Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview

26:05And to their point, this does actually make sense. It is a sequence of events that other people have now done. They're not wrong. There is a clear path. That's right. And that's a trap. That's a trap that leads to unhappiness. That's right. But there's always been this notion of celebrity and kind of, you know, like this, the celebrity replaced the monarchy, replaced the church, whatever. But nowadays, with the influencer culture, the celebrity is accessible, meaning I have access to being in that state. So it creates this deep dark hole for me, at least this is my read on it, that I can't, I'm not in that state, but I should be, I could be.

26:47Therefore, I have this deep emptiness because theoretically, I could be that person. It's not like there's a caste system. It's not like there's a monarchy where your blood determines whether or not you get to be a king or the church where the Lord determines whether you get to be in charge. In this case, someone got there, but I'm not there. So I get to see, and not only that, but my reference library historically was like four to six sitcoms a week. Now my reference library is four to six TikTok videos a minute. And you know, I'm just like suddenly there's all these different things that I don't have.

27:19and as statuses that I don't, that I have an accumulate. Should we talk about thoughtful proposals in your book and the latest book, The Anxious Generation? I, I, two things struck me as absolute no brainers. And you are currently in a war with people trying to, I think maybe who got to these topics before you and maybe fill some ownership of them. And they, you've basically become, I don't know the lighting rod for all of this discussion now and people are coming to you as the expert I get to send some of these sociologists a little upset that you've taken their They're shine putting it aside Because you do reference them and you give them a lot of credit in the book The pouches at school for and the phone lockers Maybe you could touch on that and then what's the proper age for kids to get a phone Those two things to me seem like the most pragmatic proposals in the book Okay, so let me just set this up by sort of jumping ahead to the notion of collective action problems and the four norms that I Suggest in the book to break out of collection collective action problems.

28:29So The clearest collective action problem is Any kid who doesn't get a phone is left out and so the kid says mom I'm the only one without a phone I mean fifth grade everyone else has a phone. They're making fun of me and this hurts us as parents So we say okay, I'll give you a I have an old phone here. We'll reactivate it for you And so you can end up in a situation where everyone has a bad outcome, which is you get to the point where now, you know, in third and fourth grade kids are all getting phones. And you sort of get there because everyone else is doing it. And Gen Z feels trapped on social media.

29:07I talk to my students. Why are you spending so much time on TikTok and Instagram and five other platforms every day? You have no time to do anything of any use to anyone. And they say, well, I have to because I need to know what people are talking about. I don't want to be left out. So this whole thing is a set of collective action traps. That's what we got so deep into this. And so the solution is collective action. So in my book, I kind of assume that we might never get any real help from the federal government. There is a chance that coast of the kids on the safety act will pass. That is the one thing that really could pass.

29:40But I really wrote the book, assuming there's not going to be a legislative solution to this, We have to do this ourselves by changing norms. And so in the book I propose, I mean, I have like 50 suggestions, 50 ideas for parents and teachers and schools. But I realize, wait, four of these are just really foundational things that we can do together and they're really powerful. So in order, they are no smartphone before high school. We have to clear this all out of middle school. Middle schoolers should not be having the internet in their pocket, give them a flip phone, give them a phone watch, give them something else, but not a smartphone.

30:12No social media till 16. Social media is wildly inappropriate for minors. It's full of extreme sex, violence, men from all over the world reaching out to you because they want sex. I mean, it's insane that we have children talking with men all over the world. So no social media till 16. The third norm is phone free schools. Lock up the phones in a yonder pouch or in a phone locker in the morning. They get it back at the end of the day. And the fourth as far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. Because until the 1990s, kids had a childhood. They were outside a lot.

30:44They had adventures. They learned to be self -governing, self -supervising. We took that away from them as it began in the 90s, totally gone by 2015. So our kids never get any fun or adventure. So all they have is their screens. So if we do those four things, we break out of these collective action problems. We restore childhood. We delay the full social media immersion until age 16 when they're you know halfway more than halfway through puberty That's my basic proposal. So those are the four reaction been to this proposal Amazing, it's not like it's not like Matt is gonna wake up someday in Zuckerberg's gonna have this epiphany that he's done more damage to children than the tobacco Of course, I've got to imagine that the reaction has been amazing to anyone that's not gone through this problem as children.

31:30Have you talked to the Gen Z about the proposal? Oh, yeah. I think that's what's so exciting about this is that, so I proposed these four norms, I have this analysis of what happened at Gen Z. I paint Gen Z as a generation that's been damaged, that's going to be less than they would have been. They're less ambitious, they're less successful, they're less happy, they're less competent. And I've given this, I've given a version of this talk in middle schools, in high schools, and universities. I always ask at the end of it, what do you think? Did I get your generation wrong? And I usually try. If I remember, I usually say, okay, question time, if you think I got something wrong, please raise your hand now.

32:10Or please be the first step to the microphone. And maybe one time someone said, I think you got this wrong. The other, thousands and thousands and thousands of times, they say, yep, that's basically right. Now, maybe some of them are too You should I speak up, but my point is young kids like, you know, 9 -10, they desperately want phone, TikTok, everything. But by the time they're in late high school or certainly college, the overwhelming view I find among Gen Z's, wow, did this mess us up? Not that I'm going to quit because I don't want to be alone, but man did this mess us up. And that's why when you ask them, do you wish social media was never invented?

32:48Most of them say yes. I wish it was never invented. So Gen Z, the Gen Z is incredibly supportive. If you go to the website for the book, anxiousgeneration .com, we have all kinds of activities for parents and teachers and Gen Z. We have writing on my substack after babble .com by Gen Z. That's why this is so different from any previous tech panic. Is that the kids themselves see the problem? What is the connection between themes in coddling of the American mind and the anxious generation and what we see on college campuses recently. So can you comment on the protests, the recent activities on campus, and maybe help us kind of understand, is there a difference or is this a continuation?

33:34Yeah, no, it's definitely a continuation. So my previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind, began when my friend Greg... By the way, I gave a copy to everyone in our summit last year, so we gave away 18 other copies of your book. Oh great, amazing. Okay, it was my pick, yeah. Yeah. So, began when Greg Lukyanov, who is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, noticed that all of a sudden around 2013 -2014, it was actually the students who were demanding protections from speech, from books, from speakers. Shut this down, ban this, stop this person from speaking.

34:02And he came to me and said, something's wrong. Something's really different about students today. It wasn't like this in 2012. Something's changed. And they are more fragile. They want more protection from words, books, speakers, they think speeches, violence. And at the time, we thought that these were millennials because that's was the name for the young generation millennials. And so we wrote an article on this Atlantic, like laying out what we think is happening, something is teaching these students to think in these distorted ways that are like cognitive distortions. And then in 2015, so the article comes out August 2015 in October 2015 or November 2015, everything blows up beginning at Yale, the Halloween costume protest, all sorts of things.

34:42University's undergo a kind of a cultural revolution. Really some very similar, a lot of similarities to the Chinese cultural revolution, of pulling down everything high, pulling down everything old, a kind of a revolutionary young people's movement, shaming professors, spitting on professors, all that sort of stuff. Now, so what's the continuity today? Though one of the worst things that the leaders did back then, the University of Presidency is they did nothing. Students would shout down speakers, no one was ever, ever punished for shouting down speakers, even when they used intimidation. I should claim up a mechanic, there was one, the claimant mechanic did ponder some students in 2018, but hundreds and hundreds of shout downs, no one ever punished.

35:21The message was, oh as long as you're protesting for social justice, you know, you can break the rules, you can use intimidation, you can shout people down, you can bang on glass and make people afraid for their lives. You can do those things because it's for a good cause and besides, we're actually kind of afraid of you too. So that was the president that was set. And that, I believe, was the beginning of one of the greatest brand destructions in American history. Higher ed used to have one of the greatest brands in the world. Elite higher ed was the envy of the world. Now it's a laughing stock.

35:45It's a, you know, Harvard is a punchline in jokes around the world, certainly in America. And so because there was fear, there was lack of leadership, and we permitted intimidation rather than persuasion. Universities must be about persuasion. You can never win an argument by saying, if you don't agree with me, I'm going to hurt you. I'm going to destroy you socially. We can't allow that, but we did. And so now along come the protests. So of course, the October 7th, the massacre was horrific. The Israeli response has produced horrific suffering and death. Yes, it's normal and expectable that there would be debates on a college campus.

36:23And nobody that I know of is saying people shouldn't be protesting in favor of the Palestinians. Canadians. But the question is really about the encampments and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of the university to pressure the university to make a statement pro -Palestine or anti -Israel or to divest from Israel. So this is the use of intimidation and disruption, which they allowed for nine years before. They said since 2015, as long as you're protesting for social justice, you can do whatever the hell you want, we're not going to punish you for anything. So now, this sort of intersectional social justice protests that are pro -Palestine and often anti -Israel and often shading and anti -Semitism, the presidents don't know what to say.

37:08And that was the spectacle we observed on December 5th in that house hearing room of the three presidents who could not explain why it was against their policies for people to call for death to the Jews. They couldn't, they had been so tied in and not whether hypocrisy they couldn't even explain it. So yeah, there's a very direct continuity. And in fairness, if the protesters were simply doing a sit -in, we've got a long history of people sitting in in the 60s and 70s protesting different things, as virtuous, it's this sort of tipping over into a temptation when five or six people surround a student and or chase them into a library or bang on the doors.

37:50I mean, if you I always use my friend Sam Harris's technique, which is just replace, go through each person on the victim Olympics and the identity politics bingo card and just replace it. Okay, now white students are chasing black students, black students are chasing Hispanic students, Hispanic students are chasing Japanese students, lesbians are chasing heteropubo, but whatever it is, pick your from the bingo card, and then just see if this stands up. And if it had been black students being surrounded by white students, people would be like, what? That's right, exactly. This is my point about like dualistic thinking, like the whole core of like the Zen Buddhist approach is to get rid of the sides in a system.

38:37But can you talk a little bit about this oppressor oppressed Yes. Concept and how critical it is to social behavior and now social evolution. I've thought a lot about this over the last year and I feel like so much of human societal development, politics, purchasing behavior is all driven by this concept of oppressor and oppressed, which can be approximated as the haves and the half -naughts. And at any given moment, I can feel like I have not to some other half. And theoretically, I'm a have to someone else who they have not. My have not identity drives me to purchasing, to getting likes on Facebook, to changing who's in office, to deciding which company I should spend money on and which company I should not spend money on.

39:27And that this notion extends its way into feeling oppressed, meaning there's a system in place that's keeping me from having something that someone else has. And maybe you can talk a little bit about has this changed has this always been in human psychology? Is this changing because of modernity and why? Would be great. No good. No, that's right. That's another point of continuity from the coddling So the the central idea of the coddling was that there are three great untruths ideas that are so bad That if any young person believes all three there are almost certain to be depressed anxious Not amount to much in life and those three are what doesn't kill you makes you weaker So avoid stressful experiences, avoid speakers who are going to say things that you hate, don't expose yourself.

40:12Always trust your feelings, your feelings are right if you feel offended by something someone has offended you. And someone has to do something about this, someone has to punish that person. And the third, to your point about duality, is life is a battle between good people and evil people. And this is the distortion that's caused the most human misery. I mean, this is a normal thing people do, this is part of being a tribal species. were very, very good at coming together to say, our side has been hurt or cheated or defiled by their side. They're the evil ones, they're perfectly bad, we're perfectly good.

40:45So it's that third distortion is really the most pernicious from a societal level. Now what you just said before about the haves and the have -nots, that's what the left used to be about from the time of Marx or the French Revolution even, until the 1950s or 60s, it was about the haves versus the have -nots. And the left was the part one that stood up for the have -nots and the left stood up for the poor and the people. But we go through a period in the 60s and 70s of the conversion away from a sort of a Marxist idea based on economics to something, is it a little bit Marx? Is it Michel Foucault?

41:22There's different intellectual heritages here where now it's all about power. It's not habs or have -nots, it's power. and power is such that whatever you look at in society, you will see that some people have power and privilege and they use that to oppress the opposite. And this is what intersectionality is about. It starts with a perfectly legitimate point that there are multiple dimensions of identity and to be a black woman is not just the sum of being black or being woman, they're unique You can dignate that hit black women that you don't notice unless you are tuned into this. So intersectionality begins, Kimberly Crenshaw with a very good insight, which I think is absolutely right.

42:05But the way it plays out on campus, what Greg and I argued in our book, is 18 -year -olds coming out to campus, they're easily lured into this incredibly simplistic and exciting way of looking at the world, which is, I don't have to know anything about you. I can just look at you. And I can say, oh, you're a man. Oh, you're a white man. Oh, that means that you're an oppressor. And I can feel virtuous to the extent that I am not that. And this puts a lot of pressure, especially on white kids, to try to develop some identity as a victim, which is incredibly disempowering, and just not good for the development.

42:43And what we end up with is a movement that thinks in these binary terms, and this is what brings us to today, is, of course, you know, Jews, I'm Jewish. We always thought that we were among history's victims and certainly you can't understand the creation of the state of Israel without understanding what happened in the Holocaust. But because of the way intersection I played out because whiteness is so quintessentially evil, whiteness is the thing that is ruining everything, whiteness is the... So everything that's not whiteness unites together to fight whiteness. Now most Jews as I understand it, most Jews in Israel are actually Sephardic, they're not from Europe.

43:23But in America, Jews are coded as white. And therefore, if there's a conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians, then obviously one is the oppressor, one is the oppressed. Now, obviously economically, Israel is wealthy, Israel is powerful. So it's not that there's no legitimacy to that view. Obviously, there's a huge power differential in Israel versus Gaza. But the mindset that says, everything is about power is so narrowing, incorrect, boring, And offensive. I spent so many years trying to help the left using moral psychology so they would stop losing elections. And I finally decided they're beyond hope.

44:02The rights beyond hope too. But the left is losing Asians, it's losing black men, it's losing Hispanics. And in the time of Donald Trump, why is this happening? A big piece of it seems to be this oppressor victim mindset pushes policies that are so offensive to most people of every race that they're like, I've had it with the left. I don't like this. So, sorry, that was a rant. That was more of a rant than an answer to your question, but I hope it was entertaining. No. It seems accurate. Giving the pendulum is shifting. What do you see broadly socially right now? Are we still in this loop where we are creating a presser, a press kind of constructs perpetuating policy or are folks in the left saying it's gone too far, it's time to make a change.

44:52Now folks are feeling, because I've seen a lot of folks that have traditionally been, I'm not a politics guy, I'm not a political party or anything, but I've seen a lot of folks who I know who are traditionally Democratic voters, Democrat voters who are now Republican voters after what's happened over the last couple of years, surprisingly shockingly would have never sworn that would have been the case 10 years ago. So are things changing now? Is that sort of shift going to be what pulls things policy wise the other way? Yeah, I think things are changing. So at least on, you have to look institution by institution.

45:26And so at least on campus, things got insane in 2015. I mean, it was like, again, it was like the cultural revolution began in 2015. It wasn't like this in 2012. And I started a group called heterodox academy. If there are any professors listening to this, please join heterodox academy. We advocate for viewpoint and diversity among professors. we think that we shouldn't all think the same. We shouldn't all be on the left and progressive. And every year since 2015, things got worse and worse and worse. And especially 2020, with COVID, especially George Floyd, a lot of progressive agadías got supercharged.

45:54Ibram Candy became the patron saint. Everything was about anti -racism. So that's when things really became completely bonkers. Not just on campus, but in journalism, in museums, firing all the white guides. And all the just crazy stuff was happening 2021, 22. business went, many businesses went that way, but businesses have to actually make money. And so by 2022, a lot of businesses were rolling it back. They're saying, well, this stuff is terrible. This is not making life better for members of minorities. This is actually just turning everyone against everyone. We all hate this. So business has begun definitely moving away from all this stuff.

46:33Universities, we're not doing, we're not really moving away until December 5th. I think December 5th that that that that hearing was so humiliating for higher ed. I think a lot of us feel much freer now. We feel like, you know what, the intersectional, the sort of the people who will destroy your reputation, if you question them, they're on the defensive now. We don't hear much from even candy anymore. We don't hear him referred to very much anymore. So I think that even on campus, the pendulum is swinging. I was afraid it wasn't a pendulum. I was afraid it was more like a tower that just falls faster and faster.

47:05But I do think because the great majority of professors and presidents are true liberals. They're on the left, but they believe in free speech, they're not illiberal. What I think has happened on the far left and the far right, we have illiberalism. So if the far left is not liberal, the far right is not conservative. And most of us, the 70 % in the middle are actually pretty reasonable people who could live together, but we're all afraid of the extremes. But we're less afraid of the extremes now than we were a year ago.

47:37Because took it too far? Is that what's... You have to look at institution by institution. And so in institutions that are governed, that are dominated by the left, and that is all the knowledge creating institutions. So it's journalism, the arts, media, universities, most of the scientific establishment, other than the hard sciences. In all those areas, yes, I think the left took it too far. You know, we went into a point where everything, like chemistry, has to be about anti -racism, and everything has to be about race. And that was just kind of nuts. And so I think there is a kind of a move to comments.

48:09A more common sense. Planonium, very racist, Alan. Yeah, right. A very racist, Alan. Yeah. Yeah. Just subtly racist. Can you talk a little bit about what traditional liberalism and conservatism should look like? Because a lot of people in our public audience, a lot of people I talk to, they're confused now about the terms because so much of traditional liberalism feels a liberal because of your point about far left behavior, traditional conservatism feels illiberal because of far right behavior. What is the difference between the two and kind of help us bring balance to the force? You know, like, so I'll answer your question as a psychologist, which is one of the amazing discoveries in psychology since the 80s is that is that almost everything about our personality is partly heritable.

48:56And if you have an identical twin separated at birth, You never met. But if you're very much on the left, your twin probably is too. Something about our brains make us predisposed to the right of the left. And it goes back to openness to experience and conscientiousness if you personality traits. But basically, there's a liberal or progressive sentiment that says it's captured by this Robert F. Kennedy quotes, some men see things as they are and say why, I dream things that never were and say why not. So, if progressives historically are the people who look at existing institutions and say, you know, why don't we change this?

49:32Like, why don't we have some other thing, which might be more just? So, progressives are always pushing for progress for change. But then the wisdom of the right is to say, you know, what? We may not understand our institutions, but if we just go changing them willy -nilly, it's going to be a disaster because we don't understand what we're doing. In fact, I opened our conversation with that. That's actually a concern that when I learned from reading the conservative intellectuals, going back to Edmund Burke, you can't just go messing with institutions and expect it to work out well. So a good liberal democracy in which you have some people pushing for change, you've got other people saying slow down, like not so fast, like let's be careful about this.

50:13And that's William F. Buckley's famous quote about a national review is going to stand to throw it, history yelling stop or at least slow down. So that's great. You have a car with a gas pedal in a brake. You need that. What happens when there are no conservatives? What happens when there's no one to say slow down? Progressive revolutions have an almost perfect record of disaster. I mean, it always descends into chaos and economic chaos and cruelty. What happens when there are no progressives when it's all conservative? You tend to get much more repressive, you know, very predictable pathologies on either side.

50:50And part of my analysis, what I think has gone wrong in our country, what I'm very focused on, what social media has done to society, as well as to Gen Z, is there always was a distribution where most people on the left are reasonable left, their progressives, I mean, so they're true liberals. They believe in a John Stuart Mill vision of a society in which people are maximally free to construct lives that they want to live. That I think is the heart of the liberal vision of a liberal society. And on the right, you have conservatives who generally believe in tradition, family, group loyalty, religion, the things that bind us together and limit that behavior.

51:29This is Thomas Sol talking about the constrained vision of humanity. So that's all healthy. And then you always have some far left radicals who, they become Maoist in one generation, they become Robespear in other gen, you know, they chop off heads prone to violence on the far left, you got a group prone to violence on the far right, that are reactionary, that are authoritarian. And let's say there was some distribution. Now then along comes Twitter, along comes Facebook, along comes social media. What happens? Mark Zuckerberg used to say, how could it be wrong to give more people more voice? That sounds great.

52:04But what if you're not giving the disempowered more voice? What if you're not giving everyone voice? What if you're bringing everyone into the Roman Coliseum and saying, okay, let's fight it out for the entertainment of the people in the stands, and the great majority of people don't want to fight with swords. They just go quiet. And some people pick up the swords like, yes, let's go. And so the far left becomes super empowered, the far right becomes super empowered, and the center left in the center right goes silent. And that's what I think is, you know, that's, I think a real disaster for our country.

52:37I think that was like such an excellent, like, commentary for people to hear. I want to ask one follow on, which is why has liberalism and conservatism in some aspects switched? So one of the things, I think a lot of folks observe is that modern liberalism is a lot of redistribution, equality for the oppressed, bring everyone up to the same outcome, the same level on an outcome basis, which limits the freedom and flexibility of others. It limits free markets, for example. More taxes, more regulations, this is one way to characterize that that conservatives will say. More taxes and more regulation is not John Stuart Mill.

53:21It's not more free market enablement. And then on the flip side, this idea of conservatives want to have less government, less regulation, less taxes, which can drive more inequality of outcome, et cetera, can drive, in fact, fundamentally, and I believe this very deeply free markets drive progress, technological progress, and social progress. And as a result, by getting technology out, the most disempowered benefit the most by new technology, they can progress more than the wealthy can progress. And so why has that flip? Why is conservatism and liberalism in some aspects flipped? And when does that?

53:58What did that happen? Yeah, so don't think of it as though liberalism and conservatism have flipped. Think of it as though the left and the right have really changed. One thing I learned from studying conservatism from the intellectual historian Jerry Mueller is that conservatism in every era is a reaction to the excesses of the left. So if the left was the revolutionaries in the French Revolution, the right were monarchists. They wanted the restoration of the king. Right. If the left in America is about, you know, pulling down the founding fathers because they were slave owners, the right is going to be, no, we're going to get extra patriotic.

54:36We're going to wear funny hats like the, you know, 18th century Americans. So you always have to understand the right as a reaction to what they perceived to be the excesses of the left. Now a lot of what's happened is, as I said, the left is a political coalition that votes similarly in elections, same with the right. It's made of a mixture of different kinds of people. There's a wonderful study from Warren Common that talked about the Seven Tribes of the Seven Groups of Americans. The progressive activists, which is the group on the furthest left, they were never liberal. In fact, they're really illiberal.

55:12They're not even about bringing up the bottom. They're much more focused on pulling down the top. That's the kind of a gap. That's like the ugly side of egalitarianism. So they're very focused on restraining rich people, pulling down privilege. They don't seem as concerned about bringing up poor people. So that's the far left. They're not liberal, but now, but for a while, they were really dominant. Not in the Democratic part. This is an important point. The Democratic Party has two wings, which one usually wins? The liberal, the moderate not the squat, not the, so if you just look at the parties, the Democrats are a functioning center left party with a, you know, now it's spoken progressive way.

55:50That's great. That's a viewpoint diverse. I love that. The right is different. If you just look at the party, you used to have all kinds of true conservatives, you know, George H. W. Bush through Mitt Romney. They were true conservatives, very decent men. They believed in decency, family, I mean, these, you know, have a lot of respect for traditional conservatives. But now it's the party of Donald Trump. And the Republican Party has gotten rid of nearly all its moderates. The Democrats pulled some dirty tricks that actually wiped out a few of those moderates, which I think they really have a lot to answer for.

56:22But my point is, if you just look at the parties, the Republican Party has been gutted of its moderates. Now they do crazy, insane things like, let's work really hard to solve the immigration problem. Oh, Donald Trump says, let's not do it. Okay, let's thread out the window. I mean, insane stuff that is really hurting the country. So I just want to make it clear. I talk a lot about universities where the villain is the left. There really is no right to speak of on university campuses. But in Washington, I think the Republican Party is the party that's really gone farther off the reservation or if you want to still say that today, whatever, you know, that's gone.

56:56Can we do some quick lightning round questions on parenting? Sure. So my kids are, I got three daughters under seven. There's a conversation amongst the parents. When do you let the kids get phones? When do you let them get on social media? And some of the parents don't listen. So then the kid, you got a couple of kids in the class that are on social media. They're on iPhones, it's fifth grade, fourth grade, whatever. And the kids that aren't are the have -nots. They're left out. They're not able to be on the text screen with the kids that are. So they're not cool. They're socially disengaged.

57:27They're angry at their parents. They're sad. How do you address that as a parent where you've got some of the kids in the class that are doing this, given the framing you provided earlier on the best rules. Yeah. So the answer is collective action. So for each kid feels left out. But what if you... So I assume you're in contact with the parents of your kids' friends, because you got to drop them off, pick them up, you do all sorts of things. So what if you were to talk with the parents of a few of the friends who don't have... haven't given phones yet? And you say, hey, we don't want our kids to have a phone -based childhood.

58:00Do you agree with me on that? If we work together, John Heights says if we work together, we can actually give our kids a fun childhood. Are you in on that? And what that means is we're going to follow the four norms. We're not giving, we are not giving our child a smartphone until high school. Let's just commit to that. Now we should be sending our kids out, in which case like I bought my daughter a phone watch, a Gizmo, it could call three numbers. That was it. And that was enough for two or three years. That was all she needed. She could go out and do errands, she could go get bagels, she could go, you know, bring food to my office across the park.

58:33So it's okay to give kids a way to contact you, but you just all agree, no smartphone. And you all agree, no social media until 16. And that even includes Snapchat, which is what the kids are using to communicate, but just lots of bad stuff happens on Snapchat. But if some of the parents don't agree, and then you've got this class system that forms, amongst the social, you know, groups of the kids, you got some kids that are that have - You just hold the line. That's what I was saying, huh? Well, yes, if you can, it's hard to hold the line on your own. It's much easier if you have three of you holding the line, but it's even better if it's not holding a line.

59:10It's offering a more positive vision of childhood. So you and the kids, so your kid and the other kids who, where your parents hold a grig, you make extra efforts to give your kids an exciting, fun childhood where they do exciting things together. The other kids can be home on their beds, swiping all day long, let them do that. They're going to end up basically anxious and never having really done anything to grow up. Whereas your kids are getting together for four -way sleep overs where you're taking them, you know, bowling and you just, you know, you just, well, to the extent that you're allowed to, you step back.

59:42Like you let them be self -coverning. You know, you give them money, you give them an allowance, I suggest in the book, be really clear about chores, allowance, and encourage them. Go right, you go right, you're bicycles down and go get ice cream, you know, go, get ice cream just before dinner for all I care be a little rebellious. So if you, you know, we've really taken almost all the fun out of childhood. There's very little adventure left in childhood. I've leaned into that. My kids love the fact that I told them my dad would kick us out of the house in the morning in the summer and we could come back home when the street lights came up.

1:00:10That's the common rule. That's right. So what do you tell me how you tell me how you do it? Because there's a lot of places where I do it today. And then I just had them leave the house and I told them I'm locking the doors for three hours go have fun outside and then sometimes when we're in town I'll have them walk around town I'll give them the 20 bucks I'll say you're gonna meet me at the Apple store at this time yeah perfect You can go ask them, but we're gonna meet at the Apple store in two hours have fun Anything goes wrong just go into any store and talk to an adult boom fantastic them those kind of like free Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful And do they see this as punishment or they excited?

1:00:45I love it. They love it. Of course. They love it Of course they ran around the house, found one of the doors open and said, you forgot to lock this one locked. Great. They said, what do we have to go to the bathroom or we need a drink of water. I said, there's the hose and there's a tree. Yeah. Excellent. That's how we did it in Brooklyn. Yeah. That's why it's very important. They think it's hilarious and they love it. And then the other thing I do as a tip is I, you know, if they want to do screen time, I tell them, great. come up with a creative project and one hour of creative project you can do one hour of TV or one hour of iPad or something.

1:01:22So I just do one for one with them. They have to earn it by doing something creative and they're like we don't know what to do and I'm like figure it out and then board them. I explain to them equals creativity. You have to be bored, your mind clears and then you come up with a great creative idea. Now, you know, beautiful movies, their writing stories, their making books, their writing songs, like they literally will complain. It's like you mentioned Skinner, when you extinguish a behavior, like an addiction to devices, the bad behavior spikes, they scream, they cry, and then boom, it drops down to zero.

1:01:54It's exactly. And you're fine. You just have to weather that like brief storm. It's the withdraw, that's right, because when you've had hyper stimulation of quick, easy dopamine, those systems downregulate, they react, they try to restore homeostasis, and now it takes more stimulation to get them to the normal level, now you take away the video games, you take away the phones, and for, you know, Annelemki says it's two or three weeks to overcome withdrawal symptoms for, especially for more serious drugs, but in my experience, it's more like here, it's like a few days. It's, you know, the first three or four days is really bad, but by a week, actually, they're mostly over it.

1:02:28That's what you find. Like summer camp, so send your kids to summer camp. And never send your child to a camp that allows kids to keep phones on them, never do that. That's a waste of opportunity for detox. This is what kids want, by the way. Kids want to have a childhood. They don't, you asked them, you poll the students and they told you, we don't want to be addicted to the stuff. That's like, if you were to ask Philip C. More Hoppin, you wanna be addicted to heroin and you wish heroin was never existed. He'd be like, yeah, I'm dead. Of course I wish heroin didn't exist. Yeah, that's right. This thing's ruined my life.

1:02:56Like, they know, they don't heroin. What did they repair? That was a poll. Like the food, I just now thinking about New York and just, I mean, I used to work on the same gyms and Chelsea Pierce. And every time I see Phil O 'Bestie Moore Hoffman in like the master or long came Polly, I just think this is what we're doing to our kids. They get addicted to these things and then Fentional and like talented Mr Ripley with me just so many great artists gone. And I think that's what's happening to these kids brains. I think their brains are being melted in all their creativity, their ability to learn and instrument to interact with each other.

1:03:28We're stealing their childhoods and replacing them with Zuckerberg's payday. Yeah. For the heavy users especially. I mean, I try to avoid saying brain melted. I try to be a little more precise for the heavy users, for the, you know, and this is the thing about five depending how you measure it, about five to 12 % of the boys do get, do become problematic users of video games. So for most boys video games are okay. They're a lot of fun. And I wouldn't say video games are melting most boys brains. But five to 12 % is a lot of boys to lose. And these are boys who are spending, you know, three, four, five hours a day on video games for years and years and years, they don't develop social skills, they don't develop dating skills.

1:04:07These are the co -incidences. That's right, exactly. It's just, yeah. I mean, you may not like to say you're an M .A. professor. It makes these kids really weird. I watch these kids who are addicted to TikTok and addicted to video games. They get really socially weird. They can't make eye contact. They can't have a conversation. And then they become young adults. They don't know how to go on a date. They don't know how to talk to adults. I mean, they don't know how to work. Yeah, tell me more about what you're seeing in Silicon Valley in the tech industry. Are you talking only about boys? Are you saying girls are this way girls aren't making eye contact?

1:04:40No, I think it's the boys mainly the girls seem to be a different set of behaviors, which is like Maybe more social pressure and more depression more eating disorders self -harm, all that collection where maybe it's directed, Edo in some way of harming yourself, which is really, internalizing disorders. That's right, that's right. That's right, so yeah. Yeah, so and tell me how Gen Z employees are working out in general, in your sense. They don't. They're terrible. And that's what I hear, partly. Yeah, you just hire people in Canada or the Philippines. Well, Canada is almost as bad as America.

1:05:22Canada has problems to they're very much like us. But I agree immigrants who are not speaking country. That's right. They have a better work ethic And I'm gonna, you know what I'm hoping that we'll get to is because this problem is so like this is what I you know I work in a business school. I talked a lot of people in business. I was asked my question I was here the same thing. I've never heard anyone say oh, yeah young people are so wonderful people having problems Integrating Gen Z employees into their companies. They're fragile The top 20 % are fantastic the majority are do not have the wherewithal the resiliency, the confidence, the communication skills to operate in a business environment.

1:06:00Period. So what, you know, what, what, what do you think about this? What about like, instead of like don't hire American kids, saying, look for signs that this person can be a team player and work with other people. So especially go for anybody who's ex -military, anybody who has major team sports. Yeah, no people do hire based on that. They always did in sales, like the sales department you want to do military people, you want to discipline, because it's a numbers game, you have to just grind it out. But I do think like even for what people don't realize is when everybody went home for COVID, managers learned how to manage remote workers.

1:06:37Once they figured out I can manage a remote worker dealing with somebody who has too much anxiety to come to work today or be in a meeting and told they did a sh** job. And like you need to buck up and do a better job. Like people will quit on the spot. People will start crying. People will drop off the Zoom because there's too much anxiety to be told you did a bad job. Now you tell that to somebody who's working in India or South America or Portugal or Manila. Hey, this is not the standard at which we operate. They're like, can you tell me how to do better? Is there a, is let me go look online.

1:07:10I'll go find some way to do my job better. Thank you for letting me know that I could do better on my job. have this generation can't handle even the modest amount of, I shouldn't say all of them, but a large percentage of them have so much anxiety, they cannot operate in the workplace. Okay, so that is similar to what I hear a lot from them, from people who are hiring young people. But let me suggest one slight variation that you might try, because a really good thing about Gen C is that they're not in denial. All the things you say about them agree with what I say in the book, I think that's basically true.

1:07:39But what I'm finding in my teaching, what I find in general is that if you approach them in the right way and You if first of all they have to understand the concept of anti -projility very easy to explain chapter one of the Kotlin American mind If you go to the Kotlin .com I have chapter one we put it up there so that everybody can use it Send it around to all your employees, you know, it's what doesn't kill you actually makes you stronger And you grow through adversity and it's no a wisdom and it's wisdom around the world So if you have that concept, you're talking about it, and then you say to your new Gen Z employees, Okay, now we can do this in two ways.

1:08:13One is since I really want you to be successful in this job. So I'm going to tell you everything I think you're doing wrong And I'm going to try to make you better. That's option one. Option two is I can be really sensitive about your feelings and really try to make everything gentle and try never to upset you which one do you want? And I guarantee you the great majority can pick option one because they do want to grow. They're not denial, they're not defensive, they're not like, no, I'm not like that. So I especially would not, I'm not giving up on Gen Z, especially those who are still in the early 20s.

1:08:53Because that's what I'm teaching at NYU. And they show incredible growth. Now they're exciting because they're doing it together. I have a class of 35 students who are doing it together. But if you have a cohort, if you're selective in your hiring and you try to avoid the ones who are most showing the signs of the extreme activism and the extreme emotionality, if you have a group and you're explicit that you want them to get stronger, you want them to succeed and that's why I'm going to give you some harsh feedback. I think they generally have it. I do think some number will rise to the occasion.

1:09:28I think it's really good advice. The other advice, I'll just tell you what people do practically in the real world. Sure, please. Higher three people expect that one's going to be fired in the first six weeks because they present well in an interview, but they're going to have a panic attack where they're just going to be, don't have the work ethic to be successful in an intense field like venture cap or a venture back startup. So, and then one will leave because they've got rich parents and they don't need to have the stress of the job Whatever and then whoever's left that's the winner and so that's how people are approaching this now is hiring people on project basis Let's see them do the work.

1:10:07Let's see if they can maintain the intensity and that's really is like If you weren't allowed if you were monitored and helicopter parented and you didn't go to the store on your own and you didn't get lost and you didn't Have somebody steal your money or you know you didn't get enough fight in the school yard or you didn't play tag and You know didn't get picked for dodgeball. You got smashed in dodgeball and they bullied you if you didn't have all those Experiences that are formative Yeah, you're not gonna survive in the corporate world. There's no time time to teach you how to you know get smashed in the face You know with a with a dodge ball, you know that should have happened in 12 12 years old It's going to be tough for them.

1:10:48I think you're doing God's work trying to get them back on track. Well, let's hope that parents and schools realize the truth of what you're saying. We get to the point where college admissions and hiring is not just going to go for the high GPA and the full resume of extracurricular activities. They're going to go for signs of being a free -range kid. They're going to go for signs that you traveled on your own for three months someplace. you know, when you were 18 or 19, they're gonna go for signs that that you actually can handle adversity. Yeah, I'd like to see your project where, you know, I see an NYU or Ford, I see an A -I -B -League school degree or something like that, you're gonna think, oh my God, this person's gonna come here and start a union or movement.

1:11:32Yep. You know, they're gonna distract everybody. This is why Coinbase and other folks are just saying, we're here for this purpose. If you're here, you're here for this mission and this purpose. Anything else you want to do on your own time, this is your business. But that's what I've got to get you major major kudos to coin base. They were the first one Armstrong He was the first one to really put that out there and a lot of companies followed. Yeah, that's yeah And now it's the stand now it's the stand okay, you're here You the random group. There's like a random channel on slack that is like one of the default channels That's where chaos occurs the first thing you have to do is delete the random channel.

1:12:04There's no random here We're here to work Yeah, there's no you know, side hustle, random, you know, your politics, whatever, indigenous group, you know, whatever group that you care most about. Yeah, that's called the weekend. That's a great. We've had a word for that in Gen X. That's your weekend. At five o 'clock on Friday, you could start thinking about that. The rest of the week, you're focused. Anyway, I'm old school. Gen X, I'm old school now. It's so great to have you on here. the books, uh, co -rolling of the American mind, anxious generation, and the first two. By all four, everybody, that's the message you get here.

1:12:44Stop what you're doing, get the audio bug, books are the greatest deal in the world. 10, 15 bucks, you get a ton of knowledge. And hopefully this podcast inspires you, whether you're a parent, educator, or a young person to just understand what's going on here. John, you're a great artist. Thanks so much, guys. I just want to put in just a quick note to learn more. Go to anxiousgeneration .com as the website for the book. After Babble .com is my sub -stock. We put a lot of research and a lot of writing. And letgrow .org is an incredible organization that we created with I think it was the North Scenazi to give parents like you more help, more ideas and how to give your kids a free range child.

1:13:19I have been all over that website. Lots of great ideas there. So I hope if there are any philanthropists in the audience who are willing to, we have a tiny little organization. We could do so much more if we had some money. It could hire more staff. So let grow .org. now letcro .org. Fantastic. Let your kids grow. Exactly. And let us know what you think of the all -in interview everybody who's a fan. John, you are amazing. Greatness. Thank you. Thank you so much, guys.