Why We've Become The ANXIOUS Generation & How We Can Fix It | Dr. Jonathan Haidt

- I'm thrilled to be joined by return guest Dr. Jonathan Haidt, one of the most influential social psychologists of our time and the brilliant mind behind bestsellers like "The Righteous Mind" and "The Coddling of the American Mind."

In today's episode, we dive deep into the heart of his latest book, "Anxious Generation," where we discuss the undeniable negative impact of social media on Gen Z and why they were hit hardest.

We debate whether social media has Gen Z and why they were hit hardest.

We debate whether social media has any actual benefit to society and teach you ways to reclaim your attention and wellbeing in this hyper-connected world.

Whether you're a parent, educator, or part of Gen Z yourself, this conversation is packed with valuable information and actionable steps.

So get comfortable and let's dive into this eye-opening conversation with Dr. Jonathan Haidt.

"The Anxious Generation."

I was born in 1989.

Do I fall into this anxious generation?

- No, you do not. - No, I've escaped.

- Oh, yeah.

No, like if you were born in 1996, you and your age group is just different because you went through puberty on social media.

You had a smartphone and probably Instagram when you turned 12 or 13.

But you missed all that.

You were born, I'm sorry, you said 85, you said?

89. - 89, 89.

So, you're sort of mid-millennial.

- [Dr. Mike] Yeah.

- You got to experience the best internet.

Now, the older millennials, they got to see the transition from just having a stupid computer that can do like WordPerfect, and it can do some clumsy video games.

And then the older millennials will share my memory of the first time you saw a web browser.

So AltaVista, you were five or six when AltaVista came out.

- I was using it, Netscape, all that good stuff.

- Okay, but you didn't know to be amazed.

- [Dr. Mike] True.

- You were like, oh yeah- - This is normal.

- You know, you just everything in the world is right here like, you know, whereas, you know, five, you know, million BC until 1994, the idea that you could just have omniscience, I mean that was godlike power.

So, you know, the 90s was this incredibly techno-optimistic period.

The Berlin Wall had just fallen.

That didn't have to do with technology, but it was like democracy is ascendant.

- Revolution.

Well, it was people power.

Democracy is ascendant.

Authoritarianism is going to die in Eastern Europe.

And then a few years later, we get the internet.

And then we're all like, wow, you know, this is going to be the best thing ever for democracy.

And so the older millennials, like Mark Zuckerberg was born, I think, in 1981.

The older millennials, they really grow up with the internet.

They're learning computer programming.

They learn hardware.

They're taking apart computers.

And so we're all like, wow, this computer and internet stuff, it's really good for the kids.

Like, look, they're going to have amazing careers.

And they did.

So your generation, your generation actually is very successful, very creative, started a lot of companies, culturally creative.

And all that kind of comes to a screeching halt in the early 2010s.

That's the dividing line.

It's puberty in the early 2010s.

That's what separates your generation from Gen Z.

- So if I was going through puberty, age 13, let's say, and I was born 10 years later in 1999, - Yeah.

- What would my life be like then?

- Right.

So let's just trace out the timing of it.

So suppose you were born in 1999.

That's about the third year.

Pew says Gen Z begins with 1997.

Gene Twenge says it's 1995.

I think 97 is too late, but most people...

So I just say 96.

In my book, I just say 1996 is the beginning of Gen Z.

So if you're born in 1999, the iPhone comes out when you're turning eight, but you don't have one because it's expensive and no eight-year-olds have phones anyway.

And then around two years later, around 2010, the iPhone comes out when you're eight, yeah.

Three years later, 2010, that's the year that some of your older siblings would have been getting an iPhone.

It's really 2010 to 2015 is when teenagers go from, they all have a flip phone or a brick phone or Nokia, whatever, to they all have an iPhone.

By 2015, I think it's 70 or 70% have an iPhone or a smartphone.

And so you, if you were born in 1999, let's see, in 2010, you're 11.

It's quite possible, probably at 11, back then you wouldn't have an iPhone at 11.

Now you would, now you'd have it at eight or nine.

But back then you wouldn't get it at 11, but by 13 you'd definitely get it.

So, you would've gotten an iPhone at 13.

Now girls start puberty a bit earlier.

So for girls, 11 to 13 is this incredibly vulnerable period.

It's completely insane that we let 11 to 13-year-old girls be on social media talking with complete strangers and comparing them.

I mean, it's horrible.

- Why is it an especially vulnerable time?

- So puberty, I have a whole chapter on puberty.

I didn't intend to write it, but as I was writing the book, I realized, wait, puberty is so important.

People have to understand.

Puberty is a period of rewiring of the brain.

So, a lot of animals are born with a form for childhood.

And the most extreme case is butterflies.

So a caterpillar is designed to eat leaves, but a caterpillar can't fly.

So the caterpillar is the child form, and then it goes through a metamorphosis, and it comes out as a butterfly.

That's an incredible transformation.

With humans, it's not quite that dramatic, but psychologically, actually, it is.

A child is very playful.

It has a certain kind of intelligence, but really, kids are pretty stupid about most things.

They just don't know much, and their brains are just beginning to wire up.

And so there's a child form, which is optimized for being small and not needing too much food and slow growths that you have time to learn your culture.

Human childhood is really different from every other species, even other primates.

Other primates just grow and grow and grow until they reproduce.

Humans grow and grow until they're five, like three or four, I forget where it stops.

And then they grow really slowly.

Freud called that the latency period, sort of six to 10.

A lot is going on in that period, but the body isn't growing much and the brain isn't growing.

The brain reaches just about full size, 90%, by around age six.

So from six to let let's say, 12, 13 is a period of slow physical growth, but massive cultural learning.

Because we have our great evolutionary feature.

We don't have sharp teeth.

We're not as strong as chimpanzees, but we have the ability to learn from each other.

No other animal can do that the way we can.

That's our superpower.

And so puberty is this biological period where the brain is converting over from the child form to the adult form.

You get huge numbers of neurons get removed, the ones that weren't necessary, the ones that didn't fire together.

And of the ones that remain, complex circuits that are useful, let's say for archery.

If you do a lot of archery as a child, whatever it takes to be a good archer, those neurons from multiple parts of the brains, the axons will myelinate so that it becomes sort of locked in as a circuit that's quick and efficient.

- Is this why the accent situation happens around that age, that if you come to a country before?

- Exactly.

That's right, that's right.

So a finding that I've never forgotten from graduate school, I went to the University of Pennsylvania and I took courses from Lila Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, who were some of the leading psycholinguistics experts, was that, so for example, Henry Gleitman, he was a great psychologist at Penn.

He had this incredibly heavy German accent.

You know, he was Jewish.

He escaped, his family escaped from Nazi Germany when Henry was 14.

And he had a younger brother who was 12.

And the younger brother had no accent.

The younger brother was like, you know, native born American, like, you know, New York, whatever it was, like totally American accent.

And Lila said, that the window begins closing.

I think she said, it begins closing around eight or nine.

And then by 13 or so, it's generally closed.

Meaning if you come at 14, it's too late.

- That's why me and my sister have that because we came from Russia.

- Oh, okay.

- And I was six.

- How old were you?

- I was six, no accent.

- No accent. - Her, 15.

- Yeah, perfect. - Accent.

- That's exactly it.

Okay, so now, then the question, what it's super interesting is, okay, it's clear for accent, how about just like being American?

Like, because there's a study that I discussed, I discussed by, what's her name?

Namora no, it's, I forget, Minora in which they looked at Japanese families that brought their kids to America in the '70s, as a lot of Japanese businesses were moving over here.

And she found that it was sort of from like 8, or 9 to 15 was the window within which if you were here then, you go back to Japan, you still kind of feel American.

You picked up some of that.

Whereas if you were 15 and you came over, you never feel American.

You go back to Japan, you feel perfectly Japanese.

So what is it with you?

Do you feel Russian?

- Not at all. - Not at all.

Does your sister feel Russian?

- She probably feels more Russian than I do.

- Yeah.

She would have those intuitions, those sort of feelings about ways of speaking or social relations, right?

So there you go.

So it's a great example of why puberty is so important.

And that's why most cultures traditionally, and hunter-gatherer cultures, traditional cultures, they almost all have initiation rights.

How do you take a child and make it an adult?

And it's always gendered.

How do you take a girl and make her a woman who can be a mother, and a wife and a gatherer, and all the things that women do in that society?

How do you take a boy, a little boy, who's weak and hanging out with the girls, how does he become a warrior in a society that is warlike?

And so you have initiation rights.

You have adults guiding the process, teaching them, sharing with them the sacred wisdom, the secret rites, all that.

And what we've done in modern times is, you know, for 100 years, we got rid of all that.

But even still, kids still had a lot of experience with adults.

Kids still, you know, spent time with their parents or they listened to them or, you know, and they watch television, which was made by adults and used to have intense moral lessons.

You know, you watch shows from the 1950s or movies from the 30s, they're really moralistic.

So, kids are getting in lessons about honesty, and courage, and duty, and, you know, all those things.

So, kids are still being socialized even by mass media.

And then what would have happened to you if you were born in 1999 is instead of getting all that, instead of getting, you know, like I watched Bugs Bunny, which was made by my grandparents' generation, you know?

Instead of getting that intergeneral transmission, if you were born in 1999, let's say you got on Instagram in 2013.

So 2012 is the big year.

Facebook buys Instagram.

Instagram comes out in 2010.

That's the year when a lot of girls move on to Instagram, 2012.

And 2013 is actually when the mental health crisis begins.

But if you moved on, let's say you moved in 2013, let's say you're 14 years old, you're a slightly late adopter because you're a boy, you're not as into it.

Well, 14 is actually right.

That's really early puberty for boys.

So girls, it's 11 to 13 is the critical age when they're starting.

Boys, it's more like 12 or 13, 13 to 15.

So you would be right in your most sensitive period of changing from boy to man, receptive to signals about how to be a man.

And now you're not getting, you know, Westerns with tough guys shooting guns and being stoic.

You're getting reels and reels of YouTube videos, either of like super macho male influencers telling you how to trick women, or maybe you're getting mental illness YouTube about how everything is, you know- - Pathology.

- Everything is pathology, everything is oppression.

So you're being socialized by random weirdos on the internet who have no particular wisdom, most of them.

They were selected by algorithm for their extremity, people who are just influencers.

You know, I know I would see you as an influencer in a sense, but you're an influencer in the sense of you actually did something.

You accumulated some knowledge and now you're trying to share it.

But like most of the people that the kids are watching, they're just other young people who just got famous for doing something on Instagram, on social media.

- Back to the conversation in just a second, but first I want to talk to you about Ground News, an app and website that gathers related articles from around the world in one place so you can easily compare coverage.

As Dr. Haidt and I have been discussing, social media can have a dramatically negative impact on your mental health, often because of the hyper-targeted info algorithms are constantly feeding you.

The algorithm does a great job serving you clips from comedians you like or sports you enjoy, but it can become really problematic when it comes to the news it serves you.

That's where Ground News comes in.

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As Jonathan Haidt said on the last podcast, nuance is a superpower.

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Not sure if that metaphor works, but you get it.

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All right, let's get back to the conversation.

- So, your socialization would have been radically different if you were born in 1999 compared to 1989.

Your puberty would have been radically different and very dysfunctional.

You would not have gotten any training in how to be a man, how to be a grownup, how to be a responsible person.

You would also have had very little outdoor play.

Once kids get a phone, it moves to the center of their life and it will be there for the rest of their lives.

They're gonna be on it for the rest of their lives.

So if you get that phone when you are, well, when did you get your first iPhone?

I'm guessing it was in your 20s.

- I remember being in college and pushing back because I really liked the BlackBerry Bold.

- Okay.

- And I didn't want to swap off the physical keyboard.

- Right.

- So that was the time, the 20s.

- There you go.

So you didn't get it.

And then eventually you gave up on that in your mid-20s.

- [Dr. Mike] Yeah.

- So, you didn't get a smartphone until you were in your mid-20s.

Your brain was done rewiring.

The prefrontal cortex is the last to go through the transition.

That's around age 25, it is said.

So your brain was fully developed in the old world, and then you moved into the virtual world, which is what me and everyone else older did.

Gen Z didn't have that luxury.

As soon as their brain started rewiring, they were thrust into the virtual world with crazy, crazy stuff coming at them.

You know, videos of animal cruelty, videos of people getting punched in the face, videos of stabbings and shootings and beheadings.

And this is at the most sensitive time.

So anyway, I'll stop there, but you get the idea.

- Well, that's an interesting point because it seems like an inflection point for society.

And whenever we have these new technologies come about, there's usually a period of adaptation, right?

Because humans are very adaptable.

The brains are very adaptable.

The way parents raise children, I'm assuming the way that Gen Z was raised during this time is gonna be different than the next generation will be raised with the same technologies.

Because I feel like as parents become more aware of your book and the consequences of allowing someone going through puberty to just be guided by their phones, the way that the parents will handle that situation will change through the different generations.

So, how will that, you think, impact?

- So, let's look at the speed of change.

So, back when there was very little change before the modern era, people did what their parents did, and you learned how to take care of kids when you were young because they were kids and parents, and there's not a lot of change from generation to generation.

Once modernity begins kicking in in, let's say, the 17th century, now you start getting, you know, sort of getting on the upward slope of innovation and technology and harnessing energy and trade.

So now each generation is a little different than the one before.

And we can adapt.

If the change is slow, we adapt.

And then, you know, all the way up, let's say 20th century television comes out.

And kids love it.

And they're watching a lot of it.

And, you know, over time, we adapt, we say, okay, you know what, we need limits on sex and violence on TV.

And parents learn like, okay, you know, you have limits you can't watch after 10 p.m. or 9 p.m.

My parents, you know, the rule was no TV after eight, but if we were really good, we'd get a paper certificate that gave us half an hour of TV after eight o'clock or whatever it was.

You know, so- - How foreign that concept is now.

- That's right.

But my point is if the change is slow, then we can adapt to it.

But we are now at the singularity.

We are now at the spot where change is so rapid that it's almost as if you're in a plane and the plane makes noise and the noise goes ahead of you.

But when you break the sound barrier, you're going so fast, the noise is behind you.

There is no noise ahead of you because you're beyond your sound.

You're leaving your sound behind.

And the same way changes now so fast that we're leaving behind everything that we ever learned, everything we ever knew.

And so just an example of the way it changes so fast that I don't think we're gonna adapt to it is, people say, oh, well, social media is new, we'll adapt to it.

Like, no, there's no time because within two years, our kids are gonna have so many AI people in their lives.

You know, like a hammer is a tool, that's great.

A calculator is a tool.

I'm not against tools and technology, but there's a huge difference between having a calculator and having a friend who will do things for you.

And you can say to this friend, tell me a story, or I want to talk to you about my day, or can you go get me this thing, or subscribe to this magazine, whatever magazine, whatever.

So we already have people in your generation having AI boyfriends and girlfriends, right?

I mean, do you know anyone who's done that, had an AI lover?

- No, I'm aware of fake influencers, AI influencers, where people follow their journey.

And initially I have this gut reaction where I'm almost judgmental of it.

Like, how could you follow something fake?

And it's like, well, we watch movies.

That's fiction.

We read books that are fiction.

How does that differ?

- Oh, so right.

So, stories are great.

Fiction is fine.

We evolved with stories and fiction.

We wouldn't be human if we didn't tell stories.

So I have no objection to kids watching movies, watching age-appropriate stories on a screen.

That's not a problem.

But there's an enormous difference between watching fiction and interacting with an intelligent creature who you can't help. - Is set to manipulate.

- Well, even if it wasn't, even if it was just set to serve you.

Think about someday when you have children, how many servants would you want your child to have?

Would you want to have a maid, a butler, a hairdresser, someone to dress?

What's the optimum number of servants for your seven-year-old to have at her disposal?

What do you think?

What's the number?

- Right, exactly.

- Besides parents, I guess.

- That's right.

- And so Gen Z, even though they've had so much bad luck in timing, they didn't get childhood.

We took that away from them.

We said, no free play, you'll be abducted.

We shoved them onto social media before we understood what it was.

COVID came along and ruined either their high school or their university experience.

But at least they are the last generation of humans who went through childhood without their own army of servants.

And my fear is that Gen Alpha, that's the name for those born after them.

We don't know when it starts.

Marketers are saying 2011.

Who knows?

We don't know.

But the next generation will be raised with so many servants, they will have no need to talk to people.

They will have much worse social skills.

They will not learn how to do hard things.

So this is why it's so urgent.

I think it's so urgent.

I'm pushing so hard.

We have to recognize this year, in 2024, we have to change our thinking about children and the internet, children and social media, children and technology.

We have to change it this year because the army of servants is gonna be here in 2025 or 2026.

Everyone's gonna have them.

And we've got to establish the principle that things that are great for adults, tools that help us do our jobs, like social media, can be devastating for children.

Childhood is different.

We have to think differently about it.

- To play devil's advocate, we're using the measuring stick or barometer right now saying they're going to be much different because we were raised a certain way.

- [Dr. Haidt] Yeah.

- Is that just us now judging it based on our nostalgia and maybe rose-colored view of what happened to us?

- Well, that's a good hypothesis.

And each generation thinks that the one after it is weak and self-indulgent.

And there's research on this from social psychologists.

So there's a normal process of intergenerational misunderstanding.

And I'm technically a baby boomer.

I was born in 1963.

So I don't remember the 60s.

I'm not a typical baby boomer, but I'm demographically that.

And my generation and Gen X looked down on your generation as, you guys think you need high quality snacks everywhere?

Like this is your birthright to have GMO free snacks?

Like shut up and get to work.

That's like the normal, that's what each generation thinks about the one after it.

This is different because Gen Z has such high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide.

I mean, there's something really broken about them.

Again, this is not a judgment of them.

It's not their fault.

We did this to them without understanding what we were doing.

My point to answer your question is that the differences between generations, you know, we used to think it was like life experience, like World War II, and boy, was that a big deal.

Like World War II really did change everything.

My parents were teenagers during the war.

Like it really changed them.

It changed everybody.

That's how we get the greatest generation.

But what Jean Twenge has shown in her book, "Generations," is that the dominant factor isn't global events, it's changes in technology.

And this was also Marshall McLuhan's point, some of the great media theorists in the 20th century, McLuhan who said the medium is the message.

Don't pay so much attention to what kids are watching on TV.

You know, everybody's focused on, we gotta clean up what's on TV.

And now it's like, we have to clean up what's on social media.

It's okay if they're on social media for 10 hours a day, but we just don't want them to watch bad stuff for 10 hours a day.

No no.

When television came in, life for all of us became, you sit down and you consume, and it becomes entertainment.

And politics becomes much more about entertainment.

And Ronald Reagan is really well-suited because he's an actor.

So it's the transition to television made us all, it affected all of us in a certain way.

Well, the transition from television to social media is not we're sitting there consuming, it's now we're posting, we're criticizing, we're liking, we're fighting, we're supporting.

It's fighting all over the place.

It's performance all over the place.

And this has transformative effects.

It makes you more egomaniacal, more concerned about your brand.

So no, this is not just, oh, each generation thinks this about the other.

This is one of the biggest transformations in human consciousness.

I mean, this is akin to the development of agriculture, which happened over thousands of years.

It's akin to the industrial revolution, which happened over a century or two.

But this is happening over the course of five or 10 years.

- How did we adapt to technologies like television and then maybe the internet?

Because that came before social media.

Did we see an adaptation that seemed reasonable in the timeframe that it happened, or did it seem that that was also starting some sort of crisis?

- I don't think that we actually adapted to the internet.

That is, the early internet was full of fun stuff and people connecting, people putting up information for free.

The earlier internet, the whole idea was, you know, let's connect people, let them be creative, let them learn from each other.

It was really wonderful.

And then- - What corrupted it?

- Well, I think, you know, once Facebook developed its business model, so- - So, are you going to be boxing Mark Zuckerberg instead of Elon Musk?

I hope, yeah, I hope it doesn't come to fisticuffs, but yeah, I am well.

All right, I won't comment on that.

- [Dr. Mike] Fair, go ahead.

- But so I've heard some analyses of where everything went wrong, how, you know, because I mean the original idea was you can't even make money off because on web one you couldn't charge money, you could just put up a web page.

And I remember I had a conversation with a friend who worked in an investment bank, because as an academic, we had early access to the internet.

We had it in 1994 is when we really got the internet.

And I had a conversation with a friend of mine who was looking to monetize it.

And I was saying to him, Dave, that's the great thing about the internet.

You can't make money with it.

You just put stuff up and people get it for free.

Oh my God, was I wrong.

So it was especially, you know, and Facebook and all these things, they were free.

It's like, oh, here's a service which is free.

And there were a lot of them.

You know, there was MySpace and Friendster.

But once Facebook really sort of got the settings right and created the platform, Zuckerberg really understood the value of a network.

I forget what, there's a law, like the value of a network increases not in proportion to the number of people on it, but in proportion to the square of the number of people on it.

So the more you get, the faster it gets valuable.

So the more you get, the faster it gets valuable.

And I saw a research paper suggesting that for social media, it's actually in proportion to the cube of the number.

So I think Zuckerberg understood that, that he had to grow at any cost.

Didn't matter if they made money or not.

They had to grow at any cost.

And he got that dominant position.

And then they were able to monetize that.

And that's normal, healthy capitalism.

I have no objection to that.

I believe in free markets, but free markets when you have good regulations so that you don't have market failures, you don't have people imposing costs on others.

So things really change in the late 2000s, not just because of the monetization.

The thing I focused on as a social psychologist is the virality.

So things could sort of go viral once we had email, because like, you know, your uncle forwards a joke, and if it's really funny, then lots of people forward it.

So that's sort of virality, but it's nothing compared to the retweet button.

The retweet button was an invention that allowed anybody on Twitter to press a button and send it to possibly thousands of people who could then a minute later, send it on to thousands more.

So you could actually get millions of people seeing something within a few hours.

And that was not possible before 2009, the like button, the share button.

So my point is the internet gets monetized.

We get, you know, web one, you couldn't make money.

Web two is two way, you can bill, you can have credit cards.

So we get web two, it gets monetized and it gets super viral.

That's when things get dark.

So I don't think we adapted to the internet.

I think rather the internet got much, much worse in the late 2000s, and that set us up for the mental health crisis and the democracy crisis in the 2010s.

- Why is it that having interconnectedness with so many people with the power of the retweet button, as you say, a bad thing.

Like inherently, it sounds like a good thing.

[Dr.Haidt] That's right.

It's like, oh, if you could reach massive amounts of people, you can educate, you can disseminate valuable information.

- So, in the history of humanity, every time there's been a major innovation in connection, it's been really good.

So roads, they were amazing, they allowed trade.

Ships, the telegraph, the telephone, all these things were amazing.

And each time there were people who said there will be problems, and there were some problems, I suppose, but the telephone, we really could reach anyone in the world.

I mean, not the entire, but the developer.

- [Dr. Mike] Sure.

- You could actually, you could call anyone in the world.

So that was amazing.

Social media had that promise and that's the way it was sold.

But, and in the early days, there was no newsfeed.

There was no like button, just, you could just communicate with people and you could check out their page.

And so now you get more performative, like, oh, it's visual.

I'm going to put up like my best photographs of my vacation and other people, they can come to my site and my page, they can see it.

So it gets more performative, but it's still not super viral.

It's once you get the retweet and like buttons, now users are giving the platform so much information.

If you're on Facebook for an hour, you're giving them huge amounts of information about what you like and what you don't like.

And now they've already developed the news feed, they've already developed algorithms. Now they begin to algorithmicize everything.

They couldn't do that in 2008.

But by 2010, so much information is coming in, you get the algorithms. And that's when the internet is not about connecting people to communicate.

It's about people frantically competing to put stuff out done in a way that will go viral.

And this is like a phase shift.

This is a major transition in the nature of life online.

And this happens, even though the key innovation in 2009, it's really 2011, 12, 13, that's when you start getting the first global cancellations.

The story of Justine Sacco, the woman who made a joke in London, got on a plane and she was fired by the time she got to Johannesburg because the whole world was laughing at her.

That wasn't possible in 2008.

But that's the world we live in now.

Anything can go viral globally in a day.

So, I think we didn't adapt to the internet, rather the internet evolved in ways that are really dark and are really not living up to its potential and are hooking people up in ways that make it just so easy for sextortionists, and criminals and drug dealers and foreign intelligence services.

We gave the world a tool to manipulate everybody.

And even if most people are very decent, all it takes is 1% using it for malevolent purposes.

And we have huge, huge costs imposed on us.

- Speaking of communism, the era of the Berlin Wall coming down, if social media if it existed during World War II, how would the world be different, do you think?

- Well, if it existed in its earliest form, it might've been helpful in certain ways.

In its earliest form, and as we saw this in the Arab Spring, when people are connected, and it wasn't just Facebook and Twitter, it was also, I forget, it was Telegram or there were other.

- ICQ or something.

- Okay, yeah, you millennials seem to all talk about that in the 90s.

So, in, you know, it's in theory, in its early days, it could have been helpful to certain efforts.

Now, of course, you know, authoritarian governments use it really well.

Hitler, I'm sure, would have used it really well.

You know, Goebbels was an expert on propaganda, I'm sure the Nazis would have used it extremely efficiently as the Chinese do and as the Russians do.

So I don't know how it would have played out, but if it was, the other thing you can say is if we had it during World War II, if we had it before World War II, we would have had a generation that was not very tough, that spent all its time liking and swiping.

And I think we would not have had the character that came out in that foundry, in that forge, in that crisis of World War II.

- So do you think by having all of this power from the Facebook side of things, that it's no longer presidents of major countries that have the power, but really the people that run these companies?

- I would put it this way.

It's not that Mark Zuckerberg wants to control the world.

I really don't think he does.

I don't think he's motivated by money.

I think he's motivated by, he wants his company to be successful.

It's his baby, he's very competitive.

And that sort of macho spirit that drives many men, more than women, drives many men to want to be big.

And a free market economy kind of harnesses that.

So that men with big egos in past eras, they would have tried to slaughter each other or fight.

Now they compete by building better rocket ships to reach the moon.

That's great.

Like we all benefit from that competition.

That's a good way to harness testosterone.

In some ways, yes, these companies are incredibly powerful.

I think the best comparison for them is not the tobacco industry, which is a reasonable one because the addiction issue.

I think the best comparison is the British East India Company.

So, in whatever 1600, I can't remember when it was, the British give a, you know, a charter or a corporate charter to some merchants, whatever it is, to go to the Indies and bring back spices, trade.

This is gonna be good for the economy, good for England.

But they basically licensed them to make deals, seize territory, raise an army, kill people, take control of countries.

I mean, the British East India Company just ran roughshod in pursuit of profit over the East Indies.

And I think that is a kind of a good comparison because in the same way that the British gave this group of merchants or whatever it was, like here, you go do what you want, you're the sovereign power in our name, or I don't know if it was in our name, but in the same way, Congress said, okay, we've got these young companies in the 90s, and we want them to grow.

So we're going to do a few things.

Like for one, you know, one of the things they said was no sales tax, no sales tax on the Internet to help them grow.

Okay fine.

And then Congress did eventually, you know, that ran out.

So we do actually have sales tax on each other.

That's good.

But they also said, how about no liability?

How about no one can sue you?

How about you can do whatever you want.

No one can sue you for what you leave up.

No one can sue you for what you show to kids.

You have complete freedom from lawsuits.

That's completely insane now we see.

And so that's why I think Facebook and Twitter and TikTok are kind of equivalent to the British East India Company, the most powerful companies on earth.

They certainly are the most influential on our children.

I think you can make the case that in many families, TikTok is much more influential on the kids than the parents are.

So, yes, these companies are running roughshod, and that has to change.

But we're entering an age of sort of like distributed craziness.

It's not, you know, now there are totalitarian countries.

We are in a contest.

The West, liberal democracies of the West, are in a very serious struggle against China, who has a very different, they have a very different idea about how countries should be run.

Authoritarianism can tame the internet.

They do that there.

They say, you know what?

We're just going to control what's on our version of TikTok.

We're going to say that kids can't be on it after 10 o'clock at night or whatever.

So, the authoritarians are adapting well to the rapidly changing technology.

We, as far as I can tell, we're doing almost nothing to adapt, almost no legislation at all.

There is legislation at the state level.

And the TikTok bill just was passed by Congress.

So we are beginning to see legislative adaptations, but those are going to be challenged in the courts and held up for many years.

So, so far, we've really done nothing to adapt, and we've got to start.

- Do you think because of the fact technology is so exponential, the fact that the growth is cubed, as you said earlier, do you think that the authoritarian regimes will struggle to contain the technology at some point?

- No, I think that the democracies are the ones that are struggling to contain it.

China is studying the problem, and then they do things to respond to it.

Whereas in America, especially, Britain actually is responding.

Britain is the one country that has passed a couple of good laws.

They're implementing them now.

So I'm sort of putting my chips on Britain to be the country that kind of figures this out, finds a way to make the internet safer for kids with parents and schools and government all cooperating.

I'm hopeful that they can get that right because we're not doing that in America.

But democracies, you know, traditionally democracies are famous for not being able to look ahead, for being messy, for not being able to deal with problems in an efficient way, which makes many people, say in America, look to Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany in the 1930s and say, oh, that works.

Like, what we have is a mess.

That works.

There's a lot to be said for that.

So traditionally, authoritarian countries look appealing for their ability to bring order and progress, but ultimately democracy is so much more dynamic, we end up out-creating, out-producing, just having an incredibly successful culture that sort of just wiped away the Soviets, for example.

I don't know that that's going to continue.

I just don't know.

If Gen Z is basically all of their attention is being extracted by a couple of platforms, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, like almost all of their attention, they don't have any attention to do anything.

They don't have attention to really create companies, do big things in the world.

So right now, it looks like we may not adapt to this.

We may just succumb.

- You know, it's an interesting point that flags in my head, and it comes from a point that you made in one of your fireside chats on a presentation you were doing that I watched recently, where much like in a classroom, if you're the one parent telling your child, don't use your phone while everyone else is using it, they feel like they're out of the loop.

But if you tell the whole class, it becomes more symmetrical, which is why weekends exist in the conversation that you had.

I think that is actually the reason why perhaps authoritarian governments will have trouble.

- Oh, tell me why.

- Internet is everywhere- - Yeah.

- And when you're trying to geographically isolate your population from the internet, I think if this happened across the globe that could be a successful effort, but when one part of the globe has this massive, very messy, us in the West, relationship with media and free speech and all of this, and your country is handling it, quote unquote,

well, how long until that damn breaks?

Because they can ultimately end up accessing what we're doing.

And much like a virus, maybe it's not the greatest analogy, it can spread to them.

And that's kind of what I saw happening in Hong Kong, where in Hong Kong, the protest that happened a few years ago, was the Western ideology starting to impact it.

And it crossed my mind of how will China respond to this?

And obviously they responded very messy, but how does that change for technology?

- So, part of what you're pointing to is the collective action problem, that if one parent says, no, you don't get a phone, it's very hard to do that because your kid is really isolated and ostracized.

But if half the parents are doing it, then it's actually very easy to do because all you say is, yeah, some kids have phones, but most of your friends don't, and I want you to play with those friends.

So at the individual level, you get this collective action problem.

I'm not sure that the cross-country thing is a collective action problem.

I think what you're talking about is if we were to get separate internets, how would that work?

And that I just don't know.

It's kind of weird to think about.

I mean, there is the Great Wall of the Great Firewall in China.

China has created its gated community.

I don't know the extent to which people use VPNs.

I don't know the extent to which Chinese.

- High.

The reason I know, because when I went to China, I watched people talk about watching my YouTube channel and how in the world would they know who I am.

- Right, because there's no YouTube in China, right.

And in my hotel room, there was a paper that said, do not go on YouTube, do not use a VPN.

And yet people knew who I was.

They talked about my content.

So it was very visible that the ideology is there.

And how long until that ideology starts the uprooting of what they're trying to protect?

- Yeah.

Well, the dominant idea in the West in the 90s was let people get rich in these countries and then they'll want rights.

And as long as the economy is booming, as it was in China in the 90s and 2000s, the people will want rights and then democracy will follow.

And that happened to some extent in Eastern Europe.

The color revolutions were democratic revolutions.

That doesn't seem to be happening in China.

In China, people are very happy about prosperity.

It's a big part of Chinese culture, prosperity.

- Because they give credit to the government.

- Yeah, that's right.

And the government has, you know, the government is what caused the greatest famine in history.

The government is what caused them to be stagnant for 40 or 50 years.

But then, you know, after Deng Xiaoping, they actually did get an incredible reduction of poverty by bringing in markets.

So, but in China, it's not clear that the people, there were some signs.

Okay, so China with COVID, China was extremely authoritarian and it was a disaster and they tried to contain the virus, but you can't, you can't contain COVID.

Everyone's gonna get it and everyone did get it.

So there were some signs of rebellion, I think then, but I don't know enough about what's going on in China to know whether that strategy will work in the long run or not.

- Interesting.

Yeah, that was just my curiosity of it.

Because much like COVID, it doesn't take a lot of people to connect to our ideology and the Western values and the freedom of the speech to then start saying, we want that for our people.

Especially, as you said, prosperity increases, and people are going to have qualms about authoritarian government.

Maybe not.

Maybe there's a way to fully control the population that I'm not aware of.

But to me, it feels like that's how revolutions start in countries, an uprising start from a little bit of information.

So I sometimes think our messiness can actually help in some ways, even though it's viewed as very messy.

Something that I want to talk about, of what part of virality or what part of using social media is harmful?

What part of that are we seeing affect brains?

And what part of that leads to certain outcomes?

Like, what are we seeing?

Because I know in your book, even in your previous book, "The Coddling of the American Mind," we talk about, or you talk about how mental health rates have shot up, especially in teen girls.

And when people have shown criticism to that as saying, well, that's just the way the world is today, the world's a mess, the environment's getting destroyed, COVID, et cetera, et cetera, but your pushback on that is largely that it's not just a phenomenon that's happening here in the United States, it's happening across the globe.

It's also happening very specific time-wise to when the social media companies have started.

It's also that individuals are not just saying they're mentally ill.

We're also seeing hospitalizations for self-harm and even worse, people ending their lives.

Is it because of the influence of others that this is happening?

Or is it the virality of the platform?

What part of that is actually the harmful bit?

- So the key thing here is to note that the phone-based childhood, when you move your childhood onto a phone and everything goes through the phone and you're communicating through social media and texting, what ends up happening is that a lot of kids get harmed in a lot of different ways.

So some kids are victims of sexual predators.

Some kids are victims of sextortion, and then they commit suicide.

There are many, many different avenues of harm for different kids.

I'm involved in an academic debate with a bunch of other researchers who say, oh, there's no evidence of harm.

And what they're talking about, first of all, there is plenty of evidence of harm.

What they're saying, what they're trying to say is if we just look at the number of hours that kids are spending online and then we look at their mental health, there is a correlation, but it's not huge.

And they're trying to trace out one.

They're looking at one causal path.

But there are so many different causal paths.

So I'll just name a few of them, which there's a lot of evidence.

Imagine a normal healthy childhood.

I assume when you were a kid, you were out with your friends a lot.

You spent time playing with your friends unsupervised.

Imagine a normal healthy childhood.

Now take out most of the time with friends, like the majority of it goes away.

Take out about a half hour of sleep every night, so you're sleeping less.

Take out most of your outdoor time, you're not spending much time outdoors.

So you're not getting daylight when you need it in the morning, but you're getting blue light at night when you don't need it.

So you've got all these different avenues of harm.

Add in chronic self-comparison, which is devastating for girls, especially during puberty, when their bodies are changing, they're insecure.

Add in a lot more bullying and opportunities for bullying, even on weekends.

You can never, ever get away, whereas bullying used to just be during school hours.

So I could keep going.

Oh, there's attention fragmentation.

There's addiction for a lot of kids.

About 5% to 10% of girls develop what's called problematic use.

Essentially, it looks like addiction.

It's compulsive use.

It's hard to stop.

So 5% to 10% in that ballpark of the girls are addicted on social media.

5% to 10% in that ballpark of the boys are addicted to video games.

So, there's all these different avenues of harm from a phone-based childhood.

And I'm involved in a debate with researchers that say, we're not gonna look at 19 of those.

We're just gonna look at one, which is the number of hours that you spend on social media.

Okay, yes, it is correlated with the rates of anxiety and depression, but we don't think the correlation is big enough.

We think it's too small.

And I say, well, it's actually much bigger than you say it is.

And it's just one of 15 or 20 different causal pathways.

So it's a very frustrating debate for that reason.

And then the press picks up on it like, oh, there's a big debate as to whether social media is harmful.

There's a big debate about one causal pathway.

Nobody's debating whether it's removing sleep, socializing time, all these other things.

Those are just facts.

- Because they compound.

Well, they compound, but for some reason, we're not focusing on that research.

There is research showing decline of sleep, decline of time with others.

So, there's plenty of research showing the effects, but for some reason, the debate is on one narrow- - And that's screen time. - Yeah.

- And I remember, I think it was in the book or maybe it was in an interview, you mentioned that there is a study that shows that maybe there's a small correlation, but once you factor in social media use as opposed to just general screen time use, that correlation becomes significantly stronger.

That's right at the crux of the debate.

There is a 2019 article by Amy Orban and Andrew Przybylski, where they reported that in large datasets, the correlation was equivalent to a correlation coefficient of 0.04.

You know, you're actually looking at betas, but it's roughly equivalent to a correlation coefficient of 0.04, which is tiny.

That really is too small to matter.

But Jean Twenge, and I looked at the same data sets, and we ran their exact same computer code on how to process this in this really complicated way that they did.

And we said, rather than just looking at everybody, we're gonna just look at girls, because that's what all the research so far says, it's a much bigger effect on girls.

We're just gonna look at girls.

And we're not gonna look look at all digital activities, including television and owning a computer.

They had everything.

We're just gonna look at social media.

And guess what?

It's not 0.04.

It's more like 0.2.

Now, 0.2, it may not sound large to people who think about statistics, but public health correlations have very poor measurement on both ends.

You never get correlations of 0.5.

Like you don't have perfect measurement.

You can't find things correlating that high.

So 0.2 is about as large as things get.

And in those same data sets, so they had reported that the correlation is so tiny, it's the same as the correlation of eating potatoes with bad mental health, which is zero.

But we say, no, actually, once you see it as 0.2, that's the same size in these data sets as the correlation of binge drinking with mental health or hard drug use with mental health.

So this one paper got huge attention.

People still cite it as the potato study, but it doesn't show what people think it shows.

It actually shows, if you look at the data carefully, it actually shows that for girls in social media, there is a pretty big effect, correlation, pretty big correlation.

- What is it about girls being more susceptible to social media, the harms of social media?

- Girls think more and care more about relationships.

The biggest or the most consistent sex difference found even across species is things versus people.

And so boys from an early age, you know, boys from an early age, they're more interested in mechanical things, you know, whereas girls are more interested in people and relationships.

And when you look at career choice, who goes into things-based, like engineering, it's overwhelmingly male.

No matter how egalitarian a country gets in Scandinavia, where people are free to do what they want, you get huge sex differences.

Whereas psychology, psychotherapy, working with people, that's overwhelmingly female.

So just the point is, when all the kids get a supercomputer in their pockets and they get the whole internet in their pockets, the boys rush over to video games, especially, and they can form teams, they can compete, it's really fun.

The girls are really interested in what other girls are doing, what other girls are saying, what other people are saying.

Scandals dating breakups all that sort of stuff, social media gives you up to the second.

Like you don't have to wait for, you know, 17 Magazine to come out every week.

Like up to the second, what's happening?

So girls get drawn in, but it's an unending stream of social comparison, gossip criticism conflicts.

That's just a really bad way to grow up as opposed to hanging out with a couple of close friends and talking and bonding and having a small tribe.

- From your experience, is that more of a biological difference or is it more of, as you mentioned earlier, that during puberty, you know, hundreds, even thousands of years ago, certain societies would raise different, like a girl versus a boy during their puberty to be mothers, to be gatherers, as opposed to hunters and warriors.

- Yeah.

So there are areas of the social sciences where people believe that everything is nurture and culture and that all sex differences are constructed by culture.

And that was very popular in the 60s and 70s.

But I think we've seen now that that's not true.

Culture is, of course, very powerful.

And women today are very different from women in this country in the 1950s and 40s.

So culture, of course, matters, and men too.

So culture, of course, matters a lot.

But the things versus people dichotomy, I think the case is strong, and I think it just makes a lot of sense.

These are effects of prenatal testosterone.

So we all start off, you know, we all start off in utero as female, with female bodies, female brains.

We're gonna, we have nipples, we have a vulva.

So we're gonna develop into girls.

But if there's a Y chromosome present, then that triggers, I think it's the, in the adrenal gland first, like a little pulse of testosterone, then you little pulse of testosterone.

You get more testosterone.

So the testosterone then changes the body.

So the vulva becomes the scrotum, the clitoris becomes the penis.

And so the body is changing from female to male, and the brain is changing too.

And what you end up with is a male brain, which in a scan looks very, very similar, just a few tiny differences, but functionally is just a little bit different.

And that shows up not so much in differences of ability.

People freak out if you say that there's a difference, like, are you saying women are inferior?

Like, it's not about ability, it's much more about interest.

What do they enjoy doing?

And this is really, really clear.

The toy aisle in a store, there clear.

You know, the toy aisle, the toy aisle in a store, there's a boy aisle and a girl aisle.

That's not some evil patriarchal construction to push girls into homemaking.

Boys are just more interested in trucks and guns and fighting and play fighting.

And girls are just more interested in talking, communicating, having dolls, having relationships with dolls.

You know, my daughter took to sewing at a very early age, you know boys generally don't, so there's just all kinds of just interests that girls have and boys have in a free society.

And it turns out there's some interesting research the freer the society the bigger the sex differences because in a free society boys and girls are perfectly free to choose their careers for example, whereas if you're in, say, Iran or some other country, everyone's pushing their kids to be an engineer.

And so there's not as much of a sex difference in career choices.

- Yeah.

And if we're talking about marketing companies and what they do well, and we're going to give them credit for, is they learn to study our psychology, and what we want to do, and they try to give us more of that, or at least sell us more of that.

So if you're creating a toy store as a marketer, you're not trying to have a view where you're forcing children to do something, you're just placating to whatever the children want.

- That's right.

- Businesses are not ideological; academics are.

- Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

- Yeah, but you know what, wait, can I turn this around for a bit?

- Yeah. - So because I'm kind of tired of hearing myself talk.

I've been talking nonstop for three months.

And, oh, and let's make sure we get to talking about older Gen Z.

But I just want to ask you, because you've been observing this debate for a long time.

You've done a lot of content on mental health.

What do you think caused the big, first, do you agree that there's an epidemic of mental illness that began in the early 2010s?

- Yeah. - Okay.

What's your theory about what caused it?

- I think it is social media, but I do think maybe the view of social media and why it caused harms has become very academic- - Yeah.

- As opposed to practical of what happened.

And I think it's largely the exposure of what people going through puberty, or perhaps after puberty are being exposed to that's leading to those outcomes.

Meaning if I could be more specific, one is the pathologizing of normal mental health states.

That's very common, something I see in my practice.

We even talked about in our last conversation where a child would come in, death of a family member that should be normal grieving, a breakup, their sad post to breakup, and they think that they have depression, or major depressive disorder.

So, that influence is very heavy.

The pressure of constantly having to adapt to new technologies is distracting.

There's a new update every minute.

There's new information passed to you that you have to be aware of.

There's right now, even with the current conflict that exists in the Middle East, there are people judging children, children, 13 year olds for not taking a stance.

How ridiculous is that?

Where even if you're a celebrity and you're 18 years old to say that they need to have a stance because they're influential is missing the point.

- That's right.

- Should they have a stance if they're knowledgeable on the subject?

Maybe, but not just force everyone to have a stance.

So I think it's these more practical applications of social media that has impacted it.

And I do believe that there is a over-diagnosis happening with a lot of mental health conditions.

- Yeah, I agree with that.

- Not necessarily because doctors are misidentifying it, but a lot of times there's pressure even on doctors to make a diagnosis either by parents or patients.

- By patients.

Yeah, they want the diagnosis.

- Driven by something a little bit different than social media.

It's something I've talked about, review sites, where doctors are not just liable for what the patient interaction is there, but if the patient says the doctor didn't treat me appropriately, said that, like, I'll tell you a very concrete example of where this happens even online.

- Oh, woow.

- I'm a big proponent of talking about how mental health can impact your physical health.

That absolutely has been seen as simple as your blood pressure being elevated if you're stressed out.

- High cortisol levels.

- Poor sleep, as we talked about earlier.

When I do that, I would think social media would view it positively and say, this is a doctor who's trying to take it to the next step and think about how the mental health can impact physical health.

And that does happen.

But there's a part of social media that creates outrage about that and says, this doctor is just very clearly searching for a reason to blame it on me. - Yeah.

- And that can be very problematic in the exam room because if you feel the patient will go out and write a negative review for that, it puts tremendous pressure on you to make a diagnosis.

- That's right.

- And that becomes even more problematic for a unique subset of people that have generally benefited from the expansion of healthcare.

- Woow.

Where what I've seen is those who do not have access get bad care for obvious reasons, terrible, but obvious reasons that they can't get the medication, can't afford the treatment, but also people who pay for executive health programs, people who tell doctors what to diagnose them with, request certain medications, want to be hyper-optimized.

I need Adderall to perform better at work.

I need testosterone to perform better in the gym.

I need scans to catch every cancer early.

And that's not how healthcare works.

- Right. - So very unique problem.

- That is incredibly helpful because, you know, in my book, I'm really looking for the direct effects of phone-based childhood on mental health.

And you know, how does it make a kid actually more anxious or depressed?

What you're suggesting is a really interesting indirect loop where social media is encouraging the kids to embrace a diagnosis.

That becomes part of their identity.

This is one of the disturbing things.

It becomes part of their identity.

Then they are pushing, because in America we have all these review sites, we have a quasi-market-driven hybrid system.

- So because the kids, young people are embracing identity, they then push the doctor to over-diagnose.

And the doctor, because of the review system, goes along, exactly as we do in the academy with grade inflation.

Each professor, you know, we think, you know, do I have to give, you know, do I have to give, they'll get so upset if I don't give most of them As.

What's in it for me to hold the line?

Nothing, just give them the As.

So in the same way of grade inflation because of our fee reviews, we're all reviewed, teach all kinds of student ratings.

So the diagnostic criteria might have dropped as an indirect effect of the arrival of super viral social media.

This probably didn't happen in 2004, 5, 6 with early Facebook, but it probably did happen in the early 2010s with super viral rating systems. Anyone can tweet out, not just give your doctor a bad rating.

They could tweet out, doctor so-and-so thinks he knows more, you know, so much.

And he, yeah, very interesting.

- It's interesting that we're very quick to call out direct to consumer advertising from pharma and say how problematic it is, but not calling out the potential issue that can arise of people glorifying the fact that they're on medications.

- Yeah, that's right.

- Because if we're talking about what's effective in driving influence, it's people saying they're on a medication or diagnosis, more so than what we see on television these days.

- That is fascinating, because I have a whole section, I have a section in the book on our learning biases.

Like part of our species is that we have these built-in mechanisms that help us learn quickly.

One of them is conformity bias, do what everyone else is doing.

If people around here in my school or on this site or in this chat group, if people are talking a certain way, talk that way.

And so we're pulled to that.

And then the other is prestige bias, which is don't just copy what everyone's doing.

Figure out who's the most prestigious person.

Who's the one everyone looks up to?

Copy what that person is doing.

And on many of the sites, the more extreme your symptoms, the more you're able to present a compelling story about your suffering, the more likes and followers you get.

And that's an automatic signal to young people, to teenagers, be like that.

So yeah, this is complicated feedback loops that are really messing kids up.

- Very complicated.

And at the same time, you don't want to negate struggle when someone truly has a diagnosis.

So where do you draw that line of how you do it respectfully?

That brings up so much nuance and subjectivity into the equation.

And whenever you're trying to create guidelines with that much subjectivity, that's bound to get very messy.

- That's right. - So...

Oh wow.

What a mess. - Very stressful.

But let's talk about Gen Z, the older Gen Z.

- Good.

Yes, I'm glad you asked.

Just before we started filming, we brought this up that I have been talking.

My book was basically written for parents and educators.

I thought about, should I write it for Gen Z also?

And I thought, no, we need to make changes in the way kids are raised, and we need to make them immediately.

We can't wait another year.

So I did aim the book at adults who are making decisions about free play, supervision, phone use, all that.

And I was gonna write a chapter for Gen Z, like advice to Gen Z, and I sketched it.

I was so far behind schedule, I had like no time, but I, you know, so I tried to sketch it.

It just sounded preachy.

It just sounded, it wasn't very good.

So I just cut it.

And in all my conversations, it's been with journalists who all have kids.

They all want to talk about raising children.

- Which is what I've seen in all of your interviews.

- Yeah, it's always about the kids.

But two things.

One is, by the end of the book, the one thing I did at the end of the book that took a while was I wrote a chapter on what it's doing to adults.

And what it's doing to us, I argued, is spiritual degradation.

My first book was "The Happiness Hypothesis," "Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom."

And I'm a Jewish atheist.

I'm not a believer.

But as a social scientist, I've come to see religion confers many benefits.

It evolved both biologically and culturally, I believe.

So I've become much more of a fan of religion than I was when I was younger, when I was like an ardent atheist, and not quite a new atheist, but in any case, one thing I learned in writing that book was that there's a huge accumulation of ancient wisdom about how to live a good life.

The ancients knew nothing about chemistry and physics.

We don't need them for that.

But they knew a lot about consciousness and about relationships.

And they're brilliant on that.

And so the ancients tell us things like, judge not lest ye be judged.

Be slower to judge, quicker to forgive.

Love your neighbor.

This is the urging we get from many traditions, East and West.

And what does a life on social media do?

The exact opposite.

Judge immediately, judge right now.

Because if you don't judge now, people are gonna judge you for not judging, like you just said about 13-year-old kids not having a position on Gaza.

So a life on social media encourages immediate judgment, harsh judgment, cruel judgment, no context, no subtlety or nuance, no forgiveness.

So it's horrible.

It's the exact opposite of what our wisdom traditions tell us.

Our wisdom traditions tell us life is a blooming, buzzing confusion, and you won't see the truth when you're caught up in the triviality of everyday life.

Find some time to meditate, reflect, sit still, calm your mind.

Of course, Eastern religions are more explicit about this.

And in that way, your heart will open to God or to humanity or to our higher nature.

And what does our modern phone-based life do?

It says, not a moment of silence.

You're walking, listen to your AirPods podcast at 1.5 speed.

Oh, you're in class?

Well, you can also be responding to texts.

So the phone-based life says, you will not have a moment of calm for the rest of your life.

Everything will be stimulus, stimulus, stimulus, stimulus.

And so in a variety of ways, my argument is our phone-based lives are messing all of us up.

Those of us like you and me who went through puberty before getting on this stuff, it's not rewiring our brain in the way that it does to a child, but it is filling our brain, and it is developing in us habits that are not compatible with either productivity, calm, generosity, or general flourishing.

- Of a very long life, of which we're living long.

- Of what?

- Of a very long life.

Because this is over, on average, 70, 80 years.

- That's right, right.

So the amount of human capital being destroyed here is beyond calculation.

If all of us are getting less productive, more confused, less happy, and by all, I don't mean every single person.

There are some people that are benefited by social media.

I'm not saying it's everyone.

But on average, most people say it's too much.

Most adults and most college students say they would prefer that Instagram and TikTok were never invented.

They use them a lot, but they don't like it.

They don't like these things on average.

So it's really doing a number on adults as well as children, but it's a little different.

And so what I want to do here with our remaining time is especially address people in the audience that they haven't really addressed, which is people in their 20s.

Gen Z, the oldest, are now 28.

And so you have a whole bunch of people who have graduated from college or just didn't go to college, but people in their 20s.

They were born after 1995.

They went through puberty with a smartphone and social media, they weren't allowed out to play on their own with a gang the way their parents were.

Is it too late for them?

That is a question I sometimes get.

And the short answer, I'll start with the bad news.

The bad news is that on average, since puberty is a critical period, on average the effects of inhuman puberty, phone-based puberty, on average those are gonna stick.

I think we are gonna see, we're not gonna see Gen Z snapping out of it.

We're not gonna see them becoming like older generations when they hit 30.

We're gonna see signs of this deprivation, this stunting of toughness, of development, of happiness.

We're going to see signs of that, I think, for their whole lives, on average.

The optimistic thing is that anyone in Gen Z who wants to work on this will have smashing success, because there are a lot of things you can do to adapt, to give yourself new habits, and to live a happier life.

And I know this because I teach a course at NYU called Flourishing.

I used to teach it just for graduate students, for MBA students, but because when we saw the mental health crisis at NYU, as everywhere, in 2019 we really began to recognize it, I decided I'm gonna create an undergrad version that going to be less about flourishing in the workplace and more about just flourishing in life.

So it's a really fun course to teach.

I have about 30, 35 NYU Stern undergraduate.

I focus on sophomores because I want them to be able to use these skills while they're at Stern.

I don't want to just give it to seniors.

So they're mostly 19 years old.

And what we find is that they have given up almost all of their attention when they look at how many interruptions they get, how many notifications.

I have them go through their morning routine and their evening routine.

This is very, very important.

This is so easy to do.

Look at your morning routine.

What's the first thing you do?

And for almost all of them, it's they pick up their phone, they look at the notifications that came in overnight that they've missed.

So if from the moment, the moment you open your eyes, you don't get a drink of water, don't go to the bathroom, you don't get out, you open your eyes, you're on your phone.

And that sets you up, right away, you're back in the rapids, like the stuff is happening, stuff is happening, I've got to respond, got to see this, got to watch this video.

- It's like a fire hydrant.

- Yeah, that's right.

The fire hydrant turns on right away and it's on all day.

And then let's work on your evening routine.

What's the last thing you do before you close your eyes at bed?

It's check your notifications.

And so you're doing that and then you close your eyes and then you try to go to sleep, which is going to impact sleep.

And so what I try to do is I try to get the students to work.

That's where we start.

We say, let's get your evening routine because about a third of you are not getting nearly enough sleep.

So you can improve your happiness just by improving your sleep.

Let's get the evening routine down.

Let's get the morning routine down.

Now, in between, you've got 12, 14 hours, some number of hours in between.

How are you going to make the most of that?

And I help them to see that as business students, there's no limit to the amount of money they can make.

There are now trillion-dollar companies.

But there's a very, very severe limit on the amount of attention that you have.

No matter how rich you are, you only have a certain amount of attention.

And every time your phone pings, every time you check it, you're giving up, you know, let's say you have $100 of attention to spend each day.

Even if you're a billionaire, you only have $100 of attention.

Every time your phone rings, that's going to, or, you know, vibrates, 50 cents, a dollar, some amount that you're giving away.

Of course, if it rings and then you end up going down a rabbit hole, now you're looking at $5 that you just squandered.

And most of my students realize, of their $100, they're giving away 90 to 100 of it.

Some of them are on TikTok five or six hours a day, just TikTok, and then there's other things.

So once you see at the age of 19 that you've developed habits that will almost guarantee that you're not gonna be very successful, if you don't have attention, you can't do anything.

So regain, so get control of your morning routine, your evening routine, get a good night's sleep, regain control of your attention, turn off almost all your notifications.

Once they see that they have so little attention, I really try to coach them to see which companies are so important to you that you grant them permission to interrupt you and take some of your attention.

And I say, let's start with Uber and Lyft.

You probably want them to notify you when the car is coming, right?

Yes, I want a notification if the car is coming.

Okay, that's the bar.

Okay, now, what else are you gonna turn on?

New York Times?

Do you want them to interrupt you with breaking news?

Really?

You know, because most of my students, they get many, many news alerts.

Almost all my students, they get an alert every time they get an email message.

Every time an email comes in, they get pinged.

I say, turn that off right away on the first day.

So there's so many things they can do.

And then once they find that now their mind is a little clearer, they have more time to think, they can do their homework more easily.

Now they can work on other things.

So now, okay, you know, your generation is risk deprived.

You've been overprotected.

What are some risks you could take?

What's something that you could do that you're a little afraid of doing?

And maybe it's, you know, ask out another student or just flirt with someone.

Or maybe it's talk to a professor about something that you were nervous about talking about.

Or maybe it could be your grade.

It could be something in the class.

So I encourage them to set small challenges for themselves.

And as you said, the over-diagnosis of anxiety.

You know, talking to a professor in a lecture class or asking a girl out if you're a 19-year-old boy.

Your heart is going to race.

And, you know And you maybe don't want to do it.

But if you do it, you're going to get feedback from the world.

And if it succeeds, you have incredible growth.

And so we have so many stories in the class of kids who, I mean, they're 19, but who set themselves a challenge, and they succeeded.

And it's so thrilling.

They do it again and again.

They know, they get a boyfriend or a girlfriend, you know, they can now take control of their lives.

- You're almost doing a phobia training.

- Well, yes. - And mass.

- Exactly, that's right.

So habituation, you know, the way you get over anxiety is not by having someone give you a trigger warning so that you can avoid it.

That's the way to perpetuate anxiety.

But, you know, but once I always have them read chapter one of the coddling, which is on anti-fragility, once they understand that concept that we need feedback from the world, we need adversity, we need failure, and that's how you grow, then they're much more open to it.

So again, Gen Z is gonna have problems for the rest of its life on average, just on average.

But anyone in that generation who sets out to take back control of their mind and their attention and their habits and their media consumption is going to get great results.

- Yeah.

I think that the idea of making attention money for business students is the greatest idea ever.

You fully played it.

You've gamified it, right?

- Yeah, oh, you're right.

You're right, I guess I did.

- Because that is neurologically embedded in us to think about it that way.

So that's great.

I will say I'm a little bit more optimistic in this regard.

As you're teaching this course, you're teaching digital literacy.

Much in the way that AI is coming up now and people are very afraid, rightfully so, of certain aspects of AI.

They see fake videos.

They see voice recordings that are not real causing trouble.

And while there will definitely be people harmed for this very badly initially, I think as a society, as we start seeing more and more cases of AI, our skepticism will go up.

Whereas the question will not be, the initial reaction won't be, oh my God, I can't believe this person said this.

The reaction will then be, is this even real?

Which presents a whole set of other challenges.

- Yeah, that right.

- But initially our concern was, well, there will be all these fakes.

And now it's, well, people are now becoming more skeptical and they're adapting.

You're teaching a digital literacy class about how to gain control over notifications.

Even Apple is instituting privacy measures against tracking and notifications and focus time and tools are coming out.

So I do think that there are some avenues that are given to us to establish control, where if we fight for it, we will get it.

And I think as human evolution, we'll see that happen more and more.

So I'm thinking that, at least hopefully, that there is a way that we can rein in social media and the harms that it's caused.

And I have actually seen it with some of the AI stuff, certainly, like the comments under certain videos when something is played from a podcast.

They're like, is this real?

And then someone comes in and says, yes, it's from this podcast on this date.

Here, go check it.

And people are like, I just listened It's very true. - Yeah.

- So, I see that happening even in my nephews who are 18, and they're curious about AI and social media, and they're seeing the negative effects of it.

They're talking about it.

Us having this conversation is happening on a social media platform.

So I also see a lot of the positives, which I know there's not a lot of great evidence for.

- Well, for adults, there certainly are positives.

Social media, look, I use Twitter.

I use it to get the word out.

And I find it's great for finding academic articles.

It's great for finding where people think you're wrong about something.

So these are powerful tools for adults to use.

Adults make their choices, and they're very useful.

I think they have very few benefits for middle school children.

- That's for sure.

- But on your general optimism about adaptation, I just want to make two points.

- Before you say that, just very quickly, when we had our last conversation, just so you remember, I said that 18 years old was the age for social media.

- What did I say?

- You agreed.

So, I'm very much that children need to be guarded for it.

But in general, I view social media like a hammer.

It's a tool.

Yes, you could hurt someone with a hammer.

Yes, you could drop it on your foot.

Yes, you could use a hammer the wrong way.

But ultimately, if you use it the right way, it's a very valuable tool.

So I feel like over-villainizing social media also has problems because ultimately it's not going away.

So finding where we could put restrictions on it, like in schools or maybe an age for social media, is very valuable.

But just blanket statements saying that social media is all bad and no benefit, I feel like would also be missing a lot of the positives that can come from it.

Do you feel that that's reasonable?

- Oh, well, again, for middle school children, no.

I think that the harms are so vast and the benefits are so hard to find.

For later high school kids, I'd be totally open to the idea that there are some benefits.

And for adults, definitely, definitely.

Businesses thrive on it.

Businesses use it.

And I agree that for health reasons, it should be 18.

Like just minors are different.

Even a 16 and 17 they're different.

We shouldn't treat them as adults.

And so I do think that the age should be 18, but my goal in the book was not to say what's ideal.

It's to say can we come up with some norms that would solve the collective action problem?

And so what I argue for the book is no smartphone before high school.

Just get it out of middle school No social media before 16, phone-free schools, and far more free play and independence in the real world.

I picked 16 because I thought if I try to call for 18, we're not going to get it, whereas 16 I think we actually could.

The Florida bill just said, 16.

We're seeing a bunch of states saying 16, so I think that's very, very promising.

But I just want to push back a little bit on your optimism.

Hate to put it that way.

- I love it.

I want that.

- So one was you talk about how, you know, we are beginning to adapt on social media.

Yeah, it was invented about 20 years ago, and it really became really terribly problematic about 12 years ago.

And we're beginning to adapt.

That's true.

12 years.

Now, AI is going to be mutating so fast, so much faster than social media.

What AI is gonna look like in two years is gonna be far beyond what it is today.

And I'm engaged in this debate with other researchers and it's taken us years and years and are we making progress?

Hard to tell.

Now we'll start a debate about AI and in 10 or 20 years, maybe we'll reach some conclusion about what AI was doing in the 2020.

But by then it'll be chip implants in the brain.

So, your optimism about our ability to adapt was true in the old world where change was not instantaneous.

It took decades to play out.

My fear is we cannot adapt because we're now, it's that we're through the sound barrier.

We're going faster than everything, you know, everything's left behind us.

- Here's my thought to that criticism.

The measuring stick that we're using to adaptation centuries ago was with the abilities we had then.

When the AI conversation, so the adaptation to social media, 12 years, AI, you're postulating that it might take longer because it's going to be more of a problem and it moves faster.

- It's not that it'll take longer.

It's that it moves so fast that we'll never catch up.

We'll never be able to study what's happening now.

- Are we saying that with the tools that we had when social media came out, or with our new skillset that we've now gotten from social media?

Are we more adept to change?

Are we going to be quicker to that?

- I would say at least in the democracies or at least in American democracy, every year or every decade at least, we're much less able to deal with things because we're more polarized.

We're more stupid.

We're literally getting stupider.

You know, the academic performances literally going down since 2012.

It's not just since COVID, it's since 2012.

So if we're getting stupider, more distracted, more polarized, more angry, that means we're not gonna be able to do good public policy.

If our Congress gets more and more dysfunctional, and it's much more dysfunctional than it was even in 2012 which was pretty bad, and we desperately need really good social science.

I think if we fail as a society, it's not gonna be because of a technological issue directly.

It's gonna be because we didn't understand the human interaction with it.

We desperately need good sociology in particular.

But as I've been working on with "The Coddling of the American Mind" and with Heterodox Academy, we have real problems in the social sciences because it's so ideological.

Things are distorted by the political desires of the professors and of the professional society.

I had to quit the American Psychological Association and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology because I just couldn't stand how directly ideological they were.

The APA had a, the last straw was they put out a report on men and boys.

And, you know, men and boys have much higher rates of suicide.

What was the report about?

Very little mention of the problems of men and boys.

A lot of mention of all the victims that men and boys have, the way men and boys are sexist and oppressive and they beat up LGBTQ kids.

So this victim oppressor mindset that's taken over many parts of the university, I think is really damaging our ability to do good social science.

And so that's another reason why I'm pessimistic, because our ability to, whatever our ability was to adapt years ago, it's much lower now, I think.

- It's always darkest before the dawn.

- Not necessarily.

It could be darkest before the very last candle is extinguished.

- Very true.

- So, you know, look, I mean, no one can predict the future.

In the long run, humanity has overcome all kinds of problems and things have gotten better.

So, you know, if you had a bet on this, you should bet on Mike, not me, being right.

I don't know about the next five or years, but if you have a bet like years, you should probably be optimistic.

But I'm just concerned that certain trends right now are pointing in such a terrible direction.

And so I've decided I'm just gonna grab this one.

- Of course.

- The democracy ones, those are bad.

I don't know what to do about them.

- Well, your book was supposed to be about threats to democracy.

- Yeah, I started writing the book to address the democracy issues.

And I was going to just have one chapter on what happened to kids when they moved on to social media.

Now let's look at democracy.

But the kids one, it became so big.

And I saw how big the crisis was.

And that was international.

Once I saw that it wasn't just us.

And it was us in Britain.

But once I saw it, no, it's actually a lot of other countries.

It's most of the developed countries.

I decided I've got to focus on this because this is a huge problem, super urgent, not partisan.

There's no left-right divide, so we can actually work on it.

And you know how much money it would cost to fix this?

Nothing nothing.

You know, just change some norms and some laws.

Schools should buy phone lockers.

That cost a little bit, not much.

- Well, the costs are gonna come at the expense of damaging the profits of the social media companies, which will hurt the stock market, which will hurt tax for generations.

- Oh, well, I wouldn't worry about the tax revenues that far.

- But I think from a lobbying effort, that's who's gonna be hurt and why they would fight against it.

- No, that's right.

They are certainly fighting against it.

They are circulating articles that they think they'll want journalists to see, I'm told, by journalists.

And so, yeah.

So this is a problem that we can solve.

And right now, every school, every university, you talk to the head of it, what are your top problems?

In the top two is always going to be mental health.

Our students are depressed, anxious, fragile.

They're really suffering.

So, what do we do?

Well, we hire more therapists.

Well, we devote more money to mental health.

Well, we have more social-emotional learning.

Well, we teach kids about their emotions.

Therapists for college students, I think, is a very good idea.

There is a shortage.

Therapists for kids, for middle school kids.

Abigail Schreier's book, "Bad Therapy," I think is very important here.

We're spending money on the therapy approach, which it's not clear that it's working.

A few experiments recently showed that some of these things actually backfire a little bit.

So we're spending huge amounts of money on a therapy approach that isn't working.

And what I'm saying is an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Let's give kids back a healthy childhood.

Let them out to play a lot.

Give them much longer recess.

Most American kids get less than half an hour of recess a day.

Sometimes that's combined with lunch.

Give them much more free play.

Give them much less screen time when they're little, and delay smartphones till high school, we're gonna see a huge, I believe, I predict, we're gonna see a very substantial decline in rates of anxiety and depression.

So we can actually address much of this problem for free, with no political division, like let's just do it.

And so if you're listening to this, if you're a parent, I hope you'll buy the book, but you can find all my talks online.

You can find lots of stuff online or just go to anxiousgeneration.com.

So if you're a parent, I hope this will give you the courage to give your kids a childhood more like you had or more like your parents had.

And if you are in your 2020s now, I hope that this discussion and my book will show you what you kind of already know already, which is social media kind of messed up your generation and maybe it messed up you.

Most people I talk to have had problems. At some point, they had a very difficult time.

At some point, they had anxiety.

So, you know, we can take control of our lives, especially if we team up with others.

Social media traps us.

We spend so much time on it.

Why?

So, you have to.

But if you can agree with your friends, if you can agree with your friends, you know what?

We're all gonna get flip phones.

Of course, we can do all this.

We can even do social media on our computers, but we're just gonna get flip phones.

And we're gonna go out in the world with flip phones.

Now, okay, you need a smartphone for Uber, so there are problems with this.

But the more you work together to try to create spaces, to try to delay, to try to get control of your attention, the more fun you're going to have and the more successful you're going to be.

- So maybe the next safe space is a cell phone-free space.

That's a good way to put it.

That's one kind of safety.

That's right.

I like two kinds of safety, physical safety and phone-free safety.

Emotional safety, no thanks.

- Well, I could hear some critics saying, oh, saying that your upbringing is very different than our upbringing or your parents' upbringing, so therefore you're suffering as a result.

And it's not that you're making the comparison one is better than the other.

You're just looking at the evidence.

You're not making a subjective judgment.

You're looking at objective data and saying, you're struggling more, you're having worse outcomes.

You're not just passing judgment saying, I don't like what you're doing.

- That's right.

And I'm referring to studies.

If you deprive monkeys and rats of play, then they come out more anxious and less exploratory.

So we have good solid evidence that mammals need play.

Let's see, there was one other thing.

Oh yes, and it's not just that I'm looking at their child and saying it wasn't good for you.

It's that they're looking at it and saying it wasn't good for them.

So on my sub stack, I hope listeners will go to afterbabel.com, sign up, it's free unless you wanna support our work, but there's no paywall.

And we just had a really amazing article by Freya India, who's a Gen Z British writer that I just hired her to write at After Babel and be part of the team.

And she has an article, it's beautiful.

It's on this Greek word, I think it's animoia, which means nostalgia for something that you never knew.

And so, you know, many people are nostalgic for their childhood, for the music of their childhood, for the foods of their childhood, but nobody's nostalgic for their parents' childhood, okay, until now.

And so Freya's point is there's a big thing among Gen Z of watching videos of high school kids interacting in the 80s and 90s.

Nobody has a phone.

They're hugging, they're touching, they're bumping into each other, they're laughing, they're looking at each other.

No one has a phone.

And they're looking at that like wistfully, feeling nostalgia while they're still children.

And so if many of today's children are nostalgic for childhood.

- That they didn't even have.

- That's right, it's really sad.

And so again, it's not just, you know, I was just asked the other day, how many times have people sent you the meme of Grandpa Simpson shaking his fist at the clouds?

Like, yeah, I do get that a lot.

People say you're an old man shaking his fist at the clouds.

Well, you know, maybe I'm an old man.

That's true.

I am 60.

But the idea of the shaking the fist at the clouds is it's hopeless.

Like you're just angry and nothing's gonna happen.

You're not gonna change the clouds.

But that's very different.

What's happening now is everyone's fed up with it.

Everyone sees the problems. So I am an old man shaking my fist and people are saying, you know what?

We're really angry too.

- It's everyone shaking their fist.

- Everyone's shaking their fist.

That's right, that's right.

- Last question.

On an emotional level, what criticism, harsh criticism that you've gotten that you've taken to heart?

- That I have taken to heart?

Let's see.

Let me just go through it, because I think I'm afraid the answer is going to be none.

Because the harsh criticisms are just full of just a non-factual statement.

So the harshest criticism is that I don't have any evidence, I'm just mistaking correlation for causation, and I can't take that to heart because it's completely false.

I've been writing about this, I have sub-stack posts, I have a section in the book.

So the reviewer in Nature who said that, it's like she didn't read the book.

Like I deal with that issue so many times.

I'm always addressing, is this evidence of causation or correlation?

So that criticism was just false and it's being repeated because now people cite this review in nature.

- Is there an expert who's the loudest voice critic-wise of yours?

- Yeah.

So yeah, Candace Hodgers at UC Irvine and Andrew Chbilsky at Oxford.

- Would you ever directly debate one of those?

- Oh, I'd love to.

Yeah, I'd be very happy to.

- Maybe we can reach out to them and set that up as our third conversation.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Because then if you point to the data and say, what about this, they can say what they think.

- So I think right now we're at a very fruitful and productive time in the debate where we're being a focus on what exactly are the arguments.

And so I'm just started a Google document where we're just sort of listing, like, what are all the common arguments?

What are the articles that they cite?

What are the articles we cite?

So, I want to get a handle on what, because it's happening very rapidly.

So I want to get a handle on what are all the arguments.

But yeah, in the fall, I'd be very happy to debate them.

Yeah, and that's the way things move forward.

You know, the way these things go, I'm never going to persuade them; they're never going to persuade me.

But we refine our positions a little bit, - [Dr. Mike] I think so.

- And the rest of the scientific community and the general public look on.

And at a certain point, they're going to say, yeah, we find those arguments more persuasive.

So, that's what I think is gonna happen within about a year.

- Very powerful stuff.

Everyone, go buy the book and all the other books that came before it.

"Happiness Hypothesis, Coddling of the American Mind, Anxious Generation."

Anxious Generation." - And "Righteous Mind."

- And "Righteous Mind."

Thank you so much, Jonathan. - Dr. Mike.

- I appreciate your time.

- It's always a lot of fun to talk with you.

Thanks for having me on.

- Speaking of negativity from social media, click here to check out some really horrible advice given on TikTok that I fact check.

And as always, stay happy and healthy.