#766 - Jonathan Haidt - The Hidden Dangers Of Social Media On Mental Health

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Jonathan Haidt, he's a professor at New York University Stern School of Business, a social psychologist, and an author. The kids are not all right. Mental health is plummeting while anxiety and depression are on the rise. Just what are the contributing elements? Is it social media, helicopter parenting, 24 hour news, or something else? Expect to learn why every generation complains about the next one. What is so important about the development of kids between 8 and 12 years old?

The biggest problem is with test scores in primary school children, the real harm of technology on kids, why words like trigger and fragility are such a problem, if there is a way to do identity politics well, and much more.

The big announcement that I have been playing around with for quite a while since a couple of weeks ago, when we filmed the world's first ever 5 camera podcast on the biggest video wall in Texas. This is basically the same technology that they filmed the Mandalorian on, which is a photorealistic background that sits behind the subject, and then you match the lighting in front of it to the backdrop, and it creates this super immersive sense that the people are...

sat in whatever environment you've created. So the first episode goes live with Dr. K, this Monday, healthy game at phenomenal episode, great insights about mental health and improving your resilience, your robustness, how to integrate emotions and love and stuff. But more than that, it is technically unbelievably hard to do this, and we pulled it off. So yeah, get ready for Monday and check out the YouTube channel to see some previews of what we're going to do.

I'm super excited, thank you to everyone who's already commented on how the clip looks and made them feel and stuff. I really think this is cool. There's not much stuff you can do that no one else has done before, and this is one of them. So, thank you. You might have heard me say that I took my testosterone level from 495 to 2006 last year, and two of the supplements I used throughout that were Fadadurjur Agrestis and Tonkat Ali.

I first heard Dr. Andrew Hume and talked about these really impressive effects that tons of research was showing, which sounds great until you realize that most supplements don't actually contain what they're advertising.

Momentus make the only NSF certified Fadadurjur Agrestis and Tonkat Ali on the planet. That means that they're tested so rigorously that even Olympic athletes can use it, and that is why I partnered with them, because they make the most carefully tested highest quality supplements on Earth. Dr. Andrew Hume is actually the scientific advisor for Momentus, so if you've ever wondered what supplements he would create, if he could, or what he really uses himself, this is the answer.

So, if you're not performing in the gym or the bedroom, the way that you want, or you just want to improve your testosterone naturally, Fadadurjur Agrestis and Tonkat Ali are the best, most researched, back place to start. Best of all, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it completely risk-free, use it, and if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally.

Right now, you can get 20% off everything, site-wide with the code ModernWisdom by going to livemomentus.com-modern-wisdom to see all the products I use and recommend. That's live-m-o-m-e-n-t-o-u-s.com-slashmodern-wisdom and modern-wisdom. A checkout. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.

From the launch your online shop stage to the first real-life store stage, all the way to the, did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is there to help you grow. Whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits, Shopify helps you sell everywhere. From that all-in-one e-commerce platform to their in-person POS system, wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify has got you covered. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout.

36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. You would be amazed at how many massive brands you love use Shopify. Gymshark. Perhaps one of the biggest independent sportswear companies in the world uses Shopify. And if it is good enough for them, it is good enough for you. So if you are looking to get started at selling something online, Shopify is the easiest, quickest and most convenient way to do it.

Plus you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com-modern-wisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com-slashmodern-wisdom to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. This episode is brought to you by Element. I have started my morning every single day for the last three years, the same way, which is with Element in water. It tastes fantastic. It reduces muscle cramps and fatigue. It optimises your brain health. It regulates appetite and it helps to curb cravings.

It's got a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium. Super simple. There is nothing fancy going on here, but it really does work. Also, they have a no BS, no questions ask refund policy, so you can buy it 100% risk-free. And if you do not like it, they will give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box.

That's how confident they are that you love it. They are the exclusive hydration partner to team your say weightlifting and relied on by tons of Olympic athletes and high performers in the NFL, NBA, NHL and FBI sniper teams. Plus, tech leaders and everyday athletes around the world. Head to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any purchase that's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jonathan Height.

We've been orbiting each other for quite a while. It's really nice to finally sit down with you in a chat. That's why we ran into each other at the Header-Ox Academy conference, which right away tells you that we share some common concerns about the state of society, knowledge at universities, young people, etc. So yeah, here we are. I'm really I'm really happy.

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

Well, yes and no. Yes, every generation complains and the complaints tend to be similar. And that's gone on, not since the dawn of history. People always quote, you know, socrates or something. But really, that begins when you start getting modernity. You start getting each generation is changing, you know, around the 16th, 17th century in Europe.

So yes, that's been going on a long time. But it's never before been the case that the mental health of the young generation suddenly was really different and really bad. So, you know, the main argument I get against me is just the one you just said that, oh, this is just another moral panic. There's nothing going on here. This is what always happens. No, this is not what always happens.

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

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

Yeah, thanks for setting it up that way because there's so much focus on the phones and social media. And and I was focused on that too. But what I decided to do in writing this book and writing the anxious generation was I'm not even going to talk about the phones and social media until I've taken readers through what is childhood.

Why do we have it? How is human childhood different from every other animal, including chimpanzees. And so, you know, if you start just with mammals, all mammals have the same life plan, which is huge investment from the parents or the mother in the baby, long childhood, big brain.

How do you wire up the brain play plays the thing your brain doesn't grow from nursing your brain grows from moving away from your mother trying to climb something, you know, anyone has had a puppy or a kitten knows they want to play all the time because they have to practice the skills to wire up the brain. So we have to let our kids wire up their brains. Now humans are different because we have much bigger brains and we have culture. This is crucial.

Other animals they grow as you know, sort of fast as they can and then they reproduce humans we grow fast and then we slow down at age seven to 12 13 we're not growing very fast. And it's thought that that period is a critical period for culture learning. All the way through puberty, we're really trying to soak in how do we do things around here. What do adults do? How do I approach the opposite sex or sexuality?

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

Well that's kind of what we've done. Yeah I I'm around kids more and more as my friends finally become less man children and actually become fathers themselves of actual children. And it's so interesting like my my group of friends largely are pretty red-pilled on this that the concerns about exposure to technology.

But you know when you go for dinner at the sort of times that you do with guys that have got families you end up going a little bit earlier which means you're also around other families. And we go to these restaurants and I'll get to see you know how other families that probably just aren't aware of this are.

And these the ties a boy's for his child and a lot of the time at the table you know it's the kids starts to act up they're a little bit bored and the parents are trying to have a conversation of the adults at the table trying to have a conversation. And one of them just goes you know open up the phone past the phone and the the maddest thing that I've seen from sort of two to three year old children is their ability to skip ads on YouTube.

Like they understand the difference between an advert and the button and how they can get past it. And I'm like what first off look if you're giving your kid this to an East the Tyson by YouTube premium it's ten ten box a month and it'll change your life gets really. But also the this level of engagement with you know the capitalist system of a Facebook pixel tagging and all that stuff from two years old is crazy.

Now that's right that's right you know we're very protective of our kids and if I said to people how about how about if we have this thing that we have a special door a special window and we're going to put it on your child's crib. And advertisers and corporations can come and they can just communicate with your kid and you have nothing to do with it.

What do you say is that okay like no we would never let that happen and then suppose when your daughter is 11 12 13 will put a special window on her bedroom and strange men can come and they can talk to her through the window they can look at her through the window. How about that would you do that like of course you wouldn't do that. But that's kind of what we're doing you know we're we're saying your company's kind of access to our kids they can train them with the stimulus response paradigm.

And strangers kind of access to our children once they go to social media account and they can try to convince them to meet up in the real world they can try to sell them things all kinds of stuff like that. Actually I want to pick up you use the word anesthetize which is a very good word here because you know as many people know like 100 150 years ago there were a variety of medications for children like that had opiates in them to calm the child and help them sleep.

Or we give them alcohol we didn't know that these things interfered with with their development and we all discovered as soon as we got our first iPhone I mean I have video you know like my son was born in 2006 and so many of our videos of me video taping him and with him reaching for the phone and saying iPhone iPhone like he you know he wants it he needs it because it's so stimulating.

Back then the early days of all this stuff you know 2008 to 2012 we thought the technology was magical and we thought you know yeah let's let our kids get stimulated by like stimulation isn't that going to be good for their brain development like so yeah it's it's seem okay to do it it'll give my head start he'll be you know digital natives he'll be comfortable with this technology and besides everyone else is doing it so it must be okay.

So yeah we have it up and it's the time. Let's back out of the technology thing we're going to get on to that but let's just talk about what has changed with regards to parenting styles outside of technology over the last few decades how is this great the raw material foundation for the kids that would grow up.

Now that's a great question it's one that I don't write enough about I am focused on the technology but Greg and I did write about this in the calling the American mind that there is a long term transition over generations as when life is hard and families are big and religion is an important part of life you tend to have a very structure there you know kids are growing a lot of structure there are do's and don'ts there are punishments if you misbehaved

and there's a big liberal conservative split on this in general conservatives want more strict child rearing progressives want more lenient liberal and now called gentle parenting. And in general as as our societies have gotten wealthier and safer and our families get smaller we've all kind of moved over to the gentle side you know when I was a kid spanking was normal but it was like only for the very like my sisters and I we got spanked like that.

And then we got a few times when we did something really terrible but now it's you know at least in you know educated circles like that's almost unheard of whereas a couple generations before there would have been a lot more physical school teacher would have yes that's right schools would hit the kids that's right so you know so many ways it's progress on the other hand if you take out if you take out the threats the punishments all the negative stuff and you kind of leave it with like what you see a lot of parents are going to do that.

What you see a lot of parents doing like now Johnny was that a wise choice or an unwise choice as opposed to say no you do not hit your sister so I think we become a little too gentle to unstructured and this might also help explain a really interesting twist in the data that it's not really in the book I found a lot of it even afterwards is that the mental health crisis is much worse for children and families on the left then on the right.

So liberals or progressives have always had slightly higher levels of neuroticism anxiety depression just a little bit more than conservatives it's a big you know long study thing conservatives are a little bit happier than liberals adults and children and if you plot out the levels of you know of happiness or the negative stuff like meaninglessness on all the graphs in my book you'll see like you get a straight line until around 2011 2012 and then all of a sudden the lines go up like a hockey stick.

So if you break it out by are you a liberal conservative which is asked on one or two surveys it's the liberal kids especially liberal girls they go up first and fastest something happens whatever it was the change in the early 2010s it hit liberal kids especially liberal girls the hardest and I think part of it is what we're talking about if you are rooted deeply in structure and community and you have to go to church every Sunday or you know you're an orthodox Jewish kid you've got Shabbat you got you know

24 hours where there are no devices in your with your family moving to the digital technology didn't wash these kids out to see but if you're a more progressive family usually a smaller family more economic more mobile you move around more perhaps you have weaker ties a lot of freedom a lot of creativity but those kids seem to be especially vulnerable to being washed away in the early 2010s it's not just left right it's also religious conservative religious secular so so

secular religious I'm sorry secular conservative kids show the least increase everybody goes up but they show the least increase whereas progressive non religious kids or families that's where you see the biggest increase in mental health problems I wonder how much of it from the liberal progressive side comes from this very softly softly gentle approach to discipline and parenting because you know I

hesitate dropping into bro psychology this early in a podcast but fuck it like if you think about your level of discomfort exposure what your what you're comfortable being uncomfortable with how often has someone told you know how often of you

being told that you're in the wrong how often has someone raised their voice at you how often has someone been stern you know all of these opportunities are times where you learn okay I can self regulate this is this can happen to me and I'm still safe this can happen to me and I'm still loved no one's going to abandon me I'd this isn't a comment on my moral character or my worth as a human this is an inbuilt part of being a fallible

human that makes errors and mom and daddy going to say you don't hit your sister you don't do that got your own time out go sit on the step and sit on the step until you've calmed yourself down and if you've never experienced that and you continue it like you don't even need you don't need to know anything about human psychology to know that it's a train a system on a type of stimulus it will become hypersensitized when you get outside the bounds of that stimulus yeah and that's where we

know I think that's perfect I can just add a little psychological color to it in two ways one is to bring in the concept of anti fragility which I hope many of your listeners are already familiar with you know something's a fragile glasses fragile you don't like kids play with it it'll break so we give them plastic which is resilient if a kid drops it and won't break but it doesn't

get better but some things are anti fragile they need to be stressed and strained and dropped and and suffer setbacks in order to get strong and this comes from this my and what you call it the seem to let so bones and muscle or anti fragile if you raised your kids by saying I never want you to put stress on your bones you know never go downstairs take the elevator you know what their bones are going to get weak same thing with muscle the immune system is

anti fragile and kids are anti fragile so that's that's like the psychology underneath a lot of what you were just saying but then there's an other one which I haven't really talked about publicly because it's sort of can easily get taken out of context maybe that'll happen here when I never we have the most

unreasonably reasonable audience in the internet you'll be fine okay it's really important for kids to learn how to accept injustice now let me quickly keep talking said that doesn't just get you know John hi you know white guy says that people need to just suck it up and accept injustice no but the situation that you just talked about you know like you know you know you do not hit your sister time out and it might be the case that your sister hit you first

and maybe there's more to the story and so maybe your parents are actually treating you unfairly and in general we would say you know authoritative parents would always hear them out like why did you hit your sister tell me why you know if you can't justify it we'll punish you know but sometimes sometimes things are unfair and if your child who is raised where in general your parents you know you trust them in general they're fair but sometimes they're not sometimes

they're just not and you just learn like okay you know it happens I'm a little magnet I'll get over it okay now fast forward 15 20 years imagine you're an employer hiring two recent college grads one of them has never had to face injustice one of them everything was always

fair and if they thought it wasn't fair they could say I think that's unfair and then they could work it out another kid had authoritative parents who sometimes made mistakes and sometimes was treated unfairly who would you rather hire and I think what we're seeing in universities is that there's a certain kind of activist young person who who sees flaws in the world and thinks that they see everything as it is and they should

never have to accept any unfairness and they can just become very very difficult to to work with because they're used to getting their way so yeah we're doing kids no favors with this sort of you know gentle you shouldn't have to do anything that doesn't make you comfortable like no sometimes in life you do have to do things that make you uncomfortable or that you know or that you think you have to respond to situations that you think are unfair

like just gone off of you lost light on your face no it hasn't nothing's changed about my setting might just be my I ball doesn't matter no it's all good okay I spent a lot of time running a big events company in the UK so I run night gloves for a decade and half and one of the things that I very quickly realized stepping into that industry is it's full of scumbags I was trained in the

art of scumbaggery but you know if I'd gone into that I had this really interesting experience because I was a university right so I was seeing and I was doing two business degrees to the masters and a bachelor's in business stuff but I was running a business and from doing night life you get to see HR marketing B2B B2C hiring fire every you see the full works right it's a full gamut of everything so I was getting to learn about business 101 but I was also

experiencing business and what I was being taught and what I was experiencing were diverging very quickly but the interesting point here is up until you leave university most people can campaign their way out of situations that they don't want to be in this is wrong

the standards that this professor is holding me to are too high you know we've seen this happen a good bunch etc etc when you enter the world of business someone doesn't need to play by your rules they can they can bring you up to the

brink of signing a contract your balls deep in loyal fees everything's ready to go you bet the business on it and they can go by the way this is it's called crank on confirmation is is the the actual tactic and they just crank the fuck out if you they go hey we're going to pay 20

percent less of this deals dead in the water you go no you go out the black I've got I'm I'm and they yeah we know that you're this deep and it which is why we want to pay 20 percent less like that's just who know the business works like this is what crank on confirmation is and it happens in night life over and over and over and over again my point being if you like if you're unable to deal with someone coming and twisting you are you going all right well I know that you need me

let's let's play a game of chicken here with who needs who the most you're just going to be so dysregulated that you can't deal with anything my point being this sort of hyper I think of it like an overton window of sensitivity you know you have the entire gamut of human experience and then you have this range within which you're familiar the tighter that you make that any

small movement outside of that is going to feel like like dysregulation and I suppose as well this gets into something I've spoken about with dr animatient and tons of people to do with child rearing the importance of risky play and why yes yes that is such a key word and that this is

something I think that won't be as familiar to to listeners you know even listeners who might have read the calling the American mind or might know about the importance of play there's really interesting research as a play researcher from Norway named Ellen San Cater and she has a

couple of papers from 2010 and more recently on the need for risk specifically risk and thrill and the keyword that I really resonate with is thrill so you know we know that even if you know kids need to play but we don't want them to play in any place dangerous we don't want them to climb any trees as far as I can tell New Zealand is the only English speaking country left in the world where children are allowed to climb trees you know like I remember you know that recess when I was a kid

and I was a tree you know some of the climate tree but we sort of decided we have to keep kids safe from danger so nothing that could have any real danger but what San Cater points out is why are kids seeking out danger why is this almost a universal feature why are kids doing things that they're almost certainly going to make them get hurt you know why are boys doing jumps on their bicycle they know they're going to get hurt why are kids skateboarding down steep hills they know they're going

to get hurt and the point and the reason she says is because part of our evolutionary programming is to test our abilities learn to manage risks that are smaller risks because life is full of risk once you're not protected by your parents boy is

life dangerous out in the jungle out in the wild out in the world of nightclubs so we have to part of our our mandate as a child is try things that are a little bit dangerous and you get to select how dangerous it is and so you know when I would take my kids to

Coney Island here in New York City you know big you know Mewsen Park area there the kids like in the car there be so much discussion I'm like are you going to do the Thunderbolt today or the you know the slingshot like oh no that's no that's too scary for me you know

everyone they're all trying to adjust but then once they do it they come off I mean they are jumping they are afraid the thrill is what they've been craving and what San Cedar says is it's that process of being afraid being really afraid like the roller coaster it's about to go over the top and it's about like you're really afraid and then on the way down you're screaming and it's thrilling and pleasurable and fearful and then when you get to the bottom and you make it off the other

it's just thrilling and when you do that you're actually changing your brain you do that over and over again and you develop the brain of a person who can face down some scumbag or some person threatening them who can actually deal with threats and stand their

ground and think quickly and not just panic and melt down so our kids need risk and thrill that means they're going to get hurt they're going to sometimes break bones but the alternative is to keep them soft so that they're going to break their mind what this obviously rolls from infancy parents into preschool school secondary school what's happening to children when they get into school and they first faced with test scores and assessment and structure

you have to you get to school at this time and no you can't do that in the teacher like how much of this is laid at the feet of parents and how much of this is laid at the feet of the education system yeah it's a kind of a yeah it is a mix of the sort of the normal human progression is up until age six seven maybe even eight there's really no value at all to homework or having too much structure you know by eight nine ten they know they they can

really learn you know to fit in to conform but the early grade especially kindergarten first grade here in the US there's really very little evidence that they benefit from being pushed to read faster or to learn math fast and we have this now you have idea that if they start learning multiplication and kindergarten they will end up in high school further ahead it's kind of a naive notion will give me head start and they'll end up for the effort that's not true

in Scandinavia especially Finland where they don't really start kids until age seven they don't really do any academic stuff until age seven and their kids are among the best in the world at all these academic measures so so I guess I would say at a certain point yeah they do need to learn all that stuff they do need to be self regulating and if they're going to fit into a free market capitalist economy and be functioning people and be prosperous

they need self-confinite all those skills but that doesn't mean you have to really start them very strictly early on what kids need in kindergarten first grade is especially a lot more play than we give them we need to really back off

on the homework and the heavy academics in kindergarten first grade is my opinion what's happening to test scores with regards to students so there are two there's a global measure of test scores around the world that's Pisa the program for international something assessment scholastic I suppose and with Pisa what we see is that scores were going up from the 90s I think it started the 90s scores were sort of going slowly up from the 90s to the 2012 assessments every three years

and beginning at the 2012 assessment some of them start to go down and then they go down further in the most recent and everybody points to that says oh COVID wow COVID was so terrible and it was it was terrible that we took kids out of school

it was terrible that we took it to weren't in any danger and said you don't get to go to school because what if you bring home the virus to an adult and so it's true that COVID you know being out of school did hurt test scores but what people are only just beginning to realize

when you look at those graphs it didn't start with COVID it started when kids and everybody got on phones around 2012 in America we have the need and a eP national assessment of educational progress it's called the nation's report card same thing there we have data back from the 70s so we were making progress like kids literally you know in fourth or eighth grade whenever they measure it kids literally were learning more about math science and better and reading there was progress for decades

slow but steady progress until 2012 and then it begins to reverse and yes it reverses even more during COVID but the reversal started around 2012 so I think the main thing we should be focusing on here is phones and schools well you know we'll talk more about what phones are doing to all of us but the idea that a child has access you know like a seventh you know seventh grader has a smartphone in their pocket they're going to text if any if the phone is available someone is texting

or group texting or posting on on on Instagram then everyone has to be checking otherwise at lunch they're going to be the one who doesn't know the thing that happened during third period so once kids around 2012 is when we get the phone based child that's roughly when teens switch from flip phones to smartphones right around them as soon as that happens they're not paying as much attention in school they're not learning enough they're not learning as much as they did

they're not paying as much attention to each other and they start getting lonely so after 2012 our kids are getting stupider and lonely and I think a lot of it not all but a lot of it is because of the phone what was that article that you tweeted about Gen Z reading books for pleasure or them not doing it?

yes so Gene Twangy who's been fantastic she was one of the first to really call attention to this in 2017 that something big is happening to our kids and Gene is a master of these four giant data sets that we have in America long running surveys monitoring the future goes back to the 1970s every year they they interview large samples of 12th graders 10th graders and 8th graders and so we have decades of data and one of the questions they ask a lot of questions

one of them is you know have you how often do you read books for pleasure or have you read a book for pleasure in the last month I can't remember the exact timing and what what Gene shows is that the number who have read no books I think that's how it is like how many of you read you know zero in the last year for pleasure or you know one to three or five to ten the number who have read zero books in the last year has been going up for a while

it didn't start in 2012 as kids are watching more television cable TV going on the internet book reading has been declining being replaced by by other screens that's been going on for a long time but it accelerates after 2012 because again once you have a smartphone and you have social media which is going to suck up all of your time if there is no limit to how much you need to consume or post or monitor

so life on a smartphone what I'm calling the phone based childhood takes up so much time there is no time for hobbies or reading or anything and so Gene shows these dramatic graphs of you know the number who never read a book those go up and the number of books people read on average goes down we have a nation of young people who have read very very few books if there anything else that we need to say about the education system and what it's got wrong maybe from a disciplinary and standpoint

we know about this sort of early thrusting of academic achievement onto kids in the hopes that it kind of starting earlier pushes them out ahead more late is there anything else aside from the technology that the education which has got wrong oh my goodness yes so one of the you know in this book I'm trying to be totally not political and and just really just focus on the kids but since I'm talking with you Chris I'll I'll share some other thoughts really other parts here it's fine Jonathan

so education schools have been accused of being ideologically progressive since the 1930s and they are they lean left the military leans right the police lean right the arts lean left education education schools lean left

that's just the way it is that's not necessarily a problem but what I've been focused on since 2011 as a social scientist is the loss of view point diversity when everyone trying to figure something out if everyone's on the left or the right you don't get your confirmation biases challenged

and you start getting what I call you start getting structural stupidity that is you know someone can say something really stupid and and no one dares to challenge them because if you challenge them you look like you're a conservative or you know or a sexist or a racist or something you'll be accused of something so people just keep their mouth shut I get emails from students in grad programs in education periodically and they say basically help

I came here to learn how to teach all we learn how to do is racial justice and equity like we never learn you know everything is oppression everything is racism we don't learn how to teach so I can't say this is true for all ed schools but for the elite schools I think they are large they become very very ideological

they were that before 2015 but in the kind of the great awakening that we've had in the real intensification of sort of the left right culture war you know we can see the right going off the deep end in a lot of ways but you know for act talking about schools

it's really it's you know the left and the education schools so I think that there's always been a debate between sort of progressive educational ideals and conservative and I've always seen that as a yin yang sort of thing like you actually need the tension of them pushing

but since there are very few conservatives left in higher education you know in the social sciences and in education schools it's all now very very ideologically progressive and that means you have a lot more the gentle parenting the focus on equality of outcomes by race

regardless of inputs let's get rid of tests let's get rid of honors classes so I think education schools have been working very very hard to lose the trust of centrist's Republicans and anyone who actually cares that their kids get an education so again you know in the current book on mental health I'm not I don't want to get get into it but if we're talking about what's happening to our kids schools and education I think I think the educational establishment is becoming structurally stupid

and we saw clear evidence of this in San Francisco during COVID where the school board was you know they were totally focused on pulling down statues of Abe Lincoln and renaming schools you know and the citizens of San Francisco who are you know very far left were so fed up with it

they voted out the school board so yeah I think the education system is becoming in this country very very ideological talk to me about the newest data that you found around smartphones you know you've been circling this wagon for quite a while yeah it's spent a good bit of time on this book since your last one which was something not too dissimilar what what are the primary harms of technology on kids and what's the latest data of other sure

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

when you say we agree do you mean you and Gene or you and the other no no me and the other side they've done a number of met analyses and they say you know the correlation is around 0.1 to 0.15 but that's for boys and girls together whereas Gene and I many others have found the correlation is much bigger for girls social media harms girls much more than boys so Gene and I found that the correlation for girls is about 0.2

well that's actually pretty much the same if they say it's 0.1 to 0.15 correlation for everyone that means they're basically saying the correlation is around 0.15 maybe even higher for girls so we actually agree and that that correlation is actually pretty big in public health

effect it's not big in a mathematical sense of variance explained but it's about the same size as you get from many other public health things you know calcium consumption and later osteoporosis I mean all sorts of effects are around that size so we actually agree on that but then the debate they say it's small we say it's actually as big as everything else the big debate is okay there's a correlation but correlation doesn't show causation you know we have to prove causation

and so I've been collecting I started this in 2019 after I was challenged on the Kotlin the American mind I said well let's get to the bottom of this is there a mental health crisis because back then the critics were saying there isn't even a mental health crisis it's just you know self report stuff it's not it's an illusion well now it's clear no it was not an illusion the rates have been going up since 2012 now the question is what caused it

and I've been collecting experiments with these big Google docs if you go to Jonathan height dot com slash reviews you can find all of our Google docs create with Zach Roush and we have one that lists all the studies we can find that are

in the correlational studies the longitudinal studies the experimental studies sorry and this is like getting too geeky and all but the point is there's like we have about 20 25 experiment true experiments that we found and the and the large majority of them do show causal effects

and the ones that don't show causal effects is very interesting if you look at the six or seven that fail to find an effect of like ticking kids off phones they all use a very short time period so if your experiment is we're going to make kids to college students stay off of social media for a week you know are three days and they're going to see how they're doing and guess what you take someone who's heavily addicted you take away their drug

and you check in on them a day later or a week later how are they doing not well but the studies that waited a month almost all find they're doing a lot better they're much happier so you know I don't know what else we can do here like we've got the correlation evidence we've got the experimental evidence the experimental evidence shows a clear pattern where if you refine it to the ones that match theoretically what's happening the effect gets bigger

you've got the quasi I mean you know people should go look at this Google doc I mean I don't know what else we can do to convince people that it's not just correlational there's a lot of causal evidence what ways could you be wrong about this evidence so on the experimental evidence the published experiments my critics say that if you look at each of these studies they're mostly pretty weak

some of them have small sample sizes just one or 200 some of them there's some other flaw and so you can you know you can find you can definitely find flaws in most of the experiments so it's possible that they're right and that only experiments that find an effect get published that is conceivable but there are so many different lines of evidence here and so I would ask listeners to think about we have a situation in which the parents see the problem

the parents whose kids are dead think that it wasn't it was only cause a social media that you know that the kid committed suicide they can they can see the harassment taking place online so you have the parents saying this is this is causal I don't know any parents who say oh no it's wonderful for my kid to be on social media

the teachers see it the principal see it the psychologist see it the kids themselves see it you you had Freya India on she is one of the best writers on what is happening to girls and Freya published a great essay on on my sub stack I think you refer to it on your show on the the algorithmic conveyor belt of just you know once you express an interest in something the algorithms are going to pull you all the way to eating disorders or self harm or whatever it is

so given that I can't find I literally cannot find anything written by someone in Gen Z that says no we love our phones our phones are great we're our phones are make our world better you know smart social media so good for like I can't even find anyone saying that but we have lots of people like Freya we're saying this is destroying us

so when you look at the experimental evidence that uses very limited manipulations one very particular operationalization of the question finds a certain effect size you got to ask yourself which is more plausible that everyone is wrong and all the experiments are wrong

maybe it's the case that something is really happening here what is the proposed mechanism by people that say smartphones don't have this big impact on mental health because the mechanism is what's being debated the change in mental health is pretty undeniable we have very very high rates of whatever is like the most

cataclysmic language about girls between age 12 and 16 is like persistent feelings of hopelessness or listlessness or something like just the this like awful pock elliptic language what are the people who disagree with you saying is the mechanism that's causing this to happen

they don't they don't that's the amazing thing so you have you know you look at the graphs and they go up in very much the same way same time in the U.S. the UK Canada Australia New Zealand Scandinavia we've got graphs of all this I hope your listeners will go to after Babble dot com that's my sub stack it's free we've got all the graphs from all these countries we've got the world's repository of data internationally it all starts in the early 2010s

and so my critics say well the amount of variants explained is very small so you know the so you using social media can only explain a small amount of variance therefore it can't explain the explosion and we're done here and then I said well what do you think does explain it no one had no one even offers there's no alternate theory the global financial crisis is at least global but that was 2008

so why is it that nothing happens to teen mental health until 2012 2013 by which time unemployment is dropping stock markets rising everything's getting better you know it's so the global financial crisis doesn't work there is no other explanation that I can find not even one that's been proposed other than the loss of the play based childhood to be replaced by the phone based childhood and that really happened between 2010 and 2015 is when the phone based childhood came in that explains the globalness of it

it explains the suddenness of it it explains the gender difference it explains everything that I found and you know my critics say well we're not convinced but we have we're not even going to offer an alternative explanation so boring super lame alright what are the primary homes of technology own kids

so once you see the kids have to grow up in a physical world we evolved outdoors nature animals people when kids grow up on screens so it's not just about social media when you grow up with what what I'm calling a phone based childhood where you're spending the latest data I think is nine hours a day average for American kids 11 hours Freya just said there's a British study it was like 10 or 11 hours a day for British kids on their phones which includes other includes tablets I think and video again

I think in any case doesn't include homework or school work just recreational time 9 to 11 hours a day that pushes out everything else and so what I say in the book is that there are four foundational harms once you see that it's taken up 10 hours a day pushing everything what matters the most important thing is time with other kids time with friends that's crucial I mean all of your in person that's right in person and we'll talk about whether virtual is is good it is not

but time actually with other kids other with your friends and that has plummeted since 2012 it was dropping before in the earlier internet age but boy it really speeds up in the in the smartphone social media age and so kids the most nutritious thing your kid can do is be out playing with other kids and this is even true for teenagers hanging out with no adults telling them what to do

so that's crucial that's really nutritious as it were now if kids you might say well but you know the spending of this 10 11 hours a lot of it is spent virtually interacting you know like on video games

well let's look at multiplayer video games now those are at least synchronous synchronous is good you're talking so that's actually good thing the girls on social media it's asynchronous I comment I wait anxiously for you to comment on my comment and so we're not really connecting we're actually performing a

gracious video games are at least synchronous but you actually you tell me I was never a gamer it seems to me that I'm a you look at me and just like the game you wasted a lot of hours playing video games am I wrong I wasted a lot of hours playing video games your there you go stereotypes sometimes have a basis in reality so look basically you know you're a healthy male that means you almost certainly playing video games I mean that's just the way it's been since the 90s

so but you tell me in video games you ever get in fights like like you get mad at each other because someone broke a rule how does how does that happen because I assume that the game itself regulates all the interactions how you mean like fights in game right no no no I mean you just have agreements you have disagreements you shout you say that that was that was totally stupid like it's more yeah fine no but what I mean is like think about when you when you were when your friends played a

pick up soccer game or baseball game or whatever when your kids and someone says no you know it was out of bounds no it wasn't yes it was no it wasn't like you argue about it and what I'm trying to say is the arguments are really nutritious the arguments John P.J the great developmental psychologist really talked a lot about this when kids play marbles they get all kinds of disputes that's crucial they learn how to work it out so you

tell me when you when you're playing video games in an average day you know you four hours of video game playing do you get those kind of fights about yes it was no it wasn't yes it was no it wasn't yes it was no it was everything game the game is the game mandates the rules set for you exactly there is no mediating needed that's right there you go so it's just like if I said we're going to replace all your kids food with

rice white rice and then someone said yeah that that should be just as good I mean it's got just the same number of calories you might say yeah but it's missing all the other nutrients and that's what we do when we put boys on video games yeah it's social it's great fun it has some benefits it gives them some social calories they're talking

but it's missing a lot of the nutrients that you get from face to face interaction okay face face interaction that gets that's what that's just what I'll go faster on the rest of number two sleep deprivation when kids have a screen in their room again these things are designed to be addictive and when you let your kids spend hours with a device designed to be

addictive sometimes they get addicted and so the kids who have a who have dependency they're going to take their phone into bed with them under the covers you know mom can't see that the light is still on because it's under the covers

so social media in particular and browsing the internet takes away a lot of sleep and if you take away sleep from teenagers who are already not getting enough they're going to be crankier less healthy they're going to gain weight there's all kinds of things that happen

physiologically and emotionally which exacerbate mental illness epidemics that's two the loss of sleep the third is attention fragmentation one of the main things kids need to do in as teens your brain is rewiring throughout childhood you brain is sort of pretty big by the time you're five or six and then a lot of it's just the rewiring the myelination of circuits in your teen years the frontal cortex myelonates the prefrontal cortex especially is the seat of executive control can

you set a goal keep your eye on the goal do the things necessary to reach the goal even though there are distractions and as adults we've all learned to do that to some degree

but crucially in that learning was those teen years when the frontal cortex is really laying down you know like how do you do this and instead what we do is it's like we put little distractors you know if a lot of the kids get interrupted every couple of minutes for the whole life they never even spend 10 minutes without an interruption this appears to interfere with their development of executive function

so we're creating young people who when they come to the office they can't just pay attention to something they need more stimulation and then they don't pay full attention so attention fragmentation is devastating to their ability to be productive and creative and then the fourth foundational harm is addiction you know I get big arguments with this with some of the researchers who are who study video games who think video games are good

and they point out you know most boys are having a great time and there's no sign of trouble problem and that's true that's true most boys who play video games I can't say that they're damaged by it but five or 10% are the ones who develop problematic gaming who are compulsive have compulsive use when they're not playing they become surly their brain is deficient in dopamine they are addicted they have a dependency

if you're going through your puberty years as a boy getting this incredible amount of stimulation of you know from you know Fort Nied or whatever game you're playing this is in addition to messing up your life you're not you're not spending time with friends you're not learning how to talk to girls whatever it is this is likely to have some very lasting possibly permanent effect so those are the four foundational harms they affect boys and girls girls on social media not so much video games

and then there's all the specific harms that affect boys and girls we can get into those but if all you knew was here's this consumer product it's going to take your kid away from his friends it's going to deprive him of sleep it's going to fragment his ability to focus and it's going to add to him what do you say if you want this for your kid like who would ever say yes but we did is it right to call social media use an addiction

I had this discussion with Andrew Cuban a couple of years ago and I sort of yeah what did he say he said it looks to him more like a compulsion than an addiction it feels like compulsive behavior he said you know if you if you saw an animal scratching scratching scratching scratching scratching in the corner looking for food scratching scratching scratching scratching scratching you think that animal sick and it it feels to me you know I you're on a plane how many times

you're on a plane you have no signal you know you have no signal you pull your phone out check it up you go feed the little cycle of apps or whatever it is that you do and you go yeah goes back down so to me that seems compulsive now obviously yeah addictive things can have a compulsion that's the reason I haven't got anything long and thin that I can use but that's the reason that smokers will get pens and you know chew down on pens it actually

satiate think I saw something that saying that people who have smoking addiction can satiate a little bit of the desire for the next cigarette by actually putting a replacement cigarette in their mouth so much of it is about the like physiological the movement of that habituated thing yeah so I mean the semantics of what is an addiction where does that cross across into a compulsion can something which is

addictive lead you to have this sort of obsessive compelled behavior that way you kind of pull this out it kind of doesn't really matter but if you got any sure I do you know I know that among addiction researchers there's a debate about whether behavioral addictions are true addictions and if you look at what happens in the brain when a person is addicted to heroin or to cocaine you know there's that's incredibly well studied you know I don't know the details

this is not my aerobics parties but that's incredibly well studied and then I think some of them are saying when you look at behavioral addictions it's a little different it's not quite the same fine I can totally accept that but to me the question is just let's just take gambling addiction

you know most of us have been to a casino the great majority don't have any problem don't have any addiction but a small number I don't know what the percentage is I'm guessing it's probably you know 2 to 7% because that's what I keep finding for behavioral addictions

for some number they went they get into a zone it's straight behavior psychology stimulus response variable ratio reward schedules they get into a zone and they lose track of time and they forget their troubles and of course their troubles are in part because they're blowing all their families money on slot machines but they can't stop

so I think would you say that a person who compulsively uses slot machines spends most of her family's money so that the family is now bankrupt and yet she still keeps doing it would you call that a compulsion or an addiction both okay what you even if you call that's fine with me you want to call just a compulsion that's fine my point is whatever that is for a gambling addict which is rewood yeah call it whatever you want to call it that is what is happening to social media

so you know whatever you want to call it's the same thing and it's yeah I mean in a sense it's literally the same thing because some of the features of our life on phones were directly copied from casinos the thing where you pull down to refresh and then it kind of bounces up and you see thing like that was literally copied from slot machines shout out to Stan Harris yeah he was yeah that's right yes just as a hero in all of this really do a lot of attention everyone about this yeah for sure

so you know there's been a lot of talk recently I've got Daniel Cox coming on the guy that did that really fantastic study about young boys breaking to the right young girls breaking to the left I've got yeah but we're seeing a lot of sex differences in world view and belief in mental health yeah what mental health is declining but the ways that it's declining the sort of usage of technology so talk to me about the sex differences in technology how

the boys and girls use technology differently sure yeah so the master variable here I believe is is a set of motivations that we've talked about psychology for 50 years called agency and communion so everybody has needs for agency to be an agent to make things happen you know

child knocks over block tower it's thrilling I did that I caused that to fall so that's agency and then communion is connection being part of a group being welcomed and embraced and connecting so everyone has both motives but on average boys have stronger agency

motives and when you let boys and girls choose what to do the boys are going to gravitate more towards games that allow agency and so fake war is one of the best examples they want to practice their skills boys I think our evolutionary program for hunting and war to enjoy hunting and war I found this out when I was 29 years old and for the first time in my life played paintball with my buddies and hunting each other we were mixing with other other people but hunting each

other in small groups and shooting guns to try to hit each other was the most thrilling thing we never got you yeah yeah yeah so that was really like wow there's like a room in my heart for being a hunter and a warrior like I didn't really know it was there but it was so anyway boys choose to pursue agency motives girls choose to pursue more communion motives they talk more with each other as Richard Reeves this wonderful wonderful British man who has this it has been

been making the case for boys heavy heavy head Richard on the show course yeah he's great of course back on again soon yeah his new initiative that the center for boys and men American Institute for Boys and Men yeah thank you that sounds awesome I'm fully Richard Reeves Pilled I'm on board with good good stuff he's need to yeah we're all Richard Reeves Pilled yes so Richard points out girls like to do things face to face boys like to do things shoulder to shoulder like

next to each other we're doing something I've got it I need to bring this up so I'm in a Robin Dunbar's book friends which came out maybe 18 months ago it's got this phenomenal study so the next time to irritate a party look at the angle of the feet that women have when I talk to each other and look

at the angle of the feet that man like what what do you mean what do you see women will talk perpendicular 180 degrees there'll be pretty much straight on like this men talk it about 120 degrees oh that's fascinating so they blade and the reason being that this is a bit of sort of

evolutionary bro psychology coming in but I think it's true if you if even try it you can try it the next time that you you're at a party just you know you'll be stood sort of like this with a guy just blading on and just turn yourself so that you're actually straight onto them and there's this just dominates rises up inside of you because really the only time that two guys would do that is if they were going to fight or they were going to kiss and if you don't intend to do it

and you just feel you like this feels right there's something about that angle it's like two magnet two north poles of a magnet right yes oh good example divot away you don't want to yeah dude look at it 120 degrees for men 180 degrees for women it's and it's you can't not say once you see it you can't unsee it so I will look for that and actually that this could suggest a really cool difference between real and virtual you know virtual interactions are not embodied like we can see you

we can see each other's upper bodies here but but I think what we would find because I don't want it all feel freaked out by you you know your face on to me on my head yeah but I don't it all feel like oh we've either got a kiss or fight like virtual well we wait until we finish yeah yeah you are you are pretty handsome I must say so so again something you know we are embodied creatures were physical creatures were animals we evolved

outdoors we had fights we had hunts and we were physical creatures and when we interact now virtually we have only it's you know it's like the white rice thing we have just like a little few of the nutrients but we're missing most of them so anyway on to boys and girls sorry I'm taken too long on this but the point is boy so when when you know laptops and then especially smartphones come out all the kids love them all the kids

gravitate all the kids are on them the boys head straight for video games and YouTube the boys are spending more time on video games and YouTube and porn the girls go straight for the visual social media films especially Instagram Tumblr Pinterest in the early days and so what are the effects the girls are now on these platforms that are all about I post a picture of me and my life and then I wait for

strangers to comment on it and that's really really bad for mental health and that I think is why the girls as soon as we hit 2012 2013 the girls have very sharp elbows in the graphs very hockey stick lines in the graphs boys on the other hand they're playing video games especially video games aren't making them depressed now the boys are getting more depressed and anxious they are roughly twice as depressed and anxious as they

used to be but it's more gradual it starts a little sooner it starts more like 2009 2010 and it's more gradual so I think what's happening and what you know what Zach Rauschen I concluded in our in the book and here we drew on Richard Reeves is you know for girls boom they get on social media they get depressed for boys they've been withdrawing from the real world since the 70s and 80s you know used to be a male

world there used to be a patriarchy I you know but boy what has it been dismantled and as everything shifts towards girls and as schools get more and more structured towards girls and girls needs and girls ways of learning and as we all freak out about gender gaps and we think that it's the girls we have to help in the 90s which wasn't true girls had already passed boys boys are finding that they don't do well in school they don't like school but man these video games are just getting better

and better and and you know it's hard to approach a girl but man the pornography is getting better and better and now you've got AI girlfriends and soon AI girlfriends will be put into incredibly sexy robots so what we're seeing is the progressive withdrawal of boys from effort in the real world that will pay off in the long run and instead boys prodigious energy and their desires are being directed into a virtual world that generates nothing absolutely nothing of any value in the real world.

Yeah the audience is going to know what I'm going to bring up I'm going to do it again it's my I've only had two citations ever in academia and this is one of them so you'll be aware of young male syndrome. No tell me what just that they're you know violent in yes correct yeah high proliferation of young sexless men high tea high risk taking they set shit on fire and push over granny it's not good totally agree.

We have the highest rates of loneliness and sexlessness amongst young men at least in the modern world maybe ever apart from in maybe some like crazy gerontocracy style like tribal bullshit 10,000 years ago.

Where's all of the in-sell violence like this isn't a request but why are we not seeing more mass shootings why we not say that's a point so it's my contention that men are being sedated out of their state of seeking and reproductive seeking behavior through a combination of social media video games and porn so they're not given a sufficient dose to make them happy or satisfied but it is enough to dampen

down and nerf that impulse so and this is what I've called the male sedation hypothesis and this is being studied so why have we not got this yeah I'm a legitimate illegitimate academic now. And there's a question to be asked there but you know everything that you're talking about there that it's triggering it's playing off the back of this desire for them to work together as a team to have into tribal warfare to create mastery to increase in status to be able to accomplish things

okay but it's within the virtual world and you can become an e-gamer and so on and so forth but how much can you cash out that status into the real world but then a more interesting question comes which you know the game is very well

made do and say well if I'm enjoying it why do I need to cash it out into the real world what is real and what isn't why is there this sort of weird axiomatic value judgment about the fact that the real world is better than the virtual world it's all part of a world it's all just dopamine serotonin

ticking around in my brain who cares same thing goes for porn you know I worried about getting me to or I don't have the this thing or whatever whatever like all of these things allow them to do that couple of white pills that me and a friend William Costello think with regards to the AI girlfriend

virtual relationship thing first one being dating and flirting is something that is incredibly anxiety inducing for men yes created CBT made it so that he could overcome approach anxiety I don't know if that's really that's supposed to air in back or is this the other guy the other dude right what's his name I forget the name yeah David David was told me about him it was created to help with the approach anxiety maybe I'm back with it too I everyone's just as a

project I think so yeah but the the primary challenge that you have in dating is that there is no such thing as practice dating if me and you want to get better at pickleball we can go to the local people court you can just hit drives at me and I can practice my drop volley right I can't it is one of the few things where you practice in public you learn out loud so there's always this high pressure to to not fail and what that means is that men often have really really they never get beyond

they never go zero to one they never actually get that first step done so me and William think that a really phenomenal and this you don't even need to wait for the sex robot thing or the whatever the in person robot you could do this with apples VR headset if it was sufficiently

well trained on a good data set so you have a virtual interaction with a woman like a computer game and in this virtual interaction the avatar is able to see your movements they can hear what you're saying that you natural language processing to work out the

intonation and you know they're able to go back and forth and they can you know you can program in shit like consent and you can program shit in like flirting and I want to increase the difficulty the disagreeability of this girl I want her to make me work and you

level up and level up and level up and if you can form that on actual human psychology you can just like a guy's practice playing the video game in great the safety of their own home yeah and then go and deploy this in the real world it's like you know the one of these

like at home gym it's like yeah or we sports right like you know you're playing a video that's a better example you're playing we sports at home you're playing tennis or whatever and then you go into the real one you like hey I played a video game but I'm kind of fitter

and this is the same I played a video game but I'm kind of better at flirting yeah and I think I think having practice flirting in the virtual world is actually a great idea I think you're right that it I remember you know when I was in seventh grade and the

adults would organize a dance it was terrifying you know and occasionally I would ask a girl to dance and either she'd say yes or no but it was terrifying but again that's that like fear and thrill when she does occasionally say yes I agree that in theory we could do

that that the headsets that the virtual reality you really could give boys practice flirting with realistic girls and the difficulty level could get harder and harder now how would this actually play out in the real world I fear that it's not really going to be hey let's

try to make you into the best possible romantic partner likely to find a really wonderful woman and they get happily married I fear that it's going to turn into either here's you know the game is to get the woman in bed and then move on to the next woman and here you know

we'll teach you how to how to bed women or it's going to be designed the woman you want and you're going to you know let's make her even lovelier let's give her even better sense of humor how about if she never gets mad at me you know you program and all these

things that are just going to take you in an unrealistic way so we see open over again you've got an evolutionary background I have to say I want to bring you back on once this tour is done I want to bring you back on and if you can remember it to talk about the

happiness hypothesis because it was one of the three books that got me into the world of EP and and and really sort of made me fall in love with it but we're given that background again me and William have spoken about this and awful lot we talked about this AI girlfriend

revolution one of the problems that you have and one of the reasons that I don't think we need to fear the AI girlfriend thing quite as much is no guy brags about the fact that he is subscribed to some woman's only fans the reason that you don't brag about it is that

there is no status associated with being selected there is no you look like a loser and well but not only that that even if it didn't even if it was neutral in the like loser oh I see a metrics because you haven't been pre selected by the gatekeeper is the price

of a cheeseburger per month yeah therefore anyone has access to this and because of the access it's you know maybe if you have a thirty thousand dollar sex robot it's a flex of your wealth but it's also like do you spend thirty thousand dollars on a sex robot

how weird are you so and I just I don't I don't know what's going to happen but I certainly know that that pre selection the status associated with a woman who is the gatekeeper choosing a man who is the protagonist that accounts for so much of the right of the guy yes great

so this brings in a key talk a key word we haven't mentioned is status and boys are boys and girls each competing for status but boys competition is really much more it's about ultimately about like physical toughness dominance originally in sort of the primeval state

ultimately backed up by the ability to physically beat the shit out of somebody but in modern times that gets converted into other other ways of contesting and we've had a long slow evolution of our economy such that such that we've harnessed male ambition for status and

turned in productive directions in fact I was going to write a book I got a contract write a book called three stories about capitalism the moral psychology of economic life I was going to write a book on like the psychology of capitalism and then the university is melted

down under the coddling and I got drawn off into all these other other things but one of the key insights is there's a is you know Adam Smith realized that when you get an economy set up the right way it's not from the benevolence of the butcher in the baker in the brewer

that we expect our dinner but from their regard for their own self interest when people can get money for doing something that helps others well then men try very hard to make money but it's not just money when you can get status by doing something productive that's going

to challenge like men are like rockets like they have this they have this incredible capacity for work but they're often miss aimed and so I think it's quite remarkable that you know when you know Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to face off how do they do it who can build

the more effective rocket launch system into outer space I mean that's a great way for men to compete so that's productive and I think what you're saying what you're pointing out is part of dating I mean part of his very intrinsically motivated you want a girlfriend

you want sex you want love but you also yeah you want a hot girlfriend you want someone that other guys will respect you for because yeah I got this woman so any discussion of boys yes we must consider status especially what are other men going to think of me and

also what are other women going to think of me based on who I date women are extremely concerned with what other women will think of them as well as separate status competitions but yeah that's a key and video games give them an alternate world in which they can gain

status within that alternate world but I keep coming back to the metaphor of the black hole you know black hole is a place where anything gets sucked in but nothing comes out and so okay here here's another controversial idea I'll air it with you maybe you can

you can just prove it here I'll just put this as a contention I don't know if this is true my contention is that nobody or is that hardly anyone in Gen Z has written has done anything yet that has really made an impact on the world let me just qualify there are always

going to be athletes always there are always going to be singers coming along that's not the issue the issue is did you start a company did you make some discovery did you write an amazing book did you do something that the world notices and says like oh wow you

know that's impressive and when I ask this of audiences they only come up with two names and I saw that you who are the members of Gen Z who've really you know entered the unit they really done something when Gen Z start and finish the Gen Z is now 28 years old so

everybody who's 28 years old or younger starts in 1996 I'm one year old I was going to say boy and slut the guy that founded and was the CEO of the ocean cleanup you know that huge thing that cleans plastic out of the ocean but that would count yeah he's 29 he's 29

so he's a male he's a male the millennials are creative and productive and mentally healthy but Gen Z so wait try again you I'm sure you're going to come up with the one name that everyone comes up with what's one person under 29 who really has changed the world

Greta Tonberg that's it that's whenever he comes up with and then there's a second that people sometimes come up with Malayla who Malayla woman Pakistan from Pakistan she was shot by you know fundamentalists but she survived and she's a I don't think I'm right

exactly this I was never going to get that okay anyway so Greta Greta is the one that everyone comes up with but that's it so there are no Americans there no men and I started thinking this two or three years ago and I keep waiting someone's going to find me a Gen Z

person who's really done something big now a lot of them want to start throwing business as an influencer they want to create an app so it's I'm not saying they're not lazy what I'm trying to say here as far as I can tell they have been raised in an economy where

what you're desperately trying to do is get more followers get more influence and it's all quantified and as long as you're working hard at that you're not generating anything that will leave the black hole of social media nothing that will affect the world outside

of your closed world I mean people about in states I'm sure that you're aware of it but the percentage of primary school kids that say that they want to grow up to be a youtuber or an influencer so exactly you know you have to they're being fed in on the front end with

this pre-supposition and then they're being spat out on the back end too with this lack of impact in the real world yeah well I mean you know maybe this is one of the white pills of automation and AI and what's a white pill I haven't heard that term so a black pill

is something that's nihilistic and it's an insight that makes you feel kind of apocalyptic and fatalistic and a white pill would be a reason for hope it's a justification for hope nice yeah okay I've got to start developing a few of this because my talks can get kind

of dark so all right white pills go ahead yeah just talking about a white pill so a white pill for and it's particularly useful to use in contrast to something that people see as something that's bad AI is going to come it's going to take all our jobs and everyone's

going to be it's going to be the matrix but one of the advantages is that if we're in this current low of real world invention invention from Gen Z maybe the increase in leverage that we have through code means that a smaller number of people can have a larger amount

of impact so the few that break through from Gen Z and do do great things can maximize and magnify their impact on the world in a way that might be able to compensate for the rest of their generations like okay that that's a good point I agree that that's

possible but this just sort of slots right into one of my main concerns about what's happening which is that digital technology and now artificial intelligence is likely to usher in an era of material prosperity if we all have an infinite number of servants to help us make

whatever we want yes there's going to be a rise of productivity and all these people who point to the coming golden age they're looking at material prosperity they're looking at physical health discoveries will procure cancer yeah materially things are going to get better

as they have been continuously you know Matt Ridley pointed this out Steve Pinker pointed this out but I'm a social psychologist and I play sociologist in my spare time because I think what we're heading into is a sociological apocalypse that is all the things that takes

to make a stable society they're not visible I learned this from Mimil Dirkheim and from reading conservative writings institutions structures traditions all the things that make our society possible but many people don't see and these are being rotted out and this precedes

this precedes the internet I mean there's always you know there's the thing hard times create strong men strong men create good times good times create weak men weak men create hard time so you know there's been kind of a decline since the world war two was a huge stimulus

for all kinds of amazing after effects and there's a decline since that so it's not all caused by by recent technologies but I think it's been accelerated by it and so what you're pointing to is yes more material prosperity and yeah that's true but if we have collapsing institutions no

trust in anything and we're willing to consign a generation to just wasting their time struggling for status on you know on TikTok because as long as 12 of them are creative and create gigantic new things will be just as good off as we were you know 10 years ago yeah so yeah okay maybe

let's move on to Grey Pill that's a Grey Pill path yeah oh good you know what Grey Pill that because it's both it's black and white I like it okay Zebra Pill a zebra pill perhaps it's striped it's striped okay so we've spoken about boys and what's happening with them you know

there's so much conversation around young teen girl mental health give me the latest data what are you seeing what's happening with with the young girls sure so I mean Freya covered covered this beautifully and she writes about this beautifully on her sub-stab girls but sort of the you know

the big picture here is let's start with the mental health but there's a lot more going on with the mental health it's very specific for girls it's what's what are called internalizing disorders it's especially depression and anxiety you know other things are up but like you know schizophrenia

bipolar disorder they're all up a little bit but it's really depression and anxiety girls have what are suffer more from what are called internalizing disorders so if they're stresses and problems they kind of turn it inwards and they suffer anxiety depression boys historically suffer more

from what are called externalizing disorders when there are problems with their development they act out they make other people miserable crime you know deviance violence so so that's historically the way girls and boys were but what's happened is actually both girls and boys have moved more in

the direction of internalizing disorders but girls especially so the numbers are hard to believe but they're up around 30 or 40 percent of girls teenage girls would qualify as having depression or anxiety disorders it used to be more like 10 or 15 percent so it's now a normal thing to be an

American or British teenage girl it's just a normal thing that you think about suicide and you have your anxiety and you manage your anxiety it's part of your identity it's part of it's with you all the time so it's tragic it's so sad you know it used to be the case that middle age people

are the least happy it's a well-known thing called the u-shaped curve of happiness the happiest people used to be young adults you know teenagers and young adults and then people in their 60s and 70s they're done with the hard work they get to enjoy their lives but there's always people in the

middle you know taking care of kids and parents that's not true anymore in Western countries the young people have plunged and especially the girls so we have a graph in the book Canadian data Canadian young Canadian women used to be the happiest now they're by far the least happy

group of people in Canada so for girls the mental health the anxiety depression that's like the central finding but there's a lot more you're question about that go on go on go on okay so you know so much of the debate is just about the mental health data but there's so much

else that's warping girls development and making them less happy the hyper sexualization the pornification of everything the fact that you've got these young girls on Instagram aping these millennial women with gigantic boobs and butts and fillers and all kinds of things this just this

is just really really bad for them so even if they don't get to press an anxious when they do but even if they didn't the fact that they oh my god the number of girls in middle school girls who are using skin care products and who are concerned about their skin and you know and doing makeup

tutorials you know like no your skin is perfect go have fun you know yes you you care about how you look girls I've always cared about how they look that's part of life it's part for boys too but to take to take these you know wonderful sprightly funny you know fifth sixth grade girls

and then suddenly to have them focus so much on on their face and their beauty because they're on social media is a tragic loss of girlhood there's that there's the exposure to older men creepy men who want to watch them dance who want to talk with them there's the

the whole economy of nudes from the boys in their class if the boys will send them a dick pick and then say come on send me one of yours come on come on yeah don't be approved don't be approved um and if a and then if a girl does said anything now the boys really got something valuable

and we cite uh you know there's a book American girls you know she the author documents how middle school boys will get a nude photo of a girl then they can give it they can trade it to high school boys for beer and so the girls nakedness the girls humiliation is valuable to the

boy because he can get alcohol and prestige by giving it to an older boy who can buy him beer or get him beer somehow or other so you know the commodification the hyper sexualization the humiliation of girls once they enter the world of social media you know it's just I mean it's

just on so many fronts that phone based childhood is not a human childhood and kids are stuck in it you have an evolutionary background you titled the book the anxious generation of all of the litany of different human emotions that we have anxiety is the one that's very prevalent what

hearing about anxiety disorders and things of the downstream from it there's even a disorder now where people can't distinguish between anxiety and depression uh and it it means that then I have what the fuck I literally learned it yesterday from David Brooks God damn it anyway it's it

they struggle to work out the difference between anxiety and depression so it's bleeding into wow first off from an evolutionary perspective I think it's a bit of a cope by people with my intellectual interest background of EP to say well well you know we're built to be

vigilant you know we've got the smoke detector principle blah blah blah I'm like yeah but it's really tuned up now it's not the first to tuned up it's like yeah supercharged and again my question being why anxiety what is it about the soup the cocktail of stimulus that we have at

the moment that's causing anxiety to be the predominant outcome yeah so I think it's too made there many contributing factors but two big ones one is the loss of thrilling play and childhood which we talked about if kids don't get to take risks they don't learn to manage risks and then

any little thing seems threatening this is why students were suddenly asking for trigger warnings in part because the idea that a book that describes a Greek myth in which Zeus rapes a woman can we expect young women to just have to read this like so what is just exposure if kids don't have exposure

when they're young and they don't have thrills and they don't have risk then any little thing is going to be much harder for them when they're older that's one piece the other is growing up on the stage you know when you're growing up you make a lot of mistakes you say something stupid to

your friend and then your friend might criticize your friend might even get angry at you and then you make up but when that happens on the stage you say something and before you know it everyone is talking about it and they're adding on their own comments and you're the butt of the joke and

as anyone ever knows who's been through any kind of a cancellation attempt or any kind of public online thing it's painful in a way beyond anything that we know in in terms of physical suffering it really makes people want to disappear and it is a spur to suicide so when the entire school

is laughing at you you know or the you know the photo you sent of your of your genitals or the thing you said that somebody caught and then added a kind you know so kids should not grow up on a stage the British I'm told have a saying don't put your daughter on the stage Mrs. Worthington

is this something you've ever heard no okay older British people I believe it's a no old coward song from like hundred years ago but don't put your daughter on the stage Mrs. Worthington is good advice especially for girls and girls are much more anxious than boys so if a girl grows up everything

she says can be amplified every image of her is commented on she never develops just the basic security to move from minute to minute an hour to hour in person to person like because anything could blow up at any time people are always judging you so we have to give kids a normal human

childhood if we expect them to develop normal human strengths what can we do oh good because I just noticed thing we our time is running out let's turn to the solutions and here's my white pill if we were talking about democracy an American democracy I'd be all black pill like I think we're

you know I don't know how we get out of this in American democracy but we're talking about the teen mental health crisis we can get out of it in a year or two and they've already started in Britain and here's what you do because it's all the series of collective action problems the reason

why fifth graders now are getting smartphones is because all the other fifth graders are getting them the reason why my students can't quit Instagram and TikTok even though they know it's wasting their time and making them anxious is because everyone else is on it so they have to be on it

so it's a these are all collective action problems and the way you deal with a collective action problem is with collective action so if we just have four clear norms four doors we can solve this first norm no smartphone till high school if you want to I'd send your kid out of school

in America it's around age 14 so in Britain the movement is 14 because I think you don't have quite the exact cutoff right we have a very clear almost all schools it's like you know eighth grade is still middle school early puberty but then ninth tenth eleventh-twelfth is high school roughly age

15 to 18 or 14 15 to 18 so if we just delay smartphone till high school you have them a flip phone let them communicate with each other and with you as the parents but to give them the internet and their pockets so that when they're on the bus they're not talking with other kids they're flipping

through stuff at lunch they're flipping through stuff so no smartphone till high school at the earliest two no social media till 16 this one is going to be a little harder to get as a norm but you know if most of us parents would say like no you're not getting until 16 they can't say but

I'm the only one I'm excluded they have to say you know half the kids have it but half don't then you say well you know you're going to be in the half the dome and before you know it it'll be a lot more than half the dome the third norm phone free schools this is in a must and this

one we can do this year this year like this September the teachers hate the phones the principals hate the phones I ask them why don't you ban them why don't you have the kids lock them up and they say because some of the parents will freak out they demand to be able to contact their kid anytime

during class text them anything but most parents are now beginning to see this is messing up our kids so I'm urging if if you're listening to this if you have kids in school and the school allows kids to have phones on them please contact the principal of your kid's school and say please go

phone free it's it's messing up their education it's making them lonely there's no good that comes from kids have phones in schools same thing with access to anything that contacts that's the third norm the fourth norm is more independence replay and responsibility in the real world but you can't

just take away the phones and the screens or you know reduce you can't just like reduce it 80% let's say and then say now sit in your room and look at the wall or you know learn how to knit or something what kids really want I once read a long ago I read a book on like the secret life of dogs like

what did dogs really the answer is each other like they they're pack animals they really want to be with other dogs and the same is true for kids what do they really want to hang out with other kids and so doing that on a video game isn't nearly as satisfying but try to arrange it so that your

kids can really spend a lot of time with other kids unsupervised no adult telling them what to do no adult resolving the conflicts so if we do those four things no smart frontel high school no social media till 16 phone free schools more independence responsibility and free play in the

real world do those four things we will roll back the phone base childhood this childhood only really came in around 2012 we've only had in about 12 years it wasn't like this in 2008 2009 so it's not permanent you know we can change it and we have to change it because it is devastating

our kids there's no other explanation for the multinational mental health crisis and with four norms of collective action we can act collectively to reverse it how's that for a white pill I like it and I also love the fact that you've inculcated this new lexicon is just it's swimming through you it owns you now and it's staring at through your eyes that's what happens when you write a book I'm going to guess that there'll be a lot of parents listening who have got kids that maybe going to be

getting to that age that probably kids get phones now maybe like eight nine something like that maybe even earlier I suppose um yeah they got there an iPad yeah you can't do we we don't have a gods I view and we can't coordinate perfectly would a small scale solution be something like try and

speak to your child's friends parents and say bingo yep let's do a cartel let's have this I've got listened to this phenomenal episode with this great psychologist and this very handsome British dude and then he said that we really need to do this why don't we hey do you have a watch

or read the book action generation can we get together we can't do this nationally but can we do this locally presumably that's a good first absolutely that's right that's exactly the thing to do and there are a number of organizations almost all started by moms who are helping so for

in the UK I've only recently learned about delay smartphones dot org dot UK and smartphone free childhood dot code dot UK so those are two organizations that are trying to help parents do exactly that now of course if you simply know the you're in touch with the parents of your kids best

friends which usually you are you can just text them you can just call them you can just talk to them at school pick up or whatever so yes coordinating on a small scale will really really make it easy for you and your those other families to give your kids back a play based childhood the goal isn't

just to delay the phones the goal is to give them a play based childhood if the school can help and say we're going phone free and if the principal can say and parents given the latest research you know I urge you to consider delaying you know try to at least wait till high school if the school

could give some guidance that really helps set the norm so this is why I'm so optimistic because the revolution began in the UK last month literally I mean there was an article in the Guardian you know these these two women the women who run smartphone free childhood they you know how to WhatsApp group there's a little publicity huge numbers of parents like everyone the parents hate this stuff the parents are ready to act and in Britain they are rising up and taking matters into their own hands

and my hope is that is that we're ready to pop in the United States that in March and April of 2024 everyone will really understand like you know we know something's wrong here let's let's try to really put our finger on it and then what do we do what we do is enact these four norms

hell yeah Jonathan height ladies and gentlemen Jonathan I love your work I've been a fan of it for a very long time it's great to finally have you on the show you're officially a modern wisdom alumni now why should people go they want to keep up to date with all your writing and you did a

really interesting writing process for this or it's sort of very transparent in in a way that that is pretty in typical yeah I started a sub stack I thought I would never do that because I don't have time to write but I started a sub stack at after babble.com and Zach Rauchman we put out

all our findings all our research all our graphs invited comment invited criticism and now we're bringing in voices like Freya India's and and Ricky Schlott we're bringing you know Gen Z so just please go to after babble.com sign up subscribe to the sub stack the website for the book is

anxious generation.com and of course I hope you'll buy the book itself anxious generation you know the soul whatever books are sold oh yeah Jonathan I really appreciate you thank you for giving it a day Chris we're fun