Transcript for:
Smartphones' Societal Impact and Recommendations

(upbeat music) - It is the question of our time. Is it all the smartphones' fault? It's the question that everybody seems to be asking, whether it's the mental health crisis, the political crises, or just seemingly everything in the world going to shit at the same time. Is it the smartphone's fault? Is everything being driven by our obsession and addiction to the devices in our pockets? NYU professor and bestselling author Jonathan Haidt argues, yes, it is the smartphones' fault. He believes there's a direct correlation between smartphones, social media, news feeds, front-facing cameras, and pretty much everything going wrong in society at the same time. His new book is chock full of data and charts supporting this claim, and he particularly focuses on the mental health crisis among young people. Now, my personal belief is, I think it's complicated. I don't think it's as simple as smartphones equal bad, (buzzer sound effect plays) smartphones ruin kids. (explosion sound effect plays) As somebody who's very familiar with the data on this subject, the story is very complex, and there's a lot of nuance to it. So in today's episode, I challenge Doctor Haidt on some of his claims, and we get into the nitty gritty of the issue. We look at the research and we ask ourselves, why doesn't some of this make sense? Now, he's been on pretty much every podcast under the sun this year talking about this subject, so I really wanted to try to take this conversation in a different direction. Some of the things that we cover include, if it is the phone's fault, why aren't we seeing mental health crises in every other part of the world? Why does this seem to be limited to the English-speaking world? Also, is this just another moral panic? I mean, I remember when I was a kid, people were freaking out about cable TV and violent video games and the corruption of the morality of our youth and how we're all going to be drug addicts shooting each other on the streets. It never happened. So if this is different, what makes it different this time? We also talk about what the difference is between psychological development and educational development, and why the difference between those two things actually really matters. Because I personally think one of the most important distinctions around this subject is separating the psychological issues from the educational issues. And I think there's much stronger evidence that there are a lot of educational issues with technology, much more so than there are psychological issues. We also talk about why smartphones affect boys and girls differently, why they affect liberals and conservatives differently, why they affect religious people and non-religious people differently, why they affect different cultures or people who speak different languages differently. This, to me, is the most fascinating part of this whole issue, is that if smartphones have such a negative effect on people, why do they affect different backgrounds and belief systems differently? And finally, if social media is an addiction, is it more like alcohol, where there's a small minority of people who have their lives completely fucked up by it and the vast majority of people are kind of okay? Or is it like cigarettes, where it's just bad for everybody all the time? I think this is a really important question, and it's an important distinction as we try to figure out as a society what our relationship is going to be with this technology. Now, while I don't buy wholesale into all of Doctor Haidt's arguments and explanations for what's going on, I really do agree with his prescriptions. I think he comes up with four really distinct, really important and practical recommendations for parents, policymakers, teachers, and educators. And all four of these strike me as really reasonable and important. So we're going to get into all four of those prescriptions towards the end of the episode, and I hope you'll stick around to listen to those. And finally, just as a quick reminder, if you're watching this on YouTube, we are moving the podcast over to its own channel soon. So be sure to head over to that channel and subscribe, otherwise you're going to miss fucking great episodes like this one pretty soon. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Jonathan Haidt. - [Narrator] 20 million books sold. Zero fucks given. (upbeat music) It's "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck Podcast" with your host, Mark Manson. - Doctor Haidt, it's great to have you here. It's great to see you again. - Great to see you, Mark. - The book is "The Anxious Generation." It is number one everywhere. You really hit the bullseye on the zeitgeist at the moment. - I got the timing right, that's for sure. - Yeah, you definitely did. The book's fantastic. I think it's super important. This might be the book, in the last year, the most random people in my life have brought it up to me. - Let me guess, all parents? - All parents. - Yeah, every parent. - All parents and educators. - Yeah.

• Yeah. - And psychologists and psychiatrists. - Yes. So it is definitely making an impact. It's the sort of topic that I think people have very strong intuitions about. And as a social psychologist, you know that our intuitions are often very wrong. - Oh, yeah, that's what I made my living proving, yes. - So I'm actually gonna, I'm gonna play a little bit of devil's advocate on this episode, mainly just because I think the research that's going on on this topic is super interesting and it is such an important topic. I mean, technology, it affects all of our lives. So I'd like to try to find a little bit of clarity or really just like break into the nuance of what's going on. But why don't we just start with what is the quick summary of the argument of the book? - The quick summary is that something went terribly wrong in the early 2010s, and young people who were born 1996 and later were really, really different from those who were born a few years earlier. And that's what gave rise to my previous book, "The Coddling the American Mind" with Greg Lukianoff. It was all about how, oh, we overprotected our kids, we didn't give them enough play. And we speculated in that book and, you know, maybe smartphones and social media, you know, the timing is right, but, you know, who knows? And that we wrote that in 2017. Well, since then, I've been collecting everything I can find on teen mental health, on the research on whether it's social media and the phones. And when you put it all together, the story of the book is not, oh, it's social media is destroying girls. I mean, there is a clear link there. The story is we had what I call the Great Rewiring of Childhood between 2010 and 2015. If you went through puberty before 2010, so what year were you born? - '84. - Okay, so you're an older millennial. - [Mark] Yes. - So you grew up with the Internet but not when you were a little kid. But you had the Internet when you were a teenager. - Yeah, it was like 11 or 12 years old. - And it was great, right? - [Mark] Yeah. - The early Internet was amazing. And so we thought, oh, you know, the technology is great. And you got your first smartphone when you were in your 20s, probably. Wow, 26, maybe 25, 26, yeah. - So your brain was basically fully cooked when you were drawn into the craziness, the cesspool of life on social media all the time. (Mark laughing) - Yeah, right. - But imagine that you weren't 26. Imagine you were ten, and now you're not going out playing with other kids, you're seeing this. I mean, it's incredible what happened to childhood between 2010 and 2015. It begins earlier, being cutting down on childhood play in the nineties. But so the argument of the book is that we have overprotected our children in the real world. We began that in the nineties and then we just do not let kids out now. We think they'll be abducted, they'll fall down, or they'll get hit by a car. And we've under protected them online, because the early Internet was so amazing, the smartphone was so amazing. And once our kids were doing this all day long, we thought, well, maybe it's stimulating their brains or something. So we didn't really notice what was happening between 2010 and 2015. But now we see it. And while the evidence is there are many specific experiments that are debatable, and I'm in those debates. But as we just saw in the Surgeon General's call last week for warning labels, I will make the case to you and your audience that I think the evidence is actually quite solid, that this phone-based childhood is really incompatible with flourishing, with human flourishing and development, and that it is harming kids at a level, a scale beyond anything you can imagine. Because it's not just the US, it's most of the developed world. - Yeah. So how is this not a moral panic? Like, when I was a kid, it was the video games were going to rot our brain. When you were a kid, it was the television was going to rot your brain, comic books. Why is it different this time? - Okay, good question. That's the one that I, that's really what animates the, you know, my critics and the skeptics. And know, as with the boy who cried wolf, if you cry wolf once, then it turns out not to be. And you cry wolf a second time and it turns out not to be. So I can understand why people say, "Isn't this just like every other one?" But there's a several part answer to it. So the first. The first is that it's never happened before that a product came out and a generation collapsed. So what we're seeing now is, I mean, we just haven't seen. It's not like when television came out, suddenly the baby boomers all got depressed or violent or anything else. There wasn't this radical change within a few years. That's the first thing. The second is that in a traditional moral panic, nothing really happens in the real world, but a story goes around about a kid who played violent video games and then shot up his school or chopped his parents heads off or something like that. And maybe it happened once, maybe it happened zero times, but it's media-induced, and then it gets spread around. This time is not like that. This time, everyone. Everyone, most people have seen. Most people. I mean, this is the main thing that parents talk about, or one of the main things parents talk about. It's one of the main things teens talk about. So everyone has seen it within their own social circles. This is not some distant story. That's the second. The third is that in a traditional moral panic, the kids playing video games aren't saying, "Please, video game companies, please make video games that are not so much fun that I can't stop. Please help us. Stop addicting us." The kids love the games, and it's the parents who are freaking out. So that's the third difference. This time around, there are now dozens of organizations started by Gen Z who are pushing back, who are saying, "Wait a sec, look what you're doing to us, stop it. And then a fourth one, which I'm just beginning to formulate, is that for these previous moral panics where everyone assumes there was no harm, we were actually, in the social sciences, we operationalize a question that is, are video games harming kids? And the way we do it is we say, "Well, let's look at those first-person shooter games. Let's look at violent video games. Are violent video games making kids violent?" And I looked into this research to write the book, and the answer is no. Violent video games don't make people behave violent. There is some debate, maybe there's a small effect, but it probably is not what caused increases in violence. But does that mean the video games are fine? And when you talk to the thousands and thousands of parents whose boys were lost to video games, who wouldn't go outside, who didn't make friends, and who spent their entire adolescence on video games, yeah, those boys were harmed. And we did some research for the book on addiction. There's a debate whether you should use the word addiction. The general word is called problematic use, but it sure looks like addiction. It's compulsive use. It interferes with other domains of life. It's hard to stop. And when you are stopped, you have the symptoms of withdrawal, including irritability, anxiety, insomnia, and dysphoria. And typically, it's about 5 to 10%. So if 5 to 10% of boys were getting addicted to video games, now, it would be higher now because the video games are amazing. Whereas when I was a kid, you couldn't really get addicted to Pong or Space Invaders or whatever. Maybe you could, but it wouldn't be the same. The question, are violent video games making kids violent? No, that was just a moral panic. But it doesn't follow that video games are okay because actually it did damage a lot of kids. The question on television is even more interesting. Did television make kids violent? Did television make kids X, Y, or Z? - Couldn't you argue that all the unrest in the sixties and the free love and the drug experimentation and Vietnam and everything, couldn't you argue that that was television-driven? - Well, remember, television was not made by kids. It wasn't made by teenagers. It was made by people in their parents' and grandparents' generation. And sure, ideas spread on television more quickly. So the extent that things are more viral. So, yes, sure, you know, Woodstock footage from Woodstock would be shown somewhere else. But I guess the main thing was, is television rotting kids brains? That's what people thought. It's gonna warp them. They're gonna come out all weird and terrible. And it looks like that's overall not true. It didn't. You know, I mean, we watched a lot of stupid TV, and I think we came out okay, most of us. But what I'm realizing is we always ask a single question, when actually there are multiple pathways. There can be multiple pathways of harm going on. What I'm really coming to appreciate about television, I've been reading Neil Postman, in particular. Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, these are the great media theorists. - Love 'em, yeah. - Because what they saw was that electronic communication, beginning with a telegraph, changed the planet. It changes everything. It's changing a major parameter of how news moves around. And it only came together for me when I was reading Neil Postman about the transformation of television. And of course, Marshall McLuhan said, "The medium is the message." Don't focus on what they're watching on TV. Focus on the fact that we're all now sitting around the hearth, which is the TV. We're not out on our porch. We're not talking to our neighbors. We're sitting in our air conditioned living room watching. That's what life is now. Now, does that rot their brains? Not necessarily. But did it rot social capital? It devastated it. So, in fact, you know, America's in huge trouble. Our democracy is coming apart. And actually, I would say that a large, some part of the blame is due to television, because television, and this is straight from Robert Putnam, he says, "The biggest factor in the loss of social capital was the loss of the greatest generation, the World War II generation." World War II was huge, but the second-biggest factor, according to his analyses, was television. And so if television played a leading role in the decline of trust, local trust, and that's setting us up for a lot of the political chaos and the real risk of ungovernability that we have in this country, that I would say those who said television was a moral panic are actually wrong. The specific question, is television going to rot my child's brain? The answer appears to be no. But is television okay? Is television a positive good for society? That's a very different question. In the long run, the answer might be no, it was not good for society. - Especially in the eighties when cable, cable television came out. Like, and you started. Maybe TV wasn't the moral panic, but it started disseminating moral panics. - Yeah, yeah. - The satanic child abuse panic. There were a number of things throughout the eighties, because as a culture, we hadn't developed the antibodies to understand what was just bullshit. - That's right, yeah. - And there's a lot of very interesting, intelligent writing in the late eighties, early nineties. Postman was writing around then. I'm a huge fan of David Foster Wallace. I don't know if you've ever. - No. People say, yeah, I need to read him. - So the basis of his most famous novel, "Infinite Jest," which I so wish he was alive today, just to know what he would say about TikTok, because the basis of "Infinite Jest," the whole premise of the novel is that there's a movie that's so entertaining that people stop eating, they stop sleeping. - Oh, my God. - They just keep watching the movie on repeat. Like, what would happen in the world if, like, such a movie exists? And in the book, it becomes an instrument of terrorism, of, like, mailing it to people without telling them what it is. So it's absolutely fascinating. And I sometimes wonder. Sometimes I feel like TikTok is the infinite jest. He was right. He was just 20 years early. - Yeah. - But, yeah, there's so much interesting media criticism from back then. - That's right. I'm unable to read books, because I always do something else. I'm off doing something else, but I can do audiobooks, because that just keeps going. You listen. And so I'm about halfway through "Brave New World," which, you know, we read in high school, and I remember in high school, I thought, "Well, this doesn't sound so bad. Everyone's getting sex." (Mark laughing) Like, I just couldn't get past the free sex. - Drugs, and sex. - This is great. Like, what's so bad about this? You know? But the question is, are we more, is our world, did our world become Orwell's "1984," or did it become Huxley's "Brave New World?" The answer is, it became "Brave New World." And social media, including TikTok, is like that. It has a narcotic effect. It's kind of a dulling effect. It's like a slot machine. Afterwards, people don't feel it was a good use of their time. Some of my students are on TikTok four, five, six hours a day, and they see that it's bad for them, but it's just hard to stop. It's hard to get off of the habit. - Between this book and "Coddling of the American Mind," you kind of hit on these three points that have changed over the last 10 to 20 years, let's say, and you already touched on all three of them, so lack of community. - Oh, yes. - Lack of play, overprotection in the real world, and then the social media piece. I'm wondering if, and this is pure conjecture, purely your opinion, if you were to make a pie chart of what percentage is being driven by each of those three things, what would you say? - I'll start by resisting the pie chart, and here's why. So in the book, the story we tell in the book is a tragedy in two acts. The loss of the play-based childhood and then the rise of the phone-based childhood. And I don't know if you got the community piece, there are hints of it in the book, or if you've heard me talk recently, but I now see it as a tragedy in three acts. This is something, this is work I've done with Zach Rausch, my research partner in all of this. Why did we take childhood away? Why did we suddenly think that our neighbors were going to sexually molest our kids in the nineties? And it turns out that the backstory of that is the loss of community and trust. All the stuff that Robert Putnam wrote about in the book "Bowling Alone," and, you know, the World War II generation begins to die off. And they were very trusting and very good citizens. Television brings us all indoors into our own home, cuts us off from our neighbors. So it's not exactly a pie chart, it's more like a tragedy in three acts. If we didn't lose community, then we would not have locked up our kids. We would not have said, "I can't ever let you out because I can't trust the adults near me." In Scandinavia, they didn't lock up their kids. In Scandinavia, they still have high trust. They let their kids walk around. So the loss of community, I'm not going to give it a pie chart. I'm going to say this is a mega social problem which could do us in. I mean, you can't have a large, diverse, free society when you don't trust each other or institutions. So this is a gigantic problem which had one of its unfortunate side effects is it drove the loss of the play-based childhood. Now then, the loss of the play-based childhood, as long as kids are now all indoors, we're not letting them out. But, oh, just in the nick of time, the Internet comes in. And so our kids, especially the boys, are perfectly happy to sit there all day on a computer. And those early boys who did that were fine. A lot of them went on to found computer companies and tech companies. So again, we thought, "Oh, this stuff is great." And it's only then the rise of the phone-based childhood is really only once you get, between 2010 and 2015, smartphones, front-facing camera, Instagram, high-speed Internet. In 2010, you couldn't spend all day long on your flip phone. But in 2015, lots of kids are spending all day long on their smartphone. So that's my way of saying it's more sequential. But I'll tell you what, I will answer your question more directly, because there are cases like Scandinavia, where they still, they didn't go through that act one of the tragedy. They still have high trust. They didn't go through losing the play-based childhood. They still let their seven-year-olds out to run around and play. And yet their kids are having rising depression, anxieties, and, well, self-harm and suicide are more complicated, but they definitely are having rising bad mental health. And in all these countries, it's always the girls going up more than the boys, at least in absolute terms. So I would say that the essential piece to this global collapse is the phone-based childhood. And it's not just social media, because for the boys, it's not so much Instagram. For the boys, it's video games and porn is what they're mostly doing. So, how's that? - That's good. That makes sense to me. And I feel like we're actually. We're going to kind of end up there. Are you a caffeine junkie (energetic music) stuck in an endless cycle of coffee jitters and crashes? Yeah, I kind of am, too. Well, then I'm happy to share with you MUD\WTR. It's great because it's a low caffeine alternative. It gives you energy in the morning. It even has the same kind of taste and vibe as coffee. But you don't get those jitters, you don't get that crazy addictive reaction. You don't get those energy crashes in the afternoon. So as somebody who's constantly pushing the limit of his caffeine consumption, I often find myself needing to do a reset. And MUD\WTR is a great option to do that reset because I can, like, dial the caffeine back, but I don't feel like I'm losing a ton of energy in the process. For a limited time, our listeners can get up to 43% off your entire order, free shipping, and a free rechargeable frother when you use the exclusive link. So head to MUDWTR.com, that's MUDWTR.com/IDGAF. It for "I Don't Give A Fuck." It's up to 43% off. That's MUDWTR.com/IDGAF. After you purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them. Please support the podcast. Tell them that Uncle Mark sent you. Can you explain briefly the psychological importance, the developmental importance of play? Why does play matter so much to kids? - The brain, I'll start at the beginning here. When the Human Genome Project was completed, it was a surprise that we had only about 20,000 genes, not very many. The idea that the genes make the brain, well, it turns out, no, there's just not enough information in the genes. The genes just sort of get the ball rolling. The nerves begin developing, they grow based on local factors. They connect, some connections die off. All that's happening in utero in the first few years of life, and that's a lot of growth. But then the brain reaches almost full size around age five or six. And from then on in, it's all fine tuning. Now, how does the brain know where to grow? The answer is from feedback from the environment. And so humans, like all mammals, we have these big brains, especially social mammals like dogs and chimpanzees, we have these big brains, and the way we wire them up is with play. So all mammals play. This giant cultural brain that we have, that no other animal has. It's expecting the right kind of interaction with the environment at the right time. And so you have to learn to crawl. You know, crawl before you can walk. And kids are interested in climbing and they do all these things. All of it is in feedback with brain development, and then it moves on to social development. So imagine this incredibly intricate dance where the environment is absolutely necessary. You have to have a lot of stuff coming in. Then you take a giant cleaver, you cut right through, you say, "How about none of that anymore? Here, here's a screen. Everything's going to happen here." It's like it just screeches to a halt. And this is why we find such a sharp division. There's never been this sharp a division. I mean, actually the Baby Boomers, 1946, okay, that was also a pretty sharp division, the post-war world. But the birth year around 1996, plus or minus, that's a really sharp division because the generation that went through puberty. Puberty is a real acceleration of this neural dance. The neurons are really rewiring from the back to the front of the brain. So in the book, I really focus on puberty. And all your listeners, all the viewers, especially those who are parents, I really want you to focus on puberty. All of childhood is important, but millennials are okay because they made it through puberty before they got smartphones and social media. Gen Z is not okay because they went through puberty on smartphones and social media. - I have to ask, how much of this is the overbearance of the educational system? Like, when I think of most parents my age, I mean, we're recording this in New York City. I used to live in New York City. I remember having friends in New York City who were applying the daycares based on which daycares could help their kids get into an Ivy League school. So it's, a lot of parents these days, they're thinking about, what's my kid's college application going to look like? And the kid is like, four. How much of this is mistaking educational development for psychological development? - Yeah, so we can go through a whole catalog of things that are bad in some way for development. But the fact that when you look at the graphs of, especially anxiety, depression, self-harm, those three really go together. You look at the graphs of those, everything was fine from the nineties all the way through 2010, 2011, there's really no sign of a change. Now, all during this period, America is getting much more intense about college. When I applied to colleges in 1981, when I graduated from high school, it was competitive, but not crazy. And by the nineties, it was crazy. So this is sort of the neoliberal revolution, the Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher. Everything's about competition. So the economy, society really changes a lot in the eighties and nineties, but we don't see a rise of mental illness. And also, that would just be in the Anglo countries, whereas the increase, because it's not exactly. I mean, the increase in mental illness is not exactly global. The developing world, life is getting better there overall. They're getting richer, they're coming out of poverty, so their happiness is not dropping, although young people's happiness is rising very slowly compared to older people. So this is actually a new finding from Danny Blanchflower just in the last month or two. All over the world, it used to be the case that the happiest people were young people and old people, and middle aged people are in the middle. It's called the U-shaped curve of happiness. That was true until about 2015. It has gone from this planet. So even in the developing world, where everyone's getting happier, on average, young people are, like, not really moving, and everyone else is. So young people are now the least happy people in their country, in the great majority of countries on this planet. That was a side. Sorry, that was a little aside. An interesting aside, I hope. (Mark laughing) Your question, oh, your question. I'm sorry, your question ultimately was about like, super competitive parenting. - Just education and just people mistaking. - Yeah. All that stuff is bad. But if it was really the rising pressure, then we'd see it more, like, in the coastal. You know, we see it more in, like, Berkeley and New York, but it's everywhere. The demographic differences are small, other than gender. Gender is huge. The other two that actually really matter, and this, I think, is a really important clue to what's going on, is religion and politics. So what race you are isn't that important. Oh, LGBTQ, their levels are higher and their increases are bigger. Whether you are in a religious family, if so, you're more protected. You didn't go up as much. You're not as bad off. And if you're in a conservative family compared to liberal. So that tells us about the anchoring, the sort of anchoring in community. - Yeah, I want to talk about both of those. Why don't we start with gender? Why is it so much worse for girls? - In the book and in my previous interviews, I've been saying that social media is worse for girls. Social media is worse for girls. I'm sorry, that's very, very clear. Overall, if we look at, but here's my new story. A little slight change. If we check in on kids when they're 14, 15, we're going to see the girls are doing worse than the boys. They have much higher rates of anxiety and depression. It is now normal. If you're an American girl or British or Canadian or Australian, it's normal that you're thinking about suicide. The latest numbers, federal surveys, I think it was 35% of American girls have thought seriously about suicide in the last year. 24% of them have made a suicide plan. - Wow. - And that is way up from 2010, when the numbers were a little more than half of that. So girls are doing really badly, and the boys, they're on video games and porn. They're having fun. They're lonely, they're not doing well, but they're not miserable and depressed. I mean, some are, but check in at 14, 15, you're going to see the boys are doing worse. Check in on them at 30. The oldest of members of Gen Z are now 28. Check in on now at 28. What do you see? The girls have largely completed college. Every college in America practically is now 55% to 60% female. Boys are dropping out of life. They're not trying in school. School is really made for girls. It gets more and more feminine. What you do in school appeals to girls much more than boys. Boys are much more sucked in. I mean, the video games just get more and more amazing. And so boys are getting pulled out of the world. They're less likely to graduate high school, less likely to graduate college, more likely to be arrested, of course, more likely to drop out for a lot of reasons, therefore, they're less employable. So when we look at 28-year-olds, we're going to see, we do see. Pew has data on this. Many more of the boys are living with their parents and have basically no future. So now who's happier? I don't actually know the answer to that question, but my point is the girls are more anxious and depressed, but at least they're employed. The boys are dropping out of life. So for the rest of their lives, I think the boys are actually going to do worse. I think the phone-based childhood actually destroys boys' development more. I should say it doesn't destroy everybody, but it's more of an obstacle to boys' development than it is even to girls. - How is it affecting each side of the political spectrum differently? - So Jean Twenge was the first to really point this out. She began pointing out in her book "iGen," 2017. But she really goes into it in a more recent book, "Generations." And several different groups have found this is that there's long been a couple of differences in positive psychology. So I wrote, my first book was called "The Happiness Hypothesis." I used to be very involved in positive psychology. I still am to some extent. And there are a couple of big effects in the happiness research literature. Marriage and religion are the two huge ones. Married people are happier than unmarried people, and much of that is causal. There's reverse correlation, too, but a big part of that is causal. And religious people are happier than non-religious. And it's not so much what you believe. It's how often you go to church, synagogue, how embedded you are. Those have been known for a long time. When you trace out the kids in those different communities. And I'm sorry, I should also say it's also been known for a long time, although this was more hotly debated, that liberals are more anxious than conservatives. And conservatives are a little happier than liberals. So that's also been known for a long, that's been a long-standing trend. So you take those gaps and you track them out for boys and girls separately, and you see everything's pretty stable until 2012, roughly. And then everybody goes up. But the kids from religious families go up a little. The kids from secular families go up a lot. The kids from conservative families go up a little. The kids from liberal families go up a lot. And I believe, we don't know why, but the most obvious explanation for me, given all my previous work, in my book, "The Righteous Mind," I'm a huge fan of Emile Durkheim, the sociologist, who talked about how we need constraints. We need limits on our ambition. We need limits to push against. And when you don't have any limits, it's not freeing and wonderful. You have anom, you have normlessness. You have a sense of just nothingness. The kids whose feet were planted in a community, they had to go to church on Sunday. They had to visit their grandmother. They had to say, "Yes, ma'am" and "No, sir." There were constraints. Those kids, the wave comes, yeah, they're on social media, but not as much as the secular liberal kids. And they are so tied to adults that they can't get washed out to sea. Whereas the secular liberal kids, especially, and especially the girls, they're all talking with each other so much, just with other girls, let's say, other kids like them, they can basically get pulled off of planet Earth and thrown out into orbit. - Yeah. And coming back to the sequentialism over the pie chart, my intuition just diving into all this research. And by the way, I need to give you credit. On your blog, you list all the research, both research that supports your conclusions and research that contradicts your conclusions. More people need to do that. So thank you for doing that. My intuition is that there's what you just said, that tethering, that tethering of community, that tethering of strong family relationships, strong friendships, real-world relationships. Like, my sense is that that is, inoculates people a little bit. - Yes, that's a good way to put it. - To the negative effects of social media. I have a harebrained theory for you. - Oh, okay. I love harebrained theories. - You're going to enjoy this. - Occasionally they're right. - Yeah, you're going to enjoy this because it is based on, and I'm glad you brought up "Righteous Mind," because this this is gonna be a grand unified theory of Jon Haidt. (laughs) So in "The Righteous Mind," you present Moral Foundations Theory, which there's five moral foundations. I'm gonna give you a butchered Wikipedia version of your own theory. So, there's harm, care. These are basically people's intuitions of what is moral and immoral. - Yeah, the thing with that is like moral taste, but it's like, the human mind is receptive to five, or actually six, but six different classes of situations. Go for it. - Okay, so, in there, you had harm and care, fairness/reciprocity, respect for authority, loyalty to the in group, and then purity, disgust, and I'm forgetting one. - Purity or sanctity is one. And then the new one that we've added is, well, it's still under discussion, but liberty. Liberty versus oppression. - Oh, interesting. - And then even more recently, when we work with Mohammad Atari, we're finding that fairness is actually two different things. There's equality, which the left favors, and there's proportionality, which the right favors. - Interesting. - So it gets more complex, but basically five or six taste buds. - So, from my recollection from the book, and it's been a while since I read it, you talk about political orientation based on the moral taste buds, and how the left tends to lean more heavily into harm versus care issues and fairness, reciprocity issues, whereas the right seems to be more predisposed towards loyalty to the in group, authority. - The binding foundations, loyalty, authority, sanctity. - So, here's my harebrained theory. - Okay. Because one of the things that I've been long interested in, especially since my profession relies upon it, is how the structural change of media in general, how all of these algorithms and platforms, even something as simple as Instagram, changing the way it ranks content, that can completely reshape my business model overnight. So it's something that I'm always paying very close attention to. One of the things I think about is what sort of content goes viral, what sort of content is naturally rebroadcast more easily, what sort of content just never really picks up steam, is under-broadcast relative to its importance. And when I revisited the Moral Foundations Theory, I realized that things that tend to go viral breaches around harm and care, things that feel very unjust, somebody's being beaten up on the street, or there's clear prejudice, racism or prejudice happening against them. And then issues of fairness or reciprocity, you think of, you know, some video of a Karen screaming at somebody in a Walmart or something like that. I feel like that sort of content is over-broadcast. Like that is disproportionate to how often it happens in reality, in real life. Whereas when you look at things like, you know, lack of loyalty to an in group or lack of respect for an authority. I can't imagine a TikTok for that. Whereas the first two, I can imagine TikToks very easily. That would have millions and millions of views. But when I think about the other, it's harder for me to immediately envision. So, harebrained theory is that the content that violates left leaning people's moral norms or expectations is overrepresented on social media. How crazy is that? - Oh, no, that's obviously true. (Mark laughing) So Twitter has changed a lot since Elon Musk took it over, but until he did that, there were all kinds of analyses of the politics of the various platforms. Twitter leaned way, way left from its inception until Musk took it over. And Twitter is probably the dominant platform in terms of shaping our perceptions of what's going on in the world. It's not just Twitter that leans left. It's most of the mainstream media. - So I've been writing about this for a long time. There are natural reasons why people on the left gravitate to cultural institutions, intellectual institutions, but then there are additional problems of prejudice and groupthink. There are all kinds of, I've been studying this with regard to the academy because, of course, professors have been. They've leaned left for a long time. Something happened in the 21st century. We went from leaning left to being overwhelmingly on the left. Very few conservatives. So your basic observation that what you see is mostly harm care stuff, stuff that upsets liberals. And in our daily life, there's a study. There was a study done, like, they beat people. Like, you know, just what comes up in life. And, yeah, it's mostly harm and fairness, because that's the stuff of interacting with strangers. But if you have a good example of someone being disrespectful, someone cursing out a teacher, there was one girl's life was ruined when she was in Arlington National Cemetery, and the sign said, "Please be quiet and respectful." And so she and her friend think it'd be funny to pose with that sign, giving the finger, and pretending to scream. Funny, right? Okay, well, that's a pretty good way to get the entire right third of the country to want you dead. So, you know, I used to study taboo violations. On all these moral foundations, I can come up with taboo violations that will go viral. - Okay. - So I wouldn't judge by the frequency. The frequency and intensity are different. So what's the harebrained part like? I actually agree. You know, it's like, it's like common sense. Like, obviously, most of the work, most of the most intellectual parts of America lean left. The left dominates all of the knowledge-creating institutions. - Well, the harebrained part is linking that, right? So it's like the research around social media and mental health is that the liberals, there's far worse outcomes for liberals when they use it. And then the harebrained part is like my anecdotal experience, I don't have any data on this. Is that harm and care violations and fairness violations. - That's actually a very good insight, because what we see, I kind of traced that with my hands before. Like, you've got these little gaps, and then they widen. They widen. So something happened to accelerate those differences. Jean Twenge has shown by looking at the time-use data and all that, so I think liberal girls used to use, they were used to be online, like, the same as conservative girls. But in the period we're talking about after 2012, liberal girls go way up and conservative girls only a little, in terms of the total time use. Liberal girls are by far the biggest consumers of social media. And I think what you're saying is social media is like catnip for the liberal brain in search of outrage, and it's not quite as effective for conservatives. Now, of course, they've got, I mean, you know, 4Chan, 8Chan. I mean, I don't even know. There'll be all kinds of, but on sort of the mainstream, but, right, I actually agree with you that there's some kind of feedback loop where social media is particularly tuned to ruining the left actually, I think. - And again, this is just, we're still anecdotal here, but I have received hate mail. So in my sample size of hate mail that I've gotten over the years, which is at this point, thousands, (laughs) it's always been interesting because the hate mail from the right, they'll call me an idiot. They'll call me all sorts of bad names. You're terrible. You're what's wrong with this country, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's always at the end of the email, rather, there's always kind of this attitude of, I hope you'll change. You're a smart guy. I hope you'll change. Whereas the hate mail from the left, first of all, it's always around harm. It's like this thing you wrote is harming people. You are morally responsible. You're part of the problem. You should delete the thing you wrote. You should delete the article. You should delete the book chapter. You should delete the podcast. And you should stop. You should stop being in public. - Well, that's cancel culture right there. You should disappear. You need to. And if you won't disappear, you need to be disappeared. We need to stop you. - It's interesting, and now we're getting a little bit off topic, but it's interesting because when I was a kid in the nineties and early 2000s, the left was, it felt like the left was the optimistic side of the political spectrum. The left was pro-technology. The left was, things are going to change. They're going to be different. They're going to be better. And again, somewhere around this area, early 2010s, it feels like that flipped. - Yeah. There was an interesting article. Derek Thompson had an interesting article in "The Atlantic" on, why is it mostly the Anglosphere? Because, and I've done a lot of, Zach and I have done a lot of research showing here are the five Anglosphere nations. Boy, are they, I mean, they're doing exactly the same thing at the same time. Like, whatever it is that caused this in America, girls started checking into psychiatric wards in New Zealand, at the same time in Australia. So the anglosphere is standing out as we used to be among the happiest countries in the world, and now our kids have really fallen. But it isn't just the anglosphere. I think Derek overstated the degree to which it's just the anglosphere. It's especially Protestant countries, which are the freest, Catholic countries and Eastern orthodox countries in Europe are more binding. So I think there is something to what you're saying. It is an amplifier. - Yeah. You jumped ahead to my next question, which was, I wanted to get into the international question, which is predominantly Anglo, Nordic to a lesser degree, or Northern Europe to a lesser degree. But when you look at Eastern Europe, especially when you look at, like, East Asia, you don't see it at all. - Right, because, so, but look at it this way, what Zach has found, because he had got there, you know, there's international data, there's a few studies. It's not nearly as plentiful as American data. But when you go through what is HBSC, HSC, I forget the name of the, data on teens is very scarce internationally. - Yeah. - What Zack found is that the one region where we had data in Europe, the one region that's getting more religious is Eastern Europe. Now, Eastern Europe was a miserable place for many, many decades. And so in some sense, Eastern Europe is joining the world. Things have been getting better for the most part, and also they've been getting more religious because religion was suppressed. So again, we think religion has a lot to do with it. Now, East Asia is a miserable place. I mean, the kids are miserable. I spent some time in Korea. In Korea, there has not been childhood for 50 years. All they do is study for exams. I mean, there's no childhood. It's horrible. They have very high suicide rates, but they are communal and collectivist. So it fits perfectly with my theory to say, when the tidal wave came, we don't see the big increases in mental illness in East Asia that we saw in the rest of the developed world. So again, I think all of this fits with the idea that community is very, very protective. - Yeah, I went, I don't know if you're familiar with Geert Hofstede. - Oh, yeah. - Cultural dimensions theory. So I went and looked up one of his cultural dimensions is individualism versus collectivism. I was curious. I went and looked up the most recent measurements of the most individualistic countries. Tell me if these sound familiar. United States, number one. Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand. And then a smattering of European countries after that. - Keep going. - Hungary, which is interesting. Italy, Belgium, Denmark, France, Sweden, Ireland. That's as far as I went. - Okay, so that's interesting. So the Scandinavians are, it's variable. Scandinavia is not what people think. I mean, in some ways, Scandinavia grants kids incredible autonomy to make their own lives. So I'm surprised that they didn't appear as more individualistic on that. But it's variable. But yes, Zach looked into, when he looked at the European countries, is it religion that matters? Is it GDP? Is it change in GDP? Is it individualism? All of them matter, because all of them are also cross correlated. So, yeah, so all of that stuff matters. But actually, let me make another point about the international differences. This entire debate has been carried out with one set of dependent variables, one set of outcome variables, which is mental health, mental illness. But when you look at what a phone-based life does to your child, even if your kid is not depressed or anxious, very few parents would say, "Oh, well, as long as they're not depressed, anxious, it's okay. I don't mind if he never reads another book. I don't mind if he sits indoors all day, doesn't get any nature. I don't mind if he can't pay attention to anything, as long as he's not depressed and anxious." Like, no, we want a lot for our kids. We don't want them to just be on the phone and screens all day long. So even in countries where, like, in Spain, is one of the only European countries where anxiety and depression did not go up. But in Spain, everybody sees the problem, too, because it's not just about anxiety depression. It's like our kids can't, you know, they can't make eye contact, the boys can't make eye contact. Kids have trouble paying attention. Look, we grown ups have trouble paying attention because our phones and our screens and everything's interrupting us. So once you broaden the set of outcome variables and say, "This isn't just an argument over which line goes up on depression, which doesn't. This is a complete transformation of how you exist on this planet." It happened in five years, 2010 to 2015. Our kids are not thriving, even those that are not mentally ill, I think they're not, on average, not achieving levels of flourishing that they would have if they had a normal childhood. - To that point, I don't have the exact numbers. I didn't write them down. But I've seen data before of standardized testing worldwide. - Yep, there you go. - And it's every, going back decades, every generation is smarter, gets higher test scores. - [Jonathan] Yeah, the Flynn effect. - It gets higher test scores than the years before. And in the late 2010s, it stops. - No, not late 2010s, 2012. 2012 is the turnaround. - 2012, okay. And it stops. And that is cross-cultural as I understand it. - That's right. It's global. And so the first sign of this was what's called the NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It's called the nation's report card. And it made big news, like a year or two ago when it was clear that we saw these graphs. Look how much we lost during Covid, and that's true. When you close down schools, which we should never have done. You close down schools for years in some cases, yeah, the kids have learning loss. But what I saw in those graphs was, it wasn't like we were making steady progress till Covid. No, we were making steady progress from the seventies through 2012. And then it starts going down. And the loss from Covid was a little bit larger on average, depending on the field, than the loss from 2012 to 2020. But that was quite substantial. For every generation for 100 years, we've been getting smarter and smarter. Better education, better healthcare. The Flynn effect. IQ literally has been going up. That stopped. Okay, so that's the American data. Then there's also the PISA data, the Program on International, whatever, scholastic. I forget what it is, but it's the global assessment of educational. - I think that's the one I saw, yeah. - And that is also astonishing. There it doesn't go back far enough to see the long rise. But, and this is what Derek Thompson had in a previous article was, you can see right at 2012, it's taken every, I think, three years. Right at 2012, everything starts to drop. And so think about it this way. I'm locked in this argument with other researchers, about what percentage of the variance is explained by the raw number of hours? (Mark laughing) And the effect sizes are tiny here, and we're all arguing about that. And at the same time, all around the planet, young people, an entire generation, is less intelligent and less educated than the previous generation. And not all around the planet, but in a third or a half of the planet, young people, especially girls, are more depressed and anxious. And so I think what's happening here is the largest destruction of human capital. I mean, I can't say in history, because obviously World War I and World War II destroyed it. But in terms of what has ever destroyed human potential around the world, other than the world wars? - Probably nonviolent destruction of human capital. - That's right. That's right. I mean, bubonic plague was really bad, but that was a Eurasian thing. (Mark laughing) That didn't hit the Americas, I don't think. It didn't, you know, it was a Eurasian thing. But, yeah, so this is not just about depression. This is about the global destruction of human capital in young people. - Okay. (upbeat music) This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. This whole episode, we've been talking about technology and mental health. And, look, it's something that we all struggle with to a certain extent. When it all gets to be a little bit too much, you feel lost and alone or just overwhelmed by the world, BetterHelp can, well, help. BetterHelp is a reminder therapy service. They can connect you to over 35,000 licensed therapists who can help keep you tethered to reality. For me, therapy was like kind of having, like, a backstage pass to my own mind. Like, just seeing all the crazy shit that was going on back there helped me uncover hidden strengths, discover new ways to handle stress. Basically, I just became a lot more self aware, and I learned how to prioritize what really matters to me. So if you've ever thought about trying therapy but just didn't feel like you had time to get in the car and go somewhere, why not give BetterHelp a try? It's completely online. You can do it from anywhere. You can do it on your couch, in your office. You know, hell, I guess you could even sit on the toilet if you wanted. Just fill out a brief questionnaire. You'll get matched to a licensed therapist, and you can switch therapist anytime you want to without extra costs. So find some balance. Get BetterHelp. Betterhelp.com/IDGAF to get 10% off your first month, that is BetterHelp.com/IDGAF. - I mean, it's just unbelievable to me that we allow kids to bring a smartphone into class in their pocket. You know, when I was a kid in the seventies, if they said, "You can bring in your TV, you can bring in your VCR, you can bring your walkie talkies, you can bring in your banjo, you can bring your painting set," you know, like that iPad commercial. Like, every possible entertainment thing is crushed down into an iPad or an iPhone. How about if you bring all of it in? You can use it during class. Just wear your headphones so that you know you're not bothering other people. Although actually, sometimes you do. So it's completely insane that kids are holding smartphones in class. - Funny story about that. So I went to, I'm from Austin, Texas, and I went to high school with Michael Dell's kids. - Okay. - And this was around 2000, '99, 2000, and everybody was really excited about technology. And so the school announced a joint venture with Dell computers. - "Every kid should have their own computer!" - Exactly. - That's what we thought in the nineties. We were so wrong! - Exactly. And so every kid in the high school, every kid got a laptop, and we started taking laptops in every class, and we take notes on it. Within two months, every teacher hated it. Every single teacher was like, I remember I had a history teacher who used to say, like, "All right, pull out your $3,000 pencil." - Wait, were you all connected to the Internet? - [Mark] Yes. - And the thing, I presume if they hated was the Internet, because it wasn't that you were typing, it was that you were browsing, you were doing things well. - And the funny thing was, was initially, we had access to the Internet so we could go research and cross reference all sorts of stuff while the teacher was talking. Of course, all the kids just ended up on gaming sites. - And porn. And I'm sure there was porn. - Oh, tons of porn. Instant messaging each other. It was a disaster. And so then they started taking away wifi within certain class. Like, teachers could request to have the wifi taken out of certain classrooms, but then kids just downloaded games onto their computer, and it also started to feel like a $3,000 pencil. Like, it started to feel ridiculous that, like, why am I typing this when I could just write in my notebook? So within this, by the next school year, they were pretty much all gone. - From your school? - From my school. - But what happened around the country was the belief that there was, what was it called? The something gap. The idea was all the rich kids have computers at home and the poor kids don't. So we have to close the, what was the name of it? We have to close the something gap. And so it's a matter of vital political importance that we give that we get laptops or iPads into every classroom, one-to-one. And, of course, the schools where the tech people send their kids to, like the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, they don't allow any tech at all. There's a computer room so they can learn how to program, but they understand the importance of paying attention in class. So the rich kids have more controls on them, they have less technology in school, whereas the lower SES kids, their schools are stuffed with free iPads. I assume they're free, I don't know, Chromebooks and iPads, because the tech companies, of course, they want to hook the kids early on their brand, whether it's Apple or Android or whatever. So, yeah, it was a huge mistake. - Yeah, yeah. - And that just. And that might be. So intelligence and learning are going down since 2012. We don't know that that's because of the phones or because of the Chromebooks and iPads. I really don't know. All we know is that beginning around 2012, kids could not pay attention in school, and loneliness in school goes up then, because kids are not paying attention to each other. And when a school goes phone-free, one of the universal things they say, most common, is we hear laughter in between classes now. It used to just be silent. - Yeah, okay. I want to throw another analogy at you, and feel free to completely just refuse to accept it. But I do think it raises an important distinction that is worth talking about. Cigarettes versus alcohol. Cigarettes, it's bad for everybody. It's bad no matter how, whether you smoke 5 or 10 or 20. The more you smoke, the more it's bad for you, regardless of who you are or where you're from. Alcohol. The majority of people who consume alcohol, - Yeah, love it. - It doesn't really affect them negatively. They're completely functional. They're completely happy. It maybe makes their life a little bit better, but there's a small minority that the outcome is so negative and so bad that it could potentially skew the overall data. So my question to you is social media and phones, is it cigarettes or is it alcohol? - It's much more alcohol. - Okay. - But let's go with the alcohol analogy. So, first of all, alcohol doesn't just affect those who drink it. The reason why we wasted two amendments to the US Constitution is not because some people are getting drunk, and isn't that a shame? They're hurting themselves. It's because they were beating their wives and gambling away all the money. So alcoholics ruined not just their own lives. They put an incredible toll on, especially on women and children. - And it's illegal for teenagers. (laughs) - That was my next point. Yes. And we have warning labels on it, because if you drink, you are harming your fetus. So, you know, look, I have a lot of libertarian sympathies. You know, part of "The Righteous Mind" was you need the wisdom of the liberal impulse, the conservative impulse, and libertarian impulse. You need a good society, you need all three of them speaking up and making their arguments. So I don't think I've ever said anything about limitations on what adults can do. I'm not saying we should ban social media for adults. There are some issues about identity authentication that would be helpful in certain things, but I'm not telling adults what to do. But at the same time, I'll be damned if the most powerful companies in the world have every legal right to grab my kids without my knowledge, get data from them, harm them, they have perfect protection against lawsuits. I can't even sue them for what they do to my kids. I mean, this is a completely insane situation. So, I'm guessing you brought that up in part because the Surgeon General last week called for warning labels on social media, saying something like, "Social media can be harmful to the mental health of adolescents." Something like that. I think he's absolutely right, and here's why. In fact, just this morning, preparing for an interview, I just looked up on a whim and said, "Okay, how many kids actually choke to death in this country from toys?" The answer, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, is something like a dozen. About a dozen kids. No, no, it's less than that. About a dozen kids a year in this country are killed by a toy. Now, thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands, I think, go to the hospital. There are injuries, but death, it's about a dozen. And they said the majority of those are choking. Okay, we put warning labels on toys that a kid can choke on because we want parents to pay attention. Like, even though it's very rare, six or seven kids a year will choke to death from toys. Okay, what about social media? Well, let's just look at choking. How many kids choke to death every year because of social media? There's the choking challenge. Can you wrap something around your neck until you pass out and videotape it on your camera, and then when you come out of the unconsciousness, you post it? Isn't that amazing? Like, what an insane thing to do! (Mark laughing) Okay, but this is a viral video challenge. And how many kids have choked to death? We can't get a clear number, but the estimate, Bloomberg covered something or other. The estimate was around a dozen in the last year, so it's in that ballpark. My point is, about a dozen kids have choked to death just on TikTok, which is more than have choked to death on all the toys combined, all other toys. So I think it might be reasonable to put a warning label on TikTok. "Warning. This could lead to you choking yourself to death." Now, I'm kidding. You don't want that warning. But I want to give a sense of scale here. Choking deaths are a tiny, tiny portion of the deaths related to social media. Mostly it's suicide. It's overwhelmingly suicide. Let's take sextortion. Hundreds of thousands of boys are sextorted every year. And the FBI looked into, I think, 15,000 cases in which they found 20 suicides that were directly related to the sextortion. - Yeah. For people who don't know, sextortion, it's somebody will create account with a really beautiful woman. - Very sexy, always very sexy. - Scantily clad, message the guy, send a bunch of, you know. - Racy photos. - Yeah, exactly. And then ask for a dick pic. And then once they have the dick pic. - With the dick and the face. So the face and the dick. - And the face, face and the dick, and then once they have that, then they, - They reveal, I know all your contacts, 'cause you and I are connected on Snapchat or Instagram. And so this obviously is the most horrible. I mean, this is, you know, and it's always a boy. Girls don't fall, girls are not so stupid (Mark laughing) as to believe that this random, you know. - A random hot girl is gonna message them. (laughs) - Yeah. So my point is, just the suicides, you know, the FBI identified 20, so it's probably hundreds, because we don't even know. So we look at all the parents whose kids committed suicide after sextortion, after bullying. Now, we're easily up into the hundreds. So if we have a consumer product that was not made for children, it seems to be harming lots of children, it's killing hundreds and hundreds of children a year, and these companies cannot be sued, and there's no warning anywhere. So it's like, can you imagine any other product anywhere on economy that kids were using five hours a day, which is the average, five hours a day. Hundreds and hundreds were dying, millions were depressed, tens of thousands were, I don't know what the number, the ballpark figure, tens of thousands checking into emergency rooms for self-harm. Like, this is beyond, this is you take all the toys in the world and multiply them by a thousand, you don't have the level of damage being done by social media. - Yeah, yeah. And not to mention all the things like the sextortion or the cyberbullying that can be enabled through it. Yeah, the cigarette and alcohol thing, I think is that's a little bit more selfishly like my industry. - What do you mean? - Well, in the self-help world, it's people deal a little bit too much in absolutes, right? So it tends to be like, you know, there's a small minority of people that social media is a real problem in their life, they're addicted to it, they're hooked to it, it makes them miserable. And so, yeah, they probably should either cut way back or cut it out entirely. But, you know, the majority of adults are probably okay, or as long as the usage is moderate, then it's probably okay. But that's not a sexy message that gets lots of clicks on Twitter, so. - Yeah, but it does work perfectly for social media, because there are many benefits to social media for adults. - Yes. - So they were originally social networking systems. There are lots of reasons why adults need to talk to strangers and get their message out to strangers. And in your industry, it's all about reaching out to a broad public. What the hell need does an eleven-year-old have to talk to strange men around the world? (Mark laughing) Like, what networking are they doing? - Yeah. And I think what people haven't, it has not caught up with the public yet that social media used to be mostly social and a little bit of media, now it's mostly media. Like, now it's 95% of my social media use has nothing to do with the people I know in my life. - That's right. So the big change, so the big change happens from the newsfeed. So originally these things were called social networking systems, and that's what they were referred to, SNS, social networking systems, because the original ones, I think Friendster was the first, MySpace, and they come in very quick succession around 2003, 2004. So you got MySpace, Friendster, and then The Facebook, which becomes Facebook, those are the big ones early on, and they're just about connecting. And this is 2004, 2005 we're talking about. And the experience in the nineties was so amazing. The Internet is so amazing. And here's another amazing application. And then you get Uber. You can just press a button and a taxi, a car will appear magical. It's all magical. - Yeah. - And what we didn't realize, changing under our noses was the arrival of the news feed, and then the like button and the share, the share and the retweet button. Now, it's not about me checking in with you, or me saying, "Hey, here's my puppy." And you say, "Oh, he's adorable." Okay, that's a kind of connection. It's not about that. It's now about the newsfeed of stuff coming in. And it's 2009 that we get the like and the retweet button. That is the beginning of super virality. And now, as you just said, it's really much more about the newsfeed and broadcasting. And so now we don't call them SNS. Nobody's heard the abbreviation SNS in a long time. They're called social media platforms. A platform is what you can stand on and yell and scream. And imagine a world in which instead of us talking to each other, everyone is on a platform yelling and screaming. Is that a world you want to live in? Whether the answer is yes or no, is that what you want to do to your eleven-year-old? And I think the answer is no. - Yeah, I like the alcohol comparison as well, because it is, nobody debates that an eleven-year-old should not be drinking. - That's right. - Like, there's no parent on earth that would even, you know, would watch little Susie drinking in the backyard and be like, "Oh, well, she seems occupied. She's gonna be fine." - Let's go even beyond that, because this is a very, very, this is like the most important thing we have to do. The most important thing we have to do to really get out of this. Well, there's several things which we'll get to, but in terms of legal or legislative, it's age gating. We have to have age gating. There's none right now. As long as you're old enough to lie, you're old enough to be on Pornhub, to have 50 Instagram accounts, TikTok, anything. Imagine if we said, "The drinking age is 21, but we can't expect bar owners to check IDs. No, no. Look, if you don't want your kid to drink, it's up to you. You're the parent. You exercise responsibility." And if you run a gambling casino and you're luring in kids with candy and you get them on slot machines that have superheroes, it's the parents' responsibility. What, are we going to do, have them check ID at the door? Are you crazy? We can't do that. It's the parents' responsibility. That's obviously insane. But that's where we are. It's become normal. Now, it's the case, fourth and fifth graders are getting smartphones. I was just in the UK, a quarter of their five to seven-year-olds have a smartphone. - Wow. - Now, I don't know if they're, not that they're on TikTok just yet, but they'll be there by the time they're nine. So, you know, it's like, you know, it's as though we're saying, you know, "How about if fifth graders, fourth graders have drinking parties and spend all day drinking?" That's going to interfere with brain development. - Is there any data on platform by platform, like, which ones are the worst offenders? - Yeah, surprisingly, not much. Usually studies are just asking, "How much social media do you use?" And then it's a very crude measurement. When there are contrasts, in general, so there are a few studies. So we have these huge, long lists of studies, if you go to AnxiousGeneration.com/reviews. So one of our Google Docs has all the studies on social media and mental health. One study compared Instagram to Facebook to solving a puzzle. And Instagram was much worse than Facebook, for girls. I don't know if they had boys in the study, so I think Instagram is particularly bad for girls. What I'm coming to see, we don't have much research on this because it's so new. Most of the research was done on Facebook or Facebook and Instagram. Instagram came out 2010 and popular in 2012, but really what dominates kids' lives now is TikTok and then the short form video, and then, of course, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. They copy TikTok. So you got these three short-form videos. I have not seen any research on it, but what I'm learning from talking to my students is this is the worst. This is like the worst stuff out there. So, parents, if you're listening to this, don't keep your kid away from the Internet. Don't give it to them in their pocket. But if you want to be discerning about what you let your kid do when your kid's 12, 13, 14, keep them the hell away from the short-form videos, because the key distinction is that stories are good. Humans live in stories. We've always told stories. As long as we had language, we told stories. Whole societies are based on giant, long stories committed to memory. Netflix is good. I asked my students, "How many of you watch Netflix every week?" Almost everybody. "How many of you wish Netflix was never invented?" Nobody, nobody. Stories are good. I asked them, "How many of you watch TikTok or one of those short forms?" The great majority. Not all, but the great majority watch them. "How many of you wish it was never invented?" Most of them. - Wow. - So the short form videos, they're designed to give you quick, cheap dopamine, variable ratio reinforcement schedules, rapid turnaround between behavior, reward, behavior, reward, on a variable ratio schedule. No redeeming value. Depending on what you click on, your feed might be just positive stuff, which is still a huge waste of time, but for a lot of the boys, again, I don't have data on this, but I'm just asking boys about this. A lot of the boys are seeing people getting run over by cars and drug cartels.
• Oh, yeah. - I mean, you're older, but do you? - Stuff like that pops up on my feed too. Somehow TikTok search serving me, like, police brutality stuff. And I was like, "Guys, this is not what I'm here for." (laughs) I don't know what the algorithm thought. - But at least police brutality, you might think there's some political interest. Like this at least is relevant to public policy issues. But videos of Mexican drug cartels dismembering a person who is alive. - I've seen people get shot. - I mean, this is just horror. - It comes out of nowhere, too, sometimes. It's interesting because one of my frustrations, as you mentioned, so much of this research, it started on Facebook. It takes a long time to produce good research. There's a lag time. And I think social media evolves so quickly. One of the things that worries me about this body of research is that, to me, the big change came with the For You feed on everything. - [Jonathan] I don't use that. - And it was pioneered by TikTok. Like, it is kind of what made TikTok TikTok, is, you know, up until TikTok, all the platforms, they would look at who your friends were. - Right, right. - The authors you followed. - [Jonathan] TikTok didn't care. - The celebrities that you liked. - [Jonathan] Yeah, a social network. - Right, and it would recommend based on your social network, TikTok, it took, they call it a psychograph instead of a social graph. They took your psychograph. They're like, "Oh, well, he's a fan of, Brad Pitt and likes Quentin Tarantino movies, so he's probably gonna enjoy this police brutality video." - Right, yeah. - And that's where I think the real rabbit hole started. And then since then, really post-pandemic, every other platform has copied the For You feed's design, and so now we're all being recommended. That's really where it turned into more media than social. So now it's more similar to television, where I would come home from school. I didn't know what was on. I would just turn on the TV, and whatever was being shown to me, that's what I'd sit there and watch, and it becomes a very passive experience. - Yeah, that's right. - And there's a real psychological difference between that passivity. - That's right. There's a huge difference. Andrew Huberman helped me figure this out. I was on his podcast about a month ago, and I asked him to elaborate on some of the things that I say in the book about neural development and puberty and dopamine and addiction. And he pointed out the difference between sort of the speed of reinforcement and what, I forget if this was his word, but, like, cheap dopamine versus hard-earned dopamine. And so if you are working at something, and then you get a reward, that feels great, that's like slow. It's sort of like the difference between eating nuts and legumes, and you know, carbs that are slow to digest and very healthy, versus straight sugar or, - [Mark] Processed sugar, yeah. - Processed sugar, yeah. And so, in the same way, watching Netflix, I mean, the quality of stories on Netflix is so much greater than when I was a kid. - Yeah. - You know, when I was a kid, like, I tried to show my kids, you know, when they were younger, like, "I Dream of Jeannie" and "Gilligan's Island," and they say, "This is stupid! This is so stupid!" (Mark laughing) So the quality of stories has gotten much, much better. But that's more like whole grain, healthy stuff. You're watching a story, you may be learning something. And, like, reading a novel, you're having human experiences. Whereas the short-form, as Huberman pointed out, if you're just getting that real quick, quick, quick. And TikTok, I guess what I'm hearing you say is the For You feed, that was how TikTok basically engineered, we're going to find the fastest way to give you a little bit of dopamine. And if you have a constant supply of dopamine, your brain is going to adapt to that, and your brain is going to down regulate so that now it takes more dopamine to get back to the same point. - Yeah. - So, again, your original question here was, are the platforms all the same, or are there some differences? Hell, yeah. For social comparison and girls, Instagram is probably the worst. For drug deals and nude pics, I'd say Snapchat. I mean, it's kind of designed for that, it seems. (Mark laughing) And for just, you know, messing with your dopamine circuit, and sucking up five hours a day, I'd say TikTok and its copiers are the worst. - Yeah. - Again, if adults want to do this, you know, adults can go gamble. They can drink, they can smoke, they can do what they want. But, I mean, I cannot believe that these companies can get to my children. Now of course I have rules, but unless I keep them away from web browsers everywhere, I can't be sure that they haven't created accounts. I mean, I trust them, but I know that I can't fully trust them. - Yeah, all right, let's get into the prescriptions. You have four primary prescriptions in the book. First one is no phones in schools. We've already kind of gone over that. That just seems like the most commonsensical. - And that's happening all over the country, all over the world now. What sort of, 'cause I know you've posted quite a bit results of schools that have experimented with this. Like, what sort of results are schools seeing when they get rid of phones? - So there's very little research on this. Like, with control conditions, there's very little, but what we find whenever school does go phone-free, what they find is that while the kids sometimes resist at first, by a week or two in, the benefits are so big that even the kids themselves say, "Hey, wow, this is more fun. Like, we're actually talking to each other." So, the teachers love it. I don't know of any school that ever went phone-free and regretted it. Sometimes there's pushback from parents, because some parents want to be able to text with their kids during class. But that's not a legitimate desire, in my opinion. So what we hear is there's better attention in school, better attention in class, better social life, and the kids are so lonely. Gen Z is the loneliest generation in history. Once you hook everybody up electronically, the time has to come from somewhere. It comes from the people around you. So when in 2012, when everybody started bringing a smartphone into class, they stopped talking to the kid next to them, so they're lonely in school. When a school goes phone-free, they're less lonely. They have better friendships, there's more fun, more excitement. So this is just like magic. And there really is no argument against it. It was just that schools, many principals were afraid to anger the parents that would object. - And is this something that principals can do on their own? Like, they don't have to wait for legislation or? - It depends. It depends on the state. And what they just announced last week was, we're going to make it mandatory you have to go phone-free, which, of course, should have been done back in 2010, but is happening now. California is doing it, and it's happening in red states and blue states. Utah, Arkansas, Florida. They've been leaders on this. I think conservative states really see the struggles families are having. They want a family-friendly policy. But New York, Governor Hochul has introduced all kinds of really good measures that would reduce the damage that these things do to kids, the exploitation. So we're seeing it across the spectrum. - Okay. Second one is no social media before 16. So what's the reasoning behind 16, or? - Okay, so the key idea for all my recommendations is I'm coming at this as a social psychologist, which means I especially study the effects we have on each other. And the main reason why kids have to be on social media, even when they know it's bad for them, and a lot of them do, especially the older ones, is because everyone else is on and they don't want to be alone. And so that's called a collective action problem. Everyone ends up with a suboptimal outcome because of what everyone else is doing. But if we could just get a bunch of us to step off together and we go play with each other, we go have fun, we go to amusement parks, we go hang out at each other's homes the way kids used to. Now it's, like, appealing, and now you can, and now other kids can do it, too. So social media is much more addictive than cigarettes, not biologically, but in the sense that with cigarettes, in the worst years of teen smoking, it was only a third of kids, of high school students who smoked. But you don't find any high schools where only a third of the kids are on social media. It's everybody or nobody, or 90% or nobody. So ideally, I think the age should really be 18. If we're just looking from a health perspective, social media is wildly inappropriate for minors. We usually protect kids from extreme graphic sexuality, extreme graphic violence, and addiction. Those three things. Social media is all of those three things. So really the age should be 18. But my goal is not to say what's the optimal age health-wise. My goal as a social psychologist is to say, "How do we break out of this trap?" And if I were to advocate for 18, we wouldn't get it. So I decided that 16 is really the age. Now, I think that's a nice compromise where we could get it. And I have a whole chapter on puberty and how we used to have graded, at some birthdays, when you're 13, you get certain rights. When you're 16, you get certain rights. When you're 18, you get certain rights. So I think 16 is the age that we should be letting kids on social media. - I wonder, because YouTube spun out a YouTube Kids a number of years ago. It's basically, it's like a sister platform, functions the exact same way, but it's only kids content, and everything's very highly screened and moderated there. Part of me wonders is, if these platforms can't just all do the same thing, right? It's like, just. - Yeah, so I had a conversation. I've had conversations with two of the top leaders at YouTube, and I realized I don't know enough about YouTube Kids in particular. If it was the case that the company's getting data from them and using that to market to them, and they are posting stuff, then I'd say, "No way, no way." But YouTube is more of a giant video repository for the world. I already said stories are good, so I can definitely spend time on it. But I can definitely imagine you could have something for kids so that they can see stories and it would be okay. - It's also, it's longer form as well. And I think the largest children's brand, or one of the largest ones, it's called "Cocomelon." It started as a YouTube channel. Now it's all over Netflix and Hulu and everything. - But what about child influencers? What about seven, eight, nine, ten-year-olds who are on YouTube, and, you know, with their parents, but they're making a lot of money. - It makes me feel really weird. I've actually, you know, in the YouTube world, there's a lot. You come across a lot of, they call them family influencers, but it's really, you know, parents pushing a child star. It's that all over again, right? - That's right. Yeah, we don't let kids work in coal mines. There are a lot of places we don't let kids work. And I think we'll look back on this, and ultimately, we'll see that kids should not be full time brand managers. They should not be, you know, the English have a phrase, "Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington," which is a line from an old Noel Coward song. And it's just the idea that if you grow up on a stage, the audience is going to change you. We've seen this audience capture for some influencers. - Right, and you probably don't develop the normal, healthy relationships. Everything's very transactional. - Performative. - Yes. Yes. All right, third one. No smartphones before high school. - So this one is very, very important, because even though I love my smartphone, the iPhones are amazing. It will long be remembered as one of the most important pieces of consumer technology ever. But it is the portal. The Internet, as I said, is wonderful overall. But having 24/7 access to the Internet means that you are now much more prone to addiction. You are much more accessible to extortion gangs around the world, to perverts and sex predators. And so that's the line you don't want your kid to cross. So by all means, have a computer in your living room, and let your kids on it, and let them search for things sometimes. But the day that you give your child an Internet-enabled device that they, in a sense, own. It's mine. I customize it. I put the apps on that I want. I have access to it, if not all day long, at least most of the day. That is a major transition in your child's life. And for many kids, when you give them the iPhone, it will be at the center of their life for the rest of their life. You know, when they come into college, the phone's already at the center of their lives. In my flourishing class at NYU, we do a lot to sort of like pull it away so they can see nature, they can see each other. So my argument, again, is really focused on puberty. The longer you can delay getting your kids sucked into, you know, into a screen, the longer, the further they can get in puberty before they do that, the better. So I'm not saying keep kids off of video games until 14 or 16, but, yeah, you know, if your 10, 11, 12-year-old is playing three or four hours of video games a day, that's probably bad. - Yeah. - And if your 10, 11, 12-year-old daughter is spending three or four hours a day on social media, or just, you know, that's probably really bad for her. - Yeah. - So, you know, in the US, we have a big break at high school. The rule in the US is no smartphone before high school. Now internationally, a lot of schools have more the UK model, where their secondary school begins around age 11 or 12, and it ends around 16. So the parents groups in the UK are saying, "No smartphone before the end of secondary school," which is 16. Ideally, that would be great, but the world kind of requires you to have a smartphone for a lot of things nowadays. And I want kids to be out in the world, independent, going places, taking Ubers. So I hope they can get that to work, and I hope the world will adapt back so that it doesn't demand that to be out in the world, you must have a smartphone. But I'm pretty comfortable saying, "Before high school, give them a flip phone, give them a phone watch. You can text them, you can call them, but don't give them a thousand apps and the Internet all the time." - Yeah. And then the last one, more outdoor play. Free-range kids. Tell us about that. - So I was really influenced by a woman named Lenore Skenazy who wrote a book called "Free-Range Kids" It's a wonderful book. If you have kids before 8th grade, or certainly if you have kids in elementary school or younger, please read "Free-Range Kids." Lenore is so amazing. She helped me and my wife really let go with our kids and send them out on errands in New York City when they were beginning fourth grade, which you and I were probably out much younger than that, but now it's more like 6th grade we kind of let kids walk three blocks to a store. So Leonora really encouraged us to give our kids more independence, and we could see exactly what she was talking about. They come back from an errand, and they're more confident. They have a better sense that they can act in the world. They can do things. It's amazing. So the fourth norm is really, really important, because the first three are about taking away screens, about not having 10 hours a day on a screen. But if you're going to take away the screens, you have to give them something to do. Why not give them the normal, healthy thing to do, which is play with each other, go have adventures, go climb a tree, go get into a little bit of trouble. So this is the hardest norm, I would say, because it actually requires us parents to overcome our own fears. And I'm not saying we should just kick our kids out at 3:00 and say, "Don't come back until the streetlights come on," because that was the usual rule. - That's how I grew up, yeah. (laughs) - And you and I grew up, well, I grew up during the crime wave. You were a little, you grew up, you had it early on. - Yeah. - But now the world's very safe physically, but we don't let our kids out. We don't trust our neighbors anymore. So I think people have to be more intentional. Like, you can't just say, "Get out of here, kid. Go find other kids to play with." Because there aren't other kids out there to play with. But if you're a parent, you are surely connected to the parents of your kid's friends, because you had to pick them up at a birthday party. I mean, you just, you know, you talk at school, whatever it is, you know them. Text with them, say, "Hey, I read this book, 'The Anxious Generation,' and they suggest that we do this together. We give our kids a fun, adventurous childhood like we had, but we have to do it together. Are you in?" Like, it could start as simple as every Friday, these five kids who are friends, every Friday they get together. They can start at any of our houses. They can go to, you know, if it's possible, they can go. They can ride bicycles, you know, oh, one of you guys has a trampoline. One of you has something. Let them take some risks. So this fourth norm, this is the really positive one. This is, I think, the inspiring one. And this is the way I think we'll really convince the kids especially, is we're not just saying, "Get off your phone." We're saying, "How about go have some fun with your friends?" - Yeah. I've heard from a number of parents that the struggle with this is the other people in their community, because they get judged for it. A lot of other parents will judge them for it. - [Jonathan] That's right. - You hear these horror stories of people having the cops called on them. - Yes, I have friends who that's happened to, the kids. - So what advice do you give to people in that situation? - So, right, if you're the only one doing it, you are taking a risk. And the risk is more that your neighbors will, because if they call the police, the police will then refer it to Child Protective Services, and then it's a bureaucratic nightmare for years. So you are taking a risk if you're the only one. So Lenore is so important that a few of us convinced her to stop just being an author and to found an organization to make her more effective. It's called Let Grow. So I'm on the board of it. So if parents go to LetGrow.org, we have our most powerful program solves the problem you just asked about. It's called "The Let Grow Project," and it works. You can do it at home as a family or a few families, but it works best at a school. So imagine, and this is happening all over the country now, there's a school in Long Island that we've studied especially. Imagine that you have, in elementary school, everyone, let's just take a third or fourth grade class. The assignment is every month, here's a handout. You bring it home to your parents. Find something that you think you can do on your own that you've never done before. Work it out with your parents. Get agreement. Maybe it's walk the dog. Maybe they've never let you walk around the block with the dog. Maybe it's, you know, walk to the store and buy a quart of milk or buy a candy bar, if there's a place that you could walk within a few blocks. And so they agree, and then the kid does it. And the first time they do it, and I've heard this from a lot of parents, the parents are nervous as hell. Like, you know, "Can she make it?" You know, "Is she?" And of course the parent was doing this when they were seven, but we don't think our nine-year-olds can do this, but they do. And then it's like, you know, the kid is so excited, and the parents are proud, and then it's easier for them to let them go the second time. But now what? And then, and of course, it's a school assignment. It's a homework assignment. I can't be called a bad parent for letting my kid do this. It was homework. And now imagine a town in which all the elementary schools are doing this and everybody's now seeing seven, eight, well, let's maybe not seven, but eight, nine-year-olds. We're seeing eight, nine-year-olds walking around, doing the shopping, walking the dog, riding their bicycles. Now the whole town transforms, and now no one can call the police. - Yeah, that's great. How optimistic are you of some sort of political regulation or policy change? Because it's, you know, the parent thing is great. But you mentioned it earlier, right? Like the kids who are going to benefit the most from parents who read a book like yours and understand the research, it's going to be the wealthy, well-to-do parents. - Married, yeah, two-parent families. Yeah, that's right. - So to get the most equal outcome here is some sort of wider regulation or policy change. - Yes. - What is your optimism level on that? - So policy change is happening all over the place. Nothing yet from the federal government since 1998. The Internet's changed a lot, and the federal government has done nothing. 0.0 new laws or regulations, but that might change. The Kids Online Safety Act is the one measure, it does a lot of things to make the online life less painful and toxic and damaging to kids. That I hope, I'm not sure when this will air, but Senator Schumer, if you or any of your people or constituents, including me, are listening, please introduce KOSA, please. You know, it's passed through all these committees. It has this huge bipartisan support. President Biden would sign it. So please, let's pass the Kids Online Safety Act. The most important thing beyond KOSA is age gating. That's going to be difficult, but the industry can solve it. They can solve anything. They just don't want to, because it's difficult. And they'll lose a lot of users, lose a lot of young users. - Well, I mean, I will say, as somebody who has to verify his profile on all these platforms, and usually means I have to send in a picture of my passport or my driver's license. The technology has gotten good enough. I mean, you can send it. You can take a, I can take a picture of my driver's license, and within 10 seconds. - [Jonathan] That's right. - The platform knows I am who I am. - That's right. So there are a lot of things. So, like with banking and finance, we have know-your-customer laws and things would be really terrible and crazy if anybody could bring a bag of money into a bank and no names asked, they, you know. So there are a lot of, I'm not saying this should be universal across the Internet, but imagine if there was a social media platform like Twitter or Instagram or whatever, on which everybody truly was verified and nobody was a Russian agent. Nobody had some psychopathology that made them a complete jerk and they'd been kicked off 20 times and just made 20 new accounts each time. Life online would be so much better if there was some sort of identity authentication. And to be clear, it doesn't mean you have to post with your real name, but you have to at least, if you're going to have a relationship with these powerful companies, you have to show that you're a real person, and then if you misbehave, they can block you from opening another account. You described the most straightforward method, which is you show your driver's license or passport, but there are many, many other methods. And so what I'm hoping we'll have is that Congress, let's say, would pass a law, and even state legislatures can do this. Congress would pass a law saying, "If you want to, if you want to do business in this kind of way, you have to offer a menu of age verification or identity authentication methods." And you know, Congress shouldn't mandate. Some bills do. They say "They must do this." Congress shouldn't mandate how they do it. They should just say, you know, "You're responsible." And there's facial recognition. There are various blockchain methods. There are all kinds of methods. And if Congress says, "You have three years to do this," they're going to figure it out very quickly. - Yeah, very true. - In ways that will not threaten privacy. I do appreciate that showing your government ID to get on Pornhub puts you at risk, because if Pornhub is hacked, now everybody, so I appreciate that. (upbeat music) This is a hard problem. I'm not saying just, you know, snap our our fingers and make it go away, but we're not even, I mean we got to work on it. - Yeah. Jonathan Haidt, it's been a pleasure. - Mark Manson, always a pleasure. - Thank you so much. - Thanks, thanks to you. (upbeat music continues)