Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)

Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation) is a social psychologist, professor, and best-selling author. Jonathan joins the Armchair Expert to discuss why his moral dumbfoundings are such tasty party tricks, if disgust contains wisdom about borders that one shouldn’t cross, and how the overprotectiveness epidemic was borne out of the safest generation yet. Jonathan and Dax talk about the fact that despite public response it’s much more dangerous for kids online than it is in the real world, the cost of gamifiying a child’s education being that their brain becomes desensitized to dopamine release, and that more serious than mental illness issues as a result of excessive screens for kids is actually attention fragmentation. Jonathan explains the four harms of increased access to smart phones and tablets, how the prevalence of a side that silences its dissidents is a reliable predictor of its wrongness, and that the key is give your kids a great and exciting social childhood. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ http://www.wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

  Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Mrs. Mouse.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 0:06Dax Shepard?

  Um, today we have Jonathan Haidt returning. Um, I don't know if you guys would remember, I want to say that's like first year.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  It was early.

• 0:15Dax Shepard?

  It was early.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:17Dax Shepard?

  And this one was really fun. I don't know about you. Were you nervous the first time we had him?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, because we had first heard him on Sam Harris's podcast.

• 0:25Dax Shepard?

  He was our introduction to podcast Jedediah Jenkins.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Mmm.

• 0:29Dax Shepard?

  Recommended, I listened to the Jonathan Haidt.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 0:32Dax Shepard?

  Sam Harris episode and I was so stimulated intellectually.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 0:38Dax Shepard?

  Oh my God, these two people know so much more about the world than I do.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:43Dax Shepard?

  Like intimidating.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Really.

• 0:45Dax Shepard?

  So when we talked to him, I was scared the first time.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 0:47Dax Shepard?

  This time was much more chill.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was fun.

• 0:49Dax Shepard?

  Jonathan Haidt, I'm sure you've seen, uh, he's been on an incredible press tour for his current book, The Anxious Generation, but you would have probably, uh, become aware of him with the Coddling of the American Mind or the Righteous Mind or the Happiness Hypothesis. He is a, uh, New York, NYU, uh, professor, uh, social psychologist and bestselling author. And this is a, this is a barn burner.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fun.

• 1:14Dax Shepard?

  I love this one.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And The Anxious Generation is on like everybody's book list. It's a very hot topic. So it's cool that he got to come in and tell us about it.

• 1:25Dax Shepard?

  I enjoyed it immensely. Please enjoy Jonathan Haidt. This episode is brought to you by McDonald's. Uh, the Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Medium Fries and a Drink is now $8.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:39Dax Shepard?

  Okay. I need to talk about something that doesn't get enough respect. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese. This is not a casual burger. This is a crafted burger. We're talking a hundred percent fresh beef, cooked right when you order it. No artificial flavors, no fillers, no preservatives, just beef doing what beef is supposed to do. And here's a detail I love. There's a cowbell sound in the kitchen. When somebody orders a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, a cowbell goes off and the grill master throws a fresh patty down. That's like having your own entrance music at McDonald's. I want a cowbell. For everything in life. The onions are hand topped by someone who just knows the right amount. Two slices of cheese laid out in a star pattern. So every single bite gets cheese. And two pickles side by side. So you're never in a pickle desert.

• 2:23Dax Shepard?

  Every bite is accounted for. Someone engineered this thing with love. I love a quarter.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Me too. That's my order. It's a quarter pounder with cheese. I love it. I didn't know they put so much effort that they did a star formation. I shouldn't know because you can taste it.

• 2:41Dax Shepard?

  You can taste it. Yeah. The love. Don't tell anyone this, but I'll put two of them back.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not surprised.

• 2:47Dax Shepard?

  The quarter pounder with cheese with fries and a drink. Now $8 for a limited time only, only at McDonald's. For a limited time only, prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California, and for delivery. Fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery. We get support from Quince.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Okay. Can we talk about the fact that the holidays are already here? It's crazy. I feel like I blinked and now we're in gifting season, which I'm not really mad about because I do love giving gifts. And Quince is making it so easy to find something great for everyone on my list, including myself. Because let's be honest, self gifting is a love language.

• 3:26Dax Shepard?

  Quince is seriously the gift that keeps on giving. Their high quality staples are made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14 karat gold, and Italian leather. Full on luxury quality at prices that won't wreck your holiday budget.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  It's the dream. The cashmere sweater is starting at $60, down jackets, wool outerwear, cashmere accessories. You and everyone on your list are staying cozy and looking incredible all season long.

• 3:53Dax Shepard?

  Well, I'm going to tell you this. It just got chilly for the first time this year in California and I'm so excited and I'm wearing my Quince cashmere right now.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  It's great.

• 4:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. And I am going to gift this to some of my friends. I hope they're not listening.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Quince is also more than clothing. They've got fine jewelry for your significant other, leather bags for your bestie, hotel quality bedding to set up your guest rooms, chef grade cookware. That's an amazing thing they offer here. And it's such a good gift because people don't like buying cook. Square for themselves, but it's very important. And they also have five star luggage, another good gift that people don't like buying for themselves.

• 4:27Dax Shepard?

  Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show.

• 5:07Dax Shepard?

  Been many, many years since we first had you on.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  It was 2018 after my previous book, The Calling of the American Mind.

• 5:13Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  New days for us then.

• 5:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, seven years ago. Hopefully we've gotten 4% better. You can score us afterwards.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Per year compounded. That's okay.

• 5:24Dax Shepard?

  If you have forgotten, I'll give you the same compliments that we probably did the first time, which is I think we were exposed to you first on Sam Harris 11 years ago, maybe 10 years ago.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:34Dax Shepard?

  In fact, that's the introductory episode I used to send people when I used to encourage people to listen to that show. It was such an invigorating debate.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was one of my best conversations ever because we're sort of similar to each other in a lot of ways, but then we had this like fight and then we buried the hatchet.

• 5:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. If you're ever going to model great discourse, it's really encouraging to hear two smart people argue, not have the same opinion, represent themselves well. Yeah, I was just kind of enamored with your intellect and your ability to communicate what you think. It's pretty unique. And then over the years, I doubt this would get to you, but Monica and I bring up your moral thought experiments.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 6:15Dax Shepard?

  So much. They're so tasty.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  What are they called?

• 6:18Speaker 02

  They're called. Moral dumbfounding.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Dumbfounding. That's the word. Okay.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  They're fun. They're good party tricks.

• 6:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Do you have a favorite? Cause we have a favorite.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  So there's the brother sister incest story.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, we love those.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then there's the eating your pet dog story. Those are really the two that are.

• 6:34Dax Shepard?

  Tell us that one.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Oh, OK, so the background here is that I was studying moral psychology as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. And the big debate was, is moral judgment driven by gut feelings, which the philosopher David Hume had said long ago and which I was leaning towards, or is it driven more by reasoning about the facts of the matter, especially about harm? As Lorenz Kolberg was the dominant researcher at the time. And since I'd been studying how morality varies across cultures, it just seemed like morality is about the body. And I ended up doing some research in India and reading a lot about Hinduism. I'd always been interested in Hinduism. I'd always been interested in travel. And it just seemed like American or Western morality was just much more cerebral and divorced from the body. I wanted to make up a bunch of stories that would hit you in the gut immediately. And then you'd reach for evidence of harm, and it's not there. What do you do?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  And so the first story I made up, a family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and they cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this. What do you think? Was it OK for them to eat their dog? Let me just first ask you, what's your first reaction?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  I mean, yes, of course, no, that's horrific. You're void of any moral, humanity, feelings. You must be a sociopath. But then.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Yes, keep going, then what?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  But then.

• 7:53Dax Shepard?

  Continue.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  I guess, although just because it tastes good.

• 7:56Dax Shepard?

  I love that detail. The genius of these things is these really tiny details. And I'm upset you didn't go into film and television. I feel like you might have an M. Night Shyamalan kind of bent to you.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Maybe a show like The Good Place.

• 8:08Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  We could maybe hook you up with that guy. Because if you had said they heard it was good for them, that would actually make it much more palatable.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Wait, are you saying that if it was healthy?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  As opposed to enjoyable?

• 8:23Dax Shepard?

  A superfood.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Doctor Superfood. No, why would that?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Because to me, that's different in like, oh, they might need.

• 8:29Dax Shepard?

  One's pleasure seeking one's sustenance seeking.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Oh, I see, I see.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  So it's actually perfect that they just want to try the taste of it.

• 8:36Dax Shepard?

  Can I just add, I don't care.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  You don't care if they eat their dog?

• 8:39Dax Shepard?

  Not at all. It's dead. Had they murdered the dog to eat it? No, we're in a different zone. They've created suffering potentially, whatever. It's already dead. It's gonna be wasted.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  I'll tell you what people around the world say.

• 8:48Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Almost everybody says it's wrong to eat your dog because it's like family. You have a relationship. The only exception is highly educated Westerners who do have a more harm-based morality. And who do say, well, you know, it was their dog. They have a right to do it. Causing suffering, that would be terrible, but the dog's already dead. One person said in my study, well, I guess in a way it's recycling and so that's good.

• 9:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Sustainable dog farming. So the point is, around the world, most people think that if you're revolted by something, that disgust contains some knowledge, some wisdom about borders where you shouldn't cross. Except for educated Westerners, especially those on the left. They have a much narrower morality based primarily around harm and especially protection of the vulnerable. So, okay, now I'll give you the more advanced one. There's a guy who's a vegetarian for moral reasons. He thinks it's wrong to kill animals. He works at a hospital in a pathology lab where they prepare cadavers for dissection. One day, there's a fresh corpse which recently died, good condition, but they have no need for it. So he's supposed to put it in the incinerator. He decides that he'd like to try meat, so he cuts off a section of the thigh

• 9:54Speaker 02

  and disposes the rest of the body and brings that section home and cooks it and eats it. Nobody sees him do this. What do you think, Monica? What do you think about that one?

• 10:02Dax Shepard?

  You know what's crazy? This is not hypothetical.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  What?

• 10:05Dax Shepard?

  There was a cannibal in France. We used to have a conspiracy theory show and our fellow host interviewed this cannibal. And he made the cannibal's cookbook and it was the exact thing. He worked in a pathology lab.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 10:17Dax Shepard?

  And he actually took it home and cooked it.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 10:20Dax Shepard?

  So it's not even hypothetical.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Wow, the world is so weird.

• 10:23Dax Shepard?

  He went to jail, but he didn't do a ton of jail time for it. And he was able to get out and write this cookbook.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  I guess if you go to jail and you're completely broke and you have this amazing story, it's a pretty clever way to monetize it.

• 10:32Dax Shepard?

  France voted, so we know where they landed.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  I think it's less amoral to do that than eat the dog because of the relationship.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Oh, because you didn't have the relationship with?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  This stranger.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm gonna guess that you're on the left politically.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  I am.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Good guess.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  There's a line. From the philosopher Leon Cass, a really brilliant writer on matters of ethics. But he has a line, "Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder." I spent a year at Princeton in 2007 to 2008. It was a really wonderful year. Cass came and he gave a set of lectures. He considers himself a sort of liberal from the old days. And he feels that things have moved so that he's now on the right. But he is more on the right philosophically. And Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher, who is more on the left. He's a brilliant utilitarian philosopher. I love both men. One of the greatest days of my academic life was Cass was giving three talks on three days. And there was a lunch at the faculty club and I was visiting as a scholar. And so there's a bunch of us around and with Singer on one side, Cass on the other, these two men with completely opposed worldviews.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  So Singer would say, "It's fine on any of these if you're not harming anyone. That's all there is, is harm to sentient creatures, including animals." So I think you're more on the Singer side.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  And Cass is more beloved by, say, Catholic intellectuals or those who are theorizing about, "Well, why shouldn't gay people marry?" Or there's a lot more than just...

• 11:50Dax Shepard?

  But there's other metrics other than suffering?

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right.

• 11:54Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Like humanity.

• 11:55Dax Shepard?

  Maybe a higher calling or a higher truth you're pursuing.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  If it's in a religious context, it makes sense. If you believe, as most religions do, that we are children of God, we are created by God, we carry some essence inside of us, whether you're Christian or Hindu or Jewish, there's a sense that your body is either on loan or a gift from God. And so you shouldn't act in ways that defile it.

• 12:19Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  And that's what...

• 12:20Dax Shepard?

  Eat it, eat God's child.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 12:22Dax Shepard?

  God's child.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  That's right. Treating it like just a piece of meat is defiling it. So if you're in a religious context, it makes perfect sense. And if you're an atheist or secular, it doesn't. And I asked Cass, I was able to talk to him afterwards alone. I said, "So do you believe in God?" And he said, "What depends what you mean." You know, as many Jewish intellectuals are not Jewish. It's like, "Well..."

• 12:40Dax Shepard?

  Rabbinical response.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  That's right. And once I made a call, "Do you believe that there's an intelligence, an essence or something that created us?" And he said, "Oh, no, not in that sense, no."

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:48Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  But so he got to that position from really what I think is a humanitarian view, which I'm kind of coming to in this age of internet degradation. Actually, I hope we'll talk about that, the degradation of our digital lives.

• 12:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  It's such an interesting area where ethics is meeting up with the craziness of what's happening to our lives now that it's all going online.

• 13:06Dax Shepard?

  What do you think about just the appeal of one answer, a binary? And I just have found now that in interviewing so many people and living long enough, at best, things are like 61% true.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  And as they say, there's two kinds of people, those who think there's two kinds of people and those who don't.

• 13:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  I would say that in general, as a heuristic in life, what you're saying is good and right. But sometimes there are true binaries and sometimes one side is completely right. So just to give you an example, with my new book, The Anxious Generation, I'm engaged in a debate with people about what caused the gigantic increase in mental illness that began with young people around 2012. It's very sudden.

• 13:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  And it happens in many, many countries. And in general, as a social scientist, I favor the view that, well, you know, it's multi-causal and there's all these different factors coming in and, oh, we never want to point to one thing. Sometimes there is one thing. I mean, like, leaded gas did some terrible stuff to developing brains. Sometimes there are childhood diseases and sometimes there is one thing that causes a lot.

• 14:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, smoking's pretty definitive.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 14:06Dax Shepard?

  We get them occasionally.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, we do. That's right.

• 14:08Dax Shepard?

  Have you found, though, really quick, as you've gotten older, because certainly I'm clocking the fact that as I get older, I am getting more conservative?

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Yep, that happens. Tell me what you mean by that and what way are you getting more conservative?

• 14:20Dax Shepard?

  I'm starting to question a lot of the assumptions I made, like decriminalizing drug use would be great. And then I see the result in Oregon and I go, well, that didn't work out. ODs went up. Our approach to homelessness here in LA, that was unsuccessful. We have to acknowledge it's unsuccessful. They seem very objectively and empirically true, but if I just plot them all on a graph, I would have to recognize, oh, isn't it suspicious that you've also gotten older? So how does one correct for this natural thing? And maybe one shouldn't, and that's the nature of life.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  I have a bunch of thoughts. First, it's long been observed that that is generally the case. I think as Winston Churchill said, any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart. Any man who's still a socialist at age 30 has no head. Something like that.

• 15:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  And there is research showing that there's certain life experiences that push people to the right. Having children is the main one because once you have children, you see more threats in the world, you're more protective and you have sort of a longer time horizon. Owning a business, when you become a businessperson, suddenly you see like, wait a second, it's impossible for me to operate my business, all these regulations.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  You're two for two.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  And then also, I don't know about you, but I'm finding I'm just much less passionate than I used to be. And this is also true just about aging. You know, your hormone levels drop, especially for me, your testosterone level drops.

• 15:34Dax Shepard?

  You're not out winning a mate. That period's over.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  That's right, through different periods of life. And I feel like I'm much more stoic. I read a lot of stoic writing, so I can think about things on all sides. Oh, and then there's another factor, which is I have this pet theory that you can't know which side is right perfectly, but you can bet without knowing anything about the topic. I could have a successful betting record on, you give me the disputes, I'll make bets on them. All I need to know is which side does a better job of suppressing and attacking and threatening its dissidents. If you tell me which side does not allow anyone to question, I can say that side is wrong about most things. What I talked with you about last time, The Coddling the American Mind, was about this weird thing that happened on college campuses beginning 2015, but it actually goes back more to 2012, 2013. It's now called the Great Awokening.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  And so there was this period, I think it really runs from, say, 2015, when things got crazy on campus, through 2020, that whole crazy year. And it's kind of ending now, but there was a period when the left was extraordinarily good at destroying socially anyone who questioned. And that led to terrible policies like the ones you just mentioned.

• 16:40Dax Shepard?

  When you're not open to any criticism.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  You become structurally stupid. You have a group of people, they can be brilliant as individuals, but they don't have the normal process of someone said, hey, let's decriminalize marijuana. And someone says, well, wait, what would happen? If you lose that process, then you become structurally stupid. Obviously, the right is insane as well. I'm not saying that they're smarter.

• 16:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  But it was a period where the left-dominated cultural institutions put in policies that really backfired. And I believe that's why so many groups moved to the right, moved towards Trump.

• 17:09Dax Shepard?

  The Liberal Party became a little illiberal in the way they welcomed the scrutiny.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  But do you think it's the majority of the party, or is it still fringe?

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Well, what matters is what people see. And so since on both sides, the fringe controlled. This is what's upsetting about our politics. The right is not conservative, the left is not liberal. At the center of our discussion here, and especially as we move to the anxious generation, when you get a change in techno- You get a change in so many aspects of life. When you get television and automobiles, great inventions, but it ends up changing the way we live together because now you're just in your home, watching your entertainment center. You get in your car and you go somewhere else. And so it decimated human interaction and neighborhoods. But that was over many, many decades. The move on to smartphones and social media, what I call in the book, the great rewiring of childhood. 2010, teens have flip phones. They might have Facebook, but they don't use it very often

• 18:03Speaker 02

  because they have to use their parents' computer to get on it. There's no privacy, that's right. Whereas by 2015, everyone has a smartphone, social media, Instagram, high-speed internet, limitless texting. So when you change radically how people are connected, you get massive changes throughout society. That new information environment is kind of what allowed the illiberal elements of the left to dominate and intimidate and harass anyone who dissented. And it ended up doing terrible damage to the left. The fact that we have Donald Trump in power saying things like, "The laws shouldn't apply to me if I'm trying to save our country." I mean, this is complete madness.

• 18:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's complicated. But on the coddling of the American mind and what you were exposing in that. Now, here's what I want to own. So part of the reason I was loving listening to you on Sam Harris, and why I was enjoying Sam Harris so much at that time was, I'm gonna say, I had succumbed to a bit of a moral panic about colleges. There are 18 million college students. There are 5,300 colleges. There were about 12 really nuts, crazy viral videos that I responded very strongly to. Bret Weinstein shouting people off stages. These things happened. But I think now, 13 years out of that context,

• 19:20Dax Shepard?

  I can acknowledge I probably overreacted. I think really, if you look at the massive amount of students that went through the system at that time and that many universities, really, how many were there of those crazy protests?

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Two ways to look at things. One is the statistical method where you say, what's the average? And the average is always fine. The average college student didn't want to take part in these things. The average college student wanted to... Do his work, get a job.

• 19:46Dax Shepard?

  Debate some ideas, probably.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  College students overwhelmingly want to be exposed to different ideas. But what I'm arguing is that since the Great Transformation, since everything became digital, Jeff Jarvis has a book called The Gutenberg Print, a really good book. There was a period, 500 years, that was based on print, text, the Gutenberg era. That ended right around 2014. 2014 is when you get the first global cancellation. That woman who told a bad joke on Twitter and then she was fired by the time she landed in South Africa.

• 20:11Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  That was not possible in 2010.

• 20:13Dax Shepard?

  You could ruin your life in three minutes.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  That's right. Because the super viral dynamics of our planet have changed everything and what it is to live within a college. Not our community colleges, it wasn't just 10 or 12, it was like the top 100 or 200, generally pervasive at our elite schools was if you say something, it could be the end of your social life.

• 20:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. Constantly calling for the deans to be fired, constantly calling for everyone to be fired.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  That's right. One of my friends, a woman who ran Heterodox Academy for a while, one of her students said to her, "My motto is silence is safer." And to be a college student, have that be your motto? There's a real problem with the culture. And since people often felt that at work.

• 20:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  And they felt it in many environments. I think that's part of what led to the general shift away from the Democrats. What I think is so important in the election results is the fact that the shift from Democrats to Republicans happened in almost every group, including Asians, black men at least, Jews. Every group shifted. And that means there's a pervasive problem. That's what the Cardigan American Mind was about, and that's what so much of my work has been about since 2004, was trying to say, "Look, Democrats, you need to understand moral psychology. You need to understand why it is that most people care about immigration in ways that you don't, why it is that people care about family and tradition."

• 21:22Dax Shepard?

  You have to acknowledge who the constituents are. It needs addressing.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Do we think this was a backlash, though, to many, many, many years of the opposite groups having to say silence is safer? Like marginalized groups have had to say silence is safer since the beginning of time. And so when it became easier, or when it became like, "Oh, you feel like that too? Oh, you feel like that too? Let's start speaking up." It was still a retaliation to that.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  But let's go through the timing. There was a time when that was true. So I was born in 1963. It just blows my mind that when I was born, it was legal to discriminate against black people in a large part of the country. I mean, that was written as a law. Let's go decade by decade. 1973, the change is unbelievable. The legal change. Now you've got the women's rights movement. The gay rights movement has started. Environmentalism, animal rights. You keep going. 83, even though you have Ronald Reagan as president, socially, the country is still, you know, the advances in acceptance of every possible group. Go to 1993, even more so. By 2013, when I turned 50, our first black president has been reelected. Gay marriage, it's been legalized in many states. Supreme Court's about to rule on it. Trans rights are coming into view, and those are quickly recognized by the Supreme Court.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  And so in 2013, if you are a young progressive, you should look back on this history of when marginalized people used to have to be quiet or stay in the margins. And you should say, wow, what incredible progress every decade since 1963. Whatever we're doing in America, let's keep doing it because it's amazing. But that's not what happened. That's exactly when an element of the left became much more radicalized. And you can see it in graphs. You can see that it's young white people, and the left especially, suddenly moved way to the left on issues of race and immigration, way to the left of black people. And it was especially young women. So that's the movement that was radicalized by the internet. Tumblr, I think, was a major place where a lot of these ideas came together about identity.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  The 2010s was a really interesting, transformative, and in many ways terrible time. It began with our sense that this technology is magical. It's going to be the best thing that ever happened to democracy. The Arab Spring occupied Wall Street. We were all so optimistic about in the 2010s. We didn't understand what it was doing to us. And I think it really did end the Democrats because it led to a set of ideas that were intense, that led to a lot of intimidation. That's what the Catholic American mind was about, the intimidation. And it led to a huge backlash.

• 23:51Dax Shepard?

  The thing I was noticing that was very concerning and continues to be is I am liberal, and all my friends are liberal. I'm having conversations with all the members of this group. And none of them think some of the broadcast values of the liberal party. And that's what was really concerning. I've yet to meet the person that agrees with issue A. Yet that's an official part of our platform. And what's happening, it felt like the cadre system. We were all afraid to tell the truth.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 24:28Dax Shepard?

  I was open to meeting a handful of people that thought this was a good idea. But numerous issues, everyone I meet in real life, not on the internet, doesn't think this way. And I'm like, oh, it's truly been hijacked. No one even thinks this.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  And that was not possible before social media. You couldn't have a small number intimidating a large number, but now you can. You know, James Carville has been great on this. He's been complaining about faculty lounge politics. Because you say you haven't met a single person, like they're all over universities. Not a majority. Most professors are on the left, but they're liberal, they're sane. But there are certain departments in which this way of thinking is dominant. This sort of thinking is very aggressive and intimidating. A small group ended up having so much power in that. Couldn't have happened before social media.

• 25:07Dax Shepard?

  Yes. Okay, so your current book, The Anxious Generation. One element of it is not a shocker to me because you brought up in the first interview, seven years ago, this concept of free range parenting. We ended up interviewing Leonore Skenazy, who we loved.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  She's great. She's so funny.

• 25:25Dax Shepard?

  So that aspect I knew would come up at some point in your work, maybe more officially. So maybe start there because that's where you and I are really in lockstep.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  I was busy studying moral and political psychology. I was going to write a book called Three Stories About Capitalism, The Moral Psychology of Economic Life. And then all of a sudden, things blew up on universities in 2015. It began as a side project. What's going on with young people? Like, why are they so anxious? And that led us to write The Coddling of the American Mind. Coddling means overprotection. And that led me to draw much more on Leonore Skenazy's work. Now, I'd moved to New York in 2011 with my wife. Our kids were very young then. We met Leonore socially and we read her book, Free Range Kids. And so we used that to help us raise our kids. And I know you and Kristin, I read that amazing story about you guys at Tivoli Gardens. I want you to tell that story.

• 26:08Dax Shepard?

  Oh, no, no, no. I don't know that I have. Normally, I would brag about getting an email from you commending us. I somehow resisted in that moment.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Lenora and others have been saying for years, we are vastly overprotecting our kids. So I'm 62, you're like 50. Wait, Monica, if I may ask, are you a millennial?

• 26:24Speaker 01

  I'm a millennial.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  You're a millennial, right.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, 37.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  So older millennials and up, we almost all had free-range childhoods. Now, we grew up during a crime wave. There was a lot of crime in the 70s and 80s.

• 26:32Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  But kids went out to play. It was like, of course you're gonna go out and play. What are you gonna do, sit and watch TV all day long? In the 90s, the crime wave ends. Life gets much safer. Drunk driving gets under control. But that's exactly the decade when we freak out about child abduction. I mean, people literally, now, they won't let their seven-year-old go two aisles over in the grocery store, because what if they're kidnapped in the grocery store? It was clear that the overprotection had something to do with this. But the overprotection was kind of gradually implemented in the 80s and 90s. And the mental health crisis hit suddenly in 2012, 2013. So there was something missing from our analysis in the column.

• 27:06Dax Shepard?

  Really quick, how have you come to trust the data? Because you born in 63, me in 75. I have never, ever been asked about my anxiety level. I've never been asked about my depression level. No one ever inquired anything of any of us. So how do you make peace with trusting this data? Just knowing that we're looking around now and we weren't.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  So in the United States, we have several long-running, very good nationally representative studies. Most countries don't have this. One of the ones that a lot of us rely on is called the Monitoring the Future Study. It began with just high school seniors. Not every high school senior, but they had, I don't know if they identified a few hundred high schools, a few thousand high schools. So it began just high school seniors. They'd ask them a bunch of questions, including, I feel anxious every day. I can't remember what the phrasing is. But here's one of them that I remember the phrasing of is, I feel that my life is useless. And roughly 9% of them agreed with that statement, plus or minus a bit, from the 90s through 2010. So we have this long-running, it goes back to the 70s. And then they added in 8th and 10th graders sometime in the 90s. So we have these long-running data sets, 8th, 10th, and 12th graders. And so we can see, one of them is,

• 28:12Speaker 02

  sometimes I like to do things just because they're a little bit dangerous. Teenagers are risk takers. And so the boys, it's probably say, yes. So we can plot, how did that question fare? And what we find is, on the question about uselessness, only 9% on a five-point scale either Strongly agree, you agree. So, most American high school students are like, no, I don't feel my life is useless. All of a sudden, 2013, it starts skyrocketing and it doubles within about five or seven years.

• 28:34Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  So about 20% of our high school seniors think that their life is useless. Data sets like this are full of slow rises and slow falls. You almost never find elbows. You almost never find a hockey stick. And this is what you see in chapter one of the anxious generation. Graph after graph, you find a hockey stick, especially for girls. I should make it clear. For girls, it's like there's no sign of a problem. And then 2012, boom, more than doubling between 50 and 150% depending which study. But it's never 10 or 20% increase. It's always 50 to 150% increase. Boys are doing much worse too, but that's a little more gradual. It's not exactly 2012. It begins maybe a little before 2010, but it accelerates in the 2010s. So something went suddenly very wrong in the early 2010s. And that's what the anxious generation is about. It's not just the overprotection. It's also, I argue, the change in the technology.

• 29:18Dax Shepard?

  Okay, I'm gonna unfortunately bring this word back again, and I know it's an aggravating one. But if we look at why there was this clampdown on the autonomy of the children in that period. You gotta call it irrational. It's an irrational fear of pedophiles.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Kidnappings.

• 29:33Dax Shepard?

  Abductions. We would have to agree that that was a moral panic. I lived through this satanic moral panic. People that weren't alive then can't really even imagine. We were sending kids to prison in Memphis because they worshiped this poster of Metallica. Like, this was happening. Kids were going to prison for Satanism. The next round, in my memory, was this big moral panic about abductions.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  A man with a white van.

• 29:58Dax Shepard?

  Yes. A response to it was far more damaging than this perceived threat of the abductors.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Right. So this was a true moral panic. And it's an important word. A moral panic, they have certain properties. It spreads through the media. People read a report about something, then they get afraid. The definition of a moral panic includes that it's not real. If there really was a sudden wave of kidnappings by men in white vans, well, then it would be rational to fear it. The FBI stats on kidnapping are astonishing. Any idea how many kids get kidnapped by a stranger any year? Like ballpark, what do you think it is?

• 30:28Dax Shepard?

  In America?

• 30:29Speaker 02

  In America.

• 30:30Dax Shepard?

  By a stranger, not a family member? Because those are high.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  500.

• 30:35Dax Shepard?

  I don't want to act like I'm ahead of the question. I know where it's going. Honestly, maybe sixty to a hundred.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  That's about right.

• 30:41Dax Shepard?

  The right's obsessed with child abductions. They think everyone's a pedophile still. They have this whole movie. They think Bill Gates has kids.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Right wing TV really goes for that.

• 30:51Dax Shepard?

  They think there's sex trafficking happening on an order of like millions of kids a year. And you're like, where are the parents? Why isn't anyone reporting this? Where are these people?

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Two things. One is on the true kidnappings. It's in the ballpark of one or 200 cases a year. So the point is, it's very, very rare in the real world. Now, once we move to online, and this is what's so insane about what's happening. Parents are afraid to let their kids run around outside because they're afraid they'll get picked up by a sex predator. The sex predators are all on Instagram. That's where they move.

• 31:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they're too busy.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Because they can contact people anonymously. They can groom them and then sometimes they can arrange to meet somewhere. Once you get a naked photo of a kid, now you've got power over them. You can make him or her do anything you want on camera for you and your boy. I mean, it's sick what's happening.

• 31:32Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  If we're focusing on online, I don't think it's a moral panic. The data from an insider at Instagram, Arturo Bejar, he found, I think it was something like one in seven teens reported some kind of inappropriate sexual contact, like somebody trying to hit on them, pick them up. One in seven every week.

• 31:49Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my God.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  You know, it's hard to know what the exact numbers are, but the point is it's much more dangerous online than in the real world. So we grossly overreacted. And here's what we've learned about why did we freak out in the 90s just as things were getting safe? And the answer is that that's when we stopped trusting our neighbors. The key work here is Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone. In the 50s and 60s, we had very, very high social capital. We trusted our neighbors. And back then, there were men going around. My sister, when she was a teenager, a man stopped in his car and opened the door and he was naked and masturbating.

• 32:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  And it was just like, that stuff just happened.

• 32:22Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  But by the 90s, that guy would be locked away for 20 years. So back when there were actually more risks, we trusted our neighbors. We let our kids out and some bad stuff happened to them.

• 32:32Dax Shepard?

  This would be a great time for me to point out, like, I was sexually abused. But almost all sexual abuse cases are a trusted person, right? They're not a stranger.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  That's right. And the fact that it was often an institution. Whether it be the Catholic Church or sports teams or Boy Scouts. So that was a huge advance was to say, look, all these organizations, they have some bad apples and then they cover up. That's what they're really guilty of. And that all came out in the 90s. And so in a sense, that was a legitimate reason to think like, whoa, this is much broader than we thought. But at the same time, crime and danger was plummeting then, and we didn't really pick up on that. But it's that we lost trust in our neighbors. And one way we can see this is that the same thing happens in Canada and the UK where they don't have the high crime rates that we do. And so it's just around the Anglosphere, we change, we spend all our time on television, we don't know our neighbors and we lose trust.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 33:30Dax Shepard?

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• 34:12Dax Shepard?

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• 34:55Dax Shepard?

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• 36:06Dax Shepard?

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• 36:18Dax Shepard?

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• 36:49Speaker 01

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• 36:49Dax Shepard?

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• 37:07Speaker 01

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• 37:16Dax Shepard?

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• 38:00Dax Shepard?

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• 38:19Dax Shepard?

  I would also add, there was a new component around that time, much like the internet, which was the daytime salacious talk show. There were new offerings. There was cable. There was a proliferation of options. It wasn't three networks. So you could find someone at any given moment on TV in the nineties, talking about some abductor. A megaphone was given to a lot of people that you would have otherwise not heard from.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  That's right. So that was part of it. What I'm coming to see is that you have to keep your eye on technology because technology changes so fast and then the downstream effects of technology are so vast. So the arrival of television had huge effects. Then television going to cable with hundreds of channels has huge effects. And then microcasting and then cable to social media, micro, microcasting. I see that you have, you have on Noah Harari's book on your shelf, Nexus, and there he says often, "Democracy is a conversation." Well, what happens when that conversation moves on to Twitter? It becomes much more polarizing and disparate and fragmented. So yes, that's what we're talking about. The way that technology changes everything about our political lives. But to return to the children.

• 39:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  So we knew that overprotection was a piece of the story, but it couldn't explain this incredibly sudden, sharp turn up around 2013 in many, many countries. And so in the coddling, we had about a page or two where we said, no, social media really comes in around the right time. Facebook opens up to the world around 2007, maybe that influenced what we then knew was Gen Z. And especially around 2011, 2012, it gets much more viral. So we speculated, now, you know, maybe it has some, but we don't know. Well, that was what we wrote in 2017. And after the book came out, some researchers challenged me and said, oh, you can't say it's social media. There's no evidence. I said, really? Wait, I saw all kinds of studies that did show at least a correlation, a couple of experiments. So I started gathering all the studies I could find in these big Google documents. You go to anxiousgeneration.com/reviews.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  You can find all these Google documents where we collect all the evidence on one side, all the evidence on the other. We organize it by method. So you can get a sense like, okay, what is the nature of the research that's out there? And as I began to see that actually the correlational studies are pretty consistent. There are some that show no correlation, but those tend to be all digital media for all kids with all kinds of outcomes. Every time you zoom in on just social media for girls, anxiety and depression, you find a much bigger correlation. The second is that there are now about 25 experiments where you randomly assign people, usually college students, it's hard to work with 12 year olds.

• 40:38Dax Shepard?

  Weirdest people on earth.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  That's right, the weirdest people, that's right, famous article. But where you randomly assign people to get off social media. And if you look just at the studies that kept them off for more than a week, almost all of them find benefits on measures of anxiety and depression. And so once you have correlational studies and you have experimental studies and you have eyewitness testimony, because Gen Z generally says this is harming them. It's very hard to find members of Gen Z who are saying, no, social media is great. We love it. It's good for us. And we have confessions from the companies. On my Substack, After Babbel, we have an article, TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale, using just their own words from the lawsuits against them. We know some of their internal memos and correspondence, just their own words. They know they're harming millions and millions of kids a year.

• 41:22Dax Shepard?

  Just a little telling, they have a different version running in China than my.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  God, that's right. Chinese kids get spinach all about how great China is and how to be an astronaut. And we get fentanyl and dog poop.

• 41:32Dax Shepard?

  What would be helpful, I think, is the first, because I wouldn't have known how to delineate the generations. So Gen X, which I'm a member of, are you?

• 41:39Speaker 02

  No, I'm the last of the baby boomers.

• 41:41Dax Shepard?

  You're the last of, okay. You're bridging it. And then we have millennials. Millennials is what era?

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Roughly 1981 through 1995.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  It's such a big group. I think it's too big.

• 41:52Dax Shepard?

  And that's Monica. Monica's representative. So we have good, we have three generations here. And then Gen Z is from?

• 41:57Speaker 02

  I say 1996. Pew says 1997. Who knows? You can't say, but roughly 1996. Gene Twenge says 1995. So if you're born in the mid 90s or later, you are Gen Z. And what I came to see is the key thing is look at early puberty. If you were born in 1995, last of the millennials, you're turning 15 in 2010. You probably had a flip phone. You didn't have Instagram in 2010. And you might have traded in later, but the point is you made it most of the way through puberty before the Great Transformation, before the Great Wiring, and you didn't get this stuff until really more like college. Your mental health is probably fine. But if you were born in the year 2000, you turn 15 in 2015. And so your first phone might well have been a smartphone. And iPhone gets a front-facing camera in 2010.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  And Instagram comes out in 2010, but Facebook buys it in 2012. That's when everyone goes on it. If you were born in the year 2000, you went through early puberty as a girl, especially on Instagram with your phone in your hand. Half of our teenagers say they are online almost constantly. Phone's always in their hand. And that, I believe, is what created Gen Z. That's why Gen Z is different from the millennials, is what were they doing in early puberty?

• 43:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they have no period of time. They have no foot in pre-internet, pre-smartphone. So it's a very interesting group to look at. When we talk about all these issues that are in the anxious generation, we are talking about Gen Z.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Gen Z and below, or just that one?

• 43:17Speaker 02

  And below. I mean, I was always just thinking about Gen Z, but we don't know when Gen Alpha begins. Marketers tell us 2010 or 2011. I think it might actually depend more on TikTok. I think TikTok is transformative for brain development. And so it might be that the generation shaped by TikTok is very different. But for now, we're going with 2010. Let's say 2011 is the first. Birth year of Gen Alpha.

• 43:36Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so a couple of things you lay out in the book which are relevant is you 90% of the mass of your brain by like six years old, but what was really happening through development is building all these neural networks, getting different areas of the brain to communicate. And that is a long journey that varies between males and females, but the frontal lobe is fully on board, the prefrontal cortex. You're in your twenties, right?

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Twenty five usually.

• 43:59Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so that's how the brain works. And now, what are your thoughts on how this technology has interfered with that process?

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Neural networks are amazing things. I was thinking going into AI in 1986, when I was done with college and I was working in computers. And AI back then was based on programming, normal computer language to do things. And it didn't get very far. It's only once they develop the idea that, hey, how about we make something like a neural network? And then you train it. And of course, we all know that training data needed to train chat GPT is enormous. And the stuff you put in is going to shape the connections made. So what happens when the stuff that gets put into a neural network is the stuff that we evolved for, which is first, you learn how to move your body, and then you learn to walk and run, and eye contact, and social life, and talking, and climbing, and fleeing predators, and forming coalitions, and all the stuff that you have to learn. And you watch kids. It's amazing.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  They'll do something, it falls down, they do it again, it falls down, they do it again. I mean, they repeat, repeat, repeat.

• 44:58Dax Shepard?

  They've got no quit. It's really impressive. It's not like any child ever tried to start walking. It's like, fuck that, that was too hard. I guess I'll crawl.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Although now, if you give a kid an iPad, they might say, fuck that, this is too interesting.

• 45:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, the what would be over there that's as interesting as that.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  That's right. So my point is that brain development takes a very, very long time. Humans have an extraordinarily long childhood. And the only way that we could have such a long childhood is if it was incredibly valuable, because evolution is a battle for survival. Why would you delay reproduction by so long? Culture is very, very powerful, very important to learn. And so we've evolved cultural mechanisms of cultural learning, and we still use this. We look not just to our parents, we look at all the adults. No child has their parents' accent. They have the accent of the people around them. So we can live in modern ways, but you still have to have this pathway of child development. Now, what? Happens when we now give kids iPhones and iPads. In Britain, there's a shocking statistic. One quarter of their five-year-olds have their own smartphone. Because parents around the world have discovered, your kid's crying, you need to make dinner.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Take the phone. You're happy, I'm happy, I can do my stuff. And it's like drugging your kid. A distinction I'm coming to see, which is very, very useful, is I don't want to tell people, be afraid of screens, never let your kid on a screen. What I'm coming to see, as I talk with my undergrads especially, and I realize how serious the attention fragmentation is. This is, I think, ultimately more serious than the mental illness, is the attention fragmentation. So I'm coming to see that distinguish between story time and fragmenting time. So stories are good things. Humans are storytelling animals. We love stories. All cultures tell stories. That's part of how we socialize our kids. And that's why literature is so important and why reading novels is so important. Stories are good. And a television screen is actually a pretty good way of portraying a story. So don't be afraid of letting your kids have story time. Not six hours a day, but on a plane ride, let your kid watch a movie, fantastic.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  But fragmenting time is, I'm doing this thing, but then I got a pop-up. I do this other thing. I'm watching this movie, but I'm a little bored, so I'll check out this, and I'll go there. And so if you give a kid an iPad, that's fragmenting time. How much fragmenting time should you give your kid? As close to zero as possible forever. But don't be afraid of stories.

• 47:00Dax Shepard?

  So you see four foundational harms from all this. One is social deprivation. Seems pretty intuitive, but go ahead and expound a little bit on that.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Kids are incredibly sociable, social. We socialize each other. We play in groups, mixed age groups. There's clear data on how much time kids were spending with friends until around 2010, 2012, about two hours a day on average. It's called the American Time Use Survey. How much time did you spend eating? How much time did you spend watching TV? So you can see, until around 2012, kids 15 to 24 is the youngest age group, they were spending about two hours a day with their friends, outside of school and work. And then you see this incredibly sharp drop around 2012, in that period, down to the point where in 2019, just before COVID, it's gone from two hours a day down to like 45 minutes a day, which is just a little bit more than older people are spending. And then COVID comes in. We get COVID restrictions, and it just goes down a little further. Gen Z began practicing social distancing

• 47:53Speaker 02

  as soon as they got a smartphone. And they finished the job almost by 2019 and then certainly by 2020. Because with a phone, you're always interrupted. It's always more interesting than the person standing next to you. And my students complain like you could sit with somebody at lunch in the cafeteria and they're on their phone half the time.

• 48:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  And so it just fragments, it disrupts. There's a great line in the book from Sherri Turkle at MIT. She says, "With our phones, we are forever elsewhere." And so this is devastating to social development.

• 48:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. You know, you meet kids, anyone with a partner experiences this.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  We're all doing it, but I guess our brains have developed before.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  That's right. We're damaging our relationships. We're not damaging our brains.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  But that leads right into the second foundational harm, which is attention fragmentation. And this is the one that I'm beginning to think is possibly the most serious. The book focused on mental illness because we have good data about that. We don't have good data on attention fragmentation. But in talking with my students, and these are students who got into a top university, at New York University, some of them say they can't watch a movie. And some of them say, or they have friends who can't watch a movie unless they're also on a second screen because they can't focus on anything for that long. They can't read a book. One of my students said, "I take out a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok." What is the cost to humanity if half of our kids can't read a book?

• 49:06Dax Shepard?

  Now, just to play devil's advocate right here.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Please.

• 49:08Dax Shepard?

  I would imagine that is how their workplace will end up looking. So I think we're moving into an era where it's like AI is doing a lot of these tasks. AI has endless concentration. You know, are they just getting prepared for the life they're going to occupy? It's not the life I want, but is it maybe just the life of the future? And I need to, again, check my being 50 and getting more conservative. What do we think about that?

• 49:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I hear that argument occasionally, like, well, the technology is here to stay. They need to learn how to use it, so they should start early. You know, I mean, sex is here to stay, but we're not going to start our kids at six or seven. Let them have normal development, there's a time for it. What I would say as a college professor is if you want to send your kids to me at NYU Stern, a business school, or preparing for these sorts of careers you're talking about, then I could choose between kids who had an iPhone or iPad from age five or always on it and can use the technology, but can't think, can't focus, can't write, can't look you in the eye. I mean, how are you going to succeed in business? If, on the other hand, I could get kids who were raised in a homeschooled Christian environment, they had no technology until they were 18, I suppose they were going to come to college, they're going to pick up how to use the technology in about three days.

• 50:16Dax Shepard?

  It's all so intuitive. It's not like you're going to fall so deeply behind.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  That's right. The millennials in the 90s, your generation, you guys grew up with the internet, but you learned how to program, what a motherboard is, and swapping in chips. I mean, there was learning before, but now these things are so easy to use, and they're designed to be addictive. The early internet was not designed to be addictive, it was designed to be useful. So no, I reject that argument. It's much, much better to let healthy brain development at least get most of the way through before you shatter it with the constant interruptions and fragmenting.

• 50:42Dax Shepard?

  It's interesting, yeah. It parallels a lot of social issues of the time. It's like, when do we allow children to do whatever they want?

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Well, circling back to ADHD, the attention fragmentation is that. So is it ADHD or is it this? It's just that we're so addicted to these things.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Well, and that brings us right to another of the foundations, which is addiction. And this is one that we mention in the book, but I'm coming to see is much more serious than I realized. So yes, let's talk about addiction a bit.

• 51:09Dax Shepard?

  Finally wandered into my field of expertise, addiction.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  All right, so I'll interview you about addiction. The key neural process here is, of course, dopamine. Dopamine is sometimes said to be a neurotransmitter of reward, but it's not reward like, I did something, I get a reward, ah.

• 51:24Dax Shepard?

  There's no satiation.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's the opposite of satiation. It's really more a neurotransmitter of motivation. You do something, it feels good, and your brain says, oh, that felt good, let's do it again. Which, in our ancestral environment, was good. Like, you taste something, like, ooh, it tastes sweet, let's have more, more, more, grab it all.

• 51:38Dax Shepard?

  I'll just add right now, because I think it's interesting for people to think of when they drink, like, if you read Dopamine Nation or Molecule Moral.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Such a good book.

• 51:44Dax Shepard?

  Both those books are great. The joy of drinking is the first two drinks. That is the most pleasurable period, because that's the dopamine dump. It's, I'm feeling the shifting of reality, what could be on the other side of this new reality. Beyond two drinks is inebriation, so you're no longer getting dopamine. So if people are wondering, like, what is that experience where it's like, the first two are great, and I feel optimistic and energized, and then the rest is just inebriation, because there's no dopamine. And that's what you really love is the dopamine.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, then what really happens is, then the next day...

• 52:16Speaker 01

  You are anticipating the first drink.

• 52:19Dax Shepard?

  You're in a deficit at that point.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  It's all about then just getting the drink.

• 52:23Dax Shepard?

  That's right.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  You're living in that dopamine dump.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  And that's the key word is deficit. So I'm now studying educational technology because our schools are stuffed full of ed tech. And a lot of it is gamified. Hey, let's teach kids math. Let's make it a fun game where they get rewards. If you do that, you'll get more engagement, but there's a cost. The more activities we give our kids that lead them to quick dopamine, which is you do something simple, you get a reward. Do something simple, get a reward, like a slot machine, like social media. You never know what's going to come, but sometimes it's good. If you gamify a quarter of a kid's day, that's a lot of quick dopamine. The brain is going to react by downregulating dopamine neurons. So they're less sensitive to dopamine. And so now, when you take away the gamification, now they're in a deficit state, which means everything is boring and unpleasant.

• 53:05Dax Shepard?

  The human body is the master at homeostasis. So if you bring it up, it must bring itself down.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Not on everything, but on anything that involves dopamine. Yes, absolutely.

• 53:16Dax Shepard?

  And it's asymmetric offset. So it's five minutes of dopamine and the cost of that, the bad chemicals you'll experience, go on for two hours.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  If you think about what you might call quick dopamine versus slow dopamine. So slow dopamine is suppose a boy sets out to build a treehouse or a racing car. Every time he makes progress, that's rewarding, but you're going towards the goal. You're keeping focused. Now, this is what executive function is. Executive function is the ability to say, here's my goal. I'm going to do the hard work. Along the way, I get rewards for making progress. And when I'm done, it feels so good.

• 53:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, delayed gratification.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  That's right. So that's all really good. But what I'm coming to see is I underestimated what's happening to boys. Because I focus more on the girls because the data is just so much clearer on social media and girls. But with boys, they get the video games early. And the video games are so much better than what I had. We had Pong. I would like the first video game. It was kind of fun.

• 54:04Dax Shepard?

  Calico Vision, I think.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  That's right, Atari, Asteroid. The boys, it starts with the video games, which is really quick dopamine. It's incredibly intense. They're beautiful. They're exciting. And many parents have observed, once they let their boy play video games, and a little bit is okay. I don't want to cause a panic here on video games. But if your kid is playing three hours of video games a day, seven days a week, probably that's going to have dopamine effects because they're in. State a deficit. And so everything else is more boring. Then we have to ramp it up. Okay, they're in school, they're bored. Let's give them gamified math. And we'll give them gamify this and that. And oh, let's let them keep their phones on them, which is insane. A study just came out from Dimitri Kostakis. On average, American students, I think it was high school, spend an hour and a half a day in school on their phone. Again, if you gamify, gamify, gamify, then the rest of life is incredibly boring. And that includes talking to people.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  We're really doing our kids a disservice. Oh, and then I haven't even mentioned the vaping and the marijuana pens and the crypto gambling and sports betting. You get the sense from my book that the girls are in worse shape than the boys, but I'm really, that's not true. At age 14, the girls are in worse shape because the boys have these amazing video games. They've got incredible porn. They're enjoying their dopamine-filled pursuits. But I think they're harming their brains more even than the girls are, which helps explain why girls are making progress career-wise. Boys are increasingly living at home with their parents because they're less suited for employment.

• 55:21Dax Shepard?

  And the gambling epidemic is soon to rival the opioid. Like, there's a lot of people now starting to shine a light on just how extreme this epidemic is.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  If you have any influence, try to roll this back. It's insane that this has been legalized. This is just fishing for boys' dopamine circuits. Richard Reeves wrote of Boys and Men. He told me that when sports betting is legalized in a state, the number of bankruptcies goes up very quickly. And that's mostly young men. And so we're just destroying young men and their futures.

• 55:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and then you're feeding into the suicide epidemic.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Well, of course, it's also depressing to be so bored. If you're living in a deficit and everything's boring and there's nothing exciting, that is depression.

• 56:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you're in discomfort a lot of your day if you're not on the thing. It's identical to drug addiction. Okay, so now the data, and you've already hinted at it, but the social deprivation, sleep deprivation, we should talk about. It really probably impacts sleep.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Sleep is so important. We're realizing much more now than we did 20 years ago. Because when I was in college, it was like, we don't really know why people sleep. All animals sleep, but when you keep people up at night, they don't die. It was known for a long time that REM sleep does have something to do with consolidating memories. So there's always been a relationship between sleep and learning. We know that. But more recently, I don't remember when this was found, but there's a lymphatic system in our bodies that Gets rid of broken molecules and proteins and flushes it out. The brain does not have a lymphatic system to flush it out. But deep sleep seems to involve a pattern of neural firing that seems to do some of that. And so it is about the brain's repair. Sleep is incredibly important. It's also important for your mental health. So we know that once you give kids, touchscreen devices are the most engaging, the most addictive, much more so than a television screen.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  Television is entertaining, but it doesn't allow you to do stimulus response stuff, whereas a touchscreen does. So if you give a kid an iPad or iPhone and you let them have it at night in their room, not all, but a lot of them are going to be on it instead of sleeping. And so there's the blue light, there's the stimulation, there's the social drama. And so a lot of kids are now really sleep deprived. Now, what happens? You're sleep deprived, you go into class, you can't learn as much, you do more poorly in school, you're more stressed out by your grades, you're irritable and short tempered, so your relationships suffer. And all of this just creates a loop where you become more and more depressed and dysfunctional. So just to go through the four, it's social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Those are the four big effects.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  So if you give your kid a smartphone or an iPad that they can hold on to, your kid is at risk for these four things. Again, I'm not saying never give them an iPad, but if they have it, it's their own, they can customize it, especially if they get social media accounts. Now they've got so much stuff coming in.

• 57:56Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so the results of all this, as you reported, among American girls between 10 and 14, emergency room visits for self-harm grew by 188%.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  It's stunning.

• 58:07Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so now this is really disturbing, but of course I am inclined to think of all the variables that could add to this. It's hard to parse out these things. So one thing is, we know the contagion effect. We just had this expert on, sleep sickness, where 3,000 of 5,000 town members all got the same sleep sickness.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  The Tourette's one.

• 58:28Dax Shepard?

  The Tourette's.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  TikTok Tourette's.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah.

• 58:30Dax Shepard?

  Right, so this power of contagion, I don't think can be underestimated. So it's kind of chicken or egg. Were they on these devices so long that they wanted to self-harm? Or did they witness self-harm on the devices? I guess the results are the same regardless, but for me, I need to work through what's going on.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's both, but I think it's especially the latter, that is the contagion effect. So here's the way to look at it. There've been these, they were called dance plagues or dance fevers. You find reports in throughout the Middle Ages in Europe. And people would begin dancing and they would dance to exhaustion. Some people would die. And it was primarily young women who are susceptible to this. Now, one thing we know about boys and girls, girls are just more socially aware. So, girls are more open to influence from other girls especially. That's been over a long time. So, what happens when you give everybody a flip phone and they can text each other, but you're only texting your friends? Not much, that's actually pretty good. And that's why the millennials' mental health didn't plunge. Talking on the phone is great. Texting is not as good because it's not synchronous, but it's not bad, just with your friends.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  But what happens by 2015, well, actually, let's look at 2013 when this all starts. Everyone's trading in their flip phone for a smartphone. They're getting off of Facebook on their parents' computer. And now they've got Instagram on their own phone. And now they're communicating not just with one friend, but with groups of friends. So, it's more display. Oh, and then you start working in strangers and friends of friends. And before you know it, you're getting into these interest groups, or you're following an influencer group on YouTube, or much later on TikTok. Why is it that anxiety, why is there this sharp elbow for the girls but not the boys? Why is it that in 2012, it's like someone flipped a light switch? And the girls instantly, in many countries, start checking into hospital emergency rooms more often? That's not true for boys. So, I think that's the contagion. If you expose young girls, who already are susceptible to social influence,

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  more so than older women or than teenage boys, you super-connect them by a thing driven by an algorithm based in Menlo Park, California, which is going to feed you the things that it has concluded are most likely to keep you on. And that is, girls and young women showing extreme dieting behaviors, and get ready with me videos, and here's how to make your lips bigger, or whatever. All the stuff that it is.

• 1:00:37Dax Shepard?

  Well, the algorithm knows it must continue to get more and more extreme.

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:00:43Dax Shepard?

  Yes, it has a natural trajectory.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  So, more and more extreme for girls' socialization, and more and more extreme on political extremity.

• 1:00:50Dax Shepard?

  And boys on YouTube, they're getting radicalized and becoming white nationalists. It's like these very predictable paths.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  This is why everything is so crazy now, because we super-connected ourselves. You know, we always thought connection was good. Hey, should we build roads to connect cities and have trade? Yes, let's do that. Should we have a postal service? Yes, let's do that. Of course, there are always problems, but the net effect is always enormously positive. This, I think, might be the first one where it's enormously negative. Again, connecting by individual communication, fine. But it's the algorithm-driven. Is this a good idea to have our kids talking with strangers at the age of 10 and 11? I don't think so. I mean, it's literally the first thing our parents told us, don't talk to strangers. And now these kids are just out there like, literally talking to strangers.

• 1:01:31Dax Shepard?

  Okay, and then the anxiety and depression, and we kind of already talked about it. You trust this figure. I'm a little more on the fence about how much of it. The anxiety and depression rates have risen 150% for this cohort.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Well, wait, hold on. I tend to say the rates have risen between 50 and 150%. Because this particular study asked the question in this way of this age group. So I can't give you a flat number. All I can say is that the numbers are generally between 50 and 150%. I can also say that the over 100 numbers, those are almost exclusively from preteen girls. If we look at girls 10 to 14, we often find more than 100% increase, sometimes 200. Self-harm is actually 300 or 400% increase. But if we're talking about older teens, we tend not to get over 100%. It tends to be sometimes 40%, more like 50 to 80%, generally speaking.

• 1:02:14Dax Shepard?

  Again, I just think we're really trying to figure out how much of it is the contagion? How much of it is, it's in our vernacular. Any kid now knows numerous personality disorders from the DSM. They know numerous mood disorders. I didn't know any of them. I knew like depression, I guess was the word I knew. So just the awareness is something. How much it's talked about is something.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  Ask me about de-stigmatization. Please say, John, isn't some of it just de-stigmatization?

• 1:02:38Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great. John, isn't some of it just de-stigmat?

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  De-stigmatization.

• 1:02:42Dax Shepard?

  You asked him, he's dyslexic. That was a big thing you asked. De-stigmatize. De-stigmatization.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:02:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, she came in.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  So we can put all these things together, because I get this a lot. So look, I said a lot of things in the book. There's been almost no pushback on any of it, except for two topics. One is, is there really a mental health crisis? And two, is it caused by social media? Those are the two areas of academic debate. On the first one, is there really a mental health crisis? Isn't this just de-stigmatization? Isn't it just that Gen Z is comfortable talking about this? Oh, and they know all these words for it.

• 1:03:15Dax Shepard?

  It's the cultural capital of the day, in a sense.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  Isn't that all it is? That's a perfectly good argument. We should ask that about any disease. But, so my mother sent me to a couple of psychologists in the mid 70s because I had various nervous tics and they seemed like nervous habits. But that was very shameful and I wouldn't tell anyone that I'd been to see a variety of therapists in the 70s.

• 1:03:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  And then, you know, in the 80s and 90s, it begins to be much more de-stigmatized. We start talking about it. There are television shows about it. And so the de-stigmatization. It's been going steadily from the seventies to today. So why was there no change in any of these measures from the late nineties through 2011? There's no change and all of a sudden boom.

• 1:03:51Dax Shepard?

  Well, look, I acknowledge it's part of the tech, but I would say even back when you were deciding who you would tell that you had gone to therapy, you're making some selection. You're not telling everybody and definitely you're evaluating what dude wants to hear, especially with dudes.

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:04:06Dax Shepard?

  You're like this fucking guy working on my sink doesn't want to know what's a therapy. You have some social awareness. Whereas you entered this world where if you choose to, you can be in a silo where everyone talks about it.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:04:16Dax Shepard?

  So it's very powerful.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a similar thing. Talking back to the way, way beginning, we were talking about race relations over time. It definitely has progressed. Mental health awareness has progressed a ton over time, but it's still like if you're in it, you can tell the slight difference, right?

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  What do you mean?

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  If you use the race for me, I was born in 87. It was definitely better than when my mom arrived, but I had to blend in and I wasn't really like, oh, I need to be talking about being Indian.

• 1:04:47Dax Shepard?

  You're not along to a lot of racist jokes that were totally commonplace.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, silence was better, really. And I'm youngish, so you can look at it overall and say it's gotten better, but there are nuances when you're in it and same with mental health. It overall has progressed, but now with the internet, it's like we can all talk about it.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  But was it experienced as a release? Like, oh, finally, like in 2010, we couldn't talk about this, but now they're all on Instagram by 2013, 2024, oh, now we can talk about it. Is it that? Or is it that we transitioned from stigmatizing it to de-stigmatizing, de-stigmatizing, de-stigmatizing?

• 1:05:24Dax Shepard?

  To incentivizing.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. At a certain point, it becomes prestigious.

• 1:05:27Dax Shepard?

  It's social capital.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:05:29Speaker 02

  And that is a terrible thing to do to kids, especially to girls. And that's what I think happened.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  The last thing you want to do to girls is say you'll get more prestige if you have more extreme symptoms.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  I agree with that, yeah.

• 1:05:39Dax Shepard?

  And I want to put a ribbon on this because I think the tension that exists is like there's people like me, there's people Steven Pinker, there's people that want to point out that the long arc is very, very positive.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  And I agree.

• 1:05:50Dax Shepard?

  And what I think some people feel When they hear that is that those people, myself included, are saying job all done. You don't have to give up improving because you've acknowledged there's been huge improvement. I think that's what some of the disconnect is, is people interpret that as you saying job's done. But that's not what I'm saying. It's like, we're on a good path. Let's not be defeatist about this or pessimistic.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  And I agree with that. I think what some people who are listening or watching might be like, why aren't you saying this part? It's just the truth and this is fine, but normally it is one type of person who is saying that loudly. And it is often a white, tall, smart, smart, handsome, very handsome, very articulate, educated man.

• 1:06:40Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Who's saying what?

• 1:06:41Dax Shepard?

  We've made great progress.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  But I agree, we have made great progress, but I think it's easier if you're not one of those people to say, and it's not as easy as saying that.

• 1:06:52Dax Shepard?

  And it still sucks, you can say.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  I don't want to say it still sucks.

• 1:06:56Dax Shepard?

  I get so much value out of Chappelle. I just love when something happens and I've processed it one way, I go, oh my, I can't wait to hear how Chappelle processed this, right? Cause he is coming from such a different and unique place than I am. And I am so regularly reminded that this is an all day occurrence for black people. Yes, those things have happened, but let me show you how we got devalued over this other group in two seconds or how this happened. Like, he's very good at reminding us, it's a joke if you think this is over. So I greatly appreciate that. What I'm pitching is like, we have room for both things. One is like, we have made huge strides. And it's still a beat down to be a black man or woman in this country, much more than I'll experience.

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  Agreed.

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 1:07:50Speaker 05

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• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  An interesting finding about all this research, a lot of this research is done with my research partner Zach Rousch. He graph all these studies by both religiosity and by politics. So on the Monitoring the Future study, one of the questions is, "Religion is important in my family." Do you agree strongly, agree a little? So five-point scale. And when you break it up by those who agreed strongly or weakly versus those who disagreed, you find is that the secular families, the kids, they go up sharply. Whereas the religious families, they go up just a little. So they were somewhat protected. And we find the same thing for politics. Seniors in high school, they added the question on politics in the 90s. So you can see, if you say that you're liberal, you go up a lot. But if you say you're conservative, you go up just a little. And so part of what's happening here is that people that are deeply anchored in a community of adults

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  that is a moral community with an order that is binding, where you have obligations and duties, and you have to do these rituals or visit your grandmother. You weren't just washed out to sea on Instagram. We know that liberal girls use social media the most. They simply spend more hours on it. And the stuff they're consuming is a lot of victimhood stuff. They're consuming a lot of really disempowering ideas about how the world is against you, and you're going to have all these problems, and there's so much sexism. It's really liberal girls, especially secular liberal girls, as soon as they moved onto Instagram, they're the ones who got much more depressed and anxious. Or at least, that's where it was concentrated. And so I think it is some of these ideas about victimhood that became so popular on campus in the 2010s that are disempowering.

• 1:09:49Dax Shepard?

  It's interesting. I've not thought of this until you're laying it out. But it's almost like we do have a natural compulsion to atone and suffer. And there's an outlet for it in religion. It's like you're born with sin, you battle it. That's the burden you have. And in the absence of that, we kind of need a burden, and we need some toxicity we're fighting. It's kind of interesting that if you don't have an outlet for it, and religion does provide that for you, you'll somehow find it. I mean, we all find religion. I think we could agree on that. It's like, if you live in Hollywood, food is the religion. It's impure, it's toxic, it's inorganic. It's all these concepts we just love, we're built to be drawn to.

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  I would agree with that. From my book, The Righteous Mind, the subtitle is Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. And the analysis that I give there is that we evolved as tribal creatures. The key that religion does for us is actually creates a community. So I follow the sociologist Emile Dorkheim, who's my favorite thinker of all time. He said the purpose of a religion is to create, to bind together a group in a moral order that then constrains us. And we can find meaning and connection within that. And when you don't have that constraint, when you can do whatever you want, that's the state he called anomie or normlessness. And that, I think, is part of what hit a lot of kids in the early 2010s. The sense that there's no clear guide for anything.

• 1:11:07Dax Shepard?

  The hedonic treadmill.

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  And if it's just getting pleasure and then you adapt. And so that's why I think we see that finding that I told you about earlier, which is all of a sudden, my life feels useless. And it goes from 9% to about 20% of American teenagers are agreeing because their lives are useless. All they're doing is consuming content.

• 1:11:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Okay, well, let's get into the four solutions. You lay out the four foundational harms, but you also lay out four solutions. And I'm in agreement on all these. So no smartphones before high school.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  Yes, let's talk about that. The day you give your kid a touchscreen device, a smartphone or an iPad, is the day that that will become the most interesting thing for him or her. It's like having B.F. Skinner in a box because it can show you something and then you behave, you get rewarded. So it can train you much more than a television ever could. And of course, they're going to have those eventually. But I'm trying to say, let's clear it out of middle school. I'm really interested and focused especially on early puberty. So around 11 to 13, let's clear it out of that. The key to the four norms is that they're all collective solutions. It's really hard for a parent to say, no, sweetie, you can't have a smartphone. I'm going to give you a good phone.

• 1:12:12Dax Shepard?

  You're going to be the only kid in your class.

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  You're the only kid.

• 1:12:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you're the pariah.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  The other kids are going to make fun of you. You're going to be left out. So that's a very painful choice and most parents don't make it. And so it ends up that all the kids have a smartphone. It's now going down into elementary school. So your girls are how old now?

• 1:12:25Dax Shepard?

  10 and 12.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  Do they have any kind of phone?

• 1:12:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they have iPods that they can make their home movies on. That's really all they do on it. And then you two, they're only allowed to watch a single show, Dr. Mike, because it's super informative. He's great. I love it. So yeah, those are kind of the parameters.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Can they text?

• 1:12:41Dax Shepard?

  If they're on wifi at home, they can text.

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  Communicate with their friends?

• 1:12:47Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:12:48Dax Shepard?

  I am aware of all the fear. And then I have my anecdotal life, which is I'm around a lot of kids, our whole friendship group. And there's fucking 14 kids in the group, right? And I'm hearing all these horror stories and I'm hearing what people deal with. And I'm just actually not seeing these zombie teens addicted to their phones. I had all this fear about giving my daughter this phone. I engraved on it, no games, so there was no games allowed on it. I said, yes, I want you to make short movies. That's great. And I want you to have music and I want you to be able to read and listen to books on tape. So I'm all for it. And then I just deep panicked that they're gonna get obsessed with it. They have it, they forget to charge it. A month goes by and they go, oh, I wanna do whatever and they charge it. It's just not happened.

• 1:13:27Speaker 02

  Tell me what they do after school and on weekends. Are they seeing friends or are they in after school programs the whole time?

• 1:13:31Dax Shepard?

  They're here running around or riding motorcycles in the neighborhood. Like, we're very out and about.

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  Just the two of them or they're with other kids?

• 1:13:38Dax Shepard?

  Oh, so yes, and this is what you read about. I'm like, go to the store, get the fuck out of here, do whatever you want. I trust you, you know how to get home, you know how to flag a stranger. So they've had really a ton of autonomy, I think, relative to other kids I'm reading about.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Are there any other kids that they're doing this with? Or are they the only free range kids and everyone else is overprotected?

• 1:13:59Dax Shepard?

  They're pretty much on their own, except for our pod, as of similar ethos.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Good, how many kids is that?

• 1:14:05Dax Shepard?

  That is 11 kids.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  Fantastic. Do they see them on a weekly basis?

• 1:14:09Dax Shepard?

  They see them nonstop.

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  That's it, okay, good. So let me return to the four norms and then we'll come back to this. Cause the way to break out of this trap where we've got 10 year olds wasting their lives away, scrolling through TikTok and Instagram, four norms. No smartphone before high school, just give them a flip phone, a basic phone, a phone watch, let them text with their friends. No social media before 16. Social media is wildly inappropriate for kids. Sex, the violence, the addiction, the drug sales on Snap and other things. Third norm is phone free schools. It's completely insane. When we were kids, you couldn't bring your television into class and watch TV during class.

• 1:14:40Dax Shepard?

  That'd be great if you rolled in a Xena council.

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. With your TiVo and electric guitar and everything else. So it's phone-free schools. That's gotta happen. It's happening fast. It's gonna happen here in California statewide and here.

• 1:14:51Dax Shepard?

  Oh, that's great.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  And then the fourth norm is far more independence, responsibility and freedom in the real world. The key is, don't just think of this like, oh, I'm gonna say no to this and no to that. The key is, give your kids a great, exciting social childhood. That's what kids need. And so if your kids have a gang, if they have just a few other kids that they can hang around with, they're probably gonna come out fine. So that's what you've done. We quote a play expert, Mariana Brisoni, who says about playgrounds, "Kids need to be kept as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible." And I quote a camp administrator who says something like, "We wanna see bruises, not scars." You know, if you run a camp or if you run a school and no one's ever injured on the playground, you're way too safe and your kids are not having any fun or adventure.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  But part of it is liability. I used to babysit. I was so nervous for these kids. But for me, I got fired from a job, not them, but before, because I wouldn't let the kid go down the banister.

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  The parents fired you for not letting them go down?

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:15:49Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  So you love them.

• 1:15:52Speaker 02

  They shouldn't have fired you. They should have just educated you.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  But also, no. I am not prepared to take this kid to the hospital and face the repercussion. I'm a babysitter, you know? So part of it is, there's so much liability in camps and stuff and they don't wanna get sued. And these are realities too.

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  That's right, especially in America.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  And they have all the same problems in Canada and Australia and the UK. So of course, you're right. The liability section makes everyone paranoid in this country especially. That is a real problem. But keeping your eye on having a fun, exciting childhood, this is one of the most fun aspects of the book, is we go deep in chapter three on play and exploration into research. There's a Norwegian play researcher, Ellen Sansiter. She says, "There are seven different kinds of thrills: high speeds, great heights, dangerous tools, hiding and getting lost. There are all these risks. And kids are seeking them out. They're trying to get to the right level of it because that's how you train your brain about where the borders are, what you're capable of. That's how you extend your abilities." Definitely want to always do a safety inspection.

• 1:16:58Speaker 02

  You want to make sure there's nothing that can kill them. Traffic and then swimming pool. A lot of kids did used to die from drowning. Drowning is serious.

• 1:17:04Dax Shepard?

  That was number one killer for kids under, yeah.

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  You need to be very careful about drowning. But climbing a tree and falling out and getting scraped up or possibly breaking an arm. That's something that should be a feature, not a bug, that there are risks.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  If my mom were here, she would make sure that this got said. Cause I was home and we were watching that documentary about the girl who got kidnapped. And the parents were at the dinner just close by, but the daughter was in the hotel room. Do you remember this? It was like a big, it was in Europe. They left the kids in the hotel room. They went to dinner at the resort and then she got kidnapped or she's gone and they never found her. And so I was watching this with my mom and she was like, why'd they do that? Why'd they go to the restaurant? I went out and played by myself all the time. I think she forgot it's been a long time, but she was like, the risk isn't worth it. And that's what a lot of people would say.

• 1:17:55Dax Shepard?

  But I have a good counter to that.

• 1:17:57Speaker 02

  Go ahead.

• 1:17:57Dax Shepard?

  You're doing it all the time. You're valuing one thing and taking on risk because you know it's worth it. So yes, one girl got abducted in Europe. 52,000 people are going to die this year in a car accident. So you're comparing the incident rate of an abduction versus dying in a car. And it's 50,000 to one, but we know we want what's on the other side of driving the car. It is too important to miss out on your whole life to not go drive the car. You take on that risk because you want it. What people are not doing, I think accurately, is assessing what's at stake. So you know, if you don't drive a car, you're not going anywhere in your life. And if your kids don't have this sense of competence and autonomy, they're going to miss out on where the car takes you.

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  What you're doing here is you're recapitulating the exact thing we started with about, does moral judgment come from your gut? Or from your head and your calculations about harm?

• 1:18:49Dax Shepard?

  Am I the elephant or the rider?

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  You are the rider. The rider is the small, the little, yeah.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, but my mom is acting out of gut.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  Right. The gut response is why should you take any risk? Whereas if you think about, you realize, wait, if I don't train my child how to take risk, I'm crippling this child. I am creating a child that won't be able to deal with the world. And that's what we've done.

• 1:19:06Dax Shepard?

  And if they get in a situation, they're actually far more vulnerable. So if your goal was to inoculate them from danger, them being as competent as possible is the best solution.

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  That's right. And so here, let me just put in the term anti-fragility, one of the most powerful and important words, a word coined by Nassim Taleb, who was kind of a polymath, interesting, brilliant guy with some affiliation at New York University. And he pointed out, there's a need for a word that describes systems that get better when they get challenged or threatened even. So the immune system is the classic example. If you protect your kid's immune system, you don't let any dirt or germs come in, you're crippling it because the system is designed to learn from the challenges, learn from the dirt and germs that get in. And so it's the same thing here. Kids are anti-fragile, and if you treat them like they're fragile, you don't want to take any risks, then you're blocking their development. And just as they'll have autoimmune diseases if you don't let them be exposed to dirt and germs, they'll have all kinds of psychological and anxiety-related disorders if you don't let them.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  So I see where you're going with those statistical arguments, but I would urge more a vision of a positive life. Imagine your kid in two ways. In one, your kid is competent and confident, they go out there into the world and they're doing things. And the other, they're just always afraid because they think everything's risky. Which one do you want for your kid?

• 1:20:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they've had no opportunity to find out they can handle stuff. Okay, well, I love all those solutions. I've got no pushback on that. Now I'm going to hit you with something you're not going to like.

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  Uh oh.

• 1:20:27Dax Shepard?

  And I'm going to start this by saying, I love my mother-in-law. She's the greatest grandmother's ever been on planet Earth, and no one loves my kids as much as my wife's mother.

• 1:20:37Speaker 02

  But...

• 1:20:38Dax Shepard?

  This is the pattern of texts I received. Big warning about 5G, huge dust-up about vaccinations, she does not want us to get the kids vaccinated, couple of abduction stories. And then out of nowhere, a month and a half ago, she texts me, have you heard of this guy, Jonathan Haidt?

• 1:20:56Speaker 02

  Uh oh, and she doesn't like me.

• 1:20:58Dax Shepard?

  No, she loves you. Links to things I should watch, interviews you've given in the promotion of this book. And I respond to her, yes, I'm aware of him, I've interviewed him. What do you think of him? And I'm going to be dead honest with you. I said, I think he's among the top five smartest people I've ever talked to. I'm very intimidated to argue with him. And I think he himself is caught up in a bit of a moral panic.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  Ah, okay. Cause you think what's happening to kids is not that serious.

• 1:21:27Dax Shepard?

  Here's what I think you're ignoring.

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:21:30Dax Shepard?

  Gen Z's teen pregnancy rate is 78% lower than 91. 31% of millennials drink regularly, only 18% of Gen Z's drink. A third of Gen Z doesn't even drink. This has never been observed. They're completely abstinent. They are more frugal than millennials. They are more health conscious. They have better nutritional practices.

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  All true.

• 1:21:54Dax Shepard?

  They have better exercise.

• 1:21:56Speaker 02

  So where are you going with this, Dax?

• 1:21:57Dax Shepard?

  Here's what I'm going with is like you've decided to kind of focus on a singular thing. I could easily make the argument that yes, this obsession with social media and the phone, although may have produced this thing. Are we not then going to credit this thing with this huge leap forward this generation's taken? All this promising stuff we know about them. I know of the anxiety depression figure, but that's to me, one metric out of like six. And they're like thriving in the other departments.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  Well, you said they're thriving. That's an interesting.

• 1:22:27Dax Shepard?

  Improving.

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  On a lot of the self-destructive metrics, their behavior is better. That's all true. Now, does that mean they're thriving? Why are they not drinking? Why are they not driving cars? Why are they not dating? Why are they not getting pregnant? Why do you think it is? Cause they're so wise? They decided, you know what? These are risky.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  Cause they're not with other people.

• 1:22:45Speaker 02

  They're not doing anything. If you're just on your bed all day long, scrolling through social media, then you're not going to be doing any of those things. So in chapter three of the book, I talk about a psychological dimension of discover mode versus defend mode. And at any moment, our brains are such that we have a very, very quickly triggered, withdraw, fear, run away, protect yourself mechanism. That's defend mode. And so it's on a hair trigger, any threat, we're in defend mode. We live in very safe worlds and especially college or school is very safe. You want your kids to be in discover mode. You want them to look at something and say, what is that? That's an opportunity, not a threat. And what seems to have happened, a succinct way to describe the change from millennials to Gen Z, is the millennials were very much in discover mode. They like to have fun. They like to party. They like to dance, be social.

• 1:23:30Speaker 02

  They were in discover mode. They had now much lower rates of teen pregnancy than previous generations. Gen X, actually your generation is actually the sickest in some ways.

• 1:23:37Dax Shepard?

  We had the highest suicide rate.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  Right. Because you're the most lead poisoned. Lead was banned in the late seventies, early eighties.

• 1:23:42Dax Shepard?

  Most lead poisoned.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  You are. No, it's serious. It's real. Millennials are the first unleaded generation. You guys were raised at a time when lead was really going down fast. But leaving that aside, if you imagine a whole generation being shifted from discover mode over to defend mode, you're going to see exactly the list you told me. So sure, they're committing fewer crimes, they're not doing crazy stupid things. Oh, wait a second, you can find reel after reel of Gen Z influencers who die because they're doing something risky.

• 1:24:08Dax Shepard?

  The one that doesn't fit with that is they should have a big uptick in addiction, and especially drinking. Because they're living these scared, unfulfilled, high anxiety, lonely, depressed lives, and it is an immediate medicine that has worked for millennia, and that one doesn't jive.

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  Well, wait a second. What percent of boys today would you say are free from addiction?

• 1:24:30Dax Shepard?

  Boys are rough, I'll grant it that, but they're slightly improved, shockingly.

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  On drug addiction? But if we all agree that the central pathway is dopamine, what percent of boys are dependent on external stimuli to give them dopamine?

• 1:24:42Dax Shepard?

  Through video games.

• 1:24:43Speaker 02

  Video games, porn.

• 1:24:45Dax Shepard?

  If we're including that.

• 1:24:46Speaker 02

  Crypto betting, everything. What percent?

• 1:24:48Dax Shepard?

  I don't know.

• 1:24:49Speaker 02

  Each of these, it tends to be somewhere between 5 and 10% develop what's called problematic use, compulsive, hard to stop, damages other things. I've never seen a stat that lumped it all together, because a lot of it is multi-addiction. If you are addicted to one dopamine thing, and Lemke says you're more at risk for other dopamine addictions. So if you add it all up, I don't know. But one thing that we are seeing is that at the upper end of the income, if you look at the richest families, you look at the smartest kids in school, they're often not down very much. But you look at the bottom quarter, whether it's by test scores or by social class, they are dropping much faster, especially for boys.

• 1:25:23Dax Shepard?

  Well, they need more salve.

• 1:25:24Speaker 02

  They're also the most exposed to digital addictions. They spend more time on their devices, they're more likely to be spending four, five, six hours a day on video games. So sure, you can show me a couple of stats that are down, but I see these as actually symptoms of a much larger malaise, which is the shift over to defend mode.

• 1:25:42Dax Shepard?

  So what troubles me about my mother-in-law's text is she didn't text me to say you should let your kids roam free.

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  Oh, you should beware of all these other threats.

• 1:25:53Dax Shepard?

  Fear is very tasty, it's very viral, it's easy to latch on to, and so my issue is that what she could have just as equally gotten from your book... Is that she should have called and said, you know what? You should let the kids go out to eat by themselves. Now, that's the part of the book I love, and I do think it's the antidote. But that's not what makes headlines, and that's not what has my mother-in-law texting me. It's not the call to bravery that I would want it to be. It's a double down on more fear.

• 1:26:25Speaker 02

  Is she really afraid of digital addictions for your kids?

• 1:26:28Dax Shepard?

  Terrified. You gotta get every phone out of the house, just off to the races.

• 1:26:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a moral panic if it's not true. It's a moral panic if this is spread by news reports only. One reason this is not a moral panic is that parents are not responding to the book because they read an article about a kid who got addicted. It's because they've seen it, if not in their own kids, then the nieces and nephews or in their friends. Because everyone has seen this. As you said earlier, Monica, like, we see it in ourselves. We can't handle all this stuff.

• 1:26:56Dax Shepard?

  Well, the most identifiable thing is the endless arguments that exist in a household about this topic. Any parent can relate to this.

• 1:27:04Speaker 02

  Exactly. So it's not a moral panic. It is really happening. And this is why the book is doing so well around the world. Whenever it comes out in a country, I don't have to go to the country. Just some parents read it and say, oh, my God, yes. Because all over the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time. None of us asked for this. We all hate it. We can see what it's doing to our kids because there is an academic debate as to whether social media is causing it or not. And some people are acting like, well, until we're sure, until we have proof, we shouldn't do anything. When we're talking about kids, it should be the opposite. It should be, if there's a credible reason to think that this is harmful, we're not sure yet, maybe, but it looks like it. And the cost of keeping them off for years is zero. They're not missing anything if all they have is flip phones. I don't think that this is in any way a moral panic.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  What I'm offering is an explanation of the concerns that almost universally shared by parents once they see their kids on devices.

• 1:27:55Dax Shepard?

  I'm in an interesting zone because I agree with you. I don't want a phone in my kid's school. They're not going to be on social media till they're older. They're just not good.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  The phones.

• 1:28:05Dax Shepard?

  The phones. As I always tell my kids, I'm like, the world is so big around you. And to reduce it to two by three inches, that's not what we should be doing. We should be trying to make it even wider, not narrower. So I'm just in an interesting zone with it because I agree with you, but I think there's a little bit of hysteria surrounding it. I also don't think it's Satan. I don't think evil's here. You can maybe accept that.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  You're afraid of extremes in general.

• 1:28:28Dax Shepard?

  I'm afraid of panics, irrational panics and fear.

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  I'm afraid of irrational panics too, but what if it is rational? Let me just make the case this way. So first, let me say, you're in a privileged position in that your kids have a group. Very few kids have a group that they can see socially and have fun with. Your kids are having a normal, human childhood. And it is that any parents out there that are listening, work as hard as you can to find other kids that your kids can hang out with without supervision. It's very important that they be unsupervised, because that's the way that they learn to be self-supervising. So that is fantastic, what you're doing. Now, as for whether this is something where we need to respond urgently, or maybe this is just kind of a problem, and we should study it more and not act hastily, that's, I think, your position.

• 1:29:13Dax Shepard?

  Are you open also to the notion that there are these cycles with new generations that are unavoidable, which is, I have some hope that this self-corrects, simply because the next generation will observe these older kids doing this outdated thing, and it'll just be passe and not cool. Facebook went away for young people.

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  It's because they moved to Instagram.

• 1:29:33Dax Shepard?

  I agree. But I have some hope that this will be a dumb, embarrassing activity that the older people did.

• 1:29:41Speaker 02

  That is possible, and I'm in the position of saying, this time is different. Now, in previous moral panics, people said this time is different, too. So I understand that. I could be wrong. But I think the effects of this technology, it's especially the touchscreen, the quick stimulus response, and then the super connection, not direct connection, but mediated by algorithm for for-profit companies. My argument is, this is different. First of all, this is global, and that hasn't happened before. This is accompanied by an instant increase in all kinds of mental illness, which didn't happen with television or anything else. This is something that the kids themselves recognize. With television, there was a moral panic, but my sisters and I were watching I Dream of Jeannie, and The Brady Bunch, and I Love Lucy, and we loved it.

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  We didn't have reservations about it. But Gen Z does. We did a survey. One question is, do you wish this technology had never been invented? And for Instagram, it was 35% say they wish it was never invented. For TikTok, 48% say they wish it was never invented. They feel trapped. So this is not like previous moral panics. Secondly, part of the reason I'm rushing with such urgency here, that we have to act quickly, is that AI is coming in faster than anyone realizes. We think chat GPT will get a little smart. No. The AI friends are coming in soon. The AI girlfriends will be implanted in robots. What's coming at kids is so far beyond what we can imagine. And the principle so far from the early days of the internet, our children are the same as adults. Anyone can be any age on the internet. There is no age. Everyone can do everything. That's been the rule. We have more than 100 years of experience in the real world saying,

• 1:31:11Speaker 02

  you know, we want adults to be able to drink and smoke, but we don't want kids to be doing it. We want adults to have sex, but we don't want kids to be doing it with strangers.

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  Driving.

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  Driving, right. We've accepted the principle in the real world that kids are not adults. Online, we have not yet accepted that principle. And AI is coming, not five years from now.

• 1:31:26Dax Shepard?

  Well, they're going to have companions that will not challenge them to ever change who they are.

• 1:31:30Speaker 02

  And they're right, character AI, they already have it. So we've already had several encounters with this. We already let social media get to our kids early. And this has been, I believe, a disaster. What's the likelihood that when our kids now have all these AI friends that are so great, so praising, no problems?

• 1:31:45Dax Shepard?

  They'll be the highest status member of that group.

• 1:31:47Speaker 02

  The odds that this is going to be good for them are so slim. That's why I do really feel like a man on a mission that we have to fix this this year, 2025. Because by 2026, 27, the AI, the rate of increase, the arrival of artificial general intelligence, the degree to which our lives will be run by agents. So we do have to act quickly. I don't think we can say, well, you know, we need more study. The proposals that I'm making cost approximately $0.

• 1:32:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, again, I'm in favor of every proposal.

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  So let's just do them. Yes, there's a chance that I'm wrong. There's a chance that this was actually caused by some weird plastic that was introduced in 2012 all over the world at the same time. It hit girls more than boys. Exactly. So that could be true. I can't be certain that I'm right about this.

• 1:32:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's a zero risk proposition. No one's going to look back in time and be like, well, fuck Jonathan Haidt. We could have been on the phone seven hours a day and we were only on it one hour a day. No one will ever regret spending less time.

• 1:32:41Speaker 01

  When the TikTok ban was happening.

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  Oh, I was excited.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  I know, I was like, oh my God, good.

• 1:32:46Speaker 02

  We didn't see protests among Gen Z because they don't want to be the only one kicked off.

• 1:32:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:32:50Speaker 02

  But they would like it to disappear.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like, go ahead, take them all. Take Instagram, take.

• 1:32:56Speaker 02

  There are pox on humanity.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:58Speaker 02

  Look at it this way, these companies are worth trillions of dollars collectively. How much money do they make from each of us? How much did you pay them? I've paid them zero.

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  So where do trillions of dollars of value come from? From sucking out our kids' attention and selling it and their data? That's it.

• 1:33:13Dax Shepard?

  Well, Jonathan, sincerely, it is an enormous privilege to get your time. I admire you greatly. I think you're such a special intellectual and I'm glad that you're passionate about this. I mean, I'd have the fear level you do, but it's a true honor and a privilege that we get to sit and talk with you.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 1:33:31Speaker 02

  Well, thank you, Dax and Monica. It was really fun. The last time we spoke, things had gotten a lot rougher and weirder since 2018. But I think there is a growing awareness of the problems. I have my concerns about the directions of American democracy. But when it comes to what's happening to our kids, what I've seen since the book came out in March makes me so hopeful that around the world, parents and especially mothers are really leading the charge. Parents are rising up, saying enough is enough. So I think we are actually going to solve this.

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  The book is huge. I mean, it's on every list I see. It was on Bill's list.

• 1:34:02Dax Shepard?

  My mother-in-law is like forwarding it to me. Yeah, I mean, you've penetrated. All right, well, thank you so much and I hope you'll come back on your next book.

• 1:34:11Speaker 02

  Love to.

• 1:34:11Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:34:12Speaker 02

  Great to talk with you guys.

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.

• 1:34:22Dax Shepard?

  Hello.

• 1:34:23Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 1:34:24Dax Shepard?

  You couldn't find your tabs?

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  No, I, so I have a Word. I keep them in Word.

• 1:34:29Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  But it's not there.

• 1:34:32Dax Shepard?

  That's what you use to write, to compose things is Word?

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:36Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you had to download that program, I guess, right? This doesn't come on a Mac.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  Well, they have Word for Mac. I don't know because this, I didn't have to download it for this newer laptop.

• 1:34:46Dax Shepard?

  But you transferred everything from your old laptop onto that one?

• 1:34:49Speaker 02

  I think I.

• 1:34:50Speaker 01

  Oh, you did. Okay, got it.

• 1:34:52Dax Shepard?

  I used text edit because it came with it.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:34:55Dax Shepard?

  Now I'm feeling like I should have gone the extra mile and gotten word.

• 1:34:58Speaker 01

  The same.

• 1:34:59Dax Shepard?

  Do you ever use Google Docs?

• 1:35:01Speaker 01

  I don't like, I, I, it's great.

• 1:35:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  But I prefer to have something I don't have to log into if I lose a password. This has happened multiple times.

• 1:35:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  Where I get locked out, then I can't access the docs or any of these things.

• 1:35:15Dax Shepard?

  It never ends with the passwords. Who would have thought that would be the bane of everyone's existence?

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:35:19Dax Shepard?

  I just had a bit of a scare. So as you know, Aaron and I are starting a podcast.

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So tell, what's the deal?

• 1:35:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think it's going to be called Mom's Car and I, I am in real life. I've registered to deliver food. For a delivery service.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:35Dax Shepard?

  Popular delivery service. I'll leave it at that. And we, um, we go pick up and deliver food. And then while we're driving around, we read questions people asked. And then in this case, we did a couple last night. We also had a fun guest in the backseat.

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:35:51Dax Shepard?

  But registering for this delivery app, it was like my social security, like info I would never give out online.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:59Dax Shepard?

  And I was like, God, now I gotta trust this company.

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:02Dax Shepard?

  To not have a data breach, which they all have them.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:36:06Dax Shepard?

  I know. I was scared.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  That is scary.

• 1:36:10Dax Shepard?

  What was really, really funny about this whole thing was I delivered for three hours. Um, didn't get much activity. I thought it would be like boom, boom, boom. But of course, we're in LA, a lot of out of work actors. I think there's a lot of folks delivering food.

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:26Dax Shepard?

  I only got to deliver three different meals in three hours.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:36:30Dax Shepard?

  Ice cream, some, uh, smoothie beverages.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:36:34Dax Shepard?

  And some hot chicken.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:36:37Dax Shepard?

  And, um, it was very, very fun. All to say, I made $22.

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  Congrats.

• 1:36:46Dax Shepard?

  And then I got home and I ordered food.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:36:48Dax Shepard?

  For everyone that was at the house, which we have people staying at the house. And I spent like a hundred and eighty dollars.

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:56Dax Shepard?

  I offset, I guess, my expenditure by twenty two dollars.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  So do you only get the tip?

• 1:37:01Dax Shepard?

  You get some fee for delivering it.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:37:04Dax Shepard?

  And then, uh, and then you get a tip, but that comes in a little while later. One thing that wasn't in any of the questionnaires, which should be. My first delivery, the person was on the fifth floor of an apartment building, no elevator.

• 1:37:17Dax Shepard?

  So I had to hoof it up five floors. I'm exaggerating. It was four. Why? I didn't need to do that. Four is a lot. I thought, they should ask if you're in shape.

• 1:37:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:26Dax Shepard?

  I don't think, and not everyone can go hustle up four flights of stairs to drop off some food.

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  Well, they might have to take breaks.

• 1:37:31Dax Shepard?

  It could take a while.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:33Dax Shepard?

  And then you could be losing your mind inside your apartment because you saw that they've arrived. And it's like still twenty minutes.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:37:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. And then I only got to meet one of the customers because most people, which I didn't anticipate, which makes sense, just leave at the door.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:48Dax Shepard?

  People want leave at the door. You're leave at the door?

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:37:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. I have to interact with them because I gotta open the gate and do the whole thing.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  Well, even when I order here, I, they, I tell them to leave it at the gate.

• 1:37:58Dax Shepard?

  You're not worried that some of the

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:38:00Dax Shepard?

  scoundrels out there are gonna dip into it?

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  I am worried, but not worried enough to

• 1:38:04Dax Shepard?

  To deal with meeting the person?

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's fun. It's very fun. Um, cool. Well, uh, I have good news. I have an update. My cholesterol is down.

• 1:38:15Dax Shepard?

  It is. How significantly?

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  I don't know. We're gonna talk about it, but Dr. Richard Isaacson, our friend, who we

• 1:38:23Dax Shepard?

  Our, our savior, our lord and savior.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  Yes. We did another round of blood draw.

• 1:38:28Dax Shepard?

  So much blood.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  So much blood again.

• 1:38:30Dax Shepard?

  No shade to the experiment we're involved with, but my God, there's ten vials of blood, right? That's what they took, ten?

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I didn't count, but it was a lot. It was ten.

• 1:38:38Dax Shepard?

  It was ten, yeah. And then finger pricks, twenty cards. So it's like you got the ten vials of blood and then all these cards.

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. A lot of blood. He just texted me, he said yay.

• 1:38:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  And I was like, oh, what's going on? And he just said yay again. And I said, oh. Is it working? And he said, yeah.

• 1:38:58Dax Shepard?

  Cause you've gone on a.

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  I'm on the statin.

• 1:39:00Dax Shepard?

  You are?

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:39:01Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  I'm on the statin and I'm on a half of the dose I was prescribed. And I wanted to see if that was gonna be enough.

• 1:39:09Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  And it seems like it is.

• 1:39:11Dax Shepard?

  He sent me a positive text too. It said that I've knocked out whatever inflammation was in one of my vessels.

• 1:39:16Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 1:39:17Dax Shepard?

  Did you get any good news, Rob? No. Must be all bad news coming. I'm sorry.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  Oh, I brought my, speaking of that, I brought my smell test.

• 1:39:27Dax Shepard?

  You did?

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you wanna do some?

• 1:39:31Dax Shepard?

  I hate my smell test.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 1:39:35Dax Shepard?

  Of all the tests we have to do again, I'm mad that I have to redo the smell test.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  Well, that's why it's fun to do it this way.

• 1:39:40Dax Shepard?

  I just think so much is like scratching. Well, we can try it. Wanna do a couple of cards?

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  Why don't we do a couple of cards?

• 1:39:44Dax Shepard?

  Okay, I just don't wanna, it's a long test.

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  So part of our study is we have to complete the smell test.

• 1:39:53Dax Shepard?

  I wonder if our first page is the same first page.

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good question.

• 1:39:57Dax Shepard?

  Are your options? A, gasoline, B, pizza, C, peanuts? D, lilac?

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:40:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  And so we're gonna scratch our thing.

• 1:40:07Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:40:11Dax Shepard?

  I hate this test.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  Oh, this was harder than the last one.

• 1:40:18Dax Shepard?

  I always wonder, like, did I get old cards? No, I'm just gonna be honest with you. I don't have an answer. I got, it's this process of elimination. I don't think I smelled gasoline. Oh, I shouldn't, I don't wanna skew your results. Do you, I'll let you lock in before.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  I have, I have one locked, I think.

• 1:40:33Dax Shepard?

  All right, I'm gonna lock in mine too.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:40:36Dax Shepard?

  But I don't really, I didn't smell this. I just want you to know, I didn't smell the other things more.

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  Okay, what'd you pick?

• 1:40:43Dax Shepard?

  Peanuts.

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  Oh, fuck. I picked lilac.

• 1:40:46Dax Shepard?

  You smell lilac?

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. You smell peanut, it smells floral.

• 1:40:50Dax Shepard?

  I don't smell peanuts, but I know I don't smell lilac, pizza, or gasoline.

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  You don't smell, oh, I have an idea. Let me smell yours.

• 1:40:56Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really good. We can, um, we have a control group, kind of.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the same smell.

• 1:41:04Dax Shepard?

  Fuck, I hate this test.

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  Well, now you've heard our things.

• 1:41:09Dax Shepard?

  I hope he says pizza.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  I did for a second think that. That would have been my second, because of oregano.

• 1:41:16Dax Shepard?

  Thank you. It doesn't smell like anything. It smelled like the lead from my pencil. Okay, so I got that one wrong.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  Well, we don't know.

• 1:41:24Dax Shepard?

  We do. You guys are better at this than me. Okay, I can concede defeat when I'm defeated. I can take the loss. All right, here we go. Number two. Okay, that one's easy. We're gonna agree on this one.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm gonna lock mine in. Hold on.

• 1:41:37Dax Shepard?

  On a count of three. One, two, three, C.

• 1:41:44Dax Shepard?

  It is bubble gum. Fuck, I gotta change it.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  Oh, no, don't change it.

• 1:41:49Dax Shepard?

  No, I, I need to, and I feel ethically fine about it. I smelled gum.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Dax Shepard?

  I smelled gum. I'm like, ooh, gum. But, and then I went, oh, wintergreen's a flavor of gum.

• 1:41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:59Dax Shepard?

  But I didn't even read bubble gum. I didn't even read it.

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  Okay, let's do one more.

• 1:42:03Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:42:06Dax Shepard?

  Yep. On the count of-

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  Wait, I'm not ready. No, hold on. You, it hurts so bad.

• 1:42:12Dax Shepard?

  I'm hasty. This should be a test of how, this, maybe, maybe this is just a test of how hasty you are. Three, two, one, D.

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  Menthol, yes, D, finally.

• 1:42:21Dax Shepard?

  Finally. Although we did agree on the last one. I just didn't read all the options. All right, let's do a fourth one. Now I like it.

• 1:42:28Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:42:30Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I hope this is D.

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:42:32Dax Shepard?

  It's my favorite smell.

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

  It's D, too.

• 1:42:34Dax Shepard?

  And it is.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  Don't do that. But yeah.

• 1:42:41Dax Shepard?

  Cherry for the listener?

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:43Dax Shepard?

  For the listener, the options were whiskey, honey, lime, cherry. And of all four of those smells, I would most want to smell cherry.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  Okay, so what's interesting already, I know me and you are doing this much differently. I don't look at them.

• 1:42:55Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  I do my thi- I smell first before I see the options.

• 1:43:00Dax Shepard?

  See, I go, I don't want to be trying to pinpoint what smell I'm smelling. I'd rather know what four options are, and then I'll be much quicker to latch it on to one.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  Do you think this is like, revealing of our personalities?

• 1:43:13Dax Shepard?

  Maybe. But like, if I just smell a smell, I'm like, oh, I don't know, it's a fruit, it's a, fuck, I know it's a fruit, is it this? It could take me forever to get to kiwi or cherry, but if I see it on there.

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you can also be misled that way, like you were with wintergreen.

• 1:43:29Dax Shepard?

  See, I didn't read them.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  Well, you read them with peanuts.

• 1:43:33Dax Shepard?

  That's why I just learned the hard- I did read that one, and I didn't get it. All right, I don't know. But I didn't read them before, and I was like, gum, wintergreen. So I would have been better off reading all of them before. Let's do one last one, because it's fun. Oh, I hope it's D.

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:43:48Dax Shepard?

  Please be D, please be D. Fuck, man, this one's a head-scratcher.

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

  But I think I have a, I'm putting mine in.

• 1:43:57Dax Shepard?

  Fuck this, it's not in there.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Stop being so petty.

• 1:44:01Dax Shepard?

  I hate this test so much. I hate you, Dr. Isaacson. You're the worst.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  You're such a, a baby, uh, test taker.

• 1:44:11Dax Shepard?

  All right, I'm just, this is like, again, uh, the least.

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree that this one isn't like, that obvious.

• 1:44:17Dax Shepard?

  Okay, on three, three, two, one, A.

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  Motor oil, oh.

• 1:44:21Dax Shepard?

  I went grass.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  The options were grass, pizza, motor oil, and pineapple. And for the listener, you're probably thinking, how the fuck is it not clear?

• 1:44:31Dax Shepard?

  Yes, those are such different smells, but I'm telling you, nothing came off this piece of paper. I am questioning.

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  Okay, Rob, do you want to come smell this one?

• 1:44:38Dax Shepard?

  There's nothing there, Rob, you're wasting your footsteps.

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  Don't, stop doing that, he knows.

• 1:44:43Dax Shepard?

  Stop doing that.

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  I guess, yeah, maybe it's this time.

• 1:44:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, smell mine, see if you agree with me. There's nothing, there's absolutely nothing there. There's no scent, I don't even think a dog.

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is, but that's not an option. No grass.

• 1:44:58Dax Shepard?

  Minty like grass? I don't care about this one. Like, I don't care if my, my, not, my, um, smells in decline.

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  I take a lot of pride in how strong my nose is.

• 1:45:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it could be a blessing, really, to not be able to smell. Famously, my dad couldn't smell anything. Cause he broke his nose so many times and he got a nose job.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:45:19Dax Shepard?

  Couldn't smell anything. House could be on fire, he wouldn't smell it. And I used, we'd be watching TV and I would fart sometimes and it would be so stinky and I'm like, oh my God, he has no clue.

• 1:45:28Speaker 01

  Oh, that part's nice.

• 1:45:29Dax Shepard?

  That part's nice.

• 1:45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:31Dax Shepard?

  It's dangerous if there's a propane leak, I suppose.

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:35Dax Shepard?

  You continued on?

• 1:45:36Speaker 01

  Sorry, I just, it's hard for me to stop halfway.

• 1:45:39Dax Shepard?

  You love this test. Yeah, I would imagine. I did a fun dad thing this morning.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  Oh, what'd you do?

• 1:45:45Dax Shepard?

  I woke up at 5:30, which I wasn't grateful for, but then I was like, oh, whatever, just get up.

• 1:45:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:51Dax Shepard?

  And I had done all the stuff I needed to do and I looked and I was like, oh, it's like, it's 6:30. I wonder if I shake the girls awake, if they'll wanna go get breakfast before.

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  Ooh, before school?

• 1:46:03Dax Shepard?

  Before school and Lincoln's already up. Lincoln is my daughter. She was, she's up at 6:00. She, yep, they're both my daughters, to my knowledge. I guess I'll never know. We all do a 23Me. But, um, she's up at 6:00, she goes and lets whiskey out and then she goes in the backyard, she goes up to the top to a swing to, uh, oh, she journaled first. Then she went in the backyard, got on a swing, got a little peacetime perspective. Then I saw her walking through the backyard at like 6:30. And then I open up the cameras and I see her, she goes up to the gym.

• 1:46:35Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:46:36Dax Shepard?

  So she's fucking journaled. She basically meditated. She went and sat on a swing.

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:46:40Dax Shepard?

  And then she went to the gym and did squats.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:46:43Dax Shepard?

  This shit is just so genetic, right? No one's telling, no one's encouraging her to do any of this stuff.

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

  No one's encour, okay, but this is, it could equally be not genetic. As you just said, you're doing all those things.

• 1:46:56Dax Shepard?

  I just, yes, yes.

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  In fact, for me, that's more of an indication. That all that's nurtured.

• 1:47:03Dax Shepard?

  I just think it's interesting that one of them does this stuff. Yes, it's been modeled. Both versions have been modeled by Kristen and I, but one happens to constantly replicate the modeling Kristen did. And one is constantly replicating the modeling I've done, which I just find suspicious.

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:47:20Dax Shepard?

  If it were a little more blurry, like a little more of each person.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:47:24Dax Shepard?

  And you're right, maybe I'm projecting. Anyways, here's this fucking girl, she's doing her whole, she's got a routine at 11, right?

• 1:47:33Dax Shepard?

  So anyways, so Delta's still asleep again, Kristen versus me. Kristen will always sleep longer than I will. So I sneak in there and I shake Delta awake. And I'm nervous waking someone up.

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:47:44Dax Shepard?

  It can make you grumpy.

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it can.

• 1:47:46Dax Shepard?

  I get a little shaken, I go, you wanna go to breakfast or before school? And she goes, yeah, absolutely. And so I tiptoe out of the room. They're all ready. And then I'm like to the errands, the errands are visiting. So I'm like, you guys wanna go to breakfast? Like, yeah, I didn't think weekly would be up, but he was up. And then we get in the car and then all of a sudden Belle runs out. She had a late enough call.

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:09Dax Shepard?

  So we had a party breakfast. There was five of us at breakfast. No, six of us at breakfast. The whole Northeast Police Department.

• 1:48:21Dax Shepard?

  The Division of the LAPD, that's Northeastern. They all went to breakfast. They took up all these tables, they were right next to us. And Delta was like, oh, that's the gun. I haven't seen a gun in real life. They just have their gun on. And then the guy overheard and he's like, yeah, this is where we keep our gun. And then she's like, what else is in your thing? And he's giving her, you know, here are my handcuffs. I go, do you have Narcan? Yeah, oh, here's my Narcan. Whole like interactive field trip, basically to a police station.

• 1:48:51Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 1:48:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they gave them stickers.

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  Oh, cute.

• 1:48:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:55Speaker 01

  Cute.

• 1:48:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it was fun.

• 1:48:57Speaker 01

  What did the sticker look like?

• 1:48:58Dax Shepard?

  LAPD.

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  White with a blue?

• 1:49:01Dax Shepard?

  Gold.

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  Gold.

• 1:49:03Dax Shepard?

  Gold and shiny. I was like, if you wear those to school, which they put them on their thing, I'm like, people are gonna think you're a narc.

• 1:49:09Dax Shepard?

  Um, 21 Jump Street.

• 1:49:12Dax Shepard?

  They're not gonna tell you any secrets anymore.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  No, a narc.

• 1:49:15Dax Shepard?

  Is an undercover.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that wouldn't be undercover.

• 1:49:18Dax Shepard?

  That's true.

• 1:49:19Speaker 01

  That's over cover.

• 1:49:20Dax Shepard?

  Okay, that's overt.

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  They'll be an over cover cop.

• 1:49:23Dax Shepard?

  Over cover.

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  Well, that's cute. That's a. Fun way to kick off the weekend.

• 1:49:27Dax Shepard?

  It was very, very fun. Um, and everyone got to school on time. It all worked out beautifully. Breakfast was for school. That never happened to me.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  Neither. A lot of my friends' parents did that.

• 1:49:37Dax Shepard?

  It's such a fun tree.

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:49:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  It's a really sweet thing to do. I brought this up in what will be an upcoming episode, but I watched Shane Gillis's special last night.

• 1:49:48Dax Shepard?

  What led to that last night?

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  We've had a couple of people on who are comics.

• 1:49:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:52Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:49:53Dax Shepard?

  Arena comics.

• 1:49:54Speaker 01

  Arena comics. And I do think people.

• 1:49:57Dax Shepard?

  Lump them all into one category?

• 1:49:59Speaker 01

  At least two of, at least Shane and one of them into one category. And then I remember when his special came out.

• 1:50:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  Everyone was watching it and loving it, but also like, eh, it's like edgy, it's risky. And a few people had told me that like, I shouldn't watch it. I wouldn't like it. So I didn't.

• 1:50:18Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  And then because we've been in this sort of world for a week or so with these comics and, you know, it's brought up a lot of questions and things and me and you have gotten into a couple of things about it. I was editing that.

• 1:50:34Dax Shepard?

  Oh, uh huh.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  After I was like, hmm, I wanna, I wanna watch Shane and, and see what I think about that.

• 1:50:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  And I thought it was so great. And so funny and, and, and good. And like, then I was like, huh, it's, it's, I of course on face value or like, I mean not face, but like on the surface.

• 1:51:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  First of all, understand how they're lumped together. And secondly, understand why, to me, why it would be like, maybe that's not for you.

• 1:51:11Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  To me.

• 1:51:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, he's doing an impersonation of someone with Down syndrome. A lot of people are, that's a big no-no for a lot of people.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  Yes, but I had seen his monologue already. So, well, and then he explains it immediately that he has a lot of family who has Down syndrome. And he also like has started a business.

• 1:51:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  There's a lot of reasons why I was not offended by that.

• 1:51:32Dax Shepard?

  Gets a pass.

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:51:34Dax Shepard?

  Yep. But for a lot of people, that's just a. That's a deal breaker. There's no going beyond that.

• 1:51:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's probably true for a lot of people.

• 1:51:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  It's why I think Chappelle also gets a lot of passes for a lot of things he says. He's lived a life.

• 1:51:45Dax Shepard?

  But by the way, that was my defense of one of these arena comedians, which is like, in the same way Shane's family members have this and he's immersed in it, like this person who's making these jokes has almost no white friends.

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  I know, but I don't think it's the same personally. Like, I think you are allowed to make jokes about your family, like, because something connected to your family or you.

• 1:52:13Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  But if, if you, I mean, you wouldn't because you know me, but you, if you went and like, felt like you could go to an Indian accent because of your proximity to me.

• 1:52:25Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  I would say probably not.

• 1:52:27Dax Shepard?

  Right, but one thing I'll say, like, here's an example where it does happen in real life. So I run, I run into Pari, our neighbor. I think we've already said this.

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:34Dax Shepard?

  And he tells me, like, you've got to tell Monica to move her porta potty.

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:52:39Dax Shepard?

  And I go, I'll tell her, but she's Indian, Pari. She's stubborn. She ain't gonna listen to a thing I say. Like, I've earned the right to say that.

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:47Dax Shepard?

  I'm close to you. I'm making a joke about Indian people being stubborn.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:52:53Dax Shepard?

  And it's a honky dory. I feel fine about it. Pari loved it.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  Pari's Indian.

• 1:52:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pari's Indian. Yeah.

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  If you had said that to a white neighbor.

• 1:53:02Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:53:03Speaker 01

  I wouldn't have liked it.

• 1:53:04Dax Shepard?

  Well, I wouldn't have said it because it wouldn't make any sense to them.

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:53:08Dax Shepard?

  But Pari knows what that means.

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. There's, and this, what you're saying right now is my entire point. There is a lot of nuance in what is offensive and what is not.

• 1:53:19Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh. But you would agree, it's not objective. It's just like, we're all in some continuum.

• 1:53:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:25Dax Shepard?

  And for you, the downstream thing didn't bomb. For other people, it totally does.

• 1:53:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:53:30Dax Shepard?

  And that's just where they're at on the continuum.

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  Well, sure, there's, there's a continuum, but there is also a, there's a reality in comedy math about who is getting made fun of.

• 1:53:43Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:53:43Speaker 01

  And sometimes, yes, on the surface of someone's doing an accent, it's like, why are they doing the accent? Is it for, like, when you, when you were telling me the story about Pari?

• 1:53:54Dax Shepard?

  It's like a better story if it sounds like Pari.

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  You were starting to do it in, in his accent because you were being him.

• 1:53:59Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  That is different than you just going into a room and doing a

• 1:54:05Dax Shepard?

  Generic.

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  Generic Indian accent for no reason, just to get a laugh.

• 1:54:09Dax Shepard?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:54:09Speaker 01

  There is a difference.

• 1:54:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:11Speaker 01

  And so, um, yeah, I guess I was really sitting with that of, there's so much, like, I think people think everyone's just offended by everything, but, and some people are, I'm not.

• 1:54:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:26Speaker 01

  I don't know, but it's, it's specific, and I, for me, anyway.

• 1:54:32Dax Shepard?

  But I think the thing that came up in that interview, which is really, really important, and I do stand by this point, which is like, it's not okay in a school where everyone's white and there's five minorities. It's totally fine in the inner city when the white kids don't have a majority, and everyone's just teasing each other, which is a fine thing everyone can agree to. And everyone can enjoy it if they enjoy it.

• 1:54:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, if people enjoy it and are in on it.

• 1:54:57Dax Shepard?

  And so my defense of the one person is like, yes, if he's just a guy who doesn't have any friends and isn't in a group where they're all teasing each other, if he's out there doing it, that is a different thing to me than someone who's grown up with, you know, predominantly all minority friends and everyone's blasting each other. That is a, um, a totally different situation. And the people that enjoy it have to be allowed to enjoy it.

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  Sure, I'm not telling anyone they can't like something or whatever. I'm just telling you what I think is smart comedy and what isn't. If I'm being honest, I think people like Chappelle and I think Shane did this in his special.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  They are doing kinda wild, saying wild things.

• 1:55:47Dax Shepard?

  Oh my god, rooting for Al Qaeda.

• 1:55:49Speaker 01

  Being very provocative.

• 1:55:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  But they're not. If you really listen to what they're saying, they are making fun of the hegemonic group and all of these things. Or if you're making fun of fucking Al Qaeda, most people aren't gonna be upset about that. When you, I mean, you might be like, oh my god, he's saying like, he's saying provocative things. He's saying 9/11, he's saying, I'm rooting for them. He's saying this. But when you really, you're like, oh yeah, he's, he is making fun of terrorists. Most people don't think they need to be, you know, you need to stick up for them.

• 1:56:22Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:56:23Speaker 01

  They're not a marginalized group.

• 1:56:24Dax Shepard?

  They don't have a lobby.

• 1:56:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. They're not a group that people feel they need to like, get behind.

• 1:56:29Dax Shepard?

  Same, yeah.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, those really, really smart comedians are Trojan horsing a positive message into the world under this kind of provocative nature. And I think that is brilliant.

• 1:56:43Dax Shepard?

  And I think we all to some degree see ourselves in the things we're watching. So like, I recognize all those things to be true about Shane that you just said. And also, I look at him and I go, oh, the fun for me is more, everyone is so quick and needs to find out whether the comedian they're listening to is on the left or the right. It's imperative. They must figure it out if they're gonna enjoy this.

• 1:57:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:57:07Dax Shepard?

  And he is bouncing both directions throughout the whole thing. It begs of you to be a little more comprehensive in how you're judging the thing.

• 1:57:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:19Dax Shepard?

  It's almost like the fun challenge, which I really appreciate.

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. He seems cool. I, I, I think.

• 1:57:26Dax Shepard?

  And also, you know, he got famous first for getting canceled.

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  I know, the Asian slur.

• 1:57:31Dax Shepard?

  Which is gonna immediately.

• 1:57:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, bring over one side.

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you do like, five minutes of a look into it and you, you know, he apologized for that too. And he said, look, there's so much of me out there. There's gonna be big misses. That was a big miss.

• 1:57:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  So that was, that was a fun little deep dive I got, I did.

• 1:57:52Dax Shepard?

  I'm due to watch it again now that we're talking about it.

• 1:57:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was good.

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  I guess this is sort of in keeping because this is for Jonathan Haidt.

• 1:58:14Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:15Speaker 01

  And I saw his book again pop up on something. It's like still number two.

• 1:58:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:22Speaker 01

  Something. It's, it is a success. Okay, but the Cannibal Cookbook.

• 1:58:28Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  That's Nico Clau. Nico, Nico Clau. C L A U X. I feel guilty because I know I would have pronounced it Klaus, but you already told me it was Clau.

• 1:58:43Dax Shepard?

  Well, I just said that LeBeau, my maiden, my maiden name.

• 1:58:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:48Dax Shepard?

  Used to be L E B E A U X.

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. And then it became L A B O.

• 1:58:54Speaker 01

  So he murdered and robbed and, according to him.

• 1:58:58Dax Shepard?

  According to him.

• 1:58:59Speaker 01

  He murdered and robbed and.

• 1:59:01Dax Shepard?

  But there is record of him being in prison.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like not for very long.

• 1:59:05Dax Shepard?

  Twelve years?

• 1:59:06Speaker 01

  Seven.

• 1:59:07Dax Shepard?

  Seven.

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  Which feels like a little bit.

• 1:59:10Dax Shepard?

  It feels too short of a prison term for murder.

• 1:59:15Speaker 01

  For murder.

• 1:59:15Dax Shepard?

  But these other countries have different approaches than we do.

• 1:59:18Speaker 01

  That is true.

• 1:59:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:20Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 1:59:21Dax Shepard?

  You could kill someone and make your tea time next week.

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  I just really liked that, this phrase that I had never heard about two types of people. There are two types of people, those who say there are two types of people and those who don't. I really liked that.

• 1:59:34Dax Shepard?

  It's clean.

• 1:59:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:36Dax Shepard?

  It's really clean. I had AI give me moral dumb foundings.

• 1:59:41Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:59:42Dax Shepard?

  Cause I wanted to do one every episode with Aaron. Cause he and I have such loosey goosey morals. I thought it'd be kind of fun to hear us process some of these things.

• 1:59:51Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:59:51Dax Shepard?

  There's a bunch. You want to hear one?

• 1:59:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:53Dax Shepard?

  The clone replacement. They have titles.

• 1:59:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:59:56Dax Shepard?

  A couple's young child dies in an accident. Overwhelmed with grief, they secretly have the child cloned and raise the clone as if nothing happened. They never tell the child or anyone else. Is this morally wrong? Why?

• 2:00:16Dax Shepard?

  So I have to first imagine.

• 2:00:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:19Dax Shepard?

  Because I'm gonna wade through this. I find this out tomorrow.

• 2:00:25Speaker 01

  About a friend?

• 2:00:25Dax Shepard?

  About me.

• 2:00:27Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:00:27Dax Shepard?

  So I find out tomorrow, my parents had a Dax already.

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 2:00:32Dax Shepard?

  He died, they cloned me.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 2:00:36Dax Shepard?

  And my honest feeling is, I'm so moved by that. They loved me so much, they couldn't, they needed another one of me. I would feel fine about that.

• 2:00:46Speaker 01

  I wouldn't feel moved, but I feel fine.

• 2:00:50Dax Shepard?

  Right?

• 2:00:51Speaker 01

  It doesn't bother me.

• 2:00:52Dax Shepard?

  It's just they double demonstrated they wanted you.

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think I, you know, growing up and being more and more, seeing your parents as real people and

• 2:01:04Speaker 01

  being a little critical of them, I guess I, I would, I would more be like, they were not able to go through a grief like that.

• 2:01:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  Or they didn't think they were going to be able to.

• 2:01:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  So they did this.

• 2:01:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  Um, weirdly, that doesn't have anything to do with me, Monica, now. Like, I wouldn't think, oh, no, I wasn't real.

• 2:01:23Dax Shepard?

  I'm the second one.

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wouldn't think any of that.

• 2:01:25Dax Shepard?

  So I don't, I'm, I cannot find who the victim in this scenario is. That's why I wanted to start with the pretending I'm the cloned person.

• 2:01:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:35Dax Shepard?

  So I don't see a victim.

• 2:01:37Speaker 01

  I guess I would say morally, it's okay.

• 2:01:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:41Speaker 01

  But, yeah, and again, the stakes couldn't be higher, so it's good, like, it's a good question.

• 2:01:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:48Speaker 01

  Because I feel like we all experience pain.

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  And then sometimes good things come out of it.

• 2:01:56Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 2:01:57Speaker 01

  But like, losing a kid, what could possibly come out of that that's positive? So I, I mean, yeah, I.

• 2:02:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, like, if the goal in life is to figure out how to not be in deep sorrow over that.

• 2:02:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:11Dax Shepard?

  That's a bizarre goal to have.

• 2:02:13Speaker 01

  Right, but I guess then, is it like, then you really can't feel anything again? Like, I wonder how it will impact you in your life as the person, the parent?

• 2:02:23Dax Shepard?

  Well, I think for the parent, it'd be really tricky, because of course, I go like, okay, if I lost Lincoln, would I try to get her back? Yeah.

• 2:02:31Speaker 01

  Obviously, yeah.

• 2:02:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. What would be kind of unfair to Lincoln 2.0 is that I have an expectation of who she is.

• 2:02:40Dax Shepard?

  And how flexible could I be when this 2.0 isn't 1.0? So I think you'd have to go into it with a a real rigid game plan of like, I'm not, I refuse to try to make her the same person. I have to let her be whoever she is, which is already the original challenge of being a parent. So it's actually not a new challenge.

• 2:03:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:04Dax Shepard?

  Which is you, you've got to try your hardest to let them be who they are.

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:08Dax Shepard?

  Which is the big battle.

• 2:03:10Speaker 01

  But also, again, like, I don't think any parent could really, if they're thinking about their own kid, could see it this way. But you and I have talked about this when we, we've sometimes talked about other people who've gone through horrible, horrible tragedies of having like a child die of a disease.

• 2:03:29Dax Shepard?

  I know dudes who are sober and they don't relapse and I'm like so blown away.

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  Right. But you've also said, like, your best self would just be so grateful to have had that time.

• 2:03:42Dax Shepard?

  That's what I would.

• 2:03:43Speaker 01

  That's your highest self.

• 2:03:44Dax Shepard?

  I would, and more importantly, I would, I would really feel like I was dishonoring her.

• 2:03:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:03:50Dax Shepard?

  To not be so grateful I got the time I got with her. That's like the weird moral position I have about it is like, I can't to be anything but grateful for every moment I had with her.

• 2:04:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:02Dax Shepard?

  Is it, is like a dishonoring her.

• 2:04:04Speaker 01

  Well, then is it, is it dishonoring?

• 2:04:07Dax Shepard?

  Her by replacing her?

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. You're right. Like, this new her, even though she's cloned, is not her.

• 2:04:17Dax Shepard?

  She's well, right. She's gonna eat different foods at different times and be at different spots on the planet.

• 2:04:21Speaker 01

  We also just had, there's, there's just so much more to us than our DNA and our, our flesh. Like, we have an essence, we have a thing, and that isn't, you can't replicate that.

• 2:04:34Dax Shepard?

  I also wondered too, um, this bond and trust I have with her, it would be easy to think I just have it when the new baby arrive.

• 2:04:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:43Dax Shepard?

  But I probably forget how much I earned along the way of that bond and trust.

• 2:04:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:04:49Dax Shepard?

  That is now mine and I can feel, but at the beginning, I was earning. I was saying, welcome.

• 2:04:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:55Dax Shepard?

  I'm your friend. Yeah, I would do that again.

• 2:04:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:59Dax Shepard?

  I guess you could assume you have a relationship, you don't. That would be interesting.

• 2:05:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:04Dax Shepard?

  In benefit of the doubt and all these things that grow over time.

• 2:05:09Dax Shepard?

  You know, she sees me admit when I'm wrong enough times that she trusts me.

• 2:05:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:13Dax Shepard?

  But the first one, the new one, two point O, wouldn't have seen that.

• 2:05:17Speaker 01

  Is the new one the age of, would it come as a baby?

• 2:05:20Dax Shepard?

  No, it'd have to come as a baby.

• 2:05:22Speaker 01

  So then you would do all the same things.

• 2:05:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:24Speaker 01

  But then that, that to me is if, if it comes as a baby.

• 2:05:28Dax Shepard?

  And then if you're just repeating everything.

• 2:05:30Speaker 01

  That's the thing.

• 2:05:30Dax Shepard?

  Is that a performance?

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  I think maybe if it's a baby, like it's maybe dishonoring the original kid.

• 2:05:37Dax Shepard?

  There's some things I wouldn't do that I learned.

• 2:05:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:05:40Dax Shepard?

  The two point O would get a little bit better of an experience. Like I had to learn along the way some.

• 2:05:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:05:45Dax Shepard?

  Lessons.

• 2:05:46Speaker 01

  But then I guess it sort of, it's like, then why not have another baby? That's not her. But is just a new person.

• 2:05:55Dax Shepard?

  I mean, that's.

• 2:05:56Speaker 01

  But it's, I guess that's what it really, it's like, it's not, it's not her.

• 2:06:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:01Speaker 01

  Unless you believe, like, I don't believe that. I don't think a clone, even though it's technically a clone.

• 2:06:09Dax Shepard?

  It is her.

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  It's technically her.

• 2:06:11Dax Shepard?

  It's not an identical twin.

• 2:06:12Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:06:13Dax Shepard?

  It's a clone.

• 2:06:14Speaker 01

  It's her. I think there are just too many factors.

• 2:06:17Dax Shepard?

  Identical twin.

• 2:06:18Speaker 01

  There are just our factors.

• 2:06:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:21Speaker 01

  In like that will make that person different.

• 2:06:23Dax Shepard?

  I have a different job. I have, we have a different level of means. We, there's a lot, a lot has changed in 12 years.

• 2:06:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Maybe there's something like that, that person had a complete, they didn't, in my opinion, because I don't really, you know, that's hard for me to like wrap my head around. But there was a, there was a beginning and an end to that.

• 2:06:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:45Speaker 01

  And then to like, kind of fuck with that feels maybe wrong to that original person. I don't know.

• 2:06:52Dax Shepard?

  But again.

• 2:06:52Speaker 01

  But that person's dead.

• 2:06:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. And if I found out like I'm dead and my parents wanted me back, I, I don't.

• 2:06:59Speaker 01

  But it's not you. Somebody else get, it's a new Dax.

• 2:07:03Dax Shepard?

  But they wanted me back.

• 2:07:04Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:07:04Dax Shepard?

  The message is still very nice.

• 2:07:06Speaker 01

  They all, well, yeah, but don't you, you don't, you, obvious.

• 2:07:09Dax Shepard?

  Some people be like, oh, let's get a, just try a different combination.

• 2:07:13Speaker 01

  Now, the study on how much time kids are spending on the phone in schools is yeah, one and a half hours on average a school day with 25% of students logging on for more than two hours.

• 2:07:27Dax Shepard?

  Now, what my question is, is has note passing gone down by an hour and a half a day? Because I pass notes at least an hour and a half a day, probably three, or drew pictures and handed the pictures I drew to Erin.

• 2:07:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:41Dax Shepard?

  So I do wonder if that, has that gone down?

• 2:07:44Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 2:07:44Dax Shepard?

  Is it just offsetting this other disruptive behavior?

• 2:07:47Speaker 01

  I, I think, it's not about disruptive behavior, it's about social isolation.

• 2:07:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think it's better for you to pass notes, but I think if you just, I think a lot of people will just go like, oh my God, they're just wasting an hour and a half of their day that they could be educated. I'm just saying, explore that a little more. Everyone's missing an hour and a half a day. We always have been, we just might have been doing different things. And then you could say which things are better for you, and I would agree, note passing's better. But I don't think missing an hour and a half of instruction is new.

• 2:08:17Speaker 01

  No, I don't either. I, I don't even know if that, maybe for that study, that's the point, but I think Jonathan Haidt would say it's not, like, the problem is just being

• 2:08:29Dax Shepard?

  Isolated.

• 2:08:30Speaker 01

  Isolated. Passing notes and stuff is rite of passage, part of school, it's part of

• 2:08:36Dax Shepard?

  It's the best part of the whole experience.

• 2:08:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:41Speaker 01

  It's fun.

• 2:08:42Dax Shepard?

  You're just wading through the instructions so you can be passing notes to friends.

• 2:08:45Speaker 01

  I know. Did you pass in the hallway too?

• 2:08:47Dax Shepard?

  Oh, did girls? Oh, I'd write love letters to Randy during class, and then I'd see her in the hallway, and I'd make out with her for a second, and then I'd leave her with a note.

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  We used to also pass, we had like slam books.

• 2:08:59Dax Shepard?

  I can see your handwriting in my head.

• 2:09:01Speaker 01

  Oh, that's cute.

• 2:09:02Dax Shepard?

  Immediately. You had slam books?

• 2:09:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, we didn't call them that.

• 2:09:07Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:09:08Speaker 01

  But like, you'd have like, one You'd have one with like these two girls and you'd all get together and you'd make the composition book and you like cut out all these things from magazines and you tape it on then you tape the whole book. So the whole book is covered in like

• 2:09:23Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:09:24Speaker 01

  A particular design that you made.

• 2:09:26Dax Shepard?

  Is it positive or is it slam book? Sounds like you're tearing people down.

• 2:09:29Speaker 01

  I know, that's not the right phrase. No, it's like I would cut out this like picture of Britney Spears and then they'd cut out a thing that's just way cool. But like that's just the front. That's just the cover.

• 2:09:41Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:09:42Speaker 01

  Then throughout the day, you you take turns with the book. So you'll write in it and then you'll pass to your friend and they'll write in it. Then they pass to the other. The thing is you'd end up having like a lot of a lot of books.

• 2:09:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:54Speaker 01

  Cause you have

• 2:09:55Dax Shepard?

  Who got to keep them though? Cause they were communal.

• 2:09:57Speaker 01

  It's rotated.

• 2:09:58Dax Shepard?

  It just rotated. Do you know the term slam piece? That made me think of that.

• 2:10:01Speaker 01

  I have heard of that.

• 2:10:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:04Speaker 01

  Slam books.

• 2:10:04Dax Shepard?

  That was a word.

• 2:10:05Speaker 01

  Slam book, I think is what's maybe used in Mean Girls. We didn't call it that, but that's

• 2:10:12Dax Shepard?

  I just had a thought you're gonna hate.

• 2:10:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:10:15Dax Shepard?

  I'm considering not participating in this part of the experiment. It just occurred to me like, maybe I just go, no, I don't want to do the smell test.

• 2:10:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:10:25Dax Shepard?

  I just had that thought, like, do I have to do the smell test?

• 2:10:28Speaker 01

  You don't have to. You don't have to. We don't have to do any of this. But we might as well do it if we've agreed to do it.

• 2:10:35Dax Shepard?

  I don't think I want to do it.

• 2:10:42Dax Shepard?

  I thought you would hate that. Is it funny to you sometimes though, how different we are? Or is it just always frustrating?

• 2:10:47Speaker 01

  It's not frustrating. It's like

• 2:10:51Dax Shepard?

  Disappointing. You feel I feel like I disappoint you a lot.

• 2:10:55Speaker 01

  It's so weird. Cause I think if you were like, this thing is giving me so much anxiety. It's causing me stress that I can't handle. I don't want to do it.

• 2:11:08Dax Shepard?

  Well, I looked over and I was like, oh my God, there's four books. I thought that way you were talking.

• 2:11:14Speaker 01

  Then I would say, don't do it. If that's gonna stress you out, if that's gonna like cause you pain.

• 2:11:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:20Speaker 01

  Then absolutely don't do it.

• 2:11:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:22Speaker 01

  It's when you, it's like, I don't wanna do that, I'm not doing it. That is a hard mentality for me, in love, for anyone in my life.

• 2:11:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, for you, yeah, I totally agree.

• 2:11:35Speaker 01

  So, I guess, I don't wanna say I'm disappointed, but that might be the right actually word for it.

• 2:11:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I can, I mean, I can feel it, yeah.

• 2:11:44Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm sorry.

• 2:11:45Dax Shepard?

  I just wanna explore it, I'm not trying to.

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  Okay, I mean, I don't.

• 2:11:48Dax Shepard?

  It seems like an interesting topic.

• 2:11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess it's cuz I feel like, well, we all, we all decided to do this.

• 2:11:58Dax Shepard?

  I think you're a rule follower, as we already know, and I'm a rule breaker, as we already know. And seeing someone break the rules also gives you anxiety. It gives you personal anxiety to see someone. Like, cuz my position is like, yeah, you don't break the rules, don't break them. And then I don't care that you're not.

• 2:12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:15Dax Shepard?

  Breaking them, but, but I, it causes you anguish when I break them in front of you. And I guess I can understand, it's just like, the thought of breaking the rules is just an uncomfortable feeling for you, even if you're just witnessing it happen with someone else.

• 2:12:28Speaker 01

  Nice way of looking at it. And maybe that is what's happening. I think it's more, I think it's more, why do, why are we doing any of this then? Like, if we're only gonna half do.

• 2:12:42Dax Shepard?

  Well, I would argue I'm gonna ninety-six percent, like, so much of the stuff is not that.

• 2:12:47Speaker 01

  Sure, if I'm, if you're gonna pick and choose.

• 2:12:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:51Speaker 01

  Maybe it's indicative of a broader fear I have.

• 2:12:56Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 2:12:57Speaker 01

  With you.

• 2:12:58Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 2:12:59Speaker 01

  Because, I mean, I'll be, if, if, if, if Rob says I don't wanna do the smell test, I'm not gonna have this feeling, it's, it's toward you.

• 2:13:06Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 2:13:07Speaker 01

  And I think it's because I feel fearful.

• 2:13:11Dax Shepard?

  That like drinking and using drugs is one of the rules?

• 2:13:14Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 2:13:15Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 2:13:15Speaker 01

  But that's, that's an interesting thought, no. I feel fearful, I guess, that you could abandon.

• 2:13:23Speaker 01

  Anything you've committed to. What if tomorrow you decide you don't want to do this anymore? It's it's that, I think, really. I mean, I don't think that, like, on consciously, I don't think that. I don't think you're gonna do that. I think you have your commitments and you stick to them. But I think that's what's happening. I think I'm just being honest that I think.

• 2:13:46Dax Shepard?

  I'm as interested as you are in.

• 2:13:48Speaker 01

  And why?

• 2:13:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:50Speaker 01

  That's only for me to fix or or change my mentality on. It's not for you to do anything about. But I do think that's probably a factor.

• 2:13:59Dax Shepard?

  Right. Gotcha.

• 2:14:01Speaker 01

  Oh, one thing before we end, Jonathan, he has some detractors.

• 2:14:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, he has several very respected detractors.

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:09Dax Shepard?

  Warner professor at UC Irvine.

• 2:14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then that was in Nature magazine.

• 2:14:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, she did. She wrote a whole article in Nature. What's her name?

• 2:14:17Speaker 01

  Candace Augers.

• 2:14:18Dax Shepard?

  Candace Augers, yes. And she has lots to push back on. But the thing I remember the most is her basically saying the conclusion that more social media leads to heightened anxiety and depression, when it's equally or more compelling to her that people with high anxiety and depression spend more time on social media. You really can't determine what direction that correlation is heading in.

• 2:14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:44Dax Shepard?

  That's a very strong pushback.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, feel free to look into some of that other stuff.

• 2:14:48Dax Shepard?

  Good article. I read it.

• 2:14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and Nature is trusted.

• 2:14:52Speaker 01

  Very trusted brand.

• 2:14:54Dax Shepard?

  Extremely trusted brand.

• 2:14:55Speaker 01

  All right, that's it for Jonathan Haidt. Glad we got to have him on.

• 2:14:58Dax Shepard?

  Me too.

• 2:14:59Speaker 01

  Promote his big fancy book.

• 2:15:01Dax Shepard?

  Yes, and I'm so scared of him, too.

• 2:15:04Speaker 01

  You didn't seem it.

• 2:15:05Dax Shepard?

  I love being scared like that. It's just weird. It's a weird, this is such a brag, but it's true. It's like, there's not a ton of people I'm very afraid to get in a debate with.

• 2:15:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:14Dax Shepard?

  And I'm like terrified to get in a debate with them.

• 2:15:16Speaker 01

  That makes sense to me.

• 2:15:18Dax Shepard?

  Jordan Peterson. It's like I've had a lot of people go like, why don't you have Jordan Peterson on? I'm like, because I don't agree with him.

• 2:15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:25Dax Shepard?

  Nor could I defeat him in a debate.

• 2:15:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:15:27Dax Shepard?

  I know my limits.

• 2:15:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:15:29Dax Shepard?

  He is a oral master. And I'd get eviscerated and then I'd leave and go like, oh, my God, I don't agree with anything he said, but I couldn't win that argument.

• 2:15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's so interesting that you bring that up. I think. I think that's common now where people just have become masters at debate.

• 2:15:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's a skill.

• 2:15:48Speaker 01

  It's a huge skill.

• 2:15:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:50Speaker 01

  But.

• 2:15:50Dax Shepard?

  It doesn't mean they're right.

• 2:15:51Speaker 01

  It doesn't mean they're right. And it doesn't even mean they've thought things out well. They're just good, very good at communicating and pivoting and it's doing that skill well.

• 2:16:03Dax Shepard?

  I think people who are, do not host shows, experience this their whole life, which is you're in a relationship with somebody and one of the two of you will be a better debater. It's very rare that both of you are going to be completely equally matched in a debate.

• 2:16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:18Dax Shepard?

  And I think a lot of people end up feeling so disheartened by the fact that the person will never take what they're saying in because they have won the debate.

• 2:16:29Speaker 01

  It's all about winning the debate as opposed to actually understanding one another.

• 2:16:34Dax Shepard?

  And I, I'm certain I've been guilty of this in the past.

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  But I do think some people, especially in the academic world.

• 2:16:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:45Speaker 01

  Really can suffer from this.

• 2:16:47Dax Shepard?

  I was very grateful. I had a girlfriend who was better at debating than me.

• 2:16:50Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:16:51Dax Shepard?

  And she just blasted me several times where it's like we left and she had won.

• 2:16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:57Dax Shepard?

  And it was so helpful to correct my own behavior because I was like, oh, all those debates I won, I haven't convinced the person of anything.

• 2:17:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:17:05Dax Shepard?

  They just lost the debate or they gave up on the debate, as I did.

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:08Dax Shepard?

  I had the same hurt feelings that she never addressed.

• 2:17:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:17:13Dax Shepard?

  And I'm like, oh my God, I'm really glad I experienced that because I think I've done that to people, I've done that to people, not I think, I have done that to people.

• 2:17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:20Dax Shepard?

  Thought I had convinced them.

• 2:17:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:17:23Dax Shepard?

  To the wisdom I was offering.

• 2:17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:25Dax Shepard?

  And I hadn't done anything to help them.

• 2:17:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:17:28Dax Shepard?

  I'd made it worse.

• 2:17:29Speaker 01

  And it's interesting when we get in these topics that are very emotional, not we.

• 2:17:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:35Speaker 01

  Sometimes we, also we, but, but in general, when it's, it's an emotional topic, but.

• 2:17:43Speaker 01

  One of the people is often like very good at debating or an academic or something.

• 2:17:48Dax Shepard?

  Great memory. That's how I would win a lot of those things. That wasn't, no, that was Tuesday. Now I make a meal out of, they're saying is, right?

• 2:17:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. But they're, they're only using logic.

• 2:17:59Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:18:00Speaker 01

  And it's really hard in a debate to combat logic. Like, you can't.

• 2:18:04Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 2:18:05Speaker 01

  But then everyone leaves and like, the person with the emotional argument is still correct. Like, their feelings are still there.

• 2:18:11Dax Shepard?

  They still feel terrible.

• 2:18:12Speaker 01

  They're still probably, you know, yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I've really had to go, do I want to acknowledge and, and, and, and help to make the person not feel the way they do? Or do I want to prove that they don't have a right to feel that way?

• 2:18:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:29Dax Shepard?

  Cause that's easy, that's the most appealing to me.

• 2:18:31Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 2:18:32Dax Shepard?

  Like, if I can prove, if I can prove to them that they're actually off base and this shouldn't be how they feel.

• 2:18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:37Dax Shepard?

  I will erase the feeling.

• 2:18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:39Dax Shepard?

  By showing that, oh, there's no logical road to where, how you feel.

• 2:18:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:18:42Dax Shepard?

  And once you realize that, you will no longer feel that way.

• 2:18:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:45Dax Shepard?

  No, they will feel, they'll feel even more like that, cause probably their initial issue with me was related to that.

• 2:18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the, we, we've talked about this, but it is worth repeating. Emotions are as important as logic. Let's look at.

• 2:19:00Dax Shepard?

  They're more.

• 2:19:01Speaker 01

  They're more important.

• 2:19:02Dax Shepard?

  You go to war over emotion.

• 2:19:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. Look at our political landscape. It's emotion driven.

• 2:19:08Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:19:08Speaker 01

  To act like that isn't a relevant part, or to dismiss it in a debate. Or like, just stomp on it with logic is, is so unhelpful, cause you're, you're removing an entire p, real legitimate piece.

• 2:19:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. And that's why I, I get frustrated when people are like, the sci, look at the science. I'm like, I know, guys, but that's not.

• 2:19:29Speaker 01

  Doesn't matter.

• 2:19:29Dax Shepard?

  Compelling. If you're dealing with a fear, science doesn't eradicate fears.

• 2:19:33Speaker 01

  That's very true, yeah.

• 2:19:35Dax Shepard?

  Wish everyone was a logical robot. No one had emotions. And I didn't have to talk about them.

• 2:19:39Speaker 01

  That would be so boring.

• 2:19:40Dax Shepard?

  It would.

• 2:19:41Speaker 01

  All right.

• 2:19:41Dax Shepard?

  All right, love you.

• 2:19:42Speaker 01

  Love you.