The TRUTH About Social Media & Your Children | Jonathan Haidt X Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] God came to Earth and said would you like to know everything instantly all the time and we're like yes it's pretty clear at this point that social media is having a deleterious impact on the mental health of the younger generation American kids now spend 5 hours a day just on social media these technologies that are supposed to bring people together they end up making them physically separate people have had enough my guest today is Jonathan height Jonathan is a social psychologist in NYU and he's a leading voice in understanding the complex interplay between technology

and childhood why is it that we're all giving our kids phones at such an early age we're afraid that they will then be left out if a system is held in place by the fear of missing out and we can all get out together then we give them back childhood we give them back play we give them back each other in Jonathan's latest work the anxious generation he examines the ways in which social media is fundamentally altering how children grow how they interact and perceive the world around them Jonathan's work is vital and his message

is loud and clear the time for Action is now 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 mark it to me do parents have any control over this the most effective thing you could do to help your kid would be today's episode is brought to you by the awesome organization that make this show [Music] possible so nice to meet you thank you for doing this I've been looking forward to this for a

very long time so much to talk with you about and I was thinking about you the other day I had to go to Palm Springs and I'm approaching Palm Springs you know where those like windmill kind I don't know if you've ever driven out there but there's like a windmill farm and there's a bunch of billboards and I saw this billboard and it said less so social media and I thought oh right I know John is behind this art campaign where there's Billboards and posters and installations that are furthering this anxious generation message and I

thought that must be him and then there was another one and then there was another one and it culminated in this billboard that was painted with all this kind of groovy street art and it said more Snapchat yeah I've heard about this and I realized that Snapchat like hypocritical tell you everything that you need to know about tech Buy in right awareness of the problem and you know the lack of enthusiasm that the corporate conglomerate social media companies have around this issue that everyone is aware of and is excited about because of this book this

is a you know I think you're everywhere all of a sudden this book is you know immediately like this sensation because it gets right to the heart of this thing that we're all thinking about all the time yeah thanks so much Rich for having me on we were at a Tipping Point even if I didn't write this book and I just had the very good fortune that I kind of rushed through you know writing the book and I felt like I had to get it out soon it just happens to come out just as America

is ready to tip in Britain they actually tipped last month in Britain the parents are rising up people have had enough I've been studying this since uh intensely since 2019 but a bit before then in 2019 it seemed pretty clear that the phones are doing a number on the kids um there was an academic debate I couldn't prove it but I I was making the case along with Jee twangy and then covid came in and Confused us all for several years what kids really needed before Co was a lot less time on their screens and

a lot more time outside playing with each other and then Co 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 with other kids face to face and it was became clear by 2223 the kids are really a mess I mean the mental health is horrific but what Jee twanky had showed 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 2011 in 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 you know it was as

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 um I first used I guess alista in 1994 and in the '90s we thought that the technology the internet was going to knock down tyrants going be the best friends of democracy so most of us are very positive about these developments and it really was amazing then we get the early social media you know 2003 2004 Myspace Facebook they're connecting people it's it's all so amazing

you get you know Uber and Amazon totally amazing 2007 the iPhone comes out and it's not at all harmful it's a digital Swiss Army now if you pull it out when you need a tool so everything's great until you know 2010 or so um 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 the evidence on whether it's causal but at

least it's incredibly well correlated what you have to see is that in 2010 and of course kids are on their phones all the time we all talked about how they're always texting but that's all 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 um they just used their phones to connect it's okay over the next 5 years uh 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 uh unrestricted data plan and so now you could be online literally all day today like in 2024 um 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 bits on input it's getting and all around the world adult societies help their kids through that transition how do 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 every thing 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 how extreme their performances 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 and 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 Ws 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 2 and three I I spent a lot of

time going into what childhood is uh human childhood is this amazing evolutionary adaptation it's different from any other species um all mammals have comparatively large brains compared to other other tax of 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 pay a lot more to develop the social skills so the human brain actually grows very fast in utero of course and then it grows very continues to grow very fast for 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 it doesn't need it's just like let's make a lot of them and then from age six to around age you know 18 20 you know toward the ending part of puberty the name of the game is not growth it's more pruning and trimming let's

let's delete stuff and the stuff that remains we're going to wire up more tightly and we're going to put a myelin sheath a kind of a fatty Tiss a fatty substance around them to make them insulated so if you think about it more like let's P all the supplies up there in the head by age six and then let's turn the child loose that's when 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 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 6:00 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 do I 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's all has to it all has to be based in the brain so if we think about puberty especially early puberty let's say ages like 10 to 14 that I think is the most vulnerable age especially for girls boys boys start period a little bit later that's the period where we should be most careful about what our children's experience is 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 mhm and while covid may not be the proximate cause of this it certainly accelerated it or exacerbated it during that period of time but on top of that we also have the downsizing of kind

of after school programs and all kinds of other outdoor activities or community-based programs that were more part and parcel of our childhood that seem to have gone the way of the dodo okay well let's talk about that where did you grow up rich outside Washington DC okay in a suburb suburb okay at what age could you ride your bicycle around and go visit your friends I mean super young second grade third grade seven or eight out all day yeah be home by dinner that's right that was the universal thing and you and I grew up

during a crime wave there were drunk drivers there was crime in the 90s things got really safe crime plummeted drunk driving plummeted you know Mothers Against Drunk Driving we locked up the drunk drivers so when you and I were young and and this goes back you know literally millions of years um kids are not in adult supervised programs they're on their own and that's absolutely crucial for developing Independence we want our kids to be self-supervised self-governing so they don't have to have someone telling them what to do but in the 990s we began locking them

up supervising them saying we can never let you out alone because there's a microscopic chance you'll be kidnapped but it looms very large in my mind because I just read a story in some newspaper about it which is called the availability bias in Psychology and it's on the side of all our the milk cartons that's right that's right the book is focused on the great rewiring which is 2010 to 2015 but there's a really important backstory which is the more gradual loss of childhood Independence loss of trust in children and loss of trust in each

other that turns out to be one of the main reasons we locked up our kids was we started thinking every adult is a potential child molester I I can't trust my kid with anyone I have to supervise or just you know very limited number of people that I'll Trust whereas when you and I were growing up during the crime wave adults generally had the sense that if a kid falls off his bicycle uh you know and is hurt and you see it you would call their mother you'd say well you know what's your phone number

we all knew our phone numbers and that kind of went away in the 90s as we lost trust in each other and and that's part of why we we clutched our kids so close that we don't let them develop mhm and the irony being that we're hyper or over protective of our kids in physical spaces and completely under prototec in this digital space which is we're learning we're discovering is far more dangerous than the imagined threat in the physical world that's right and that's why I I started off by talking about the incredible techno optimism

that we all had in the 90s and the 2000s because we thought this stuff is so amazing and we saw that even back in the 80s you know kids who played with computers and we called them Geeks and nerds wow they're starting companies now they're you know they're doing amazing things with this new technology hey there's my kid playing with an iPhone maybe he'll grow up to you know start a company maybe he'll get smarter and more technically skilled but that didn't happen we have all this techno optimism we think computers are good for our

kids we think oh we need to get computers to every kid you know in the 90s or early 2000s oh it's terrible that the rich kids have computers but the poor kids don't have them we have to have every kid have a computer and of course the tech companies you know they they want to come in they want to give kids you know Chromebook get them using our operating system so we let this happen because we thought well it looks like it'll probably be good for them and there was no data on that and we

weren't really collecting any data and we just let the devices take over childhood and it was only just before covid that we really began to notice but then Co came and Confused us all and we lost a few years now that Co has receded now I I think everyone sees the wreckage and that's why you opened by talking about how it feels like you know things are changing everyone sees it yeah now that Co is receded we all see the wreckage yeah I'm trying to remember the feeling that I had when the internet was brand

new and there was this sense of possibility and this excitement and it's hard to judge ourselves against the optimistic promise that the internet held at that time like how could it be a bad thing to connect everybody and to have access to information in this way this can only make the world a better place right the irony being that that hyperconnectivity is driving loneliness and depression and self harm and suicide and all the like so 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 cognitive fragmentation and addiction so just very briefly American kids now spend 5 hours

a day just on social media that's mostly Tik Tok um YouTube shorts It's the short videos um also longer videos on YouTube and it's also Instagram and a bunch of other things that's 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 8 to 10 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 Tik Tok 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 just stunning a couple of my favorite graphs in the book favorite in that they're you know kind of horrible but uh they're dramatic uh 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 we doing at this time this time this time and when you

look just at time outside of work in 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 you 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

more uh 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 Co like you see it goes from like you know 40 minutes to 20 minutes like really we locked away you really see a drop but for teenagers what you see is the drop from 2019 to 2020 with after Co restrictions was no steeper than the drop from 2018 to 2019 oh that's interesting in other words they were they were already socially

distancing so fast since 2012 that covid didn't even speed it up wow yeah you would have thought that covid would have been this pattern inter erupt that that we didn't recover from and that would be particularly a for a teen but to understand that it was already at a plummeted State at that point and hasn't recovered right that's right it Plateau or does it continue to go down right so I don't know because we just you know it takes a while to get the data so here we are in 2024 I don't have data for

2023 we have data for 2022 some data is coming for 2023 so we can begin to see you know the rebound from Co but on the time you study I haven't seen it yeah but right that would be an interesting prediction if adults went down and then they go up a little bit that's what you'd expect so my prediction would be that teenagers who went down so far they're not going to bounce back up because it's not as though oh CO's gone hey after school today how about if I come over to your house like

I don't think that's going to happen because they've acclimated to a different way they've acclimated and for boys they literally can't go over each other's houses if they want to play video games they have to be in their own pod that's right they have to have their own equipment in their own house so these technologies that are supposed to bring people together they end up making physically separate so the social deprivation piece the sleep deprivation piece they're they're relatively self-evident um I would like to know a little bit more about this attention fragmentation idea this

idea of being constantly distracted and having to kind of toggle switch your brain because things are happening so fast that's right you know we all think that we can multitask but the research has shown for decades and decades if you try to do two things you'll do each of them less than half as well like there's a net loss from the transfer cost so multitasking is a bad idea with our phones the Temptation is always to multitask that's just one piece of it the even worse piece is the notifications and interruptions so when the iPhone

came out in 2007 there were no push notifications there was no app store it was just a set of tools that you could pull out when you wanted as you said before you get the retweet button the like button things get much more viral now it's like urgent thing this things blowing up you need to know about it um Apple introduces I think was called software development kits which allow any other company to create an app and this is transformative because what now happens is kids are now carrying this thing you know Beginning by 2010

because they're carrying a a portal by which any company can reach your child any company can send them notification I mean if they've downloaded the app just once they download an app it's like they're giving permission to this company hey you can interrupt my child whenever you want oh you think there's breaking news oh you can get 10% off on this thing oh you know somebody said something about you so we've created these these incredible interrupting devices which all of us are struggling with right I mean we adults I don't use my phone that much

because I'm always at a computer and I've shut off almost all notifications that's really crucial you have to shut off almost all notifications other than like uber you know a few things you need to leave on um but it's hard for me to focus because if I'm doing something which is hard part of my brain says what's the weather going to be oh let me go check that yeah let's get a little you know and then it's 40 minutes later for you to get back into that state where you can do your writing or your

work but but you and I have fully developed prefrontal cortices that's what happens in mid to late puberty is the brain kind of rewires from the back to the front and it's not until late teens that the prefrontal cortex which is the seed of executive control decisionmaking uh self-control those aren't really you know really baked in until late teens that's why young teens are so impulsive and so to have the neurons like imagine these neurons like trying to seek each other out like which way do we grow you know what should connect and instead of

having normal human experience where the job will be done pretty well you throw in you know this like giant dance party and all kinds of uh extra dopamine and you know not much sleep like it's going to affect neural and on the addiction piece if there's one thing we've all learned like I'm 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 it addtion is because we all have that pull or that lure we you know we

can't put it down we 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 uh 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 um one of the revelations you know Francis brought out thousands of pages uh 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 user 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 I they're not trying to harm kids but they are trying to win the race to keep their attention MH 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 you

know 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 kid should be on social media until they're until they're 16 let's keep going the addiction because I actually have a question for you so there's a debate in the academic literature I've been warned to be careful about using the word Addiction for smartphones because the addiction research Community it's clear obviously you know heroin nicotine they're they're very

well understood neurochemical systems that involving dopamine neurons like so chemical addictions are very well understood behavioral addictions some people apparently say you shouldn't call it addiction you should call it compulsive use or problematic use to me it sure looks like addiction if you think that slot machines are addictive to some people not most but to some people this seems very much like that but I'd love to hear from you because you certainly have experienc the chemical addictions would you might first tell me what what were your chemical addictions uh alcohol the main one yeah is

the main one so yeah what do you think about the similarity difference my thoughts on this have evolved like I'm I'm sort of indoctrinated in 12ep and AA and that has a very kind of rigorous definition and philosophy around what is an addiction and what isn't but over many years I've really expanded what I would categorize as addiction I think it I think it lands on a much broader Spectrum than we understand it to be and you know when I got sober if you were an addict or an alcoholic that meant were a gutter drunk

or somebody who couldn't pull the needle out of their arm but I think that we all fall somewhere on that spectrum and some people only have the slightest dusting of addictive compulsive you know when you get to the far end of the spectrum compulsivity and addiction start to look like the same thing and maybe they are but you know as you slide towards um more compulsivity and your decision tree becomes narrower and narrower it starts to look more like what's at the other end of the Spectrum so I have a very liberal uh definition of

addiction and I would say that what you are talking about squarely Falls within that whether or not that's going to show up in the DSM right okay so we're exposing our kids to something that can addict a lot of them now you know I get push back from some other researchers which is all good and healthy this helps us all get closer to the truth especially on video games uh who say that no you know video games are are good for kids and they you know they call some benefits and iand coordination things like that

in digging into the data on addiction what I what I found what you what what I report in the book um is that video games are not particularly harmful for boys in general and on average whereas social media is harmful to girls in general and on average not all but a lot you know but the thing to watch out for is that for both what we find is but somewhere between 2 and 15% depending on the Criterion count is having either addiction or what's called problematic use or compulsive use that interferes with other important domains

of life so you know even if you want to take a very you know generous view and say oh you know most kids are not addicted and that's true most kids are not addicted to their phones most kids are not addicted to social media addicted to video games but if it's like 10% if it's like five or 10% are kind of addicted that's unbelievable like we would never ever let our 10-year-olds do something if we thought it was like you know Russian Roulette you know you have a you have a one in 10 chance that

this is going to become something that damages your life and possibly changes your brain development and sucks up most of your adolescence so you're not going to do anything else so you know I definitely don't want to put the word out there parents don't let your boys play video I would not want to say that but just know that something you know High single digits are going to get uh more or less addicted so you really have to watch out for that and so that's also your spectrum so you think it's a personality trait like

some people just have a brain that is going to be easily pulled to addiction and some people it's much harder to pull in I think that that's still the case I think there are certain people who are more prone to this I think yeah but I'm not sure that anyone is in an opt out situation right you know they just haven't found the right Behavior or the right substance well okay but that also brings up the possibility that maybe what's happening here isn't exactly addiction it's just being trained and so if you want to train

a dog right some reward system EX in your brain that's right we all have the reward system in the brain that runs especially through dopamine neurons which don't just make you feel good I mean the you know people commonly assume like oh you eat a piece of chocolate you get dopamine ah that feels good reward but dopamine has this interesting property that it's not just like oh you did good it's immediately linked to the motivation to get more it's like oh that was good I want more oh that was good I want another and that's

why you know if you if you have one potato chip it's it's not just like oh yummy it's like I want want more give me more give me more and so I think this raises the possibility that even if you are almost immune to chemical addiction well nobody's immune but if you're on the end of the spectrum that you laid out if a system is designed so that it can train you the way a a dog trainer trains a dog it give you a little rewards for if you do something oh you know you added

something to your profile a little reward oh you had a good post you little reward uh it's possible that all of us can be trained by Operate conditioning to do these behaviors and then we watch our hand moving and we say but I don't want to do that why do I keep doing it why do we keep doing it because our brains are pattern matchers and then we have this Consciousness sitting on top and the Consciousness says what the hell is going on down there if you're like me never without a water bottle let's get

it right people allow me to rock your world with my new favorite toy that's actually not a toy at all it's a non-negotiable essential Camel Back Podium steel 100% % leak proof water bottle emphasis on leak proof for all you Gearheads this is built for the bike but honestly this simple but elegant stainless steel Contraption is built for anything and everything it keeps whatever you put in it cold for hours and straight up goes everywhere I do for all you weight weenies out there Campell actually also offers an ultra lightweight titanium version very beautiful shall

we level up yes we shall sh because right now Campell back is offering an exclusive discount just for you all my people so stop what you're doing and type up Campell back.com sign up with your email and use my code Rich Roll for 20% off your entire purchase at checkout or you can click the link in the description below 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 so right so the way to think about it is that on any Behavior related to anxiety and depression those are you know internalizing disorders you're always going to have girls and women being higher than boys and men in terms of the mean in terms of How High the line is that's always the case the one big exception is that when you look at completed suicides when you look at

actual deaths boys and men are much higher than girls and women and that's always been the case um boys and men tend to use irreversible means they tend to use a gun in America at least or a tall building whereas girls and women have many more suicide attempts but they tend to use reversible means they tend not to end up killing them so the urge to Suicide the thinking about suicide is different in boys and girls and and suicide is especially a plague that is destroying boys but it's both of them so that's just the

background when we look at the rate of increase what we generally find is that things were pretty stable in the 2000s they not lines aren't really going up or down the suicide line as I said is you going down somewhat and then everything goes up what we find is that the sharpness of the upturn is much more for the girls that is the girls it's like nothing's going on lines are steady and then boom you hit 2013 and they all go up whereas the boys it's more curved the boys they begin going up a little

bit earlier like even 2008 2009 and that might be this is speculative but it might be as the boys are doing more and more multiplayer video games they are moving away from their friends from being physically present with their friends before the girls do but I'm not sure about that in any case the point is the boy's mental health begins to show some signs of deterioration before 2010 and then it accelerates in the 2010s but it's not directly pegged to 2013 the way the girls are and the percentage increases are you're right they're generally larger

for the girls but not all way sometimes the boys percentage increase is similar it's just that they're at a lower level so their their graph doesn't look like a hockey stick as much as the girls MH and so how do we like understand this can you unpack what's going on here that's creating that yes differential yeah so what I do in the anxious generation is I lay out what childhood is what adolescence is um and how we subverted it and all of this would suggest a gradual change in mental health gradual meaning not a single

year like you know over 5 or 10 years that's the larger story and that's true for both boys and girls but then there are some specific things happening for girls and I think the main thing is the key year that they all get wired up to each other is 2012 2013 and the reason is because you know as we said before they're going from flip phones to smartphones that's part of it they're going from no notifications to lots of notifications that's part of it they're going from no front-facing camera to front-facing camera that's part of

it you get the filters that where girls can um press a button and make themselves more beautiful but I think the real thing to keep your eye on is that in 2012 Facebook buys Instagram uh before then it had very small user base it was you know adult photographers were using it Facebook doesn't change the platform very much in its early years but that's the year that there's huge publicity that's the year that all the girls get on I should say it becomes normal and typical for teenage girls even in Middle School to start that

you know you lie about your age you can open an Instagram account and so it's when you Super Connect girls they are much more vulnerable to emotional contagion than boys are because of group friend Dynamics well it's a lot of things in part there's a very deep psychological difference this is described by Simon Baron con one of the leading autism researchers that boys are a little bit more over on the Spectrum towards autism in utero we all start off as female fetuses with female bodies and female brains and then when testosterone is triggered around the

10th week of gation 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 the male pattern and the male pattern is higher on systemizing Lower on empathizing this is just on average there 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 know she had appendicitis they think about who's related to who and how so girls are a little more socially aware the differences here are not big on ability but they're very big on interest what boys like to do if you give them Freedom versus what girls like to do if you give them freedom is really different and so when social media comes in and instantly you can see how everyone's related to everyone

what everyone is saying about everyone that's behind door number one door number two is you can form teams that will combat each other with swords and flamethrowers which door do you want and the girls say I'll take door number one the boys most I'll take door number two now the video games are not particularly harmful unless you play them a lot and with you know you get addicted whereas the social media I think was harmful to most girls because you're super connecting girls who are more open to sharing emotions and what emotions are they sharing

well even if it was even positive negative a basic truism in Psychology is that bad is stronger than good so in a marriage John godman's research if I say twice as many nice things to my spouse as criticisms or bad things we are headed for divorce very quickly because a five to1 ratio is sort of the minimum like if it's five good things to one thing you know then maybe you'll be okay but bad is stronger than good and so if some girls are sharing their anxiety their depression that's incredibly contagious it literally will make

other girls Direct ly more likely to be depressed and anxious and it also conveys a 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 hyperconnected and that's when they began sharing contagious emotions also I would imagine just

the sort of loow hanging fruit obvious thing around knowing what everybody in your friend group is doing all the time and you know 247 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 she's is actually fine with she 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 uh but she wants Snapchat because that's what they all use you know you know 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 I had a strong sense 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 we used to be I had the general sense that Snapchat wasn't so bad because it's mostly just texting you know texting with photos you know how bad could that be My Views about Snapchat are getting more negative as I think about a few features um one is the 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 he

promised it'll only be about 15 20 kids two or three hundred showed up because once they could see that everyone was there everyone went so this sort of mob Dynamics A 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 um 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 sit there they have to post and post and post and post not because they really want to but in order to keep the streak that's an example of a feature that is only done to ad dict 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 uh in the Wall Street Journal has been great on this on really tracking down what the social media companies are doing to our kids uh 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 uhuh I hadn't heard about it either until this Wall Street Journal article this morning so apparently so if you are a paying subscriber apparent you can pay $4 a month to get the premium service if you're a paying subscriber then

um it shows you your social Universe like here's you here are the people who are closest to you as as we calculate based on your communication we can see this is 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 her Mercury and I'm her Mars like I'm

out where Mars is like wait what 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 but I would callous 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 teach young people at NYU

in the business school and I know that you've taken a poll you ask for a raise of hands around who would be willing to let go of their social media accounts or or how much money would it take how much would I have to pay you or would you pay to get off it so explain a little bit about what you discovered in doing this so my analysis all the way through and this is this is the major theme of the book is that we're all stuck in a set of collective action problems um that

people are on it not because they like it but because they feel like they have to be and because everyone else is so it's it's so soci scientists have studied these for you know 50 100 years Collective action problems like the commons problem that's the center of my analysis there was a great study published it's a working paper it was put online last October by some faculty at the University of Chicago Leonardo buron is the lead author uh and so I read this after I turned to the manuscripts this is not in the book but

I mentioned it in this Atlantic article I wrote a few weeks ago what they did was they they said to college students at a number of schools um how much would we have to pay you to get off of Instagram or Tik Tok you know some some were it was stud on Tik Tok some Instagram how much we have to pay you to get off for a month and you know people say some amount of money I think the average was $50 but you know some people it was a lot more so this is a

standard thing that economists do to measure the total value of something to society you know if I said to you how about if you didn't use any mapping programs you know Street mapping programs for a month how much would you pay to avoid that well that's a pretty good measure you know what people really value this like it's we all get it for free but actually you know it's worth you know a trillion dollars to the total sum of Americans or you know humans so it's a common Economist technique by that measure Tik Tok and

Instagram are incredibly valuable companies delivering enormous value for free we all get it for free okay but this is not a normal consumer product this is like an addictive drug this is a trap and the way that they showed this what they found was they said in another condition they said okay now we're trying to get the great majority of people at your college to do this as a as a mass experiment how much would we have to pay you to take part in that if we can get almost everyone else off how much would

we have to pay you to get off I don't know if they did a you know fill in the blank or if they was lots of choices but it went from like you'd have to pay me X dollar to I would pay xll to do it and so what they found was that then people reverse college students say oh I would pay you for that I would love to get if we could all get off it then I'd love to get off it and so I thought this was amazing because it really shows in econometric

terms just how devastating this you know Tik Tok I mean look Tik Tok and Instagram obviously they create value for creators for business I'm not saying their net drag on the economy overall but if you include if you really look at the at the way they suck out the attention and the happiness of so many people it's possible that these things have a gigantic negative value to society so I read that article and then I checked it with my students it's at NYU Stern and I found the same thing I did it in very simple

format what I did was I first asked them I said how many of you watch Netflix at least once a week all hands go up how many of you would rather that Netflix was never invented you'd rather live in a world with no Netflix zero hands go up because Netflix is stories and they're really good they're high quality stories you know you know people sometimes watch too much of it but they don't say ah I wish this was just never invented mhm then I said okay how many of you check Tik Tok at least once

a week not all hands you know but the great majority hands go up I say just those of you who use Tik Tok how many of you would prefer that Tik Tok was never invented almost all hands went up and I say so why don't you get off they say we can't because everyone else is on we have to know what videos and Trends are they talking about it used to be Instagram I think was the most harmful program I think that really did a number on girls in the early 2000s Tik Tok only become

super popular a little before Co and during Co so we have very little data on it we I can't say oh we have studies proving that Tik Tok is doing this but from what I've seen about the earlier part of the great we wiring I suspect that Tik Tok is the worst yet I mean it's reach its power to train its power to reinforce it's power to shape beliefs so I do think Tik Tok is an unrivaled um danger to our kids the collective action problem being that as much as you want to get off

it you're just not going to because everyone else is on it and the solution therefore or the responsibility for solving this problem can't rest on the shoulders of the individual we need to look to governments to spefic organizations schools the tech companies themselves 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 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 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 till High School let's rip this nonsense out of Middle School give them a flip phone that's okay cuz you know 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 you know 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 you know like an Apple Watch a lot of parents are telling me they're having good good results there so that's the first Norm that would at least let the kids get through early puberty before moving their entire lives online but that's still on some level an individual action item it's made by the parents not by systems no 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 smart 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 till 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 soci media account until you're 16 there was push back uh there's a Libertarian argument that you know you know who are you to tell me how I can raise my kids which is fine with me Florida law does allow uh 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 pornhhub 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 till 16 the third is phone- free schools you know you might tell your kid no

I want you to you 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 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 are literally getting stupider since 2012 after decades and Decades of progress going up academics scores are dropping not because of well Co 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 phone during class they're on their phone between classes they're on their phones at lunch like it's in 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 cost 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 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% for middle school kids is my hope I just made up that number I should be more precise but you know we have to we have to get rid of most of the screen

use for at least through middle school and Elementary School um we have 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 run 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 uh sometimes I feel I'm no good at all all of this starts really

in 2012 2013 and the more we 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 I'm G to play devil's advocate for a minute jeez I love that there's a variety of arguments uh counterpoints to your thesis the first of which is that everything you're saying I understand but it's all correlative there's no indication that social media and these platforms are causing the conditions that you're talking about there was an article on nature that just came out about this um there are many other causes that we need to look at economic disparity and lack of opportunity the opioid crisis things like this

the other big one is this just typical moral Panic we see this every generation you got those are the three arguments I hear okay let's go through them those are exactly AR let's do those three right so the first thing that it's all correlational so we all know that correlation does not show causation that we need experiments well guess what we have experiments there are a lot of them so I get really fed up when journalists and and other researchers say oh it's all correlational no the fact that we have hundreds of correlational studies most

of which show an effect a correlation doesn't negate the fact that we also have dozens of experiments that show causation studies like when you assign kids to go off of social media for a month if you assign them to go off for a day or two they're not happier because of course if you take someone off heroin for a day or two they're not happier but those that look for a month or longer the great majority find an effect so that's the name of the game experiments caus we've them you go to my subst after.com

I have a whole post laying out here's what we know from the correlational studies here are the dozens of longitudinal studies that allow you to infer causality here are the dozens of experiments that allow us to infer causation more strongly so there's a lot of experimental evidence so it's just not true that it's all correlational second thing is that the Skeptics the ones who say that I don't have the evidence they're using a standard of proof which is equivalent in the legal system to Beyond Shadow Beyond A Reasonable Doubt and that's what we use in

science for our journals we all review articles for journals and we don't say you know is this probably true probably not true no we say have you shown that this statistically that this is very unlikely to have happened by chance that's the mindset we're all in it's as though we're all you know criminal attorneys like we're not you can't be convicted until we overwhelming evidence but we're in a public health emergency you do not use that standard in a public health emergency you know there's a disease spreading it looks like it's Coler but we're not

100% sure let's not do anything no we're not going to do anything until we are sure now given that the things I'm proposing cost nothing and Do no harm the cost of doing nothing is enormous and the Skeptics are saying they used to say it's all correlational and the correlations are nearly zero well no it actually uh now there are experiments and the correlations turn out to be around we actually all agree it's around 0.15 in the data sets where you can infer it you for girls and social media it's around correlation coefficient around 0.15

they used to say it's just in America like if it if it was really the phones it would be in other countries too well guess what now we know it is in other countries too um it's in all the English speaking countries it's in northern Europe it's in the freest countries where the kids are not anchored in as tightly it's a normal academic debate uh your right to raise it this was just a review article came up from Candace Candace aers who's a major researcher in the field but I have responses to that on my

substack and I'll write another one soon to really put it all together that's one what was the next one you said moral Panic moral Panic so it is a moral panic in the sense that it looks superficially like previous moral panics it starts with people making claims about what's happening parents get freaked out the media picks it up um so these media researchers who there's a small group of them who who criticize me on this because they say it's just another moral Panic um to which I say I understand your point it might look like

that at first but if you think about the boy who cried wolf you the panics around you know novels in the 18th century and comic books and all these previous moral panics that doesn't the lesson of the boy who cried wolf is not therefore the wolf will never come well lessons actually don't lie but the point is that you know even if the first two alarms were false there can still be a real emergency and in previous moral panics we didn't see suicide rates going up by 50% in previous man moral panics we didn't see

a sudden collapse of Teen Mental Health in previous moral panics the stories were in they in the media it was a story in the media about a kid who you know smoked marijuana and went and killed his parents like you read about these freak stories that's not what's Happening Now what's happening now is everyone sees it if not in their own kids in their friend's kids so in many ways this is very different from previous moral panics I think Jee twangy and I we're called alarmists but I think the proper term is alarm ringers we're

ringing an alarm we could be wrong I don't think we are and I think the evidence grows more and more that this is a major International collapse of Teen Mental Health oh and you said that economic that was your third one was what about like what's called factors economic gun violence opioid crisis all these other things that are kind of yeah that's right that's right those are all good theories for the United States and if you know if graph after graph shows that Teen Mental Health collapsed in 2012 2013 what about school shootings the new

town shooting that was 2012 kids have had lockdown drills of course they're anxious but why did girls start checking into psychiatric WS in New Zealand the same time and Canada and the UK and Australia and Northern Europe why was this a global coordinated response of teen girls especially younger teen girls because of American school shootings or because of American inequality or anything else that's when I really began to feel like oh my God this is this is gigantic this is not just some social science anomaly of the US that we can debate about for decades

this is happening in many countries the increase in mental illness has not H we don't find evidence of it yet in East Asia East Asia is very different but at least across the develop Democratic open Western Society that's right that's [Music] right one of the things I'm trying to understand better or make sense of is how you square another thing that we're seeing in gen Z which is a greater capacity for empathy you're going to have to explain that tell me what you mean well I think there is some understanding that this generation has been

acclimated to mental health in a way that we weren't and there's a whole corner of Tik Tok that's just all about mental health and they're learning about mental health at a at an earlier age and there's a sense of sensitivity around that and how does that work within the context of the statistics that you're seeing right so first are you presenting this as like a good thing like it's a good thing that this oh I I don't know I don't know I mean if I'm being honest I guess I would have a predisposition to think

that that would be good right uh because you and I are from a time when there was a stigma around mental illness my mother sent me to a psychotherapist when I was in Middle School because I developed some ticks and uh and that was shameful like I didn't want to admit that to other other kids um so there was a stigma to mental illness to seeing a therapist and so you and I have the intuition that well yeah let's decrease the stigma that would be good thing and that is a good thing we don't want

people to feel ashamed of who they are or what problems they're facing so that's all good I think the stigma was pretty much gone by 2010 like we really were successful in destigmatizing therapy and mental illness in the early 2010s I believe what happened is not just that we removed the stigma but that we reversed it that is on Instagram and and YouTube originally now on Tik Tok um there are these gigantic communities of around every possible mental illness and what effect do they have on kids is this a good thing giving them more information

making or is it making them increasingly more and more fragile and un resilient well that's right because what happens because of the way the algorithms work the ones that are presented are the most successful ones the most successful ones are the most extreme ones and so if you have maybe a little bit of a tick or maybe if you don't there's actually diagnosis now there are these tick disorders they're not truly tourettes but they look kind of like tourettes the people really believe they have them but they develop involuntary motor ticks and in one of

the best known examples they shadowed the word beans because there was a British woman Eevee something or other who I she might have really had Tourette I don't know but she would shout out the word beans and then all these girls would watch her and then they would shout out the word they they develop similar things so as we were saying before girls are more open to influence from other girls than boys are from other boys especially emotional influences so immersing immersing our kids especially Middle School girls immersing our kids in a community in which

mental illness is valorized and mental health is a source of shame because you're somehow insensitive oh you think you're so happy when the rest of us are miserable I've heard this from some kids um so no I do not think that Tik Tok and Instagram and all those things are good for the mental health of people who are suffering mental health problems I think we're now seeing um over therapy we're seeing over psychologization uh we're seeing valorization we're we're seeing incredibly bad information spread around so no I think this is a really really bad thing

what social media has done to the Mental Health Community in terms of of misinformation like looking more broadly down on the internet we're seeing this increase in fragmentation we no longer enjoy a monoculture of any way yeah misinformation out there and there's also this rise in contrarianism this idea that everything you've been told is a lie and this is what they don't want to know and so people are walking around in all manner of myriad alternate realities about what is true and what isn't so my first question is what is this doing to our brain

and then secondarily the existential question like can we cohere as a society as a democracy when we can't even agree upon a shared sense of what is true and real that's right um I won't have much to say about the first one because while I I'm learning a lot about what social media and other things are doing to Teen Mental Health and teen brains during puberty I can't exactly say what our current information environment is doing to adult brains so I'm going to set that aside it's alluring it's attractive when you come across that post

and it's like here's the thing the secret thing like we're going to click on that and that's what you know the internet traffic's in that's what's getting you know all of the engagement yeah so I'll make two two points off the bat one is um we're a very tribal species we love doing group versus group conflict the Great success of liberalism in the last few hundred years I would argue is overcoming that traditional societies cohered around shared blood shared Gods shared enemies and liberal democracies have been able to cohere around a set of procedures and

processes for legislating and resolving disputes that leave us each free to construct lives that we want to live and we can live together in peace and harmony with you with a lot of diversity so all that stuff was really suppressing our tendency to tribalism and I think once social media became super viral again in the early days it was wonderful it looked like a friend of democracy but once you get the like button the retweet button everything converts to being super duper viral after 2009 this now is what leads to the fragmentation of everything you

use the word monoculture before and I I think many of your listeners would Flinch like mon we don't want a monoculture you know what we want is a rich culture with lots of little pockets of communities and lots of different ethnic groups can have their own culture but it's against the back ground of a common American understanding not perfect but some sense that you know there was an election and we had procedures and this person won some sense of here's what American history was we we always argue about the details but there has to be

some way of making sense of things together when the 911 attacks happened we very quickly settled on the narrative that we were attacked by al- Qaeda and I think that was obviously true there were some conspiracy theories but they didn't go very far because this was 2001 we had the older internet which was not perfectly made for for conspiracy theories I mean they flourished but it wasn't like it is now it's only once things get super viral and super intimidating especially Twitter once you get people able to attack anyone anytime anywhere an attack that could

go viral and destroy the person's life people get scared don't speak up as much and when you get the moderates Going Quiet you get what's called a spiral of Silence there's a a West German uh political scientist in the 70s I've forgotten her name Elizabeth Noel noyman I think it was uh she wrote this really brilliant article about you know looking at the whole communist countries just to the east of her um where when you attack the moderates on your side and they go quiet and all you hear is people more extreme everyone gets a

sense of like this is what public opinion is oh this is what people think and then once you get that the new moderates the new people on the edge they get attacked and then they go silent and that shifts the perception even further to the extreme so this is now happening on the left and on the right so we see it I believe in the Republican Party uh with the the loss of all the moderates you there are hardly any moderate Republicans left in Congress um and I think the party I think is is going

off the deep end in many ways we see it on the left not so much in the Democratic party in which the moderate Wing actually generally wins over the more radical Wing but in the left I believe we see it in the institutions that are dominated by the left which are primarily the epistemic institutions anything about generating knowledge so universities media journalism the Arts museums in all those areas we see you know almost everybody was on the left but they were mostly true liberals they mostly believed in free speech they believed in truth but once

the moderates get attacked and silenced now the people who speak up are the people who are further to the extreme who say you know our goal isn't knowledge our goal isn't to preserve the best of what's been thought and said our goal is to bring about racial equality or divestment in Israel or whatever like some political goal and when you do that then you're betraying the institution you're betraying the mission of the institution and of course the public loses trust so I think what social media has done by silencing moderates by super empowering extremists is

it's shattered any ability for us to reach a common understanding what's happening and it is undermining and I would say shattering the institutions that we depend on to find truth I do think we can solve the problem for kids I don't know what we do for democracy where your optimism lies with the younger generation this is a much more pessimistic view it's one it's one that I share and I think there's this ability that there's a giant swath of the population that would fall into that moderate category you're just not hearing them they're not speaking

up on social media and the idea is like well they still turn up and vote and you know they still talk to their friends or whatever but is it that that swath of the population is narrowing and narrowing and becoming smaller and smaller as as the edges of what constitutes being kind of a moderate or a Centrist gets more thinly defined I are products of the 20th century where we think about public opinion and we think about is the middle shrinking and we think that an election is a measure of what the electorate thinks and

so the goal should be to expand the number of people who think in a good way let's say but since 2010 or so that's not the way things work it's not about shifting people or it's about the Dynamics of who has the power of intimidation and so the middle I don't think the middle has shrunk in America if you were to measure everyone's attitudes in fact there's a debate about whether America's getting polarized and people on the other side say no we're not getting polarized look at public opinion polls people are still pretty moderate most

Americans are still in the center on most things or you know there's a bell-shaped curve so if you're looking at the averages those aren't changing very much but in the super viral social media World average doesn't matter except on Election Day on Election Day it actually does matter what people think but every other day of the year it doesn't really matter what people think what matters is what's going on in this bizarre distorting stage that things take place on which is social media in which case a lot of the people yelling and screaming aren't even

real a lot of them are Russian or other foreign agents A lot of them are people with personality disorders um trolls you know men who enjoy being frankly um so this is not at all a reflection of public opinion and yet it shapes it shapes almost everything we do right and in turn and in time it will shape public opinion that's right what is the impact on the younger generation who are trying to wrap their heads around what they think and where they fall along that spectrum and we're only at the beginning of the Advent

of AI and what that's going to do to this whole thing so it is very much a concerning you know situation like Can America or can liberal Democratic institutions at large survive what we're looking at right now that's right I think that is truly an open question in a way that it wasn't um before 2010 it just wasn't an open question I mean so it's happening in other countries not all other not all other democracies some are not as polarized but there are others you know Poland actually Japan and Korea I mean there are a

number of democracies that are experiencing more dysfunction polarization uh but not all but ours as particular problems were very large very diverse our first amendment which is so wonderful in many ways means that we have almost no options for regulating social media among adults I think we can regulate for kids but there's very little we can do at the legislative level for adults and Democratic discourse um so I think we're very vulnerable and you know I I don't want to be too pessimistic because it's always been wrong to bet against America in the past doesn't

mean it's going to always be wrong in the future I'm I'm hopeful that people will realize we can't just go on as we're going and we're going to have to adapt to this new world um in fact the title of my next book is going to be life after Babel adapting to a world we may never again share and one of the features of this world is going to be people really really need to do their jobs they really really need to set their politics aside if you're a librarian be a librarian don't try to

bring in your politics into what people can read if you're a college professor teach your subject don't bring in your views about this or that if you're a journalist be a journalist don't say we're not going to platform the other side as many young journalists say um so we have a crisis of our institutions from a a real spread of lack of professionalism because people think that what is good is for me to use my position to advance the party of the good MH and that way lies ruin yeah there is this dramatic erosion of

trust in institutions broadly in journalism in government in institutions of Higher Learning Etc how do we repair that trust is it yeah is it in accordance with what you just shared but or is it more than that I mean unless we can do that it does become a very dire situation I feel like we're just not we're on the precipice of that right now given that degradation of trust I I feel that's the way I feel that we are on the precipice of something that could be very very bad I'll just give you my my

thoughts about the world that I know best which is the University World um where uh in 2015 higher education in the United States had extraordinary support we had one of the best brands in the world American universities dominated every list of the top smart kids from all over the world wanted to come to America to go to our top universities so we had this amazing brand and at the heart of the brand was excellence and honesty um we cannot lie um you know people would say a study from Harvard showed X well because you know

Harvard is a name brand well that means it must be true so that's what we had until 2015 and it wasn't perfect it wasn't entirely true but it was mostly true like you know universes are big diverse places where lots of smart people are making lots of discoveries I love being a professor I love the academic world but but in 2015 because of social media this is what I've been writing about in other in other work because of social media we were overrun by people pursuing political agendas rather than scholarly agendas it wasn't most people

by far but because the activists could intimidate and threaten and destroy our reputations a lot of us were cowed into silence we acques to the Takeover of the purpose of the University that's why I believe trust in highered plummeted after 2015 this all began in 2015 in that Courtyard at that I won't go into details but 2015 there were a lot of student protests University presidents caved in they never punished people for shouting down speakers they never asserted academic Integrity so that's just plummeted and plummeted and and Gallup data shows that by June of 20123

it wasn't just Republicans who hated higher ed it was moderates and centrists higher ed this amazing brand from 2015 had somehow managed to alienate most of the country our reputation was in the toilet and that was all before October 7th and before those Congressional hearings we saw those three presidents who couldn't say why it was bad to say was a complete disaster so that's the world that I know best but the one optimistic thing I can say is that even though I've been I've been studying this and working on and trying to fix it or

help it since 2015 every year was worse than every year before there was never really any progress until 2023 things have begun to turn around in higher ed um I co-founded an organization called Head do Academy um we're about 6 or 7,000 people mostly professors um who believe that we need Viewpoint diversity open inquiry we need to do our jobs we love our jobs um if there any professors or uh University administrators listening I urge you to join it's free heterodox academy.org but what I'm saying is the way America has traditionally worked is that we

have problems they don't get fixed they get worse and worse and then they get so bad and then something happens and we do ultimately fix them and this is a problem of democracies they don't look ahead they don't they're not foresightful authoritarian countries like China are very foresightful they plan ahead five-year plans now they're not very Dynamic and they have a rigidity you know so even though the trends now are very bad uh for American political life you should never assume that they're just going to continue something's going to change and things could turn around

but your sense is that the pendulum has swung as far as it's going to swing and it's swinging back now a little bit some balance for the you know if you'd asked me this two years ago I would have said I don't think it's a pendulum I think it's more like a tower you know a pendulum is a negative feedback loop where the further out it goes the stronger the force returning it to the center but a tower is a positive feedback loop where you push over a tower a little bit the further you push

it the stronger the force pulling it over so I had feared that universities and the sort of this ideological Revolution was more like a tower there was no way to stop it but we're now seeing some signs maybe it is like a pendulum which I think is a very hopeful sign we've seen it in journal too the New York Times finally stood up for itself and started saying you know what if our reporter wrote something that you don't like we're not going to fire them tough luck we're journalists and they hadn't really done that from

2015 until 2023 but they started doing it they really started standing up I think better in 2023 yeah we could do several hours on what's happening in media right now and the gutting of Journalism and all of that we don't have the bandwidth of the time for that um but what I do want to talk about is this very interesting somewhat unexpected chapter in the anxious generation which is about the larger kind of more existential thing that's happening amidst this crisis which is spiritual degradation which is a chapter you wouldn't expect to find in a

book like this it's atypical so talk a little bit about what you mean in this chapter and why you felt strongly about including this I'm glad you picked up on that it's an unexpected chapter because I didn't expect to write it um I expected to write a short book uh on what social media was doing to girls and expanded into a larger book on what the whole digital environment is doing to teens and I was way behind schedule and I told my publisher that have it in a certain date I was like way behind schedule

but by the time I got near the end I felt like okay I've laid out all this evidence about mental health and a couple other things and kids but I haven't touched what it's doing to adults and all of us are feeling it I feel we all feel fresh fragmented frazzled overwhelmed wanted to say something for adults and what I realized when I made my list of concerns like what is it doing to us it acate a whole part of my mind from long ago my first book was called the happiness hypothesis finding modern truth

and ancient wisdom and what I did was I collected um psychological claims from east and west thousands of years ago and today you know things like there's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so is you know that's from Hamlet but you similar things in Marcus Aurelius and Buddha so I learned a lot from writing that book about ancient wisdom and what I realized is what what a life online does to us what social media in particular does to us is the exact opposite of what the Ancients advised so just a simplest example is

many Traditions are wise to the fact that we're quick to judge we're Hypocrites you know judge not lest you be judged why do you see this the the speck in your neighbor's eye when you don't see the plank in your own all of that so that urges us to judge more slowly be less angry be more forgiving that's spirit ual wisdom and what is a life online what is you know Twitter or or any other you know most of the there are some platforms that have that have nice cultures but for the most part kids

are being immersed in a culture of Judge instantly now because if you don't judge now someone's going to say why haven't you judged do you not care about this issue so it makes us hyper judgmental with it makes us not care about context whereas in reality Moral Moral violations moral concerns they're almost always really complicated there's there's always a story but so soci media strips it away so it makes us more judgmental the Ancients advise us to calm and clear our minds because when people are focused on their own concerns their Petty concerns they're not

open to God or other people and so spiritual advancement comes from sort of clearing away the dust the dirt the cobwebs sitting silently uh learning to silence the jumping monkey of your mind I think is something the Buddhists say it's hard to do it takes practice but if you do it the rewards are incredible and the research on meditation is very very good very positive what is a life online the exact opposite it's just constant stuff coming in constant notifications constant interruptions and you're really really focused on yourself should I chime on on this what

did people say about the thing I did chime in on what's Happening is my status going up or down and I have a catalog I think I have seven different things seven different issues in the book about how here's what spiritual advancement is here's what a life online does and it's exactly the opposite I'm coming at this from the point of view of an atheist I'm I'm Jewish by ethnicity and culture I was never religious but my research on morality led me to research on religion because they're very closely related and that all led me

to studying ancient insights uh there's a lot of wisdom in these traditions and I think part of our modern world is we're losing touch with everything that was said before five minutes ago we're losing our past we're losing guidance we're losing ballast we're losing a lot of spiritual wisdom mhm this is the most profound and important piece I think in this whole thing it's this battle or this war between the ego and the advancement or the focus on the self versus self-transcendence so you go online it's about you how do you measure up it's about

what just happened what's about to happen it's anticipating it's you know fearing it's you know the role of the individual in terms of this Collective and it drives binary thinking it drives a lack of empathy it undermines forgiveness all of these things that we would all agree are laudable traits to cultivate at the cost of any investment in in self-transcendence in understanding that all of the things that we're seeking through scrolling are actually uh found by getting offline and being present and starting to invest in not only the internal work of becoming more self-actualized but

also in understanding that you know it's not about the self it's really about the whole right that's right and I know your your listeners are very interested in self-improvement and and health and mental health yeah I think this is a kind of practice that is hard uh but you need to be conscious of it you need to commit to it um and you need to change your habits to make room for it any part of your day that you don't you don't have some guardrail up like this stuff is going to just come in and

take over that time you made it like a dimension of self are you self-focused or other focused that's I think that's a very important Dimension that is at the heart of of spirituality and and spiritual Traditions are trying to move us along that Dimension and is this not just at the crisis of meaning and a lack of purpose that so many of us are suffering from yeah that's right that makes it a lot a lot harder a lot worse um when we don't have a sense of purpose a sense of noble purpose we feel scattered

and fragmented we pursue other things we pursue status we pursue material possessions the other way to think about this Dimension ra rather than just self other is is higher versus lower and that's something that I took from the happiness hypothesis that around the world you you see many cultures talk about a vertical dimension of life now there's a vertical Dimension like hierarchy and authority and the king is up and vassals are down but what I found psychologically is that there's also another vertical Dimension you know so imagine like a threedimensional space you know there's the

x-axis the y- axis is the vertical Dimension but then there's a z-axis like coming out of the page which I I've called Divinity because a lot of societies have this idea that God is up or high he's up in the sky he's good he's Noble um and then the devil or demons are down below they're low they're in Hell which is down we have a lot of embodied cognition about high low and high is also less carnal it's more ethereal it's it's more loving it's more calm and down below is more carnal sensual biological lustful

painful um and so because you find this in a lot of cultures that really attracts me whenever I find any sort of like really ornate strange thing in multiple cultures then I start thinking almost like Carl Young with theory of archetypes like you know why do these these common patterns occur around the world there must be something in our brains that are causing this to happen so I think that thinking in this three-dimensional space is the normal human way to think oh and a lot of my thinking here was influenced by just spending three months

in India doing research I know you're going to India very soon so you know Hinduism is very explicit about some areas are zones of Purity some are zones of pollution and there's an very explicit high low sense to that um we moderns live in a world world that's been stripped of that third dimension entirely there is no Divinity you just you know if you like it you do it if it gives you pleasure it's good but I think people feel the loss of it because it's in our heads so if we don't talk about it

we're sort of left wondering like what is this thing I feel why do I feel unsatisfied I don't know how does that play into how you think about your specialty which is moral psychology this idea that the answers that we're seeking and looking for are not necessarily going to be found in reason and yeah logic but in our instincts and and in our gut yeah doing this work in psychology on the you the psychological foundations I've call them the moral Foundation moral foundations theory has really changed my thinking about morality and politics and a good

society and everything in the western tradition there's a long tradition of trying to reason our way to morality just as the you know the Scientific Revolution people are able to reason and use evidence to find the truth truth about stars and about gravity and about plants and everything people have tried to do this in the moral world in the social world can we have a science of well a science of sociology and societies can we have a science of morality for hundreds of years people have sought the science of morality can we prove what's right

and wrong and I'm a pretty cerebral rational type of guy I should be really down for that but what this research has brought me to is realizing our communities are these emergent things they're these sociological facts that don't make any logical sense but they have a power of their own and we need them we desperately need them we need order and structure we need a sense that there's a moral world we need a sense that we live in the same world as other people this is all very irrational stuff but it's who we are it's

human stuff and um I think we're losing that we're losing that sense of living in a shared moral matrix it's very disorienting and as Emil durkheim showed than 100 years ago in his book on suicide when you have anomy or normlessness people don't feel free they don't feel like hey I can do what I want here they feel lost they feel why is anything worth doing we're confused and that's when suicide rates go up at least in Western cultures that are sort in a sense almost too free he would say um so yes doing this

work certainly pushed me to a moral view which is very different from what I had when I was a younger man talk a little bit about the solutions to this cohesion problem how do we you know reach across the aisle and develop better ways of communicating or just being present with people who see the world differently I'm glad you put as a cohesion problem because that I can address as I've been getting increasingly alarmed about American politics and democracy since 2008 when I started working on this my first T talk was about the left and

right and why they don't understand each other in 2008 I began increasingly alarmed and the way I see it now is you know think about this complex sculpture this complex thing and you start it spinning or you put on a on a wheel you know or like a playground spin you start it spinning and you spin it faster and faster well parts are going to blow off parts are just going to get thrown out by the the centrifugal force and what we need is corresponding centripetal force to pull it back in um we have a

large secular liberal democracy with a lot of diversity it's got lots of Parts if we were a small cohesive Nation with one ethnicity one religion we wouldn't have this problem we'd be very cohesive we wouldn't have the creativity of diversity the vibrancy but we'd have a lot more cohesion and trust and the Scandinavian countries used to have that they were very small homogeneous countries very very high trust very easy to have a liberal democracy there so I think what we need to do is we need to think as Americans okay this is who we are

this gives us unique strengths but man we are coming apart and we cannot function if we're coming apart we have to restore some basic functionality institutions trust so if you think about it that way now what can we within an American framework and I think some things like emphasizing assimilation again this is one of my most controversial points um you can have diversity if you have assimilation and this is the America of the 20th century post-war world you know so my you know my grandparents came from Eastern Europe they were religious Jews my parents were

more secular we we all had very Jewish identity but we all had very American identity and we're grateful to this country for allowing that to be possible so immigration with assimilation doesn't raise has very many problems people whose anest were here for a long time they see people coming in but if the people assimilate they're basically saying we love America we're happy to be here you know you don't get the nativist rejection it's when people started saying and this was I think a problem on the Progressive left started saying no assimilation that's cultural genocide people

should not assimilate assimilation is bad people should keep their own cultures here we should assimilate to them and this is happening in Europe as well and it causes a huge right-wing reaction it is literally Reviving Nazi affiliated parties in Europe so immigration is a gigantic issue today in America and Europe and I think the fault you know you can point to racism on the right but the anti- assimilationist view on the left Mass immigration with low assimilation I think that very predictably triggers the right-wing reaction here I'm drawing on the political scientist Karen Stenner a

wonderful Australian political scientist so anyway if you think about anything immigration anything in terms of how do we create cohesion while still having our diversity then I think we can make progress another would be a gap year After High School of some kind of national service give kids a common experience move them to different parts of the country a red blue exchange something like that so there there's a lot we can do to convey the sense that we are one country our Fates are interlined we have to learn how to get along we have common

interests and common concerns uh that's the way how to approach it yeah and we have a lot to lose we sure do if we don't really get on top of this I think we sure do we've Tak this country for granted and this country I think is a miracle I'm I'm very grateful it is a miracle and it is in danger of coming apart I want to shift gears and talk a little bit about parenting lots of parents listen to this I'm a parent you're a parent um you've shared a few things around how to

shift our relationship with our devices how to counsel our kids to have a better relationship um with these devices and I'm laughing because we all know how difficult this and practicality right like okay just tell your kid this that or the other or these are the rules like all right well good luck with that you know what I mean like putting this into motion is very challenging and we as adults have our own challenges with our compulsive Behavior around these phones kids pay attention to what we do not what we say what is the advice

to the parent who has a kid who you know isn't eight is yeah 15 or 16 like the the ship is already pulled out right and you can see it happening in front of you and there's a sense of powerlessness like you can't yank it away because you know that's already been done right so yeah I'm sure you have parents that that ask you about this all the time abolutely absolutely that's right um so you know the the central idea of the book is that we're all stuck in Collective action problems and if you say

to your kid you know you've been on Instagram for years I'm canceling your account you've had a smartphone for years I'm giving you a flip phone okay that's I'm not advising that some parents may want to do that but my recommendation would be don't do that if you're the only one but if you can find several others several other parents of your kids's friends not necessarily to go that far but whatever you do if your kid feels that he is alone he's the only one then it's it's going to be really scary for him and

he's going to resist with all his might um and he's going to see you as a tyrant who's cutting him off from his friends what I'm hoping to do with this book is create such a widespread understanding that this is really damaging our kids which is a view the kids share so we don't have to convince them of it that it may become possible for parents of 15 years olds to say you know what you know I gave you a smartphone too early I wish we hadn't given it to you in fifth grade you've got

it now I'm not going to take it away from you but we're going to have a house rule which is you when you come in you you have to put your phone in this box and you you get it when you go out a smartphone's very useful when you're out you don't have it when you're in the apartment or the house now you still have your computer so yeah you can text you can still text your friends I'm not saying don't text your friends but I'm saying the smartphone is unusually addictive because of the touchscreen

technology and the small screen let's have some limits this is what we do with my daughter um who's 14 and she has a smartphone um no social media and when she's in the house we don't enforce it perfectly enough but when she's in the it's supposed to be on the kitchen counter charging and she can use her computer she can text her friends that's then the next thing we have to work on but it's much better than just spending her whole day looking just at at her Palm Dinner might we have a very strict rule

my wife really enforces it you know it's so natural you're having a conversation like oh what was his name let me just look it up like no do not you you're not allowed to take out your phone at dinner I'm not saying take your kid off again some may want to do that that could be the right thing to do but it's very very hard I'm saying at least put in put in limits that they're not on it all the time the most effective thing you could do to help your kid would be encourage the

kids school to go phone free the kids don't really have the capacity to say you know what this is bad for me I'm going to not do it like that's very very hard to do even for an adult um but if this school goes phone free then everyone is doing it and then everyone is talking to everyone people are much friendlier a sense of inclusion improves when schools go phone free so I would say be a social psychologist about this try to get the school to improve the environment and try to work with a few

other families so your kid doesn't feel singled out and alone on the subject of collective action and what is your sense of where the te 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 um

I think some of these leaders still May believe they might believe you know the Skeptics there are some professors that are I'm in a debate with so you Mark Zuckerberg points to their work whenever like on the on the Senate stand he points to 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 that it's harmless or not I don't know but my sense is that because they are

locked in a collective action problem they 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 Tik Tok 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 them

immunity from lawsuits for what they publish back in 1997 or six whenever the 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 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 um 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 um so you know the 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 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 you know young children it does a lot of good things so kosa needs to be passed and that is bipartisan and that's actually one encouraging sign is that almost all this stuff is totally bipartisan there's no left right one thing that talk about cohesion like this might be the one thing that saves America no you're right that's right yeah we need a common enemy we together social media can be the common enemy that binds us together the irony of

that that's right 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 Tik Tok 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 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 specifically the total tonnage of damage is going to be a function of the total hour spent times the perniciousness of those hours so Tik Tok is the platform that sucks up the most time but like when you compare it to Netflix it's like exponentially more on Tik Tok right I don't know for sure for teens I imagine they're spending more time on Tik Toto and I don't know that number obviously adults are spending more time on on Netflix than

on Tik Tok so I don't know the numbers it's the number of hours so Netflix huge numbers of hours times the piousness very very low pricious for for Netflix whereas Tik Tok huge number of hours and the most pricious thing I mean you know hardcore porn there are some other things that are worse but I think Tik Tok is the worst of the worst it's the short videos this is I didn't know this for the book but I'm seeing it since then from talking to my students it's the short form which causes you to get

into this narcotic State it's like a slot machine you know slot machine addict they they get into this state I'm told kind of zone out they get into a a strange State uh in which they their worri their anxiety goes away it's it's like a hole that they're in so the short firm videos do that um like slot machines so I think Tik Tok is the worst of the worst Instagram reels and you know YouTube shorts I can't say that those are not as bad but the tonnage of damage is not as high so that's

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 uh 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 it's not like the game is harming them it's more the opportunity cost the taking them out of life the 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 Skeptics even the people I debate with uh 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 inst 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 stronger well so I think that's where that's where I think we need to be putting pressure on Congress to enforce so Congress passed the Capa the online privacy protection act in 1998 I think it was um they set the age to 13 it was going to be 16 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 MH 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 bar strip clubs brothel 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 we need to put pressure on Congress to actually do its job and solve Collective action problems and provide some minimal regulation to

the industry that is doing the most damage to our kids rather than conferring on the same industry blanket immunity from lawsuits I mean this is the Absurd situation we're in so my hope is that we'll put pressure on Congress and this year there really could be some action barring that since you know Congress always disappoints us on these matters um barring that the states are taking it up now obviously a state level solution is not optimal but some state but Utah and Florida are taking the lead um on actually creating helping to create environments in

which parents can actually raise their kids and have some minimal degree of control over what the kids are doing online what does it look like internationally who is getting this right Britain is really leading on this they have a functioning legislature which we don't so they have a parliament which has passed some laws they passed an age appropriate design code there's a wonderful woman biban Kidron in the House of Lords who really has led the child rights child safety activism on about online so Britain is leading the EU is doing some things but the EU

tends to be very clumsy and over-regulated so I don't know that they're going to produce good legisl I think the Brits are doing a great job of it and here's the thing when when Britain passed this age appropriate design quote of several years ago I can't remember what the exact Provisions where like certain things have to be set to private and there might be limits on oh yeah there are limits on what time of day the company can ping the kids you know the Google and Facebook they then rolled these changes out globally because it's

a pain for them to have separate rules in different countries right so if the if Britain and Australia can take the lead here and show that it's possible I think it'll make it easier for America to follow sure if you find those regions or governments that are more receptive and more Nimble at putting the policies into action it becomes inevitable that that's right obviously right that's right and obviously the money that Facebook that meta spends on supporting Congress people and and on lobbying here are dwarfs what they spend overseas and they you know they just

can't influence Britain Australia the way they can influence the US Congress what I love about this book is that it's just one piece in what is really a broader Movement Like if you go to the anxious generation.com website I don't know who built that website but they did a brilliant job Township oh oh gosh wonderful I think it's called Township it's a small operation but they do beautiful work yeah yeah it's it's it's very compelling and it's sort of story tells the thesis why this is important and how to really kind of understand it visually

and then there's this whole art piece I mean we open talking about these Billboards but you've got all kinds of really cool stuff like out in the world that's like you know kind of percolating into our Consciousness um as people walk around our urban center so how did that come together and talk a little bit about you know how you're extending the message of the book Into You Know real action yeah oh thank you for the opportunity so this came about because I'm friends with a brilliant artist in New York city named Dave cicerelli um

who came to me because he liked what I was doing at heterodox Academy he volunteered to help I was putting together this book of John Stewart Mill uh uh chapter 2 on Liberty it's this amazing piece of writing but it's a little dense I said Dave can you illustrate his metaphors and Dave created these gorgeous drawings and so online you can find that on Amazon a Kindle version um it's called all minus one it's it's John Stewart Mill Illustrated so it was a great collaboration with a brilliant artist that was like 2018 or so so

then I start looking into social media and I talk to Dave and I say Dave could we come up with like some images that we could like put up on subways like provocative images to kind of dramatize what's going on here and he had all these great ideas I said great I'll see if I can raise some money maybe we can have maybe we can do this this is like 2019 and I I wasn't able to raise the money and I was busy and we just sort of dropped it so then I write this book

and so here we are in 2023 the penguin press they have their art Department come up with covers and they're boring and they're kind of pedestrian and they're this covers so yeah so that's a real artist who took who took that photo so I said uh to Dave I said hey Dave I'm really stuck here could you do better and he said sure I'd love to so he came up with this gorgeous design and it has this like feeling of like opilia floating in the river like you know drowning and it's got like all these

yellow balls that seem happy but but it's actually very threatening because I said I want conflicting I want Beauty and conflicting emotions to me that's great art um so he did it and that's the beautiful cover and then the cover is so powerful I remember how it started but we said to each other like hey remember those posters like why don't we do it let's do it uh and so Dave came up with this whole plan with Billboards and signs on the back of buses and these provocative posters and stencils uh that were putting up

in your playgrounds when adults step back kids step up a simple thing about letting your kids have more freedom and so we' done this uh Dave uh he built this 10ft tall milk carton um that says on the side uh you know missing uh childhood instead of you know it has the photo of the girl on it is that in front of the capital there's a photo part of the capital yes he was on the National Mall last week you know with a team trying to you know get people to talk about it and you

get lots of young people taking pictures of it for Instagram which is great so he was in Washington then he moved it to New York City uh I joined him there last week and then it was in San Francisco uh like yesterday it might even still be there today go to anxious generation.com you can see the page about the art but it's in San Francisco and then it'll be coming to Los Angeles once we we need to raise more money to to bring it but we're going to bring it to Los Angeles and then maybe

other cities as well so if anyone wants to support this art project let me know and there's Billboards and there's posters and these sort of you know like when you're walking down New York City where it says post no bills and there's bills everywhere and it's just like there a ton of them in a row of the young girl in a space suit saying send me to Mars yeah which is provocative because you're like I don't know what does that mean right it's asking you to kind of dig a little bit deeper so maybe explain

that idea so the idea so the idea so I I'm an intuitionist in my in my academic research I'm best known for moral foundations Theory arguing that we don't really come to moral views because of we reasoned our way it's we have a gut feeling and then we look for reasons afterwards so if I'm trying to persuade people I'm going to not just give them the you have to give the evidence the arguments that's what I do in the book but you also have to give them the right gut feeling and so art can do

that and dramatic images can do that and great television or great movies can do that you know and there are many points in history where a great book changed the course of history um you know you know Uncle Tom's Cabin or you harri beer Stow there all sorts of cases where some literary work got people to feel something so that's what we're trying to do with with the with the art project and with the book um and so some of the images one of them made up by by Lenor ski who wrote Freer range kids

she works with us it says like you know supervision is love and it looks like big brother topic it's distopic 1984 because the way we're raising our kids is from like straight out of 1984 I mean this this insane paranoia Dave has put created these be and they're beautiful they're beautiful and also a little shocking so we're trying to illustrate the metaphors and tap into people's gut feelings if we just manipulated gut feelings that would I think not be honest that would not that would be like a demagogue but since I think you know I

Marshall all the evidence the research is in the book but then also having the god that that's why we're doing the art project as well but it is leading I didn't want to start a movement I'm very busy I'm an academic I don't want to run anything but wherever I go whatever we do people are coming forward saying can I help like I hate what's going on I hate what this did to my kid I hate what this is doing to to kids today so if you're listening to this if you want to be part

of the movement just for starters just go to anxious generation.com scroll through the main web page that kind of tells the story as as which was just describing kind of narrates you through at the bottom uh we have a place where you can just put in your email address and we'll keep you posted I don't have a 501c3 I don't have a way to I think you can also like Download a pdf like there's there's sort of helpful tools for parents as well yes thank you yes that's right we have if you go to the

resources page you'll find we have a lot of tools for parents and for teachers and schools if you want to have encourage your kids school to go phone free we have a petition or a letter you could send you just copy that text you can modify yourself and send it in so we want to make it easy for parents especially to escape from these Collective action problems to coordinate with each other and there are a lot of groups we have a list of like 30 groups that are helping people do that like wait until 8th

we have resources for parents we have lots of additional research so there's a lot of resources there I hope people will go to anxious generation.com so instead of waiting for Collective action at the highest level organizing your own Collective action in your local community that's right start with just a few families because almost every parent is already on a text thread with the parents of three other kids who had a play dat once like so we're all you know we're all generally connected in small groups you can start in small groups all it takes is

three or four families and suddenly you have a group of kids that are playing with each other after school rather than sitting and scrolling all day and then they're don't they don't feel left out right so to end this on an optimistic note you're your analogy is sort of like the Berlin Wall like it's about to burst it's not this incremental thing that we're going to be sitting around waiting for forever there's enough energy behind this that you know the dam is going to burst soon and then everything changes exactly there's what's called preference falsification

there there are situations in which in which if people are only supporting something because they're afraid to speak up or if they're kept in place by fear as soon as the fear comes everything can change very very quickly and that happened in Eastern Europe everyone hated communism I traveled there in 1987 I I don't think there were many communist or any back then like everyone hated it but they were just kept in place by the secret police they were afraid and once it became clear that actually you know if we all mass at the wall

and try to knock it over we win and then it fell everywhere now that's a little bit too dramatic for what we're talking about here but the the the social dynamics are actually very similar because why is it that we're all giving our kids phones at such an early age because we're afraid that they will then be left out and they're afraid of being left out so it's not the fear of the secret police that's the most powerful human urge that's right yeah I mean being afraid of the secret police and being abducted in the

night and torture that's pretty Primal too okay I'm not saying but but it's the same pathway right we want to be a member in good standing of a group we're terrified of being isolated being cut off being alone that's why banishment used to be a punishment in the ancient world before they had like good prisons and things like your punishment is to be banished we're not going to kill you we're just going to send you away and that's like death social death and teenages are really really vulnerable to social death so anyway my point is

if the kids themselves say yeah I'd like to get off if everyone else does well then why don't you get off because everyone else so if a system is held in place by the fear of missing out and we can all get out together then kids aren't missing out we give them back childhood we give them back play we give them back each other well said the book is profound there's a reason why you're everything everywhere all at once this has really struck a cord and a nerve and it is the one thing that we

can all agree upon I think except for a little quibbles over there at nature few other people that's normal it's good and I want to thank you publicly for like putting the work into doing something like this it's a great Public Service um and I am at your service if there's anything I can do to help you or or to help this Mission so I appreciate you coming here today and sharing oh thanks so much for thanks for giving me the chance to talk to your audience you know and thanks for drawing me out and

raising you know raising the Devil's Advocate questions you know that that's how we learn and that's how we explore the complexity of the issue so thank you so the book is the anxious generation you can go to anxious generation.com and you can go to Jonathan's substack at after after babble.com right cool man come back and talk to me again sometime I'd love to thank you peace thanks all right all right man that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources

related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at Rich roll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch my books Finding Ultra voicing change in the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. rich.com if you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcast on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated and sharing the show

or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful and finally for podcast updates special offers on books the meal planner and other subjects please subscribe to our newsletter which you can find on the footer of any page at Rich roll.com Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameo with additional a audio engineering by Kale Curtis the video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director Dan Drake portraits by Davy Greenberg graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel CIS thank

you George a Wy for copywriting and website management and of course our theme music was created by Tyler Patt Trapper Patt and Harry Mathis appreciate the love love the support see you back here soon peace plants namaste [Music]