How Smartphones Changed Childhood: Jonathan Haidt on The Anxious Generation

26:37So we have a variable on mental health. So if you just look at that correlation, then girls have a bigger correlation repeatedly. Girls are more harmed by spending time on social media if you're just looking at that relationship. That I'm very confident about. But what I've come to see is that even though girls use it more, they care about it more, they're more drawn in, they're more addicted to getting social information than boys are. When we look at very serious harms, like who actually dies because they bought drugs that relates with fentanyl on Snapchat? super easy to buy drugs you can do it within 10 seconds of opening an account he was able to get find drug dealers so it was dying because they bought percocet that turned out to have fentanyl in it who is getting sextorted that is who is being tricked into sharing a naked photo of themselves showing their genitals and then is revealed oh i thought i was talking with a sexy girl but it turns out it's a sextortion ring operating somewhere in asia or africa and they're going to destroy my reputation and send this photo to everyone i know unless i pay them 500 dollars, and then another 500, and then another 500.

27:38And so we know of about 40 cases, we know the names of boys who killed themselves that day or the next day. So when we look at the very serious harms, sextortion, driven to suicide, fentanyl, now I'm not sure there's a sex difference. Oh, cyberbullying, that caused a lot of suicides. And there it's also a lot of girls. So in terms of very serious harms, there may not be a sex difference, or it might even tilt towards boys in terms of actual death, but I don't have those hard numbers. And I think you already said this, but I just want to reiterate that this is not a uniquely American phenomenon, right?

28:11Right. Is it everywhere that has smartphones and social media like this? Not quite, not yet, for an interesting reason. So a couple of amazing things about this, and this is what convinced me. So to go back to your question, like, okay, you got this correlation. Does that prove causation? The correlation doesn't prove causation, but the fact that very much the same pattern happened in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand. So the Anglo countries at the same time, usually whatever happens in America gets to Australia and New Zealand three to five years later. But this was the same. And in all countries, the girls' curve is steeper than the boys'.

28:41So that tells you that this has nothing to do with Obamacare redefining mental illness. This has nothing to do with the Newtown shooting. That's what some of my critics say. Oh, well, yeah, 2012. That was the Newtown shooting. And kids have had these lockdown drills, these shooter drills. Of course they're anxious. Really? Why did that cause girls in New Zealand and Iceland to suddenly cut themselves? So once you see that this is happening in many other countries, now the causal hypothesis becomes more plausible because there is no alternative. Nobody has even proposed an alternative. Some people say, oh, it was the great financial crisis.

29:16No, that was 2008. By 2012, 2013, we're already on the mend. Some people say, oh, it's not too simple to blame it on technology. Depression is caused by poverty and racism and fears of climate change. really so why was it like totally steady from the 90s through to what those were not changing and then all of a sudden in 2012 everything changes all over the world like everyone there's more poverty there's more racism suddenly in 2013 like so i think when we look at what's happening in the world but now to get to your specific question so we have really good data from the anglo countries and there's a couple of good studies in europe when you look at the developing world there's the gallup world poll which has a question about well-being but it doesn't have any questions about depression there's one question about worried which is like anxiety so there's not very good data but they actually do cover the world but we don't really have good data to map it up but to the extent that we can't because that we've tried what we're learning and this is work done by zach roush who's my lead researcher what we're learning is that the effect seems to be bigger in the anglo countries than in europe although within europe it's actually pretty big in scandinavia and it's a little less in southern europe we're not seeing so much in Eastern Europe.

30:27Now, Eastern Europe used to be poor and communist, and life is getting better there over the last few decades. So there's two things. Is the economy improving? Is life improving in places where it is? And that's true in a lot of the developing world. I'm not sure what we're going to find. We're going to find out we're working with the Gallup people and the World Happiness Report people. So I can't say it's happening in the developing world. And it's happening less in Eastern Europe and Southern Europe than in Northern Europe and the Anglo countries. And our hypothesis there is that in places that had a lot of freedom, where kids were very free, not bound in by obligations and traditions, traditionally but actually generally good for mental health.

31:04But it's in those countries that the kids got just washed away into this bizarre, crazy world of influencers and social media and extremists and addiction. I should add, we also don't see this big trend in families that are religious or conservative. Everyone's doing worse off, but the increase is much smaller in those that are religious or conservative. And as I said in The Righteous Mind, one of the big differences, conservative moralities are more binding. Like you have to do your duty, you have to do your chores, you have to go to church, you have to go see your grandmother. Conservatives, you have more strict parenting, which traditionally is not better than other kinds of parenting.

31:40But if you have strict parenting and you're embedded in webs of adult relationships and obligations. Now, everyone's getting on Instagram, but you don't get swept away because you still have to go see your grandmother and you still have to go to church and you still have to clean the dishes and you're still deep in contact with adults. Whereas in more secular progressive families, a lot of freedom, not a lot of obligation or tradition. Those kids were most vulnerable. They're the ones who are worst off. So that's my best guess as to what's happening with the cultural variation. And this is even true in, I don't know, every year you come out and you see a study that Denmark or Norway is the world's happiest country and all that.

32:18It's true there too. Yeah. So that's very interesting because it's true that Scandinavian countries have long been rated as the happiest, along with Switzerland, Israel. So especially small countries tend to do better. So that's been true for a long, long time. But really interesting work. There's a guy named Danny Blanchflower, an economist at Dartmouth. He showed, as many others, this has been long known, for a long time there's been a u-shaped curve of happiness where if you graph how happy life's at whatever you find the highest levels are actually in the elderly people in their 60s and 70s are actually the happiest and then in middle age they're less happy and young people young adults are the second happiest it's like you start off pretty happy and then you get less happy in mid life you got kids you got a job you got to take care of the parents like you know it's hard but then kids are out and you're retiring and so there's long been a u-shaped curve of happiness And that was true not just in a couple of rich countries.

33:12That was generally true around the world until 2015. What Blanche Flower finds is that once kids are getting on, or whatever it is, my hypothesis is that it's once kids leave behind a play-based child, they take a phone-based childhood. As soon as that happens, the you goes away because the young adults are much less happy. Older people haven't changed. Older people today are the same happiness level as older people were 20 years ago. But young people today used to be the second happiest group, and now they're either flat, like the same as people in midlife, or in some countries, they're actually the least happy group.

33:43And that's true in Scandinavia, too. So Scandinavia is still generally where you find the happiest populations, but their young people are no longer so happy. But we, almost by definition, because it's only been 10 or 15 years, but we don't know the long-term impact. So when Gen Z becomes the old people, could they recover and become happy again? They might become happier. But I believe at this point, the damage has been going on for so long. And some people thought like, oh, they'll grow out of it. Like these college students that are so fragile or that are complaining about a book, they won't be able to do this at Google.

34:20They won't be able to act like this. They're going to have to grow up and join the real world. That's what we thought 10 years ago. But it turns out that a lot of these companies are accommodating to this. Now, part of it is, of course, you need to accommodate to levels of mental illness. That's the law, and that's the ethical thing to do. So young workers today have much higher levels of anxiety, depression, and other internalizing disorders. So you have to accommodate to it, but they don't seem to be growing out of it. So people in their 20s are much less happy than people in their 20s used to be.

34:46It's not just a teen thing. And again, if you go through puberty is when your brain is changing and assuming adult position. If you're not socialized by your culture, by the elders in your culture, by your older siblings by books and movies that your culture thinks are good if instead it's just 10 million little snippets of nothing on tick tock if that's what's wiring up your brain during puberty there's a good chance that it's going to be permanent and by per i don't mean like anyone who improves their habits can improve their outcomes i'm not saying a fatalist like you're locked in but when we look at a whole generation we're looking at averages and the odds that the average or that all of these people in their 20s, are going to quit social media, try to regain control of their attention, try to develop some discipline.

35:30That's not going to happen. So I think we are going to see an echo where Gen Z, all the way through their life course, is going to look different and diminished compared to the millennials or Gen X before them. Okay, so let's assume that you're right. You got seven pieces of evidence. So the next question for everybody listening is, okay, so now what do we do at this point? What's the collective response we should be making? That's a good way to put the collective response. I think that's what I brought to this topic. I haven't been studying this my whole life. I've just been studying it for eight years, but intensively for six years.

36:04What I brought was the sensibility of a social psychologist. And so I think the people who were researching it before, they didn't seem to fully grasp the degree to which what everyone was doing was kind of forced by what everyone else was doing. It was a collective action problem. The kids all had to be on Instagram back in 2012 because everyone else was getting on Instagram and they had to have a smartphone. Nowadays, you have to have a smartphone in sixth grade in a lot of places because everyone else has a smartphone in sixth grade. So what I did in the anxious generation was at the end, I said, okay, let's understand that this is a collective action trap.

36:35The kids are in it. The parents are in it. Even the companies are in it. Because if Instagram or if Meta was to do the right thing and not let on people under 13 years old, which is what the law is supposed to be, if they actually kicked off people under 13, they'd all just go to TikTok. So the companies themselves are trapped in a collective action problem. They're competing viciously to get younger and younger and younger users. So the way out of a collective action trap is with collective action. So what I laid out in the book is four norms. And if we do these four norms, then we'll save Gen Alpha.

37:04We'll save the kids. Gen Alpha, birth year 2011, 2012, we don't really know yet, but roughly in there. So the kids who are just beginning puberty now, that generation, if we can do these four norms, we can make a big impact on their mental health and their strength and their competence and their confidence. Here they are. No smartphone before high school. You can give a phone watch, you can give a flip phone, but don't give them a supercomputer with an app store and push notifications. Don't give them all that stuff, which is going to take over their lives. Wait until they're in high school for that.

37:32Ideally, we'd wait longer, but the world is making kids have a smartphone. So let's just clear it out of middle school. Second norm, no social media before 16. This should be a law. The current law says 13 with zero enforcement. The companies have no obligation to check ages. Australia has raised the age to 16, in part because the wife of one of the politicians there read The Anxious Generation said to her husband in South Australia, said, Peter, you got to read this book. You got to do something about it. And so they developed first in South Australia, then the whole country, a law that'll take effect in December that kids are going to have to be 16 to open an account or to maintain their account.

38:06And that would be huge because there's really no way to use these things safely. Once you're on these algorithm-driven, engagement-based business models, even if they could take away all the bad content, you still would get addicted, huge social comparison, you wouldn't sleep as much, all these problems would still be there. So raise the age to 16, be done with it. Treat it like drinking, driving, gambling. There's all sorts of things that are appropriate for adults, not appropriate for children to be talking with strange men who are gonna sextort them. The third norm is phone-free schools. And this has been the most spectacular success because the teachers can't stay on the phones.

38:39Can you imagine standing in front of a classroom and trying to teach anything while half the kids are on social media, especially TikTok and Instagram, they're watching short videos. A quarter are playing video games and a quarter are watching porn. Okay, it's not a quarter watching porn, but sometimes it is. The point is that the teachers have long hated the phones. There's no reason why kids should have phones while they're in school. If there's a smartphone buzzing in your pocket and you're addicted to it it, and everyone else is texting, you've got to check. And so test scores are literally dropping around the world and across the country.

39:12Our kids literally know less than kids did 15 years ago because they're so distracted. They're not able to pay attention in school. Once we propose, here are the four norms. One of them is voluntary schools. Teachers, parents, people jumped into action saying, yes, we wanted to do this for so long, but we were afraid of the number of parents that would complain, the parents that would say, no, I have to be able to text my son. What if he's anxious? I need to text with him. No, we don't. this is part of the problem if you think that you do the kid needs to learn to separate and learn how to deal with the people in school you need eight hours apart is good for your kid good for you so this is just an amazing success a number of countries have done it brazil within 10 months of the book coming up brazil had banned all phones in school and 19 american states have done that if you're listening to this and your state is one of the 19 or so that only banned it during class time i'm really sorry for you but your legislators made a mistake because while that will help a little bit during class you don't get any of the benefits from an all-day ban when schools ban phones for the whole day we always hear the same thing there's laughter in the hallway we haven't heard that in 10 years the lunchroom is loud we haven't heard that in a long time kids are playing games with each other they're playing soccer at lunch rather than sitting on their phones for the lunch period so only a phone free school the distraction free school the whole school day that brings miraculous results.

40:32Oh, discipline problems drop. Many schools are to some ballpark of 50%. These are not small drops in one of the most important outcome variables. Are kids getting in fights? Are they destroying the bathroom? All that. If they can't take a video of it, why would you do it? Why would you trick someone into coming into the bathroom so you can beat the hell out of them if you can't take a video and post it? And so once you go phone free for the school day, discipline problems plummet. And then the fourth norm is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. Because the point isn't just take away the devices and hope that they play with each other.

41:05It's rearranged life so that they're actually allowed to walk out the front door without you. They're allowed to go over to a friend's house who lives three blocks away when you're nine or 10 years old. Everyone used to walk around by the age of eight. You and I grew up during a huge crime wave, maybe not in Hawaii, but in most of the country, there was a huge crime wave in the 70s and 80s, but kids still played outside. Now crime is way, way, way down. Drunk driving is way, way, way down. Child deaths are way, way, way down. The world is so much safer than it was when you and I were growing up.

41:35But parents are afraid. We've lost trust in each other. We're freaked out by things we see on social media and television. So we've got to overcome that. We've got to find ways to let our kids out to play and develop a sense of independence and learn that if there's a setback, they can handle it. They don't need to call for reinforcements by phone or text. So those are the four norms. If we do that, we change childhood, we roll back the phone-based childhood, we restore the play-based childhood, and Gen Alpha is going to come out a lot better. Up next on Remarkable People. How about if we come together?

42:03How about if groups of families come together in a neighborhood and say, we're all going to wait to give our kids a smartphone. And our kids can go to each other's houses and play without us walking them three blocks. We can take collective action on our own as families, as groups in neighborhoods, as schools, and as towns.

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43:38You know, it just gave us that runway to be able to breathe a little bit. Then you get to focus on the cooking of the food and making the experience great. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards. Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. To play devil's advocate a little bit, isn't one of the interpretations of that, that to protect privacy and stuff like that, you have to invade privacy. I mean, how do you actually enforce something in Australia that you have to be over 16 and kids are going to figure out a way around that?

44:25They're going to find a site that doesn't participate in that. There's so many loopholes. How do you make this work in practical terms? So if your question is how do you make it work perfectly, the answer is you can't. Same thing with alcohol. We have laws against drinking, but kids are going to find a way around. We have laws against heroin and marijuana, but kids are going to find a way around. So perfection is impossible here. I grant that. But we as a society, we have 100 years of experience age-gating the physical world. We know what's dangerous. You have to have a fence around a swimming pool.

44:57You have to be 18 or 21 to gamble. We've had fences in the real world. But with the virtual world, we just said, oh, whatever. It's hard to do. It's hard to age-gate. It's true. It's harder than in the real world, you show a driver's license to buy beer. It's harder. so how about we give up how about we just say it's hard so let the companies have the kids we don't need the kids anyway let them take a second generation and what australia has done i think is really brilliant they didn't try to legislate how to do this because governments aren't good at that what they said is for the first time you guys are making the money from this you guys are hurting the kids you figure it out and look there are a lot of industries that already age gate you can buy alcohol you can buy all sorts of things online but you have to age you can gamble online there's age gating.

45:38So age gating exists. Often it uses a government ID. And what the Australia bill says is you can't only ask for a government ID. So Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, they all, it's up to them. You do it how you want. And probably what I'm hoping will happen, I imagine it'll happen. If you want to open an account on TikTok, let's say you put in your age as you currently have to do. And then rather than just accepting that you were born 18 years ago, which is what they often do with the default. So on Snapchat, if you sign up for an account, it helpfully suggests that you were born exactly 18 years ago.

46:08So every 11 year old opens a Snapchat account. A lot of them just say they're 18 and then there's no restrictions. That's got to stop. So instead of just putting in whatever you want, it'll take you another page that will say, okay, here's five ways that you can verify your age. One will be, you can show us a photo of your driver's license or passport or whatever. That would be one. Another, so I have clear. Do you clear where you go to airports and you have a quick line so if you have a clear account boom you're done you're in like because all that happens would be like meta or tick tock they would just send over a call you type in your clear password or whatever it is on the way but they would send over a call to clear or there's so many different companies that will age get so they can pick the five or ten companies that they want to make as options and clear would just send back yes or no.

46:58Because the query would come, is this person 13 or is this, in this case, 16, is this person 16? And clear doesn't need to even know what it is you're doing, just they got a query about you and then they just say yes or no. And so that's one way. There are so many other ways to do it. And so I understand people's concerns about privacy because if it was TikTok taking your driver's license or TikTok taking all your information, look, they already do take your information. But all these companies get hacked at some point. So I do appreciate the concern about privacy. But to say there could be a risk of privacy, so let's just condemn all future generations to exploitation and diminished cognitive capacity.

47:39No, I don't think we should do that. And what about the concern that, you know, so now you're 16 and we have been over protecting you up to 16 and at 16, the gates, the floodgates open wide open. And sure, that's a good because one of the themes in my book is that we've been overprotecting our kids in the real world. We need to back off, let them out. And we've been underprotecting them online. We need to do something. We need to begin doing something. We can't just let the companies rip them to shreds with zero liability, zero accountability. So far, not a single company has lost a lawsuit. They've paid nothing for the millions of kids that they've harmed and the thousands that are dead.

48:17It'd be one thing if we were keeping them hermetically sealed from the internet. And then at 16, we say, here you go, porn, gambling, everything. No one is hermetically sealed from the internet. They've been Googling things since they were five or seven. They will have been on all kinds of sites. They will have watched all kinds of YouTube videos because the law isn't that you can't watch YouTube. That would be crazy. We rely on YouTube, a lot of us, and we all do. The law says you can't open an account, meaning you can't sign a contract with a company that is known to hurt kids that will exploit you that will take your data without your parents knowledge or your parents consent you have to be 16 to do that so it's not that they're not going to know what the internet is they'll know all about it they just won't be able to have an account where an algorithm is now hooked up to them to hook them with whatever is most engaging for them that we will delay algorithm manipulation will be delayed until 16.

49:14and at that point their brain is most of the way through puberty. It's through the intense period of puberty. So there are all kinds of proposals to make the internet safer. Let's try to cut this pro-suicide content by 90%. Let's try to remove more beheadings so that kids only see a beheading every now and then, not so often. So we could try to make it better. But as far as I'm concerned, you can put all those reforms in one bucket and then put age gating in the other. I'll take the age gating. And that's going to transform kids' lives. And what if I'm Mark Zuckerberg listening to this and either my belief or my rationalization is my fiduciary responsibility is to the shareholders, it's not to kids.

49:55So it's not that I'm a bad person. I'm fulfilling my fiduciary responsibilities. It seems that a lot is being done in terms of fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. So first, the idea that an executive has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders is disputed. Some economists interpret the law that way. Your fiduciary duty is to the company, not to the shareholders. You have a duty of the shareholders. You need to repay them. You need to help them earn a profit. But it's not certain in legal circles that is literally a fiduciary duty. It has some things in common with it, but some things are different.

50:29Secondly, the fact that you have a duty of your shareholders does not mean you have zero duty to the planet or the people. It does not mean that you should exploit children up to the point where you might lose lawsuits. And since so far they've never lost any lawsuits, that means there is no stopping point. And Mark Zuckerberg has made that clear. When, you know, now, six months ago, we weren't thinking about chatbots. We didn't know about all the deaths, all the boys who've been urged to kill themselves by their chatbots. We didn't know about all the sex talk that kids are doing with chatbots.

50:57We didn't know that Mark Zuckerberg said when they were trying to make the safety guidelines for Meta's AI, some were concerned that these ai's are going to do sexual fantasies with anyone there's no age gating so anyone can do sexual fantasies how about we put some guards so if we think it's a child how about we don't do that and we know from reporting the wall street journal i think it was jeff horowitz that zuckerberg specifically gave the instruction like no make it as engaging as possible he weakened the guardrails for children because he wants it as engaging as possible I've met him twice.

51:30I've talked with him. I read a lot about him. I know he doesn't want to hurt children, but everyone says he's a very, very competitive person. Nick Clegg said in his recent book, he's the most competitive person he's ever met. So I don't even know that Zuckerberg is trying to give a return to his shareholders. I think Zuckerberg just really, he just wants to win. He's very competitive and channeled in the right way. That is great for a free market society. But that is only if you have functioning markets where there are constraints on the externalities that you can impose on innocent people. and meta has such a long history of telling us they're going to reform telling us they care about kids but there's just insult after insult injury after injury and specifically saying that chatbots can talk about sex with kids is unbelievable oh and it wasn't just this one thing that he said in an interview a little later a document came out it was their internal company policy that said they can have sensual conversations and they gave examples of what's permissible it's disgusting Absolutely disgusting.

52:28The chatbot talking to a 13-year-old saying, oh, I would bring you to the bed and I would rip off your shirt. This is completely disgusting. And this document was signed by the chief legal officer, by the chief ethics officer, by all the top brass. This is official meta policy. We're putting out a product that will do sexual fantasy with any nine-year-old who says she's 13. You know, I'm sorry, but the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is very competitive doesn't mean shit to me. I don't give a shit how competitive you think you are. It's still not right. That's right. Ethics, right. And this is the eternal problem in a free market society.

53:12We get all the benefits. You've been right there in Silicon Valley. The benefits from the tech sector are beyond calculation. I love tech, and I used to think it was making the world better. And in many ways, it still is. But we now have some technologies, first social media and now AI, where the trajectory looks incredibly dark. Yeah. What do you think of a concept that, to use the metaphor, it's kind of like the process of getting a driver's license that, you know, there's a certain minimum age, you get a learner's permit, you might have to take a driving class before you get a full license.

53:48because right now, isn't it the day you're 16 and can prove it, bada bing, bada bang, you're in. What about the day you're 16, you cannot just jump in a car and drive. You have to pass a written test. But I'm going to challenge that metaphor and apply a different one because I recognize that the internet is different from driving because of free speech issues. And especially in the United States with the First Amendment, which I love, I'm a big fan of the First Amendment compared to other countries. And so I would never say, the internet, so many dangers. Kids need a driver's license before they can use the internet.

54:24We'll make a kid's license so that if you're a kid, you can go to these sites. Okay, no, I would not want to see that. That would be a clear violation of the First Amendment. No, that's out of the question. But here's a better analogy using cars. When cars first came out, there were no safety features. It was really just, can we get this thing to go? And if you crash into a tree, the glass breaks and punctures you because it's window glass. And there are no seatbelts and et cetera, et cetera. So over time, they get a little better, but not much better. And in the 60s, Ralph Nader writes a book called Unsafe at Any Speed, pointing out that we're putting people in these vehicles that are beautiful.

55:02Pinto is not beautiful. That's true. Because after the gas crisis, you're right, they get small and stupid. but when nader was writing he was showing these companies they're all competing on looks okay they're competing on style great we have stylish cars that's nice but they see safety as a cost like why would we put in seat belts and safety glass if it's going to raise our production cost and consumers aren't asking for it so let's not do it so nader writes this book unsafe at any speed and i forget where he said but in the book or later he says he imagined that someday he hopes companies will compete on safety.

55:37And it only happened because government mandated. They said, okay, wow, here are some minimum safety standards. If you're going to put people in cars, you have to have seatbelts and eventually you have to have airbags. You have to have all these things. And cars got so much safer. That I think is the right analogy here. Right now, the tech company, the social media companies are competing viciously, passionately for engagement. That's it. It's all engagement. Can we grab this kid before another company grabs him? It's for adults too, but I'm focusing on the kids. They're all competing on engagement.

56:04And now with AI slop, now it's, oh, let's have AI. Our users weren't making weird enough stuff. Let's have AI make even weirder stuff that'll hook people because it's so weird and interesting. So how about if government says, here's some minimum safety stint. This is not about speech. If you are going to have children on your site, if you are going to have millions of children on your site, you can't be connecting them to strange men who have a history of sextortion on your site. You have to have ways to block contact with strangers, perhaps in one setting, or to reduce, if Snapchat were to remove the quick ad feature, that's the way drug dealers and sex tortionists get to kids that they don't know.

56:41You have to have features that protect kids. You have to set defaults to private. If government were to say, here's some minimum safety standards, that would have no political ramification. It doesn't help the left or the right. It would work everywhere in the world. It doesn't depend on content moderation. Content moderation is bad news, hard to make it work, always going to overcorrect. The left or the right is going to hate it. So I never talk or think about content moderation. I'm totally focused on design. We designed cars dangerously before the 60s. Now we design them safe and they're so much safer.

57:10We need to do the same for social media platforms, which are the companies that own our kids' lives. Well, Jonathan, I understand what you're saying. But then when all these tech billionaire bros are showing up at the inauguration and donating a million dollars and being on stage and promising$500 billion in U.S. investments and giving you a glass and gold trophy, I don't think you can expect the government to reign them in. I do not expect the US government to reign them in for the very reasons that you just said. It seems very clear to me that Meta has unlimited influence over Congress because they have unlimited money and they spend it.

57:46They spent it to block the Kids Online Safety Act. So I am not putting any faith or hope in Congress. But guess what? There are a lot of other governments in the world. So the state governments are acting really fast. It turns out Republican governors and legislators have kids and they see it and they're acting. And it turns out that democratic governors and legislators have kids and they see the problem and they're acting. So there's been huge action at the state level, especially on phone-free schools. That was done in a flash. A lot of states, my state in New York, Governor Kathy Hochul has been great, regulations on the use of algorithms.

58:23So there are things you can do at the state level. And guess what? There are a lot of other countries in the world. And the EU and the UK have both enacted some laws that are a little complicated, but we'll see how they work out. Australia has done something very simple and powerful. We'll see how that works out. So there are governments that can act. And I wrote the book as an American, meaning we don't have a functioning legislature in our country. We have a thing that sits in Washington and I don't know what they do, but they don't respond to the needs of the country. So I wrote the book, assuming we'll never get any help from legislators.

58:57I wasn't even thinking about state and international. I wrote the book saying, we're on our own here. We have to solve this ourselves without any help from government. How are we going to do that? How about if we come together? How about if groups of families come together in a neighborhood and say, we're all going to wait to give our kids a smartphone and our kids can go to each other's houses and play without us walking them three blocks. We can take collective action on our own as families, as groups in neighborhoods, as schools, and as towns. And that's happening all over the country. Okay.

59:29My last question for you is, what do you say to a parent who says, it's too late, my kid's already hooked, what can I do? Well, if your kids are 18 and out of the house, it is very hard. You don't have much influence over them. I hope you would maybe get them the audio book of the anxious generation. Gen Z has difficulty reading books, but they're fine on audio books. I hope you would talk to them, but if they're out of the house, it's very hard. Now, even then, it's not too late. I teach a course here at NYU called Flourishing, the business school here. It's all sophomores, mostly sophomores.

1:00:07They're about 19 years old, and they make amazing progress regaining their attention, getting time back, being able to talk more deeply because they're not always checking their phone and always being interrupted. So even in your early 20s, it's not too late to change. It's just hard to make someone change. And if your kids are, say, 10 to 12, and they already have a phone or an iPad, and they're already on these things, you can change things. You can take it away. It's going to be a lot less painful if you do it with the parents of their friends. The kids are not terrified of losing the iPad or iPhone.

1:00:39They're terrified of being the only anyone who loses it, because then you'll be an outcast and you'll be not in the mix. So try to be like a social psychologist about that. Like, I understand that this is how you communicate with your friends. I know you opened an Instagram account three months ago, but you're just going to have to close it down. And so are your friends. So if you do it together, you can do it. A very important rule that anyone can do, you don't even need your friends, is you just say no devices in the bedroom overnight. So everything comes out of the bedroom at 9.30 or 10 o 'clock.

1:01:07Learn to go to sleep with a book. learn to wake up with an alarm clock, because the really bad stuff especially happens when a kid is talking to strangers overnight. That's the main thing. You definitely want to stop that. There's still a lot you can do. And I guess I'll just close by saying you're not alone. All of us are facing this. Even if your kids are five, six, seven, there's a good chance they're already hooked on an iPad. You've seen them play video games that create compulsions and addictions and irritability when they're separated. So we're all seeing this. We're all in this together.

1:01:34For help, for advice, for resources, please go to anxiousgeneration.com. We have all kinds of resources for parents, for teachers, for legislators. Also go to letgrow.org, which I started with Lenore Skenazy, who wrote a book called Free Range Kids. A lot of advice for schools and parents about how to be a more free range parent, how to let your kid have the kinds of experiences that will make them healthy and confident and capable out in the world. And also please subscribe to my sub stack, which is afterbabel.com. It's free. You don't have to pay anything. And that's where we put out our research.

1:02:06That's where we'll be putting out the document with the seven different lines of evidence. So there's a lot of information. And there are like 100 other organizations. We have those all listed at Anxious Generation. Like a couple of mothers got together. They share the concern. They start an organization. They're doing great work on phone-free schools. There's Wait Until 8th. There's Mama, the Mothers Against Media Addiction. So there are a lot of organizations that you can join, that you can get information from. Yeah, we're all in this together. And we've got to win. There isn't an alternative.

1:02:32Wow. Oh, Jonathan, thank you very much for all this information and inspiration. I recently became a grandfather, so my kids are all. Congratulations. I am going to insist that my son and daughter-in-law listen to this episode, and I'll get them a copy of your books. Thank you very much. Wonderful. Your grandchild is a little too young now, but we're coming out with a children's version of the book on December 30th. It's called The Amazing Generation. It's written for kids 8 to 12 years old. Jonathan, thank you so much. Let me thank Madison Niesmer, the co-producer, Jeff C., co-producer, Tessa Niesmer, researcher, and Shannon Hernandez, sound design engineer, because there's a whole team of people trying to help you be remarkable.

1:03:15And thank you so much, Jonathan. All the best to you. Well, thank you. What fun to talk with you. You radiate positivity, and I had a lot of fun.

1:03:27This is Remarkable People.