How Modern Life Is Making Us Less Happy - Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt is a Professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, social psychologist, and an author. The kids are not alright. Mental health is plummeting while anxiety and depression is on the rise. Just what are the contributing elements? Is it social media? Helicopter parenting? 24 hour news? Or something else? Expect to learn why every generation complains about the next one, what is so important about the development of kids between 8 and 12 years old, what the biggest problem is with test scores in primary school children, the real harm of technology on kids, why words like ‘trigger’ and ‘fragility’ are such a problem, if there is a way to do identity politics well and much more... - 00:00 The Uniqueness of the New Generation 01:10 What Does a Good Childhood Look Like? 07:06 Changes in Parenting Styles 10:59 Lack of Discipline in Modern Parenting 15:16 The Importance of Risk in Play 20:47 Is the Education System Ruining Kids? 27:16 The Problem With Ideological Academia 30:45 Latest Data on Social Media’s Impact 38:47 Primary Harms of Technology on Kids 46:12 Is Social Media Use Addiction or Compulsion? 49:48 How Boys & Girls Use Technology Differently 56:46 The Male Sedation Hypothesis 1:02:37 Are Gen-Z Bothered About Status? 1:12:34 Latest Data on Female Mental Health 1:17:31 Why is Anxiety the Most Prevalent Feeling? 1:21:11 How We Solve the Teen Mental Health Crisis 1:28:04 Where to Find Jonathan - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't every generation complain about the next one that's coming along? Is what we're seeing at the moment not just more old hats that's occurred for every generation previously?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Well, yes and no. Yes, every generation complains and the complaints tend to be similar. And that's gone on not since the dawn of history. People always quote, you know, Socrates or something, but really that begins when you start getting modernity. You start getting each generation is changing, you know, around the 16th, 17th century in Europe. So yes, that's been going on a long time, but it's never before been the case that the mental health of the young generation suddenly was really different and really bad. So, you know, the main argument I get against me is just the one you just said that, oh, this is just another moral panic. There's nothing going on here. This is what always happens. No, this is not what always happens. You don't ever before get a doubling of the suicide

• 0:57Speaker 01

  rate of preteen girls. You don't ever get, and across the board, across many nations, plummeting of mental health, all beginning right around 2012, 2013. So no, this time is really different.

• 1:10Chris Williamson?

  What is it that children need to do in childhood? Like, we don't think about it that importantly. It's just, it's just the thing that you do before you get to puberty, where you start to become a person. But those experiences are very formative. What does a good childhood look like?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, thanks for setting it up that way because there's so much focus on the phones and social media. And, and I was focused on that too. But what I decided to do in writing this book and writing The Anxious Generation was I'm not even going to talk about the phones and social media until I've taken readers through what is childhood? Why do we have it? How is human childhood different from every other animal, including chimpanzees? And so- You know, if you start just with mammals, all mammals have the same life plan, which is huge investment from the parents or the mother in the in the baby, long childhood, big brain. How do you wire up the brain? Play. Play is the thing. Your brain doesn't grow from nursing.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Your brain grows from moving away from your mother, trying to climb something. You know, anyone who's had a puppy or a kitten knows they want to play all the time because they have to practice the skills to wire up the brain. So we have to let our kids wire up their brains. Now, humans are different because we have much bigger brains and we have culture. This is crucial. Other animals, they grow as you know, sort of fast as they can, and then they reproduce. Humans, we grow fast and then we slow down. At age seven to 12, 13, we're not growing very fast. And it's thought that that period is a critical period for cultural learning. All the way through puberty, we're really trying to soak in, how do we do things around here? What do adults do? How do I approach the opposite sex or sexuality?

• 2:57Speaker 01

  So there's a lot of learning that has to happen. And the problem is, we've taken that learning period. We've said, instead of learning from grownups around you, or even from, you know, older kids in your neighborhood, how about if we just hook you up? Here's a phone or an iPad. We'll just hook you up and you can get socialized by random weirdos on the internet. We're selected by an algorithm for being really extreme. How about that? Well, that's kind of what we've done.

• 3:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I uh, I'm around kids more and more as my friends finally become less man children and actually become fathers themselves of of actual children. And it's so interesting, like my, my group of friends largely are pretty red pilled on this, the concerns about exposure to technology. But you know, when you go for dinner at the sort of times that you do with guys that have got families, you end up going a little bit early, which means you're also around other families. And we go to these restaurants and I'll get to see, you know, how other families that probably just aren't aware of this are.

• 3:59Chris Williamson?

  Anesthetising a boisterous child and a lot of the time at the table, you know, it's the kid starts to act up, they're a little bit bored and the parents are trying to have a conversation or the adults at the table are trying to have a conversation and one of them just goes, ah, you know, open up the phone, pass the phone. And the maddest thing that I've seen from sort of two to three year old children is their ability to skip ads on YouTube. Like they understand the difference between an advert

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:30Chris Williamson?

  and the button and how they can get past it. And I'm like, well, first off, look, if you're giving your kid this to anesthetise them, buy YouTube Premium. It's 10 bucks a month and it'll change your life.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Gets rid of the ads, yeah.

• 4:41Chris Williamson?

  But also, this level of engagement with, you know, the capitalist system of Facebook pixel tagging and all that stuff from two years old is crazy.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  No, that's right. That's right. You know, we're very protective of our kids. And if I said to people, how about, how about if we have this thing that we have a special door, a special window and we're going to put it on your child's crib. And advertisers and corporations can come and they can just communicate with your kid and you have nothing to do with it. What do you, what do you think? Is that okay? Like, no, we would never let that happen. And then suppose when your daughter is 11, 12, 13, we'll put a special window on her bedroom and strange men can come and they can talk to her through the window and they can look at her through the window. How about that? Would you do that? Like, no, of course you wouldn't do that. But that's kind of what we're doing. You know, we're saying here, companies can have access to our kids and they can train them with a stimulus response paradigm.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  And strangers can have access to our children once they get a social media account. And they can try to convince them to meet up in the real world. They can try to sell them things, all kinds of stuff like that. Actually, I want to pick up, you use the word anesthetise, which is a very good word here because. You know, as many people know, like 100, 150 years ago, there were a variety of medications for children like that had opiates in them to calm the child and help them sleep. Or we'd give them alcohol. We didn't know that these things interfered with with their development. And we all discovered as soon as we got our first iPhone. I mean, I have video, you know, like my, my son was born in 2006. And so many of our videos of me videotaping him and with him reaching for the phone and saying, iPhone, iPhone, like

• 6:29Speaker 01

  he, he, you know, he wants it. He needs it because it's so stimulating. Back then, in the early days of all this stuff, you know, 2008 to 2012, we thought the technology was magical. And we thought, you know, yeah, let's let our kids get stimulated by like stimulation. Isn't that going to be good for their brain development? Like, so yeah, it's it seemed okay to do it. It'll give him a head start. He'll be, you know, digital natives. He'll be comfortable with this technology. And besides, everyone else is doing it. So it must be okay. So yeah, we ended up anesthetizing them.

• 7:03Chris Williamson?

  Let's back out of the technology thing. We're going to get on to that. But let's just talk about like, what has changed with regards to parenting styles outside of technology over the last few decades? How has this created the raw material foundation for the kids that would grow up?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  No, that's a great question. It's one that I don't write enough about because I am focused on the technology. But Greg and I did write about this in The Coddling of the American Mind, that there is a long term transition over generations as when life is hard and families are big, and religion is an important part of life, you tend to have a very structured, you know, kids are growing up with a lot of structure. There are do's and don'ts. There are punishments if you misbehave. And there's a big liberal conservative split on this. In general, conservatives want more strict child rearing. Progressives want more lenient liberal, now called gentle parenting.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  And in general, as as our societies have gotten wealthier and safer and our families get smaller, we've all kind of moved over to the gentle side. You know, when I was a kid, spanking was normal, but it was like only for the very like my my sisters and I, we got spanked like a few times when we did something really terrible. But now it's, you know, at least in, you know, educated circles, like that's almost unheard of. Whereas a couple of generations before, there would have been a lot more physical Your school teacher would have. Yes, that's right. Schools would would hit the kids. That's right. So, you know, so in many ways, it's progress. On the other hand, if you take out, if you take out the threats, the punishments, all the negative stuff, and you kind of leave it with like what you see

• 8:46Speaker 01

  a lot of parents do, like, now, Johnny, was that a wise choice or an unwise choice? As opposed to saying, no, you do not hit your sister. So I think we've become a little too gentle, too unstructured. And this might also help explain a really interesting twist in the data that it's not really in the book. I found a lot of it even afterwards.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Is that the mental health crisis is much worse for children in families on the left than on the right. So liberals or progressives have always had slightly higher levels of neuroticism, anxiety, depression, just a little bit more than conservatives. It's a big, you know, long studied thing. Conservatives are a little bit happier than liberals, adults and children. And if you plot out the levels of, you know, of happiness or the negative stuff like meaninglessness, on all the graphs in my book, you'll see like you get a straight line until around 2011, 2012. And then all of a sudden, the lines go up like a hockey stick. Well, if you break it out by, are you a liberal or conservative, which is asked on one or two surveys, it's the liberal kids, especially liberal girls, they go up first

• 9:52Speaker 01

  and fastest. Something happens, whatever it was that changed in the early 2010s, it hit liberal kids, especially liberal girls, the hardest. And I think part of it is what we're talking about. If you are rooted deeply in structure and community, and you have to go to church every Sunday, or, you know, you're an Orthodox Jewish kid, you've got Shabbat, you've got, you know, 24 hours where there are no devices and you're with your family. Moving to the digital technology didn't wash these kids out to sea. But if you're a more progressive family, usually a smaller family, more economic, more mobile, you move around more perhaps, you have weaker ties, a lot of freedom, a lot of creativity. But those kids seem to be especially vulnerable to being washed away in the early 2010s.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  It's not just left, right, it's also religious conservative, uh, religious or secular. So, so secular religious, I'm sorry, uh, secular conservative kids show the least increase. Everybody goes up, but they show the least increase. Whereas, uh, progressive, non-religious kids or families, that's where you see the biggest increase in mental health problems.

• 10:59Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how much of it from the liberal progressive side comes from this very softly, softly gentle approach to discipline and parenting. Because, you know, I, I hesitate dropping into bro psychology this early in a podcast, but fuck it. Like if you think about your level of discomfort exposure, what you're, what you're comfortable being uncomfortable with, how often has someone told you no? How often have you been told that you're in the wrong? How often has someone raised their voice at you? How often has someone been stern? You know, all of these opportunities are, are times where you learn, okay, I can self-regulate. This is, this can happen to me and I'm still safe. This can happen to me and I'm still loved.

• 11:43Chris Williamson?

  No one's going to abandon me. This isn't a comment on my moral character or my worth as a human. This is an inbuilt part of being a fallible flawed human that makes errors. And mom and dad are going to say, you don't hit your sister. You don't do that. Go, you're on timeout. Go sit on the step and sit on the step until you've calmed yourself down. And if you've never experienced that and you continue, it like, you don't even need, you don't need to know anything about human psychology to know that if you train a system on a type of stimulus, it will become hypersensitized when you get outside the bounds of that stimulus.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:15Chris Williamson?

  And that's where we're at.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  No, I think that's perfect. Um, I can just add a little psychological color to it in two ways. Uh, one is to bring in the concept of anti-fragility, which I hope many of your listeners are already familiar with. Um, you know, some things are fragile, a glass is fragile, you don't let kids play with it, it'll break. So we give them plastic, which is resilient. If a kid drops it, it won't break, but it doesn't get better. But some things are anti-fragile. They need to be stressed and strained and dropped and and and suffer setbacks in order to get strong. And this comes from my NYU colleague, Nassim Taleb. So bones and muscle are anti-fragile. If you raised your kids by saying, I never want you to put stress on your bones, you know, never go downstairs, take the elevator, you know, their bones are going to get weak.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Same thing with muscle. The immune system is anti-fragile and kids are anti-fragile. So that's that's like the psychology underneath a lot of what you were just saying. But then there's another one, which I haven't really talked about publicly because it sort of can easily get taken out of context. Maybe that'll happen here when I

• 13:16Chris Williamson?

  Never, we have the most unreasonably reasonable audience on the internet. You'll be fine.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Okay. It's really important for kids to learn how to accept injustice. Now let me quickly keep talking so that that doesn't just get taken out of context. You know, oh, you know, John Height, you know, white guy says that people need to just suck it up and accept injustice. No, but but the situation that you just talked about, you know, like, you know, no, you do not hit your sister, timeout. And it might be the case that your sister hit you first. And maybe there's more to the story. And so maybe your parents were actually treating you unfairly. And in general, we would say, you know, authoritative parents would always hear them out, like, why did you hit your sister? Tell me why, you know, if you can't justify it, we'll punish you. But sometimes, sometimes things are unfair. And if you're a child who was raised where in general, your parents, you know, you trust

• 14:06Speaker 01

  them in general, they they're fair, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're just not. And you just learn like, okay, you know, it happens, I'm a little mad and I'll get over it. Okay, now, fast forward fifteen, twenty years. Imagine you're an employer hiring two recent college grads. One of them has never had to face injustice. One of them, everything was always fair. And if they thought it wasn't fair, they could say, I think that's unfair. And then they could work it out. Another kid had authoritative parents who sometimes made mistakes and sometimes was treated unfairly. Who would you rather hire? And I think what we're seeing in universities is that there's a certain kind of activist

• 14:44Speaker 01

  young person who who sees flaws in the world and thinks that they see everything as it is, and they should never have to accept any unfairness. And they can just become very, very difficult to to work with because they're used to getting their way. So, yeah, we're doing kids no favors with this sort of, you know, gentle, you shouldn't have to do anything that doesn't make you comfortable. Like, no, sometimes in life you do have to do things that make you uncomfortable or that, you know, or that you think you have to respond to situations that you think are unfair.

• 15:15Chris Williamson?

  I spent a lot of time running a big events company in the UK. So I ran nightclubs for for a decade and a half. And one of the things that I very quickly realized stepping into that industry is it's full of scumbags. I was trained in the art of scumbaggery, but, uh, you know, if I'd gone into that, I I had this really interesting experience because I was at university, right? So I was seeing and I was doing two business degrees, did a master's in and a bachelor's in business stuff. But I was running a business and from doing nightlife, you get to see HR, marketing, B to B, B to C, hiring, firing, every, you see the full works, right? It's a full gamut of everything. So I was getting to learn about business one on one, but I was also experiencing business.

• 15:57Chris Williamson?

  And what I was being taught and what I was experiencing were diverging very quickly. But the interesting point here is up until you leave university, most people can campaign their way out of situations that they don't want to be in. This is wrong. The standards that this professor is holding me to are too high. You know, we've seen this happen a good bunch, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? When you enter the world of business, someone doesn't need to play by your rules. They can, they can bring you up to the brink of signing a contract, you're balls deep in lawyer fees, everything's ready to go, you bet the business on it, and they can

• 16:38Chris Williamson?

  go, ah, by the way, this is, it's called crank on confirmation is is the the actual tactic. And they just crank the fuck out of you and they go, hey, um, yeah, we're going to pay 20% and I saw this deal's dead in the water. And you go, no. Wow. You can't do it. It's like blackmail. I, I'm, I'm, and they, yeah, we know that you're this deep in it, which is why we want to pay 20% less. Like, that's just the way that business works. Like, this is what crank on confirmation is, and it happens in nightlife over and over and over and over again. My point being. If you like, if you're unable to deal with someone coming and twisting you, are you going, all right, well, I know that you need me. Let's, let's play a game of chicken here with who needs who the most. You're just going to be so dysregulated that you can't

• 17:20Chris Williamson?

  deal with anything. My point being this sort of hyper, I think of it like an overton window of sensitivity. You know, you have the entire gamut of human experience and then you have this range within which you're familiar. The tighter that you make that, any small movement outside of that is going to feel like, like dysregulation. And I suppose as well, this gets into something I've spoken about with Dr. Anamachin and tons of people to do with child rearing, the importance of risky play and why it's so important.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yes. That is such a key word. And that this is something I think that won't be as familiar to, to listeners. You know, even listeners who might have read The Coddling of the American Mind or might know about the importance of play. There's really interesting research as a play researcher from Norway named Ellen Sands Sater. And she has a couple of papers from 2010 and more recently on the need for risk, specifically risk and thrill. And the key word that I really resonate with is thrill. So, you know, we know that even if you know kids need to play, but we don't want them to play in any place dangerous. We don't want them to climb any trees. As far as I can tell, New Zealand is the only English speaking country left in the world where children are allowed to climb trees.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  You know, like I remember, you know, at recess when I was a kid, if there's a tree, you know, sometimes we'd climb a tree. But we've, we sort of decided we have to keep kids safe from danger. So nothing that could have any real danger. But what Sands Sater points out is why are kids seeking out danger? Why is this almost a universal feature? Why are kids doing things that they're almost certainly going to make them get hurt? You know, why are boys doing jumps on their bicycle? They know they're going to get hurt. Why are kids skateboarding down steep hills? They know they're going to fall at some point. And the reason she says is because

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Part of evolutionary programming is to test our abilities, learn to manage risks that are small risks, because life is full of risk. Once you're not protected by your parents, boy, is life dangerous out in the jungle, out in the wild, out in the world of nightclubs. So we have to, part of our mandate as a child is try things that are a little bit dangerous, and you get to select how dangerous it is. And so, you know, when I would take my kids to Coney Island here in New York City, a big, you know, Mucun Park area, the kids like in the car, there'd be so much discussion of like, are you gonna do the thunderbolt today? Or the, you know, the slingshot? Like, oh, no, that's, no, that's too scary for me. You know, everyone, they're all trying to adjust, but then, once they do it, they come off, I mean,

• 19:49Speaker 01

  they are jumping, they are exhilarated, the thrill is what they've been craving. And what Sandseeder says is, it's that process of being afraid, being really afraid, like, the rollercoaster, it's about to go over the top, and it's about, like, you're really afraid. And then, on the way down, you're screaming, and it's thrilling and pleasurable and fearful. And then, when you get to the bottom and you make it off the other end, it's just thrilling. And when you do that, you're actually changing your brain. You do that over and over again, and you develop the brain of a person who can face down some scumbag, or some person threatening them, who can actually deal with threats, and stand their ground, and think quickly, and not just panic

• 20:31Speaker 01

  and meltdown. So our kids need risk and thrill. That means they're gonna get hurt, they're gonna sometimes break bones, but the alternative is to keep them soft so that they're gonna break their minds.

• 20:46Chris Williamson?

  What, this obviously rolls from infancy, parents into preschool, school, secondary school.

• 20:57Chris Williamson?

  What's happening to children when they get into school and they are first faced with test scores and assessment and and structure, you have to get to school at this time and no, you can't do that. And the teacher like, how much of this is laid at the feet of parents? And how much of this is laid at the feet of the education system?

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a kind of a, yeah, it is a mix. The sort of the normal human progression is up until age six, seven, maybe even eight, there's really no value at all to homework or having too much structure. You know, by eight, nine, 10, you know, they, they, they can really learn, you know, to fit in, to conform. But the early grade, especially kindergarten and first grade here in the US, there's really very little evidence that they benefit from being pushed to read faster or to learn math faster. We have this naive idea that if they start learning multiplication in kindergarten, they will end up in high school further ahead. It's kind of a naive notion, we'll give them a head start and they'll end up further ahead.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  But that's not true. In Scandinavia, especially Finland, where they don't really start kids until age seven, they don't really do any academic stuff until age seven, and their kids are among the best in the world in all these academic measures. So, so I guess I would say, at a certain point, yeah, they do need to learn all that stuff. They do need to be self-regulating. And if they're going to fit into a free market capitalist economy and be functioning people and be prosperous, they need self, they need all those skills. But that doesn't mean you have to really start them very strictly early on. What kids need in kindergarten and first grade is especially a lot more play than we give them. We need to really back off on the homework and the heavy academics in kindergarten and first grade, is my opinion.

• 22:43Chris Williamson?

  What's happening to test scores with regards to students?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  So there are two, there's a global measure of test scores around the world. That's PISA, the Program for International Something Assessment.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Scholastic, I suppose. And with PISA, what we see is that scores were going up from the 90s. I think it started in the 90s. Scores were sort of going slowly up from the 90s to the 2012 assessments every three years. And beginning at the 2012 assessment, some of them start to go down. And then they go down further in the most recent. And everybody points to that and says, oh, COVID. Wow, COVID was so terrible. And it was. It was terrible that we took kids out of school. It was terrible that we took kids who weren't in any danger and said, you don't get to go to school. Uh, because what if you bring home the virus to an adult? Um, and so it's true that COVID, you know, being out of school did hurt test scores.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  But what people are only just beginning to realize, when you look at those graphs, it didn't start with COVID. It started when kids and everybody got on phones around 2012. In America, we have the NEAP, N A E P, National Assessment of Educational Progress. It's called the nation's report card. Same thing. There we have data back from the 70s. So we were making progress, like kids literally, you know, in fourth or eighth grade, whenever they measure it. Kids literally were learning more about math, science and better and reading. There was progress for decades, slow but steady progress until 2012. And then it begins to reverse. And yes, it reverses even more during COVID, but the reversal started around 2012.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  So, um, I think the main thing we should be focusing on here is phones in schools. Um, we'll, you know, we'll talk more about what phones are doing to all of us. But the idea that a child has access, you know, like a seventh, you know, seventh grader has a smartphone in their pocket. They're going to text if any, if the phone is available, someone is texting. And if someone is texting or group texting or posting on, on, on Instagram, then everyone has to be checking. Otherwise, at lunch, they're going to be the one who doesn't know the thing that happened during third period. So once kids, uh, around 2012 is when we get the phone-based childhood. That's, that's roughly when teens switch from flip phones to smartphones, right around then.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  As soon as that happens, they're not paying as much attention in school. They're not learning enough. They're not learning as much as they did. They're not paying as much attention to each other and they start getting lonelier. So after 2012, our kids are getting stupider and lonelier. And I think a lot of it, not all, but a lot of it is because of the phone.

• 25:24Chris Williamson?

  What was that article that you tweeted about Gen Z reading books for pleasure? Or them not doing it?

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Yes, so Jean Twenge, who's been fantastic, she was one of the first to really call attention to this in 2017, that something big is happening to our kids. And Jean is a master of these four giant data sets that we have in America. Long-running surveys, monitoring the future, goes back to the 1970s. Every year, they interview large samples of 12th graders, 10th graders, and 8th graders. And so we have decades of data. And one of the questions, they ask a lot of questions. One of them is, you know, have you, how often do you read books for pleasure? Or have you read a book for pleasure in the last month? I can't remember the exact timing.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  And what Jean shows is that the number who have read no books, I think that's how it is, like, you know, how many have you read? You know, zero in the last year for pleasure? Or, you know, one to three, or five to 10? The number who have read zero books in the last year has been going up for a while. It didn't start in 2012. As kids are watching more television, cable TV, going on the internet, book reading has been declining, being replaced by other screens. That's been going up for a long time. But it accelerates after 2012. Because again, once you have a smartphone and you have social media, which is going to suck up all of your time, there is no limit to how much you need to consume or post or monitor.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  So, life on a smartphone, what I'm calling the phone-based childhood, takes up so much time. There is no time for hobbies, or reading, or anything. And so Jean shows these dramatic graphs of, you know, the number who never read a book, those go up, and the number of books people read on average goes down. We have a nation of young people who have read very, very few books.

• 27:16Chris Williamson?

  Is there anything else that...? We need to say about the education system and what it's got wrong. Maybe from a disciplinarian standpoint, we know about this sort of early thrusting of academic achievement onto kids in the hopes that it kind of starting earlier pushes them out ahead more late. Is there anything else aside from the technology that the education system's got wrong?

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness. Yes. So one of the, you know, in this book, I'm trying to be totally not political and and just really just focus on the kids. But since I'm talking with you, Chris, I'll share some other thoughts.

• 27:51Chris Williamson?

  We're all bigots here. It's fine, Jonathan.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  So education schools have been accused of being ideologically progressive since the 1930s. And they are, they lean left. The military leans right, the police lean right, the arts lean left, education, education schools lean left. That's just the way it is. That's not necessarily a problem.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  But what I've been focused on since 2011 as a social scientist is the loss of viewpoint diversity. When everyone trying to figure something out, if everyone's on the left or the right, you don't get your confirmation biases challenged. And you start getting what I've called, you start getting structural stupidity. That is, you know, someone can say something really stupid and and no one dares to challenge them. Because if you challenge them, you look like you're a conservative or, you know, or sexist or a racist or something. You'll be accused of something. So people just keep their mouths shut. I get emails from students in grad programs in education periodically. And they say basically, help, I came here to learn how to teach. All we learn how to do is racial justice and equity.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Like, we never learn, you know, everything is oppression, everything's racism. We don't learn how to teach. So I can't say this is true for all ed schools, but for the elite schools, I think they are largely, they've become very, very ideological. They were that before 2015. But in the kind of the great awakening that we've had in the real intensification of of sort of the left right culture war. You know, we can see the right going off the deep end in a lot of ways. But, you know, if we're talking about schools, it's really, it's, you know, the left and the education schools. So I think that there's always been a debate between sort of progressive educational ideals and conservative. And I've always seen that as a yin yang sort of thing, like you actually need the tension of them pushing. But since there are very few conservatives left in higher education, you know, in the social sciences and in education schools.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  It's all now very, very ideologically progressive, and that means you have a lot more the gentle parenting, the focus on equality of outcomes by race,

• 29:52Speaker 01

  regardless of inputs, let's get rid of tests, let's get rid of honors classes. So I think education schools have been working very, very hard to lose the trust of centrists, Republicans, and anyone who actually cares that their kids get an education. So again, you know, in the current book on mental health, I'm not, I don't want to get, get into it, but if we're talking about what's happening to our kids' schools and education, I think, I think the educational establishment is becoming structurally stupid. And we saw clear evidence of this in San Francisco during COVID, where the school board was, you know, they were totally focused on pulling down statues of Abe Lincoln and renaming schools, you know, and the, the citizens of San Francisco,

• 30:35Speaker 01

  who are, you know, very far left, were so fed up with it, they voted out the school board. So yeah, I think the education system is, is becoming, in this country, very, very ideological.

• 30:45Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about the newest data that you've found around smartphones. You know, you've been circling this wagon for quite a while. And you've spent a good bit of time on this book since your last one, which was something not too dissimilar. What, what are the primary harms of technology on kids? And what's the latest data about that?

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Sure. So there's been, you know, a lot, there's a huge academic literature on whether, we all agree that there's a correlation. We all agree, it turns out, even, there's a few major sort of skeptics and critics, and then there's Jean Twenge and me on the other side. And that's sort of the, where a lot of the debate has been. And it turns out, we actually agree on the size of the correlation between how much time you spend on social media and how anxious and depressed you are.

• 31:26Chris Williamson?

  When you say we agree, do you mean you and Jean or you and the other side?

• 31:29Speaker 01

  No, no, me and the other side. They've done a number of meta-analyses and they say, you know, the correlation is around point one to point one five. But that's for boys and girls together. Whereas Jean and I and many others have found, the correlation is much bigger for girls. Social media harms girls much more than boys. So Jean and I found that the correlation for girls is about point two.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  That's actually pretty much the same. If they say it's point one to point one five correlation for everyone, that means they're basically saying the correlation is around point one five, maybe even higher for girls. So we actually agree. And that that correlation is actually pretty big in public health effect. It's not big in a mathematical sense of variance explained, but it's about the same size as you get from many other public health things. You know, calcium consumption and later osteoporosis. I mean, all sorts of effects are around that size. So we actually agree on that. But then the debate, they say it's small. We say it's actually as big as everything else. The big debate is, okay, there's a correlation, but correlation doesn't show causation. You know, we have to prove causation.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  And so I've been collecting, I started this in 2019 after I was challenged on the Coddling of the American Mind. I said, well, let's get to the bottom of this. Is there a mental health crisis? Because back then, the critics were saying, there isn't even a mental health crisis. It's just, you know, self-report stuff. It's it's not, it's an illusion. Well, now it's clear. No, it was not an illusion. The rates have been going up since 2012. Now the question is what caused it. And I've been collecting experiments with these big Google Docs. If you go to JonathanHaidt.com/reviews, you can find all of our Google Docs created with Zach Roush. And we have one that lists all the studies we can find that are cor- you know, correlational studies, the longitudinal studies, the experimental studies. Sorry, and this is like getting too geeky and all. But the point is, there's like, we

• 33:16Speaker 01

  have that 2025 true experiments that we found. And the and the large majority of them do show causal effects. And the ones that don't show causal effects is very interesting. If you look at the six or seven that failed to find an effect of like taking kids off phones, they all use a very short time period. So if your experiment is, we're going to make kids or college students stay off of social media for a week. You know, or three days, and then we're going to see how they're doing. And guess what? You take somebody who's heavily addicted, you take away their drug, and you check in on them a day later or a week later. How are they doing? Not well. But the studies that waited a month almost all find they're doing a lot better. They're much happier. So, you know, I don't know what else we can do here.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Like, we've got the correlational evidence. We've got the experimental evidence. The experimental evidence shows a clear pattern where if you refine it to the ones that match theoretically what's happening, the effect gets bigger. You've got the quasi, I mean, you know, people should go look at this Google Doc. I mean, I don't know what else we can do to convince people that it's not just correlational. There's a lot of causal evidence.

• 34:22Chris Williamson?

  What ways could you be wrong about this evidence?

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Um, so on the experimental evidence, the published experiments, my critics say that if you look at each of these studies, they're mostly pretty weak. Some of them have small sample sizes, just one or 200. Some of them, there's some other flaw. And so you can, you know, you can find, you can definitely find flaws in most of the experiments. So it's possible that they're right and that only experiments that find an effect get published. That is conceivable. But there are so many different lines of evidence here. And so I would, I would ask listeners to think about,

• 35:08Speaker 01

  we have a situation in which the parents see the problem. The parents whose kids are dead think that it wasn't, it was only because of social media, you know, that the kid committed suicide. They can, they can see the harassment taking place online. So you have the parents saying this is, this is causal. I don't know any parents who say, oh, no, it's wonderful for my kid to be on social media. The teachers see it, the principals see it, the psychologists see it. The kids themselves see it. You had Freya India on. She is one of the best writers on what is happening to girls. And Freya published a great essay on my Substack, I think she referred to it on your show, on the algorithmic conveyor belt of just, you know, once you express an interest

• 35:52Speaker 01

  in something, the algorithm is going to pull you all the way to eating disorders, or self-harm, or whatever it is. So, given that, I can't find, I literally cannot find anything written by someone in Gen Z that says, "No, we love our phones. Our phones are great. Our phones make our world better." You know, "Social media is so good for..." Like, I can't even find anyone saying that. But we have lots of people like Freya, who are saying, "This is destroying us." So, when you look at the experimental evidence that uses very limited manipulations, one very particular operationalization of the question finds a certain effect size, you've got to ask yourself, which is more plausible? That everyone is wrong and all the experiments are wrong? Or maybe it's the case that something is really happening

• 36:37Speaker 01

  here?

• 36:39Chris Williamson?

  What is the proposed mechanism by people that say smartphones don't have this big of an impact on mental health? Because the mechanism is what's being debated. The change in mental health is pretty undeniable. We have very, very high rates of whatever. It's like the most cataclysmic language about girls between age 12 and 16. It's like persistent feelings of hopelessness or listlessness, or something like just this awful apocalyptic language. What are the people who disagree with you saying is the mechanism that's causing this to happen?

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Right. They don't. They don't. That's the amazing thing. So, you have, you know, you look at the graphs, and they go up in very much the same way, same time, in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia. We've got graphs of all this. I hope your listeners will go to afterbabbel.com. That's my Substack. It's free. We've got all the graphs from all these countries. We've got the world's repository of data internationally. It all starts in the early 2010s. And so, my critics say, "Well, the amount of variance explained is very small." So, you know, the...

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Using social media can only explain a small amount of variance. Therefore, it can't explain the explosion and we're done here. And then I say, well, what do you think does explain it? No one, no one even offers, there's no alternate theory.

• 37:59Chris Williamson?

  So boring.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  The global financial crisis is at least global, but that was 2008. So why is it that nothing happens to teen mental health until 2012, 2013? By which time unemployment is dropping, stock market's rising, everything's getting better. You know, it's so the global financial crisis doesn't work. There is no other explanation that I can find, not even one that's been proposed. Other than the loss of the play-based childhood to be replaced by the phone-based childhood. And that really happened between 2010 and 2015 is when the phone-based childhood came in. That explains the globalness of it. It explains the suddenness of it. It explains the gender difference. It explains everything that I found. And, you know, my critics say, well, we're not convinced, but we have, we're not even going to offer an alternative explanation.

• 38:44Chris Williamson?

  So boring, super lame. All right. What are the primary harms of technology on kids?

• 38:52Speaker 01

  So, once you see that kids have to grow up in a physical world, we evolved outdoors, nature, animals, people. When kids grow up on screens, so it's not just about social media. When you grow up with what I'm calling a phone-based childhood, where you're spending, the latest data I think is nine hours a day, average for American kids. 11 hours, Freya just said, there's a British study. It was like 10 or 11 hours a day for British kids on their phones, which includes other, includes tablets, I think, and video games, I think. In any case, it doesn't include homework or schoolwork, just recreational time, nine to 11 hours a day. That pushes out everything else. And so what I say in the book is that there are four foundational harms.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Once you see that it's taken up 10 hours a day, pushing everything else out, what matters? The most important thing is time with other kids, time with friends. That's crucial. I mean, all of your, in person, that's right, in person. And we'll talk about whether virtual is, is good, it is not. But time actually with other kids, other with your friends. And that has plummeted since 2012. It was dropping before in the earlier internet age, but boy, it really speeds up in the in the smartphone, social media age. And so kids, the most nutritious thing your kid can do is be out playing with other kids. And this is even true for teenagers, hanging out with no adults telling them what to do. So that's crucial. That's really nutritious, as it were.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Now, if kids, you might say, well, but you know, the spending of this 10, 11 hours, a lot of it is spent virtually interacting, you know, like on video games. Well, let's look at multiplayer video games. Now, those are at least synchronous. Synchronous is good. You're talking. So that's actually a good thing. The girls on social media, it's asynchronous. I comment, I wait anxiously for you to comment on my comment. And so we're not really connecting. We're actually performing and we're anxious.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Video games are at least synchronous, but you actually, you tell me, I was never a gamer. It seems to me that

• 40:50Chris Williamson?

  Were you assuming that I'm a, you look at me and just think

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, you look like a gamer.

• 40:53Chris Williamson?

  That's a guy that wasted a lot of hours playing video games.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Am I wrong?

• 40:57Chris Williamson?

  I wasted a lot of hours playing video games. Your

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Okay, there you go. Stereotypes sometimes have a basis in reality.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  So, oh, look, basically, you know, you're a healthy male. That means you almost certainly were playing video games. I mean, that's just the way it's been since the 90s.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  So, but you tell me, in video games, you ever get in fights? Like, like you get mad at each other because someone broke a rule?

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Oh, do you, how does, how does that happen? Because I assume that the game itself regulates all the interactions. How can someone cheat?

• 41:27Chris Williamson?

  You mean like fights in game, right? No, no, no. I mean, you just have disagreements. You have disagreements. You shout and you say that that was, that was totally stupid. Like, it's more

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, fine. No, but what I mean is like, think about when you, when you and your friends played a, you know, pick up soccer game or baseball game or whatever, when you're kids and someone says, no, you know, it was out of bounds. No, it wasn't. Yes, it was. No, it wasn't. Like, you argue about it. And what I'm trying to say is the arguments are really nutritious. The arguments. Jean Piaget, the great developmental psychologist, really talked a lot about this. When kids play marbles, they get in all kinds of disputes and that's crucial. They learn how to work it out. So you tell me, when you're playing video games in an average day, you know, you have four hours of video game playing, do you get in those kind of fights about, yes, it was, no, it wasn't, yes, it wasn't, it wasn't.

• 42:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, no, because the game, the game mandates the rule set for you.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 42:16Chris Williamson?

  There is no mediating needed.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  That's right. There you go. So it's just like if I said, we're going to replace all your kids' food with rice, white rice. And then someone said, yeah, that should be just as good. I mean, it's got just the same number of calories. You know, you might say, yeah, but it's missing all the other nutrients. And that's what we do when we put boys on video games. Yeah, it's social, it's great fun. It has some benefits. It gives them some social calories. They're talking. But it's missing a lot of the nutrients that you get from face to face interaction.

• 42:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay, face to face interaction, that gets squeezed.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  That's one. And that's just one. I'll go faster on the rest of them. Number two, sleep deprivation. When kids have a screen in their room, again, these things are designed to be addictive. And when you let your kids spend hours with a device designed to be addictive, sometimes they get addicted. And so the kids who have a dependency, they're going to take their phone into bed with them under the covers. You know, mom can't see that the light is still on because it's under the covers. So, social media in particular, and browsing the internet, takes away a lot of sleep. And if you take away sleep from teenagers who are already not getting enough, they're going to be crankier, less healthy, they're going to gain weight. There's all kinds of things that happen physiologically and emotionally, which exacerbate the mental illness epidemic. So that's two, the loss of sleep.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  The third is attention fragmentation. One of the main things kids need to do in, as teens, your brain is rewiring throughout childhood. You know, your brain is sort of pretty big by the time you're five or six. And then a lot of it is just the rewiring, the myelination of circuits.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  In your teen years, the frontal cortex myelinates, the prefrontal cortex especially, is the seat of executive control. Can you set a goal, keep your eye on the goal, do the things necessary to reach the goal, even though there are distractions? And as adults, we've all learned to do that to some degree. But crucial in that learning was those teen years when the frontal cortex is really laying down, you know, like, how do you do this? And instead, what we do is it's like we put little distractors, you know, if a lot of the kids are getting interrupted every couple of minutes for their whole life, they never even spend 10 minutes without an interruption. This appears to interfere with their development of executive function. So we're creating young people who, when they come to the office, they can't just pay attention

• 44:36Speaker 01

  to something, they need more stimulation, and then they don't pay full attention. So attention fragmentation is devastating to their ability to be productive and creative. And then the fourth foundational harm is addiction. Um, you know, I get in big arguments with this with some of the researchers who are, who are studying video games, who think video games are good. Um, and they point out, you know, most boys are having a great time and there's no sign of trouble, of problem. Well, and that's true. That's true. Most boys who play video games, I can't say that they're damaged by it. But 5% or 10% are, um, the ones who develop problematic gaming, who are compulsive, have compulsive use. When they're not playing, they become surly, their brain is deficient in dopamine, they are addicted, they have a dependency.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Um, if you're going through your puberty years as a boy, getting this incredible amount of fixed stimulation of, you know, from, you know, Fortnite or, you know, whatever game you're playing, this is, uh, in addition to messing up your life, you're not, you're not spending time with friends, you're not learning how to talk to girls, whatever it is, um, this is likely to have some very lasting, possibly permanent effect. So those are the four foundational harms. They affect boys and girls, girls on social media, not so much video games. Um, and then there's all the specific harms that affect boys and girls, we can get into those. But if, if all you knew was, here's this consumer product, it's going to take your kid away from his friends, it's going to deprive him of sleep, it's going to fragment

• 46:03Speaker 01

  his ability to focus, um, and it's going to addict him. What do you say? Do you want this for your kid? Like, who would ever say yes? But we did.

• 46:12Chris Williamson?

  Is it right to call social media use an addiction? I had this discussion with Andrew Huberman a couple of years ago, and I sort of.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, what did he say?

• 46:25Chris Williamson?

  He said it looks to him more like a compulsion than an addiction. It feels like compulsive behavior. He said, you know, if you if you saw an animal scratching, scratching, scratching in the corner, looking for food, scratching, scratching, scratching, scratching, you'd think that animal's sick. And it it feels to me, you know, I you're on a plane, how many times? It's such a great example. You're on a plane, you have no signal, you know, you have no signal. You pull your phone out, you open it up, you go through the little cycle of apps or whatever it is that you do and you go, ah, yeah, goes back down. So to me, that seems compulsive. Now, obviously, addictive things can have a compulsion. That's the reason I haven't got anything long and thin that I can use.

• 47:07Chris Williamson?

  But that's the reason that smokers will get pens and chew down on pens. It actually satiates. I think I saw something that's saying that people who have smoking addiction can satiate a little bit of the desire for their next cigarette by actually putting a replacement cigarette in their mouth. Because so much of it is about the like physiological, the movement of that habituated thing.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:32Chris Williamson?

  So I, and I mean, the semantics of what is an addiction? Where does that cross across into a compulsion? Can something which is addictive lead you to have this sort of obsessive compelled behavior? The way you kind of pull this, it kind of doesn't really matter. But have you got, have you got any insight on that?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  No, I do. You know, I know that among addiction researchers, there's a debate about whether behavioral addictions are true addictions. And if you look at what happens in the brain when a person is addicted to heroin or to cocaine, you know, there's. It's incredibly well studied. You know, I don't know the details. This is not my Arab expertise, but that's incredibly well studied. And then I think some of them are saying, when you look at behavioral addictions, it's a little different. It's not quite the same. Fine, I can totally accept that. But to me, the question is just, let's just take gambling addiction. You know, most of us have been to a casino. The great majority don't have any problem, don't have any addiction, but a small number, I don't know what the percentage is, I'm guessing it's probably, you know, two to seven percent, because that's what I keep finding for behavioral

• 48:31Speaker 01

  addictions, for some number. They, when they get into a zone, it's straight behaviorist, psychology, stimulus response, variable ratio, reward schedules. They get into a zone and they lose track of time and they forget their troubles. And of course, their troubles are in part because they're blowing all their family's money on slot machines, but they can't stop. So I think, would you say that a person who compulsively uses slot machines, spends most of her family's money, so that the family is now bankrupt, and yet she still keeps doing it, would you call that a compulsion or an addiction?

• 49:08Chris Williamson?

  Both.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Okay. What, even if you call it, that's fine with me. If you want to call it just a compulsion, that's fine. My point is, whatever that is, gambling addicts, which is real.

• 49:17Chris Williamson?

  Even a new word, yeah, call it whatever you want.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Whatever you want to call it. That is what is happening to social media compulsive users. You know, whatever you want to call it, it's the same thing. And it's, I mean, in a sense, it's literally the same thing, because some of the features of our life on phones were directly copied from casinos. The thing where you pull down to refresh, and then it kind of bounces up and you see things like that was literally copied from slot machines.

• 49:40Chris Williamson?

  Shout out Tristan Harris. Yeah, he was a

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Yes. Tristan is a hero in all of this. Tristan really brought our attention.

• 49:45Chris Williamson?

  Telling everyone about this. Yeah, for sure. All right. So, you know, there's been a lot of talk recently. I've got Daniel Cox coming on, the guy that did that really fantastic study about young boys breaking to the right and young girls breaking to the left. I've got him coming on soon. But we're seeing a lot of sect differences in worldview and belief and mental health.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:05Chris Williamson?

  What mental health is declining, but the ways that it's declining, the sort of usages of technology. So talk to me about the sex differences in technology. How do boys and girls use technology differently?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah. So the master variable here, I believe, is, is a set of motivations that we've talked about psychology for 50 years called agency and communion. So everybody has needs for agency, to be an agent, to make things happen. You know, a child knocks over a block tower. It's thrilling. I did that. I caused that to fall. So that's agency. And then communion is connection, being part of a group, being welcomed and embraced and connecting. So everyone has both motives. But on average, boys have stronger agency motives. And when you let boys and girls choose what to do, the boys are going to

• 50:56Speaker 01

  gravitate more towards games that allow agency. And so fake war is one of the best examples. They want to practice their skills. Boys, I think, are evolutionary programmed for hunting in war, to enjoy hunting in war. I found this out when I was 29 years old and for the first time in my life, played paintball with my buddies. And hunting each other, we were mixed in with other, other people, but hunting each other in small groups and shooting guns to try to hit each other was the most thrilling thing we'd ever done.

• 51:23Chris Williamson?

  That'll get you. Yeah, yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that was really cool. Like, wow, there's like a room in my heart for being a hunter and a warrior. Like, I didn't really know it was there, but it was. So anyway, boys choose to pursue agency motives. Girls choose to pursue more communion motives. They talk more with each other. As Richard Reeves, this wonderful, wonderful British man who has this, has been, been making the case for boys. Have you, have you had Richard on the show?

• 51:46Chris Williamson?

  Of course. Yeah, he's great.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 51:48Chris Williamson?

  He's coming back on again soon. Yeah. His new initiative, the Center for Boys and Men?

• 51:52Speaker 01

  American Institute for Boys and Men. Yeah.

• 51:54Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. That sounds awesome. I'm fully. Richard Reeves pilled. I'm on board with

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Good. Oh, good. Yes, me too. We're all Richard Reeves pilled. Yes. So Richard points out, uh, uh, girls like to do things face to face. Boys like to do things shoulder to shoulder. Like we're next to each other, but we're doing something.

• 52:12Chris Williamson?

  I've got to, I need to bring this up. So in, in a Robin Dunbar's book, Friends, which came out maybe 18 months ago. Got this phenomenal study. So the next time that you're at a party, look at the angle of the feet that women have when they talk to each other. And look at the angle of the feet that men have.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Like what? What do you mean? What do you see?

• 52:29Chris Williamson?

  Women will talk, uh, perpendicular 180 degrees. They'll be pretty much straight on like this.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 52:36Chris Williamson?

  Men talk at about 120 degrees.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Oh, that's fascinating.

• 52:40Chris Williamson?

  So they blade.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 52:42Chris Williamson?

  And the reason being that this is a bit of sort of evolutionary bro psychology coming in, but I think it's true. If you, if even try it, you can try it the next time that you, you're at a party, just, you know, you'll be stood sort of like this with a guy. Just blading on and just turn yourself so that you're actually straight onto them. And there's this just rises up inside of you because really the only time that two guys would do that is if they were going to fight. Or they were going to kiss. And if you don't intend on doing either of those things. And you just feel you're like, this feels right. There's something about that angle. It's like two magnet, two north poles of a magnet.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. Oh, good example.

• 53:22Chris Williamson?

  Divert away.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  They don't want to. Yeah.

• 53:24Chris Williamson?

  Yep. Dude, look at it. 120 degrees for men, 180 degrees for women. It's, and it, you can't not see it. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  It's so good. Now I, I will look for that. And actually that, this could suggest a really cool difference between real and virtual. You know, virtual interactions are not embodied. Like you, we can see, you know, we can see each other's upper bodies here, but, but I think what we would find, because I don't at all feel freaked out by you, you know, your face onto me on my head. Yeah. But I don't at all feel like, oh, we've either got to kiss or fight like because we're virtual.

• 53:55Chris Williamson?

  Well, we wait until we finish.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, yeah. You are, you are pretty handsome, I must say. Um, so, so again, something, you know, we are embodied creatures. We're physical creatures. We're animals. We evolved outdoors. You know, we, we, we had fights. We had hunts and we were physical creatures. And when we interact now, virtually, we have only, it's, you know, it's like the white rice thing. We have just like a little few of the nutrients, but we're missing most of them.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  So anyway, on to boys and girls. Sorry, I'm taking too long on this, but the the point is, boy, so when when, you know, laptops and then especially smartphones come out, all the kids love them, all the kids gravitate, all the kids are on them. The boys head straight for video games and YouTube. The boys are spending more time on video games and YouTube and porn. The girls go straight for the visual social media platforms, especially Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest in the early days. And so what are the effects? The girls are now on these platforms that are all about, I post a picture of me and my life, and then I wait for strangers to comment on it. And that's really, really bad for mental health. And that, I think, is why the girls, as

• 55:05Speaker 01

  soon as we hit 2012, 2013, the girls have very sharp elbows in the graphs, very hockey stick lines in the graphs. Boys, on the other hand, they're playing video games, especially video games aren't making them depressed. Now, the boys are getting more depressed and anxious. They are roughly twice as depressed and anxious as they used to be, but it's more gradual. It starts a little sooner. It starts more like 2009, 2010, and it's more gradual. So I think what's happening, and what, you know, what Zach Roush and I concluded in the book, and here we drew on Richard Reeves, is, you know, for girls, boom, they get on social media, they get depressed. For boys, they've been withdrawing from the real world since the 70s and 80s. You know, it used

• 55:46Speaker 01

  to be a male world, there used to be a patriarchy, you know, but boy, has it been dismantled. And as everything shifts towards girls, and as schools get more and more structured towards girls and girls' needs and girls' ways of learning, and as we all freak out about gender gaps, and we think that it's the girls we have to help in the 90s, which wasn't true, girls had already passed boys, boys are finding that they don't do well in school, they don't like school, but man, these video games are just getting better and better. And, and, you know, it's, it's hard to approach a girl, but man, the pornography is getting better and better. And now you've got AI girlfriends and soon AI girlfriends will be put into incredibly sexy robots. So what we're seeing is the progressive withdrawal of boys from effort in the real

• 56:31Speaker 01

  world that will pay off in the long run. And instead, boys' prodigious energy and their desires are being directed into a virtual world that generates nothing, absolutely nothing of any value in the real world.

• 56:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the audience is gonna know what I'm gonna bring up, but I'm gonna do it again. It's my, I've only had two citations ever in academia and this is one of them. So you'll be aware of young male syndrome.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  No, tell me what, just that they're, you know, more violent and.

• 56:59Chris Williamson?

  Yes, correct. Yeah. High proliferation of young sexless men, high tea, high risk taking. They set shit on fire and push over granny. It's not good.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Totally agree.

• 57:08Chris Williamson?

  We have the highest rates of loneliness and sexlessness amongst young men, at least in the modern world, maybe ever, apart from maybe some like crazy gerontocracy style, like tribal bullshit 10,000 years ago. Where's all of the incel violence? Like, this isn't a request, but why are we not seeing more mass shootings? Why are we not seeing all the rest of it?

• 57:28Speaker 01

  That's a good point.

• 57:29Chris Williamson?

  So it's my contention that men are being sedated out of their status-seeking and reproductive-seeking behavior through a combination of social media, video games, and porn. So they're not given a sufficient dose to make them happy or satisfied, but it is enough to dampen down and nerf that impulse. So, and this is what I've called the male sedation hypothesis, and this is being studied. So why have we not got this yet? I'm a legitimate, illegitimate academic now. But this is, and there's a question to be asked there, but you know, everything that you're talking about there that it's triggering, it's playing off the back of this desire for them to.

• 58:16Chris Williamson?

  Work together as a team to have intertribal warfare, to create mastery, to increase in status, to be able to accomplish things. Okay, but it's within the virtual world and you can become an e-gamer and so on and so forth, but how much can you cash out that status into the real world? But then a more interesting question comes, which you know, the gamers very well may do and say, well, if I'm enjoying it, why do I need to cash it out into the real world? What is real and what isn't? Why, why is there this sort of weird axiomatic value judgment about the fact that the real world is better than the virtual world? It's all part of a world. It's all just dopamine serotonin ticking around in my brain. Who cares? Same thing goes for porn. You know, I worried about getting me tooed, or I don't have the this thing, or whatever, whatever, whatever. Like, all of these things allow

• 58:58Chris Williamson?

  them to do that. Couple of white pills that me and a friend, William Costello, think with regards to the AI girlfriend virtual relationship thing. First one being dating and flirting is something that is incredibly anxiety inducing for men. The guy that created CBT made it so that he could overcome approach anxiety. I don't know if that's

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 59:19Chris Williamson?

  That's supposed to be

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Is this Aaron Beck or was this the other guy?

• 59:21Chris Williamson?

  The other dude.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Right. What's his name? I forget the name. Yeah.

• 59:25Chris Williamson?

  David, David Boss told me about him. It was created to help with approach anxiety. Maybe Aaron Beck was it too. Everyone's just has a

• 59:31Speaker 01

  I don't think so. Yeah.

• 59:33Chris Williamson?

  But the, the primary challenge that you have in dating is that there is no such thing as practice dating. If me and you want to get better at pickleball, we can go to the local pickleball court and you can just hit drives at me and I can practice my drop volley.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:50Chris Williamson?

  I can't, it is one of the few things where you practice in public, you learn out loud. So there's always this high pressure to not fail. And what that means is that men often have really, really, they never get beyond, they never go zero to one. They never actually get that first step done. So me and William think that a really phenomenal, and this, you don't even need to wait for the sex robot thing, or the whatever, the in-person robot, you could do this with Apple's VR headset if it was sufficiently well-trained on a good data set. So you have a virtual interaction with a woman, like a computer game. And in this virtual interaction, the Avatar is able to see your movements. They can hear what you're saying. They use

• 1:00:33Chris Williamson?

  natural language processing to work out the intonation and, and you know, they're able to go back and forth and they can, you know, you can program in shit like consent and you can program shit in like flirting and, and, and I want to increase the difficulty, the disagreeability of this girl. I want her to make me work and you level up and level up and level up. And if you can form that on actual human psychology, you can have guys practice playing the video game in the safety of their own home.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Chris Williamson?

  And then go and deploy this in the real world. It's like, you know, tonal, one of these like at home gym things. It's like, or Wii Sports, right? Like, you know, you're playing a video game. That's a better example. You're playing Wii Sports at home. You're playing tennis or whatever. And then you go into the room and you're like, hey, I played a video game, but I'm kind of fitter. And this is the same. I played a video game, but I'm kind of better at flirting.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think, I think having practice flirting in the virtual world is actually a great idea. I think you're right that it, I remember, you know, when I was in seventh grade and the adults would organize a dance, it was terrifying, you know, and occasionally I would ask a girl to dance and either she'd say yes or no, but it was terrifying. But again, that's that like fear and thrill when she does occasionally say yes. I, I agree that in theory, we could do that, that the headsets, that the virtual reality, you really could give boys practice flirting with realistic girls and the difficulty level could get harder and harder. Now, how would this actually play out in the real world? I fear that it's not really going to be, hey, let's try to make you into the best possible romantic

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  partner, likely to find a really wonderful woman and they get happily married. I fear that it's going to turn into either, here's, you know, the game is to get the woman in bed and then move on to the next woman. And here, you know, we'll learn, teach you how to, how to bed women. Or it's going to be design the woman you want. And you're going to, you know, let's make her even lovelier. Let's give her an even better sense of humor. How about if she never gets mad at me? You know, you program in all these things that are just going to take you in an unrealistic way. So.

• 1:02:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, you've got an evolutionary background. I have to say, I want to bring you back in. Once this tour is done, I want to bring you back on. And if you can remember it, to talk about the happiness hypothesis, because it was one of the three books that got me into the world of EP and really sort of made me fall in love with it. But given that background, again, me and William have spoken about this an awful lot. We talked about this AI girlfriend revolution. One of the problems that you have, and one of the reasons that I don't think we need to fear the AI girlfriend thing quite as much, is no guy brags about the fact that he has subscribed to some woman's OnlyFans. The reason that you don't brag about it is that there is no status associated with being selected. There is no-

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  You look like a loser.

• 1:03:19Chris Williamson?

  But not only that, that even if it didn't, even if it was neutral in the loser-

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  Oh, I see.

• 1:03:25Chris Williamson?

  ...metrics, because you haven't been pre-selected by the gatekeeper is the price of a cheeseburger per month.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Chris Williamson?

  Therefore, anyone has access to this. And because of the access, it's, you know, maybe if you have a $30,000 sex robot, it's a flex of your wealth, but it's also like, dude, you spent $30,000 on a sex robot. How weird are you? So, and I just, I don't, I don't know what's going to happen, but I certainly know that that pre-selection, the status associated with a woman who is the gatekeeper choosing a man who is the protagonist, that accounts for so much of the bragging rights of the guy.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Yes. Great. So this brings in a key word we haven't mentioned is status. And boys are, boys and girls are each competing for status, but boys' competition is really much more, it's about, ultimately about like physical toughness, dominance, originally in sort of the primeval state, ultimately backed up by the ability to physically beat the shit out of somebody. But in modern times, that gets converted into other, other ways of contesting. And we've had a long, slow evolution of our economy, such that, such that we've harnessed male ambition for status and turned it in productive directions. In fact, I was going to write a book, I got a contract to write a book called Three Stories About Capitalism: The Moral Psychology of Economic Life. I was going to write a book on like the psychology of capitalism.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  And then the universities melted down and I wrote the coddling and I got drawn off into all these other other things. But one of the key insights is there's a is you know, Adam Smith realized that when you get an economy set up the right way, it's not from the benevolence of the butcher and the baker and the brewer that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own self-interest. When people can get money for doing something that helps others, well, then men try very hard to make money. But it's not just money. When you can get status by doing something productive, that's going to challenge like men are like rockets, like they have this, they have this incredible capacity for work, but they're often misaimed. And so I think it's quite remarkable that, you know, when,

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  you know, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to face off, how do they do it? Who can build the more effective rocket launch system into outer space? I mean, that's a great way for men to compete. So that's productive. And I think what you're saying, what you're pointing out is part of dating, I mean, part of it is very intrinsically motivated. You want a girlfriend, you want sex, you want love. But you also, yeah, you want a hot girlfriend, you want someone that other guys will respect you for because yeah, I got this woman. So any discussion of boys, yes, we must consider status, especially what are other men going to think of me? And also, what are other women going to think of me based on who I date? Women are extremely concerned with what other women will think of them as well,

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  separate status competitions. But yeah, that's a key. And video games give them an alternate world in which they can gain status within that alternate world. But I keep coming back to the metaphor of the black hole. You know, black hole is a place where anything gets sucked in, but nothing comes out. And so, okay, here, here's another controversial idea. I'll air it with you. Maybe you can, you can disprove it. Here, I'll just put this as a contention. I don't know if this is true. My contention is that nobody, or is that hardly anyone in Gen Z has has done anything yet that has really made an impact on the world. Let me just qualify. There are always going to be athletes, always, there are always going to be singers coming along. That's not the issue. The issue is,

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  did you start a company? Did you make some discovery? Did you write an amazing book? Did you do something that the world notices and says like, oh, wow, you know, that's impressive? And when I ask this of audiences, they only come up with two names. So I'll ask you, who are the members of Gen Z who've really dented the universe? They've really done something.

• 1:07:16Chris Williamson?

  When does Gen Z start and finish?

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  The Gen Z is now 28 years old. So everybody who's 28 years old or younger, it starts in 1996.

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  I'm one year old. I was gonna say Boyan Slatt, the guy that founded and was the CEO of the Ocean Cleanup. You know, that huge thing that cleans plastic out of the ocean.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  Okay, that would count. Yeah.

• 1:07:38Chris Williamson?

  He's 29. He's 29, so he missed him. He's in my group.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  The millennials are creative and productive and mentally healthy. But Gen Z, so wait, try again. I'm sure you're gonna come up with the one name that everyone comes up with. What's one person under 29 who really has changed the world?

• 1:07:53Chris Williamson?

  Greta Thunberg?

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  That's it. That's what everyone comes up with. And then there's a second that people sometimes come up with. Malala.

• 1:08:01Chris Williamson?

  Who?

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Malala, the woman from Pakistan, she was shot by, you know, fundamentalists, but she survived and she's a rights activist.

• 1:08:11Chris Williamson?

  I was never gonna get that.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  Okay. Anyway, so Greta. Greta's the one that everyone comes up with. But that's it. So there are no Americans. There are no men. And I started thinking this two or three years ago, and I keep waiting. Someone's gonna find me a Gen Z person who's really done something big. Now, a lot of them want to start their own business as an influencer. They want to create an app. So I'm not saying, they're not lazy. What I'm trying to say here is, as far as I can tell, they have been raised in an economy where what you're desperately trying to do is get more followers, get more influence, and it's all quantified. And as long as you're working hard at that, you're not generating anything that will leave the black hole of social media, nothing that will affect the world outside of your closed world of people seeking status.

• 1:08:58Chris Williamson?

  I'm sure that you're aware of it, but the percentage of primary school kids that say that they want to grow up to be a YouTuber or an influencer. So, you know, they're being fed in on the front end with this presupposition, and then they're being spat out on the back end too with this lack of impact in the real world. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, maybe this is one of the white pills of automation and AI and leverage.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  What's a white pill? I haven't heard that term.

• 1:09:22Chris Williamson?

  So a black pill is something that's nihilistic and it's an insight that makes you feel kind of apocalyptic and fatalistic. And a white pill would be a reason for hope. It's a justification for hope.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Nice. Okay, I've got to start developing a few of those because my talks can get kind of dark. So all right, white pills. Go ahead.

• 1:09:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, just talking about a white pill. So a white pill from, and it's particularly useful to use in contrast to something that people see as something that's bad. AI is going to come, it's going to take all our jobs and everyone's going to be, it's going to be the matrix. But one of the advantages is that if we're in this current lull of real world invention from Gen Z, maybe, the increase in leverage that we have through code means that a smaller number of people can have a larger amount of impact. So the few that break through from Gen Z and do do great things can maximize and magnify their impact on the world in a way that might be able to compensate for the rest of their generation's lack.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Okay, that's a good point. I agree that that's possible. But this just sort of slots right into one of my main concerns about what's happening, which is that digital technology and now artificial intelligence is likely to usher in an era of material prosperity. If we all have an infinite number of servants to help us make whatever we want, yes, there's going to be a rise of productivity. And all these people who point to the coming golden age, they're looking at material prosperity, they're looking at physical health, discoveries will cure cancer. Yeah, materially, things are going to get better as they have been continuously. You know, Matt Ridley pointed this out, Steve Pinker pointed this out.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  But I'm a social psychologist and I play sociologist in my spare time because I think what we're heading into is a sociological apocalypse. That is, all the things it takes to make a stable society, they're not visible. I learned this from Amel Durkheim and from reading conservative writings. Institutions, structures, traditions, all the things that make our society possible, but many people don't see. And these are being rotted out and this precedes, this precedes the internet. I mean, there, you know, there's always, you know, there's the thing, uh, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. So, you know, there's been kind of a decline since the, World War II was a huge stimulus for all kinds of amazing after effects.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  And there's a decline since then. So it's not all caused by, by the recent technologies, but I think it's been accelerated by it. And so what you're pointing to is yes, more material prosperity. And yeah, that's true. But if we have collapsing institutions, no trust in anything, um, and we're willing to consign a generation to just wasting their time, struggling for status on, you know, on TikTok because as long as 12 of them are creative and create gigantic new things, we'll be just as, as good off as we were, you know, 10 years ago.

• 1:12:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 1:12:22Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Maybe less of a white, that's a gray pill. That's a gray pill.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, good. You know what? Gray pill, that, cause it's both. It's black and white. I like it. Okay. A zebra pill, a zebra pill.

• 1:12:31Chris Williamson?

  Perhaps, yeah, striped, it's striped. Okay. So we've spoken about boys and what's happening with them. You know, there's so much conversation around young teen girl, mental health. Give me the latest data. What are you seeing? What's happening with, with the young girls?

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Sure. So, I mean, Freya covered, covered this beautifully and, and she writes about this beautifully on her Substack, Girls. But sort of the, you know, the, the big picture here is let's start with the mental health, but there's a lot more going on. Uh, with the mental health, it's very specific for girls. It's what's, what are called internalizing disorders. It's especially depression and anxiety. Um, you know, other things are up, but like, you know, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, they're all up a little bit, but it's really depression, anxiety. Girls have what are, suffer more from what are called internalizing disorders. So if there's stresses and problems, they kind of turn it inwards and they suffer anxiety, depression. Boys historically. Suffer more from what are called externalizing disorders. When there are problems with their development, they act out.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  They make other people miserable. Crime, you know, deviance, violence. So, so that's historically the way girls and boys were. But what's happened is actually both girls and boys have moved more in the direction of internalizing disorders, but girls especially. So the numbers are hard to believe, but they're up around thirty or forty percent of girls, teenage girls, would qualify as having depression or anxiety disorders. It used to be more like ten or fifteen percent. So it's now a normal thing to be an American or British teenage girl. It's just a normal thing that you think about suicide and you have your anxiety and you manage your anxiety. It's part of your identity.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  It's part of, it's with you all the time. So it's tragic. It's so sad, you know? It used to be the case that middle aged people were the least happy. It's a well known thing called the U shaped curve of happiness. The happiest people used to be young adults, you know, teenagers and young adults, and then people in their sixties and seventies. They're done with the hard work. They get to enjoy their lives. But it's always people in the middle, you know, taking care of kids and parents. That's not true anymore. In Western countries, the young people have plunged, and especially the girls. So we have a graph in the book, Canadian data. Canadian, young Canadian women used to be the happiest. Now they're by far the least happy group of people in Canada.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  So for girls, the mental health, the anxiety, depression, that's like the central finding. But there's a lot more. Oh, you question about that? Go on, go on, go on. Okay. So, you know, so much of the debate is just about the mental health data. But there's so much else that's warping girls' development and making them less happy. The, the hypersexualization, the pornification of everything, the fact that you've got these young girls on Instagram aping these millennial women with gigantic boobs and butts and fillers and all kinds of things. This just, this is just really, really bad for them. So even if they don't get depressed and anxious, and they do, but even if they didn't.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  The fact that they, oh my God, the number of girls now, middle school girls, who are using skincare products and who are concerned about their skin. And, you know, and doing makeup tutorials, you know, like, no, your skin is perfect. Go have fun. You know, yes, you you you care about how you look. Girls have always cared about how they look. That's part of life. It's part of for boys too. But to take to take these, you know, wonderful, sprightly, funny, you know, fifth, sixth grade girls. And then suddenly to have them focus so much on on their face and their beauty. Because they're on social media is a tragic loss of girlhood. There's that. There's the exposure to older men.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Creepy men who want to watch them dance, who want to talk with them. There's the the whole economy of nudes from the boys in their class. If the boys will send them a dick pic and then say, come on, send me one of yours. Come on, come on, you know, don't be a prude, don't be a prude. And if and then if a girl does said anything, now the boys really got something valuable. And we cite, you know, there's a book, American Girls. You know, she the author documents how middle school boys will get a nude photo of a girl. Then they can give it, they can trade it to high school boys for beer. And so the girl's nakedness, the girl's humiliation is valuable to the boy.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  Because he can get alcohol and prestige by giving it to an older boy who can buy him beer. Or get him beer somehow or other. So, you know, the commodification, the hypersexualization, the humiliation of girls once they enter the world of social media. You know, it's just, I mean, it's just on so many fronts. The phone-based childhood is not a human childhood and kids are stuck in it.

• 1:17:31Chris Williamson?

  You have an evolutionary background. You titled the book, The Anxious Generation. Of all of the litany of different human emotions that we have, anxiety is the one that's very prevalent, we're hearing about anxiety disorders and things that are downstream from it. There's even a disorder now where people can't distinguish between anxiety and depression. And it means that then, I literally learned it yesterday from David Brooks. God damn it. Anyway, they struggle to work out the difference between anxiety and depression. So it's bleeding into, wow.

• 1:18:11Chris Williamson?

  First off, from an evolutionary perspective, I think it's a bit of a cope by people with my intellectual interest background of EP to say, well, you know, we're built to be vigilant, you know, we've got the smoke detector principle, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, yeah, but it's really tuned up now. It's not just tuned up, it's like, yeah, supercharged. And my question being, why anxiety? What is it about the soup, the cocktail of stimulus that we have at the moment that's causing anxiety to be the predominant outcome?

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think it's too many, there are many contributing factors, but two big ones. One is the loss of thrilling play in childhood, which we talked about. If kids don't get to take risks, they don't learn to manage risks, and then any little thing seems threatening. This is why students were suddenly asking for trigger warnings in part, because the idea that a book that describes a Greek myth in which Zeus rapes a woman, can we expect young women to just have to read this? So what is just exposure? If kids don't have exposure when they're young, and they don't have thrills, and they don't have risk, then any little thing is going to be much harder for them when they're older. That's one piece. The other is growing up on the stage.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  You know, when you're growing up, you make a lot of mistakes. You say something stupid to your friend and then your friend might criticize you. Your friend might even get angry at you and then you make up. But when that happens on the stage, you say something and before you know it, everyone is talking about it. And they're adding on their own comments and you're the butt of the joke. And as anyone ever knows who's been through any kind of a cancellation attempt or any kind of public online thing, it's painful in a way beyond anything that we know in terms of physical suffering. It really makes people want to disappear and it is a spur to suicide. So when the entire school is laughing at you, you know, or the, you know, the photo you sent of your, of your genitals

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  or the thing you said that somebody caught and then added, you know. So kids should not grow up on a stage. The British, I'm told, have a saying, don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington. Is this something you've ever heard? No. Okay, older British people, I believe it's a Noel Coward song from like a hundred years ago. But don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington, is good advice, especially for girls. And girls are much more anxious than boys. So if a girl grows up, everything she says can be amplified. Every image of her is commented on. She never develops just the basic security to move from minute to minute and hour to hour and person to person. Like, because anything could blow up at any time. People are always judging you.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  So we have to give kids a normal human childhood if we expect them to develop normal human strengths. What can we do? Ah, good, because I was just noticing we are, our time is running out. Let's turn to the solutions. And here's my white pill. If we were talking about democracy and American democracy, I'd be all black pill. Like, I think we're, you know, I don't know how we get out of this in American democracy. But when we're talking about the teen mental health crisis, we can get out of it in a year or two. And they've already started in Britain. And here's what you do. Because it's all a series of collective action problems. The reason why fifth graders now are getting smartphones is because all the other fifth graders are getting them.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  The reason why my students can't quit Instagram and TikTok, even though they know it's wasting their time and making them anxious, is because everyone else is on it, so they have to be on it. So it's a, these are all collective action problems and the way you deal with a collective action problem is with collective action. So if we just have four clear norms, four norms, we can solve this. First norm, no smartphone till high school. If you want to, I send your kid out. What age is high school? Uh, in America, it's around age 14. So in Britain, the movement is 14, because I think you don't have quite the exact cutoff. Correct. We have a very clear, almost all schools, it's like, you know, eighth grade is still middle school, early puberty, but then ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th is high school, roughly age 15 to 18.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  Um, or, you know, 14, 15 to 18. So if, if we just delay smartphones till high school, give them a flip phone, let them communicate with each other and with you as the parents. But to give them the internet in their pockets so that when they're on the bus, they're not talking with other kids, they're flipping through stuff. At lunch, they're flipping through stuff. Um, so no smartphone till high school at the earliest. Two, no social media till 16. This one is going to be a little harder to get as a norm, but you know, if most of us parents would say like, no, you're not getting until 16, they can't say, but I'm the only one, I'm excluded. They have to say, you know, half the kids have it, but half don't. And then you say, well, you know, you're going to be in the half that don't. And before you know it, it'll be a lot more than half that don't.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  Uh, the third norm, phone-free schools, this is a must, and this one we can do this year, this year, like this September. Um, the teachers hate the phones, the principals hate the phones. I asked them, why don't you ban them? Why don't you have the kids lock them up? And they say, because some of the parents will freak out, they demand to be able to contact their kid anytime, during class, text them, anything. But most parents are now beginning to see, this is messing up our kids. So I'm urging, if, if you're listening to this, if you have kids in school and the school allows kids to have phones on them, please contact the principal of your kid's school and say, please go phone-free. It's, it's messing up their education, it's making them lonely, there's no good that comes from kids having phones in schools. Same thing with access to anything that can text. That's the third norm.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  The fourth norm is more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. Because you can't just take away the phones and the screens or you know, reduce it. You can't just like reduce it 80%, let's say. And then say, now sit in your room and look at the wall. Or you know, learn how to knit or something. What kids really want, I once read a, long ago, I read a book on like the secret life of dogs. Like what do dogs really want? The answer is each other, like they, they're pack animals. They really want to be with other dogs. And the same is true for kids. What do they really want to hang out with other kids? And so doing that on a video game isn't nearly as satisfying. But try to arrange this that your kids can really spend a lot of time with other kids unsupervised.

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  No adult telling them what to do, no adult resolving the conflicts. So if we do those four things, no smartphone till high school, no social media till 16, phone free schools, more independence, responsibility and free play in the real world. Do those four things, we will roll back the phone based childhood. This childhood only really came in around 2012. We've only had it in about 12 years. It wasn't like this in 2008, 2009. So it's not permanent, you know, we can change it and we have to change it. Because it is devastating our kids. There's no other explanation for the multinational mental health crisis. And with four norms of collective action, we can act collectively to reverse it. How's that for a white pill?

• 1:25:17Chris Williamson?

  I like it. And I also love the fact that you've inculcated, this new lexicon is just, it's swimming through you. It owns you now and it's staring out through your eyes.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  That's what happens when you write a book.

• 1:25:27Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to guess that there'll be a lot of parents listening who have got kids that may be going to be getting to that age. That probably kids get phones now, maybe like eight, nine, something like that, maybe even earlier, I suppose.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, they get their own iPad.

• 1:25:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you can't do, we don't have a God's eye view and we can't coordinate perfectly. Would a small scale solution be something like, try and speak to your child's friends, parents and say,

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  Bingo.

• 1:25:58Chris Williamson?

  Yep. Let's do a cartel, let's have this. I've, I listened to this phenomenal episode with this great psychologist and this very handsome British dude. And they said that we really need to do this. Why don't we, hey, do you have a watch or read the book, anxious generation? Can we get together? We can't do this nationally, but can we do this locally? Presumably that's a good. First time.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely. That's right. That's exactly the thing to do. And there are a number of organizations, almost all started by moms, who are helping. So if in the UK, I've only recently learned about delaysmartphones.org.uk and smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk. So those are two organizations that are trying to help parents do exactly that. Now, of course, if you simply know that you're in touch with the parents of your kid's best friends, which usually you are, you can just text them, you can just call them, you can just talk to them at school pickup or whatever. So yes, coordinating on a small scale will really, really make it easy for you and your, those other families to give your kids back a play-based childhood. The goal isn't just to delay the phones.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  The goal is to give them a play-based childhood. If the school can help and say, we're going phone-free, and if the principal could say, and parents, given the latest research, you know, I urge you to consider delaying, you know, try to at least wait till high school. If the school could give some guidance, that really helps set the norm. So this is why I'm so optimistic, because the revolution began in the UK last month. Literally, there was an article in The Guardian, you know, these two women, the women who run Smartphone Free Childhood. They, you know, had a WhatsApp group, there was a little publicity. Huge numbers of parents, like everyone, the parents hate this stuff. The parents are ready to act. And in Britain, they are rising up and taking matters into their own hands. And my hope is that, is that we're ready to pop in the United States,

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  that in March and April of 2024, everyone will really understand, like, you know, we know something's wrong here. Let's try to really put our finger on it, and then what do we do? What we do is enact these four norms.

• 1:28:02Chris Williamson?

  Hell, yeah. Jonathan Haidt, ladies and gentlemen. Jonathan, I love your work. I've been a fan of it for a very long time. It's great to finally have you on the show. You're officially a Modern Wisdom alumni now. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all your writing. And you did a really interesting writing process for this, where it was sort of very transparent in a way that is pretty untypical.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I started a Substack. I thought I would never do that because I don't have time to write. But I started a Substack at afterbabbel.com. And Zach Roush and I, we put out all our findings, all our research, all our graphs, invited comment, invited criticism. And now we're bringing in voices like Freya Indias and Ricky Schlot. We're bringing in Gen Z. So just please go to afterbabbel.com, sign up, subscribe to the Substack. The website for the book is anxiousgeneration.com. And of course, I hope you'll buy the book itself. Anxious Generation, you know, sold wherever books are sold. Oh, yeah. Jonathan, I really appreciate you. Thank you for today. Chris, what fun.

• 1:29:00Speaker 02

  Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today.

• 1:29:08Speaker 03

  Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.com today to save on your first order.

• 1:29:28Speaker 02

  1-800-CONTACTS.