Jonathan Haidt: Here's How We Can Free The Anxious Generation (E323)

0:28Watch it early on the High Performance App. The phone-based childhood is only 12 years old. It started in 2012, 2013. We can realize we made a huge, huge mistake and we can undo it and we're going to. That powerful voice you just heard belongs to Jonathan Haidt, one of the world's leading and most important social psychologists, the best-selling author and a true authority on human behavior and the complex challenges of our modern world. I'm Jake Humphrey and alongside our expert co-host, Damian Hughes, we're on a mission to uncover the mindsets ideas and experiences behind the world's greatest high performers.

1:03But this conversation with Jonathan, it's different. Myself and Damien are both parents. Like many of you listening to this, we're in that difficult world of trying to navigate the use of mobile phones, the use of social media, and keeping our children safe online. You're about to hear from Jonathan that he believes we're over-protecting children in the real world, where we need to give them even more freedom and we're under protecting them in the online world where we need to take control as he explains in this searingly honest conversation the issues with mobile phones and social media with our young people is damaging mental health and costing lives his latest book the anxious generation how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness is an incredible book it sits on my bedside table and it is all about tackling a crisis affecting so many households today.

1:55So throughout this conversation, expect to hear us talk about the negative effects of social media on your children's mental health, tips on how we can all parent better in this digital age, and practical steps you can take right now as soon as this conversation's over to mitigate the risks of digital addiction, online danger, and the risk that he believes is particularly bad for young boys. Damien and I found this discussion pretty shocking at times, but I also think it's one of the most valuable and important ones we've ever had. Because these are the conversations that might just change the future for our young people.

2:28As we welcome author Jonathan Haidt to High Performance.

2:36Jonathan, welcome to High Performance. My pleasure. Very nice to be here with you. So I read that you pay your daughter$50 a month to not use TikTok. Why? Because she's very persuasive. it was clear to me that social media is the worst of the worst. It's the thing, especially for girls, that is really damaging them. So the one thing I think I did well as a parent is keeping my son and my daughter off of social media until my son was 15 or 16. And with my daughter, we just negotiated, and I don't remember how it happened, but rather than me just being strict and saying, no, you can't use it, she got me to agree,$50 a month.

3:17And I figured, you know, if that works, it's infinitely valuable to keep my, because my daughter, if she was on social media, she would never get off. And it's working. I can check her phone. I never caught her using it. Maybe she has some way around it, but it really doesn't seem to be a problem for her. She's not even on Snapchat, even though everyone in her grade, she's in 10th grade, which is right at age 15. Everyone is on Snapchat, but she's not. So you describe social media as being the worst of the worst. Do you think most parents realize the true danger? No, no, they don't. These things, when they came out, they were fun.

3:57And for each platform, when it comes out, it's pretty positive. TikTok was just, you know, girls dancing. What could go wrong with having young girls dancing for strange men around the world? You know, we just didn't think about that. And a lot of us were techno-optimists 15 years ago. We thought this technology is going to protect democracy around the world. It's going to take down dictators. It gives our kids an outlet for creativity. So we had very positive ideas about this up until about five or seven years ago. When I talk to parents, there is a pervasive sense of unease. Parents, and especially mothers, I should clarify, mothers almost universally have felt uneasy about this.

4:36They could feel their kids slipping away. Fathers are much more variable. A lot of them are like, oh, cool technology. Hey, let me show you this. But there's like an army of mothers rising up around the world saying, we knew something was wrong. And now mothers are activating everywhere. So I think there is now a very growing understanding, at least among women, that this is really damaging our kids' development, self-confidence, and social relationships. So I think that's why things are moving so fast now. Jonathan, this is such an area of important conversation for myself and Damien, because we both have children who are right in the midst of this.

5:11You know, they are in there. How old are the two sets of kids? My son is nine, my daughter's 11. And my daughter's 12 and my son's 15. And what we see a lot of is parents not allowing their children at a similar age to ours to walk to school because it's dangerous. Yet at the same time, allowing them unchecked on social media any time of the day. What is the cost of those two things being combined? Yeah. So my book, The Anxious Generation, is not just a warning about smartphones and social media. The book is really about childhood and what is a healthy childhood and what did we do to childhood when we moved it all onto phones.

5:48And I can summarize the whole book by saying we have overprotected our children in the real world and we've underprotected them online. And here, it's good that I'm talking to you in Britain because our countries are really linked. The internet doesn't care about national borders, but it does care about linguistic borders. And whatever is happening in America, the exact same things are happening in Canada, Australia, the UK. And in America, we had a terrible crime wave in the 70s and 80s into the 90s. And it was at that point, near the end of that, that we decided we can never let our kids out of our sight or they'll be kidnapped and killed.

6:27And that was never true. The rates have always been extremely, extremely low. But we freaked out. And you did the same in the UK. And they did the same in Canada, even though you didn't have the same crime that we had. So all of our countries have gone in for intensive parenting, snowplow parenting, helicopter parenting, and this blocks human development. How does a child learn how to become an independent, functioning, self-governing adult? By getting gradually more independence and self-governing opportunities as a child, and that needs to start by age seven or eight. By age seven or eight, kids have to be walking over to a friend's house, going to the supermarkets themselves to get stuff if one is walking distance.

7:09So when we block their independence and we're always there, we're always there to protect them. We're always there to resolve disputes. They don't learn basic skills. And at the same time that we're overprotecting them in the real world, which is not that dangerous, we've said, oh yeah, you can be talking to strangers around the world who are trying to get naked photos of you to six door. Yeah, go ahead. That's what everyone's doing. So it's completely insane what we have done to childhood since 2010. And we'll talk in detail about your second point there about the use of mobile phones and the risks.

7:42But before we move on to that, I do want to just talk about this helicopter parenting thing for a moment. I'm a huge believer that we have to get away from this. You know, on our show, Jonathan, we've had over 300 guests and we've seen resilient people outperforming talented people by a rate of 100 to 1. So building this resilience in our young people is so important. Would you just expand on the point you made there about being too close to our children? I think a lot of parents would go, well, they can walk to the shops at 15. They don't need to do it at nine. What is the damage? Yeah. Well, so first, I would like everyone listening, especially if you're, this is the high performance podcast, you're about high achievement and optimal performance.

8:22I'd like everyone listening to think back to your own childhood. And especially if you're over the age of 30, you probably remember a lot of time hanging out with your friends. And sometimes there were difficulties. Sometimes you took risks. Sometimes you did stupid things. Sometimes somebody got hurt. But it's in that process that you learn how to deal with people. You learn that you can handle things. You don't always have to go running home to mom. And if listeners would think back on what were the best things in their childhood, what are the most exciting memories you have from childhood? How many of those were your parents present?

8:53And how many of them were out of the house with friends. So that's the kind of childhood that breeds an independent, functioning, confident, resilient adult. Now, I want you all to now imagine your own kids, those of you who have kids or your future kids, imagine that you take from their childhood the following. All the times that you ever spent hanging out with friends, cut that by 50 % or more because everyone's just on their separate phones. All the times you ever laughed with a friend, cut that by 80 % because you're not hanging up joking anymore. All the times you were outside, cut that by 50%.

9:31All the sunshine that came into your eyes, cut that by 50%. All the adventures, the thrills, the excitement, the fears, cut that by more than 50%. Take everything important out of childhood and replace it with millions and millions of 15-second TikTok videos and Instagram posts. That's what we've done. So we can't expect our kids to grow up to be confident, creative, good performers if we don't give them a childhood that nature evolved for us in order to bring humans from childhood to adulthood.

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11:47you say that there's a global youth mental health crisis jonathan and in your book you share some quite starting statistics where there's been 145 increase in major depression of teenage girls since 2004 161 percent in teenage boys how do we know that it's linked to increase mobile phone use Well, let's first just start with what's happening. So there are different studies. Some studies get higher numbers, some get lower numbers. But in general, the numbers are between 50 and 100 % increases, especially anxiety, depression, and self-harm. Those are the linked areas. In general, the increases are larger in girls, although not always.

12:28And in general, the increases are largest in 10 to 14-year-old girls, in younger teen girls. They're the ones who got devastated. It begins very sharply around 2012, 2013. There's no sign in the international statistics, no sign of an elbow or a hockey stick until before 2010. And then suddenly around 2012, 2013, everything goes up. So how do we know that this has something to do with the phones? Well, with historical trends, you can't run experiments. So I can never prove to you that that's what happened. But we start by saying, well, what's an alternative explanation? No one can come up with one.

13:03The only one that's ever offered is the global financial crisis, but that was 2008. And the problems don't kick in till 2012, 2013. And they're getting worse as the economies are getting better and better. So the global financial crisis doesn't work. There's just no other way to explain the sudden increase all over the developed world. We don't know about East Asia, that we're looking into that now, but around the Western world, that's the first thing. Now, how do we know they're linked? Well, there are many kinds of evidence. There are correlational studies that show that heavy users have much higher levels of anxiety and depression, But that's just correlational.

13:39We don't know that it's causation. So then we look at experiments. There are a few different classes of experiments. Experiments that ask people to go off of social media for a while, find that if they're off for a day or two, they actually get worse because they're in withdrawal. But if you stay off for more than a week, those experiments find mental health gets better. So we have direct mental health evidence. And then we have the testimony from the kids themselves. The kids themselves say that this is messing them up. It's very hard to find young people out there advocating or a phone-based childhood or defending the social media companies.

14:14They largely say, I'm quoting from a Gen Z poet here, I know it's poison, but I drink anyway. They're on it because they have to be on it. They're on it because everyone else is on it. And so they themselves say that it's harming them. And also the companies themselves. We now have a lot of leaks and memos and things that have come out from lawsuits. They know what they're doing. They are, they confess that they are doing everything they can to addict the kids. They expose them to porn, to violence, to drug sales. So there are a lot of converging lines of evidence that this spike didn't just happen for no reason.

14:52It happened when we changed childhood between 2010 and 2015 from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood. You know what, Jonathan, I mean, thank you for such a clear answer. So it reminds us of, we were lucky enough to interview Johan Hari, the author, who recounted being at a Silicon Valley conference of app designers where the question was asked, how many of you are happy with the world you're creating for the next generation? And he said there was thousands of designers there and not one of them was willing to put their hand open. Wow. They're trapped in a collective action problem too.

15:29This is the key to the book. there are certain kinds of problems that you can fix yourself. You know, and like, if you want to lose weight, that's up to you. Now we can talk about the food environment, but there are things that governments can do. But, you know, your weight is sort of your issue. But if you're on social media and everyone else is, it's very hard to get off, especially if you're a girl, because then you're isolated, you're cut off. So we're all stuck in a collective action problem. And to some extent, the companies are too. They created this Frankenstein monster, and now they can't reform them.

16:02Because let's suppose Instagram were to do the right thing and say, we're actually going to kick off all the underage users. I mean, they know how old everybody is. They know everything about us. Suppose they were to actually kick off everyone who was under 13. They would just go to TikTok and other platforms. And so the companies themselves and the designers all have incentives to just keep going. We've created this monster. It's damaging a generation. Let's go faster. I read somewhere, Jonathan, that 13 is the number that we assume. Oh, they must have thought that children are old enough at 13 years of age to be able to deal with this stuff.

16:42But that's not the case, is it? No, 13 is a very unfortunate choice. The way it happened was back in the 90s when the internet was brand new and some kids were on AOL and things like that. But Congress addressed the question of, at what age can a company just take a kid's data and sign a contract with the kid, the terms of service, without their parents' knowledge or consent? You'd think it's 18. At 18, you can sign contracts for yourself. But they said, no, you know, let's maybe younger. And so the original bill said 16. Senator, then Congressman Markey, said 16. At that age, you know, as long as you're 16, the company can do what they want to you.

17:22But if you're below 16, they have to get your parents' permission to do what they want to you. And so that was the original bill. And the companies hated it, and they lobbied, and they got it lowered to 13. Not for any reason, they just pushed it down, and they finally, okay, we can do 13. But they also got in a clause that says, as long as a company doesn't have affirmative knowledge that a child is under 13, they're okay. So as long as you say, as long as you, if you know the kid, if you have information that the kid's under, is under 13, then you're liable. But as long as you say, are you over 13 or what's your birthday?

18:00As long as they say they're over 13, you can do whatever the hell you want to them. So in other words, there is no age limit. There are no age limits on the internet. Some things need a credit card, but other than that, there are no age limits. So that's why the age of first social media keeps creeping down and down and down. Many seven, eight, nine-year-olds are on TikTok. And so this is, again, a global disaster. Children's brains are developing very fast during puberty. They're changing very rapidly during puberty based on input from the surrounding community. That's the way it's been for millions of years until 2010.

18:35Now it's based, I think, primarily on input from TikTok and Instagram. So what is actually happening to our young people? Why is this so dangerous, so pervasive? Why do we have to rise up against this? So think about all the things you have to learn to go from the child form of human being to the adult form. Children have different bodies, and this is true in all other mammal species are the same. The child has a particular body, and it's optimized for play. Kids need to play, and that's what drives brain development, is repeated interactions with other kids and with the environment. and seeking out challenges.

19:14And in that way, the neurons wire up and they rewire during puberty. So that transition from the child form of the body and brain to the adult form of the body and brain is very delicate. And let's just take social relationships. What does it take to read the cues on another person to understand their facial expressions? You can't read a book on that. You can't be taught by an adult, like, here's what you look for. You have to do it, literally millions of times. You have to have millions of social interactions before you get it. And, you know, one thing that many people say now is that young people, especially the boys, they have trouble looking you in the eye.

19:53It's painful. It's difficult. They're not used to it. Kids move less because they're so sedentary. There's the development of your eyeballs. Myopia is increasing around the world because kids are on phone so much. They have short, short vision. They're not outside very much. So in so many ways across social cognitive development, creativity. A phone-based childhood just blocks it, and you're left, not exactly with the child form, but you don't get to the adult form, which means we have an entire generation, Gen Z, which I don't want to quite say damaged. I mean, many of them are doing fine. They're lovely kids.

20:27They're hardworking as a generation, but I would say they are less than they would have been. I would say that human beings born in the Western world after 1995 have been diminished at an international scale. Diminished, meaning as adults, they will be less than they would have been otherwise. But so why do you see that that is linked to depression and anxiety, though? Depression is primarily about, it results when you feel cut off, socially not valued. You're, as I say in the book, we have a kind of an internal sociometer, a measure of how well we're doing. And when you feel that you're below, you're lower, you're going down, it produces a kind of a panic and a despair.

21:13For adolescents, for all of us, we can feel that. But for adolescents especially, they're, you know, they were often very happy as kids, they were playful, they hit puberty and everything changes. And often they get much darker, much more anxious, much more depressed, especially girls. So what we call middle school around age 11 to 13 has always been the hardest time for young people to make it through that transition. If you're going through that transition and you're well-planted, you have a group of friends, you have a close family, you're probably going to get through it fine. But if you have a thousand contacts and no close friends, no best friend, you're always insecure.

21:52You don't know where you belong. People are always talking about you and you're talking about people. So this is just tailor-made. The life online, especially on Instagram, the social life on Instagram is really tailor-made to make kids feel insecure, especially girls, because most girls are less attractive than average. What I mean is what they see is all these beautiful girls and they, when they look in the mirror, they see a girl that's not as attractive. So the sociometer goes down. They feel more worthless. They feel ugly. They're going to go in for crazy diet stuff and then Instagram is going to give them crazy diet stuff.

22:26so I want everyone to understand puberty is this really delicate transition you know like a butterfly going from a caterpillar into a chrysalis into a butterfly and we take that chrysalis stage and we say let's just rip it open and throw stuff in you're not going to get a butterfly at the other end so one thing I've noticed with my daughter Florence a recent phenomenon Jonathan is the selfie and it's not just taking a photo of herself it's taking a photo with her hair pulled forwards over her shoulders her lip in some weird pout position and doing the v sign now she's only got that from seeing other people do it right that's not just a natural pose for a young girl bearing in mind my daughter is not allowed on any social media and this is the thing i want parents to understand just because you tell your child not to go on social media doesn't mean you have a child that doesn't go on social media that's right because the way things are set up if your child can get to a web browser anywhere they can create an infinite number of accounts on instagram snapchat tiktok talk.

23:24And you won't know. There is no age gating. There is no age verification. The companies all lie. They say that they enforce their ages, but they don't. They all know that they have many, many kids under 13. So you've kept your daughter off social media. I've kept mine off social media. And at first they pay a price because they feel left out. But my daughter tells me that she sees how Instagram makes the girls stupid. And she's actually glad that I kept her off. Snapchat, it took longer for her to come to that. But now she finds that she sees all her friends. They're just always in their Snapchat.

24:00They're always in some drama. They're always have their heads in their phones. And she realizes she's not like that. And she says that when there's something important that I need to know, one of my friends will just tell me, they'll text me and tell me what it is that's happening. So my goal with the book is that you will never be the only one. Your daughter will never be the only one again. In every class, it'll be maybe half the kids are not allowed on social media until 16. It'll be that in the UK, they follow Australia, and they actually mandate enforcement of a 16-year age limit. Right now, we're in a collective action problem, and those of us who do the right thing, our kids pay a price in the short run.

24:41In the long run, they're much better off, and they often see that. They usually see that. so that's what we're trying to change here you have a great organization in the uk called smartphone free childhood everybody i hope will just google that smartphone free childhood they organize groups of parents in every town every school in the uk to pledge to not give their kid a smartphone till 14 and some are going to go later till 16 there's something else which happened almost by default and i cannot remember the day that i i saw this thing for the very first time, but only now do I realize the incredible damage that it's done, not just to our children, but to all of us, I think.

25:22And it's the front facing camera. What happened there? So life is meant to be lived. And it's often hard to be present in what you're doing. And my first book was called The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. And I collected insights from sages from ancient wisdom, East and West, across the millennia. And many of them urge us to be more present. This is what a lot of Buddhist practice is about, is being more present, not letting the constant rush of reflection and rumination overwhelm us. Nowadays, there's a lot of interest in mindfulness meditation. We humans, we have a problem being fully present with people.

26:03We tend to think elsewhere. Now imagine that you're a 10, 11, 12-year-old kid. And you have a camera, you have a phone in your pocket. It's always in your hand. So you might be taking pictures of everything, which means it's hard for you to really be fully engaged in the thing. We all know this when we're on vacation. We think, oh, do I pull up my camera and take a photo of the sunset? Or do I just enjoy the sunset? Well, now imagine it's not just a regular camera, which is what the original iPhone had. In 2010, the front-facing camera comes out on iPhone and on Samsung. And from then on, it's, here's a photo of me in front of this sunset.

26:39Here's a photo of me in front of, you know, I live near Washington Square Park. There's the, we have a beautiful arch, you know, like the Arc de Triomphe. And it's always an infinite set of young women posing in various forms with the arch behind them and them in front. So the front-facing camera means you're going to spend a lot less time living life and a lot more time recording, editing, and posting it. You lose a lot of life that way. So Jonathan, you mentioned my favorite book that you wrote, The Happiness Hypothesis, where you went across many different cultures looking for that ancient wisdom.

27:16Have you seen that these mental health trends differ across different cultures? And if so, what can we learn from these differences? Yes, there's one clear lesson. I can say it in a couple of words, rooted in community. Kids who are rooted in community are not doing so badly. Kids who are not rooted in community got washed away after 2010. So here's what I'm drawing on. We've looked, so with my research director, Zach Rauch, we've looked, and if you go to our sub stack, we have all this on our sub stack, afterbabel.com, after B-A-B-E-L, or after Babel, you would say, I think. So go there. We have all kinds of posts showing international trends.

27:58And here's, I can summarize it pretty like this. we have a general hockey stick pattern with flat until around 2012, and then it goes up. That's what happens in all the Anglo countries. It happens, the one place it doesn't happen is Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe actually, and some things have gotten a little better. Now, Eastern Europe is the only part of Europe that's getting more religious as communism fades into the rearview mirror. And whereas Northern Europe is where the curves are sharpest, and Scandinavia, which has such freedom, such quality of life, but yet their kids got washed away.

28:31Their kids have higher increases in depression and anxiety compared to the rest of Europe and Southern Europe. So that's one clue. Here's another. A country where this didn't happen at all, Israel. Israel, even the secular Jews, of course, the religious Jews are deeply embedded in the community, but even the secular Jews in Israel were deeply enmeshed in so much. They do military service. So Israeli kids, they're on their phones, but they weren't showing signs of this problem. And of course, since October 7th, they've rallied. They're all fighting. They're in the army. So even though Israel took this horrible hit to its society, it has really rallied.

29:09And when a country is attacked, mental health tends to improve because, yeah, you get really strong community. In the U.S., the curves are sharpest for liberals, for progressives, and they're much flatter for conservatives. Conservatives are more deeply rooted in family, community, rules, laws, church. And also secular versus religious. The curves are much sharper for secular kids, kids who say religion is not important to our family, whereas kids who say religion is important. So that's the master variable. There are others, but that's the master variable. If you're not rooted in community, you're going to get swept away into, and those are the kids who use social media the most.

29:46You're going to be swept away into this insane world that is not conducive to human development. and you've got much higher rates of mental illness. We should be sure to talk about the boys. We should talk about video games and other things. Should we do that? Yeah, please. Okay, because when I started the book, I thought this was going to be a story about social media and girls because that's where the evidence is clearest and that's what the kids say. That's obvious. And I didn't know what to say about boys. They're more anxious and depressed. They're on social media, but not as much and they're not as gripped by it as the girls are.

30:14And it took a while to figure this out. But what Zach and I, the conclusion we came to in the book, is that for boys, boys have been withdrawing from the real world since the 1970s or 80s. Boys used to do better in school than girls or they scored higher on tests. They went to college more often. But since the 70s and 80s, boys have been retreating from school. They're doing less well. Girls are doing better and better. In the United States now, and I think it's the same in the UK, 60 % of university students are girls. Boys are less likely to go on to university, less likely to finish, less likely to get a job, more likely to live at home with their parents.

30:48boys are dropping out. And part of that, we think, is that while the world has become more conducive to girls for a lot of reasons, many of those reasons are good, doors are open, there's not as much discrimination anymore. Many are about the economy, manufacturing jobs, physical strength jobs are declining, whereas service jobs, where women excel, are increasing. So they're economic factors. But the piece that we add in our book is the technological factors. When I was a kid, Pong came out, the video game Pong in the 70s. And it was, you know, you could play tennis on your TV set. It was really fun, but it was pretty minimal.

31:23And you'd play it for a while and you'd go out and play outside. You wouldn't play Pong all day long. But every few years, the games get better and better. And now they're incredible. They're so gripping. And the games are designed by people who understand behaviorist psychology. They understand variable ratio reinforcement schedules. They're doing everything they can to keep you on their game so you don't go to another their game. So boys are getting ever more addicted to video games, to porn, when they get a little older, to gambling. Sports betting is now legal in the United States. It's insane.

31:56So for boys, I think the problem is they blow out their dopamine circuits early. From the time they're young, they're on screens and stimulating activities. And if you are getting stimulated with lots of quick dopamine hits, lots of little bits of pleasure, lots of little, you know, everything's gamified. You go to school. Oh, for math, here's an app. You can play this game and you rack up points by getting. So if half your day is gamified, so you get quick pleasure, quick hits of dopamine. The other half, if you're not on a screen, is painfully boring. Everything is so boring. And so boys especially, they're not reading books.

32:29They don't have hobbies. Everything is boring. And that means they're going to be less creative, less successful, less likely to invent anything. So when we look at kids at the age of 14, 15, it looks like the girls are doing worse? Because the boys are having fun. They love the porn. They love the video games. But when we look at them at the age of 29, which is what the oldest Gen Z is, I think we're actually seeing the boys doing worse. The girls at least have finished school and gotten jobs. The boys less likely. So I think the ultimate toll of this phone-based childhood in the long run will be highest on boys and men.

33:02And I saw your book as an extension of the book that you'd wrote back in 2010 or the paper originally the coddling of the American mind where I was fascinated by what you identify are the three like the three ways in which we tend to see the world when we grow up online would you share with us a little bit about that because I think that helps those of us in the workplace dealing not necessarily with adolescents but those that have grown up online since the early 2000s yeah sure so I started noticing something was going wrong with college students in 2014 they were very different from the students in 2012.

33:38And my friend Greg Lukianoff pointed this out to me, and he came up with this idea that young people somehow are talking in ways that suggests that they have learned the cognitive distortions that Greg had learned to stop doing when he was treated for severe depression with cognitive behavioral therapy. He learned to identify, catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, black and white thinking. And so we noticed that college students were doing this in 2014, 2015, we wrote an essay in the Atlantic magazine called The Coddling of the American Mind. And then things got a lot worse. And it became clear, it's not just college students, it's people born after 1995, high rates of depression, anxiety, and just distorted thinking, these cognitive distortions.

34:22So we wrote that up in a book that came out in 2018. And in that book, we focused on three great untruths. These are ideas that are so terrible that anyone who believes all three is almost certain to have a bad life, not successful, not happy. And these three truths are the opposites of three of the chapters in the happiness hypothesis. So the first great untruth is whatever doesn't kill you makes you weaker. That is, be careful about anything negative because it's going to hurt you and you're going to come out worse off. So let's protect kids from conflict. Let's protect them from hurtful words.

35:03Let's make sure there are no fights in the playground. Let's always have an adult to settle them. We have microaggression training in universities. So this whole idea that kids are fragile is just wrong. And if you think I'm fragile, I don't want to see anything that could be upsetting, you're not going to grow into a stronger person. So that's a major error. Nietzsche's dictum, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger is actually generally true. And that was chapter seven, I think, in the happiness hypothesis. The second one is always trust your feelings. If you feel that you've been offended, you were, and somebody has to punish that person, not you, some adult, go to an adult, there's a way to complain, there's a way to file a grievance.

35:45And if you raise kids with anonymous reporting mechanisms, as we're doing now, well, that's like Eastern Europe and, you know, under the Stasi and things like that. You don't want to train kids to always run to an adult to punish people who've offended them. You want to train kids to work out problems on their own. And that's what the nature of CBT is and Stoicism and Buddhism. We don't see the world as it is. We see it through filters and we can control that. And then the third grade on truth is the most pernicious. It's ancient and universal. Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

36:20My book, The Righteous Mind, is about how we evolved in groups. We evolved for tribalism. We evolved for warfare. We evolved for intergroup conflict, violent intergroup conflict. We're designed for that. And a part of that is our mental apparatus to do us versus them, to have a tribe. The tribe has rituals. The tribe has ways of creating esprit de corps, creating cohesion to prepare for battle. You see this in every college town in America the night before a football game. It's playful, it's fun, it's not bad, but it's tribalism. And the more young people feel that everything is about group versus group, the worse.

36:55The UK and the US are now large multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-racial societies. And I think the American genius has been, how do you have a country that doesn't share blood, doesn't share gods? And I think we did a pretty good job of that until recently. But because of the nature of recent identity politics, that's backfiring. And so teaching kids to see that some people are good, some groups are good, some groups are bad, Some groups are oppressed or some groups are oppressed. This is a terrible thing to do to kids. And it's very bad for a multi-ethnic democracy. So those are the three great untruths.

37:30And we have to all be on the lookout for them and try to gently persuade young people who believe them to come away from them. It's such a challenge though, isn't it, Jonathan, for parents? Because all those things you've just spoken about, talking to kids about good and bad, you know, it's one thing or the other. talking to young people about trying to keep them safe, making sure you deal with all the problems that are in front of them, making sure that people aren't offended or that they don't have any issues in their lives. As parents, we feel like we're doing all the things to solve the problems for our young people.

38:03And it sounds like, actually, from the research, we're creating these problems. By trying to do our best, we're almost doing our worst, you know? That's right. By overprotecting, we block their development. But the way you phrased the question points out an even deeper problem. which is as individual parents, we try to train our kids, but our kids aren't that interested in us. And there's a really interesting argument. I first heard it from Judith Rich Harris had a really interesting piece. She has a book called The Nurture Assumption, I think it is. And she points out that especially once kids reach puberty, their job is to fit in with their peers.

38:42Their job is to gain status among their peers. That's what they're focused on. Their parents are never going to expel them. Their parents are biologically linked to them. They're not going to let them die. So they don't have to please their parents. They must please their peers. That's the imperative. And so especially, you know, when your kids are very little, they look up to you. When your kids are very little, like what you do, they might copy you. But as they go on, they're by age seven, eight, nine, their attention is turning much more towards peers and towards the surrounding community, look at language.

39:12No child has the accent of their parents. If a family comes to the UK from Pakistan or Nigeria, the parents are going to learn English and have a heavy accent. The kids aren't going to copy their parents. They're going to copy the kids around them. Same thing with culture. So for all these great untruths, you can do a lot to try to argue against them, but the kids are copying what everyone else is doing, not what you're doing. So we have to find ways to raise our kids in stable, real-world communities. When kids find, quote, community online, really? Okay, so they're in some eating disorder interest group on Instagram?

39:50That's community? No, that is a horrible place where they're going to soak up a way of being and thinking about their bodies. It's going to be terrible. So our abilities as individual parents to influence our kids is much more limited than we would like. But our ability as communities to influence children is actually very strong. Unfortunately, community is declining in the UK and in the US and throughout the world. So what does the future look like then for us and our children, Jonathan? I'll answer this question in the shadow of the announcement only this week from Mark Zuckerberg that Meta are now going to stop having automated fact-checking on their posts.

40:30And I just, I'm fearful for the future. I'd love you to tell me how you feel about it. Yes. No, I'm fearful too in this. I'm fearful on one point and I'm optimistic on the other. I set out to write a book with the title, Life After Babel, Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share. And it's because in 2018, 2019, 2020, I was really looking at what social media was doing to our ability to know anything together, what social media was doing to our epistemic institutions. That is, institutions that create knowledge, universities, newspaper and journalism, courts, the legal system. And social media is subverting all of that sense-making and truth-seeking.

41:10So the future of democracy, as we've had it for hundreds of years, is in very serious doubt. If we can't have shared facts, if we can't have shared stories, it's going to be very hard. And so I am actually very worried about what's going to happen over the next, let's say, 10 to 30 years with Western liberal democracies, which were magnificent accomplishments of the 20th century and earlier. But the other major issue is, as I said, the decline of human capital and potential, the loss of human potential if the young generation is depressed, anxious, and can't pay attention. On that, I'm wildly optimistic because I've never seen anything change so fast.

41:49A year ago, everybody kind of thought, well, what are you going to do? This is just the way the world is. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Everyone's doing it. But since my book came out in March, there's been a tidal wave of change, especially around schools. Phone-free schools is happening all over the world now, the Western world at least. So I'm actually very optimistic that we're going to solve these collective action problems around childhood, around schools, around free play is a little harder, encouraging more free play and independence. But around the technology, I think we're going to make a lot of progress in rolling back the phone-based childhood and restoring the play-based childhood.

42:26I would urge everyone listening to go to anxiousgeneration.com, the website for the book. It's really the website for the movement. We have a lot of action steps you can take as a parent, as a teacher or educator, as a legislator. So I'm actually, given the pace of change, given the way that parents everywhere are embracing this, given the way that this is a completely bipartisan topic and nothing else is in the US. In the US, we hate each other across the partisan divide. We disagree on almost everything. But Republicans and Democrats all have kids. They all see the problem. So I think we're actually going to get a handle on this one in the next couple of years.

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45:10So tell us then, Jonathan, we're having this conversation in 2025. What can we do as individuals to start a tidal wave along with our hundreds of thousands of listeners? Just talking about the problem contributes to this sense of what's called shared knowledge. That is, we kind of all knew that something was wrong, but until we all know that everyone else knows it and everyone else knows that we know that they know it, now you have common knowledge and people can take action. So as a podcast, as a platform with a lot of listeners, you just keep talking about the need to follow these four norms.

45:45Here we go. Here are the four norms for coordination. Norm number one, no smartphone before age 14. Just keep saying that. Keep urging people, just give your kid a flip phone or a phone watch. You You can text with them, but don't give them the internet in their pocket. Don't let strangers talk with them on social media platforms. So no smartphone till 14. No social media till 16. Do everything you can to keep your kids off, especially TikTok. TikTok is the worst for their attention. Snapchat is the worst for sextortion and drug deals and other things. So keep them off of especially TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, at least until they're 16.

46:23The third norm is phone-free schools. If your kids can text you during class, if they can text you between classes, I guarantee you, your kids are not developing as much as they should. They're not getting the education they could. They are distracted. They are probably on their phone during class. So phone-free schools is a must, and that has to happen as quickly as possible. There's no downside. And then the fourth norm is far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. And again, in the UK, hey, you have the same problem we do. You don't let your kids out. You don't trust them.

46:56You don't trust your neighbors. But we have to get over that. We have to find ways to let our kids have some independence. And I would urge everyone to go to letgrow.org. We have a couple of programs that make it very easy to give your kids independence working with other families, which makes it much more fun as well. So four norms. And if you would talk about those norms occasionally, the more people hear it, the more they think, oh yeah, everyone else is doing this, so I can do it. I want to pick up on a few things there, Jonathan. As a parent, my 11-year-old has a smartphone, but no social media.

47:27And therefore, in my naive head, I think, well, she's fine because she doesn't have TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat. Am I wrong? Well, I kind of thought the same way. Originally, I thought the data was clearest on the harms of social media, but not necessarily overall screen time, I thought. And so I was pretty lax with my kids about their computers. Now, of course, during COVID, everyone had to have a computer in their bedroom. But if I had it to do... So you did well, and this is what I did with my son. The most important thing is keep your kid off of social media. That's the most important single thing.

47:58I would also extend that to video games. Not that you should keep your kids off of video games entirely, but if your son is playing two or three hours of video games a day, that is distorting the dopamine system, the reward system, and that's going to make it harder for him to enjoy anything else about life. So regular use, heavy use is bad for boys especially. But what I've realized, my kids are now, my son is 18, my daughter is 15. And I really regret that I didn't follow a couple of rules. The one I should have said, should have done, and I've said this publicly, but I didn't do it myself because I didn't get an early start on it, was no screens in the bedroom ever.

48:32Start with that rule. When your kids are little, you can have a desktop computer in the living room or the kitchen. That's great. You know, kids need to see the internet. They need to search for things. That's all fine. But have it be a public computer out in a common space. And then the rule should be no screens in bedrooms ever. I wish I'd done that. Now, once your kids are 11, 12, 13, they have a lot of homework. Okay. You're going to have to say, okay, you know, you can take, here's a laptop, or maybe, maybe we give the kid a laptop. You can have it in your room for a couple hours to do your homework, but then it has to come out.

49:03I really wish I'd done that because my, my children, they spent so much time on their computers, just watching videos. Now it's not social media. They're watching Netflix, which is not as bad, but I wish I had been much more attentive to screen time in general and the computers in particular. You also said that TikTok has been proven as the number one thing for... For attention fragmentation. It's the number one destroyer of the ability to attend, to focus, to develop executive function. So I think it's the number one destroyer of human potential because it is so widely used. It's the most addictive.

49:37It's the one that many of my students say they can't quit. Every year in my class of 35 students in my version class. There are one or two who are on TikTok six hours a day. In other words, that's all they do is TikTok. It's hard to do their homework. They don't go see friends. It's just TikTok. It's really tragic. TikTok is the fentanyl of social media. And why is it the fentanyl of social media? What is it about it? So all of social media developed on this idea of social networks, the social graph. And Facebook and Instagram, they're going to recommend to you things based on the people that you know.

50:16And that's an interesting strategy. TikTok was the first to say, to hell with that. We don't care about your social network. We're going to look at the micro delays as you pause on, oh, you paused on a video about exercise. Oh, okay. Well, let's give you some dieting stuff too. Because the algorithm has found that girls who pause on exercise are interested in being thinner. And before you know it, and many journalists have done this. You set up a fake account for a 13, 14-year-old girl, very quickly you're inundated with eating disorder, with pro-anorexia content, things like that. So TikTok was the first to develop that, and it's magic in terms of sucking out the attention from a child's brain.

50:55So that's why I say TikTok is the worst of the worst. I don't think anybody should be on TikTok, but certainly not below the age of 18. Thank you. Jonathan, this has been an incredibly eye-opening and fascinating conversation. I've had a conversation with my children's head teacher to try and persuade them of the smartphone-free schools. Could you give us a script that any of us could be able to use to effectively persuade those in education that this is the way that we need to go? Yeah. So the first thing is it's important you band together with other parents, not just one. and that you go to the head teacher and that you also, and that you talk with teachers as well.

51:42Try to talk with teachers. I guarantee you all teachers hate the phones. It's hard enough to be a teacher. It's a very challenging job. You know, imagine if when we were kids, you could bring your television into your class and watch TV during class. I mean, that's what teachers are competing with now. So do try to understand what's happening at the teacher's perspective. And then a few of you go to the headmaster, head of school, And you say, you know, look, the whole world is realizing that phones are destroying attention in class, that phones are interfering with education. Schools all over the United States and the UK are going phone free.

52:18Surveys show that the teachers hate the phones, that most school administrators hate the phones. We beg you or we demand that our school follow what other top schools are doing. Eaton, I think, just went this way and say, take the phones in the morning, give them back in the end of the day. Let's give the kids a chance to learn. Let's give the teachers a chance to teach. What I found in my experience is that most heads of schools hate the phones, but they don't ban them because some parents will freak out. Some parents, especially in America, will say, no, I have to. What if there's an emergency?

52:53I have to, you know, what if my kid's upset? He needs to reach me. And it's true that there are some parents like that. But if you get a bunch of parents to put counterpressure to say, no, you know what? We parents, we really want you to take the phones. That will give the school leadership the backing they need to do it because they probably want to do it anyway. So, again, go to anxiousgeneration.com and click on take action. And we have actually a script, a letter that you can send to the head of the school to make the argument. There's also a lot of survey work. There was a great report by Policy Exchange.

53:27I forget the title of it. UK think tank that showed that schools in the UK that have a real ban, most of them say they ban phones, but they don't mean it. Those that actually take the phones in the morning, they have better educational outcomes. Whereas those that say, oh yeah, we ban phones, you have to keep in your pocket, or they don't have a policy, those kids are declining in their education. So we have a lot of resources for you at anxiousgeneration.com. Thank you. Jonathan, I don't want to scare parents, but I also want them to understand the very real truth about sextortion? I think we all know about the use of social media.

54:02We know about attention issues with using phones. But I think most parents would be naive to the truth of sextortion. What is the truth? Oh, yes. This is one of the biggest dangers of all. And it's exploded just in the last three or four years. So what sextortion is, is, you know, your kid is online and it's especially boys fall for it, not girls. I shouldn't say that. Girls do actually get tricked as well. But you're flirting with someone. They look like an attractive person of the sex you're attracted to. And actually, LGBTQ kids get hit harder than anyone else. And then the person sends a sexy photo and asks you for a sexy photo.

54:37And then they ask for a sexier photo showing your genitals. And a lot of kids do it. A lot of kids comply. And the instant they send that photo showing their penis and their face, then the person on the other end reveals, I'm not this sexy girl. I'm actually, you know, I'm, you know, it's usually, it's a sextortion ring often located in, I think, Nigeria or East Asia, Southeast Asia. And unless you send me$500 on this gift card or whatever, here's a way you can pay me. Unless you send me$500, I am now going to send this photo to everyone in your network because you friended me and now I'm friends with all your friends.

55:14And so I can destroy you. And a lot of boys kill themselves at this point because the shame is overwhelming. We have revelations from TikTok. We have all these lawsuits against, I'm sorry, Snapchat. Snapchat, we now know, they get 10 ,000 reports of sextortion, not a year, a month. 10 ,000 kids, mostly boys and mid-teens, are falling for this. They're sextorted. The FBI looked into 20 ,000 of these reports, and they found 22 confirmed cases of suicide. So we don't know the total number of suicides, but it's surely in the hundreds. And so sextortion is probably one of the worst things that can happen to your kid online.

55:56And it is closely linked to suicide. And so I just ask, what would you think about a consumer product that said, I'm going to put your kid in touch with strangers around the world who are not verified. A lot of them are lying about who they are and they're going to trade photographs. What do you think? We would never do that in the real world, but online we're like, well, whatever. That's what the kids are doing. So I think there's no way to stop this other than keeping kids off social media. We have to have a global awareness that social media is like tobacco or alcohol or driving or other things where we say, you know what, we're going to let adults make their choices.

56:30But these things are just wildly inappropriate for minors. Kids under 18 or at least 16, they just shouldn't be on this. Jonathan, we've reached the point of our interview where we're going to wrap up with a few very fast, quickfire questions.

56:45What are the three non-negotiable behaviors that we should take into account when using social media? For kids or for adults? I think for adults. Well, first of all, I would say just always be civil. The platform pulls for incivility and then that just gets you involved in all sorts of horribleness. But always be civil. If in doubt, don't post. We should all post less. And if you're spending more than half an hour a day on social media platforms, you really need to think about the opportunity cost. Do you really endorse this? Do you really endorse this use of your time? Because the average, at least the average for teens, is four or five hours a day.

57:31I don't know what it is for adults, but it's several hours a day. So yeah, we have to use it less if we want our lives back, and we have to use it in a more civil and less emotional way. What are the best and the worst things about social media? The best thing is that you can find information very, very quickly. You know, like if I hear an explosion, I'll sometimes go to Twitter and just see, you know, did something big just happen? I live in New York City, like something huge could happen. And it is quite amazing that you can get information so quickly. So I do, you know, I don't talk much about social media in adults because I understand businesses use social media.

58:10There are a lot of purposes for adults. I think there's almost nothing good about it for children. So the best thing is its original promise that it can connect us instantly and effortlessly. The worst thing about it is that it alters our view of the world in ways that make us feel worse, trust others less, and just have less attention for the real world. Jonathan, before we wrap up, your final message to people that have listened to this fascinating hour of at times quite scary conversation, but important nonetheless. So yeah, my final lesson is we can change this if we act together. When we act alone, when you're a parent telling your kid, no, you can't have social media, even though all your friends do, that's really hard.

58:58But if you just talk to other people, talk to other parents, the more you talk to others and get people to agree, and this is why you should all go to smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk, I think it is. The more we team up, the stronger we are, and the faster we're going to change this. The phone-based childhood is only 12 years old. It started in 2012, 2013. We don't have to have it. We don't have to keep it. We can realize we made a huge, huge mistake, and we can undo it, and we're going to. Jonathan, thank you so much. That was a fascinating conversation. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

59:37Damien. Jake. My feeling throughout that interview is this sense that we're making sure that our kids are safe all the time, that they're well-fed, that they're getting great messages from us, yet at the same time, without us even realising it, those same kids are having their childhood stolen almost in stealth mode by something that we don't even understand. Yeah, definitely. I feel the sense of... I remember Martin Luther King saying it about the American civil rights movement, about righteous indignation. You have to feel indignant that our children's childhoods are being stolen from them and it's not right.

1:00:14And I think that listening to Jonathan explain the problem and clarify it there, it fills me with that righteous indignation to say, how do we all take a stand? How do we all fight back against something that I think we'll look back on in 30 years' time and go, how did we allow that to happen? and we were walking in with our eyes shut. He's given us the evidence that says we need to open our eyes, open our ears and open our minds to be able to change this. And I think there's still so much for us to learn. Like, I know that it's not great for my kids to go on TikTok or Snapchat or Instagram or the comparison culture or the front-facing cameras.

1:00:52I had not even considered that Seb, who's nine years old, does most of his maths now on a computer and it's a brightly coloured screen and he answers questions. when he answers questions he wins a star and when he's got a certain number of stars he can choose a reward from the sort of online shop and this is provided by his school by the way right this is a yeah as we just heard from Jonathan sitting there writing with a pencil on a white piece of paper gives no dopamine so my son when I think he's getting better at his maths and it's great because he loves it he's messing with his dopamine levels completely so as he gets older he's constantly chasing a hit yeah it's mad and then do you remember when we had Mary Portas on where she spoke about with her young son, how she actually welcomed him being bored, welcomed him being in his bedroom with nothing to stimulate because then she said that was where creativity comes in.

1:01:41That was where he'll write a song, he'll make up a game, he'll go and learn a skill. And I think that that's what we're seeing, social media is stealing from us. You have that great quote, don't you? Yeah, shall I read it? Because we're reading out because again, it sort of made my jaw drop. This is by Glennon Doyle. When we hand our children phones, we steal their boredom from them. As a result we're raising a generation of writers who will never start writing, artists who will never start doodling, chefs who will never make a mess of the kitchen, athletes who will never kick a ball against a wall, musicians who will never pick up their aunt's guitar and start strumming.

1:02:16A sad way to end an important episode. Absolutely. Thanks mate. Thank you. Well that's it for today's episode. Thank you Jonathan. Please get in touch with us and let us know your questions and the greatest lesson you've taken away from the episode. We'd love to hear from you. And if you want to watch these episodes before anyone else, why not give the High Performance app a go? You can also try our brilliant new habit reminders feature that allows you to save a habit and you get reminded of it every single day to get you closer to your own version of high performance. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.

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