The Anxiety Doctor: Social Media Is Causing A Mental Health COLLAPSE (& It's Only Getting WORSE!)

there has never been a global synchronized collapse of mental health this is far larger than anything we've ever seen in terms of its effects on kids this is way way larger than Co a much buzzed about book The anxious generation is available now here's of course Jonathan height girls are extraordinarily anxious and depressed boys are extraordinarily undeveloped we shouldn't have kids with a massive entertainment center in their pocket by which strangers can reach them this is complete Insanity hey everyone I've got some huge news to share with you in the last 90 days 79.4% of

our audience came from viewers and listeners that are not subscribed to this channel there's research that shows that if you want to create a habit make it easy to access by hitting the Subscribe button you're creating a habit of learning how to be happier healthier and more healed this would also mean the absolute world to me and help us make better better bigger brighter content for you in the world subscribe right now the number one Health and Wellness podcast Jett J shett the one the only Jett hey everyone welcome back to onp purpose the place

you tune into to become happier healthier and more healed thank you so much for investing in your growth and your journey by being here today as I'm about to interview one of my favorite authors a researcher a professor that I'm so excited to talk to I've been wanting to have this conversation with him about many of his books and we're finally here for his latest installment it's called the anxious generation how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness please welcome to on purpose Jonathan height Jonathan thank you for being here

thank you for making the time and spending this energy with us oh my pleasure Jay thanks for having me this is a conversation that I feel as I was saying to you offline which is so critical and Central for our listeners I know that everyone who's tuned in whether it be right now on YouTube or listening to us on an audio platform this is of the number one concern in their life which is their personal mental well-being and then the mental wellbeing of their children and the people that they care about and love and I

think when I first saw the title The anxious generation I was thinking about how there's this rhetoric that has become quite normal in society around how every generation has had their anxiety whether it was the world wars whether we talk about oh we have social media but you know kids back in the day had black and white TVs and then color television and then then they had video games and so I feel like there's been this rhetoric that social media is just the latest installment in a host of previous technologies that have made old people

worried about young people why is this different uh so that is the main counterargument I get is from people say oh we've been through this before when I was a kid we watched too much television but look it didn't do anything to us um and it is true that ever since modernity began so beginning in the 17th century when the pace of change really begins to accelerate generation to generation the Next Generation actually is a little different from the previous one and the and generally we think the Next Generation they're kind of soft you know

they don't have our virtues um they have funny habits so that's always been going on and that's what I'm a late baby Bomer I was born in 1963 so that's what we thought about you know you know the millennial generation you know oh they're always just you know folks on their coffee and their and their avocado toast they're not serious but actually and you're a millennial I believe right that's correct so Millennials born 1981 through 1995 roughly um but the Millennials their mental health was actually pretty good um better than Gen X actually and they're

an amazingly successful generation they were creative they traveled the world they start companies so that's the normal intergen difference this time is really really different because all of a sudden in 2012 2013 it's like someone flicked on a light switch and all over the developed world we don't have data from the from the developing world but all over the developed World certainly the english- speaking countries Scandinavia girls in particular began to get depressed anxious they began to cut themselves they began checking into psychiatric wordss in right around 2013 in the US it's very sharp right

around 2013 it sometimes is little bit but it's basically the early 2010s this has never happened before there has never been a global synchronized collapse of mental health this is far larger than anything we've ever seen in terms of its effects on kids this is way way larger than covid um this is affecting most kids so I'm engaged in debates with other Scholars about well why did this happen and what I Marshall in the book is the evidence that it's not just a coincidence it's not just a correlation that oh that's exactly when kids basically

switch from flip phones to smartphones it was between 2010 and 2015 all over the world um but I'm showing that there there's a lot of uh of experimental evidence that shows causation and another thing that makes this different the kids themselves say it so when I was a kid we watched too much TV but you didn't see kids organizing to keep kids off TV you didn't see kids saying oh please save us from TV you know we're stuck watching it we don't want to be watching it but that's what young people are saying about social

media I just saw a survey uh the majority the majority of people of of all ages including young people say they would rather that Tik Tok was never invented they're spending time on it because everyone else is but they see that they're trapped so this is so different from any previous moral Panic that's so fascinating to hear that it's the first time that people are actually saying or kids are actually saying that this experience is something that we're feeling yet we feel so trapped addicted and exactly that's what my students say at NYU that's what

students say on surveys when you ask them why do you think mental health is so bad in your generation the most common answer is social media they see it happening the parents see it happening to the kids the teachers see it happening to the kids so there's all kinds of eyewitness testimony like people see this happening it's not just like hm I wonder if it's the phone like no we see the evidence of it what I'm fascinated why are people debating you well there are so you know I'm an academic and we publish um our

articles and journals and there are some people who been studying media for a long time and many of them are um very technophilic that they they you know they like technology they some of them like video games have been writing about the benefits of video games and there are some and so I think they come to this prepared to believe that this is just another moral Panic we've been through this with television and video games and before that comic books the 18th century it was novels people didn't want young women to read novels because stimulate

their sexual appetites so they sort of approach it with a like you know this is just another one of those moral panics and then I keep doing this work with Jee twangy and Zack Rous we keep showing like no other explanation works this time is different this is not just some artifact of kids being more willing to talk about it this is you the same Curves in self-report you see those same Curves in Hospital admissions uh so and psychiatric emergency department busit so this is not just some illusion uh but you know there's about four

or five five or six researchers um you know they're serious researchers and they look at the same data I do and they uh they say well the the correlations are too small to explain it or they say you know it's mostly correlational they're not enough experiments and I say okay look I found 25 experiments 16 of which do show a causal effect you know with random assignment the kids who the young people who are assigned to do less social media um in the first few days maybe their mental health is bad because they're addicted but

if you wait three or four weeks on average they feel better so I say look here are all these experiments and they say well the experiments aren't good enough here's a flaw in that one here's a flaw in that one so this is a normal academic debate not going to change their minds ever they're not going to change my mind ever um this is just the way these things go but as we argue it out in public the rest of the world can look and they can say what are my arguments what are their arguments

and then they'll decide yeah absolutely and from reading your book and your work what I understand is you actually I'm not saying social media doesn't have benefits either that's not really what you're saying you're not saying that there is no validity to it well what I would say is for adults social media has many benefits so you know obviously many people start their business businesses look I use Twitter to get my research out so for adults so think about this these are these were these used to be called social networking sites because originally they were

just ways to connect people and as an adult I have a need to network and it's useful to me and Linkedin is useful Twitter is useful many you know Facebook groups are use these are all useful for adults but let's talk about middle school kids so in America Middle School is roughly ages 11 to 13 let's talk about kids just beginning puberty how much need do they have to network how much do they need to meet strangers strange men who are approaching them how much do they need that um how much do they need social

media to connect with their friends the telephone was an amazing invention you pick it up you press some numbers and you can talk to your friend anywhere in the country anywhere in the world so we already had that how much more help did 11 and 12y olds need to connect with their friends and so I would argue that when we look at middle school this is my main focus is early puberty early puberty the brain is extremely vulnerable because the fr the the fral part of the brain is rewiring very rapidly um growth is slow

during childhood but it's very rapid in puberty and so I would say that for 11 12 13y old kids I'm willing to say there aren't really any benefits and the harms are extraordinary so that's why I say we need to just raise we need to raise the ages we should have a norm that no one gets a smartphone before high school we shouldn't have kids with massive entertainment center in their pocket by which strangers can reach them companies can reach them and we should raise the age of social media opening account from 13 which is

at present not enforced to 16 and enforce it if we do those two things we'll really get at least a handle we'll protect kids during early puberty yeah and I want to get on to all of those points I think one thing before that I think the word anxiety in some cases we've become so numb to it it's become so normalized it is the norm to hear someone you know as anxiety someone you love as anxiety children have anxiety and I feel that word has been so repeated over the last 5 to 10 years maybe

that it's become we've become numb to it and because of that we don't really understand and which you do spend a lot of time in the early parts of the book not only defining what anxiety is an experience but the extent to which anxiety affects our normal everyday functioning could you give us a short summary on that which I want people to dive into the book to read the Deep research on but could we at least explore what are the implications what is anxiety and what are the implications of anxiety in the long term if

not for some of these recommendations you're suggesting so the most important emotion for Animals is fear fear is across all the different species vertebrates and vertebrates there's a very you know huge long Evolution a lot is known about fear because if you've ever been snorkeling or out in the woods you know that life for Animals is you're looking forood you're looking for food and then you're dead because someone jumped on you so all animals including us have a hair trigger alarm system that's normal that's healthy uh so that's fear now sometimes um that's when you're

attacked you're threatened now sometimes you're in an environment where you don't see a threat per se but it's you're very wary of it and so let's say you know so humans are much more afraid in the dark because in the dark you're much more likely to be killed by Nocturnal hunting animals so we have an innate fear of the dark it doesn't mean we're necessarily afraid but we're just we're a little more on edge and so that's your brain saying okay we're going to shift the alarm system over we're going to make you a little

warier if anything happens you're going to jump whereas if it was broad daylight you would just look and say what was that um so our brains are these incredible survival machines that have very very deep circuits for fear which mobilizes us to fight or to to flee or fight um and then for anxiety which is more diffus just a general sense of threats now when the fear system is triggered and then you take action and then it shuts off that's normal that's healthy but as many of your listeners will know chronic stress causes an increase

in circulating cortisol it keeps your stress system on stress is not bad kids need stress but short-term stress but when you have long-term stress now you have hormonal disregulation you have cortisol which has many functions in the body but high levels of cortisol expose you to all kinds of health problems joint problems immunity I mean I forget the whole list cortisol has so many effects um so what's happening is um young people there have always been anxious young people some people are set to anxious some people are set to more calm that's always been the

case but there's a shift so that more and more kids are are closer to the anxiety side now um part of this is they're told there's a lot of talk actually just this week or two there's a lot of talk about how these programs that teach kids to label their emotions and they talk about you know were you afraid were you anxious they seem like they're well-intentioned it seems you know social emotional learning there is some basis to that decades ago but it seems though it's moving in a direction of teaching kids to dwell on

their own emotions always be looking inward how did that make you feel how did that make were you anxious um you know what you know where can you go for help um that this there's actually not much evidence that this is helping and there's some new studies suggesting that this stuff backfires this is actually making kids more anxious what kids what I argue in the book is what kids really really need to overcome anxiety is exposure go out and play and sometimes you will be afraid and sometimes you'll climb a tree and you'll be go

too high and you're afraid I remember those feelings from my childhood but that's how you get over childhood anxieties where sitting inside in a classroom with a teacher giving you an emotion Circle and saying which of these emotions are you feeling right now Johnny you know and and sometimes they're asked have you thought about suicide have you thought about harming yourself and they ask this over and over again so this suggests to kids that they are weak that they have these emotions and if they have these emotions it's a problem so I think we're you

know the Mental Health Community um you know I think we're just we're not we're not recognizing what's driving the epidemic and we're not doing things that would effectively reverse it what is the root of that because I feel like the research oscillates in some cases or at least as humans we like to oscillate there's this idea of the past and I assume it's the opposite of what you just said where when you were young you weren't allowed to feel I think everyone's experienced that idea of oh don't worry everything will be okay or oh it

it doesn't matter that you feel pain like everything will be fine let Let It Go or you know don't cry or things like that and so that was one extreme and then the other extreme is what you're saying now where it's like well let's talk about every emotion and give it equal waiting and give it equal priority what what is the middle and yeah so um so I'm saying kid need adversity they need to sometimes be excluded so all of that is necessary you know if you if you ask any parent how many times would

you like your child to be excluded you just have a newborn child your child's going to turn 18 and 18 years in those 18 years how often do you want your child to be excluded and to feel excluded and anybody who says zero they're speaking from their heart but they're not speaking from their head I would never hire someone who's never been excluded this person is going to be have it very difficult to have normal human relationships sometimes they won't be included and that's not a big deal U so we need adversity now I think

what you're saying is it used to be we were too insensitive and that's true uh and there were a couple of categories especially so bullying bullying is really really bad but what we have to be clear about is bullying is not aggression bullying is aggression or humiliation directed at a kid day after day it has to be over time because aggression is a normal and necessary part of childhood you have to let kids experience aggression Express aggression Express hostility you have to allow that and let them work it out now now and then there will

be a problem there'll be one kid who is picking on another kid and that kid doesn't want to go to school and if that goes on for more than a day now it's bullying and now we need to be responsive and I was a kid we weren't in the 70s that we weren't um and in some countries I know at the time you know in Japan and Korea there were horrible I mean the culture around bullying and English boarding schools I've heard so it's great progress that we're being more senstive about bullying um obviously the

shaming of LGBT TQ kids that was a that was constant when I was a kid um but now it's much much better so so in many ways we do need to be more sensitive but I think the gist of your question is have we overshot have we and I would say yes we have really overshot um you know if if there's any you know recess in America is often very heavily monitored and as soon as there's any kind of conflict an adult comes in when my kids my kids went to New York City Public Schools

they go there still they're in high school um and so that kind of attention to let's make sure no one's upset let's make sure no one's excluded you know my daughter and her friend they formed a little Club but they were you know on the playground they were told no you can't do that you can't exclude anyone that's crazy kids need to play with that so anyway that's the I think we've gone too far yeah talking about recess I believe it was in your book that you said that the average recess time or outdoor time

is 37 minutes is that the numbers vary it depends on the but in elementary school I've heard numbers as low as 27 minutes as the average average yeah across the day and sometimes that's combined with lunch some kids only get 25 minutes including lunch and so you go you know you're in you know kids need to run around they need recess there's a lot of research on this play helps them learn helps them attend later but in America at least and in East Asian countries I would imagine um we're so focused on on on test

scores on that we think what five and six and seven year olds is more need is more math and they don't they don't need more math what they need is more playtime and then they'll learn more in a shorter amount of math um in the States if you are in a federal maximum security penitentiary you are guaranteed two hours a day of yard time you can't keep it's in inhumane to keep them in in their cells all day two hours of yard time but if you're in elementary school student in the United States you have

no guarantee and it's it's very often as little as 27 minutes including lunch which means you have to stand in the lunch line that takes 10 minutes you get your lunch you have you know you wolf it down in 5 minutes you have whatever 5 minutes left to play this is complete Insanity if we want to get a handle in the Mental Health crisis I think we need to back off on the adults instructing kids about their emotions do a lot less of that and take all the money and all the time we're spending on

that and give kids more play and what do what do we need you talk about what we need as children you're talking about the need for play is play truly just play or is there certain parameters certain ideas certain thoughts that make play more effective yes play is a mamalian universal so mammals you know the first mammals whenever it was that some females began to secrete milk from glands in their skin it's kind of an amazing evolutionary adaptation for having a longer childhood you know other animals they lay an egg and that's it animals on

their own but mammals we have this long long childhood and that allows us to have much larger brains and much more complex social behavior compared to say reptiles and so we have this long childhood um and especially the social animals dogs more than cats but you know dogs and humans and are incredibly playful creatures we have a puppy at home she's now a year and a well year and a half she still looks like a puppy she wants to play all the time and she has to play that's the thing since all mammals play when

they're young and they take risks so Evolution isn't stupid Evolution didn't say we're going to let these these baby animals practice jumping out of trees and practice getting in fights for no good reason no there's a very good reason that's what you have to do to train your brain to reach adulthood and that's why for hundreds of thousands of years millions of years you could say all human children played unless they were being seriously deprived of play and stuck in a factory so we in America we had play all the way up through the 1990s

that's when we begin to lose it in the '90s we freak out in America and Britain and Canada uh and we say it's too dangerous you'll be abducted you'll be sexually molested no you stay home or you stay under supervision oh and there's this fabulous new internet so why don't you spend more time on that that's what happened in the '90s and that's when childhood really departed from the human need for play and independent activity and became over supervised helicopter parented uh restrained restricted and you can play on a video game in a way but

it's not embodied whereas we're physical creatures we need to run jump touch wrestle hug uh you know I remember doing all those things with my with my friends when I was in second or third grade we would sometimes hug each other or pick each other up or wrest Soul you know it's children are physical like puppies but but now you know kids they're on their screen all the time there can be a playful element but there's no risk there's no physicality um they don't learn the social skills that you do from face- Toof face encounters

when you were saying that I was actually thinking back to a trip I took to Rwanda two years ago and I was thinking about our our gorilla friends who we share I believe over 96% of our DNA with and watching the young gorillas play outdoors and you when you talking about wrestling and and we so recognizable that's right yeah and it was such a like cuz we're primates primates have arms and primates use their arms in play and you see it with all you know with chimpanzees and bonobos and gorillas yeah and it's so cute

right like we love watching it because we mammals as adults we are primed for cuteness because that triggers in us a protective Instinct over the kids so we have this protective Instinct and un unfortunately it's kind of run rampant you know it used to be the kids are out of the house you don't see them but now we can monitor kids all the time and we're just we're swooping in too quick yeah no I I mean I think we all resonate with that even as adults there's this beautiful quote from George burnard Shaw where he

said that we don't stop playing because we get old we get old because we stop playing beautiful yes that's right and I think that we can relate to that I can relate to the this idea that I miss play I think the challenge is that as you said in the 1990s when things started to Veer off course now children given the choice generally are going to choose indoor video games phone time iPad and they're not going to choose play so I think the challenge becomes now that our taste buds have become technological how do we

rewire that taste bud when we've been so diverted that's right so it's not clear whether it's that the taste buds have become technological or that the technology has adapted so profoundly that it now knows exactly what we most want so uh I was born in 1963 I remember when the game pong came out it was the first video game you could get on your home television so it was very very crude but it's was amazing you turn a knob and you can play tennis and I'd sit there with my friend and we'd do that for

you know 20 30 minutes and we'd go do something else um so these video games were not immersive they were fun and and you played with a friend um but once you get you know you get graphics cards you get color monitors you get high-speed internet you get multiplayer video games these games are incredible I mean my son plays fortnite I didn't let him on in sixth grade when he was 11 but I did let him on 13 around covid time um these games are incredible and as a boy what's most exciting is war games

and so the games just get better and better and and this is actually something we we need to talk about you know so much of the talk about social media and girls with boys it's a different problem boys there are many that are harmed by social media many are driven to Suicide I don't want to say it's okay for boys but social media use is not so correlated with depression and anxiety for boys it is for girls for boys what's happening is the technology is so amazing and the real world is getting more and more

inhospitable to them I mean we've been really trying to reduce prejudice against girls and open up girls and bring them into every that's all great but girls are just so much better in school they just do better in school they school is made for more of a a female child than a male child it's for you sit still you learn you please the teacher um and we've we've pushed Out rough and tumble play we've reduced recess there's no more shop class so boys aren't enjoying school as much as girls um boys um are enjoying the

technology more and more and it's not just the video games it's also the pornography um so you know war games and sex those are deeply appealing to boys and young men and as the technology gets better and better now you know if you're a boy with buding sexual urges and you have two choices one is the most incredible pornography you've ever seen and then soon there'll be goggles soon it'll be put into into sex dolls and robots I mean you can have this amazing sex life that you can customize you can customize the body size

you can customize the personality you know you can have virtual girlfriends and boyfriends now so boys are finding uh uh video game play and pornography more and more satisfying and it's just difficult to arrange a soccer game with your friends that's just difficult let's just meet online and it's difficult to flirt with a girl and develop a relationship and fall in love and have sex that's really hard um so I think we're losing boys um it's not just because their taste buds are rewired it's because the technology is amazingly good at learning what do we

most want let's deliver that but it's not what we most need it's what we most want and what's the cost of that what's happening to boys brains and Minds so the big picture is that boys are failing to have the kinds of experiences that will toughen them teach them skills teach them virtues and turn them into men um boys development is different from girls development all around the world traditionally um boys generally initiation rights involve more toughening toughness demonstrations and we can say this is terrible and patriarchal but I actually think it's important um so

you know all kids start off in the female sphere we all live we know we're all raised by mothers and girls and aunts traditionally around the world um and so girls stay within the female world and girls initiation rights are usually pegged to puberty to menstruation and then they're taught all the secrets of of being a woman all that boys have to make the transition from the girl the women's world into the men's World and less so today I'm not saying it needs to be this way I'm just saying it generally is to some extent

boy development is different from girls development and boys um if you give them the easy way out all the time the many of them will take it and then they don't they don't grow they don't toughen and so I think what we're seeing now is is a generation jenz born after 1996 and later in which the girls are extraordinarily anxious and depressed much more so than the boys um but the boys are extraordinarily undeveloped many people say they have no social skills they don't look you in the eye um they don't know how to behave

in public they certainly don't know how to talk to girl so I think we're seeing just a massive massive blockage of development and you know jenzie the oldest St 28 we'll see um we'll see if they come out of it but when the Millennials were 28 they had already invented so many companies they were inventing Technologies I mean the Millennials by 28 they were like you know a meteor streaking across the sky and gen Z seems much more to be hunkered down like you know talking about their anxiety so I'm not blaming them at at

all um it's not their fault we deprive them of play we put touch screens in their hands then they had the bad luck to you know basically come out of college the eldest of them right into covid so those in their 20s now their work experience was truncated what they need is mentoring in a real office or a real job and they didn't get it so again I'm not blaming but man we have to have a lot of sympathy and we have to make sure this stops we have to stop this right now and I

think that's the challenge right A lot of people say well people are going to have virtual girlfriends and we are going to live in the the virtual world and everyone's going to go home and put their headset on and you know disapp disappear into the abyss and then we'll be wearing it all day not just in the evenings and so there's that belief system that actually we're just getting better at using the technology that would define our future success anyway or future failure if we don't know it but you're saying that there's just what what

are the I guess the harsher implications of what does this look like in 20 time okay so I'm very influenced by by one of the puzzles that I first tried to deal with is why you know what made jenz why because when I started this work when I started writing the Kling the American mind with Greg lukianov we first wrote an article in 2015 in the Atlantic and we thought college students were Millennials the you know the millennial generation started in 1981 and you it was expected to be if you're born all the way up

through 2000 you're a millennial that's what we thought um but then jeene twangy came out with her book I Jen and her research showing that kids born around 1996 and later are very different much higher rates of mental illness and so when you look at the millennial generation their mental health is actually pretty good you know the youngest Millennials are a little bit more like Jen Z but for the most part the Millennials mental health is fine they made it through puberty before they got their first smartphone and social media account so if you didn't

get a so you know Millennials like a lot of them got you know Facebook when they were in college in fact originally Facebook was only for college students you had to be in college to get Facebook so what we see in the data is that if you didn't get a smartphone in social media until you were 18 or older your mental health is fine now you know let's say you're 35y old right now you might feel overwhelmed you might feel that this thing is stressing you out but you had normal brain development you had you

you used technology when you were a kid you had a flip phone you used it to connect with other kids you used it to you know you'd have to text and it was hard to text and you had to use your thumbs and press number keys but you use the technology as a tool to help you meet up with your friends or maybe you called them on the phone that was it that's all your phone could do but if you got a smartphone in social media at the start of puberty which is what almost all

kids do now um that means you're going through puberty on social media and with a with a massive entertain with a supercomputer and a entertainment system in your pocket with you all the time so my point is this if we can protect childhood and let kids get through puberty and then we give them the goggles and the virtual girlfriends and everything else their lives are still going to be kind of messed up by this stuff but at least their brains matured and they're probably not going to be depressed and anxious for life if we if

we keep giving it you know it used to be at you know 1011 is when kids get their first smartphone now it's more it's going down to five or six um if we keep giving little children a touchscreen device including an iPad and and using it as a babysitter and saying oh yeah yeah you just you know here here's here's your device I'm busy I'm doing email I'm cooking here's your device if we keep doing that um we're not our brains are not going to adapt to that children's brains are not going to somehow evolve

so that that becomes okay it's not going to be okay yeah and it's it's it's such a harsh reality but it's true that people have less time we have less we are doing so much more it seems we are living further away from family there's so many reasons why the iPad is becoming the babysitter that feels validated because we're not living in bigger family spaces we don't have the support of our neighbors we don't have we don't have the resources or the funds to have a a paid babysitter or whatever it may be so there's

so many almost valid reasons for why we even say take the iPad no that's right again you know in my book I have almost no really no criticism for parents yeah and some people say you know why don't it's the parents responsibility it's their fault why aren't you blaming the parents to which my answer is you know I'm a parent I know a lot of parents a lot of us are really trying and it's really hard I mean the technological environment now is such that you know if you don't give your kid a smartphone she's

left out and she you know says Dad I'm the only one I'm left out so parents are trying and as a social psychologist who studies morality I know that if one person does something that seems evil well maybe they're maybe they're evil but if an entire society and if an entire planet changes at the same time in the same way it's not individual's fault and so if parenting changed certainly across the english- speaking World um we can't blame the parents for that there must be some reason why we all freaked out and began overprotecting um

so yeah I don't I don't blame I don't blame the parents I say we're stuck in systemic problems and I'm proposing Norms by which we can escape and I think anyone when I've been mentioning you were coming on the on the show I was talking to people about your work and I was talking about your recommendations of no social media before 16 no phones before 14 and I don't think there's any adult that I spoke to that had any debate with either of those I think everyone looked to me you know I'm talking to everyone

25 and up but anyone that I talked to 25 and up went that makes perfect sense I think that's a great idea and what a brilliant recommendation like when when do we get started like that's right that's right people are ready to get started because everyone sees it everyone's sick of it yeah and and obviously in the book you hold you say here's what governments can do here's what technology companies can do here's what schools can do I think my question is and I know you've talked about what they can do in so many other

places which is fantastic my question is how do we actually get that to be a reality like what does it actually take to change Norms because I was trying to think and and I'd love your take on this like when was the last time we tried to do that in any sphere of life and how did it go and and where did it work and where did it fail so we have a lot of experience with Norm changes so one of the clearest is smoking it took 20 or 30 years uh when I was in

high school in the 70s um you know a bunch of kids smoked most of us didn't but a bunch of of high school kids smoked you know age you know 15 16 17 and beginning in the ' 80s or 90s there was an anti-tobacco campaign and it took a few decades um but the rates of smoking are very very low now now there's vaping kids moved on to vaping which is bad but not as bad as smoking um Norms around lgbtq and shaming and bullying and using racial slurs these Norms have changed radically in the

last 20 or 30 years so Norm change normally happens over the space of a few decades and we have many many examples there's we've been studied so some things get more moralized like smoking is now seen as evil whereas homosexuality which used to be seen as evil is now seen as perfectly okay so Norms change over the course of decades what's happening now is very different what's happening now the digital world has put us into an environment in which things can spread within minutes I mean this has never happened in human history um Norms can

spread around the world in days not Norms but ideas or memes can spread around the world in in days and what that means means that Norms can change very quickly too and so all over the world all over the developed world uh in 2010 kids had flip phones no social no social media on their phones in 2015 we have now the phone based childhood all over the world kids are behaving the same way so that that changed very quickly and that put pressure on everyone else to do the same thing okay so we're stuck in

this Collective action problem that emerg very very quickly but by the same token we can escape very very quickly because Wherever I Go the main counterargument I get is parents who say h you know it's just it's too late the trains left the station what are we going to do this is the way of the future so resignation is really the only obstacle I'm facing but most parents so many parents are upset by this that they're ready to act if only some way can be found to coordinate them so in the UK I just got

back from London a few days ago in the UK the parents Revolution started in February um a couple of mothers Daisy uh Greenwell and Clare Reynolds they just put up um on a Instagram post they put up that they started a WhatsApp group for parents who wanted a smartphone fore childhood they were going to delay giving their kids smartphones and like overnight tens of thousands of of British parents signed up there's a limit on WhatsApp groups they had to form local they had to form hundreds of WhatsApp groups it spread like wildfire and what I'm

finding I've been involved in a lot of efforts to change ideas and Norms it's very hard takes decades on this one I don't have to convince anyone on this one it's like everyone's ready to act they just need to know what to do um and so you know I'm proposing these four simple Norms as you said the two that I would add that I add uh that we haven't mentioned are phone free schools we must keep the phones out of school there's lock them up as soon as you come in that should be doable that

is doable this can be done by September yeah and the fourth is give far more free play and Independence in the real world that's the hardest one actually but that's incredibly important so let me actually just take advantage I'm actually very excited you have this gigantic Global a I was about to ask my next question how can we help what can we do because I I want to be a part of the mission great great so so here's what I can say uh first let me just give a little background which is is this just

happening in the United States no um uh if if listener if you so all over the world please go to after babble.com after Babel that's my substack it's free nothing's behind a pay wall uh that's where we're putting our research out um and you'll find articles there uh we have one post on on how the the mental health epidemic is hitting all the anglosphere countries and so this so Zack Rous this was his first International Post we've gathered all the mental health data we can from around the world most countries don't have any but the

developed countries often do um so we can show that the same thing is happening at the same time in all the Anglo countries and then he moved on to Scandinavia same thing's happening at the same time in the Scandinavian countries now that's very interesting because I just had an interview with a Finnish journalist this morning and she said you know in Finland we let our kids out like our kids at 78 they're out playing but even still she says they go outside to play and they sit down and they're on their phone because they all

have phones from the age of you know six or seven so so this is happening all over the developed World um I in Europe Zach has a post on the rest of Europe it's especially Northern Europe it's a little less so in Eastern Europe and southern Europe um so first there is variation around the world in mental health that that is definitely important but what I'm finding is parents everywhere are seeing their kids not playing they're seeing them sit on their phones at recess in in countries where the kids can have a phone in their

pocket at recess the kids are often sitting down on their phones they're not running around and yelling and laughing so wherever you are in the world figure out you know figure out whether you have this problem you probably do that your kids even if they're not depressed they're missing most of childhood they're missing Adventure they're probably have fewer Hobbies they probably don't read books they probably don't spend much time with other people so this is going to influence them in a bad way around the world um and then start talking to other parents um the

simplest thing most of us are on a text thread with the parents of our kids friends because you had to arrange for the oh this birthday party okay I'll pick them up and you know so we're all in contact with the parents of our kids friends just start with that say do you know do you see this problem are you concerned and especially if you have younger kids you can delay when you know you can delay when you give your kid a smartphone if your kids friends are in the same boat then it's not hard

that's the point of this Collective get getting out of the collective action problem um I would also urge um anyone around the world bring up the subject of phone-free schools if your child so a number of countries France um Australia um a few countries have and Britain um just have guidance that schools must go phone free they must either you know lock them up or lock up the phones in a lock special Locker and a Yonder pouch a lockable pouch um but if your country doesn't do that start advocating for it if you go to

anxious generation.com that's the website for the book we have a whole research Page look at that send that to people I have all kinds of talks I've given on YouTube you can find my YouTube channel lectures about why we need to go phone free so that's right that's the thing we can do this year we can do it in 2024 is make all our schools phone free and that will allow our children to learn more because when there's sitting in class they don't have the world's greatest entertainment center in their hand ridiculous and they're not

texting and they're not bullying each other and they're not doing Tik Tok challenge they're actually listening to the teacher or passing notes with other kids which is fine they're interacting with other kids that's actually okay with me why haven't school's done it already I I feel like it's a because a few parents complain in the United States the only problem the only reason they don't do it is that American parents are so overprotective many not all so overprotective and they've gotten so used to being able to text their kids throughout the day so it could

be you know hey Johnny how did you how did your math test go and they might even te text that during the math test and the kid checks his phone during the math test um you know or oh I'm going to be late for pickup like okay do the kid need to know that during English class like why not just you know let when when he gets his phone back he can see okay you'll be late for pickup um and in America we have the problem that because we do have school shooting now they're extremely

rare but they're happening more so some parents think oh if there's a school shooting I want to be able to talk to my child and this is a huge mistake because if there actually was a shooter on a school campus what you want is the kids to follow directions and do what they were trained to do you don't want every kid pulling out their phone and crying to Mom and Dad so I've spoken to many principles or or heads of school and I asked them why don't you B you know ban the phones and they

always say the same thing there' be a riot among the parents well only among some parents and so if you're listening to this podcast you kids in school talk to the head of school and say no I want my kid to be in a phone free school I want my kid to listen to the teacher and to interact with other kids so that's something we can all do right away and do you have resources on how to have that conversation effectively okay brilliant I do so at anxious generation.com we do have some you go to

resources or take action and then there's a tab for parents there are also two organizations in the United States there's smartphone free schools.org and smartphone free schools movement.org so we have two different organizations that are they show you here's a sample letter that you can send here's what you can do um in the UK there's smarton prech childhood. co.uk So within a number of countries there are already movements but you know what you can just use the resources from The American or the British one um and you know what this Global audience start your own

um come to anxious generation.com we have a list of aligned organizations mostly in the US and the UK but there are a couple in Canada there's I think one in Germany there's one in somewhere in Latin America so people are starting these parents are rising up all around the world let's join them let's talk about before we dive into spirituality because I was curious to see you had a chapter dedicated to that inside the book talk to me about the difference in girls and their use of social media versus boys because like you said and

I'm glad we talked about young boys because often they can get forgotten in the conversation but let's talk a bit about young girls and how social media is having a far more adverse effect on their Mental Health First the evidence of a link is just very clear for girls um with girls their mental health was very stable until 2012 and then in 2013 it starts Rising it really is a light switch for boys it's not so sharp it's more gradual um secondly um the correlations for girls are much higher the correlation between time spent on

social media and mental health problems so for girls the evidence is much clearer now why why the connection um in the book I go into the psychology of of motivation and there are two categories of motivation they're very important to understand agency and communion so agency is the desire to be an agent to make things happen you know when I was a kid it was so exciting to take a BB gun and shoot at tin cans because I pull a trigger and the thing Falls over it's it's an incredible thrill so that's agency making things

happen um communion is connection being with friends bonding sharing stories sharing emotions I really enjoyed that too everyone has both motives on average on average boys and men are have a little bit more on the agency side it matters more to them when you let them choose what to do they're going to go out they're going to build a tower and then knock it over my friends and I used to build model airplanes like World War II fighter jets then we'd we'd put like rubbing alcohol in them and then we'd light them on fire like

that was really fun to do so that's agency making things happen communion is connection girls if you let kids play the girls are much more likely to sit and talk they want to connect and what are they talking about other girls they're talking about relationships they're developing their mental map of space so girls are a little more sophisticated about social relationships they think more about them they share emotions more and that's a strength that's that's something that that's why women excel in certain professions uh and Men excel in other professions um but the differences aren't

so much how good they are they're what they enjoy doing and so when the companies come along and they say hey do you want to see what everyone's doing do you want to see what everyone's saying do you want to see what they are saying about you this is like catnip for girls this is this is they really Target the girls insecurities and they get girls to come on and then there's drama which brings more girls on um now boys are affected by this too but it's it's not it's just not as alluring and if

you give so when everyone gets multiple screens you know by 2010 2011 and the iPad comes out multiplayer video games everyone is tempted by screens the boys go rushing into multiplayer video games and porn they do a lot more of that the girls go rushing for Instagram Pinterest Tumblr especially the the visual platforms okay so now why is this so bad for girls and I go through I think five reasons in the book uh so one is just the social comparison girls are always judged more on their looks I just came across a quote from

epicus I read stoic writings in the mornings epicus commented in ancient Rome about how when they turn 14 girls are are are judged as sexual partners and they focus they're made to focus too much on their look and you know this is a sad thing that these girls are are are just becoming focused on their looks what's happening now because girls it's constant social comparison with other girls who get praised for being not just beautiful but sexy so whether they know it or not They're copying porn star type poses porn star type looks they're being

hypersexualized massive social comparison and on average they don't measure up because if if everyone on Instagram is actually appears much more beautiful than in real life well then everyone else is below average so the social comparison hurts girls more than boys um the nature of aggression is such that boys aggression is more physical and it's ultimately about who can dominate who who can beat up who if it came to that girls aggression girls are just as aggressive but it's different girls aggression historically and across cultures and even across species um is more relational girls will

damage another girl's reputation or relationships and boy does social media allow them to do that anonymous ly and on the weekends too it used to be that girls were safe from bullying on the weekends but because they're out of school but now they're not so and then there's the sexual predation you know there are sexual predators that are going for boys but if you're a boy on the internet you're not being constantly sexually proposition by older men I mean it happens but it's not that common if you're a girl on the internet we just published

an article from Antonio bear who was a Facebook whistleblower and his research within Facebook within Instagram actually was that 13% % of teenagers 13 to 15 year old teenagers had gotten some sort of a sexual proposition or someone coming on to them a stranger coming on to them in the past week in the past week 133% so if you're a girl online it's just you're just living among Predators you're like you know the animals we talked about before in the Woods After Dark you're more frightened so for all these reasons when kids shifted from a

play-based childhood to a phone based childhood it was more devastating for the girls VI and I were talking about this yesterday what's your take on uh he was he was suggesting this idea of everyone on social media being verified oh yeah having to be verified what would be your take on that oh my god of course that has to happen so think about it you know we're in America we're afraid to let our kids out in part because we think they'll be abducted there'll be a stranger hanging out by the playground luring them into a

car and that has happened in America it's very very rare there's only about 100 150 cases of true kidnapping by Str in this country every year so it's extremely rare but it does happen we're very afraid of strangers approaching our children um but guess what the strangers are not at the playground anymore they've moved to Instagram okay so the idea that we're going to put our kids on platforms where strange men can reach them flirt with them say that they're a 12-year-old boy or 15-year-old boy exchange fake photos including a photo of your daughter in

a bathing suit or less this is complete Insanity um I don't think we should be having children interacting with complete strangers um the sextortion Rings now it used to be just 10 or 20,000 a year reported um in in the United States it's way more now there's a Nigerian gang the Yahoo boys I think it's called they've industrialized it so we don't know but you know hundreds of thousands millions of boys are getting six distorted now and dozens are known to have committed suicide it's probably hundreds who have committed suicide but most we don't know

about um because you know they're flirting with what they think is a girl and then this criminal gang trick fix them into sending a nude photo and at that point then they say I have what I need to ruin your life send us send me $500 right now or I will send this to all of your contacts this is complete Insanity that we let our boys and our girls interact with criminals day and night so what I would like to see um is first we just have to raise the age so you know below 16

they just shouldn't be on it at all they they need to be in contact with each other over 16 okay you know this is the nature of the world people are going to be interacting with strangers there are some benefits to that there's networking issues but if you were on a platform like LinkedIn LinkedIn people use their real names you don't hear problems about LinkedIn the problems are especially on Instagram Snapchat um any platform that has Anonymous strangers interacting um so if we had if we had both age verification which is essential we we have

to get age verification eventually and then also identity verification now here I'm not saying that the government needs to mandate identity verification on all platforms the world would be a much better place if we did that um there would be many fewer threats to democracy if we did that Russian agents and Chinese agents couldn't like just drop crazy rumors and make us hate each other in America the way they do so I would prefer that we live in a world where every platform has mandatory identity verification you could still post with a fake name but

in order to open an account you have to show I'm a real person in this country and I'm old enough but I would be content even if it's not mandated I would be content if platforms just made this the default what if meta or let's say not meta they're not going to do it but what if there was an alternative to U Instagram in which people had to be verified uh and then they had all kinds of other safety features if they have an immune system built in now how would I feel about letting my

16-year-old daughter on that much better than on a platform where she's interacting with criminals from around the world have you spoken to meta yes I've spoken to why would they not do it well they say they're working on it they say they're working on age verification but they I've seen nothing from them they I shouldn't say they haven't done nothing they did they've done a few things one thing is they at least I think they set the Privacy defaults to high for under 16 I think it is whereas it used to be you know you

you know you're you're a nine-year-old you lie you say you're 13 and what you say is public that's completely insane so they have taken a few steps but not much and again Antonio Bear's testimony to the Senate last year was I showed them what's happening the sexual solicitation of teens I I told them a simple way to have this reported they didn't do anything so I think um meta in particular has shown itself resistant to changes suggested by people within that's why we have a couple of Facebook whistleblowers um so I'm hoping that market competition

will help um I'm hoping that Congress will repeal the mistakes it made in the United States we created this problem for the world um we you know our companies created this stuff our Congress said that we're not allowed to sue them for what they do to our kids they can show our kids whatever they want and we can't sue them it's a special law that says we can't sue them uh but in other countries they can and so I'm really hopeful that all around the world people initiate lawsuits when their kids have committed suicide because

of things that happen on social media um I hope that people will initiate proceedings if they can um if it's clear that it was caused by by on online activity uh and then Cong the US Congress created this really this very ridiculous law that the age at which you can sign a contract with a company give away your data without your parents knowledge without your parents consent is 13 which is insanely low um it should that I think needs to be 16 or 18 but it was set to 13 in 1998 with no enforcement in

fact the way the law is written as long as Facebook or Instagram or SnapChat as long as they don't know you're underage they're fine but if they ask and then they find out that you're under 13 well then then now they're responsible so it's very important for them that they not know how old their users are and we have to change that we have to get to the point where they have to know of course they do know how old their users are they know everything about their users but they don't kick them off so

we have to get to the point where the companies are held responsible for underage use in the physical world it's like it's so absurd you know people say tell me well it's the parents job to keep them off okay imagine a world in which we generally think kids should not be exposed to hardcore sex to drugs to violence and to addiction so we have age limits on bars strip clubs brothel there you know the brothel in Nevada and in Europe um and casinos we have age limits on those what if someone said you know it's

the parents job to keep the kids out of that if they don't want their 13-year-olds into brothel they should stop them from going to brothel like no that's not the way it works like no this is a business this business is hurting kids this business is responsible for checking IDs for keeping out Children yet in the online world we say well you know what are you going to do you know N9 year olds are going to be watching beheading videos they're going to be watching anal sex they're going to be watching the cat in a

blender video have you heard of this one cat and a blender I didn't know that one it's exactly what it sounds like and this is something that kids are exposed to like a it's an actual cat put in a blender and killed yeah I have not watched the video because I don't ever want to see it because I'll never unsee it but I did enough research to know this is not just an rumor this actually happened in it was in China um so you know this is the world that our kids are now inhabiting and

I'm saying no no wait at least till you're 16 get partway through puberty before you're immersed in this garbage and that is a great transition to our spirituality discussion well it's an it's an ironic situation where we were glorifying the Millennials to have been much more productive and effective but a lot of the Millennials who created amazing companies are the companies that are now creating this challenge that's right is an irony yeah but I read something around over 10 years ago and it talked about how humans defined what was most important to a community a

city or a town based on the tallest building that was built and so previously it was the church or the place of worship few years later that transformed or few decades later that transformed to the government building yeah and then decades later that transformed to the corporate offices and and now the tech companies or the financial instit and so we saw how Society has shifted its North Star I was curious to see why you brought a chapter on spiritual elevation and degradation into this conversation and how is it connected yeah so my first book was

called the happiness hypothesis finding modern truth and ancient wisdom what I did in that book it grew out of my teaching psych 101 introductory psychology at the University of Virginia I noticed when I was trying to explain psychology to 300 you know students I would quote sh spe you know there's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so well that Insight is actually also Marcus aelius and Buddha Buddha says we are what we think with our minds we make the world um and so I realiz wow you know across the Millennia across the continents

people have come to these deep insights about psychology about happiness about love about Consciousness so I collected I read a lot of ancient wisdom all over the world and I took out every psychological claim and I organized them and I made it into 10 chapters and you know so some of them are you know like you know be slower to judge quicker to forgive you know Jesus says judge not lest ye be judged you know and I have a whole chapter on how our moral psychology is such that we jump to judgments we care about

our tribe we don't care about the truth you know so so that was my background I I wrote that book on Ancient wisdom and then I wrote the coddling the American mind with Greg lukanov and we talked about these three great untruths the ways that students are being taught you know that they're they're fragile ancient wisdom is you know what doesn't kill you makes you stronger there's quotes from all over the world about that um but kids are being taught no you're fragile like uh you know if someone says a word or a name that

can be violence against you so we're making mistakes here um so that's sort of my background is thinking about ancient wisdom in Psychology all right so then I end up writing this book The anxious generation and I'm it's July of last year and I'm way behind deadline and I'm already really stressed about like you know I'm so far past the the deadline in order for us to get the book out but I felt like you know what I just wrot this whole book about kids I haven't said anything about adults but we're all feeling it

most of us at least are feeling it where something is wrong you know the you know when I got my first iPhone it was so amazing I loved it um but these technologies have become our Master they're changing our lives and I decided you know what I I'm going to write a chapter for adults I'm just going to stick in a chapter what is it that's happening to all of us and I just start making the list you know it keeps us indoors it keeps us distracted and I suddenly realized wow almost all the ancient

insights into how to live the phone based life is the opposite and once I saw that I said oh my God that's the structure for this chapter so I opened it with my earlier work on moral elevation I I I study moral emotions I I used to have writings on moral elevation which everyone will recognize when you you see a story about you read a story you see a you know on the news or anything about heroism about loyalty um about devotion you know a dog that um you know was so devoted to its master

and it keeps coming to the train station to greet him I mean you know we're easily moved and we feel it we feel it in our chest and it it's the Vegas nerve um gets activated our heart rhythms change um there are hormonal effects uh there's um um oxytocin is released women lactate I I showed that experimentally in a study with Jennifer Silvers so I did all this research on moral elevation and the key to it is the psychology of up and down some things make us feel closer to God uh some things make us

feel further from God that's the way cultures talk about it um and it's always a vertical metaphor God is up the devil is down so this is my view I'm a Jewish atheist myself I don't I'm not a Believer but I've had some religious experiences I've had a number of spiritual experiences so I know these are an important part of human psychology and once I put in that framework that ancient Traditions are trying to move us up they're saying you know meditate you know Hindu Traditions Buddhist Traditions you know things everything out of India is

much more get control of your attention get control of your Consciousness otherwise it just gets drowned in trivia but no you know meditate live purely do your work with Mastery come out like the moon come out from behind the clouds and Shine That's a loose translation of from the dapada but what does a phone based life do constant notifications constant interruptions my students at NYU you know they get two or 300 notifications a day on average on their phones many of them never go 10 minutes without interruption um so so I just made a list

and it was things like spiritual practices involve making something sacred and we all agree this thing is sacred and we worship it we have sacred days so you know in the Jewish religion we have the Shabbat you know Sabbath you're not supposed to use Electronics if you're Orthodox um things are sacred and it's the sharing the sacredness binds us together that's what every religious community does but a life online nothing is sacred there's no there's no sacred time there's the internet never closes it's Global um there's no there are no holidays there are no holy

days um and the constant demand for you to post about your brand what you're doing look at the amazing life I have so we have a posted after Babel we we we're just taking on this really wonderful British writer a young woman named Freya India jenz writer and she has a post which starts with you see a photo of of a young woman posing for a sexy selfie on the train tracks in front of aitz here she is she's on some tour of aitz the concentration camp but it's a nice day in Poland and so

she poses in a sexy way in front of the gates of hell and so you know if everyone's a brand manager all the time nothing is sacred oh and it's All About You whereas one of the keys to spirituality is it's not all about you you actually are not that important it's only when you can transcend yourself transcend your self-interest that you can open your heart to God to to our higher motives to love to other people so you know you just go through the list whatever the Ancients urg us to do to achieve spiritual

progress a life lived online even for us adults pulls Us in the opposite direction I couldn't agree with you more and I think what's really interesting when I'm hearing that and that's primarily why I started this show the goal and the intention behind this show was how can we avoid gossip how can we avoid the juiciest scoop how can we avoid the lowest hanging fruit and still get as many or more views than everyone else on the internet beautiful because my belief system was that if you were able to make wisdom go viral then you

could actually raise Consciousness and if we keep feeding people junk food and junk content it's actually not that hard to get clicks and Views but if you actually just as if you've retrained your habits when you put a healthy meal in front of someone it can taste like the tastiest meal in the world because you've retrained it and we've seen that like I know that the audience that listens and watches us which is all across the world every age bracket and every demographic is choosing to do something healthier with their time but I wonder when

I'm listening to you Jonathan I'm hearing the challenge again goes back to the iron ironic point I made which is if creators are not informed and trained in sacred creation you end up creating things that have the flaws of the Creator and so when oh beautifully put right when I look at what the flaws of the Creator that's beautiful yeah like i' I've always thought when everyone's like oh do you think AI be manipulative of us I'm like of course it will because we're manipulative like it's it can't not be anything that we've seen so

we're like AI is going to take over the world it's like yes because humans did like it's not it's not that surprising and so when I think of the challenges that I see in even TV content and streaming content and how dark it's got and whenever anyone says to me in my coaching practice that I have anxiety the first thing I asked him is what did you watch last night and it's there's such a direct correlation between these cffh that are released in everyone's brain to keep them addicted and so I go where do this

education come in because we can take away and I agree with you by the way I'm fully with you we take away what is currently causing an amplification of insecurity Envy ego and the acceleration of it but the challenge is that the seed of that Still Remains and then gets exercised in adulthood how what do we do well so the first thing is we need to understand what's happening to us and this is all so new and um my argument is that the world change life Chang between 2010 in 2015 and my book is about

how it changed for kids but it changed for all of us and we're confused we don't understand it um these things are powerful tools we know we adults we benefit from them in many ways um but we don't understand what's happening to us and so my hope is that you with my book with your show with a lot of people who are writing about this I think people are coming to realize you know we were we were confused in the 2010s it was so new and I think we were beginning to get there to see

this is a problem and then Co hit and we all got super confused by Co and we needed our online devices all the time in Co but I think the reason why things are changing so fast now is because now that we're coming out of covid now everyone sees the wreckage they see it in the new patterns in their children they see it in the new patterns in themselves they're sick of being on Zoom calls all the time they want crave human contact so so let's just see how far we can get just by raising

awareness of this as you're doing on on your show as many people are doing so two things I would urge people to think about are you need to control your own attention your attention is the most precious among the most precious resources you have so once you see your attention as a precious resource you can stop letting companies just steal it from you this is perhaps the most effective thing I do with my students at New York University and they're mostly 19 years old plus or minus and I I I show them how important attention

is they're business students they want to have an effect on the world they want to create something and I show them if youve giving away all your attention to Notifications to Tik Tok you have no attention left so you're not going to be able to do anything in this life do you want that no they don't well okay how about if we turn off almost all your notifications how about if we take social media off of your phone so I'm hoping that some of them will quit entirely but let's just start by just don't it

on your phone you can use your laptop at home whatever if you need to check you need to keep up with things just by making a few changes they regain their attention now suddenly they have the mental capacity to think to to to think big to to do things so we we need a global awaren a global recognition that our attention is being drained away as if there was like a like a giant mosquito you know like a giant drill stuck into our brain sucking out our attention we got to say stop we got to

pull the needle out that's the first thing um uh another is to recognize that we need to be rooted in real communities with real relationships and face Toof face and touch and so we need to resist taking the easy way it's so much easier to set up a zoom meeting than it is to get in your car and go to visit someone uh and there's many times when you need to do that but but we need to rehumanize our lives and that means more time with real people not feeling so rushed um and being able

to be open to people and sharing experiences so that's another there's so many list I'll just list one more area where I want to really raise awareness which is time in nature so the modern world we're further and further away from nature um and as we get busier and busier we have no time and so after 2012 when everyone's on social media all the time everyone's on their phones um people are spending less time people in America uh Church attendance has plummeted since 2011 or so 2012 because no one has time everyone's so busy with

their notifications and their and their posts um so exposing ourselves to to Beauty to Nature going out for all walks go out for a walk I have my students go out for a walk in a park with no phone and no headphones they can't listen to music they have to go just walk slowly and the effects are amazing because many of them they've never noticed they've never noticed how beautiful the world is yeah so we can we can take steps to rehumanize our lives and how do we resp spiritualize them like how do we going

back to that chapter of I feel like it's also spiritualizing of intention right if someone's creating something and I'm assuming when you do your research and the books you've written and even the the the one H happiness hypothesis that you started with and and the journey that you've gone on it seems like your intention has been to uplift people through your work certainly my early work I used to study positive psychology and the goal there was very explicit the whole movement started by Martin Seligman in the 1990s the whole movement was psychology is pretty good

at taking people from -6 up to zero we we we're you know we we have some ways to bring you up to zero but most people are actually above zero most people are actually doing reasonably well and they want to go from plus two to plus seven and psychology had nothing to say to them so yes a lot of my early work was about how do we get to plus seven um but especially with the cing the American mind and now the anxious generation I'm I'm now talking about how do we get from10 up to

up to zero I mean that's the first step um just help kids help the Next Generation get out of defend mode out of performance mode and into a more human real childhood it's almost like your students in the you know the people that will go on to become entrepreneurs and Business Leaders it's almost like the challenge still becomes that even if people think big and think successfully and think scaled and are open-minded it's almost like without the inherent belief that I should create something to help others without that no matter what you create will in

some way harm or or cause difficulty to others because it wasn't there in not saying that you can do something perfectly and not saying you could build something without any floors completely that's no one can do that but this idea that at least if that's my intention if that's at least my North Star if that's my compass and I'm wondering where where people are getting that from if at all yeah I'll take what you said and I'll just make it a little bit more business friendly please um you said seem to be something like if

you intend to make something that's good for people or or you know if you have a positive intention that's is going to help people and so you know many people think like oh you know I should go into a nonprofit work I should go into charity work you know a lot of young people are headed to towards nonprofit work and a lot of the nonprofits don't do very much and they're they're wasting their talents there since I moved to a business school in 2011 I used to teach in the psychology department of the University of

Virginia but I've been at the NYU Stern School of Business since 2011 what I've come to see is that is that almost all businesses make the world better because they're creating something that people need and I once heard a philosopher say in an ideal capitalist Society the only way to get rich is by making other people better off and so you don't have to be all pro-social you can just say look there's a need for this kind of wrench I invented this wrench the world's better off people need it and and then I make money

that's great you know if I tell my students if all you do is is create goods and services that increase this the general welfare of humankind because it's a useful product that's great you're part you're part of progress um but now when we look at it that way now we get a new view of social media because social media is not a normal consumer product a normal consumer product if it hurts the customers they'll stop buying it unless they're addicted but with social media and especially the um the the advertising driven business model that Facebook

developed originally now many of them have copied the customer is the advertiser that's who pays the money the consumer is the product they're the victim in a sense of this and that explains why for especially for Tik Tok and Instagram I've seen a couple of surveys now and I did with my own class you say do you use Tik Tok you know so let's do it this way I ask my students how many of you use um Netflix how many of you watch Netflix at least once a week almost all hands go up how many

of you wish Netflix was never invented nobody nobody Netflix is Stories full length Stories We enjoy it maybe we watch too much but we don't feel it's ruining our lives okay how many of you use Tik Tok once a week most hands go up how many of you wish Tik Tok was never invented most hands go up same thing for Instagram so we have this bizarre situation where a couple of big platforms especially Tik Tok Instagram Facebook Twitter a few others they're sucking up most human attention billions and billions of people are spending hours a

day day most human attention is being drained away for a product that most people wish never existed so this is I think the greatest destruction of human value in human history these products should not exist or at least they should not exist in their present form unregulated not responsible for the harm they cause causing massive harm the people who use them don't overall which they didn't exist something is deeply deeply wrong um with with our society and the and the the nature of these companies which are now some of the biggest richest companies on Earth

yeah and you could argue that fast food companies and junk food companies have done the same for years and got away with it too well that's true that's true but at least there people are making a decision now there it's it's part of it is addiction but at least there you know like I really enjoy Fritos I just love Fritos it's just you know something I and M&M there are a few consumer products that I love and I you know I know they're bad for me but I make a decision about it um and I

don't think and and they are of course they are adding to obesity but I think social media is so much more pernicious because if I eat Fritos that doesn't make anyone else eat Fritos but if I get on social media that you know the more of us are on the more pressure there is to be on and that's especially hitting our kids we've got to break that up absolutely Jonathan it's been such a joy talking to you and uh so insightful I'm so glad you gave our audience so many great call to actions and we'll

make sure we put them in the caption in the comment section so people can find them easily uh we end every episode of of on purpose with a fast five or a final five these have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum so you have some something to play with drink of water let me compose myself this could be difficult uh Jonathan I these are your final five the first question is what is the best advice you've ever heard or received well what comes to mind I don't know if it's the best

but what comes right away to mind is what my father said when he dropped me off at college and he said uh John the most important things you learn uh you're not going to learn in the classroom and it was just you know it's just advice to go have experience and and that's actually something I tell my students now is just you take risks have experiences beautiful uh question number two what is the worst advice you ever had or receive um the worst advice I ever received um hard to say but I think um generally

a piece of bad advice that young people receive um is you know just follow your passions um that's important but I think many young people now think that they need to be engaged in work which is not just rewarding but socially valuable like as though my first job after college has to be have all these features and what I try to tell them is no no you want to end up there you want at you know in a decade or two you want to have work that you love that doesn't mean you have to love

every moment of it yeah you know think long term think about the skills you need think about the toughening you need think about the experiences you need and it might even be unpleasant for a while but but think long term mhm great uh question number three an experience that you'd never thought you you'd ever try but you're glad you did um I'm really Pro experien I'm very high in openness to experience and I always kind of wanted to try everything so you know whether it was psychedelic drugs or um you know travel all over the

world so I actually can't think of anything so you've done them all well I I've done I mean I've done a lot of different things in my life yeah yeah which I've talked about on some podcasts now that now that Michael Polland has written a book on it now that people can talk about psychedelic experience that is you know I mentioned before I've had a number of spiritual experiences some of the most intense ones were on psychedelics question number four an experience that you are excited to try this year an experience I'm excited to try

this year uh well this well actually going to Wimbledon my my son have you ever been before no it's going be amazing my my son is graduating from high school and I wanted to give him something special I said what's something that that you what's an experience you want to have and he said wimble he loves tennis we go to the US Open in New York but he's never been to Wimbledon oh you're going to have the best time yeah so I was able to scr up a few tickets and we'll go a couple of

days fantastic that would be great okay Fifth and final question we asked this to every guest who's ever been on the show if you could create one law that everyone had to follow what would it be I mean I'm thinking kind of practically here you know um you know one would be that businesses that impose costs on others um that are not party to The Exchange should have to bear the cost so basically get rid of externalities and social media imposes so many externalities um but if I if I have just like one Dart to

throw one thing to ask right now I'm just going to say let's get uh effective mandatory age verification on the internet so that some sites um are actually like porn sites are actually not open to Children um I think a law like that would be that's that's going to be the big hard one that would be a real game Cher so again not very I you know hoping you know it would be great if I could come up with you know some version of K's categorical imperative here um but uh no I'll just go with

those are the ones I've been thinking about fantastic everyone thank you so much for listening the book is called the anxious generation how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness Jonathan height thank you so much for joining us on on purpose I really am encouraging everyone who's been listening and watching to go ahead to the sites that Jonathan recommended see if we can be a part of the mission support the work that Jonathan and his team are doing because I couldn't agree with you more I think this will this is

what I what I love about what you've done is often I find a lot of thinkers and thought leaders create fear based arguments and without any Concrete Solutions and I feel that only adds to the fear and anxiety in the world and so I'm very grateful that we have very tangible specific things that we're fighting for here and I really really hope that you'll lean on us to help you and and help be a part of this with you well thank you Jay I am wildly optimistic that this is a problem we can solve in

a year or two at least get most of the way towards solving and I really appreciate your help in getting the word out I'm so excited to reach a global audience because this is this is a panum this is a global problem AB so thank you Jay thank you Jonathan thank you if you enjoyed this podcast you're going to love my conversation with Michelle Obama where she opens up on how to stay with your partner when they're changing and the four check-ins you should be doing in your relationship we also talk about how to deal

with relationships when they're under stress if you're you're going through something right now with your partner or someone you're seeing this is the episode for you no wonder our kids are struggling we have a new technology and we've just taken it in Hook Line and Sinker and we have to be mindful for our kids they'll just be thumbing through this stuff you know their their mind's never sleeping