The Anxious Generation

Do you have a singer? Is your brain too adult from being on Instagram? I like how we're going to be making jokes about that like it's not true Oh, I guess I'm stupid now because I can only think in dumb memes

Isn't that right Jonathan Haydn? I'm literally scrolling on TikTok right now. I'm not listening. I'm just Responding to a picture of the Hawk 2 a girl with the word mother as we speak we did do a whole episode where you describe what you think my internet Activity is I think that's what you think I do you You just have some like burner account with the avi of some like AI generated twink and you're just like going around

Commenting slutty bullshit all over the place. We should have never taught you what twink means What do you what do you have what do you have? All right Peter Michael? What do you know about the Anxious generation?

All I know is that if you're here to tell me that tiktok hasn't ruined zoomers brains. We're gonna be in a fight So the full title of this book is the Anxious generation Colin held a great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness Okay, this has been on the bestseller list for weeks It was at one point the number one New York Times bestselling book in the country. It's extremely popular It started a huge amount of discourse about what are the teens doing on their phones?

And I think that this is a good distillation of the argument that the phones are ruining the teens Well also though like boomers also fucked due to their phones with kids

It's resulting maybe in mental illness with boomers. They're storming the capital It's manifesting in different ways across generation exactly and maybe there's a particular concern when the brains are a little bit softer This is why I want to do like a tedious Preamble to this episode because I know this is this is one that people are clenched for It's like are we gonna say that like all of the phones are ruining all of the teens which seems really one dimensional

Or are we gonna say like the phones are fine and there's nothing to worry about which also seems really one dimensional No, we're gonna hit the perfect balance folks You've never heard it take so nuanced. So I'm gonna start with a series of totally contradictory statements

All of which are true. Okay, I think it is important to acknowledge that like the internet and smartphones are a Transformative technology that is changing society in all kinds of like genuinely very profound ways Mm-hmm, and it would be really fucking weird to act like that has no

Downsides. Yeah, it's also true that every previous technological Advancement has resulted in a moral panic about teenagers for our disco demolition episode I looked into like the moral panic around jukeboxes There's this idea that like kids were gonna be dancing too much and some of that will be

Interracial dancing and the parents freaked out. There was a moral panic about cars. I read a lot of really interesting literature for this episode about the moral panic about Radio plays Then of course we got TV then of course we got video games and it just non-stop whenever something new comes out It's like oh what's it gonna do to teens and adults lose their minds? It is also true that some of these technologies were bad

Yeah, now the jukebox thing was true. I read a really interesting article about these constant tech and teens moral panics that said It's it's actually quite rare to sort of circle back to the previous technology and

Understand what affected had so you know we we had this decade-long panic about kids watching too much TV And TV was gonna rot their brains and then we sort of moved into like the video games are gonna rot their brains But no one ever really like went back and was like well, wait a minute

What was the effect of TV? There's some argument that like maybe TV did have effects on childhood and adults that weren't great Like this shift from active entertainment to passive entertainment might have actually been bad and a lot of the stuff on TV Was garbage yeah, like I personally think that video games probably have had some negative effect on society I don't think it's like ruined a generation But like I'm concerned about how much violence and how much misogyny there is in video games

I don't think that's like a moral panic thing to talk about of course you don't Of course you don't another true thing to say about this is that John height is a reactionary centrist and a bad thinker He talked about his previous book the coddling of the American mind We found that like it wasn't just that we disagree with that book although we do it's that like the book was bad It had shoddy research it had anecdotes that were wildly mischaracterized

It was based on this idea that like the left has fallen for these four ideas that everybody believes and then like nobody actually believes them Yeah, and so I went into this book without a lot of trust Yeah, when the whole books about brains being bad you want the person who's reading it to have a good brain That should be one of the most important qualifiers and then the last Contradictory thing is that it really feels true that social media is fucking up our kids brains

However a lot of the actual evidence for this is anecdotal One of the articles that I read is by a researcher who's been looking into this for decades And she said this this guy came up to her after a talk and was like, you know

How dare you say that the field and the evidence is nuanced on this my daughter turned 13 I gave her a smartphone and you know within a year she had an eating disorder She was depressed and like it basically ruined her life and like how dare you say that this isn't based on anything

Yeah, that's called being 14 This is the thing is like at the same time that it's very possible to me that this is ruining teens brains Yeah, that period of life between like 11 and 15 is a time when teens pull away from their parents like this happens Every single teenager and parents oftentimes want something to blame Yeah, for this episode I talked to six teenagers across a wide range of ages and every single one of them said that like my parents

Blame my phone for everything. It's like you didn't clean your room because you're always on your phone You didn't do your homework because you're always on your phone. Yeah, and they're like well sometimes that's true But Sometimes I'm just a teenager who doesn't want to clean his room right people are coming to this with like either our experience

Which is like oh my god. Thank God. I didn't have a phone in high school Which is absolutely what I believe yeah, but also I didn't have a phone in high school So I don't really know what it would have been like to have a phone in high school But also if someone if an adult watched me in

1999 they would have been like thank God I didn't have age of empires to in high school because obviously this will ruin a human being You said they're like TV or like first-person shooters or like whatever the thing was when we were in high school Right that we spent way too much time doing when we should have been outside a lot of this conversation is playing out Based on anecdotes or things like my daughter got her phone and now she's sad something that is like you can't really prove

That's because of the phone when you're talking about like what's happening to teenagers the inputs are so vast and complicated that even though it feels very intuitive that like Tik Tok cannot be doing any good. Yeah, yeah, yeah It's really hard to parse out exactly what it's doing and so that doesn't mean phones are great for kids But it also it doesn't mean that phones are bad for kids I think if we're gonna have a conversation about this as a society

We need to get the evidence in front of us and actually like talk to experts and talk to teens and teachers and psychologists and like Really understand what we're looking at my purpose with this was like to try to genuinely understand Not just this book but like for myself like what do I think about the effect of the phones on the kids?

Right, so that is my purpose with this episode. Okay, and mine is to provide commentary I'm glad that you know your role so well and my and my role is to ignore you and continue speaking So as we always do on the show I want to start with the first few Paragraphs of the book okay dive in and we're gonna hear John Heights argument for Why the kids are in danger from their telephones?

Suppose that when your first child turned 10 a visionary billionaire whom you've never met chose her to join the first permanent human settlement on Mars Unbeknownst to you she had signed herself up for the mission because she loves outer space and besides all of her friends have signed up

She begs you to let her go She's going to Mars before saying no you agree to learn more you learn that the reason they're recruiting children is that they adapt better to the Unusual conditions of Mars than adults particularly the low gravity if children go through puberty and it's associated growth

Spurt on Mars their bodies will be permanently tailored to it unlike settlers who come over as adults at least that's the theory It's unknown whether Mars adapted children would be able to return to earth Did the planners take this into account?

Did they do any research on child safety at all as far as you can tell no so would you let her go of course not Couldn't agree more I Would not let my 10-year-old child go to Mars and I'll say it on a podcast This is by far like the best argument in the book He's basically saying that like we're doing the society-wide experiment where we're just giving

Teenagers this like brand new technology, right and we're just all kind of assuming. Oh, yeah, they'll probably be okay But like there there was no like FDA process to see what I mean is this harmful before we give it to every single teenager in the country at an Extremely vulnerable time in their life the FDA comparison is at because what social media really needs is more aggressive regulation Yes, if you just make a book called like we should regulate social media everyone will get mad at you

But I do feel like that's probably the conclusion that I'm gonna come away from some of this shit with height Then talks about like the sort of overall he sort of lays out the history of social media a little bit and he he's kind of Scoping the book what what he really wants to examine is there was a huge spike in

Mental disorders among teenagers between 2010 and 2015. Okay He says in the introduction that he's really zeroing in on this period because that's the period where you can essentially prove That social media is causing a spike in Teen depression anxiety and suicidality that is the argument in the book And so he says very clearly in this section that he's like we're not talking about the internet in general right because that was like roughly

Mid-2000s. We're not talking about video games. We're not talking about screen time and TV These are all kind of totally separate concerns. We're also not talking about what you might call the contemporary era of social media then right like the rise of the short video You're veering into spoiler territory, but no according to this section of the book He's not talking about the rise of these short video platforms like TikTok. He's also not talking about the effects of the pandemic

So we're just limiting ourselves to this relatively short period of time. Okay, this is like Farmville era Facebook. Yeah, I mean that's why he's saying we're not talking about that right? We're not gonna talk about like Friendster or Myspace or early Facebook. He's zeroing in on the Innovations that tech companies used in the mid-2000s to the 2010s which essentially culminated in

Social media being this uniquely harmful thing for kids. So he kind of lays out this timeline. Okay, you know We had the internet starting in the early 2000s We started to get universal broadband in you know, throughout the United States in like late 2000 We then have these like these little

Baby steps that all make social media much more harmful so in 2006 Facebook introduces the news feed in 2007 we get the introduction of the iPhone in 2009 we get the like and retweet buttons We then pretty quickly start getting these increasingly algorithmic ways of showing you on your news feed It's not just chronological anymore. That's around sort of 2008 to 2010 Yeah, he also mentions endless scrolling, right?

You can just kind of mindlessly scroll on these apps forever We get push notifications from these apps starting in 2009 Most smartphones start to have self-facing cameras in 2010 so you can start taking selfies We then get Instagram in 2010 in 2012 Facebook acquires Instagram and between 2011 and 2013

Instagram goes from 10 million user to 90 million users. Okay, where where in this timeline is damn Daniel I just need to situate myself relative to damn Daniel the culmination of this trend is that kids are now spending Roughly seven hours a day on various screens A third of teens say that they use social media quote almost constantly I mean, there's various surveys of like how many kids have a smartphone by the time they're 11 It's about 50 50 but then by the time they're 14

It's essentially every kid has one. Yeah, oh kids that have smartphones the vast majority also have various social media accounts It has taken a while to sort of get here But we really are at like almost Universal penetration of smartphones for both adults and children

I'd probably use a phrase other than universal penetration, but I hear you. I know as I said it I was like, okay, fuck this is Peter bait So that's like the timeline of all the tech innovations that brought us to this place What he's most concerned about is essentially kids who hit puberty right around this like 2008 to 2012 period when the tech companies were getting more sophisticated That's why you see rising rates of depression and anxiety among generations Z

But you don't see them in millennials and other and other age groups. Yeah That's why I'm doing great. Yes, why all of us are happy about our phones. We have a great relationship with our phones

I'm normal. So here is Where he draws the distinction between adult use of social media and teen use of social media Social media companies are making products that are useful for adults helping them to find information jobs friends love and sex Making shopping and political organizing more efficient and making life easier in a thousand ways Most of us would be happy to live in a world with no tobacco, but social media is far more valuable

Helpful and even beloved by many adults. So he does acknowledge that there are also drawbacks for adults, right?

He says that everything we talk about with teenagers is also happening with adults However adults do derive real benefits from social media Here is the section where he talks about the difference for kids The same is not true for miners while the reward seeking parts of the brain mature earlier the frontal cortex Essential for self-control delay of gratification and resistance Attemptation is not up to full capacity until the mid-twenties and preteens are at a particularly vulnerable point in

Development as they begin puberty They are often socially insecure easily swayed by peer pressure and easily lowered by any activity that seems to offer social validation We don't let preteens buy tobacco or alcohol or enter casinos The costs of using social media in particular are high for adolescents compared with adults while the benefits are minimal Let children grow up on earth first before sending them to Mars

So this is the core of the argument to the book that for adults there are some benefits of using social media for kids There are none. It is only a harmful influence. Yeah It it feels a little reductive although maybe like gesturing in the correct direction If the point is there are higher risks for children because of where their brains are sure I think that's pretty defensible acting like it's nothing but upside for adults and nothing but downside for kids

Just seems very reductive. This is the first glimpse of like I don't know that he's the best guide through this debate Right because I think you think of any kid who's like a member of a minority group, right?

Like a teenage gay kid somewhere with like homophobic parents social media might be like their only lifeline It's it's really easy to think that like there are some kids who derive some benefits from social media It's just sort of weird to say you know to compare it to like tobacco or gambling

Some of it's just like interacting with your friends. Yeah, I want to be clear when I was 14 years old a thing you would do is be on the phone with your Middle or high school girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever and just sit there silent Because you were both in your rooms with nothing to do and then every five minutes Someone's parent would pick up the phone to try to use it and we'd be like we're on the phone

And eventually someone would yell at you. Yeah, they'd be like I need to use the phone for a real purpose Not whatever the fuck this is that's what social interaction look like and I'm sorry if I'm if I look at like snapchat as Perhaps an improvement in some ways at least the first chapter of the book is where he walks us through the

Teen mental health crisis. Okay, so we're gonna want to a video clip because this chapter is mostly charts and I don't want to sit here and describe charts to you so

Just send you a link all right. Hold on. I'm getting a com comala HQ ad here We got to get you some ad blockers buddy comala asking me for even more money even though I've already donated You were on the you were on the white women for comala call last night, weren't you everyone is talking about the white women for Comala call last night you love those and my create they were like a hundred and fifty thousand people were on the call

And then at the end they were like it raised two million dollars and I'm like All right, so like seven bucks per white This is this is the redemption of white women that I was told the man we're recanceling white women Folks as a bit of a connoisseur. I'm here to tell you they are still no good So here is a Talk that he gave where he's kind of going over the evidence that teens are experiencing higher rates of depression anxiety and suicidality From the 90s through the 2000s

We're talking the millennial generation which many of you in this room are if you're born between 1981 and 1995 You're a millennial your mental health was actually fine come a little better than Jan X before you So all the numbers are going along they go up down up, you know Bips are moving along and then all of a sudden those numbers all start rising right around 2012 2013 and The level of the rise especially when for boys. It's a little slower

It's not such a sharp elbow. That's a different story But for girls it's a very sharp elbow and when we look at the younger teen girls ages 10 to 14 That's where we see the hugeest rises so That those younger girls they didn't used to be hospitalized for self-harm. It was very very rare But after 2012 the numbers go way up

For the older teen girls. I think it's like 70 80 percent increase for the younger teen girl That's more like 150 that's an America in Britain That you have data that 10 to 12 year old girls are up for almost three hundred eighty percent increase It's it's more than a more than a quadruple

Quadruple for self-harm. That's right. So Something happened that especially Well when girls got super connected and began sharing The idea of self-harming and the idea of anxiety became just much more widespread Not a funny not a funny or dunkable clip, but he's laying out the statistics

This is actually kind of compelling because Hospitalizations for self-harm are a useful metric in the same way that like Murder is a useful metric for crime because it's always reported as opposed to something that's like Self-reported and might be the result of people just having greater awareness of mental illness or anxiety or whatever Peter this transitions I feel like you're doing this on purpose this transitions extremely well into

The thing that I want to say I mean we're not going to go through the entire chapter of his book But I do want to complicate the picture that he's painting of youth mental health Okay, so he points out that rates of various markers of teen mental health are flat and then all of a sudden

They explode in 2010 And this is essentially the heart of the book that there's a strong correlation Between adoption of smartphones in roughly 2010 and this huge spike in Susadality self-harm all of these markers also in 2010 That's the core of the book is just these like two lines going up at the same time right But the adoption of smartphones was not the only thing that happened around 2010 The other big thing is the implementation of Obamacare huh?

So the percentage of kids in America who didn't have access to health insurance Had actually been steadily dropping from the 1990s But the implementation of the Affordable Care Act extended Medicaid coverage to a huge number of children And also increased access to private insurance plans

So what you find is that in 1997 around 14% of kids were uninsured and by 2016 that's down to 5% So around the same time for both adults and kids you start to see much more Medicaid coverage of mental health admissions To the hospital you see more diagnosis you see more prescriptions the just kind of overall access to mental health care treatment Really did significantly expand as part of the implementation of Obamacare

Another thing that happened was there was guidance from the US preventative services task force that recommended Screening adolescent girls for depression starting in 2011. Mm-hmm It also made it mandatory for insurance companies to cover it got it There was also guidance around the same time that instructed doctors to add suicidal ideation

As a cause of harm to medical records. Uh-huh I mean, this is another thing that he kind of glosses over that the numbers were actually rising of teen mental health problems Before smartphones So he's a little bit off on the timeline and he's a little bit off on the age groups because 10 to 14 year olds didn't actually have cell phones at that time That was actually much later So they don't actually match up perfectly and people in the medical system were already very concerned

About these steady rises in suicidality in self-harm especially for adolescent girls And so there's a really interesting study of medical records in New Jersey that notes throughout the entire state what looks like a huge increase in suicide attempts and Hospitalizations for self-harm There's no actual difference in the numbers It's just they're writing down suicidal ideation as like a sub cause of the injury

There's other things too in 2008. There's something called the mental health parody and addiction equality act Which improves access to mental health care for teens There's also the update of the DSM in 2013 which loosens a lot of diagnostic criteria This was just a period totally independent of smartphones where teens were just getting more access to the health care system in general And there was a lot more focus on getting teens the mental health help that they needed

So I don't want to say that like this whole thing is fake like the the fact that kids are feeling worse does appear to be real And there's lots of statistics on this that do not depend on things like hospitalizations or you know diagnoses of depression If you look at qualitative surveys of teens they're much more likely now to say I'm depressed or I'm anxious or I don't have a lot of friends Yeah, although I that's the stuff that I'm less persuaded by really yeah simply because self reports

Might be the result of a generation that's just much more aware of depression When I when I was a teenager people didn't talk about being depressed so it's pressly Yeah, you know people didn't talk about anxiety The idea that like this stuff is now in the mainstream vernacular and so you see teenagers self-diagnosing That's sort of what seems noisier to me than something like hospitalizations even if hospitalizations aren't a totally clean

metric yeah, well the thing is there's also surveys that don't ask teens like are you depressed But they'll say like you know how how many times a week do you feel lonely or right right there's there's one What was it there's one where they ask kids a bunch of questions and if if you answer of five out of nine of them Then they say you've experienced a major depressive episode And it's things like how often have you lost interest and become bored with most of the things you usually enjoy

I don't think that's the kind of thing that would necessarily depend on like the sort of expanding you know reducing stigma of depression anxiety and like the discourse around it So yeah, there are also surveys that find like how often are you anxious?

Yeah, there's also things that ask about like the the component parts of depression anxiety which also show rising numbers Right one of the really interesting things that they mentioned numerous times in this analysis of the suicidality data from New Jersey

All of these hospital records is they say look this doesn't mean that the kids aren't depressed What it actually means is that they were under diagnosed yeah for things like suicidal ideation before So what we might be looking at is teens are very depressed and we're now better at catching it It could also reflect an increase. Yeah, another thing that he doesn't mention is that kids are significantly less likely to kill themselves now

And they were in 1988. Hmm if you look at teen suicide rates Like every other form of like violent crime that we've talked about you know murders and wipes and child abuse It's like rises steadily in the 60s and 70s Plattoes in the 80s Drops really quickly in the 90s and then gradually starts rising again Right, that doesn't mean that it's not smartphones That doesn't mean that's not the internet right you could say well when people started at broadband internet in the 2000s

We started to have higher rates of teen suicides like this actually is congruent with his theory right and right Maybe something else was causing it in the 60s and 70s and cell phones are causing it now again It's not really debunking his theory

But it does show that there are there are many factors that affect teen suicide So anyway, I'm afraid that people are going to think like oh like Mike thinks that teen suicides don't matter or something or like Mike thinks that teen mental health is like not a problem in America That's not remotely what I'm saying What I'm saying is it's it's more tricky to measure these things than it seems

I think you've been clear and any haters are just anti-hops. Thank you. That's their bias This is this is the hateration and toleration that Mary J. Platto is talking about So okay, so that's just like a factual overview Michael the references you drop in any given episode is super Posterous It's because my brain stopped developing in like 1999 and so I I just look at my phone now and I watch

Aren't you buying videos? It's just the most contemporary reference on that it's all Haram Bay jokes. That's when my brain stopped He then turns to the causes of why teens are sad. Okay He says that a lot of the other Proposed explanations for the teen mental health crisis don't really make sense

And I kind of agree with this. I feel like there's the the sort of counter narrative to like the phones are making kids sad People will often say like climate change is making kids sad or like school shootings are making kids sad Honestly, that's always felt kind of like as one dimensional to me as the smartphones explanation So the first thing he talks about is the financial crisis that like well Maybe kids started getting sad in 2010 because like their dads were unemployed, right or their moms

But that doesn't really make sense timeline-wise because you have this massive increase in unemployment And then it steadily goes downward like the country has been getting better on like economic indicators ever since and yet teens start getting sad in 2010 and they keep getting sadder So if this was meaningfully related to economic conditions The teens would be doing better now than they were in 2010 and they're not You know, there's been other economic crashes, right?

In 2001 we had this huge economic crash and like we didn't see teen suicides bike Yeah, yeah the relationship between economic conditions and like teen mental health is just not an easy one-to-one thing He also mentions climate change This is another thing that you hear that you know kids are bummed out because the world is heating up around them Which it absolutely is but there isn't actually any evidence for this explanation

There's a lot of evidence that kids who experience hurricanes or wildfires have higher rates of PTSD and anxiety Depression suicide all that stuff is true those disasters are increasing due to climate change But it's kind of not enough to explain an entire generation

Right that is showing these higher rates of depression anxiety It also can't explain why girls seem to be suffering so much more than boys It can't really explain why we see these big spikes in 10 to 12 year old kids Right who are just like less aware of news events in general and

It's always seemed a little one-dimensional to me just because like we've had climate change as like a really major Political issue for like 20 to 30 years now and we haven't seen any spike in Mental illness among teens until recently until 2010 I wonder whether maybe not climate change

Specifically, but one of my sort of like general layperson guessing at what might be driving this sort of things is that like Social media bumbards you with things to be concerned about yeah Yeah, if you're 11 or 12 you might not process that on a analytical level very well

But you do get this like impression that things are bad right things are things are bad the future is bad This is also one of the weird things is that people oftentimes bring this up as a counterpoint or like a debunking of the Social media is making kids sad narrative, but then it's like okay. Well why are 12 year olds sad about climate change Oh, they're watching videos on tick talk about climate change all the time

Which then kind of brings you back to social media is making kids sad. I want to just throw another theory in a mix What about the rise of the tea party? This is the thing you could say you could say it's like the rise of kids watching anime Or like listening to kpop there's a million other things that happened between 2010 and 2020 I don't know why you're just throwing those out like it's a joke

Both of those wreak of mental illness to me the other thing that that is a little bit tricky for this is is the international comparisons He said you know people oftentimes point to school shootings and and kind of America's insane culture of guns But you also see

Increases in teen mental health problems in Canada and in some countries in Europe some not But it's like this is relatively broadly an international phenomenon If it was anything specific to America You wouldn't be seeing these massive increases especially in the English-speaking world

The the the fact that you see bigger increases in English-speaking countries then in like parts of western Europe where fewer people speak English is actually an argument for Social media that like people in Australia are consuming a lot of American news

Right, so maybe they are getting sad about American stuff even though it doesn't necessarily affect them What a shitty country we have that we're making Australian sad, you know But then so so after he goes over all of these things that don't explain Teen mental health right the financial crisis climate change etc He then basically says well, it has to be social media because nothing else explains it As like a methodology I don't think that like you've discarded two other

Explanations therefore your explanation is true is like a very robust way to do it Like you could easily say like well, it's not the financial crisis It's not climate change so it must be vaccines right like you have to actually offer evidence for your view

You can't just debunk other views one of the problems that I'm starting to see with this argument is that he's sort of reliant on your Prior intuition that this is true when yeah, he hasn't quite done the work, but again I still sort of agree because I

This makes intuitive sense. Yeah, but then what's so weird about this book is you know the first chapter is this very detailed overview Of the teen mental health crisis and a little bit about the causes like things that don't really explain it I was expecting then like okay, we've established the teens are sad

What is the evidence that the cell phones are making kids sad right he doesn't really do that? Oh he then moves on To this kind of sub argument in the book that kids are too protected in general right? This is the thing that he mentioned the coddling of the American mind He's fucking sneaking in the coddling of the American mind argument. This is three chapters But I'm kind of merge them. It's part two of the book is the decline of the play-based childhood

God damn it. And he says we've moved from a play-based to a phone-based childhood. I was just gonna complain about like generalists and The dangers of stepping out of your lane as an expert and as quickly as I was about to say it He just sort of turns back into his lane

Yeah, all right. Here's this here's this thing. I already wrote a stupid book about and large sections of this are true Right like it's a huge bummer that American kids don't walk and bike to school anymore You know people live in the suburbs were their way to spread out It's like he's kind of correct about this, but then you also start to see his weird penchant for kind of overstating harm

And and speaking about all of these trends in this kind of weird black and white way. So Here is a little section from chapter four Smart phones and other digital devices bring so many interesting experiences to children and adolescents that they cause a serious problem

They reduce interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience The child will spend many hours each day sitting in thrawled and motionless except for one finger while ignoring everything beyond the screen And then this is from a little bit later Our screen-based experiences less valuable than real life flesh and blood experiences when we're talking about children Who's brains evolved to expect certain kinds of experiences at certain ages?

Yes, a resounding yes Communicating by text supplemented by emojis is not going to develop the parts of the brain that are expecting To get tuned up during conversations supplemented by facial expressions changing vocal tones direct eye contact and body language We can't expect children and adolescents to develop adult-level real world social skills when their social interactions are largely happening in the virtual world

I know this doesn't sound totally wrong to me. It sounds Although it's sort of like this does feel a little more old man yelling at cloud than some of the prior arguments where it's like yes, the Mode of communication is changing if you imagine that it is

Replacing in full face-to-face interaction then there are real downsides But it's also just sort of its own thing right and them being good at it has benefits for them and we'll continue to have benefits for them in the future when for example there

You know talking to their colleagues on slack or whatever the fuck I also whether it's replacing in-person interactions is an empirical question Yes, in here he says their social interactions are largely happening in the virtual world That is straightforwardly not true

That there's these time-use surveys where they survey thousands of people and they're like what did you do today and like teens 15 to 18 spend more time with their friends than any other age when they're in school all day right kind of by definition They're spending eight hours a day with their friends. That's in-person time and again when I

Got out of school. I would sometimes hang out with friends for a couple hours And then I was just alone in my room for the remainder of the night That is what childhood used to be like There's also this thing. I think people say this about kids all the time that like kids don't know how to socialize anymore

Right kids are on their phones. They're not hanging out with their friends again This is an empirical question and I found various attempts to actually measure this There's a really interesting study where they looked at like teacher assessments of kids social skills like how well our kids socializing over time And they found no change like there just isn't evidence that like kids are worse at making small talk making friends

Mm-hmm. Maybe it's true, but we don't have any evidence of it right and for this I put out a call to just like people on blue sky Like hey, do you have kids between 12 and 19? Can I talk to them about their social media use? I also talked to a lot of parents. This is not I mean obviously It's not a remotely representative sample but like every single teenager that I talked to for this was like Yeah, if you're with your friend and he's on his phone the whole time it's fucking rude

And I'll be like hey get off your phone like just like adults do if you want to tell me that cruising tick tock can Fuck up your ability to think critically about like politics and cruising Instagram can skew your perceptions of reality That's very intuitive to me But the idea that like this is messing up kids communication skills It looks more to me like communication is evolving. Yeah, I mean when I was talking to my friends on aim

Sometimes my parents would be like why aren't you talking to them in the real world? And it's like well like this is what people do now I don't know what to tell you also if you're 14 years old you don't have a car You don't have any independent way to go see your friends again

You are stuck in the fucking house. Yeah, like I honestly I have an intuition that some of this stuff is an improvement Right because yeah, you get to socialize a little bit more than you were previously able to he also in the section talks about how The risk has been taken out of real life play and all of the risk has been moved online So we're going to watch a clip from one of my favorite podcasts

Here's this this is from maintenance phase. I swear to God So tell me that but what was your policy with your kids with your younger with all three on when you let them out like they could go out the door Get on a bicycle walk seven blocks to a friend's house without any adult with them. What do you remember what age or grade?

No, I don't I mean it's fine if you live in a good neighborhood that the problem is if you're if you know Childhood predators are real not really not anymore what I mean is well when you and I were growing up There were childhood predators out there in the physical world Approaching children and I think you said there you told the story about one who approached you when you were doing magic tricks So there were child predators out there. That's true

They're all on Instagram now. Oh Instagram and especially Instagram Makes it super easy for them to get in touch with with children. Yeah So the visit so this is my point I can summarize the whole book with the single sentence We have overprotected our kids in the real world and underprotected them online How would agree to that?

So that you know, yes child predators are terrible, but guess what we actually locked up most of them You know when you and I were growing up they weren't all locked up They were just eccentric who were exposing themselves remember flashing flashers what you know that doesn't happen anymore Because if you do that now you're going to jail for a long long time What's going on here? So we actually talked up most of the predators

And they know don't approach kids in a playground approach them on social media. I don't know if we are doing that Okay, I I'm sorry just Hearing two morons who are like wrong about these things but in opposite directions is insane to listen to It's this whole he has a whole chapter about this He basically says like yeah, we made this mistake in the 80s and 90s by saying they were child predators and kids We're gonna kidnap and like that resulted in all this like extra safety as I'm around kids

But now the strangers are online and the danger is real. Yeah, it's like wait So you're debunking the stranger danger panic and then just repeating the stranger danger panic But saying it's on the internet Joe you're invested in the wrong moral panic. I know that's what it is I was like pulling my fucking hair out this entire chapter also minor point, but we're Flasher's viewed is just like eccentric's I don't know what the fuck he's talking about with flashes

I mean this is clearly somebody who has not thought about the basic data behind a core argument of his book It's not that we used to have a bunch of predators Proulling the streets and now we don't have them anymore because we locked them all up It's that there were never predators roaming the streets in the first place But also the the idea that we locked up all the predators

Conflicts with his other thesis that they all went online. I just don't get what he's saying right exactly And also anyone that this was where I mean I really was doing my best with this book But this was where I lost any confidence like a person who talks about the threats to children as like strangers If they do not know rather than their parents their son of a coach

They're fucking. Yeah, anyone who speaks like this is just not a serious person. Yeah, the minute you look at actual data on Child online exploitation It is almost exclusively someone they fucking know

It is like your boyfriend posting revenge porn. It is your fucking soccer coach DMing you there's a really interesting survey of 2500 Law enforcement agencies so they get all of the records of all of the child exploitation cases and in only 8.5% of cases was the perpetrator someone they met online right the patterns of online exploitation

Match mirror perfectly the patterns of offline exploitation. Yeah, this thing of like people meeting kids online and like you know Kidnapping them or whatever this is a thing that happens just like you know kids do get kidnapped by strangers and murdered

It's extremely rare right and in the actual literature There's a lot of really heartbreaking stuff in the literature that this this whole kind of thing of Predators will like you know pretend to be a 15 year old boy and then like trick you into getting nudes Whatever this generally doesn't happen

Most of the kids who actually do get victimized by these kind of online predators in the rare cases where it does happen It's mostly kids in like foster care or kids in traumatized situations kids who've experienced abuse whose parents are around

It's basically kids who get no positive attention at all and all of a sudden there's somebody online Who's like wow you look really pretty right someone who's like notably and uniquely vulnerable to that sort of situation Exactly, it's the same vulnerabilities that we see in offline Exploitation right and it's kids who often times the kids know that this guy's 40 years old They know that they're meeting for sex, but they think it's a relationship because the guys fucking line to them being like

Oh, I really love you blah blah blah. That's the deception that's going on And so when when you find this kind of exploitation in the real world It is almost always along the fault lines of existing vulnerabilities and the way to solve it is to address those vulnerabilities right God hey

Sorry my brain got very scrambled by listening to those two I know I know I don't think I've ever like sat down and listened to or watch a full episode of I'm joking but I've seen clips or whatever and uh the idea that like young people are listening to shit like this being like This is intellectual

I know That's my moral panic the other reason I wanted to watch this is because Listening to John Hyte it it does just sound like a guy who's like saying stuff that this book is not remotely rigorous It's actually really shocking to me that it's it's had such an impact

I think mostly because it's telling people something that they want to believe yeah, and I already believe I interviewed more Teenagers for this I interviewed more experts for this and I interviewed more teachers and researchers for this episode Then he interviewed for his book

As far as I can tell in the text of the book he interviewed one actual teenager about what they do on their phone He does not appear to have engaged with any researchers other than the one that he's already collaborated with He hasn't spoken to any teachers about what it's like in their classrooms

He didn't speak to any psychologists. It's so annoying that I'm doing a Unaproximately as rigorous episode about Eric Adams Every evening I have two drinks and then I watch Eric Adams clips and start outlining a books could kill bonus episode Again, I do think that there needs to be a societal conversation about this But I do not think this is the person to be leading this conversation This is the kind of thing where I feel like the book got popular because it's just giving

Intellectual heft or the appearance of intellectual heft to this intuition that we all have yeah, yeah, so that you can say Hey Fones are fucking your kids up and then everyone's like yeah, definitely and you get to be like there's a book about it And yeah, that's how I know this is real and serious. Yeah, I agree that the decline of of outdoor play is bad It's just that he's super reductive about what exactly is good and what exactly is bad and what we should be doing right

It's just lazy honestly. It's just like yeah, yeah, I don't mean to be fucking snooty But it's just it's just someone who's not intellectually curious it's someone who's just like pushing Really simple narrative and isn't that interested in identifying a supporting set of evidence

Do you want to do you want to get snooty and talk about the evidence? Yeah, it's snooved it up. Yeah, so as I said I don't really have a dedicated chapter or anything of just the evidence on how kids are harmed by the smartphones He sort of just takes it for granted in the book that this is obvious and this is happening So the book is more about like how smartphones harm kids and why smartphones harm kids

He's much clearer on his sub stack. He has entire sub stack and a Google doc of all existing literature Okay on this subject and he's very Very straightforward about the fact that he believes smartphones are the cause of the mental health crisis among teenagers He's not like there's an association that we should look into right right a blog post called

Social media is a major cause of the mental illness epidemic in teen girls. Here's the evidence So when I went into this episode I thought it was just gonna be really obvious that like if you look at the data Kids who use smartphones more are more depressed and kids who use smartphones less are less depressed And it would be really clear and then me and you would have this this like detailed conversation of like correlation versus causation

And like what does this mean right like that? That's what I was expecting to get into in this episode But it turns out that's not even true. So this is from a 2020 Summary of like what have we learned about teens and internet social media everything in the last 10 years

And I think it's a good summary. It's in kind of academic ease So I had to condense it a little bit, but this is a good overview small association still exist as adolescents who report more depressive symptoms Also tend to report spending more time online

However a review of meta analyses recent large scale pre-registered studies and daily assessments of digital technology usage Show that associations between time online and internalizing symptoms are often a mixed between positive Negative and null findings Be when present likely too small to translate into meaningful effects and see typically not distinguishable in terms of likely cause and effect

Essentially the research is all over the place at just the most basic level our kids who are on their phones less happy than kids who are not on their phones We can't even really say anything definitive and to the extent that we do find associations They're extremely small and another thing that you find in the literature is This turns out to be like remarkably difficult to study. Huh, okay

So the first problem is how much are kids on their phones? Uh-huh The vast majority of the data on this is from these huge surveys that they give to like tens of thousands of kids every year Do you remember these you'd like go to home room and then you'd have a questionnaire with like 300 questions on it And it would be like how how much do you do drugs how much do you drink how much money do your parents earn?

It would just ask you like a million things. I have absolutely no recollection of this Not I used to lie on them because I thought it was funny. I would just fill out like yes, coke

Yes, I impregnated somebody last week now now. I'm upset. Do I have I completely lost like a memory of something that happened to me many times or did they just not they didn't even bother with my school The way this works is you give these surveys to tens of thousands of kids a year and then you make the data available and people can Come through it for all kinds of stuff right there

There it's hundreds of questions many of them and so you can correlate like kids with divorced parents are more likely to be left-handed or like whatever the fuck right?

That's why they get divorced. Yeah And so in these data dumps they they ask kids about their social media usage and they add they have all kinds of questions about their mental health But the problem is that people of all ages are terrible at estimating how much time they spend online Ah, yeah So like if I ask you yesterday how many hours did you spend using like looking at a screen not related to work?

24 That's probably true might actually be easier with you because you're always online every every week I get that screen time notification Because I forget to shut it off and every week I'm like ah, oh my god That's why I don't have mine on because I genuinely don't want to know you know I don't either but I immediately forget about it as soon as it goes away Because of the brain poisoning that the screen does so so there are studies where they like put things on people's phones

And then you know later on they ask them how often are you on your phone and then they compare like actual data versus what people say And they're off by like 30 40 50 percent We just don't really know how much kids are on their phones and like what they're doing

There's also one of the other problem is they now because the these studies are updated every year with like new You know they weren't asking kids about smartphones in like 2002 obviously because they didn't exist yet So they're always updating these things with new technology Starting in 2013 they did start asking kids like how often are you on on social media?

Right, this is like the rise of Facebook and Instagram is like a big deal in teenagers lives But the frequency Responses so kids were asked how often are you on social media?

The choices were a few times a year One sort twice a month at least once a week or almost every day Okay, so no data no data is being collected Yeah, so basically every kid put almost every day because the kids were already by that point on social media of course All the time to what 80 year old was like how many times a year Are you online?

My boomer parents were like checking their email once a day in 2013 for sure There's also like the earliest studies on this so we we start getting these like kids are on their phones on their satire studies in 2018 And a lot of them are using data From this time where they weren't even asking kids about social media use they weren't differentiating between different types of Like internet devices so they would just ask how many hours a day are you on a screen?

Uh-huh, and then it would say like this includes Xbox and Facebook and email right one of the main things that I learned from talking to researchers Over the last month is that this whole concept of screen time is just such fucking garbage

Screen time includes like reading you know going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and also includes like watching pornography Like it just is not useful to talk about screen time as being harmful But most of the data that we have about kids is just how much are you on your screens? I guess Wikipedia versus porn is the strongest economy you can make but like But if you're trying to figure out what's rotting the kids brains?

Yeah, you would need to separate out every app every different use of every different app etc It becomes there's just so much going on

There are so many different variables that to call it screen time. Yeah is just sort of clearly not great There's also something very funny I felt really old when I was speaking to the teens for this that all of them said that Messages like the text message app that we use is like what they use to communicate with old people and actual kids always communicate on snapchat or Instagram through DMs Whatever get a job get a job

But this is the thing so even if you're measuring how many hours a day are you on Instagram a lot of that's just like texting with their friends Yeah, that's not actually you know looking at images of for example like women that are potentially going to give you an eating disorder Like the kinds of things that we associate with social media harm Even if you're measuring how much time they're on Instagram that doesn't necessarily Account for that right?

So that's kind of the first problem with these big quantitative data dump studies The second problem is something that I've become so fucking radicalized on It's very easy to design these studies to get the result that you want

You can pick different statistical controls. I saw so many fucking weird statistical controls in these things You can determine like what you're measuring So one thing is a lot of studies use these broad umbrella terms of like well-being How much does being on your phone affect your well-being?

I'll take they'll pick sort of ten or fifteen questions from these big data sets And they'll say like oh, this is well-being or sometimes they call it like life satisfaction But it's like totally arbitrary what you put in those things and with the kinds of statistical software that people use now It's really easy to be like okay if I control for income What does this say about cell phones? Oh, it says cell phones are fine

Uh, what if I control for income and education? Oh, it says cell phones are bad. Okay. I'll control for those two things And all of these statistical decisions kind of look defensible in a vacuum

But when people publish papers on this they don't publish okay. Here's all of the other Models that we ran here's all of the other statistical techniques that we used for all we know They're trying a thousand things and they're picking the one that gives the result that they want So big picture the data sucks and

And when you look at what we do have there's no clear answers. There's no clear answer and Even I like I think this whole like exercise of combing through fucking data sets and looking for associations is such bullshit The the one that john height really like steaks his reputation on he works with this researcher named gene twenge Yeah, I reached out to try to have a phone call with She didn't want to do that, but we did email back and forth about some methodology stuff

Mm-hmm john height is working with her and they get into this big fight with these other two researchers named Amy Orbin and Andrew Shabilsky Both of whom I also interviewed and they have this big long kind of methodology years long methodology fight

About how to measure these things and it sort of culminates in Orbin and Shabilsky Running this like huge meta analysis where they basically ran a bunch of different scenarios Like if you control for this if you didn't control for this they run some like three million different permutations And they find that in essentially all of them except for a few you don't find an association between social media and

depressive symptoms. It's a sort of like how a polytrady son finds the golden path I mean basically you're like I was gonna say a doctor strange who does like 16 million scenarios and only two of them have us meeting Thanos It's basically they're like in a tiny Minority of scenarios like statistical analyses. Do you find any association and when you do find an association It's a really small effect. It's they said it's roughly the same as the effect of kids who eat potatoes

Like both the impressive symptoms and kids who are on their smartphone. You have to control for Britishness as well there So there's this one study that sort of aims to like end the debate They're like look we barely find an association when we do it's so underpowered that it's like on par with eating potatoes

Which is basically meaningless and then John Hyatt and Gene Twenge then publish this paper. They're like no We reran it with different controls and we actually found a much larger effect Mm-hmm in this what they seem to think is this sort of culminating work on this like okay We finally ended the debate they have this table with all of these different effects and it's like how much do various things affect

Teen depression right and they have social media is like way higher. It's like a point two correlation Which in any other? Yeah study is like considered very weak What if you combine that with the effective eating potatoes then where are we?

This is a thing so they're they're trying to be transparent about like how big the effect of social media is But even in this like allegedly argument ending study the effect of social media is still smaller than kids who eat breakfast every day Okay, and and when you sort of circle back to these statistics that Hyatt was referencing in terms of like Hospitalizations for self-harm, right?

That's where like in the UK he was talking about a 400% increase nearly Yeah, I guess the point being if that flows directly from Social media use then surely you can produce more than the The highest liver of a percentage change here. Yes, exactly and something that is not on par with Something like eating breakfast where we know that that's reflecting other things right?

It's probably people whose parents tend to be at home and have time. Yeah a little more family stability Etc Yeah, it's like it's a reflection of other things and then if we're then putting it on par with like kids to eat breakfast That it also compares it to kids to eat fruit It's like barely more important than kids eat fruit every day. It's like okay

Well if those we can all acknowledge that like eating breakfast. That's not what's causing right the depression Right, it's obviously a cluster of other things Well, then maybe social media is a cluster of other things too I'm just like I'm so sick of these studies where they're just like oh

We found this correlation between this thing and that thing I just don't think that you actually understand Complex social phenomena this way like through these averages Uh-huh So I really was planning on going much deeper into the quantitative debate and like the methodology fight

But in the end you realize that the debate is between the academic consensus Which is that there's essentially no connection at all and on the other side John Height and Jean Twingay who say that there's an extremely small effect Which does not prove cause and is highly contingent on like a very specific set of parameters. Yeah There really isn't that much of a debate like there's not that much to go into everybody agrees

That we're not really looking at something strong and obvious here. Right. There's also like if if if the argument is that social media causes

Kids to feel depressed. We should be able to capture that in other ways. Yeah So one of the things people start doing in the 2010s is they start doing longitudinal studies Which is like you you track the same people over time right if cell phones are causing kids to be depressed Then we would would find like kids who get cell phones at age 11 are going to be depressed earlier Right then kids who get cell phones at 13 and these don't really find anything most of the longitudinal studies

Don't actually find like kids are fine and then they start using their phones and then they're depressed The majority of them actually find the opposite effect that if you follow kids who are depressed You find them over time using smartphones more. Uh-huh

That doesn't mean that it's like irrelevant right? I mean if if smartphones are something that makes depressed kids more depressed That's something that like we need to take seriously like that's not a null result, right But we don't see this kind of Tobacco metaphor of like I was fine and then I got a phone and now I'm sad right? That's not really something that shows up in the longitudinal data We also have diary data where people write down like every day How is your mood and then oftentimes?

I'll either have like a tracker on their phone for like how much of the using social media or they'll also write down like how much was I on social media today and you don't find associations between on days when I was on social media I was more depressed in the book John Height kind of

Attempts to show that social media is causing mental health So one of the studies that he mentions numerous times is uh experiment at the University of Pennsylvania where they got 143 undergraduates and for half of them they told them to only check Facebook snapchat and Instagram 10 minutes a day They limited them to like very little social media use and after a month the undergraduates were happier

They were less depressed and less lonely. Okay, so he's like all right. If you stop using social media

You're happier. Yeah, I mean this is obviously like a very small study and you know Undergraduates are not a remotely represent sample but the much bigger problem is that 80% of the Participants in the study dropped out before them The researchers say like yeah, we probably shouldn't have given them extra credit at the beginning of the study We probably shouldn't wait it incredible the end of the study incredible These are the people who believe that they know what's best for children

And also I think people who dropped out of the study like people who can't hack it are probably the people who are like less happy Right like the only people who are gonna stick with it are like yeah This is working really well to not be on social media. So I'm gonna stay with this study So it's like well, yeah for some people they're gonna be happier But if 80% of people drop out you're basically

Removing all of the people for whom this did nothing. Yeah another argument that he makes is that it's not that it's making Individuals sad directly, but it's destroyed the social environment So a school where like everybody has a smartphone is an environment where it's harder to make friends It's easier to be lonely

Etc. I actually find this relatively interesting as a hypothesis however There's also no real evidence for it either right, but this is one of the theories that he gives for causality and this is One of the studies that he uses as evidence for this So let me send you this There is one small but important class of experiments that does measure group level effects by asking How does a whole community change when social media suddenly becomes much more available in that community?

For example one study took advantage of the fact that Facebook was originally offered only to students at a small number of colleges As a company expanded to new colleges did mental health change in the following year or two with those institutions compared with colleges where students did not yet have access to Facebook Yes, it got worse with bigger effects on women

The authors found that the rollout of Facebook at a college increased symptoms of poor mental health Especially depression and led to increased utilization of mental health care services So this is like a natural experiment remember how Facebook rolled out to different colleges? I do remember and I was gonna say I I was in college when this shit was happening so like I had a vague recollection of the Facebook rollout

Are you sad? Is that what you're sad? I do feel like it made me sad I don't know because I like it's hard to explain how Minor of a cultural phenomenon it was at the time like it was popular, you know But it wasn't it wasn't something that was like a big part of anyone's life So this is another study that is like a little bit implausible It basically shows that as Facebook rolled out to different colleges those colleges experienced almost a one standard deviation

Increase in mental health problems. So a huge effect they say it's 22% as serious like as big of a deal as losing your job Just getting Facebook at your college when Facebook rolled out It was literally just like you have a profile and people can look at it. Yes. Thank you So there's a very good critique of this study written by an economist named David Stein Who's like this does not hold up for like two fucking seconds?

So remember at the beginning of the book height says we're talking about Instagram we're talking about like social media, you know likes retweets doom scrolling algorithmic feeds Facebook rolled out to colleges in 2004 it was still called the Facebook at the time right there was no news feed There were no smartphones and when you got it It was like it wasn't even the second most popular social media This was the time of Friendster and Myspace yeah, yeah

This structure is is so harmful to mental health that you experience almost a one standard deviation increase in mental health problems at all these campuses Why didn't Friendster and Myspace have any effect? Doesn't this fuck with his timeline of like this all really got kicked off in 2010 This is another thing that he does throughout the book where he he does this very kind of responsible sounding Scoping exercise in the introduction

He's like we're not talking about things before 2010 or the internet. We're not talking about porn We're not talking about video games But then throughout the book he cite studies that were done way before 2010 He talks about video games. He talks about pornography He talks about broadband internet. He has an entire chapter about boys Even though the mental health effects on boys are much more modest and his own correlations Don't show any link between social media and mental health for boys

He has a whole section where he talks about the pandemic. Are we gonna talk about the the boys thing because it is I it's wild to think that we're looking at like massive devestating impacts on young girls and boys are just like scrolling snapchat like just just doing great

Yeah, he doesn't I mean he he does have a chapter about girls and he has a chapter about boys And he attempts to sort of explain why it's so bad for girls I mean one of the arguments that he uses is like they're more prone to predators Which we already established isn't true

Yeah, he also says that a big part of it is a cyber bullying for girls Which with the minute you dig into the literature is also it's not as much of an urban legend as the sexual predator stuff But it is much more overblown than it really is among kids So bullying has been going down both online and offline bullying has been going down steadily for the last 20 years And so if the internet was a big driver of bullying we would see huge increases as all these kids moved online

Uh-huh one of the most interesting conversations I had for this was with a researcher named Emily Weinstein who wrote a very good book called behind their screens Where she took the radical step of actually talking to teenagers about the way that they use their phones and whether or not

That is helping or harming their mental health and she said like yeah when you talk to teenagers about their mental health They don't cite cyber bullying all that much it does come up for some kids But in general it's a lot more kind of social anxiety of like specific things driven by the internet So one thing she mentioned was that like you know, maybe you you go on Venmo and you see that like one friend Venmo to another friend for like movie tickets

And you're like, are they seeing a movie without me right or you'll go on Instagram and you'll see photos of a party that you weren't invited to yeah Or you're somebody uploads a photo of you, but they don't tag you right or like the kids that I talked you mentioned this too

That sometimes somebody will upload it like a really bad photo of you And you're sort of like did they do that on purpose like to make fun of me or to make me look bad or is it just you know They don't think I look bad in the photo or it's kind of an honest mistake and then it's like oh well Should I write them and say something but then that kind of starts all this drama or like should I just ignore it like do I like it?

Do I not like it she said one of the things that that really has changed qualitatively in the experience of teenagers is you know People are so concerned when you're that age of like where do I fit in the social hierarchy and now there's just so much more Information who else is hanging out what are the parties that I wasn't invited to like when I was in high school There were thousands of parties I wasn't invited to but I know without most of them now you find out on Monday

And you're like I'm a big fucking loser. Yeah Exactly and it's like the the forms of social exclusion that people can use whether it's deliberate or not Whether it's bullying or not people you know You can just watch people do things and have fun without you

And I do actually think that it's like worth reckoning with as an as an actual change and again I continue to be Intuitively in agreement with the with the idea that all of this social media use it just has to have some negative impact On children like there's just no way it doesn't it's too It's too much of a sort of sea change And how we engage with the world to not have a big impact on mental health in at least different areas right And to me that that resonates as like a very

Simple realistic way that it would impact the average person where like I think everyone has had some experience Where like you're a teenager and you find out your friends hung out without you Yeah, and you're trying to figure out was it intentional was it not do they just not care are they yeah Are they like very actively excluding me and yeah if they were just like posting pictures of it Maybe that intensifies those feelings right and I gotta say like the this issue really opened up for me

And I feel like I came to a more productive way to think about it after I started reading the qualitative studies So Emily Weinstein has a really fascinating article where she just interviewed 30 kids who tried to kill themselves These were kids who attempted suicide and survived she speaks to them after this and talks about their relationship with social media So here is an excerpt from that study

She calls this kid p24 in the study, but we're gonna call him scott. This is a 15 year old boy Scott explained that there are challenges associated with social media, but quote there are still so many pros Among key benefits for him social media is an important source of connection and self-expression He also values opportunities to digitally seek receive and offer social support Scott appreciates that he can reach others fast when struggles arise

Being able to talk to multiple people means he can hear different perspectives and get better insight Scott also values using social media to share his artwork connect with other artists and get feedback and inspiration Yet he describes downsides too quote you can get ignored or you get less feedback than you hoped it makes me insecure unquote this feeling of insecurity intersects with metrics related stress for example not getting enough likes on his posts

And unmet friendship expectations when his friends are unresponsive or fail to offer the support he hoped for Self-expression can be helpful to quote clear my mind and reset my thoughts unquote But can cause problems because quote I get angry. I say words that I don't really mean and so is social media good for kids?

Yes, is social media bad for kids? Yes Yeah, that's the sort of intuition I have it just can't be untrue that there are downsides It can't be untrue that there are upsides the question like the fundamental question is can we suss these out and is there anything to be done yes, and that's a much more complicated question than like

Our phones destroying the children. Yeah, I just think that like our phones good or our phones bad is just an insipid way to look at this The the kind of conclusion that I came to from reading like studies of various methodologies It's just like there are some kids for whom

Being on their phone is deadly fucking poison. It's so bad. Yeah, yeah Right there are also some kids but it's good for that really benefit from the fact that they can like keep in touch with old friends I talked to one girl who just moved and her new school is like on zoom or it's like only one day in class And social media is the only way that she keeps in touch with her old friends like three states away And that's like a really important lifeline for her

I once had a best friend who moved 20 minutes away and we just straight up never talked again Exactly like there's it It just kind of depends on the kids and it's interesting when there are some surveys of kids where kids actually say this

So in the infamous like leaked internal Facebook polls where they talked to their users about like how much is is Facebook and Instagram Harming you about 20% of kids said I feel worse when I use Instagram and that appears to be the high watermark I mean some kids feel worse when they use Instagram

And so they just don't use Instagram and it doesn't really have like a you know a systematic effect on their mental health Some kids do some kids can't stop themselves There's also a Pew poll where they ask kids how you know how his social media affected your mental health about 9% of kids say that it's been really bad for their mental health and about 40% of kids say that it's been good for their mental health Yeah, and 40% say that it hasn't really had any effect at all Yeah

And I think that's like a way to look at it that there's some percentage of kids for whom this is really bad And they probably shouldn't be on their phones or they should have them limited or something But we don't know how big of a percentage that is it's hard to identify those kids in advance And another thing that Emily Weinstein told me which I think is really important is that the harm of Social media is very different for different kids. So she said for some kids

It's just like there it keeps them up late. Yeah, it doesn't really matter what they're looking at

But it's like the adrenaline of social media just keeps them up and they don't get sleep kids. I'm right there with you Yeah, yeah, this is why I love blue sky because at midnight there just aren't any more posts But then for other kids the thing that is harming them is going to be like radicalizing content for other kids It's just going to be kind of like Translakes scrolling on TikTok just kind of mindlessly scrolling More compulsive use right there with their friends

But they can't stop themselves from reaching from their phones for other kids It's going to be eating disorders again our phones bad or our phones good is just not a useful way to think about this Yeah, I mean you see some Outputs of like what must be Social media sort of social contagion or whatever the fuck they want to call it where it's like women in their 20s Are getting Botox at crazy rates, right?

And you're like this feels like the output of Instagram. Yeah That as a quote unquote harm can be sort of isolated, right? And separated out from like this other person is getting radicalized by right wing YouTube And this other person is being kept up like these are all very separate problems problems. Yes

Yeah, but you know are they a single problem? I think the answer to that is no It's so much easier to talk about this and think about this with older Technologies so in his chapter about boys Height has a whole section on video games and he's like you know

I was originally gonna say that video games are just bad for boys But when you look at the literature it turns out for some people it actually improves their hand-dike Ornation yeah for some it's like a social lifeline dude's rock baby It's true that if you think about it Most people play the game's and it just doesn't have that much of a role in their life For some people video games can be a real like social thing or they get into e-sports or whatever

Like it can be really wholesome. Yeah, there's some kids. It's really fucking bad for them He says around 7% of kids who play video games have like a really toxic relationship with them And they get addicted and it's compulsive and they do it too much And it's sort of like well, yeah, that's probably the same with TV Right, if you look at previous Technologies of you know the automobile has also had great benefits for human society and huge drawbacks

And those just all kind of exist at the same time and it's it's like only with social media that people want this like really one dimensional explanation right and it just hasn't really been true with any previous technological

Advances so he looks at video games and basically gives them the nuance treatment that he should be giving social media Which is what his whole fucking books about it's also very funny He has like a little debunker where he's like well, what about the benefits of social media?

And then he's like well a lot of that's based on self-reported data And a lot of the definitions aren't actually clear with what they're saying and a lot of it's correlational and it's like John That's the problem with all of the data and research all the fucking data for the benefits and the drawbacks

It's all like it's just really hard to say anything definitive. I'm probably being speaking a little too broadly here But it probably it almost makes no sense that all of the benefits have data problems

And none of the stuff about drawbacks has data problems that those two things can't quite sit side by side So I do think this book is maybe a kind of airport book that we haven't really talked about before where it's a book that is Diagnosing a real problem and Investigating a real social phenomenon But that is written by a fundamentally unserious person. Yeah, and so the next section of the book the last section of the book

Is the solutions. He's very clear about the fact that these will have large and major and rapid effects So he says if most of the parents and schools in a community were to enact all four of these recommendations I believe they would see substantial improvements in adolescent mental health within two years Okay, so these are big effective changes. They are one no smartphones before high school Two no social media before 16 okay three phone free schools

For far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. I have to say there's nothing to outlandish in there Yeah within the context of this book all four of these honestly sound fine to me. Yeah It's interesting that in a book that is kind of written by this reactionary centrist guy He comes to I think pretty justified conclusions. Yeah, but then one of the weird paradoxes of this book In the same way that we started out by saying all of these kind of fundamentally contradictory statements

All of these solutions. I think are basically fine. Although I would quibble with things like no smartphones before high school No social media before 16. I think parents are in a better position to yeah That's a little aggressive. You know your kid might be in a position where it's it's appropriate for them earlier But kind of like he sort of admits this he's like yeah, whatever like also parents can be flexible. It's not that big of a deal Yeah, but even though I agree

Roughly with all four of these recommendations. This is by far the worst section of the book

Oh, and so once we get into these solutions sections. This is the final third of the book He separates the Solutions into what companies can do what governments can do what schools can do and what parents can do So we're going to start with what governments and tech companies can do to solve this problem His core recommendation is to raise the age of internet adulthood to 16 He points out that you know We now have this thing of like you must be 13 to use Instagram or whatever

But think you literally just take a box. You're like yes I'm 13 or if it's a porn side or whatever you tick the I'm 18 box But there's no actual verification So he says that we should basically bump this up to 16 He says that's not necessarily for like using the internet like it's fine for kids to be on the internet like they're Whatever using Wikipedia to write essays for school. That's all fine

But as far as setting up social media accounts. Uh-huh. We should raise the age from 13 to 16 This basically would involve some way of verifying Kids ages. Yeah, if you raise it to 16 There's just going to be a box that says are you 16 and you take the box?

What if when you create an Instagram account you get a message from someone asking you for a pick and then You send the pick and they judge whether or not you look like you're Under 16 that's the thing I think this is actually like kind of interesting as a social problem

Where I think most people would agree that like yeah We really nice if we could verify that like fucking 10-year-olds and 11-year-olds are not on Instagram I think that's like a perfectly reasonable thing to be concerned about But how do you get there right he he proposes a couple like solutions? He says one option is using a network of people to vouch for each other So some sort of like peer-to-peer thing like yes, this person is over 13

He says issuing a blockchain token to anyone who is verified once by a reliable method. Yeah I don't know what that means. I stopped reading it blockchain No, no, no, no, let's let's drill down on that What if at birth you are assigned a Bitcoin another option is using biometrics to establish identity Yeah, no, this is this is great. We got blockchain biometrics biometrics I like how immediately his solutions are drastically more dangerous than the existing problem

He says he also has this kind of like weird cock-a-mamae thing. He says Clear a company known for rapid identity verification in airports is now used as a quick way for its clients who previously verified their age

To prove that they are old enough to buy alcohol at stadium events. That's what you want Let's make clear the most powerful entity on error So essentially like whether or not you think that this thing of raising the internet age to 16 is a good idea or not It feels like almost like a moot point to me just because the way of doing it would be

More problematic than the system we have now. Yeah, or at least like introduce new variables that no one really understands or does had a control He kind of admits this he just says there's not at present any perfect way of implementing a universal age check There is no method that could be applied to everyone who comes to a site in a way that's perfectly reliable and raises no privacy or civil liberties objections Right He also the only other kind of like specific thing that he mentions is

There there's various legal efforts to do something along these lines The closest thing we have in America is this thing called the kids online safety act or kosa I think one of the the real problems with this book is because he's a reactionary centrist and like a both sides guy

He can't look at a law like this and notice that it's just a very obvious Republican moral panic law Right, I was gonna say isn't coke kosa is the law that is like Okay, I'm trying to well, but yeah, I'm not gonna remember accurately what it's about I just don't remember that there's like huge civil libertarian objections and concerns from the LGBTQ community

This is the actual text of the law. I've condensed this down from the legal ease But this is roughly the the core of the law It says Platforms shall take reasonable measures to prevent and mitigate the following harms to minors one anxiety depression eating disorder substance use disorders and suicidal behaviors two patterns of use that indicate or encourage Addiction like behaviors three online bullying and harassment for sexual exploitation and abuse

That this is one of the clearest examples of moral panic legislation. I've ever seen It's basically saying it's illegal for tech companies to harm teenagers But that's so broad that it can be interpreted in almost any way and it leaves

The the sole authority for determining that up to state attorneys general Mm-hmm, and so if an attorney general just says oh, yeah, it harms kids to come across things that like oh you might be transgender Well, that's harming kids that's causing them to be depressed

they could then strip that from the internet and like essentially sensor or ban it very easily and the co-sponsor of kosa Marsha blackburn has said the purpose of this law is to protect minor children from the transgender in our culture

The transgender in our culture. Yes, the transgender her name is Rebecca. There's one. There's one lurking You see them in the distance like a fire golem in Elden ring when you have a law this broad when we don't have a clear definition Of really what the problem is and we have no evidence on this at all You're essentially just handing a huge amount of power over to whoever defines the term harm This is a major With many sort of vague bullshit laws that shouldn't be passed

But like the essence of this law is like what if we made it illegal to hurt people This is I think the output of moral panic media cycles But also it's just fundamentally stupid. You don't need to like contextualize it that much to realize it Okay, so then so that was what governments and tech companies can do pass the dumbest law in the world. Have we thought about this?

So the next section is What schools can do hell yeah, so I'm gonna send you his little vignette where he starts to say why schools should ban cell phones Mountain middle school in Durango, Colorado went phone free back in 2012 at the start of the mental health crisis The county around the school had among the highest teen suicide rates in Colorado when Shane Voss took over his head of school Students were suffering from rampant cyber bullying sleep deprivation and constant social comparison

Voss implemented a cell phone ban for the entire school day phones had to stay in backpacks not in pockets or hands There were clear policies and real consequences if phones were found out of the backpack during school hours The effects were transformative Students no longer sat silently next to each other scrolling while waiting for home room or class to start They talk to each other or the teacher Voss says that when he walks into a school without a phone ban

Quote it's kind of like the zombie apocalypse and you have all these kids in the hallways not talking to each other It's just a very different vibe. It's like we used to have phones and everyone was silent and sad and now you have you hear laughter in the hallways He says

They're hearing like the peeling of children's laughter because there's no phones. I mean you laugh when you're looking at social media too You laugh because you see a great joke cyberbilliant bullying one of your class made Well, I look I don't know I don't know where exactly we're going, but I'm I

I think that sounds like a good policy to me and I'm ready to believe that it works at least in some regards it that it makes School environment better So this is the thing is I actually like the idea of banning smartphones in schools I think I've mentioned before that one of my best friends in Seattle is a public high school teacher and phones are the fucking bane of his existence You know, it's like whenever you're doing like a little lecture thing and then you're like okay

We're gonna break up into groups every kid pulls their phone out and then you gotta be like okay Put your phones away do this yeah, I think that John height actually mentions in the book that I think is relatively insightful is that the

There's also this huge problem of fucking notifications that you're sitting there with your phone in your pocket and it buzzes And you're like okay, was that in like is that my mom saying hey you need to get home right now or is that just like I'm freaking news alert It's the the worst sub stack that you subscribe to just publish a new post I think that's like a real thing of like fracturing kids attention and having you know

I like I'm like that. This is why I put my phone on do not disturb most of the time is because if I feel it buzz in my pocket There's like a little part of my brain. Yeah, yeah, what is that? What is that was that the whole time? It's never it's never important and so I like this idea of like banning phones however One of the problems with this description that he gives this kind of one dimensional like things were bad and then we ban phones and now things are good

Narrative that he's giving us is that most schools in America already banned phones. Uh-huh

So he notes that as of 2020 77% of schools already banned phones. Oh, that's a massive number. Okay Just three quarters not even pre-pandemic Uh-huh Most of the problem is actually with enforcement So most of the kids I talked to already went to schools where they banned phones and they said that like at the beginning of the school year It's like we're banning phones no phones out and they're really strict about it

But then over time people kind of drift and then you know you have your phone out for second You're like oh, I'm just using the calculator and they're like okay Okay, okay, okay, and then before you know it after like a month Kids are basically on their phones most of the time right and one thing my friend The public high school teacher says is that like it's really unfair to kind of leave this enforcement up to the teachers

I just thought of a solution. You know how phones have airplane mode. What if there was a school mode and There's an app where the teacher controls it and school mode only allows 9-1-1 and a calculator and maybe like text from one number you get to you get text from your your mom or something I was gonna say EMP blast it and just like shut down all the phones

I would like to do that in movie theaters too. Wow, we're at it. There's many places I would like all of the phones to die actually cut my idea from the podcast I'm gonna call Google and I'm gonna become so fucking rich School mode. This is why I think it's it's a much better idea for schools to have these much more comprehensive policies We're like you just put your phone and like a weird little locker at the beginning of the day

Yeah, and you get it back at the end of the day. Yeah, this is what my friend wants in his school Him and the other teachers have been pushing for this all year It's mostly parental resistance actually because I like I might need to contact my kid That's interesting and I think that um it's framed often as a problem with children But like parents who aren't used to having any separation from their children. No exactly All of a sudden with the advent of smartphones

You don't really ever need to not be in contact with your kid. Yeah, and so some school being like There's now gonna be an eight-hour block where you're not every single day probably feels pretty overwhelming A lot of parents. I do support this policy. However, there's thing of like everyone was a zombie

And now where there's laughter in the hallways thing. It's just not true because we've had these phone bands in place for so long There's tons of studies on the effects of phone bands in schools So there's a really interesting natural experiment in Spain where two regions of Spain Pass laws saying all schools have to ban smartphones And so you can compare them to the other regions of Spain And they saw a 15% reduction in bullying and a pretty modest but noticeable increase in test scores

Okay, there's one in Denmark that shows that kids did more physical activity at recess because they took away their phones during recess Sure, there's one in Norway that was reported as saying students had better mental health after a bunch of schools banned smartphones

But if you read the actual study the schools didn't ban smartphones They just made kids turn their phones on silent and it's a little Implausible that they would have such a large effect and the study hasn't been in a peer-reviewed journal Uh-huh. So in general studies seem to find extremely modest effects and Most of those effects are measured by teacher perceptions. Okay. I do favor these bands I mean partly because like I think if teachers perceive

Kids to be doing better. That's like worth noting like that's not that's not nothing Yeah, but height starts that anecdote by saying you know, oh before they banned phones The school had a problem with bullying and sleep deprivation and social comparison And now they don't have those problems anymore and like smartphone bands just aren't gonna affect that kind of stuff

Kids can still bully each other after school. Yeah, kids can still overuse their phones height is quite explicitly proposing this as a silver bullet and it just isn't one not without school mode and for only $500,000 a year you choose can subscribe you did read the four hour work week You're already on the phone to India hiring people to do this for you. I want that New York Times magazine piece about me Where with the the moody picture of me sitting in a chair like the man who changed school

So that is his I think good suggestion for improving schools for the mental health of teens here is his slightly less convincing Suggestion he says that schools should become more playful And here is His little vignette that he opens this with one constant of these airport books is that whenever

Someone uses a cutesy little new term you know they're about to say something very stupid But you don't know exactly exactly what it's gonna be All right, Kevin Steinhart a fourth grade teacher at the central Academy of the Arts an elementary school in rural South Carolina

Realized he was having the same conversation over and over with teachers and parents Students were struggling and many seem to have little resilience perseverance or ability to work with others The adults were all talking about the students fragility, but none had any idea what to do about it

Kevin was stumped to until he attended a conference at the nearby Clemson University on the benefits of something pretty basic Free play With his schools blessing Kevin started to incorporate more free play into students lives by making three changes One longer recess with little adult intervention

Two opening the school playground for half an hour before school starts to give students time to play before class or leave playgrounds three offering a play club Anywhere from one to five days a week school stays open for mixed-age free play from two 30 to four 30 p.m

Instead of going home children spend time together playing it's a no-phone zone the kids are the kids are given Nearly complete autonomy like a lifeguard Adults intervene only in the case of an emergency autonomous kids in the very first semester He made these changes Kevin started noticing a shift in his students quote our students are happier Kinder have fewer behavior problems have made more friends feel more in control of their day and their life in general

And in some cases have dramatically changed course from bullying behaviors and frequent office referrals to no bullying behaviors and no office referrals Okay, so all Three of these three solutions are just recess. Yes more recess one is longer recess two is recess before school and Three is recess after school Yes, and also height mentions kind of briefly in the next couple paragraphs of this play club thing of like kids can play after school

He he's describing this huge turnaround, right? Like the kids are happier and everybody's making more friends This play club after school thing was only one day a week Oh, so he's essentially saying that like longer recess and early playground being open and one day The playground is open late just completely transformed the school maybe my experience is not representative But when I was a youth there was recess before school like you arrived and you were you were dumped off onto the playground

Unless it was like raining or something as we see so much in this book It's like he doesn't really do any of the empirical work to be like our kids not using the playgrounds Right or like how are you stopping them from using phones in the recess? So he then This is gonna sound like I'm like cherry picking

But he spends so much time in this book talking about playgrounds. Okay. He has this whole thing of like we've De-risked the American childhood and like kids should be falling off of the playground structures and like Skinning their elbows and like that's that's part of childhood is like learning how to deal with stuff and like we're not doing that anymore And so yeah, he goes on and on and on about just like play like they have better playgrounds in Europe

And they have a junkyard playgrounds where you can like play around on tires and ropes and stuff Should we ever play around should have rusty metal spike He has a thing. There's like I guess there's like nature playgrounds with like bales of hay

And kids can work together to like flip the bales of hay. That's just something that broke schools say They're like uh, yeah, this is a nature playground So another one of his major things with having playful schools is to do something called no rules recess So here is his description of this I need to get my brain straight for no rules recess because it sounds like it's gonna be fun to tell Consider the no rules recess at Swanson Primary School in New Zealand before no rules recess

Students had been forbidden to climb trees ride bikes or do anything with any risk But then the school took part in a study in which researchers asked eight schools to reduce rules and increase Opportunities for risk and challenge during recess while eight other schools were asked to make no changes to their recess policies Swanson was in the freedom group and prince The freedom group Swanson was in the freedom group and principal Bruce McClacklin

Decided to go all the way he scrapped all rules and let kids make their own no rules recess Fucking pay-per-view challenge recess ECW The result more chaos more activity more pushing and shoving on the playground and also more happiness and more physical safety more safety rates of injury

Vandalism and bullying all declined boom what boom. I'm telling you this you you tell Nine-year-old me no rules Rates of injury around me are not declining Kids are getting fucked up It's easy to sort of not notice this because he's he's talking about this is like part of a study

But like this is essentially just an anecdote for one principal There's there's only one of these schools went to no rules recess And if you read the actual study it appears that schools that tried this like freer kind of play at recess Had no more physical activity among the kids and had slightly more bullying And it even says in the study it says overall schools liked the intervention and reported many benefits including increased physical activity

However, these beliefs did not translate into significant differences in objectively measured physical activity Either as counts per minute or as minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity all of that extra Physical activity was the first two minutes after you said the words no rules to the children Just immediately started punching each other and you're like with a cardio they just get amped They start charging around punching each other and then they tuck of themselves

I'd also keep in mind this is not a mental health intervention This is an intervention aimed at increasing physical activity among kids And I personally think that like increasing physical activity among kids is like a very worthwhile goal like that's awesome

Yeah, it's not one to one mental health right? Yeah, it's like maybe that will have some improvement But it's like we're already two degrees of separation away from the alleged outcome that we want And also there's been a ton of these like playground equipment studies projects over the years because they're really fucking easy And people like it because you don't actually have to address the real challenges of the kid

You're like oh, let's spend a hundred thousand dollars on improved playing equipment

And like they almost never work. There's a Analysis in the UK that said that of you know the average kid in the UK gets 78 minutes Like throughout the course of the day and after school and everything of recess Improving playground equipment results in three extra minutes of activity during those 78 minutes It's like we just don't see effects you need a control group with no rules social media use We've removed the porn the porn blocker on your on the Wi-Fi network

Uh have at it. How are those kids doing this actually kind of goes into our like one book theory Because what is essentially proposing here as we saw in fucking nudge as we've seen over and over again is That this need among like centrist American elites to have these technical

Fixes yeah without having to address any of the underlying drivers of the problem and without having to spend any real money One thing these folks love is the implication that like the people in charge of stuff are big dumb assholes Yeah, yeah, yeah, there are simple easy interventions that like you know these know it all libs Are blocking for one reason or another

But if we just implemented them society would be so much better. So the final Set of solutions that he gives us is like what parents can do what can parents do and I kind of get this before But large sections of the book are dedicated to his idea that we're in the midst of kind of like a spiritual crisis We've created lives that don't have meaningful activities in them spiritual like think things that really feed our soul

This is sort of a subgenre of the like final chapter of an airport book Where they've like gone off the rails and this is the scope of their project has become too big yeah And so the final chapter is like the massive metaphysical crisis facing America today The solution recess before schools

Okay, so here is his One of his descriptions of the spiritual crisis that we're in Durkheim showed that nearly all societies have created rituals and communal practices for pulling people up temporarily into the realm of the sacred where the self recedes and the

She's Christ. What's happening? You need Durkheim? Oh god. Durkheim wanted better playgrounds Where the self recedes and collective interest predominate Think of Christians singing hymns together every Sunday in church think of Muslim circling the Kaaba and Mecca Think of civil rights marchers singing as they walked Durkheim called this state of energized communion collective effervescence But what happens when social life becomes virtual and everyone interacts through screens

Everything collapses into an undifferentiated blur. There is no consensual space At least not any kind that feels real to human minds that evolved to navigate the three dimensions of planet earth In the virtual world there is no daily weekly or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things

Nothing ever closes. So everyone acts on their own schedule In short, there is no consensual structuring of time space or objects around which people can use their ancient programming for sacredness to create religious or quasi religious community sensual sacredness everything is available to every individual all the time with little or no effort There is no Sabbath and there are no holy days. Everything is profane. Okay, what the fuck is that?

Living in a world of structuralist anime It makes adolescents more vulnerable to online recruitment Interradical political movements that offer moral clarity and a moral community thereby pulling them further away from their in-person communities There's no effort for science the problem the kids are not effervescent. This is a message to all potential airport book authors You don't have to talk like this

This isn't something you need to do. We're putting this on the loudspeaker at Davos Peter the problem lack of collective effervescence the solution 30-minute recess before schools also I can think of a lot of experiences online that I felt were Examples of a collective effervescence like I don't think he was around when we bullied iggy isalia off of tumblr when Trump got covid yeah Night on twitter that was some of the most intense collective effervescence I never felt my fucking life

Chapel Rowan that's collective effervescence right whatever's happening there I think is I also really want to point out that he is fucking wrong about this right so first of all I don't know what the fuck he means with like there's no time or sacredness on the internet. That's just not true Secondly, this is the only place in the entire book that he talks about radicalization

Maybe because he knew he was going to go and fucking Joe Rogan and talk about it. Yeah, this is clearly not an issue that he takes seriously at all And third yet another reason why he is the worst possible pundit to be leading this conversation is that he is a libertarian And he doesn't want any content specific

Moderation by social media companies. So if you look at the actual literature on radicalization There are specific beliefs that predict radicalization and a lot of them are things like In-group dominance like thinking that you're part of a group that disappear you're to other groups

Believing that you are experiencing Relative deprivation right that like black people are getting all the jobs But like you can't even be a white person in America anymore Negative attitudes toward the government and the political system like they're all out to get you Conspiratorial beliefs. Yeah, these are things that he cannot address because they require Acknowledging that right wing radicalization is a much bigger problem in America than left wing radicalization

But he has dedicated his entire career to pointing out left wing radicalization. Yeah All he can do is make this incoherent argument that the virtual world is this Descicated black and white version of social interaction that is also so good that it's tempting kids out of their real life

Relationships, but we need is more religious fervor is never an argument that's going to like really sit well with me But he seems to think that online interactions are qualitatively worse than in-person interactions Right and every interaction that's online is bad and every interaction that's in person is good And like I read a couple articles about the panic over TV right kids are on their screens too much in the 1980s

And it was the same thing it was like everything on TV is bad and everything that's not on TV is good And it's like well, you can read radicalization literature and you can watch a fucking David Attenborough documentary on TV Yeah, it's really silly to say that the medium is more important than the content I like the idea of trying to get more spirituality and more like you know less self centeredness and more reflectionary lives I think that's really great

But it's not the case that that isn't available online and it's not the case that like this sense of The lack of collective effervescence is what's causing Political radicalization whenever conservatives like moderate conservatives point to the decline in church attendance as like a

Sort of sign of the downfall of these in in-person communities The question that pops up to me is like why are the communities where church attendance is very common in popular some of our most politically radicalized

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm just not entirely seeing it and it feels like a lazy analysis that's only looking at half of the issue Is solution for this like you know what parents can do to foster this kind of collective effervescence among their children is a much greater focus on in-person activities and his first recommendation is just like more

Kids doing sports, which honestly seems great to me. I have no I have no problem with that But he says research consistently shows that teens who play team sports are happier than those who don't yeah Humans are embodied a phone-based life is not screens lead us to forget that our physical bodies matter if you think that Intramural sports would help then just say that don't don't talk to me about collective effervescence

And then be like and the solution more soccer and then if you go to the footnote He acknowledges the fact that just because kids who play sports are happier does not mean the sports are causing them to be happier

It could be that happier kids play sports. Yeah, like he does this a lot Where he just says that like you should get your kids to play sports because like sports will make them happy And then you go to the footnote and he's like oh might just be they play sports because they're already happy

I know like sorry. That's not like a footnote. Right. That's uh That's the thing you got to figure out Jonathan He he spends the rest of this section Talking about how like kids need to spend more time in nature and he has this whole thing about all Kids need to be awestruck more and when you're struck by this sense of awe like I'm small in the world And you're looking at like majestic mountains and a sunset that it grounds you in the physical self and he recommends his students at NYU

To go on awawaks in New York City. What is an awawak? It sounds like a rare bird You all know what an awawak. Everyone knows what a fucking awawak is wait a minute wait a minute I have the text of the book in front of me hang on trying to learn what an awawak is thank god I have my phone right next to me

He's talking about this guy that he listened to he says after hearing docker in a podcast conversation Describe the awawak he took while grieving his brother's death from cancer I decided to add a session on awe and beauty to the undergraduate flourishing class that I teach at New York University

Folks no when your professor starts talking about he's like I'm we're now entering the beauty portion Get up and leave I told my students to listen to the podcast and then take a walk slowly anywhere outside During which they must not take out their phones

The written reflections they turned in for that week's homework were among the most beautiful I've seen in my 30 years as a professor some students You'll love this Peter some students simply walked slowly through the streets of Greenwich village around NYU

Noticing for the first time the architectural flourishes on the 19th century buildings that they had passed many times No, but the most powerful reports came from those who walk through parks one student Yime began her awawak in Washington Square Park which is the green heart of the NYU campus

It was a perfect April day when the cherry trees were in full bloom. What the fuck these kids have never walked in Washington Square Park If you go to NYU and you're like I just walked through Washington Square Park for the first time I don't know what to tell you you need to re-evaluate the way that you exist This is this is wild I wasn't planning on going into those those much no no no no here's why I can't go to Washington Square Park just to give you an

Just to give you an understanding because there's so many fucking NYU students there What if they're ruining the awe of everybody else by being there My first Washington Square Park experience was my first trip to New York I was like 13 and my mom bought us tickets to rent and I hated it So I left at halftime and went to Washington Square Park and bought weed what the fuck is Well, but I was an aw being stoned walking around New York City Do you do you on awawks in a story a queens?

It's a part of your life. No, I don't go on awawks. I I live a normal life where I just I just live At my desk and in my phone and then I watch TV at night until I get a headache and I go to sleep That's what life is about you got to grab it by the horn the thing is I like

This is one of those things that you can't really like disagree with because like should people be more awestruck Yeah, I mean great fine, but like people react with awe to different things I am making fun of this idea, but you should obviously go on walk I think what I'm really reacting to is when professors try to do holistic lifeship Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's like why don't you teach me what you're an expert at?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're not my therapist you were my professor I also did a decent amount of reading on this because I think that the flip side of a moral panic is a moral bandwagon When all of the elites in a society decide that a specific thing is good

And I think that very similar to remember the 90s I was like play your kid Mozart and there I cue will go up and they'll like be able to speak French or whatever And everyone just kind of decided that classical music was like intellectually nourishing

This is what they envisioned a smart person doing is just like listening to Mozart while doing math or whatever There's this entire field now called nature-based interventions where it's like people will go on nature walks There's a whole subfield of like forest bathing interventions

I came across something called therapeutic gardening. There's surfing therapy It's this whole idea that like just being outside is intrinsically good for you Yeah, all of the data on it is just fucking garbage It's just like people went on a 15 minute nature walk and then we ask them afterwards like are you less depressed? And they said yes, I'll bet it's like yeah People like taking breaks Fucking forest bathing studies that I've read was like a day long

Forest bathing intervention. It was like a hot spring thing somewhere in Japan And it's like people felt better after a day essentially at a spot like you're basically taking a day away for free And like just hanging out in nature and then researchers ask you like how do you feel and you're like yeah? I'm pretty relaxed

Right, it's like yeah people like days off. Yeah, you might have gotten the same effect from people playing video games all day There's a lot of uh selection bias and a lot of these studies Yeah, it's like wow people who go on walks say that they like them

It's like really people who yeah enjoy going on walks are going on walks Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, what a what an insight, you know, you like you need you need to flesh it out a little bit I want to talk a little bit about what I think is one of the harms of the book I don't want to go overboard because we read way more harmful books than this But I think when we find like you know bad parenting and harmful parenting

It's often along the lines of like you must do this specific thing, right? You must become a doctor You must do ballet right? You have this very specific thing in mind and height is basically doing this with like nature He has this idea that like being outside is intrinsically good for you and being on your phone is intrinsically bad for you Right this just doesn't show up in the literature

All there's tons of studies on extracurricular activities and I read this really interesting almost like philosophical meta analysis of this that You know, you you constantly see these econometric studies that are like you know kids who played baseball were 6% less likely to be depressed than kids You didn't play baseball forever And what that actually means in practice is that kids who play baseball some of them are more depressed

Some of them nothing and some of them are less depressed. Yeah, right? And so you're talking about like a normal distribution like a bell curve And that bell curve kind of moves back and forth depending on the activity But for any activity some kids are gonna like be more depressed after they do it And some kids are gonna be less depressed after they do it

It's not really about the specific activity It's whether or not the kids like the activity and they think they get an in group identity from that activity And so some kids really love nature And I think every kid should be given the option of going out in nature

I think it's a great idea for parents to like introduce their kids like maybe you really like hiking and camping Let's let's try that out right But some kids don't like fucking nature right and that's fine And the most harmful thing that you can do to a kid is you know You go on a camping trip and you're kids like oh this isn't really my thing and you're like no

We're gonna go next weekend. You're gonna be sitting outside because it's good. Yeah, yeah, and that's awful Like what is so important for kids is finding groups that give them meaning and that's gonna be different for every fucking kid It took me so long

To realize that I just hate running because so many people told me if you just get out there after that first couple My you're gonna feel incredible and you're gonna want to do it for the rest of your life I tried to make myself a runner for so long before

One day I it just sort of hit me when I heard someone talking about this that I was like I fucking hate that in this study They do talk about how the specific activity matters way less than they say like the micro level components of the participation or whatever Which is basically academic ease for like what's the specific of the situation right so uh as far as outdoor stuff goes I was in a boy scout troop which was like one of the worst things that ever happened to me

Like our boy scout leader was like an alcoholic who like used to show up drunk and like give us beer at like 16 And then the two scout leader dudes were like Psychopaths that like would make kids eat out of the dumpster as like an initiation thing What are you talking about even seriously and like even at like age nine? I was like I don't think initiation is like a part of being in boy scouts. I think this is bad

I'm like that was my experience of the outdoors. That's what Teddy Roosevelt would have wanted the main thing I took from the study was that the intrinsic structural components of any Extracurricular activity are not going to be so powerful that they overwhelm the specific dynamics right that you're thrown into So like at your school Maybe the soccer coach is like a complete fucking asshole and the head of the chess club is like a really good dude Who creates a really

Some supportive environment for kids the fact that soccer is outdoors and chess is indoors is just not that important Ultimately, right? Maybe just don't like chess and but something there is something out there Right that will become a positive outlet for you I don't want to make it sound like I'm making fun of the concept of like therapeutic gardening or like surfing therapy

If you like surfing it's gonna be therapeutic if you like gardening It's gonna be therapeutic right and like I spoke to kids for this who got a huge amount of meaning and community From their activities online and it would be really weird to like force those kids Like out into the wilderness in the same way that it would be really weird to take a kid who like really loves hiking and camping And like force them to go inside and write fan fiction now those kids need to be writing twilight porn

All right, so before we get into my sort of wrap up thoughts on the book and the main bigger reason I think this solution section is bad. I just I have a little section of my notes called like what is this guy's fucking deal

Uh-huh, and I just want to watch a clip because I it brought me to a sort of grand unifying theory of Jonathan height. Okay What most alarm me when I when I heard the the the Tristan Harris podcast was the the ease of influencing American kids to to be pro this or pro that on any political issue

We're seeing that with a palstine and Gaza. Yeah, I think so well, it's very obviously many things with TikTok The trans stuff and there's a there's a lot of different things that they're encouraging and you know people that are opposed to that are Are being banned, which is also very odd

And specifically like female athletes. We had Riley gains who was the female athlete that competed against lead Thomas and She has said that male biologically male athletes should not be able to compete with biologically female athletes because they have a significant advantage and she was banned from TikTok just for saying that Yeah, that's right

So you know this relates to the larger issue that we talked about last time and that I hope we'll continue to talk about today um, which is that we've social media has brought us into an environment in which anyone has the ability to really harm anyone else Um, there's an extraordinary amount of intimidation available via social media um, and so this has led the leaders of all kinds of organizations to run scared Greg and I Greg look young up and I saw this in universities

Why don't the university president stand up to the protesters who are shouting down visiting speakers And then we saw it in journalism of newspapers and editors who wouldn't stand up for journalistic principles Um, and so I think what has happened here is that um, social media allows whoever is angriest and can mobilize most force to threaten to harass to surround to mob Anyone and when people are afraid to say something that's when you get the crazy distortions that we saw on campus

Um, or that or that Riley gains was seeing too just that people are afraid to speak up and in a in a democracy in a large Secular a diverse democracy we have to be able to talk about things. Yeah It's like you can't even say certain things anymore That everyone getting mad at you online

Riley gains a still on tech doc by the way. Yeah, of course. Yes. I don't the fuck he's talking about whatever when you listen to his interviews And when you really go through the book you don't get the sense of somebody who truly cares about teen mental health

You get the sense of somebody who hates social media. Yeah, the experience of social media that he's describing here Where like everybody's walking on eggshells and you can get yelled at at any time and it's bringing out the worst in people That is not the experience of like a 13 year old girl on Instagram That is the experience of a middle-aged center right political pundit on like Twitter and substack Yeah, throughout this book

He shows no interest in what kids are actually doing on their phones like you learn nothing about teenage social media use From reading this book right like I think there's something more complicated to this than just a straightforward moral panic But he speaks about social media the way that previous moral panickers talked about TV and video games. Yeah, damn it He says in this like awestruck section of the book. He says

Social media is a fountain of bedevilments. It trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world's wisdom traditions Here we go think about yourself first be materialistic judgmental boastful and petty seek glory as quantified by likes and followers Yeah, here's this dumb conservative bullshit one thing that it is sort of easy to forget

About all of his solutions is that none of them are about teen mental health. Yeah, all of his solutions are about getting kids off their phones You see it with the the way they were talking about Gaza They just believe that there's no way that young people could organically be left of center totally that young people are just sort of looking at the

Course of events in Palestine and siding with Palestinians. There's yeah, surely something off here It's uh, perhaps the Chinese trying to metal or something similar I also am like fairly uncomfortable with like you know This guy's kind of out in front leading this societal conversation about this issue and like the way that he speaks about actual teenagers is really Stigmatizing yeah, and this analysis of just like they lack resiliency

They're too fragile. They've been coddled their whole lives is a terrible starting point for a useful conversation about how to help treat mental illness among teenagers. Yeah, and one thing that I found when I spoke to Amy Orbin and Andrew Shabelsky for this is that both of them said that like a much more productive way to think about this is not like social media is harming teens a better way is

There's a teen access to treatment crisis in America. Yeah, teen stuff some of the highest rates of mental health problems and some of the lowest rates of access to care Right, and when I talk to Emily Weinstein this researcher who's interviewed hundreds of kids She's like the most important thing that sticks out to her is that like kids want recognition kids want to feel real They want to feel like adults. They want to feel like they're being listened to and there's nothing in John Heitz book

Like for all of his advice to parents right? It's all about like controlling the way that they use the internet There's nothing about just like make sure your kids know that you love and support them no matter what right

That's a way bigger predictor of teen mental health problems than what they're doing on their phone Well, it doesn't feel like that's heitz like fundamental concern right it feels like when you listen to the Rogan clip It feels like what he's talking about is like are you sort of losing control of

Your child's life in in ways that are hard to pinpoint like your child's politics are drifting and they're becoming sexually active for example and You the parent are confused because not only are these normal things happening But they're happening within the confines of a social world that you no longer completely understand Yes, this book is for all the parents who go you didn't clean your room because you're always on your phone

Right that's who it is for and that's what it is for right if he took the issue of teen mental health Promotely seriously this book would contain some teen mental health interventions

Ha there's actually a lot that we can be doing. There's a lot of stuff with like screening and intervention You know, we know a lot of the precursors of like very severe suicidal episodes and a lot of it is like Experiencing bullying oftentimes kids who bully other kids are at very high risk of suicide Yeah, I read a really interesting article about like the role of school nurses In just like identifying like this kid might actually be struggling or there might be some things at home

You know, there's also some like logistical things that he doesn't seem all that interested in There's actually some evidence that states that pass anti-bullying laws basically requiring schools to have Anti-bullying plans and policies in place have lower rates of suicide There's also things like restrictions on firearms like boys are four times more likely to kill themselves

Then girls and they tend to use firearms. Oh, right. Oh, you know the greatest predictor of killing yourself is having a previous Suicide attempt so those kids really need to be watched and understood Uh-huh kids that have other mental health conditions if they're struggling with it's like there's there's logistical obvious things that we need to do to address the teen mental health crisis

But those require resources, right? I mean it's something that he he sort of mentions offhand in the book But doesn't really dig into is like poor kids are more likely to kill themselves than rich kids And they're also more likely to use their phones than rich kids

And whether or not you think that's causal like that that's where the resources need to go Yeah, there are things that that are directed at the people who are at the highest risk of mental health problems That he just is not interested in at all And this is sort of another manifestation of his

General lack of interest in the nuance here. I think you can probably ascertain that social media has negative effects on certain kids in certain situations in certain regards and And you can either drill down on that or you can be like well then we got to get rid of phones

What about the awl walks are the kids walking in Washington, where park are they looking at trees? Let those kids loose in Washington, where park I think like a busing plan a nationwide busing plan sending them to Washington, where park if you think if you think kids are helped by walking freely around New York City I want you to go speak to one young adult who grew up in New York City and tell me that that kid's okay