#766 - Jonathan Haidt - The Hidden Dangers Of Social Media On Mental Health

26:53So life on a smartphone, what I'm calling the phone -based childhood, takes up so much time. There is no time for hobbies or reading or anything. And so Gene shows these dramatic graphs of the number who never read a book. those go up and the number of books people read on average goes down. We have a nation of young people who have read very, very few books. Is there anything else that we need to say about the education system and what it's got wrong? Maybe from a disciplinary and standpoint, we know about this sort of early thrusting of academic achievement onto kids in the hopes that it kind of starting earlier pushes them out ahead more late.

27:35Is there anything else aside from the technology that the education which I've got wrong. Oh my goodness. Yes. So one of the, you know, in this book, I'm trying to be totally not political and just really just focus on the kids. But since I'm talking with you, Chris, I'll share some other thoughts related to other parts of life. It's fine, Jonathan.

27:56So education schools have have been accused of being ideologically progressive since the 1930s. And they are. They lean left. The military leans right, the police lean right, the arts lean left, education, education schools lean left. That's just the way it is. That's not necessarily a problem. But what I've been focused on since 2011 as a social scientist is the loss of viewpoint diversity when everyone trying to figure something out. If everyone's on the left or the right, you don't get your confirmation biases challenged. And you start getting what I call you start getting structural stupidity.

28:33That is, you know, someone can say something really stupid and and no one dares to challenge them because if you challenge them you look like you're a conservative or you know, or a sexist or a racist or something. You'll be accused of something so people just keep their mouth shut. I get emails from students in grad programs and education periodically and they say basically help. I came here to learn how to teach. All we learn how to do is racial justice and equity. Like we never learn, you know, everything is oppression, everything's racism. We don't learn how to teach. So I can't say this is true for all ed schools, but for the elite schools, I think they are large, they've become very, very ideological.

29:10They were that before 2015. But in the kind of the great awakening that we've had in the real intensification of sort of the left -right culture war, you know, we can see the right going off the deep end in a lot of ways. But, you know, So if we're talking about schools, it's really the left and the education schools. So I think that there's always been a debate between progressive educational ideals and conservative. And I've always seen that as a yin yang sort of thing. Like you actually need the tension of them pushing. But since there are very few conservatives left in higher education, in the social sciences and in education schools, it's all now very, very ideologically progressive.

29:45And that means you have a lot more the gentle parenting, the focus on equality about comes by race, regardless of inputs, let's get rid of tests, let's get rid of honors classes. So I think education schools have been working very, very hard to lose the trust of centrists, Republicans, and anyone who actually cares that their kids get an education. So again, you know, in the current book on mental health, I don't want to get into it, but if we're talking about what's happening to our kids schools and education, I think I think the educational establishment is becoming structurally stupid. And we saw clear evidence of this in San Francisco during COVID where the school board was, you know, they were totally focused on pulling down statues of Abe Lincoln and renaming schools.

30:32And the citizens of San Francisco, who are very far left, were so fed up with it, they voted out the school board. So yeah, I think the education system is becoming, in this country, very, very ideological. I talked to me about the newest data that you found around smartphones. You know, you've been circling this wagon for quite a while. Yeah. It's spent a good bit of time on this book since your last one, which was something not too dissimilar. What are the primary harms of technology on kids and what's the latest data of other? Sure. So there's been a, you know, a lot, there's a huge academic literature on whether we all agree that there's a correlation.

31:10We all agree. It turns out even if there's a few major sort of skeptics and critics and then there's gene twangy on the other side. And that's sort of where a lot of the debate has been. And it turns out we actually agree on the size of the correlation between how much time you spend on social media and how anxious and depressed you are. When you say we agree, do you mean you and Gene or you and the other side? No, no, me and the other side. They've done a number of meta -analyses and they say, you know, the correlation is around 0 .1 to 0 .15. But that's for boys and girls together. Whereas Gene and I, many others have found, the correlation is much bigger for girls.

31:42social media harms girls much more than boys. So, Gene and I found that the correlation for girls is about 0 .2. Well, that's actually pretty much the same. If they say it's 0 .1 to 0 .15 correlation for everyone, that means they're basically saying the correlation is around 0 .15 maybe even higher for girls. So we actually agree. And that correlation is actually pretty big in public health effect. It's not big in a mathematical sense of variance explained, But it's about the same size as you get from many other public health things You know calcium consumption and later osteoporosis. I mean all sorts of effects are around that size So we actually agree on that but then the debate They say it's small.

32:21We say it's actually as big as everything else The big debate is okay. There's a correlation but correlation doesn't show causation You know, we have to prove causation and so I've been collecting, I started this in 2019 after I was challenged on the Codling the American Mind. I said, well, let's get to the bottom of this. Is there a mental health crisis? Because back then, the critics were saying, there isn't even a mental health crisis. It's just, you know, self -report stuff. It's an illusion. Well, now it's clear. No, it was not an illusion. The rates have been going up since 2012. Now the question is what caused it.

32:56And I've been collecting experiments with these big Google docs. If you go to Jonathan at www .thesanite .com slash reviews. You can find all of our Google Docs, create with Zach Roush. And we have one that lists all the studies we can find that are correlational studies, the longitudinal studies, the experimental studies. Sorry, and this is like getting too geeky, and all but the point is, there's like, we have about 2025 true experiments that we found. And the large majority of them do show causal effects. And the ones that don't show causal effects is very interesting. If you look at the six or seven that fail to find an effect of like ticking kids off phones.

33:32They all use a very short time period. So if your experiment is we're gonna make kids, or college students, stay off of social media for a week, you know, or three days, and then we're gonna see how they're doing. And guess what? You take someone who's heavily addicted, you take away their drug, and you check in on them a day later or a week later. How are they doing? Not well. But the studies that waited a month almost all find they're doing a lot better, they're much happier. So, you know, I don't know what else we can do here. Like, we've got the correlation evidence, we've got the experimental evidence, the experimental evidence shows a clear pattern where if you refine it to the ones that match theoretically what's happening, the if that gets bigger, you've got the quasi exp, I mean, you know, people should go look at this Google Doc.

34:15I mean, I don't know what else we can do to convince people that it's not just correlational. There's a lot of causal evidence. What ways could you be wrong about this evidence? So on the experimental evidence, the published experiments, my critics say that if you look at each of these studies, they're mostly pretty weak. Some of them have small sample sizes, just one or two hundred. Some of them, there's some other flaw. And so you can, you know, you can find, you can definitely find flaws in most of the experiments. So it's possible that they're right and that only experiments that find an effect get published, that is conceivable.

34:58But there are so many different lines of evidence here. And so I would ask listeners to think about, we have a situation in which the parents see the problem. The parents whose kids are dead think that it wasn't, it was only because of social media that the kid committed suicide. They can see the harassment taking place online. So you have the parents saying this is this is causal. I don't know any parents who say oh no it's wonderful for my kid to be on social media. The teachers see it, the principal see it, the psychologists see it, the kids themselves see it. You had Freya India on. She is one of the best writers on what is happening to girls.

35:43And Freya published a great essay on on my sub -stack. I think she referred to it on your show on the algorithmic conveyor belt of just you know, once you express an interest in something, the algorithms are going to pull you all the way to eating disorders or self -harm or whatever it is. So given that I can't find, I literally cannot find anything written by someone in Gen Z that says, no, we love our phones. Our phones are great. Our phones make our world better. Social media is so good for it. Like, I can't even find anyone saying that. But we have lots of people like Freya, we're saying this is destroying us.

36:17So, when you look at the experimental evidence that uses very limited manipulations, one very particular operationalization of the question finds a certain effect size, you got to ask yourself, which is more plausible that everyone is wrong and all the experiments are wrong? Or maybe it's the case that something is really happening here. What is the proposed mechanism by people that say smartphones don't have this big of an impact on mental health because the mechanism is what's being debated. The change in mental health is pretty undeniable. We have very, very high rates of whatever. It's like the most cataclysmic language about girls between age 12 and 16.

36:59It's like persistent feelings of hopelessness or listlessness or something like just this like awful, pochaloptic language. What are the people who disagree with you saying is the mechanism that's causing this to happen? They don't. They don't. That's the amazing thing. You look at the graphs and they go up in very much the same way, same time in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia. We've got graphs of all this. I hope your listeners will go to afterbabel .com. That's my sub -stack. It's free. We've got all the graphs from all these countries. We've got the world's repository of data internationally.

37:36It all starts in the early 2010s. My critics say, well, the amount of variants explained is very small. So, you know, using social media can only explain the small amount of variance. Therefore, it can't explain the explosion and we're done here. And then I say, well, what do you think does explain it? No one had no one even offers. There's no alternate theory. The global financial crisis is at least global, but that was 2008. So why is it that nothing happens to teen mental health until 2012, 2013, by which time unemployment is dropping stock markets rising, everything's getting better. So the global financial crisis doesn't work.

38:16There is no other explanation that I can find, not even one that's been proposed. Other than the loss of the play -based childhood to be replaced by the phone -based childhood, and that really happened between 2010 and 2015 is when the phone -based childhood came in. That explains the globalness of it, it explains the suddenness of it, It explains the gender difference. It explains everything that I found. And my critics say, well, we're not convinced, but we're not even going to offer an alternative explanation. So boring, super lame. All right. What are the primary homes of technology -owned kids?

38:52So once you see that kids have to grow up in a physical world, we evolved outdoors, nature, animals, people. When kids grow up on screens, so it's not just about social media. When you grow up with what what I'm calling a phone based childhood where you're spending of the latest data I think is nine hours a day average for American kids 11 hours Freya just said there's a British study. It was like 10 or 11 hours a day for British kids on Their phones which includes other includes tablets, I think and video games I think in any case doesn't include homework or schoolwork just recreational time nine to 11 hours a day that pushes out everything else.

39:30And so what I say in the book is that there are four foundational harms. Once you see that it's taken up 10 hours a day, pushing everything else out, what matters? The most important thing is time with other kids, time with friends. That's crucial. I mean, all of your, in person, that's right, in person. And we'll talk about whether virtual is good, it is not. But time actually with other kids, other with your friends. and that has plummeted since 2012. It was dropping before in the earlier internet age, but boy, it really speeds up in the smartphone social media age. And so kids, the most nutritious thing your kid can do is be out playing with other kids, and this is even true for teenagers, hanging out with no adults telling them what to do.

40:15So that's crucial, that's really nutritious as it were. Now, if kids, you might say, well, but you know, they're spending of this 10, 11 hours, a lot of it is spent virtually interacting, you know, like on video games. Well, let's look at multiplayer video games. Now, those are at least synchronous. Synchronous is good. You're talking, so that's actually a good thing. The girls on social media, it's asynchronous. I comment, I wait anxiously for you to comment on my comment. And so we're not really connecting. We're actually performing over anxious. Video games are at least synchronous. But you actually, you tell me I was never a gamer.

40:48It seems to me that you look at me and just Yeah, you look like a game. You're tough. I wasted a lot of hours playing video games. Am I wrong? I wasted a lot of hours playing video games. You're a exception. There you go. Stereotypes sometimes have a basis in reality. So, oh, look, basically, you're a healthy male. That means you almost certainly were playing video games. I mean, that's just the way it's been since the 90s. So, but you tell me, in video games, you ever get in fights? Like you get mad at each other because someone broke a rule? Oh, how does that happen? Because I assume that the game itself regulates all the interactions.

41:26How do you mean like fights in game? Right. No, no, no, no. I mean, you just have disagreements. You have disagreements. You shout and you say that that was that was totally stupid. Like it's more in fine. No, but what I mean is like think about when you when you were when your friends played a, you know, pick up soccer game or baseball game or whatever when your kids and someone says, no, you know, it was out of bounds. No, it wasn't. Yes, it was. No, it wasn't like you argue about it. And what I'm trying to say is the arguments are really nutritious. The arguments, John Piaget, the great developmental psychologist, really talked a lot about this when kids play marbles.

41:58They get all kinds of disputes. And that's crucial. They learn how to work it out. So you tell me, when you're playing video games in an average day, you know, you're four hours of video game playing, do you get those kind of fights about? Yes, it was. No, it wasn't. Yes, it wasn't. It was everything. The game is the game mandates the rules set for you. Exactly. There is no mediating needed. That's right. There you go. So it's just like if I said we're going to replace all your kids food with rice, white rice, and then Someone said, yeah, that that should be just as good. I mean, it's got just the same number of calories You know, you might say yeah, but it's missing all the other nutrients and that's what we do when we put boys on video games Yeah, it's social.

42:38It's great fun. It has some benefits. It gives them some social calories. They're talking But it's missing a lot of the nutrients that you get from face -to -face interaction. Okay face to face interaction that gets squeezed. That's one. That's just one. I'll go faster on the rest of them. Number two, sleep deprivation. When kids have a screen in their room, again, these things are designed to be addictive. And when you let your kids spend hours with a device designed to be addictive, sometimes they get addicted. And so the kids who have a who have dependency, they're going to take their phone into bed with them under the covers.

43:11You know, mom can't see that the light is still on because it's under the covers. So social media in particular, and browsing the internet takes away a lot of sleep. And if you take away sleep from teenagers who are already not getting enough, they're going to be crankier, less healthy, they're going to gain weight, there's all kinds of things that happen physiologically and emotionally, which exacerbate mental illness epidemics. That's two. The loss of sleep. The third is attention fragmentation. One of the main things kids need to do in, as teens, your brain is rewiring throughout childhood.

43:44Your brain is sort of pretty big by the time you're five or six. And then a lot of it was just the rewiring the myelination of circuits. In your teen years, the frontal cortex myelinates, the prefrontal cortex especially, is the seed of executive control. Can you set a goal, keep your eye on the goal, do the things necessary to reach the goal, even though there are distractions? And as adults, we've all learned to do that to some degree. But crucially in that learning, was those teen years when the frontal cortex is really laying down, you know, like, how do you do this? And instead, what we do is it's like we put little distractors, you know, if a lot of the kids are getting interrupted every couple of minutes for their whole life, they never even spend 10 minutes without an interruption.

44:27This appears to interfere with their development of executive function. So we're creating young people who, when they come to the office, they can't just pay attention to something. They need more stimulation and then they don't pay full attention. So attention fragmentation is devastating to their ability to be productive and creative. And then the fourth foundational harm is addiction. You know, I get in big arguments with this with some of the researchers who are study video games, who think video games are good. and they point out, you know, most boys are having a great time and there's no sign of trouble, and that's true.

45:01That's true. Most boys who play video games, I can't say that they're damaged by it. But 5 or 10 % are the ones who develop problematic gaming who have compulsive use when they're not playing, they become surly, their brain is deficient in dopamine, they are addicted, they have a dependency. If you are going through your puberty years as a boy, getting this incredible amount of fixed stimulation from Fortnite or whatever game you're playing. This is, in addition to messing up your life, you're not spending time with friends, you're not learning how to talk to girls, whatever it is, this is likely to have some very lasting, possibly permanent effect.

45:44So those are the four foundational harms. They affect boys and girls, girls on social media, not so much video games. And then there's all the specific harms that affect boys and girls we can get into those. But if all you knew was, here's this consumer product, it's going to take your kid away from his friends. It's going to deprive him of sleep. It's going to fragment his ability to focus. And it's going to addict him. What do you say? Do you want this for your kid? Like, who would ever say yes? But we did. Is it right to call social media use an addiction? I had this discussion with Andrew Cuban a couple of years ago and I sort of yeah, what did he say?

46:25He said it looks to him more like a compulsion than an addiction. It feels like compulsive behavior He said you know if you if you saw an animal Scratching scratching scratching scratching in the corner looking for food Scratching scratching scratching scratching scratching you think that animal's sick and it it feels to me You know, you're on a plane. How many times is it's such a great example? You're on a plane. You have no signal. You know you have no signal. You pull your phone out, check it up, you go through the little cycle of apps or whatever it is that you do and you go, ah yeah, goes back down.

46:58So to me, that seems compulsive. Now obviously addictive things can have a compulsion. That's the reason I haven't got anything long and thin that I can use, but that's the reason that smokers will get pens and chew down on pens. It actually satiates. I think I saw something that's saying that people who have smoking addiction can satiate a little bit of the desire for the next cigarette by actually putting a replacement cigarette in their mouth. So much of it is about the physiological, the movement of that habituated thing. So I mean, the semantics of what is an addiction, where does that cross across into a compulsion?

47:38can something which is addictive lead you to have this sort of obsessive compelled behavior that way you kind of pull this out. It kind of doesn't really matter. But have you got any stress on that? No, I do. I know that among addiction researchers there's a debate about whether behavioral addictions are true addictions. And if you look at what happens in the brain when a person is addicted to heroin or to cocaine, you know, there's, that's incredibly well studied. I don't the details. This is not my Arabic expertise, but that's incredibly well studied. And then I think some of them are saying, when you look at behavioral addictions, it's a little different.

48:12It's not quite the same. Fine. I can totally accept that. But to me, the question is just, let's just take gambling addiction. You know, most of us have been to a casino. The great majority don't have any problem. Don't have any addiction. But a small number, I don't know what the percentage is. I'm guessing it's probably, you know, two to seven percent because that's what I keep finding for behavioral addictions. For some number, they went, they get into a zone, it's straight behaviorist, psychology, stimulus response, variable ratio, reward schedules, they get into a zone and they lose track of time, and they forget their troubles.

48:48And of course, their troubles are in part because they're blowing all their families money on slot machines, but they can't stop. So I think, would you say that a person who compulsively uses slot machines spends most of her family's money so that the family is now bankrupt and yet she still keeps doing it. Would you call that a compulsion or an addiction? Both. Even if you call it, that's fine with me. If you want to call it just a compulsion, that's fine. My point is, whatever that is, the emblematic, which is re -wood, whatever you want to call it, that is what is happening to social media compulsive users.

49:24Whatever you want to call it, it's the same thing. And it's, I mean, in a sense, it's literally the same thing because some of the features of our life on phones were directly copied from casinos. The thing where you pull down to refresh and then it kind of bounces up and you see thing like that was literally copied from slot machines. Shout out to Stan Harris. Yeah, he was a - Yes, Chris Tennis, a hero in all of this. Chris Tennis, really. He brought our attention. Yeah, for sure. All right, so, you know, there's been a lot of talk recently. I've got Daniel Cox coming on. the guy that did that really fantastic study about young boys breaking to the right and young girls breaking to the left.

49:58I've got a lot of sex differences in world view and belief in mental health. What mental health is declining but the ways that it's declining the sort of usage of technology. So talk to me about the sex differences in technology. How do boys and girls use technology differently? Sure. Yeah. So the master variable here, I believe, is a set of motivations that we've talked about psychology for 50 years called agency and communion. So everybody has needs for agency to be an agent to make things happen. You know, a child knocks over a block tower. It's thrilling. I did that. I caused that to fall.

50:37So that's agency. And then communion is connection being part of a group being welcomed and embraced and connecting. So everyone has both motives. But on average, boys have stronger agency motives, and when you let boys and girls choose what to do, the boys are going to gravitate more towards games that allow agency. And so fake war is one of the best examples. They want to practice their skills. Boys, I think, are evolutionary program for hunting and war to enjoy hunting and war. I found this out when I was 29 years old, and for the first time in my life played and paintball with my buddies, and hunting each other, we were mixing with other people, but hunting each other in small groups and shooting guns to try to hit each other was the most thrilling thing we'd ever got you.

51:24Yeah, yeah. So that was really cool. Wow, there's like a room in my heart for being a hunter and a warrior. Like I didn't really know it was there, but it was. So anyway, boys, choose to pursue agency motives. Girls choose to pursue more communion motives. They talk more with each other. As Richard Reeves, this wonderful, wonderful British man who has this, it was been making the case for boys. Have you had Richard on the show? Of course, yeah, he's great. Of course. He's back on the show. He's new in ancient times. Okay, the center for boys and men. American Institute for Boys and Men. Yeah, thank you.

51:55That sounds awesome. I'm fully Richard Reeves pilled. I'm on board with good, good stuff. Yes, me too. We're all Richard Reeves pilled. Yes. So Richard points out, girls like to do things face to face. Boys like to do things shoulder to shoulder. Like we're next to each other, we're doing something. I've got it. I need to bring this up. So I'm in a Robin Dunbar's book, Friends, which came out maybe 18 months ago. It's got this phenomenal study. So the next time to irritate a party, look at the angle of the feet that women have. When I talk to each other and look at the angle of the feet that manly, like what do you mean?

52:29What do you see? Women will talk a perpendicular 180 degrees. There'll be pretty much straight on like this. Oh, man, talk it about 120 degrees. Oh, that's fascinating. So they blade. And the reason being that this is a bit of sort of evolutionary bro psychology coming in, but I think it's true. If you even try it, you can try it the next time that you're at a party, just, you know, you'll be stood sort of like this with a guy just blading on. And just turn yourself so that you're actually straight onto them. And there's this just dominant rise is up inside of you because really the only time that two guys would do that is if they were going to fight or they were going to kiss.

53:10And if you don't intend to do it, you'll see those things. And you just feel like this feels right. There's something about that angle. It's like two magnet, two north poles of a magnet. Right. Yeah. Oh, good example. Divide away. You don't want to. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, look at it. 120 degrees for men. 180 degrees for women. It's, and it's big. You can't not say once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's so good. I will look for that. And actually, this could suggest a really cool difference between real and virtual. You know, virtual interactions are not embodied. We can see, we can see each other's upper body is here.

53:45But I think what we would find, because I don't want it all freaked out by you, you know, your face onto me on my head. Yeah, but I don't feel like, oh, we've either got a kiss or fight. Like, because virtual. Well, we, wait until we finish. Yeah, you know, you are, you are pretty handsome, I must say. So, again, we are embodied creatures, we're physical creatures, we're animals, we evolved outdoors, we had fights, we had hunts, we're physical creatures. And when we interact now, virtually, it's like the white rice thing, we have just like a little few of the nutrients, but we're missing most of them.

54:21So, anyway, onto boys and girls, sorry, I'm taken too long on this, but the point is, So when laptops and then especially smartphones come out, all the kids love them, all the kids gravitate, all the kids are on them. The boys head straight for video games in YouTube. The boys are spending more time on video games in YouTube and porn. The girls go straight for the visual social media platforms, especially Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest in the early days. And so what are the effects? The girls are now on these platforms that are all about, I post a picture of me and my life, and then I wait for strangers to comment on it.

55:00And that's really, really bad for mental health. And that, I think, is why the girls, as soon as we hit 2012, 2013, the girls have very sharp elbows in the graphs, very hockey stick lines in the graphs. Boys, on the other hand, they're playing video games, especially. Video games aren't making them depressed. Now, the boys are getting more depressed and anxious. They are roughly twice as depressed and anxious as they used to be, but it's more gradual. It starts a little sooner. It starts more like 2009, 2010, and it's more gradual. So I think what's happening and what Zach Rausch and I concluded in the book, and here we drew on Richard Reeves, is for girls, boom, they get on social media, they get depressed.

55:41For boys, they've been withdrawing from the real world since the 70s and 80s. used to be a male world, there used to be a patriarchy, but boy has it been dismantled. And as everything shifts towards girls and as schools get more and more structured towards girls and girls' needs and girls' ways of learning, and as we all freak out about gender gaps and we think that it's the girls we have to help in the 90s, which wasn't true, girls had already passed boys. Boys are finding that they don't do well in school, they don't like school, but man, these video games are just getting better and better.

56:14And, you know, it's hard to approach a girl, but man, the pornography is getting better and better. And now you've got AI girlfriends. And soon AI girlfriends will be put into incredibly sexy robots. So what we're seeing is the progressive withdrawal of boys from effort in the real world that will pay off in the long run. And instead, boys' prodigious energy and their desires are being directed into a virtual world that generates nothing, absolutely nothing of any value in the real world. Yeah, the audience is going to know what I'm going to bring up, but I'm going to do it again. It's my, I've only had two citations ever in academia and this is one of them.

56:53So, you'll be aware of young male syndrome. No, tell me what, just that they're, you know, more violent and yes, correct. Yeah, high proliferation of young sexless men, high tea, high risk taking, they set shit on fire and push over granny, it's not good. totally agree. We have the highest rates of loneliness and sexlessness amongst young men, at least in the modern world, maybe ever, apart from maybe some like crazy gerontocracy style, like tribal bullshit 10 ,000 years ago, where's all of the in -style violence? Like this isn't a request, but why are we not seeing more mass shootings? Why are we not seeing all the rest of it?

57:28That's a good point. So it's my contention that men are being sedated out of their and state of seeking and reproductive seeking behavior through a combination of social media, video games, and porn. So they're not given a sufficient dose to make them happy or satisfied, but it is enough to dampen down and nerf that impulse. So, and this is what I've called the male sedation hypothesis. And this has been studied. So why have we not got this? Yeah, I mean, illegitimate, illegitimate academic now. But there's a question to be asked there, but everything that you're talking about there that it's triggering, it's playing off the back of this desire for them to work together as a team to have intertribal warfare, to create mastery, to increase in status, to be able to accomplish things.

58:23Okay. But it's within the virtual world and you can become an eGamer and so on and so forth. but how much can you cash out that status into the real world? But then a more interesting question comes, which the game is very well made, and say, well, if I'm enjoying it, why do I need to cash it out into the real world? What is real and why is there this weird, axiomatic value judgment about the fact that the real world is better than the virtual world? It's all part of a world. It's all just dopamine serotonin ticking around in my brain, who cares? Same thing goes for porn. I worried about getting me to, or I don't have the this thing, or whatever, whatever, like all of these things allow them to do that.

58:59A couple of white pills that me and a friend William Costello think with regards to the AI girlfriend virtual relationship thing. First one being dating and flirting is something that is incredibly anxiety inducing for men. Yeah. I created CBT made it so that he could overcome approach anxiety. I don't know if that's true. Oh really? That's supposed to be there. Is there Aaron Becker or is this the other guy? The other dude. Oh, right. Wes is now I forget the name. David was told me about him. It was created to help with the project. Maybe I'm back with it too. Everyone's just as a project. I don't think so.

59:33But the primary challenge that you have in dating is that there is no such thing as practice dating. If me and you want to get better at pickleball, we can go to the local people court and you can just hit drives at me and I can practice is my drop volley. I can't, it is one of the few things where you practice in public, you learn out loud. So there's always this high pressure to not fail. And what that means is that men often have really, really, they never get beyond, they never go zero to one. They never actually get that first step done. So me and William think that are really phenomenal.

1:00:14And this, you don't even need to wait for the sex robot thing or whatever of the in person robot, you could do this with Apple's VR headset if it was sufficiently well trained on a good data set. So you have a virtual interaction with a woman like a computer game. And in this virtual interaction, the avatar is able to see your movements. They can hear what you're saying. They use natural language processing to work out the intonation and, and, you know, they're able to go back and forth. And they can, you know, you can program in shit like consent and you can program shit in like flirting and I want to increase the difficulty, the disagreeability of this girl.

1:00:50I want her to make me work out and you level up and level up and level up and if you can form that on actual human psychology you can have guys practice playing the video game in the safety of their own home. Yeah. And then go and deploy this in the real world. It's like, you know, the one of these like at home gym. It's like, yeah, or we sports, right? Like, you know, you're playing a video, that's a better example. You're playing Wii Sports, oh, I'm you're playing tennis or whatever. And then you go into the real one, you're like, hey, I played a video game, but I'm kind of fitter. And this is the same.

1:01:20I played a video game, but I'm kind of better at flirting. Yeah. Now, I think, I think having practice flirting in the virtual world is actually a great idea. I think you're right that it, I remember, you know, when I was in seventh grade and the adults would organize a dance, it was terrifying. You know, and occasionally, I would ask a girl to dance and either she'd say yes or no, but it was terrifying. But again, that's that like fear and thrill when she does occasionally say yes. I agree that in theory we could do that. That the headsets, that the virtual reality you really could give boys practice flirting with realistic girls and that difficulty level could get harder and harder.

1:01:57Now how would this actually play out in the real world? I fear that it's not really going to be, hey, let's try to make you into the best possible romantic partner likely to find a really wonderful woman and they get happily married. I fear that it's going to turn into either, here's, you know, the game is to get the woman in bed and then move on to the next woman and here, you know, we'll teach you how to, how to bed women. Or it's going to be designed the woman you want. And you're going to, you know, let's make her even lovelier. Let's give her even better sense of humor. How about if she never gets mad at me, you know, you program in all these things that are just going to take you in an unrealistic way.

1:02:34So we see open over again. You've got an evolutionary background. I have to say, I want to bring you back on, once this tour is done, I want to bring you back on, and if you can remember it to talk about the happiness hypothesis, because it was one of the three books that got me into the world of EP and really sort of made me fall in love with it. But given that background, again, me and William have spoken about this an awful lot. We talked about this AI girlfriend revolution. One of the problems that you have, and one of the reasons that I don't think we need to fear that AI girlfriend think quite as much, is no guy brags about the fact that he is subscribed to some woman's only fans.

1:03:12The reason that you don't brag about it is that there is no status associated with being selected. There is no, you look like a loser. But not only that, that even if it didn't, even if it was neutral in the like loser, oh I see a metrics, because you haven't been preselected by the gatekeeper is the price of a cheeseburger per month. And therefore, anyone has access to this and because of the access, it's, you know, maybe if you have a $30 ,000 sex robot, it's a flex of your wealth, but it's also like, do you spend $30 ,000 on a sex robot? How weird are you? So I just, I don't know what's going to happen, but I certainly know that that pre -selection, the status associated with a woman who is the gay keeper choosing a man who is the protagonist.

1:04:02that accounts for so much of the cracking rights of the guy. Yes. Great. So this brings in a key word we haven't mentioned is status. And boys are boys and girls each competing for status. But boys competition is really much more, it's about ultimately about physical toughness, dominance, originally in sort of the primeval state, ultimately backed up by the ability to physically beat the shit out of somebody. But in modern times, that gets converted into other ways of contesting. And we've had a long slow evolution of our economy such that we've harnessed male ambition for status and turned in productive directions.

1:04:42In fact, I was going to write a book. I got a contract write a book called Three Stories about Capitalism, the Moral Psychology of Economic Life. I was going to write a book on the psychology of capitalism. And then the university is melted down and wrote the coddling and I got drawn off into all these other things. But one of the key insights is there's a, is you know, Adam Smith realized that when you get an economy set up the right way, it's not from the benevolence of the butcher and the baker and the brewer that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own self interest. When people can get money for doing something that helps others, well then men try very hard to make money.

1:05:17But it's not just money. When you can get status by doing something productive, that's going to challenge. It's like men are like rockets. Like they have this, they have this incredible capacity for work, but they're often mis -amed. And so I think it's quite remarkable that, you know, when Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to face off, how do they do it? Who can build the more effective rocket launch system into outer space? I mean, that's a great way for men to compete. So that's productive. And I think what you're saying, what you're pointing out is part of dating, I mean, part of is very intrinsically motivated.

1:05:53You want a girlfriend, you want sex, you want love, but you also, yeah, you want a hot girlfriend. You want someone that other guys will respect you for because, yeah, I got this woman. So any discussion of boys, yes, we must consider status, especially what are other men going to think of me. And also what are other women going to think of me based on who I date. Women are extremely concerned with what other women will think of them as well as separate status competitions. But yeah, that's a key. and video games give them an alternate world in which they can gain status within that alternate world.

1:06:24But I keep coming back to the metaphor of the black hole. You know, black hole is a place where anything gets sucked in, but nothing comes out. And so, okay, here, here's another controversial idea. I'll air it with you. Maybe you can just prove it. I'll just put this as a contention. I don't know if this is true. My contention is that nobody or is that hardly anyone in Gen Z has done anything yet that has really made an impact on the world. Let me just qualify. There are always going to be athletes always. There are always going to be singers coming along. That's not the issue. The issue is, did you start a company?

1:06:59Did you make some discovery? Did you write an amazing book? Did you do something that the world notices and says, oh, wow, that's impressive. And when I ask this of audiences, they only come up with two names. So I'll ask you, who are the members of Gen Z who've really dented the universe? They've really done done something. When did Gen Z start and finish? Gen Z is now 28 years old. So everybody who's 28 years old or younger starts in 1996. I'm one year old. I was going to say boy and slat, the guy that founded and was the CEO of the ocean cleanup, you know, that huge thing that cleans plastic out of the ocean.

1:07:37But that would count. Yeah. He's 29. He's 29. So he is a millennial. He's a millennial. The millennials are creative and productive and mentally healthy. But Gen Z. So wait, try again, I'm sure you're going to come up with the one name that everyone comes up with. What's one person under 29 who really has changed the world? Greta Tonberg. That's it. That's whatever everyone comes up with. And then there's a second that people sometimes come up with. Malayla. Who? Malayla, the woman from Pakistan, she was shot by, you know, fundamentalist, but she survived and she's a, you know, I don't think I'm right exactly this.

1:08:11I was never going to get that. Okay. Anyway, so Greta, Greta is the one that everyone comes up with. But that's it. So there are no Americans, there are no men. And I started thinking this two or three years ago and I keep waiting. Someone's going to find me a Gen Z person who has really done something big. Now, a lot of them want to start throwing business as an influencer, they want to create an app. So I'm not saying they're not lazy. What I'm trying to say here, as far as I can tell, they have been raised in an economy where what you're desperately trying to do is get more followers, get more influence, and it's all quantified.

1:08:46And as long as you're working hard at that, you're not generating anything that will leave the black hole of social media. Nothing that will affect the world outside of your closed world. I mean, people about in states. I'm sure that you're aware of it, but the percentage of primary school kids that say that they want to grow up to be a YouTuber and influencer. So you know, you have to they're being fed in on the front end with this pre -supposition and then they're being spat out on the back end too with this lack of impact in the real world. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, maybe this is one of the white pills of automation and AI and leverage.

1:09:20What's a white pill? I haven't heard that term. So a black pill is something that's nihilistic and it's an insight that makes you feel kind of apocalyptic and fatalistic. And a white pill would be a reason for hope. It's a justification for hope. Oh, nice. Yeah. OK, I've got to start developing a few of this, because my talks can get kind of dark. So all right, white pills. Go ahead. Yeah, just talking about a white pill. So a white pill from, and it's particularly useful to use in contrast to something that people see as something that's bad. AI is going to come. It's going to take all our jobs and everyone's going to be, it's going to be the matrix.

1:09:51But one of the advantages is that if we're in this current low of real world invention invention from Gen Z, maybe. The increase in leverage that we have through code means that a smaller number of people can have a larger amount of impact. So the few that break through from Gen Z and do do great things can maximize and magnify their impact on the world in a way that might be able to compensate for the rest of their generations lack. Okay, that's a good point. I agree that that's possible. But this just sort of slots right into one of my main concerns about what's happening, which is that digital technology and now artificial intelligence is likely to usher in an era of material prosperity.

1:10:40If we all have an infinite number of servants to help us make whatever we want, yes, there's going to be a rise of productivity. And all these people who point to the coming golden age, They're looking at material prosperity. They're looking at physical health discoveries, will cure cancer. Yeah, materially things are gonna get better as they have been continuously. Matt Ridley pointed this out, Steve Pinker pointed this out. But I'm a social psychologist and I play sociologist in my spare time because I think what we're heading into is a sociological apocalypse. That is all the things it takes to make a stable society.

1:11:17They're not visible. I learned this from Mimil Dirkheim and from reading conservative writings. Institution, structures, traditions, all the things that make our society possible, but many people don't see. And these are being rotted out. And this precedes the internet. I mean, there's always, you know, there's the thing, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. So, you know, there's been kind of a decline since World War II was a huge stimulus for all kinds of amazing after effects. And there's a decline since that. So it's not all caused by recent technologies, but I think it's been accelerated by it.

1:11:55And so what you're pointing to is, yes, more material prosperity. And yeah, that's true. But if we have collapsing institutions, no trust in anything, and we're willing to consign a generation to just wasting their time struggling for status on TikTok talk because as long as 12 of them are creative and create gigantic new things, we'll be just as good off as we were 10 years ago. Yeah. So yeah, maybe that's the one. I have to go to Grey Pill. I have to go to Grey Pill. Oh good. You know what? Grey Pill, because it's both. It's black and white. I like it. Zebra Pill. Zebra Pill. It's dry. It's striped.

1:12:32It's striped. Okay. So we've spoken about boys and what's happening with them. You know, there's so much conversation around young teen, girl, mental health. give me the latest data, what are you seeing, what's happening with the young girls? Sure. So I mean, Freya covered this beautifully and she writes about this beautifully on her sub -stab girls. But sort of the big picture here is, let's start with the mental health, but there's a lot more going on. With the mental health, it's very specific for girls. It's what are called internalizing disorders. It's especially depression and anxiety. other things are up, but like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, they're all up a little bit, but it's really depression and anxiety.

1:13:15Girls have what are suffer more from what are called internalizing disorders. So if they're stressed and problems, they kind of turn it inwards and they suffer anxiety depression. Boys, historically, suffer more from what are called externalizing disorders. When there are problems with their development, they act out. they make other people miserable. Crime, you know, deviance, violence. So that's historically the way girls and boys were. But what's happened is actually both girls and boys have moved more in the direction of internalizing disorders, but girls especially. So the numbers are hard to believe.

1:13:48But they're up around 30 or 40 % of girls, teenage girls, would qualify as having depression or anxiety disorders, it used to be more like 10 or 15%. So it's now a normal thing to be an American or British teenage girl. It's just a normal thing that you think about suicide and you have your anxiety and you manage your anxiety. It's part of your identity. It's part of, it's with you all the time. So it's tragic. It's so sad. You know, it used to be the case that middle age people were the least happy. It's a well -known thing called the U -shaped curve of happiness. The happiest people used to be young adults, teenagers and young adults, and then people in their 60s and 70s.

1:14:34They're done with the hard work they get to enjoy their lives. But there's always people in the middle, taking care of kids and parents. That's not true anymore. In Western countries, the young people have plunged and especially the girls. So we have a graph in the book, Canadian data. Canadian women used to be the happiest. Now they're by far the least happy group of people in Canada. So for girls, the mental health, the anxiety depression, that's like the central finding. But there's a lot more. Oh, you're question about that. Go on, go on, go on. Okay. So, you know, so much of the debate is just about the mental health data.

1:15:14But there's so much else that's warping girls development and making them less happy. The hyper sexualization, the pornification of everything, the fact that you've got these young girls on Instagram aping these millennial women with gigantic boobs and butts and fillers and all kinds of things, this is just really, really bad for them. So even if they don't get to press an anxious when they do, but even if they didn't, the fact that they, oh my god, the number of girls in middle school girls who are using skincare products and who are concerned about their skin and doing makeup tutorials. Like no, your skin is perfect.

1:15:56Go have fun. Yes, you'll care about how you look. Girls have always cared about how they look. That's part of life. It's part of for boys too. But to take these wonderful, sprightly funny fifth, sixth grade girls, And then suddenly to have them focus so much on their face and their beauty because they're on social media is a tragic loss of girlhood. There's that. There's the exposure to older men, creepy men who want to watch them dance, who want to talk with them. There's the whole economy of nudes from the boys in their class. If the boys will send them a dick pick and then say, come on, send me one of yours.

1:16:39Come on, come on. Don't be a pro. Don't be a pro. And then if a girl does said anything, now the boys really got something valuable. And we cite, you know, there's a book, American girls, you know, she, the author documents, how middle school boys will get a nude photo of a girl, then they can give it. they can trade it to high school boys for beer. And so the girl's nakedness, the girl's humiliation, is valuable to the boy because he can get alcohol and prestige by giving it to an older boy who can buy him beer or get him beer somehow or other. So, you know, the commodification, the hypersexualization, the humiliation of girls once they enter the world of social media, you know, it's just, I mean, It's just on so many fronts that phone -based childhood is not a human childhood and kids are stuck in it.

1:17:31You have an evolutionary background. You titled the book, The Anxious Generation of all of the litany of different human emotions that we have. Anxiety is the one that's very prevalent, what's the hearing about anxiety disorders and things of the downstream from it. There's even a disorder now where people can't distinguish between anxiety and depression. And it means that then I literally learned it yesterday from David Brooks. God damn it. Anyway, they struggle to work out the difference between anxiety and depression. So it's bleeding into, wow, first off from an evolutionary perspective, I think it's a cope by people with my intellectual interest background of EP to say, well, we're built to be vigilant.

1:18:25We've got the Smoke Detector Principle. We're blah, blah, blah. I'm like, yeah. But it's really tuned up now. It's not the trust tuned up. It's like, supercharged. And I'll get into my question being, why anxiety? What is it about the soup, the cocktail of stimulus that we have at the moment that's causing anxiety to be the predominant outcome? Yeah. So I think it's too many contributing factors, but two big ones. One is the loss of thrilling play and childhood, which we talked about. If kids don't get to take risks, they don't learn to manage risks, and then any little thing seems threatening.

1:19:09This is why students were suddenly asking for trigger warnings in part because the idea that a book that describes a Greek myth in which Zeus rapes a woman Can we expect young women to just have to read this like so what is just exposure if kids don't have exposure when they're young and they don't have thrills and they don't have risk Then any little thing is going to be much harder for them when they're older. That's one piece The other is growing up on the stage You know, when you're growing up, you make a lot of mistakes. You say something stupid to your friend and then your friend might criticize.

1:19:45Your friend might even get angry at you and then you make up. But when that happens on the stage, you say something and before you know it, everyone is talking about it and they're adding on their own comments and you're the butt of the joke. And as anyone ever knows who's been through any kind of a cancellation attempt or any kind of public online thing, it's painful and away beyond anything that we know. in terms of physical suffering. It really makes people want to disappear and it is a spur to suicide. So when the entire school is laughing at you, or the photo you sent of your genitals, or the thing you said that somebody caught and then added a kind, you know.

1:20:27So kids should not grow up on a stage. The British I'm told have a saying, don't put your daughter on the stage Mrs. Worthington. Is this something you've ever heard? No. Okay, older British people, I believe it's a Noel Coward song from like 100 years ago, but don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Weirthington, is good advice, especially for girls and girls are much more anxious than boys. So if a girl grows up, everything she says can be amplified, every image of her is commented on. She never develops just the basic security to move from minute to minute an hour to hour and person to person like, because anything could blow up at any time, people are always judging you.

1:21:02So we have to give kids a normal human childhood if we expect them to develop normal human strengths. What can we do? Ah, good because I just noticed that our time is running out. Let's turn to the solutions. And here's my white pill. If we were talking about democracy and American democracy, I'd be all black pill. Like I think we're you know, I don't know how we get out of this in American democracy. But when we're talking about the teen mental health crisis, we can get out of it in a year or two. and they've already started in Britain. And here's what you do. Because it's all the series of collective action problems, the reason why fifth graders now are getting smartphones is because all the other fifth graders are getting them.

1:21:43The reason why my students can't quit Instagram and TikTok even though they know it's wasting their time and making them anxious is because everyone else is on it. So they have to be on it. So these are all collective action problems and the way you deal with a collective action problem is with collective action. So if we just have four clear norms, four norms, we can solve this. First norm, no smartphone till high school. If you want to, I'd send you to high school. In America, it's around age 14. So in Britain, the movement is 14. Because I think you don't have quite the exact cutoff. We have a very clear, almost all schools.

1:22:18It's like, you know, eighth grade is still middle school, early puberty. But then 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th is high school. Roughly age 15 to 18. 14, 15, 18. So if we just delay smartphone till high school, give them a flip phone, let them communicate with each other and with you as the parents. But to give them the internet and their pockets so that when they're on the bus, they're not talking with other kids, they're flipping through stuff. At lunch, they're flipping through stuff. So no smartphone till high school at the earliest. Two, no social media till 16. This one is going to be a little harder to get as a norm.

1:22:54But you know if most of us parents would say you know, you're not getting until 16 They can't say but I'm the only one. I'm excluded. They have to say you know half the kids have it But half don't and then you say well, you know, you're gonna be in the half the dome and before you know it It'll be a lot more than half the dome The third norm phone free schools. This is a must and this one we can do this year this year like this September The teachers hate the phones the principals hate the phones I asked them why don't you ban them? Why don't you have the kids lock them up? and they say because some of the parents will freak out, they demand to be able to contact their kid anytime during class, text them anything.

1:23:30But most parents are now beginning to see, this is messing up our kids. So I'm urging if you're listening to this, if you have kids in school and the school allows kids to have phones on them, please contact the principal of your kid's school and say, please go phone free. It's messing up their education. It's making them lonely. There's no good that comes from kids having phones and schools. Same thing with access to anything that contacts. That's the third norm. The fourth norm is more independence, replay and responsibility in the real world. But you can't just take away the phones and the screens or reduce it, you can't just like reduce it 80 % let's say.

1:24:07And then say, now sit in your room and look at the wall or learn how to knit or something. What kids really want, I went straight along a go, I read a book on the secret life of dogs. What do dogs really want? The answer is each other, like they're pack animals, they really want to be with other dogs. And the same is true for kids. What do they really want to hang out with other kids? And so doing that on a video game isn't nearly as satisfying, but try to arrange it so that your kids can really spend a lot of time with other kids unsupervised. No adult telling them what to do, no adult resolving the conflicts.

1:24:41So if we do those four things, no smart front -to -hand school, no social media till 16, phone free schools, more independence responsibility and free play in the real world. Do those four things. We will roll back the phone base childhood. This childhood only really came in around 2012. We've only had about 12 years. It wasn't like this in 2008, 2009. So it's not permanent. We can change it. And we have to change it because it is devastating our kids. There's no other explanation for the multinational mental health crisis. And with four norms of collective action, we can act collectively to reverse it.

1:25:15How's that for a weight pill? I like it. And I also love the fact that you've, Inkulke, this new lexicon is just, it's swimming through you, it owns you now, and it's staring at through your eyes. That's what happens when you write a book. I'm gonna guess that there'll be a lot of parents listening who have got kids that may be going to be getting to that age that probably kids get phones now, maybe like eight, nine, something like that, maybe even earlier I suppose. Yeah. They got through an iPad, yeah. You can't do, we don't have a God's eye view and we can't coordinate perfectly. Would a small scale solution be something like try and speak to your child's friends, parents and say, let's do a cartel, let's have this, I've listened to this phenomenal episode with this great psychologist and this very handsome British dude.

1:26:08And then he said that we really You need to do this. Why don't we, hey, do you have a watch? I'll read the book. I actually, generation. Can we get together? We can't do this nationally, but can we do this locally? Presumably, that's a good first. Absolutely. That's right. That's exactly the thing to do. And there are a number of organizations, almost all started by moms who are helping. So if we're in the UK, I've only recently learned about delaysmartphones .org .uk and smartphone free childhood .co .uk. So those are two organizations that are trying to help parents do exactly that. Now, of course, if you simply know your in touch with the parents of your kids' best friends, which usually you are, you can just text them, you can just call them, you can just talk to them at school pickup or whatever.

1:26:52So yes, coordinating on a small scale will really, really make it easy for you and those other families to give your kids back a play -based childhood. The goal isn't just to delay the phones, the goal is to give them a play -based childhood. if the school can help and say we're going phone free and if the principal could say and parents given the latest research, you know, I urge you to consider delaying, you know, try to at least wait till high school, if the school could give some guidance, that really helps set the norm. So this is why I'm so optimistic because the revolution began in the UK last month.

1:27:26Literally, I mean, there was an article in the Guardian, you know, these two women, the women who run smartphone free childhood, They had a WhatsApp group, there's a little publicity. Huge numbers of parents, like everyone, the parents hate this stuff. The parents are ready to act. And in Britain, they are rising up and taking matters into their own hands. And my hope is that we're ready to pop in the United States. That in March and April of 2024, everyone will really understand. Like, we know something's wrong here. Let's try to really put our finger on it and then what do we do? What we do is enact these four norms.

1:28:02Yeah. Yeah. Jonathan Height, ladies and gentlemen, Jonathan, I love your work. I've been a fan of it for a very long time. It's great to finally have you on the show. You're officially a modern wisdom alumni now. Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with all your writing and you did a really interesting writing process for this, where it is sort of very transparent in a way that is pretty and typical. Yeah. I started a sub -stack. I thought I would never do that because I don't have time to write, but I started a sub -stack at afterbabel .com and Zach Rauchman, I'd be put out all our findings, all our research, all our graphs, invited comment and invited criticism.

1:28:35And now we're bringing in voices like Freya, Indias and Ricky Schlott. We're bringing you out, Gen Z. So just please go to afterbabel .com, sign up, subscribe to the substack. The website for the book is anxiousgeneration .com. And of course, I hope you'll buy the book itself. Anxious generation, you know, the sold wherever books are sold. Oh yeah, Jonathan, I really appreciate you. Thank you for the day. Chris, we're fun.