies that would have to put up those firewalls to prevent younger people from logging on, right? That's right. That's right. So how does that get strong on? Well, so I think that's where I think we need to be putting pressure on Congress to enforce. So Congress passed the Kappa, the Online Privacy Protection Act in 1998, I think it was. They set the age to 13. It was going to be 16 in the original bill. But lobbyists got it pushed down to 13. That wasn't about safety. That was about,

at what age can a child give away information without their parents' knowledge or consent? At what age can I, as a kid, tell this company about all my likes and hopes and fears, and they can take the data, they can sell the data, they can market to me? You know, do parents have any control over this? And Congress said, 16 would be the age and then it got pushed down to 13. Oh, and no enforcement whatsoever. No enforcement. As long as the company doesn't know that you're under 13, they're fine. So they're really motivated to not know. This is insane. This is completely insane. This is like saying, the drinking age is 18, but you know what? It's up to the parents to enforce it. And bars, strip clubs, brothels, whatever, you know, we can't expect you to check IDs. It's up to the

parents to keep their kids out. That's completely insane, but that's where we are. So maybe steal man your case for the problem. Like, what is the problem? Oh, man, what is the problem? I mean, in some, in some level, I think the most sympathetic case that you can make for the platforms is that on some level, the problem is human nature. And an enormous amount of the book ended up being focused on something I did not think it was going to be focused on, which are the frailties in our nature. basically and some of those are things that evolved in some of them are ways that we constructed society that we deal with our own impulses and instincts and the basic problem i would

say is that because these social media platforms are designed over all else to maximize engagement which means just whatever they have to do to get you to spend more time scrolling tapping and sharing so that they can sell more ads against you and so that you will hook in other users that they can sell ads to because of the ruthlessness of their systems, the scale of their systems, and the fact that they work by playing on our most basic social impulses and our social needs has made them incredibly powerful at bringing out instincts that we have tried to suppress in what you would call modernity and at bringing out things that we know are harmful for us, but that are tough to resist when we have this platform

that is giving us a reality where it feels like it's something that we have to do, it feels like it's something that's necessary or pleasurable to do. It is something that its influence can be so invisible, and it's designed to be invisible. You open up your Instagram or your Twitter and you think you're seeing your community.

You think you're seeing your friends or your family or you think you're seeing the voices you follow, the people you want to hear from. And when you interact with them, the feedback that you get in terms of what travels, what gets likes, what doesn't get likes. You think that that is feedback from real people. But these are overwhelmingly the choices of these automated systems

that are deciding what's going to get attention, what's not going to get attention, because the amount of content that's on social media is huge and the amount of content you can see is tiny. So it can tell almost any story at once by what it pulls out and what presents to you and how it presents it to you. And it smuggles its choices through your community,

in a way that feels neutral but is not, and in a way that has much more power to affect how you think and how you feel than you might believe, because we derive so much of our emotional state and so much of our sense of how to behave and even what we think we want internally or how we feel internally from the cues

that we take from people around us that we think are from the people around us. Right, and that's a big piece in the book, like our group identity, and how we kind of gauge status amongst our peers, et cetera. And when you look at what's being served up to you, even understanding that that choice is being made by an algorithm and that algorithm is selecting for engagement

with the overriding goal being the platform maximizing as much time as possible and also understanding that what drives engagement often are things that are at odds, with our well-being, things like moral outrage, you know, outgroup dynamics, all of these sort of psychological, you know, kind of buzzwords and keywords that drive engagement that are deftly understood by these, you know, equations, correct, and the people that design them. But I think it's also important, and your book makes, you know, a big point of this, to understand

that this is not a reductive situation. Like we can't just say, well, we need to change the algorithms or we need to change. Like this is systemic, it's baked into the very origin story of Silicon Valley altogether. And it was really fascinating as somebody who's, you know, I used to live in that area and I'm familiar with, you know,

many of the people and the places that you describe in the kind of, you know, formation of this industry all of. together and how that makes solving this problem so difficult because it's bred into the DNA of how these companies were built from the outset. So talk a little bit about that. I think it's super interesting. So, I mean, like we were talking about beforehand, in some ways it's a story of capitalism. And I mean, that's when you trace it back. That's in some ways the original sin, where these companies were built on this very specific financial model that turns out to determine

basically everything about how they work and what they do to you. And that financial model is called, I mean, of course you know this, is called venture capitalism. And the idea is that someone comes in an investor and they give a kid, because we're talking about the internet era. It used to be they would give someone who designed a widget a bunch of money and say, go build a factory and sell those widgets and they're, you know, semiconductor or something like that. So it might be a $10 million and it takes 20 years before it turns around and makes money.

so you have to be really thoughtful about what your business plan, how are you going to bring in revenue with the customers. That changed at the start of the internet era where the way that the model now worked for venture capitalists is you wanted to find a kid with a website. And the reason that you wanted to find a kid with a website is that you could give them very, very little money, really, really small investment because it's basically free to start a website. And if they got enough users, whether or not they made a dime and profit and some of the biggest success stories in Silicon Valley never made any profit whatsoever like Netscape, you could then sell it to a bigger company or you could go public. And then you would have what's called an exit where your initial investment for $10,000, now it's worth $1 million or your initial investment for $300,000 is now worth $30 million. dollars and what this created was this incentive where if you are an investor looking for the next big hit or if you were the you know kid who's trying to start the next big tech company what you want to get is as many users as possible as quickly as possible and you do not care about your business

model is because that's someone else's problem after the after Oracle buys you for half a billion dollars and that leads directly to the social media companies because their whole thing thing is owning your attention. That's the product that they're selling because more attention means more users, which means it's more attractive when you go for that exit. But the problem is that attention is finite. There are only so many people in the world and we only have so many seconds per day. So it created this arms race for how can, I mean, first it was MySpace or these other companies that we've never even heard of now, and then Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, how can they compete to get that next second,

that next flick of an eyelid that they can sell ads against? And as they start putting more and more money into this, because this is now the entire economy of Silicon Valley is fighting for your attention, these systems get more and more sophisticated. And as you said, even the engineers who are creating them because these are automated, AI-driven systems, they don't even know how they're working

or the choices that they're making, but because they are hiring really, really good people because they can pay whatever they want, they become incredibly powerful and effective at hooking people in. Right. So you have that sort of engineering mentality, and at some point that intersects with social psychology, right? And so much of this can be tracked back to BJ Fogg's class.

Yes. What's the lab call that he was one? Yeah. So all of these students, Tristan Harris, being among them, Kevin Sistram, founder of Instagram, like a lot of people took his class that went on to found these companies. And he was really steeped in this social science

of how to drive engagement and how the human mind operates to kind of create products and tools that will basically addict people. It's so crazy to read the transcripts of conferences from like 10 years ago, which is kind of the peak of this era of like the Persuasion Lab and this guy near A.L. Who wrote this book, I think it was called Persuasion,

that was basically explaining how to implement these ideas. How open a lot of these consultants in the Valley were and a lot of the CEOs in the Valley were about, we want to design products that are going to be deliberately addictive and not just addictive in the sense that it's like a game and it'll be fun to use, but chemically addictive, and that we are going to exploit dopamine and that we're going to model our process. on casinos and on slot machines. And that's why your phone, it looks like a slot machine very deliberately, where it has these little buttons and these widgets. And it makes the little like vibration haptic feedback when you use it.

And that is designed like your Pavlov's dog to train you to associate certain feedback with using your phone. And there's one case from one of these lectures that was, you know, they would never say this now because they know how bad it sounds. But the 10 years ago in the Valley was very common where this consultant who is teaching companies how to do persuasion, which means, getting your customers to change their behavior. It sounds a little scarier when you define it.

This example that he used was that Facebook creates a sensation when you go onto it. He uses this hypothetical one, Barbara. Barbara goes on to Facebook because she wants to connect with her friends and family. And Facebook creates a simulation of that that actually feels like it is really exaggerated in scale. and it feels like a much more extreme version of that connection. Because when you connect with someone in the real world, you have, you know, when you chat with people in the real world, you're dealing with maybe five people at once.

And the feedback that you'll get will be kind of implicit. When you go onto social media, if you post something, you might get positive feedback from 20 people or 100 people or 1,000 people. So it chases this desire for human connection and serves you an exaggerated version of it. And it serves it to you at this incredible convenience so that when you want that feeling, you'll pick up your phone instead of going to find a person. But the thing about this that's really pernicious is that it doesn't actually deliver that

feeling of connection. And this consult was very open about this. He said that what it gives you is a dopamine boost that you get, that initially makes you think that you were satisfying the social urge to connect with other people. But in fact, because it does not fulfill it, you will continue to be lonely and crave that. So you would go back to Facebook more and more. And then over time, Barbara, this woman who we invented, will learn to pick up her phone and to really chase this feeling of connection

through her phone that she will never get by design so that she'll keep picking it up more and more, which I think resonated with me when I heard that. Yeah, I mean, that is dark, right? It is. It's like so dark. I mean, you're essentially setting up a digital environment that is equivalent to chasing the dragon.

Like you're trying to get hot. You're never going to quite get that high, but it's luring you back time and time again. I really think that if there's one thing I want people to take away from this book, it's not about the political ramifications. It's not about regulation with tech companies. All that stuff is really important. But I would just really like for people to take away that social media acts like a drug and to think of it like a drug. And I think when you start to see that this is something that, doesn't just deliberately, deliberately by design,

addict you like a drug, but that it also changes your behavior. And it changes the way that your mind works akin to a drug. It makes it much easier to understand because it's a drug that hides itself because you don't realize that that's what it's doing. You think you're just going on and you're talking to your friends,

but you're actually not. You're interfacing with this technology. And it's also a very pernicious drug because whereas, say, alcohol will play on or distort your mood, your sense of balance. It's mostly a hormonal physical response. Social media plays through social impulses that we're not used to thinking of as affected by drugs.

But it is something that absolutely changes that. And it is a drug that each of us takes, I think the average is like 15 times a day, every single day. I think American life makes a little bit more sense if you think that 80% of Americans are taking a drug 15 times a day without really, realizing it's a drug, it's some things start to kind of click into place. Yeah. And I think that if you see it that way as a consumer trying to navigate life that is, you know, dominated by social media,

it becomes a little easier to understand what's the difference between what's coming from me and things that I actually want or emotions or urges that I'm actually feeling and what's being instilled in me by this drug that's delivered to me by the largest companies in human history. Sure, and it goes back to that point you made earlier about how we all think that we're independent-minded and we're not prone to being impulseed in that way. Like I'm strong enough, I'm of sound-minded body, I can resist this, or I'm not gonna get lured down

some crazy rabbit hole because I'm sentient and independent and thought and all the like. But as movies like this social dilemma did such a good job of showing, you know, we are powerless, against the amount of science and technology that's gone into the addictive mechanism here. So there was two things that you said.

There's the addiction piece, which I think we've explored. I've had plenty of conversations on this podcast with people like Johann Hari about that very thing. I'm more interested in this behavior piece that you alluded to like it is changing our, it is changing our minds, it's literally changing how we think.

And of course, when you change someone's mind, it's going to change their behavior. And so there's tons, tons of interviews that you've done in this book and people that you've spoken to about this very thing. So maybe help us understand that and flush that out a little bit. Yeah, let me give you two examples, one that is kind of small and one that's a little bit bigger.

There is this very specific type of sentiment called a moral emotional sentiment. And that's a complicated way of saying any emotion or sentiment that touches on both, an emotional feeling and also the moral component means something that implicates what we think of as social moors are right and wrong. So if I said that you were really kind person or I said that you were a liar, those are moral emotional sentiments. Another way to think of it is just outrage. Outrage is the most powerful moral emotional sentiment and outrage is different from anger because

it means I think that you have transgressed a wrong against the community and I think that you've transgressed a wrong against the social norms that hold us together. There was this fascinating experiment that I write about in the book where these researchers tried all sorts of different words on a fake Twitter platform to see what were the words that were going to increase engagement. And basically every kind of sentiment was much closer to neutral that they thought. Angry words didn't seem to have much of an effect. Left-leaning or right-leaning words, sad words, happy words.

Even words like car wreck, like exciting words, didn't have much of a difference. but every moral, emotional word had a 20% increase in the reach of any tweet that contained it, which is huge. That's nuts. Although if you have spent time on Twitter, that's something that you very quickly learn, as that that is the kind of sentiment that travels. But the piece of this experiment that really stuck with me, because honestly it hit a little close to home, is that they would take these research subjects and they would try to pull. pull them and basically gauge their sense of internal outrage as a person. How prone to outrage were they at people who they thought of as their outgroup? You know, they're liberal, people they thought

of conservatives, fight fursa, you know, it can be a division by race, by religion. And people who had a very low propensity to outrage, if the researchers nudged them to say, you know, send a couple tweets with outraged words in them, what would happen is that subject would send those tweets and they would get a lot of engagement because that's what the platform does. It identifies those as engaging and pushes them out to a lot of people and gives you a social reward in terms of lots of likes and retweets, is that the subject would internalize that and first start to send more tweets like that just to chase the high. But then soon enough, that urge would start to come from within. The research subject would send outrage tweets even if they didn't get a reward because their

nature had fundamentally been changed in the, what they found in the, um, kind of polls and studies they would take with these individual people is there the outreach they felt internally even when they were offline had increased so this training effect of the platforms in terms of what works is so powerful that just spending time on it you inevitably end up not just serving the platform when you're online but in your offline life your emotional balance changes so all right so we have a sense of the problem right in your and you're reporting on this and all the work that you've done and the people that you've spoken to, what is the thing that most shocked you or surprised you about the extent of this problem?

I think it was honestly learning that using the platforms, it was what we talked about, using the platforms influences your own sense of right and wrong even when you're not on them. And it was this sense that it's not just the Pizza Gate guy. It's not just the Q&N on people, that it's all of us who are being distorted by it. And when I started to learn about that, I really scaled back my social media usage. I turned off a lot of the features. And I really felt a change. I felt the change in my mood.

I felt the change in how I think about politics and the news that happens. If I don't read it through social media, if I just read it through regular old websites or podcasts. And I think that maybe that just shook me the most because it implicated me. You know, probably objectively, I should be most upset about the fact that Facebook played a major role in a genocide that expelled the huge population of Myanmar from the country. But it's hard not to come out of this thinking that I was affected to without realizing it. And that if that is true for billions of people, including like 80% of Americans, then the effect must be pretty profound. Yeah, this mass unprecedented experiment that is being performed on all of us in real time.

Right. Without precedent. I mean, it almost, it's, I'm going to sound like that guy from Dr. Strangelove. It's almost this like pulp be sci-fi movie where they're putting drugs in the water and nobody realizes it and we're all taking it without realizing it. I mean, that's more true than not.

Right. You know. Right. Leave us with, you know, some poignant thoughts on just how powerful it is and maybe some other ways in which we can modulate or think about our information diet and the extent to which these platforms are useful or not.

We live in a world that is dominated by these platforms and maybe one day that will change, but as an individual living in that world, we have to make peace with these systems that we are gonna have to use to understand the world around us, to relate to people, and we're all facing a microcosm of the same time, dilemma that you described, which is how to be moral on them, knowing that the platforms make

it more appealing and enticing and rewarding than it's ever been to do things that we would otherwise consider immoral, and they make it harder and harder and more of a disincentive to try to be responsible with even just individual words that we might use on dashing off a tweet, because each of these things that might feel like you're just at a stoplight, you have a few seconds and you're just going to dash off a comet. But they all play into this broader system. They're all training the algorithm. They're all training yourself. They're training your peers, other users. And maybe the best thing that you can do, I mean, you should try to modulate your usage. You should try to be really thoughtful about how often do I really have to be on it.

I post like 5% as much as I used to. But probably the best thing you can do is just to be really aware about when you go to tweet something or post something or to record something in YouTube being thoughtful about, is this because I think this is a good idea and what I want to do? Or is it because this giant corporation has nudged me towards doing that because they want to make a little bit more money off of me and try to addict other users to make more money off of them? And what do I want my input into this giant system that is shaping everything in the entire world to be?

And conversely, applying that same rubric to your consumption. Like, do I really need to watch this video or click on this link or whatever? Like I think just being much more mindful and responsive versus reactive. And there are little tricks you can do. You can set up times where your phone will shut off certain apps. You can turn your phone onto gray scale, which is actually incredibly helpful in making it less addictive. It doesn't take away too much from it. But ultimately, I think it's just about knowing.

And it's just about trying to find that will to decide what the right thing is going to be and then to do it, even if it might feel really good to look at some more tweets. The most common question I was getting from parents as I travel the country was social media safe for my kids. And they were worried it wasn't. And they were asking, well, nobody said that it's not safe or no one said what to do about it from medical public health. So like we guess it's okay, is that right? And in my mind, that reflected not necessarily the fact that it was okay, but the fact that the public health establishment had not spoken up early enough about the health harms that we were seeing in the data.

And so it was our job as an office to step up and do that. So, you know, sometimes it involves taking risk, sometimes you get pushed back, but I feel confident that we made the right choices about these issues. And the reception overall has been not only quite positive from individuals and institutions, but interesting, it's been actually quite bipartisan. which is not a common thing these days, you know, in a very polarized society, but all of these issues have garnered strong support from members of both major parties. The social media advisory was focused on advocating for warning labels, essentially, right?

And that came out this summer, June or something like that? So, yeah, we need two things on social media. One was an op-ed this summer, earlier this year, calling for a warning label on social media so that parents, kids, and other caregivers understood the harms associated with social media use for kids. But last year, in this spring of 23, we had actually put out a full advisory on social media and youth mental health,

which actually laid out a series of policy steps that we needed to take to, one, make social media safer for kids, two, actually enforce the age restrictions, which were in placement not being enforced by the companies. and third, that also called for measures to demand transparency from the company so that they shared the data they had about the impact of their platforms on the mental health of kids. Because researchers were routinely telling us they couldn't get that information. So we called for a series of policy measures. And on top of that, this year, we called for the warning label as well.

The warning label is not the entire solution. The warning label is meant to tell parents and kids what's going on while we work hard to enact those policy solutions. But it's a step, right? Like this is a multi-factor. This is a long road, right? And somebody has to first speak up about it and, you know, and then it gathers energy and things start to fall into place over an extended period of time.

But we're already seeing this. I mean, the under 16 ban in Australia was a huge step. And it's easy to point a finger at that and say, well, it's sort of a toothless, you know, kind of initiative and how are they going to police it? And there's privacy concerns and the like. but it is a symbolic gesture as much as anything else for, you know, a nation to kind of step forward and say, we're going to do this. And I think it makes it easier then for further, you know, changes to be made in the wake of that.

It does. And I think you made the exact right point, which is that someone's got to step up and talk about these things first and then it can build energy. And what I've been really struck by is that even though sometimes it can feel like policy takes forever to change and these conversations take, you know, years to develop. In the last year and a half since our advisory, we have seen so much such a shift. And we've been in conversation with so many legislators from around the world who have made come to us and said, how can we work on implementing these in our country? But in addition, Australia, you mentioned, we've seen in the United States, multiple states actually pass measures to make social media safer or restrict use for vulnerable kids.

we've also seen 42 attorneys general from around the country come forward and ask Congress to pass the warning label that we called for in June. 42 AGs don't often come together across parties to do a whole lot because it's a polarized environment we live in, but it speaks to just the importance of this issue. And when given some of the, I would say, when you're opening the door and giving people the foundation and the sort of the scientific credibility to say, yes, this is a concern. and yes, there are solutions to it. We've seen people run with that in ways that are promising.

Now, at the end of the day, the job is not done until the platforms are ultimately made safer until kids aren't being harmed anymore. So we've got more work to do, but the last year and a half has reminded me that progress is possible. In the real politic of all of that, like what is your estimate or sense of where that's going to lead in the coming years?

Do you think that we are tiptoeing towards some kind of federal initiative or ban or is it going to be a state-by-state thing? What is your prediction? I think that there is a good chance that we actually get federal legislation on this. In fact, we're actually close at the moment. You know, the Senate already passed a bill,

and the House has taken that bill up, whether or not they pass it before they, you know, recess before the end of the year, remains to be seen. But this is a bill that actually has had broad bipartisan support at the federal level. So I think what you're seeing in parallel to that, is you're seeing a growing movement among parents

to actually step up and call for these changes because they're the ones who are living with the consequences of it, right? Along with their kids. So I actually feel optimistic that we can get it done, but it won't happen unless there is ongoing conversation and advocacy driving this because it's too easy in D.C. for other issues to the issues of the day to sort of take precedence and to shove aside things that are important

but may not necessarily be making the headlines on a given day. Yeah, I think there is a lot of energy happening and we're seeing schools, individual teachers, et cetera. The problem is the social connection issue on an individual basis. Like it has to be the entire class or the entire school, so you're not ostracizing certain kids. And I think Jonathan Heights book, The Anxious Generation,

has done a lot towards kind of educating the broader populace about that and parents as well, because every parent is looking for a solution to this, right? Your children are six and seven. Is that how? Oh, yeah. Six and eight. Six and eight now. Yeah. So you're nearing that age where, you know, this is going to be an ongoing kind of negotiation between you and your kids. That's absolutely right. And look, I'm worried about that time coming. It's already we can see

the tussle, you know, with our kids who would like to be on the iPad all day long, you know, watching videos if we gave them a chance to and we don't. But managing technology with your kids is a struggle that starts really early. And when it comes to then phones and social media during adolescence, that can be really tricky. That's why I think not only for my own kids' sake, but for all our kids' sake, I think the faster we can make these platforms safer,

the better off will be. But you mentioned just a really critical component I want to underscore, which is a collective action challenge, which is if you've got the situation many parents are in right now where their child is coming up to them and saying, everybody else in the class has a phone, is on social media. I'm the only one who's not going to have it if you don't let me open up an account. Then you get worried. I don't want my child to feel isolated or alone. But this is what's

been heartening to me to see not only schools stepping up more and more now to restrict the use of social media and phones in classrooms, but more parents actually bending together to say, you know what, we're actually going to wait until after middle school to start and allow our kids to use social media. And we're going to come together and do that so our kids don't feel like there alone? You wrote in this op-ed in the New York Times in June that adolescents who are online, three hours or more a day, are at twice the risk of anxiety in depression. And that's set against the situation in which average use is 4.8 hours a day for adolescents. But what's interesting is that the adolescents themselves, they don't want to be in this problem. They want a solution just as much

as the parents do. 50% of adolescents say social media makes them feel worse about their body. So if nobody can use it, I think by and large, or for the most part, like they would be happy with that. And the kind of recent experiments with this have borne that out. Yes. I mean, there have been studies on this where the kids are actually a lot happier when the classrooms say, you know, not, you know, not during school hours. Yeah, it's so interesting because I think there's a myth out there that we're pitting, you know, adults against kids when it comes to these social media decisions. But just as you said,

some of the voices that have been most prominent, the loudest voices that I've encountered across the country, raising the alarms about the harms of social media, having kids themselves who are seeing what's happening to them and their classmates. But they also know that it's really hard, not only to be the sole actor, but it's really hard to detach yourself from these platforms

because they're designed to maximize how much time you spend on them. And when you've got an adolescent, and whose brain is still developing and who's trying to figure out how to manage their impulses and that impulse control doesn't develop until later in life almost fully.

You've got a situation where you're pinning them against the best program developers in the world and some of the best resource companies who are designing these platforms with the intent to keeping them on as long as possible.

That's literally the definition of an unfair fight. Without transparency. Without transparency. So young people do want solutions and I was in Lincoln, Nebraska, actually not long ago, and was with a group of high school students,

and they had just had a policy enacted maybe within the last year in their school that restricted the use of phones during classroom time. And I asked them, what did you think about that? They were like, you know, juniors and seniors in high school. And they sort of said, well, you know, initially we weren't sure if this was really necessary and important, but after a few weeks we realized that we were really getting to know each other. These are students who had been in school for a couple of years together already,

but because they were always on their phones, they actually didn't really have real conversations with each other, and now they finally were. There's another school I went to in Indiana, where the administrators came up to me and they said, after you put out your advisory, we actually decided to finally enforce the rule we've had on the books for a long time about not using your phone during classroom time.

And like many schools have these rules on the book, by the way, but they just don't enforce them because for a bunch of reasons. So they said, we finally decided to do that, and guess what we saw? I said what? They said, well, we noticed that the volume in the hallway started to go up because kids were actually talking to each other. And then we went into the library and we saw something we've never seen before, which is

the kids were actually sitting on the floor and playing board games with each other and having fun and laughing. And wow, isn't that incredible? And you talk to people a couple of generations ago and they're like, well, that was kind of normal as part of childhood. But I think this is where I think we have to just appreciate the extent of what's happened to kids today, which is through no real choice of their own, they have a very choice of their own. They have been dropped right in the middle

of a profoundly different digital environment that's consumed so much of their attention and focus and fundamentally transform their relationships with each other. And I believe contributed to more loneliness and isolation. So, yeah, kids are asking for solutions. And I think that, every reason I feel such urgency around this is that, Rich, you know, kids, a year in their life is a lot of time, is a lot of development happening during that time.

And this is why I worry that Congress is not done enough. to respond to the urgency of the moment in getting legislation done fast enough. But these steps that schools are taking, the steps parents can take in terms of waiting until after middle school to let their kids start using social media, working with other parents so that they're not alone, drawing tech-free zones in their lives,

their kids' lives to protect sleep and in-person time. That's why these steps really, really matter and they make a big difference in our kids' lives. Yeah, it's easy to forget that that time is so precious, the plasticity in your brain, is not time to be wasted, right? Like once it kind of gets anchored in, you become who you are and trying to create new neural pathways

or rewire yourself becomes a laborious process when you're that age and you're so receptive to learning in a certain way. Like that should really be revered and respected. And I guess I'm of two minds when it comes to kids, you know, being at the sort of leading edge of calling for change. Like on one hand, like,

That's so encouraging. Like they're raising their hands and saying, do something about this. But at the same time, it's like, where are the adults in the room? Like they're like, you guys are supposed to be taking care of us and we're the ones who have to like, you know, call out and say, do something about this.

It's well put the way you did. And we should be stepping up to do more for our kids. And this particularly includes our policy makers who I think, you know, obviously have a lot on their plate. But I can't think of a responsibility rich that's more important than making sure our kids are okay. And that feels like one of our most sacred responsibilities in society to take care of our kids. And by that measure, Congress has really failed to do that over the years.

Social media has been around for 20 years. It's not like it's just popped up on the scene last year. There have been bills languishing in Congress for years. There was ever a time to step up and get something done. It would be now and it would be on this issue. And again, there's broad popular support for this. There's broad bipartisan support for it. It's a question of leadership and stepping up to,

to make it happen because after you pass a law, you need time to implement it, right? And that every day that goes by without a safer social media environment is one more day that more kids are being harmed. At the same time that there's bipartisan support for this, you also have to take into consideration the extent to which Congress is captured by K Street and the lobbying efforts, which are not insignificant on behalf of meta

and the sort of tech conglomerates out there who, I don't know what their lobbying budgets are, but they're gigantic, right? And so that exerts pressure on these bipartisan representatives with respect to, you know, ushering forth the legislation and the regulatory changes that are required to enact that change. So you're right, and that's a reality of our system right now, not a reality I like, but that there's a lot of money in politics, right? And that impacts sometimes the decisions that people make. But the one thing that can overcome the power of money and politics are just the voices of overwhelming numbers of people who speak up and demand something different.

And I have seen that, you know, like happen in the past. And it's what we need right now, you know. And this is actually why it's so important that parents in particular are being mobilized, you know, around this issue. And why young people themselves are actually not staying silent. They're building their own movements, like the log off movement and others, to try to help each other develop a healthier relationship. relationship with technology and with social media in particular. But their mobilization, I think, is what we need more of to ultimately drive the kind of change. Because like you said, they're headwinds here. There's the inertia. There's money in politics. There's all the, there are a lot of

reasons not to do this. But the most important reason is that our kids' well-being is at stake. Before we continue with the show, I want to point you toward an award-winning podcast, I think a lot of you will get something out of. If you're a parent, you know this feeling. You want real trustworthy guidance, but most of what's out there either overwhelms you or makes you feel like you're failing. That is exactly the gap that raising good humans fills, and why I'm thrilled to welcome this show into our voicing change family. It's hosted by Dr. Eliza Pressman, a developmental psychologist out of Mount Sinai, who has spent nearly two decades working with families and is a mom of four herself. Each episode, she sits down with experts and parents and goes deep on the actual

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