Jonathan Haidt On How Social Media Is Rewiring Childhood

24:46And on the addiction piece, if there's one thing we've all learned, like I'm in recovery, and part of that community. But I think now that everyone has a smartphone, I think everybody has a better understanding of what the feeling of addiction is because we all have that pull or that lure. We can't put it down. Whenever we're bored, we just can't help but look at it. But what is particular to the pubescent mind when all that myelination is occurring and those neurons are trying to figure out where to connect? When you introduce this thing that really does hijack that dopamine system. What is it doing to that process of the developing brain?

25:25That's right. One of the revelations that Francis Haugen brought out thousands of pages, screenshots of internal Facebook communications. And one was a seminar or a document or something prepared by some Facebook staff for other Facebook staff on teen brain development. And it goes into how the emotion centers are very active and those are developing early in puberty, but the prefrontal cortex is much later. And so there's this period, which is really the sweet spot for social media, which is especially teenage girls, you know, 13 to 17, very, very heavy users. There's a sweet spot for them in which the emotions are intense and the social concerns are intense.

26:04They really want to know what people think about them, but they don't have much self-control. They don't have the ability to say, no, I need to do my homework. I'm not going to check Instagram right now. And so they know that's the vulnerability and then they go for it. Again, they're not trying to harm kids, but they are trying to win the race to keep their attention. So for all these reasons, this is why I say one of the most important things we can do is raise the age at which anyone can open a social media account. I think it should be 18 in terms of health, but my goal is to give us clear norms that we could reach.

26:35So I say 16. If I said 18, I don't think we could achieve it. But 16, I think, is achievable. So nobody should be on, no kids should be on social media until they're 16. Let's keep going on the addiction because I actually have a question for you. So there's a debate in the academic literature. I've been warned to be careful about using the word addiction for smartphones because the addiction research community, it's clear, obviously, you know, heroin, nicotine, they're very well understood neurochemical systems involving dopamine neurons. So chemical addictions are very well understood. Behavioral addictions, some people apparently say you shouldn't call it addiction.

27:11You should call it compulsive use or problematic use. To me, it sure looks like addiction if you think that slot machines are addictive to some people, not most, but to some people. This seems very much like that. But I'd love to hear from you because you certainly have experience with chemical addictions. Would you mind first tell me what were your chemical addictions? Alcohol is the main one. So, yeah, what do you think about the similarity or difference? Well, my thoughts on this have evolved. Like I'm sort of indoctrinated in 12-step and AA, and that has a very kind of rigorous definition and philosophy around what is an addiction and what isn't.

27:45But over many years, I've really expanded what I would categorize as addiction. I think it lands on a much broader spectrum than we understand it to be. And, you know, when I got sober, if you were an addict or an alcoholic, that meant you were a gutter drunk or somebody who couldn't pull a needle out of their arm. but I think that we all fall somewhere on that spectrum. And some people only have the slightest dusting of addictive compulsive. You know, when you get to the far end of the spectrum, compulsivity and addiction start to look like the same thing and maybe they are. But, you know, as you slide towards more compulsivity and your decision tree becomes narrower and narrower, it starts to look more like what's at the other end of the spectrum.

28:29So I have a very liberal definition of addiction. And I would say that what you are talking about squarely falls within that, whether or not that's going to show up in the DSM. Right. Okay. So we're exposing our kids to something that can addict a lot of them. Now, you know, I get pushback from some other researchers, which is all good and healthy. This helps us all get closer to the truth, especially on video games who say that, no, you know, video games are good for kids. and they cause some benefits and eye-hand coordination, things like that. In digging into the data on addiction, what I found, what I report in the book, is that video games are not particularly harmful for boys in general and on average, whereas social media is harmful to girls in general and on average.

29:18Not all, but the thing to watch out for is that for both, what we find is somewhere between 2 % and 15%, depending on the criterion, count as having either addiction or what's called problematic use or compulsive use that interferes with other important domains of life. So, you know, even if you want to take a very, you know, generous view and say, oh, you know, most kids are not addicted. And that's true. Most kids are not addicted to their phones. Most kids are not addicted to social media, addicted to video games. But if it's like 10%, if it's like 5 or 10 % are kind of addicted, that's unbelievable.

29:52Like we would never, ever let our 10-year-olds do something if we thought it was like, you know, Russian roulette. You know, you have a one in 10 chance that this is going to become something that damages your life and possibly changes your brain development and sucks up most of your adolescence. So you're not going to do anything else. So, you know, I definitely don't want to put the word out there. Parents, don't let your boys play video. I would not want to say that. But just know that something, you know, high single digits are going to get more or less addicted. So you really have to watch out for that.

30:21And so that's also your spectrum. So you think it's a personality trait. Like some people just have a brain that is going to be easily pulled into addiction and some people it's much harder to pull them in. I think that that's still the case. I think there are certain people who are more prone to this, of course. Yeah, I think that's true. But I'm not sure that anyone is in an opt-out situation. Right. You know, they just haven't found the right behavior or the right substance. Well, okay, but that also brings up the possibility that maybe what's happening here isn't exactly addiction. It's just being trained.

30:53And so if you want to train a dog. Right, some reward system in your brain. That's right. We all have the reward system in the brain that runs especially through dopamine neurons, which don't just make you feel good. I mean, you know, people commonly assume like, oh, you eat a piece of chocolate, you get dopamine. Ah, that feels good. Reward. but dopamine has this interesting property that it's not just like oh you did good it's immediately linked to the motivation to get more it's like oh that was good i want more oh that was good i want another and that's why you know if you if you have one potato chip it's it's not just like oh yummy it's like i want more give me more give me more and so i think this raises the possibility that even if you are almost immune to chemical addiction nobody's immune but if you're on the end of the spectrum that you laid out.

31:40If a system is designed so that it can train you the way a dog trainer trains a dog and give you little rewards for if you do something, oh, you added something to your profile, a little reward. Oh, you had a good post, a little reward. It's possible that all of us can be trained by operant conditioning to do these behaviors. And then we watch our hand moving and we say, but I don't want to do that. Why do I keep doing it? Why do we keep doing it? Because our brains are pattern matchers. And then we have this consciousness sitting on top and the consciousness says, what the hell is going on down there?

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35:39Let's talk a little bit more about the differences between boys and girls. You have all these graphs throughout the book, many of which are just hockey sticks, basically. But not in every case, but I would say in the vast majority of the cases throughout all of these graphs, it's much more extreme in the case of young girls than it is with boys yeah so right so the way to think about it is that on any behavior related to anxiety and depression those are you know internalizing disorders you're always going to have girls and women being higher than boys and men in terms of the means was how high the line is that's always the case the one big exception is that when you look at completed suicides when you look at actual deaths boys and men are much higher than girls and women.

36:22And that's always been the case. Boys and men tend to use irreversible means. They tend to use a gun in America, at least, or a tall building. Whereas girls and women have many more suicide attempts, but they tend to use reversible means. They tend not to end up killing them. So the urge to suicide, the thinking about suicide is different in boys and girls. And suicide is especially a plague that is destroying boys, but it's both of them. So that's just the background. When we look at the rate of increase, what we generally find is that things were pretty stable in the 2000s. Their lines aren't really going up or down.

36:57The suicide line, as I said, is going down somewhat. And then everything goes up. What we find is that the sharpness of the upturn is much more for the girls. That is, the girls, it's like nothing's going on, lines are steady, and then boom, you hit 20, 13, and they all go up. Whereas the boys, it's more curved. The boys, they begin going up a little bit earlier, like even 2008, 2009. And that might be, this is speculative, but it might be as the boys are doing more and more multiplayer video games, they are moving away from their friends, from being physically present with their friends before the girls do.

37:32But I'm not sure about that. In any case, the point is the boys' mental health begins to show some signs of deterioration before 2010. And then it accelerates in the 2010s, but it's not directly pegged to 2013 the way the girls are. And the percentage increases are, you're right, they're generally larger for the girls, but not always. Sometimes the boys' percentage increase is similar. It's just that they're at a lower level. So their graph doesn't look like a hockey stick as much as the girls'. And so how do we understand this? Can you unpack what's going on here that's creating that differential?

38:05So what I do in The Anxious Generation is I lay out what childhood is, what adolescence is, and how we subverted it. And all of this would suggest a gradual change in mental health, gradual meaning not a single year, like, you know, over five or 10 years. That's the larger story. And that's true for both boys and girls. But then there are some specific things happening for girls. And I think the main thing is the key year that they all get wired up to each other is 2012, 2013. And the reason is because, you know, as we said before, they're going from flip phones to smartphones. That's part of it.

38:40They're going from no notifications to lots of notifications. That's part of it. They're going from no front-facing camera to front-facing camera. That's part of it. You get the filters, the way the girls can press a button and make themselves more beautiful. But I think the real thing to keep your eye on is that in 2012, Facebook buys Instagram. Before then, it had a very small user base. It was, you know, adult photographers were using it. Facebook doesn't change the platform very much in its early years. But that's the year that there's huge publicity. That's the year that all the girls get on.

39:11I should say it becomes normal and typical for teenage girls, even in middle school, to start that, you know, you lie about your age, you can open an Instagram account. And so it's when you super connect girls, they are much more vulnerable to emotional contagion than boys are. Because of group friend dynamics? Well, it's a lot of things. In part, there's a very deep psychological difference. This is described by Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the leading autism researchers, that boys are a little bit more over on the spectrum towards autism. In utero, we all start off as female fetuses with female bodies and female brains.

39:45And then when testosterone is triggered around the 10th week of gestation, you get the testes are activated, you get a little testosterone. The body begins changing over the male pattern, and the brain begins changing over the male pattern. And the male pattern is higher on systemizing, lower on empathizing. This is just on average, there are lots of exceptions, but boys are shifted over a little. They're more likely to like reading subway maps and computer programming and things that are high systemizing. Boys will grow up to read popular mechanics whereas girls are a little lower on systemizing, higher on empathizing.

40:18They care more about what's happening to other people. They remember more about, oh, how's your sister? Last time you told me that she had appendicitis. They think about who's related to who and how. So girls are a little more socially aware. The differences here are not big on ability, but they're very big on interest. What boys like to do if you give them freedom versus what girls like to do if you give them freedom is really different. And so when social media comes in and instantly you can see how everyone's related to everyone, what everyone is saying about everyone, that's behind door number one.

40:51Door number two is you can form teams that will combat each other with swords and flamethrowers. Which door do you want? And the girls say, I'll take door number one. and the boys must, I'll take door number two. Now, the video games are not particularly harmful unless you play them a lot and you get addicted, whereas the social media, I think, was harmful to most girls because you're super connecting girls who are more open to sharing emotions. And what emotions are they sharing? Well, even if it was even positive negative, a basic truism in psychology is that bad is stronger than good. So in a marriage, John Gottman's research, if I say twice as many nice things to my spouse as criticism or bad things, we are headed for divorce very quickly because a five to one ratio is sort of the minimum.

41:37Like if it's five good things to one thing, you know, then maybe you'll be okay. But bad is stronger than good. And so if some girls are sharing their anxiety, their depression, that's incredibly contagious. It literally will make other girls directly more likely to be depressed and anxious. And it also conveys a subtle message of valorization that it is prestigious to do this. It is rewarding. If you do this, you get so much support. And the more you do it, the more support you get. So that's why I think, I can't prove this, but I do think that we often see this big jump between 2012 and 2013 for the girls.

42:09And I think it's because that's when they hyper-connected and that's when they began sharing contagious emotions. Also, I would imagine just the sort of low-hanging fruit, obvious thing around knowing what everybody in your friend group is doing all the time. And, you know, 24-7 feedback on where you stand within that group dynamic. And if you're not invited to the party, being able to see what's happening at the party in real time while you sit at home. That's right. And good, because this gives me an opportunity to talk about Snapchat, which I don't talk much about, but I'm going to start. My daughter is 14.

42:43She really wants Snapchat. I didn't let her have Instagram in middle school. And that she's actually fine with. She could see that, as she put it, the girls on Instagram are stupid. She said that to me in seventh grade, like she could see what it's doing to girls. But she wants Snapchat because that's what they all use. You know, you could just do it all with texting, but they're all on Snapchat. And so I wasn't sure what to say about Snapchat. I had a strong sense. At first, we don't have nearly as much research on it as we do about Facebook and Instagram, which have been around longer and are more widely used, or used to be.

43:15I had the general sense that Snapchat wasn't so bad because it's mostly just texting, you know, texting with photos. You know, how bad could that be? My views about Snapchat are getting more negative as I think about a few features. One is the heat map, as you were describing, the ability to see where everyone is. So boy, do you feel left out. Someone was just telling me, you know, his son threw a party and he promised it'll only be about 15, 20 kids. Two or 300 showed up because once they could see that everyone was there, everyone went. So this sort of mob dynamics, desperate fear to not be left out.

43:47So that's bad. Another thing that's really bad about Snapchat is the streaks. That I think the company should be ashamed of. they claim that they are trying to help kids, they're helping them connect. The streaks, which is where they'll tell you, oh, you have a two-day streak with this person. Don't break the streak. You better send them something today. So you have all these kids who have other things to do in their life. They have to service their Snapchat streaks. They have to sit there. They have to post and post and post and post, not because they really want to, but in order to keep the streak.

44:15That's an example of a feature that is only done to addict and compel them to stay on. It is an evil feature. Snapchat should be ashamed of itself. It should drop that feature. It's just bad for kids. That's one. Just this morning, I read another article. The Wall Street Journal has been great on this, on really tracking down what the social media companies are doing to our kids. A feature I didn't know about. They now show you everyone's social world like a solar system. Have you heard of this? Do you know about this? No, uh-uh. I hadn't heard about it either until this Wall Street Journal article this morning.

44:45So apparently, so if you are a paying subscriber, apparently you can pay$4 a month to get the premium service. If you're a paying subscriber, then it shows you your social universe. Like here's you. Here are the people who are closest to you. As we calculate based on your communication, we can see this person is your Mercury. They're the closest to you. And this other person, oh, you know, she's, you know, Neptune. Okay, so you get to see that for yourself. You get to see it for everyone else. And so you can see that this person that you thought was your best friend, actually, you know, it's Maria who's her Mercury and I'm her Mars.

45:20Like I'm out where Mars is. Like, wait, what's going on? And so this is a cruel, cruel feature. I mean, I cannot believe that they do this to kids. I had never heard of that. Yeah, I hadn't either. I think it might be a new feature. That feels pretty pernicious. Yeah. Oh, it's horrible. Yeah. So, you know, I think Snapchat has a lot to answer for. I have not picked on them until now, but I'm going to start picking on them. I really think that they're doing bad things to our kids. You teach young people at NYU in the business school. And I know that you've taken a poll. You asked for a raise of hands.

45:50around who would be willing to let go of their social media accounts or how much money would it take? How much would I have to pay you or would you pay to get off it? So explain a little bit about what you discovered in doing this. So my analysis all the way through, and this is the major theme of the book, is that we're all stuck in a set of collective action problems, that people are on it, not because they like it, but because they feel like they have to be and because everyone else is. So social scientists have studied these for 50, 100 years. Collective action problems like the commons problem.

46:23That's the center of my analysis. There was a great study published. It's a working paper. It was put online last October by some faculty at the University of Chicago. Leonardo Burstyn is the lead author. And so I read this after I turned to the manuscripts. This is not in the book, but I mentioned it in this Atlantic article I wrote a few weeks ago. What they did was they said to college students at a number of schools, how much would we have to pay you to get off of Instagram or TikTok, you know, some somewhere it was studied on TikTok, some Instagram, how much we have to pay you to get off for a month?

46:55And, you know, people say some amount of money. I think the average was $50. And, but, you know, some people, it was a lot more. So this is a standard thing that economists do to measure the total value of something to society. You know, if I said to you, how about if you didn't use any mapping programs, you know, street mapping programs for a month, how much would you pay to avoid that? Well, that's a pretty good measure. You know what, people really value this. Like, we all get it for free, but actually, you know, it's worth, you know, a trillion dollars to the total sum of Americans or, you know, humans.

47:24So it's a common economist technique. By that measure, TikTok and Instagram are incredibly valuable companies delivering enormous value for free. We all get it for free. Okay. But this is not a normal consumer product. This is like an addictive drug. This is a trap. And the way that they showed this, So what they found was they said in another condition, they said, okay, now we're trying to get the great majority of people at your college to do this as a mass experiment. How much would we have to pay you to take part in that? If we can get almost everyone else off, how much would we have to pay you to get off?

48:01I don't know if they did a fill in the blank or if there was lots of choices, but it went from like you'd have to pay me X dollars to I would pay X dollars to do it. And so what they found was that then people reverse. college students say, oh, I would pay you for that. I would love to get off. If we could all get off it, then I'd love to get off it. And so I thought this was amazing because it really shows in econometric terms just how devastating this, you know, TikTok. I mean, look, TikTok and Instagram, obviously they create value for creators, for business. I'm not saying they're net drag on the economy overall.

48:33But if you include, if you really look at the way they suck out the attention and the happiness of so many people, it's possible that these things have a gigantic negative value to society. So I read that article, and then I checked it with my students at NYU Stern, and I found the same thing. I did it in a very simple format. What I did was I first asked them, I said, how many of you watch Netflix at least once a week? All hands go up. How many of you would rather that Netflix was never invented? You'd rather live in a world with no Netflix? zero hands go up. Because Netflix's stories, and they're really good.

49:06They're high quality stories. You know, people sometimes watch too much of it, but they don't say, oh, I wish this was just never invented. Then I said, okay, how many of you check TikTok at least once a week? Not all hands go up, but the great majority of hands go up. I say, just those of you who use TikTok, how many of you would prefer that TikTok was never invented? Almost all hands went up. And I say, well, so why don't you get off? They say, we can't because everyone else is on. We have to know what videos and trends are they talking about? It used to be Instagram, I think, was the most harmful program.

49:35I think that really did a number on girls in the early 2000s. TikTok only becomes super popular a little before COVID and during COVID. So we have very little data on it. I can't say, oh, we have studies proving that TikTok is doing this. But from what I've seen about the earlier part of the great rewiring, I suspect that TikTok is the worst yet. I mean, it's reach, it's power to train, it's power to reinforce, it's power to shape beliefs. So I do think TikTok is an unrivaled danger to our kids. The collective action problem being that as much as you want to get off it, you're just not going to because everyone else is on it.

50:09And the solution, therefore, or the responsibility for solving this problem can't rest on the shoulders of the individual. We need to look to governments, to civic organizations, schools, the tech companies themselves. You know, this is sort of like the last third of your book, all of these solutions that we should be talking about and enacting to counteract what we're seeing. So talk a little bit about what those solutions are. And I mean, you're optimistic about this. I am. I am optimistic that we can change. And I think that because most people want to change, because these four norms that I propose are actually pretty easy to do if we all do them together.

50:45So I think we can do it even if we never get any help from Congress. And here's why. So the first norm is no smartphone before high school. because the parents are all in a trap. The reason why you give your kid a phone when she's 10 or 11 is because she says, mom, everyone else has a phone and I'm left out if I don't have one, I'm alone. So that really breaks everyone's heart. We give in because everyone else gave in. So, but if we can set a clear norm, how about if we just don't give a smartphone till high school? Let's rip this nonsense out of middle school. Give them a flip phone. That's okay.

51:19Because, you know, I understand you need to be able to text them about pickup or about after-school activities. I'm not saying go back to the way you and I were raised when we didn't have phones on us all the time. But the flip phones didn't seem to have harmed the millennials. So give them a flip phone or a phone watch, just like an Apple watch. A lot of parents are telling me they're having good results there. So that's the first norm. That would at least let the kids get through early puberty before moving their entire lives online. But that's still on some level an individual action item. It's a decision made by the parents, not by systems.

51:51Well, that's right. That's right. But this one, like, I don't think it would make any sense to have a law saying you can't give, you know, if you want your kid to have a smartphone, you can't. Like in Britain, they're talking about that. There's some proposal for that, but we could never do that in America and I wouldn't want us to. So that can be done as long as, I mean, it would be helpful if the school gave guidance and we'll get to that in a moment. So no smartphone till 14, no social media till 16. And that's what the new Florida law does, which I think is fantastic. That was the original law was just, you can't open a social media account until you're 16.

52:19There was pushback. There's a libertarian argument that, you know, who are you to tell me how I can raise my kids, which is fine with me. Florida law does allow 14 and 15-year-olds to open an account if they have their parents' explicit permission. And I'm excited to see if that law forces the companies to finally develop a parental permission format. At present, kids can go anywhere, Pornhub anywhere, no parental permission, no age verification, nothing. And that law is relatively toothless until there are protocols set up on the tech platforms themselves, right, to verify identity? Yes, that's right.

52:53But we have to force them to do it because they desperately don't want to. It's going to be hard for them. They're going to lose a lot of customers. Their user base will plummet because a lot of them are bots. They're not real people anyway. A lot of them are children. So anyway, the second norm, no social media until 16. The third is phone-free schools. You know, you might tell your kid, no, I want you to lock your phone in your locker and not have it on you during class. But if everyone else is texting, then you have to be texting, otherwise you're left out. That seems like the first order of business.

53:22It's the easiest, yeah. And perhaps the easiest one to implement. It is. It's the one I'm most excited about because that's the one that I think we're gonna achieve this year, like literally in 2024. If you're listening to this podcast, if your kids go to a school where they're allowed to keep their phone in their pocket, please contact the head of the school and say, please make the school phone free. Our kids' education is plummeting. They're literally getting stupider since 2012. After decades and decades of progress going up, academic scores are dropping, not because of, well, COVID, yes, but it started after 2012.

53:53It's the phones. And I can tell you, the principals all hate the phones. The school, the teachers all hate the phones. They just can't lock them up because some parents freak out and yell at them. But if we can get more parents saying, please give my child six hours a day where they can attend to the teacher and to the other children, because otherwise they come into school and they're just on their phones. Like they're on phones during class, they're on their phone between classes, they're on their phones at lunch. Like it's insane. Why bother going to school? So phone-free schools, that's a must.

54:25It's easy. There's no obstacle to it. There's no cost. I mean, it costs a little bit to buy phone lockers, but that's it. So that's the most powerful one that we can do right away. The final one is the hardest. The final one is we have to give our kids far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. We have to give them back a normal human childhood where they have some independence to make small mistakes and take small risks. If we're going to cut back on screen time by, you know, let's say 80 or 90 percent for middle school kids is my hope. I just made up that number.

54:58I should be more precise. But, you know, we have to get rid of most of the screen use for at least through middle school and elementary school. we have to then give them not just something to do, we have to restore to them what a normal childhood is, which is a lot of independent play. And we have to give them chores and responsibilities. I mean, running errands, going to the store, these are great things to do. Kids today feel useless. This comes up in a lot of surveys. They say, my life has no purpose. Sometimes I feel useless. Sometimes I feel I'm no good at all. All of this starts really in 2012, 2013.

55:31And the more we let our kids be part of the family, do some jobs, run errands, the more they'll feel useful. So those four reforms, if we do those, I think we will not roll it back all the way, but I think we will, for the first time, see these rising curves. They're going to turn around. They're going to drop. The suicide rate will drop. The depression rate will drop. Again, I can't say it's going to go back to where it was in 2010, but I think we can really bring it down. And so far, it's done nothing but rise. I'm going to play devil's advocate for a minute. Please, I love that. There's a variety of arguments, counterpoints to your thesis.

56:05The first of which is that everything you're saying, I understand, but it's all correlative. There's no indication that social media and these platforms are causing the conditions that you're talking about. There was an article in Nature that just came out about this. There are many other causes that we need to look at, economic disparity and lack of opportunity, the opioid crisis, things like this. The other big one is this just typical moral panic. We see this every generation. You've got, those are the three arguments I hear. Okay, let's go through them. Those are exactly the three arguments.

56:38I got a couple more, but go ahead. Let's do those three. All right. So the first thing that, oh, it's all correlational. So we all know that correlation does not show causation, that we need experiments. Well, guess what? We have experiments. There are a lot of them. So I get really fed up when journalists and other researchers say, oh, it's all correlational. No, the fact that we have hundreds of correlational studies, most of which show in effect a correlation, doesn't negate the fact that we also have dozens of experiments that show causation. Studies like when you assign kids to go off of social media for a month, if you assign them to go off for a day or two, they're not happier.

57:08Because of course, if you take someone off heroin for a day or two, they're not happier. But those that look for a month or longer, the great majority find an effect. So that's the name of the game is experiments showing causation. We've got them. You go to my substack afterbabble.com. I have a whole post laying out. Here's what we know from the correlational studies. Here are the dozens of longitudinal studies that allow you to infer causality. Here are the dozens of experiments that allow us to infer causation more strongly. So there's a lot of experimental evidence. So it's just not true that it's all correlational.

57:40The second thing is that the skeptics, the ones who say that I don't have the evidence, they're using a standard of proof which is equivalent in the legal system to beyond a reasonable doubt. And that's what we use in science for our journals. We all review articles for journals. and we don't say, you know, is this probably true, probably not true? No, we say, have you shown that this statistically, that this is very unlikely to have happened by chance? That's the mindset we're all in. It's as though we're all, you know, criminal attorneys. You can't be convicted until we're overwhelming evidence.

58:09But we're in a public health emergency. You do not use that standard in a public health emergency. You know, there's a disease spreading. It looks like it's cholera, but we're not 100 % sure. Let's not do anything. No, we're not going to do anything until we are sure. Now, given that the things I'm proposing cost nothing and do no harm, the cost of doing nothing is enormous. And the skeptics are saying, they used to say it's all correlational and the correlations are nearly zero. Well, no. It actually, now there are experiments and the correlations turn out to be around, we actually all agree, it's around 0.15 in the data sets where you can infer.

58:43For girls and social media, it's around correlation coefficient around 0.15. They used to say it's just in America. Like if it was really the phones, it would be in other countries too. Well, guess what? Now we know it is in other countries too. It's in all the English-speaking countries. It's in Northern Europe. It's in the freest countries where the kids are not anchored in as tightly. It's a normal academic debate. You're right to raise it. This was just a review article that came out from Candice Ogiers, who's a major researcher in the field. But I have responses to that on my Substack, and I'll write another one soon to really put it all together.

59:15That's one. What was the next one you said? Moral panic. Moral panic. So it is a moral panic in the sense that it looks superficially like previous moral panics. It starts with people making claims about what's happening. Parents get freaked out. The media picks it up. So these media researchers who – there's a small group of them who criticize me on this because they say it's just another moral panic. To which I say, I understand your point. It might look like that at first. But if you think about The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the panics around novels in the 18th century and comic books and all these previous moral panics.

59:48That doesn't, the lesson of the boy who cried wolf is not, therefore, the wolf will never come. Well, lessons actually don't lie. But the point is that, you know, even if the first two alarms were false, there can still be a real emergency. And in previous moral panics, we didn't see suicide rates going up by 50%. In previous moral panics, we didn't see a sudden collapse of teen mental health. In previous moral panics, the stories were in, they're in the media. It was a story in the media about a kid who smoked marijuana and went and killed his parents. You read about these freak stories. That's not what's happening now.

1:00:28What's happening now is everyone sees it, if not in their own kids, in their friend's kids. So in many ways, this is very different from previous moral panics. I think Gene Twenge and I, we're called alarmists, but I think the proper term is alarm ringers. We're ringing an alarm. We could be wrong. I don't think we are, and I think the evidence grows more and more that this is a major international collapse of teen mental health. Oh, and you said the economic. That was your third one was what about like what's – Yeah, other factors, economic, gun violence, opioid crisis, all these other things that are kind of happening culturally.

1:01:03Yeah, that's right. That's right. Those are all good theories for the United States. And if graph after graph shows that teen mental health collapsed in 2012, 2013, what about school shootings? The Newtown shooting, that was 2012. Kids have had lockdown drills. Of course they're anxious. But why did girls start checking into psychiatric wards in New Zealand the same time and Canada and the UK and Australia and Northern Europe? Why was this a global coordinated response of teen girls, especially younger teen girls, because of American school shootings or because of American inequality or anything else?

1:01:42That's when I really began to feel like, oh my God, this is gigantic. This is not just some social science anomaly of the U.S. that we can debate about for decades. This is happening in many countries. The increase in mental illness has not happened. We don't find evidence of it yet in East Asia. East Asia is very different, but at least across the developed world. Free, democratic, open Western societies. That's right. That's right.

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1:03:44One of the things I'm trying to understand better or make sense of is how you square another thing that we're seeing in Gen Z, which is a greater capacity for empathy. You're going to have to explain that. Tell me what you mean. Well, I think there is some understanding that this generation has been acclimated to mental health in a way that we weren't. And there's a whole corner of TikTok that's just all about mental health. And they're learning about mental health at an earlier age. And there's a sense of sensitivity around that. And how does that work within the context of the statistics that you're seeing?

1:04:19Right. So first, are you presenting this as like a good thing? Like it's a good thing that this is happening? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, if I'm being honest, I guess I would have a predisposition to think that that would be good. Right. Because you and I are from a time when there was a stigma around mental illness. My mother sent me to a psychotherapist when I was in middle school because I developed some tics. And that was shameful. Like I didn't want to admit that to other kids. So there was a stigma to mental illness, to seeing a therapist. And so you and I have the intuition that, well, yeah, let's decrease the stigma.

1:04:52that would be a good thing. And that is a good thing. We don't want people to feel ashamed of who they are or what problems they're facing. So that's all good. I think the stigma was pretty much gone by 2010. Like we really were successful in de-stigmatizing therapy and mental illness. In the early 2010s, I believe what happened is not just that we removed the stigma, but that we reversed it. That is on Instagram and YouTube originally, now on TikTok, There are these gigantic communities around every possible mental illness. And what effect do they have on kids? Is this a good thing, giving them more information?

1:05:27Or is it making them increasingly more and more fragile and unresilient? Well, that's right. Because what happens, because of the way the algorithms work, the ones that are presented are the most successful ones. The most successful ones are the most extreme ones. And so if you have maybe a little bit of a tick, or maybe even if you don't, there's actually a diagnosis now. There are these tick disorders. They're not truly Tourette's, but they look kind of like Tourette's. The people really believe they have them, but they develop involuntary motor tics. And in one of the best-known examples, they shout out the word beans because there was a British woman, Evie something or other, who she might have really had Tourette's.

1:06:04I don't know. But she would shout out the word beans, and then all these girls would watch her, and then they would shout out the word. They developed similar things. So as we were saying before, girls are more open to influence from other girls than boys are from other boys, especially emotional influences. So immersing our kids, especially middle school girls, immersing our kids in a community in which mental illness is valorized and mental health is a source of shame because you're somehow insensitive. Oh, you think you're so happy when the rest of us are miserable. I've heard this from some kids.

1:06:36So no, I do not think that TikTok and Instagram and all those things are good for the mental health of people who are suffering from mental health problems. I think we're now seeing over-therapy. We're seeing over-psychologization. We're seeing valorization. We're seeing incredibly bad information spread around. So no, I think this is a really, really bad thing, what social media has done to the mental health community. In terms of misinformation, like looking more broadly down on the internet, we're seeing this increase in fragmentation. We no longer enjoy a monoculture of any way. Yeah. Misinformation out there.

1:07:14And there's also this rise in contrarianism, this idea that everything you've been told is a lie and this is what they don't want you to know. And so people are walking around in all manner of myriad alternate realities about what is true and what isn't. So my first question is, what is this doing to our brain? And then secondarily, the existential question, like can we cohere as a society, as a democracy, when we can't even agree upon a shared sense of what is true and real? That's right. I won't have much to say about the first one because while I'm learning a lot about what social media and other things are doing to teen mental health and teen brains during puberty, I can't exactly say what our current information environment is doing to adult brains.

1:08:01So I'm going to set that aside. It's alluring. It's attractive. When you come across that post and it's like, here's the thing, the secret thing, like we're going to click on that. And that's what, you know, the internet traffic's in. That's what's getting, you know, all of the engagement. Yeah. So I'll make two points off the bat. One is we're a very tribal species. We love doing group versus group conflict. The great success of liberalism in the last few hundred years, I would argue, is overcoming that. Traditional societies cohered around shared blood, shared gods, shared enemies. And liberal democracies have been able to cohere around a set of procedures and processes for legislating and resolving disputes that leave us each free to construct lives that we want to live, and we can live together in peace and harmony with a lot of diversity.

1:08:46So all that stuff was really suppressing our tendency to tribalism. And I think once social media became super viral, again, in the early days, it was wonderful. It looked like a friend of democracy. But once you get the like button, the retweet button, everything converts to being super duper viral after 2009. This now is what leads to the fragmentation of everything. You used the word monoculture before, and I think many of your listeners would flinch, like, we don't want a monoculture. What we want is a rich culture with lots of little pockets of communities and lots of different ethnic groups can have their own culture, but it's against the background of a common American understanding.

1:09:24Not perfect, but some sense that there was an election and we had procedures and this person won, some sense of here's what American history was we always argue about the details, but there has to be some way of making sense of things together. When the 9-11 attacks happened, we very quickly settled on the narrative that we were attacked by Al-Qaeda. I think that was obviously true. There were some conspiracy theories, but they didn't go very far because this was 2001. We had the older internet, which was not perfectly made for conspiracy theories. I mean, they've flourished, but it wasn't like it is now.

1:09:55It's only once things get super viral and super intimidating, especially Twitter, once you get people able to attack anyone, anytime, anywhere, an attack that could go viral and destroy the person's life, people get scared. So don't speak up as much. And when you get the moderates going quiet, you get what's called a spiral of silence. There's a West German political scientist in the seventies. I've forgotten her name, Elizabeth Noel Neumann, I think it was. She wrote this really brilliant article about, you know, looking at the whole communist countries just to the east of her, where when you attack the moderates on your side and they go quiet and all you hear is people more extreme, everyone gets a sense of like, this is what public opinion is.

1:10:37Oh, this is what people think. And then once you get that, the new moderates, the new people on the edge, they get attacked and then they go silent. And that shifts the perception even further to the extreme. So this is now happening on the left and on the right. So we see it, I believe, in the Republican Party with the loss of all the moderates. There are hardly any moderate Republicans left in Congress. and I think the party, I think, is going off the deep end in many ways. We see it on the left, not so much in the Democratic Party, in which the moderate wing actually generally wins over the more radical wing.

1:11:08But in the left, I believe we see it in the institutions that are dominated by the left, which are primarily the epistemic institutions, anything about generating knowledge. So universities, media, journalism, the arts, museums, in all those areas, we see, you know, Almost everybody was on the left, but they were mostly true liberals. They mostly believed in free speech. They believed in truth. But once the moderates get attacked and silenced, now the people who speak up are the people who are further to the extreme who say, you know, our goal isn't knowledge. Our goal isn't to preserve the best of what's been thought and said.

1:11:41Our goal is to bring about racial equality or divestment in Israel or whatever, like some political goal. And when you do that, then you're betraying the institution. You're betraying the mission of the institution. And of course, the public loses trust. So I think what social media has done by silencing moderates, by super empowering extremists, is it's shattered any ability for us to reach a common understanding of what's happening. And it is undermining, and I would say shattering, the institutions that we depend on to find truth. I do think we can solve the problem for kids. I don't know what we can do for democracy.

1:12:14Right, I was going to say, where your optimism lies with the younger generation, this is a much more pessimistic view. This is much harder. It's one that I share. And I think there's this sensibility that there's a giant swath of the population that would fall into that moderate category. You're just not hearing them. They're not speaking up on social media. And the idea is like, well, they still turn up and vote and, you know, they still talk to their friends or whatever. But is it that that swath of the population is narrowing and narrowing and becoming smaller and smaller as the edges of what constitutes being kind of a moderate or a centrist gets more thinly defined.

1:12:51You and I are products of the 20th century where we think about public opinion and we think about, is the middle shrinking? And we think that an election is a measure of what the electorate thinks. And so the goal should be to expand the number of people who think in a good way, let's say. But since 2010 or so, that's not the way things work. It's not about shifting people or it's about the dynamics of who has the power of intimidation. And so the middle, I don't think the middle has shrunk in America if you were to measure everyone's attitudes. In fact, there's a debate about whether America is getting polarized.

1:13:25And people on the other side say, no, we're not getting polarized. Look at public opinion polls. People are still pretty moderate. Most Americans are still in the center on most things. Or, you know, there's a bell-shaped curve. So if you're looking at the averages, those aren't changing very much. But in the super viral social media world, average doesn't matter. Except on election day. On election day, it actually does matter what people think. But every other day of the year, it doesn't really matter what people think. What matters is what's going on in this bizarre, distorting stage that things take place on, which is social media, in which a lot of the people yelling and screaming aren't even real.

1:13:58A lot of them are Russian or other foreign agents. A lot of them are people with personality disorders, trolls, men who enjoy being assholes, frankly. So this is not at all a reflection of public opinion. And yet it shapes almost everything we do. Right. And in turn and in time, it will shape public opinion. What is the impact on the younger generation who are trying to wrap their heads around what they think and where they fall along that spectrum? And we're only at the beginning of the advent of AI and what that's going to do to this whole thing. So it is very much a concerning situation. Like can America or can liberal democratic institutions at large survive what we're looking at right now?

1:14:43That's right. I think that is truly an open question in a way that it wasn't. Before 2010, it just wasn't an open question. I mean, so it's happening in other countries, not all other democracies. Some are not as polarized, but there are others, you know, Poland, actually Japan and Korea. I mean, there are a number of democracies that are experiencing more dysfunction, polarization, but not all. But ours as particular problems were very large, very diverse. Our First Amendment, which is so wonderful in many ways, means that we have almost no options for regulating social media among adults. I think we can regulate it for kids, but there's very little we can do at the legislative level for adults in democratic discourse.

1:15:22So I think we're very vulnerable. And I don't want to be too pessimistic because it's always been wrong to bet against America in the past. It doesn't mean it's going to always be wrong in the future. I'm hopeful that people will realize we can't just go on as we're going, and we're going to have to adapt to this new world. In fact, the title of my next book is going to be Life After Babel, Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share. And one of the features of this world is going to be people really, really need to do their jobs. They really, really need to set their politics aside. If you're a librarian, be a librarian.

1:15:59Don't try to bring in your politics into what people can read. If you're a college professor, teach your subject. Don't bring in your views about this or that. If you're a journalist, be a journalist. Don't say we're not going to platform the other side, as many young journalists say. So we have a crisis of our institutions from a real spread of lack of professionalism because people think that what is good is for me to use my position to advance the party of the good. And that way lies ruin. Yeah, there is this dramatic erosion of trust in institutions broadly, in journalism, in government, in institutions of higher learning, etc.

1:16:41How do we repair that trust? Is it in accordance with what you just shared? Or is it more than that? I mean, unless we can do that, it does become a very dire situation. I feel like we're on the precipice of that right now, given that degradation of trust. I feel that's the way I feel that we are on the precipice of something that could be very, very bad. I'll just give you my thoughts about the world that I know best, which is the university world, where in 2015, higher education in the United States had extraordinary support. We had one of the best brands in the world. American universities dominated every list of the top.

1:17:20Smart kids from all over the world wanted to come to America to go to our top universities. So we had this amazing brand. And at the heart of the brand was excellence and honesty. We cannot lie. You know, people would say a study from Harvard showed X. Well, because, you know, Harvard is a name brand. Well, that means it must be true. So that's what we had until 2015. And it wasn't perfect. It wasn't entirely true, but it was mostly true. Like, you know, universities are big, diverse places where lots of smart people are making lots of discoveries. I love being a professor. I love the academic world.

1:17:51But in 2015, because of social media, this is what I've been writing about in other work, because of social media, we were overrun by people pursuing political agendas rather than scholarly agendas. It wasn't most people by far, but because the activists could intimidate and threaten and destroy our reputations, a lot of us were cowed into silence. We acquiesced to the takeover of the purpose of the university. That's why I believe trust in higher ed plummeted after 2015. This all began in 2015 in that courtyard at Yale that I won't go into the details. But 2015, there were a lot of student protests.

1:18:25University presidents caved in. They never punished people for shouting down speakers. They never asserted academic integrity. So that's just plummeted and plummeted. And Gallup data shows that by June of 2023, it wasn't just Republicans who hated higher ed. It was moderates and centrists. Higher Ed, this amazing brand from 2015, had somehow managed to alienate most of the country. Our reputation was in the toilet. And that was all before October 7th. And before those congressional hearings, we saw those three presidents who couldn't say why it was bad to say. It was a complete disaster. So that's the world that I know best.

1:19:02But the one optimistic thing I can say is that even though I've been studying this and working on it and trying to fix it or help it since 2015, every year was worse than every year before. There was never really any progress until 2023. Things have begun to turn around in higher ed. I co-founded an organization called Heterodox Academy. We're about 6 ,000 or 7 ,000 people, mostly professors, who believe that we need viewpoint diversity, open inquiry. We need to do our jobs. We love our jobs. If there are any professors or university administrators listening, I urge you to join. It's free, heterodoxacademy.org.

1:19:38But what I'm saying is the way America has traditionally worked is that we have problems. They don't get fixed. They get worse and worse. And then they get so bad and then something happens and we do ultimately fix them. And this is a problem of democracies. They don't look ahead. They're not foresightful. Authoritarian countries like China are very foresightful. They plan ahead five-year plans. Now, they're not very dynamic and they have a rigidity. So even though the trends now are very bad for American political life, you should never assume that they're just going to continue. Something's going to change and things could turn around.

1:20:14But your sense is that the pendulum has swung as far as it's going to swing and it's swinging back now a little bit into some balance. If you'd asked me this two years ago, I would have said, I don't think it's a pendulum. I think it's more like a tower. A pendulum is a negative feedback loop where the further out it goes, the stronger the force returning it to the center. But a tower is a positive feedback loop where you push over a tower a little bit. The further you push it, the stronger the force pulling it over. So I had feared that universities and this sort of this ideological revolution was more like a tower.

1:20:46There was no way to stop it. But we're now seeing some signs maybe it is like a pendulum, which I think is a very hopeful sign. We've seen it in journalism too. The New York Times finally stood up for itself and started saying, you know what? If our reporter wrote something that you don't like, we're not going to fire them. Tough luck. We're journalists. and they hadn't really done that from 2015 until 2023, but they started doing it. They really started standing up, I think, better in 2023. Yeah, we could do several hours on what's happening in media right now and the gutting of journalism and all of that.

1:21:13We don't have the bandwidth of the time for that. But what I do wanna talk about is this very interesting, somewhat unexpected chapter in the Anxious Generation, which is about the larger kind of more existential thing that's happening amidst this crisis, which is spiritual degradation, which is a chapter you wouldn't expect to find in a book like this. It's atypical. So talk a little bit about what you mean in this chapter and why you felt strongly about including this. I'm glad you picked up on that. It's an unexpected chapter because I didn't expect to write it. I expected to write a short book on what social media was doing to girls and expand it into a larger book on what the whole digital environment is doing to teens.

1:22:01And I was way behind schedule. And I told my publisher I'd have it in a certain date. I was way behind schedule. But by the time I got near the end, I felt like, okay, I've laid out all this evidence about mental health and a couple other things and kids, but I haven't touched what it's doing to adults. And all of us are feeling it. I feel, we all feel fragmented, frazzled, overwhelmed. I wanted to say something for adults. And what I realized when I made my list of concerns, I was like, what is it doing to us? It activated a whole part of my mind from long ago. My first book was called The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.

1:22:35And what I did was I collected psychological claims from East and West thousands of years ago and today. You know, things like there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so is, you know, it's from Hamlet, but you get similar things in Marcus Aurelius and Buddha. So I learned a lot from writing that book about ancient wisdom. And what I realized is what a life online does to us, what social media in particular does to us, is the exact opposite of what the ancients advised. So just the simplest example is many traditions are wise to the fact that we're quick to judge, we're hypocrites, you know, judge not lest ye be judged.

1:23:11Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye when you don't see the plank in your own, all of that. So that urges us to judge more slowly, be less angry, be more forgiving. That's spiritual wisdom. And what is a life online? What is Twitter or any other? There are some platforms that have nice cultures, but for the most part, kids are being immersed in a culture of judge instantly now, because if you don't judge now, someone's going to say, why haven't you judged? Do you not care about this issue? So it makes us hyperjudgmental. It makes us not care about context, whereas in reality, moral violations, moral concerns, they're almost always really complicated.

1:23:49There's always a story, but social media strips it away. So it makes us more judgmental. The ancients advise us to calm and clear our minds because when people are focused on their own concerns, their petty concerns, they're not open to God or other people. And so spiritual advancement comes from sort of clearing away the dust, the dirt, the cobwebs, sitting silently, learning to silence the jumping monkey of your mind, I think is something the Buddhists say. It's hard to do. It takes practice. But if you do it, the rewards are incredible. And the research on meditation is very, very good, very positive.

1:24:25What is a life online? The exact opposite. It's just constant stuff coming in, constant notifications, constant interruptions. And you're really, really focused on yourself. Should I chime in on this? What did people say about the thing I did chime in on? What's happening? is my status going up or down? And I have a catalog. I think I have seven different things, seven different issues in the book about how here's what spiritual advancement is. Here's what a life online does. And it's exactly the opposite. I'm coming at this from the point of view of an atheist. I'm Jewish by ethnicity and culture.

1:25:00I was never religious, but my research on morality led me to research on religion because they're very closely related. And that all led me to studying ancient insights. There's a lot of wisdom in these traditions. And I think part of our modern world is we're losing touch with everything that was said before five minutes ago. We're losing our past. We're losing guidance. We're losing ballast. We're losing a lot of spiritual wisdom. This is the most profound and important piece, I think, in this whole thing. It's this battle or this war between the ego and the advancement or the focus on the self versus self-transcendence.

1:25:41So you go online, it's about you. How do you measure up? It's about what just happened, what's about to happen. It's anticipating, it's fearing, it's the role of the individual in terms of this collective. And it drives binary thinking. It drives a lack of empathy. It undermines forgiveness. All of these things that we would all agree are laudable traits to cultivate at the cost of any investment in self-transcendence and understanding that all of the things that we're seeking through scrolling are actually found by getting offline and being present and starting to invest in not only the internal work of becoming more self-actualized, but also in understanding that it's not about the self, it's really about the whole.

1:26:34Right. That's right. And I know your listeners are very interested in self-improvement and health and mental health. Yeah, I think this is a kind of practice that is hard, but you need to be conscious of it. You need to commit to it. And you need to change your habits to make room for it. any part of your day that you don't have some guardrail up, like this stuff is going to just come in and take over that time. You made it like a dimension of self, are you self-focused or other focused? I think that's a very important dimension. That is at the heart of spirituality and spiritual traditions are trying to move us along that dimension.

1:27:10And is this not just at the crisis of meaning and a lack of purpose that so many of us are suffering from? Yeah, that's right. That makes it a lot harder, a lot worse. When we don't have a sense of purpose, a sense of noble purpose, we feel scattered and fragmented. We pursue other things. We pursue status. We pursue material possessions. The other way to think about this dimension, rather than just self-other, is higher versus lower. And that's something that I took from the happiness hypothesis, that around the world you see many cultures talk about a vertical dimension of life. Now, there's a vertical dimension like hierarchy and authority, and the king is up, and vassals are down.

1:27:51But what I found psychologically is that there's also another vertical dimension. So imagine like a three-dimensional space. There's the x-axis, the y-axis is the vertical dimension. But then there's a z-axis coming out of the page, which I've called divinity. Because a lot of societies have this idea that God is up or high. He's up in the sky. He's good. He's noble. And then the devil or demons are down below. They're low. They're in hell, which is down. We have a lot of embodied cognition about high-low. And high is also less carnal. It's more ethereal. It's more loving. It's more calm. And down below is more carnal, sensual, biological, lustful, painful.

1:28:37And so because you find this in a lot of cultures, that really attracts me. Whenever I find any sort of like really ornate, strange thing in multiple cultures, then I start thinking almost like Carl Jung with his theory of archetypes. Like, you know, why do these common patterns occur around the world? There must be something in our brains that are causing this to happen. So I think that thinking in this three-dimensional space is the normal human way to think. Oh, and a lot of my thinking here was influenced by just spending three months in India doing research. I know you're going to India very soon.

1:29:09So Hinduism is very explicit about some areas are zones of purity, some are zones of pollution. And there's a very explicit high-low sense to that. We moderns live in a world that's been stripped of that third dimension entirely. There is no divinity. If you like it, you do it. If it gives you pleasure, it's good. But I think people feel the loss of it because it's in our heads. So if we don't talk about it, we're sort of left wondering, like, why does this thing I feel? Why do I feel unsatisfied? I don't know. How does that play into how you think about your specialty, which is moral psychology, this idea that the answers that we're seeking and looking for are not necessarily going to be found in reason and logic, but in our instincts and in our gut?

1:29:57Yeah. Doing this work in psychology on the psychological foundations, I've called them the moral foundations theory, has really changed my thinking about morality and politics and a good society and everything. In the Western tradition, there's a long tradition of trying to reason our way to morality. Just as the scientific revolution, people were able to reason and use evidence to find the truth about stars and about gravity and about plants and everything. People have tried to do this in the moral world, in the social world. Can we have a science of, well, science of sociology in societies? Can we have a science of morality?

1:30:34For hundreds of years, people have sought the science of morality. Can we prove what's right and wrong? And I'm a pretty cerebral, rational type of guy. I should be really down for that. But what this research has brought me to is realizing our communities are these emergent things. They're these sociological facts that don't make any logical sense, but they have a power of their own. And we need them. We desperately need them. We need order and structure. We need a sense that there's a moral world. We need a sense that we live in the same world as other people. This is all very irrational stuff, but it's who we are.

1:31:09It's human stuff. And I think we're losing that. We're losing that sense of living in a shared moral matrix. It's very disorienting. And as Emil Durkheim showed more than 100 years ago in his book on suicide, when you have anomie or normlessness people don't feel free they don't feel like hey i can do what i want here they feel lost they feel why is anything worth doing we're confused and that's when suicide rates go up at least in western cultures that are sort of in a sense almost too free he would say um so yes doing this work certainly pushed me to a moral view which is very different from what i had when i was a younger man talk a little bit about the solutions to this cohesion problem?

1:31:53How do we, you know, reach across the aisle and develop better ways of communicating or just being present with people who see the world differently? I'm glad you put it as a cohesion problem because that I can address. As I've been getting increasingly alarmed about American politics and democracy since 2008, when I started working on this, my first TED talk was about the left and right and why they don't understand each other in 2008. I've been getting increasingly alarmed. And the way I see it now is, you know, think about this complex sculpture, this complex thing. And you start it spinning or you put on a wheel, you know, or like a playground spinning.

1:32:30You start it spinning and you spin it faster and faster. Well, parts are going to blow off. Parts are just going to get thrown out by the centrifugal force. And what we need is a corresponding centripetal force to pull it back in. We have a large secular liberal democracy with a lot of diversity. It's got lots of parts. If we were a small, cohesive nation with one ethnicity, one religion, we wouldn't have this problem. We'd be very cohesive. We wouldn't have the creativity of diversity, the vibrancy, but we'd have a lot more cohesion and trust. And the Scandinavian countries used to have that.

1:33:00They were very small, homogeneous countries, very, very high trust, very easy to have a liberal democracy there. So I think what we need to do is we need to think as Americans, okay, this is who we are. This gives us unique strengths, but man, we are coming apart and we cannot function if we're coming apart. We have to restore some basic functionality, institutions, trust. So if you think about it that way, now what can we do within an American framework? And I think some things like emphasizing assimilation. Again, this is one of my most controversial points. You can have diversity if you have assimilation.

1:33:32And this is the America of the 20th century post-war world. So my grandparents came from Eastern Europe. They were religious Jews. My parents were more secular. We all had a very Jewish identity, but we all had a very American identity, and we were grateful to this country for allowing that to be possible. So immigration with assimilation doesn't raise very many problems. People whose ancestors were here for a long time, they see people coming in, but if the people assimilate, they're basically saying, we love America. We're happy to be here. You know, you don't get the nativist rejection. It's when people started saying, and this was, I think, a problem on the progressive left, start saying, no assimilation, that's cultural genocide.

1:34:08People should not assimilate. Assimilation is bad. People should keep their own cultures here. We should assimilate to them. And this is happening in Europe as well. And it causes a huge right-wing reaction. It is literally reviving Nazi-affiliated parties in Europe. So immigration is a gigantic issue today in America and Europe. And I think the fault, you know, you can point to racism on the right, but the anti-assimilationist view on the left, mass immigration with low assimilation, I think that very predictably triggers the right-wing reaction. Here I'm drawing on the political scientist Karen Stenner, a wonderful Australian political scientist.

1:34:42So anyway, if you think about anything, immigration, anything, in terms of how do we create cohesion while still having our diversity, then I think we can make progress. Another would be a gap year after high school of some kind of national service. Give kids a common experience, move them to different parts of the country, a red-blue exchange, something like that. So there's a lot we can do to convey the sense that we are one country. Our fates are interlinked. We have to learn how to get along. We have common interests and common concerns. That's the way I'd approach it. Yeah. And we have a lot to lose.

1:35:17We sure do. If we don't really get on top of this, I think. We sure do. We've taken this country for granted. And this country, I think, is a miracle. I'm very grateful. It is a miracle and it is in danger of coming apart. I want to shift gears and talk a little bit about parenting. Lots of parents listen to this. I'm a parent, you're a parent. You've shared a few things around how to shift our relationship with our devices, how to counsel our kids to have a better relationship with these devices. And I'm laughing because we all know how difficult this is in practicality, right? Like, okay, just tell your kid this, that, or the other, or these are the rules.

1:35:55Like, all right, well, good luck with that. You know what I mean? Like putting this into motion is very challenging. And we as adults have our own challenges with our compulsive behavior around these phones. Kids pay attention to what we do, not what we say. What is the advice to the parent who has a kid who, you know, isn't eight is 15 or 16. Like the ship is already pulled out, right? And you can see it happening in front of you. And there's a sense of powerlessness. Like you can't yank it away because that's already been done, right? So I'm sure you have parents that ask you about this all the time.

1:36:32Oh, yeah. Absolutely. That's right. So the central idea of the book is that we're all stuck in collective action problems. And if you say to your kid, you've been on Instagram for years, I'm canceling your account. You've had a smartphone for years, I'm giving you a flip phone. Okay. I'm not advising that. Some parents may want to do that, But my recommendation would be don't do that if you're the only one. But if you can find several others, several other parents of your kid's friends, not necessarily to go that far. But whatever you do, if your kid feels that he is alone, he's the only one, then it's going to be really scary for him.

1:37:10And he's going to resist with all his might. And he's going to see you as a tyrant who's cutting him off from his friends. What I'm hoping to do with this book is create such a widespread understanding that this is really damaging our kids. which is a view the kids share, so we don't have to convince them of it, that it may become possible for parents of 15-year-olds to say, you know what, you know, I gave you a smartphone too early. I wish we hadn't given it to you in fifth grade. You've got it, and I'm not going to take it away from you. But we're going to have a house rule, which is, you know, when you come in, you have to put your phone in this box, and you get it when you go out.

1:37:44A smartphone is very useful when you're out. You don't have it when you're in the apartment or the house. Now, you still have your computer. So yeah, you can text. You can still text your friends. I'm not saying don't text your friends, but I'm saying the smartphone is unusually addictive because of the touchscreen technology and the small screen. Let's have some limits. This is what we do with my daughter, who's 14. She has a smartphone, no social media. And when she's in the house, we don't enforce it perfectly enough, but when she's in the, it's supposed to be on the kitchen counter charging and she can use her computer.

1:38:11She can text her friends. That's the next thing we have to work on, But it's much better than just spending her whole day looking just at her palm. Dinner, we have a very strict rule. My wife really enforces it. You know, it's so natural. You're having a conversation like, oh, what was his name? Let me just look it up. Like, no, you're not allowed to take out your phone at dinner. I'm not saying take your kid off. Again, some may want to do that. That could be the right thing to do, but it's very, very hard. I'm saying at least put in limits so that they're not on it all the time. The most effective thing you could do to help your kid would be encourage the kid's school to go phone-free.

1:38:45The kids don't really have the capacity to say, you know what, this is bad for me, I'm going to not do it. Like, that's very, very hard to do even for an adult. But if the school goes phone-free, then everyone is doing it, and then everyone is talking to everyone. People are much friendlier, a sense of inclusion improves when schools go phone-free. So I would say be a social psychologist about this. Try to get the school to improve the environment and try to work with a few other families so your kid doesn't feel singled out and alone. On the subject of collective action, what is your sense of where the tech companies are right now?

1:39:24I know that you've spoken to Mark Zuckerberg and they may say one thing, do another, I don't know. But do you think that there is hope for some version of reformation here? Well, you know, I think, I mean, Metta has shown no inclination to reform despite getting whistleblower reports or internal reports, I should say, about dangers and threats. Nobody set out to harm children. I think some of these leaders still may believe, they might believe. You know, the skeptics, there are some professors that I'm in a debate with. So, you know, Mark Zuckerberg points to their work whenever, like, when he's on the Senate stand.

1:39:58He points to their work saying, well, the scientific consensus. It's just like the cigarette thing. Yeah, exactly. That's right. That's right. because there are some conflicting studies that he can point to, but I don't know whether he believes that it's harmless or not. I don't know. But my sense is that because they are locked in a collective action problem, any one of them that does the right thing is going to lose all their underage users. Huge numbers of users are under 13. And any company that does the right thing, they're gone. They have to kick them off. And then they're just going to go to TikTok and other companies that won't do the right thing.

1:40:30So I do not see any hope for reform from the social media companies or the gaming companies until they are forced by legislation or lawsuits. This is my hope. Congress stupidly grant them immunity from lawsuits for what they publish back in 1997 or 6, whenever the Communications Decency Act was passed. so we can't sue them for what they show to our kids. But those laws have been interpreted, as I understand it, really broadly so that parents can't really sue even for design choices the platform's made, like streaks, for example. There's no reason for streaks. That's not a First Amendment issue.

1:41:07It's a trick they did to addict our kids and parents have not yet been able to sue, but there's a huge number of cases moving through, refining the legal theory for why these platforms should actually be responsible for damaging kids, or at least for keeping them off. So if these suits succeed, they're gonna be much larger than the tobacco settlement. This is many more kids, many more people than tobacco ever affected. So these suits could be gigantic and that would have an effect. In Congress, there is the Kids Online Safety Act. There is one act that it doesn't delay social media, which is the most important thing, but it does make their time online less toxic.

1:41:46It sets more things to private. It makes it harder for men to contact girls and young children. It does a lot of good things. So COSA needs to be passed, and that is bipartisan. And that's actually one encouraging sign is that almost all this stuff is totally bipartisan. There's no left right to vote here. This is the one thing that – talk about cohesion. This might be the one thing that saves America. No, you're right. We need a common enemy. We're all coming together and agreeing on. Social media can be the common enemy that binds us together. The irony of that. That's right. That's right. What's unwinding us is actually going to come all the way back around and bring us back together again.

1:42:20Like if you could go inside of these app companies, whether it's Instagram or TikTok, like which ones are the worst? You talked about streaks with Snapchat. Like what are the ones that you think are doing the most damage, particularly to young girls? And if you could unwind some of the features on these apps, like which would be the ones that you would like to see go first? Is it the like button? Is it the algorithm? the follower count, where's the harm? Like where's the locus of the harm specifically? So the total tonnage of damage is going to be a function of the total hours spent times the perniciousness of those hours.

1:42:57So TikTok is the platform that sucks up the most time. But like when you compare it to Netflix, it's like exponentially more on TikTok, right? I don't know for sure. For teens, I imagine they're spending more time on TikTok. I don't know that number. Obviously, adults are spending more time on Netflix than on TikTok. So I don't know the numbers. It's the number of hours. So Netflix, huge numbers of hours times the perniciousness, very, very low perniciousness for Netflix. Whereas TikTok, huge number of hours and the most pernicious thing, I mean, you know, hardcore porn, there are some other things that are worse.

1:43:31But I think TikTok is the worst of the worst. It's the short videos. I didn't know this for the book, but I'm seeing it since then from talking to my students. It's the short form, which causes you to get into this narcotic state. It's like a slot machine, you know, a slot machine addict. They get into this state, I'm told, they kind of zone out. They get into a strange state in which they're worried, their anxiety goes away. It's like a hole that they're in. So the short form videos do that, like slot machines. So I think TikTok is the worst of the worst. Instagram reels and YouTube shorts, I can't say that those are not as bad, but the tonnage of damage is not as high.

1:44:09So that's the worst. Instagram, I believe, was the worst for girls because of the incredible amount of social comparison to other girls' perfect lives, carefully edited and run through filters. So those are the two that I think have done the most damage to girls. And then video games are harming boys, but it's not like the game is harming them. It's more the opportunity cost of taking them out of life, the things they don't do. The most important thing I think that we could possibly do is not tinker with algorithms, not tinker with like buttons. It's just delay. Let kids get through early puberty.

1:44:45That's what we have to do. Early puberty and even the skeptics, even the people I debate with, there's a group in Britain, even they found, they have a publication showing that at least the correlation between harm and social media use is largest between 11 and 13 for girls. Like even they find it. So can't we all agree that the existing current age of 13, which is way too low, can't we at least all agree that it should be enforced? Like why are 10-year-olds on Pornhub? Why are 11-year-old girls living on Instagram? We do agree. The only people who are not agreeing are the tech companies that would have to put up those firewalls to prevent younger people from logging on, right?

1:45:23That's right. That's right. So how does that get stronger? Well, so I think that's where I think we need to be putting pressure on Congress. to enforce. So Congress passed the COPPA, the Online Privacy Protection Act in 1998, I think it was. They set the age to 13. It was going to be 16, the original bill, but lobbyists got it pushed down to 13. That wasn't about safety. That was about at what age can a child give away information without their parents' knowledge or consent? At what age can I as a kid tell this company about all my likes and hopes and fears and they can take the data, they can sell the data, they can market to me?

1:45:55Do parents have any control over this? And Congress said 16 would be the age, and then it got pushed down to 13. Oh, and no enforcement whatsoever. No enforcement. As long as the company doesn't know that you're under 13, they're fine. So they're really motivated to not know. This is insane. This is completely insane. This is like saying, the drinking age is 18, but you know what? It's up to the parents to enforce it. And bars, strip clubs, brothels, whatever, you know, we can't expect you to check IDs. It's up to the parents to keep their kids out. That's completely insane, but that's where we are.

1:46:30So we need to put pressure on Congress to actually do its job and solve collective action problems and provide some minimal regulation to the industry that is doing the most damage to our kids rather than conferring on this same industry blanket immunity from lawsuits. I mean, this is the absurd situation we're in. So my hope is that we'll put pressure on Congress and this year there really could be some action. Barring that, since Congress always disappoints us on these matters, Barring that, the states are taking it up. Now, obviously, a state-level solution is not optimal. But Utah and Florida are taking the lead on actually helping to create environments in which parents can actually raise their kids and have some minimal degree of control over what the kids are doing online.

1:47:15What does it look like internationally? Who is getting this right? Britain is really leading on this. They have a functioning legislature, which we don't. So they have a parliament which has passed some laws. They passed an age-appropriate design code. There's a wonderful woman, Biban Kidron, in the House of Lords who really has led the child rights, child safety, activism about online. So Britain is leading. The EU is doing some things, but the EU tends to be very clumsy and over-regulated. So I don't know that they're going to produce good legislation, but I think the Brits are doing a great job of it.

1:47:44And here's the thing. When Britain passed this age-appropriate design code several years ago, I can't remember what the exact provisions were, but like certain things have to be set to private and there might be limits on, oh yeah, there are limits on what time of day the company can ping the kids. You know, Google and Facebook, they then rolled these changes out globally because it's a pain for them to have separate rules in different countries. So if Britain and Australia can take the lead here and show that it's possible, I think it'll make it easier for America to follow. Sure. If you find those regions or governments that are more receptive and more nimble at putting these policies into action, it becomes inevitable.

1:48:23That's right. And obviously, right. And obviously the money that Facebook, that Meta spends on supporting congresspeople and on lobbying here dwarfs what they spend overseas. And they just can't influence Britain and Australia the way they can influence the US Congress. What I love about this book is that it's just one piece in what is really a broader movement. Like if you go to the anxiousgeneration.com website, I don't know who built that website, but they did a brilliant job. Township. Oh, gosh. It's a wonderful company. I think it's called Township. It's a small operation, but they do beautiful work.

1:48:53Yeah, it's very compelling and it sort of story tells the thesis why this is important and how to really kind of understand it visually. And then there's this whole art piece. I mean, we opened talking about these billboards, but you've got all kinds of really cool stuff like out in the world that's like, you know, kind of percolating into our consciousness as people walk around our urban center. So how did that come together? And talk a little bit about how you're extending the message of the book into real action. Yeah. Well, thank you for the opportunity. So this came about because I'm friends with a brilliant artist in New York City named Dave Cicerelli, who came to me because he liked what I was doing at Heterodox Academy.

1:49:35He volunteered to help. I was putting together this book of John Stuart Mill, Chapter Two on Liberty. It's this amazing piece of writing, but it's a little dense. I said, Dave, can you illustrate his metaphors? And Dave created these gorgeous drawings. And so online, you can find it on Amazon, a Kindle version. It's called All Minus One. It's John Stuart Mill Illustrated. So it was a great collaboration with a brilliant artist. That was like 2018 or so. So then I start looking into social media and I talk to Dave and I say, Dave, could we come up with like some images that we could like put up on subways, like provocative images to kind of dramatize what's going on here?

1:50:08And he had all these great ideas. I said, great, I'll see if I can raise some money. Maybe we can do this. This is like 2019. And I wasn't able to raise the money and I was busy and we just sort of dropped it. So then I write this book. And so here we are in 2023. The Penguin Press, they have their art department come up with covers and they're boring and they're kind of pedestrian. Yeah, this covers. That's a real artist who took that photo. So I said to Dave, I said, hey, Dave, I'm really stuck here. Could you do better? And he said, sure, I'd love to. So he came up with this gorgeous design.

1:50:41and it has this like feeling of like Ophelia floating in the river, like, you know, drowning. And it's got like all these yellow balls that seem happy, but it's actually very threatening. Because I said, I want beauty and conflicting emotions. To me, that's great art. So he did it and that's the beautiful cover. And then the cover is so powerful. I remember how it started, but we said to each other like, hey, remember those posters? Like, why don't we do it? Let's do it. And so Dave came up with this whole plan with billboards and signs on the back of buses and these provocative posters and stencils that we're putting up in your playgrounds.

1:51:16When adults step back, kids step up. Just simple things about letting your kids have more freedom. And so we've done this. Dave, he built this 10-foot tall milk carton that says on the side, you know, missing childhood. Instead of, you know, it has the photo of the girl on it. Is that in front of the Capitol? There's a photo of it in front of the Capitol. Yes. He was on the National Mall last week with a team trying to get people to talk about it. And you get lots of young people taking pictures of it for Instagram, which is great. So he was in Washington. Then he moved it to New York City. I joined him there last week.

1:51:50And then it was in San Francisco like yesterday. It might even still be there today. Go to anxiousgeneration.com. You can see the page about the art. But it's in San Francisco. And then it'll be coming to Los Angeles once we need to raise more money to bring it. but we're gonna bring it to Los Angeles and then maybe other cities as well. So if anyone wants to support this art project, let me know. And there's billboards and there's posters and these sort of, you know, like when you're walking down New York City where it says post no bills and there's bills everywhere. And it's just like, there are a ton of them in a row of the young girl in a space suit saying, send me to Mars, which is provocative because you're like, what does that mean?

1:52:27It's asking you to kind of dig a little bit deeper. So maybe explain that idea. So the idea, so I'm an intuitionist. In my academic research, I'm best known for moral foundations theory, arguing that we don't really come to moral views because we reasoned our ways. We have a gut feeling, and then we look for reasons afterwards. So if I'm trying to persuade people, I'm going to not just give them the evidence. You have to give the evidence the arguments. That's what I do in the book. But you also have to give them the right gut feeling. And so art can do that, and dramatic images can do that, and great television or great movies can do that.

1:53:00You know, and there are many points in history where a great book changed the course of history. You know, Uncle Tom's Cabin or, you know, Harriet Beecher Stowe, there are all sorts of cases where some literary work got people to feel something. So that's what we're trying to do with the art project and with the book. And so some of the images, one of them made up by Lenore Skenazy, who wrote Free Range Kids, where she works with us, it says like, you know, supervision vision is love and it looks like big brother. Dystopic. Yeah, it's dystopic 1984. Because the way we're raising our kids is from like straight out of 1984.

1:53:32I mean, this insane paranoia, Dave has created these, and they're beautiful. They're beautiful and also a little shocking. So we're trying to illustrate the metaphors and tap into people's gut feelings. If we just manipulated gut feelings, that would, I think, not be honest. That would not, that would be like a demagogue. But since I think, you know, I marshal all the evidence, the research is in the book. but then also having the gut fitness. That's why we're doing the art project as well. But it is leading. I didn't want to start a movement. I'm very busy. I'm an academic. I don't want to run anything.

1:54:01But wherever I go, whatever we do, people are coming forward saying, can I help? Like, I hate what's going on. I hate what this did to my kid. I hate what this is doing to kids today. So if you're listening to this, if you want to be part of the movement, just for starters, just go to anxiousgeneration.com, scroll through the main webpage that kind of tells the story as Rich was just describing, kind of narrates you through. And at the bottom, we have a place where you can just put in your email address and we'll keep you posted. I don't have a 501c3. I don't have a way to. I think you can also like download a PDF.

1:54:31Like there's some helpful tools for parents as well. Thank you. Yes, that's right. We have, if you go to the resources page, you'll find we have a lot of tools for parents and for teachers and schools. If you want to encourage your kid's school to go phone free, we have a petition or a letter you could send. You just copy that text. You can modify it yourself and send it in. So we want to make it easy for parents especially to escape from these collective action problems, to coordinate with each other. And there are a lot of groups. We have a list of like 30 groups that are helping people do that, like wait until 8.

1:55:02We have resources for parents. We have lots of additional research. So there's a lot of resources there. I hope people will go to anxiousgeneration.com. So instead of waiting for collective action at the highest level, organizing your own collective action in your local communities. That's right. Start with just a few families because almost every parent is already on a text thread with the parents of three other kids who had a play date once. So we're all generally connected in small groups. You can start in small groups. All it takes is three or four families and suddenly you have a group of kids that are playing with each other after school rather than sitting and scrolling all day.

1:55:37And then they don't feel left out. Right. So to end this on an optimistic note, your analogy is sort of like the Berlin Wall. Like it's about to burst. It's not this incremental thing that we're going to be sitting around waiting for forever. There's enough energy behind this that, you know, the dam is going to burst soon and then everything changes. There's what's called preference falsification. There are situations in which if people are only supporting something because they're afraid to speak up or if they're kept in place by fear, as soon as the fear calms, everything can change very, very quickly.

1:56:09And that happened in Eastern Europe. Everyone hated communism. I traveled there in 1987. I don't think there were many communists or any back then. Like everyone hated it, but they were just kept in place by the secret police. They were afraid. And once it became clear that actually, you know, if we all mass at the wall and try to knock it over, we win. And then it fell everywhere. Now, that's a little bit too dramatic for what we're talking about here. But the social dynamics are actually very similar because why is it that we're all giving our kids phones at such an early age? Because we're afraid that they will then be left out.

1:56:40and they're afraid of being left out. So it's not the fear of the secret police. And that's the most powerful human urge. That's right. Yeah. I mean, being afraid of the secret police and being abducted in the night and tortured, that's pretty primal too. Okay, I'm not saying - But it's the same pathway, right? It's really primal. Like we want to be a member in good standing of a group. We're terrified of being isolated, being cut off, being alone. That's why banishment used to be a punishment in the ancient world before they had like good prisons and things like, your punishment is to be banished.

1:57:09We're not going to kill you. We're just going to send you away. And that's like death, social death. And teenagers are really, really vulnerable to social death. So anyway, my point is, if the kids themselves say, yeah, I'd like to get off if everyone else does, well, then why don't you get off? Because everyone else – so if a system is held in place by the fear of missing out and we can all get out together, then kids aren't missing out. We give them back childhood. We give them back play. We give them back each other. Well said. The book is profound. There's a reason why you're everything everywhere all at once.

1:57:39this has really struck a chord and a nerve. And it is the one thing that we can all agree upon, I think, except for a little quibbles over there at Nature, a few other people. But that's normal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good. And I want to thank you publicly for like putting the work into doing something like this. It's a great public service. And I am at your service if there's anything I can do to help you or to help this mission. So I appreciate you coming here today and sharing. Oh, thanks so much, Richard. Thanks for giving me the chance to talk to your audience. And thanks for drawing me out and raising the devil's advocate questions.

1:58:11That's how we learn and that's how we explore the complexity of the issue. So thank you. So the book is The Anxious Generation. You can go to anxiousgeneration.com and you can go to Jonathan's sub stack at afterbabel.com. Right. Cool, man. Come back and talk to me again sometime. I'd love to. Thank you. Peace. All right. All right, man.

1:58:39That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

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2:00:01Portraits by Davy Greenberg Graphic and social media assets Courtesy of Daniel Solis Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting And website management And of course our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt And Harry Mathis Appreciate the love, love the support See you back here soon Peace Plants Namaste

2:00:32Thank you.