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and don't forget to use the discount code spiked10 to get 10% off. That's code spiked10 at checkout at Monk Debates.com. The generation is they're so lonely, they are starved for human contact and when you're drowned in texts and DMs and stuff, that's not really human contact. That's strategic, it's superficial, it's disembodied. It's almost as if you took a plan and just ripped them
out of the soil and said here, grow up in the air, they're wither. So again, it was so sudden, in 2012, college students were great fun and by 2016, they were all lined up outside the counseling center. Hello, welcome back to the Brendan O'Neill show with me, Brendan O'Neill and my special guest this week, Jonathan Hyte. John, welcome to the show. Brendan, what a pleasure to see you again. It's great to have you on. You were one of my first ever guests on this podcast many years
ago. We had a great conversation in New York, so it's really good to have you back on, especially to talk about your new book, The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. It's such a fascinating book, it's been covered so widely around the world, there have been so many discussions about it,
so I'm really thrilled to be able to talk about it with you today. I've got lots of questions, but I guess I want to start with a broad question, and I know it's one you've probably answered a hundred times already, but let's start with who this generation is. What you mean by the Anxious Generation? For someone who hasn't read your book yet, who are you talking about and what is this anxiety that you're trying to get to the knob off?
So it's people in developed countries who were born after 1995. It's not all developed countries necessarily, we're studying that, but certainly it was all the English-speaking countries, the Nordic countries, Northern Europe, Australia, New Zealand. I guess I'll get into it this way, especially with this audience. My previous book with Greg Lukiana was called The Coddling the American Mind, and that book was initiated because the students
who are arriving on campus in 2014 and 2015 were just really different. In America, we have these four-year residential colleges, about a little less than half of the country sends their kids to some sort of college, and at the elite level, you live in these beautiful places, you have fun, you drink, you try to have sex, you learn, you do all sorts of things. That's our stereotype of college students, but the students who arrived in 2014, 2015
were very different. They were much more threat-sensitive, they saw threats everywhere. If a speaker's coming to campus that they don't like, this could be dangerous, this could really harm people, and we didn't understand, we just didn't understand what they were even saying. What do you mean? You don't have to go to the lecture. How are you going to be harmed by a lecture you don't have to go to? We thought that they were millennials because that was the word
for that generation. We thought the millennial generation, marketers said, oh yeah, 1981 through 1999, they just said, they just guessed it, that would be birth years. But it turns out there's a very sharp delineation right around birth year 1996, plus or minus a year, at least in the United States. It might be a little bit off in other countries. The difference is basically puberty. If you went through puberty with a flip phone, you're a millennial, and
you're okay. The millennial's mental health is fine. The youngest one's, the youngest female millennials have some of the anxiety, but overall, the millennial generation is doing well, they're creative. They started businesses. They travel the world. I really admire the millennial generation for the way it just embraces life. But if you were born a few years later,
let's say you were born in the year 2000. Well, you probably got your first smartphone at the age of 10 or 11, back then it might have been 12, but the point is that, let's say you got it at 11, so you get your first smartphone in 2011. Instagram has just been invented. And in 2012, Facebook buys it, and that's the year that so many young women move their
social lives onto Instagram. The front facing camera just came out. So now your iPhone has a front facing camera, and you have an Instagram account, and you have high speed internet. And so you are now going to go through all of puberty holding your phone. You're going to be looking at it a lot. And even when you're not looking at your thinking about, you're thinking about the drama, you're thinking about what you just posted. I wonder if
it's what people said about it. So my point is that life for the millennials was still recognizably a human childhood. They used their phones as a tool to meet up with each other. You know, you text. It's hard to text on those little numeric key pads. So it's a tool to say, you don't meet you at three o'clock at the mall or whatever. But by 2015, you're not meeting up anymore. The time with friends plummets, it just, it falls off a cliff.
The technology is not a tool to facilitate social life. It's an experience blocker that blocks out almost everything else because now they're spending, you know, five to ten hours a day on the phone, possibly a lot more than that for heavy, well, for heavy users. So that pushes out almost everything else. Sleep, social life, reading a book, having a hobby. All that stuff has to be squeezed down because you got to make five to ten hours
a day for this new way of living. So that's a really good outline for who we're talking about and what we're talking about. And I thought about the coddling of the American mind a lot when I was reading this book. I saw this new book, The Ancest Generation, as almost the backstory to the coddling of the American mind, the origin story of how all these things happened. And of course, you reference the coddling of the American mind
a few times throughout this new book. And I do want to ask you about the role of technology in particularly the role of iPhones. And the way you've described it just there, a millennial with a flip phone, generally okay, a gen Z with an iPhone, not so much. That's a really
good starting point. But let's, before we get into that, talking a little bit about the mental health crisis as you see it, because there's a really quite shocking part of the book where you talk about, you call it the surge of suffering, this wave of angst, this wave of anxiety, this wave of even of depressive moods that seems to sweep this anxious generation,
this very young generation. Explain a little bit to listeners, how bad do you think that has got in terms of the experiences that these kids are having? Sure. So yeah, I'll just pull up the slideshow that I show, because I graph out a lot of the numbers are absolutely stunning. And so if you read the book or if you watch my talks online, we're just going to anxiousgeneration.com. We have a lot of the, we have a big long
thing about the evidence showing showing these graphs, they're stunning. What you see, whatever you're graphing, if it's related to anxiety, depression, self harm, suicide, what you see is that from the late 90s through 2010, things were pretty stable or actually getting a little bit better. So the millennials were actually a little bit mentally healthier than Gen X before them. Gen X is born 1965 through 1980, millennials are 1980, 1 through 1995.
So the millennials are doing fine when they're the teenagers. All the graphs I show, there's really nothing going on until 2010. And then I do a big dramatic reveal on each graph. I press a button and like, you know, a square moves away and you see a hockey stick, they're all hockey sticks. All of a sudden, especially for the girls, for the girls, they're very sharp hockey stick. For boys, it's a little more gradual. All of a sudden, the numbers go up
and they go way up. Anywhere from 52, 150 percent for most things. When you look at the younger teen girls, that's where you see the gigantic increases. Often, sometimes 200 percent rates of self harm are up on the order of 200 percent, hospitalization, hospital admissions for self harm. 10 to 14 year old girls didn't use to cut themselves, but now they do. So what we're seeing is not a 10 or 20 percent rise. What we're seeing is a rise so big that if you're an
American teenage girl now, it's just normal that you've made a suicide plan. It's not a majority, but it's about a quarter have made a suicide plan. And a majority say they, I believe some majority say they have felt persistent sadness. The generation is they're so lonely, they are starved for human contact. And when you're drowned in little texts and DMs and stuff, that's not really human contact. That's strategic. It's superficial. It's disembodied.
So what we're seeing is a generation, it's almost as if you took a plan and just ripped them out of the soil and said, here, grow up in the air. And they were there. So again, it was so sudden, you know, in 2012, college students were great fun. And by 2016, they were all lined up outside the counseling center. Yeah. Okay, let's talk about some of the origins to this crisis that you
describe, which is very real. I don't think anyone listening to this would doubt it. When I go to speak on campuses now to the younger generation, the ones who are now 18 or 19, I'm always quite disturbed by how many of them not only have mental illnesses, or they would describe it as mental ill health, but are also quite willing to talk about it. They're open about it. They will
make declarations about it. There is definitely a peculiar culture at the moment. But I think some of the critiques that I've seen of your book give the impression that you think it's all down to the iPhone, nothing else. The phone comes along and boom. Everything goes down very quickly. And you do critique phones and social media and technology quite a lot. And I really want to ask you some questions on that. But you also dig into other cultural trends and social trends and parenting
trends that have contributed to the rise of this anxious generation. So I wanted to ask you about a couple of those. There's a really brilliant section in the book on play and the importance of play and you describe play as the work of childhood. And you give a really good description of why play is important, not only for human children, but also for mammals. It's the way which mammals learn survival skills that will protect them in the future. And it's essential for children too.
So explain a little bit about why you think play. Even risky play is so important. And what happens when it declines? Yeah. No, thank you for this. Because there's about seven to ten accusations that are widely made. And some of them just for anyone who's read the book, they would know it's not true. So the idea that I blame it all on the phones is absurd. A third of the book is about childhood, about play, about overprotection. And a lot of the book is also about
other cultural changes. The loss of trust, the loss of solidarity. So I'm a social scientist and I like to think I don't do one factor stories. I love nuance. I love interweaving different storylines. For this one, this is the other major storyline, which is the loss of the play-based childhood. And the more I dug into the research on play, the more fascinating and really fun it gets because you remember your own childhood. And so the starting point is what you said,
just that were mammals. And that's just part of being a mammal is the mammalian order came about when somehow I don't know how some skin on the chest of some females secreted nutritious, I mean, it's amazing how the hell lactation evolved. But it did. And as long as you're lactating and feeding this little thing, you're going to have a much longer childhood. Oh, if you have a much longer childhood, you have the possibility for a lot more learning, a lot more a larger brain,
all that stuff. So so mammals have this long childhood high investment. And what are they doing? They're playing and they're taking risks when they play and they can get eaten when they're taking risks. They're not with their mother. So evolution must have found it to be pretty effective to do this rather than just keep them with the mother all the time, keep them safe. And humans are the same way. Human children begin to explore, they wander away, but then they look back. If
they're anxious, they look back, you check in, you make sure your secure base is there. And if you have a secure base, then you can go even further away. And that's where the learning happens. Doesn't not a lot of it happens when you're sitting there with mom, even if she's lecturing at you. The real learning happens when you're out with some other kids and you face a challenge, you say, can we cross this river? Can we climb this tree? What are we going to do? Hey, let's have a,
you know, let's have a let's have a game with the kid. My friend and I got in a rock fight with some neighboring kids, but we formed teams and we had rules and it was great fun and it was risky. So what I really dug into on this one, because I have a chapter on play in the coddling as well, but I really dug into this one is some newer research showing the importance of thrills.
This is the keyword, thrills. And so the most so when you when you're out with your friends, you take risks and the possibility of getting hurt, that's why you climb a higher wall. That's why you climb to a higher branch on a tree. You know, that's why you decide to like play a hunting game. You know, my best friend and I we had beabey guns and we will we hunted each other without goggles was completely insane, but you know, but it was we we took risks and it's when you take
risks that you something resets in your brain like, okay, I've been there. I've done that. I know my limits. I know I can do more than I thought I could do yesterday, but I know where my so so so gradual process it plays out over all of childhood. And then when you're a teenager, then you're doing even more you're you have to form your new identity, you have to reform your identity.
So so this is the this is how we evolved. And if you take away that independent risk seeking, thrill seeking behavior, you're stunting your kids growth, just as if you took away all the vitamin C or all the vegetables. I mean, we need a wide variety of experiences. And the phone once you give what the day you give your kid their own phone to hold on to is the day that they're going to put in front of their face. And from then on, the phone is an experienced blocker. So,
you know, I really want people to think about that. When are you ready to have your child block out most of the experience the world has to offer at what age? It should not be six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 or 13. Hi, it's Brendan here. I just wanted to remind you that you can still buy my book. It's called a heretics manifesto essays on the unsayable. And I've really been blown away by the response to it from readers reviewers, spike supporters, people really like this book.
And I think you're going to like it too. It covers all the insanities of our time from climate change hysteria through to COVID authoritarianism, through to the trans ideology. And it basically makes the case for more freedom of speech, more debate and more heretical thinking to challenge the conformism of our times. So, what are you waiting for? Go to Amazon right now and order my book,
a heretics manifesto essays on the unsayable and now on with a show. So, in relation to play, and you've written about this, lent them this book, but also as you say in previous work too, I wanted to ask you about the role of parenting, the new forms of parenting, in contributing to the decline of play. And I think most people would agree that the decline of play is a bad thing for kids. It stunts their burgeoning independence, their ability to move on
and develop the skills all of us need if they don't, if they're not playing. I think the stuff you have in this book on parenting and the changing nature of parenting is really actually very nuanced because there is a tendency I've noticed, especially I guess in the right wing press, to really moan about parents, these stupid parents, helicopter parents, which is a real thing, of course, and parents coddling their kids or spoiling their kids and so on. And no doubt that
happens. But you kind of interweave the crisis of parenting with the crisis of solidarity. So, one of the points you make is that the more that adult society itself gives up on the shared experience of looking out for kids or allowing kids to have that freedom to roam, the more that parents feel very much on their own, very secluded, parenting gets harder as a consequence of that, and you make the point is that's especially true for women, a single mum, for example, having to
do absolutely everything. So there is a problem, there's a social contribution, isn't there, to this crisis of parenting and the way in which that impacts them on kids and their ability to develop? Oh, absolutely. One weakness of my book is that I didn't really go in, I didn't critique parents very much, I didn't discuss parenting styles very much other than the general over protection.
And since the book came out, I've had conversations with lots of people, there's a American woman, Dr. Becky, she's a psychologist who is an expert on child rearing and she's very popular among millennial parents. And one of the high points of my book tour was I was on a stage with her and Oprah Winfrey, that was really exciting. But Dr. Becky, one of her big issues is that parents need to set limits, they should not try to be friends with their kids and be
nice and give them everything they want. Parents must set limits, kids need limits, they thrive with limits, they just sort of dissipate without limits. And as she points out, if you haven't been setting limits with your kids all along, if they haven't grown up in a world where,
book, this is the rule and if I disobey it, there will be consequences. If you haven't been setting rules and limits all during their lives, and now all of a sudden you gave them a phone at age 10, and now you're trying to enforce limits and say, well, only three hours a day, and not at meal times and not at bedtime, you are in for just constant fighting. So it's very important that parents set limits and structure. And it's just part of modernity, part of sort of
a general shift towards permissiveness. And I think this might help explain why there is this really interesting twist in the data, which Greg Lukiana, if I have both been writing about on our substacts, where whenever you plot up the mental illness graphs, everyone is up, there's nobody has been spared. But whenever you contrast left versus right, it's that liberals are up more. Their liberals have got, liberals always were a little more anxious and neurotic than conservatives.
That's a long known fact. It's a relatively small difference, but it's been there. But after 2012, that gap widens. So the conservative kids go up a little, the liberal kids go up a lot. Same thing for secular religious. It's long been known in positive psychology, one of the fields I work in, that the two big, the really big things that are always associated with happiness are marriage and religion. People who are actively religious, they go to church or synagogue, they're happier than
those who don't. They're more rooted. They have more sense of meaning in community, all that stuff. So that difference existed before 2012, but it widens after 2012. The religious kids are up a little, the secular kids are up a lot. When you put it all together, in some of the graphs that, Zach Roush might lead research of some of the graphs he's made, the religious conservative boys are barely up at all, whereas the secular liberal girls are doing the worst of all.
There's a lot of reasons for that. We can get into that. Some of it is the bad ideas that circulate, but I suspect that some of it is that liberal, so there's three parenting styles. A authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive. This is worked by Diana Baum, it's very widely respected in psychology. In general, in modern Western cultures, authoritative parenting is the most effective. It's more likely to produce kids who are self-governing, they can follow rules,
but they're independent. Conservatives generally used to use a mix of authoritarian, which is really strict, and authoritative, whereas liberals used to use a mix of authoritative and permissive. So that's why I think we used to have the differences. But I think in our modern culture, everyone has shifted towards permissive. So conservative families are probably, my guess is they're doing less authoritarian stuff than they used to 30 years ago, and more authoritative, which is
actually pretty good. That might help explain why the conservative kids are coming out with better mental health, whereas the liberal family is that used to be authoritative. My parents were, my mother was great at being authoritative, not a dictator, but boy, if she made a rule,
I knew there were not going to be exceptions. This was the law. So if liberal families shift from authoritative and permissive, more towards more permissive, then their kids are going to come out, less anchored, and more ready to be swept away when the virtual world comes marching in.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's talk a bit about the virtual world and the real world, because one, there was a line in the book or a paragraph in the book, which was a real light bulb moment for me, as I was reading it, where you make this observation that we live in an incredibly contradictory period, because kids are encouraged to think that the real world is full of monsters. Don't go outside. You might fall out of a tree. You might meet this stranger danger. There's
all sorts of problems lurking around the corner. But then, for a period of time, anyway, they were seen as okay to let them roam around the virtual world instead, to stay at home with a ripad or the iPhone or their computer to live in that universe. I know this from personal experience when I look at my nephews and nieces and they're looking at their phones all day, they're usually just watching YouTube videos of young fellas playing video games. They watch
people playing video games all the time, which I find very strange. But I find myself thinking all the time, what are you looking at on your phones? Is there bad stuff there? Is there dangerous stuff? Because I know it's accessible. I know you can find it if you want it. I'm sure I would be far less concerned if they were going outdoors and doing the kind of things that I used to do,
and that you used to do, which was sometimes dangerous, but also good fun. Talk a little bit about that contradictory and some people are so fearful of the real world and so trusting of the virtual world. That's right. When I was growing up in the 1970s, there was a huge crime wave in the 70s and 80s. There was some real danger. I grew up in a safe suburb, but kids who grew up in New York City, everyone out and played, and just sometimes you would get mucked, like somebody would threaten you
and you'd take your money. There were crazy people in the 70s and in New York City, there were serial killers. There was a guy who'd bite people's ears off. There was all kinds of weird stuff happening. But since then, life has gotten incredibly safe. There was a lot of drunk driving. It used to be in every high school. There'd be some kid died. There'd be a memorials because there's always a kid who died in drunk driving. Now there are probably more memorials, but it's for suicide.
Suicide is way up, whereas deaths from all other causes are way down. We used to go out in the real world when it had some dangers. In the 90s, the real world got really, really safe. We started locking up drunk drivers in the United States and so drunk driving was way down. We started locking up. My sister was once flashed. A man just exposed his raincoat and he was naked underneath. She was grossed out, but then that was it. The man, it didn't occur to us that we need to file charges
and have this man locked up. This thing was tolerated back then, which is terrible. Now those people are all locked up or they're on Instagram. They're not out there at playgrounds trying to pick up kids. That's really dangerous. They're all on Instagram, where it's perfectly safe. They can make up an alias. No one can find out who they are. They say they're a handsome 14-year-old boy, whatever it is. We have to understand here how do we get into this mess where your
nephews are sitting there watching other people play video games all day long? How do we get into this? In the 90s was the transition period. We thought the real world was dangerous. I should say the same thing goes for Britain and I should say a lot of the insights here, especially what you led into this segment with about the loss of trust in each other. Here, I'm taking a lot of this from you have a wonderful British sociologist, Frank Faradie, who wrote a book called Paranoid
Parenting. It's brilliant. He points to, because you didn't have the same crime that we did in America. I mean, you had some in the 70s, but it's not as bad as we did. Why did you guys freak out? Why did you guys overprotect your kids and the ideas? There was no reason for it. But what Faradie says is that the central factor is the loss of adult solidarity that we stop trusting each other. You had a number of scandals as we did where I forget which organizations were accused
of child molesting. Some of those were true, some are not. So we'd be into think that the real world is really threatening to our kids. And at the same time in the 90s, this amazing thing comes in called the internet. Now, I'm older than you, but I imagine that you remember the first time you saw the internet. How old were you when you first saw a web browser and you could type in questions and the answer comes back instantly? Do you remember? I think I was about 17, 17, quite young.
Okay. Do you remember being absolutely amazed or was just like, oh wow, this is amazing. Yeah. Okay. So imagine, and you were just 17. Imagine that you were already a full grown adult. And you knew how hard it was to get information. And all of a sudden, God comes down and says, would you like omniscience? Here, omniscience, you can know everything instantly. I mean, this was just like, it was unbelievable. And we thought it was wonderful. And our kids took to it, especially
the boys early on. Boys were always much more interested in hardware. They would build computers and things like that. And early on, they were more interested in the internet. Once social media comes in, then it evens out. But before then, it was more a boy thing. And so our boys are not drunk driving. They're not running around. They're sitting at a computer. That's great. Wow. They're going to get technically skilled. Oh, they're going to have such great careers. And actually, for
that first generation, it was true. Those were the millennials. They actually did learn how to use computers. They did learn how to program. That doesn't happen anymore. To use all the social media apps, you don't know any program. You don't know anything about hardware. So my point is, the internet comes in on this tidal wave of optimism and amazement. And we think it's good for
the kids. And it might have been the early internet might have been good for the kids. And that might be part of the reason that the millennials mental health is actually a little better than Gen X before them. But all that turns around in the 2010s. So we're still super optimistic about tech in 2010, 2011. The Arab Spring is 2011. We think, wow, social media is going to bring down dictators. It's the best thing in the world for democracy. So even 2011, 2012, while the great
rewiring is happening, we're still optimistic. And we still think, okay, my nephew is watching other people play video games for five hours a day. But maybe it's stimulating. Maybe that's good. Maybe I don't know. It feels weird, but maybe. Well, now we know it wasn't. It wasn't. Kids need a huge amount of varied experience, most of it in the real world. And they stop getting that in the early 2010s. Yeah, right. Okay. I've got a few more questions on that in a moment.
But I did want to ask you about the importance of puberty. Now, I think this is something everyone instinctively knows that puberty is an incredibly important part of a young person's life. But I want to ask you about just how important it is and the problems that arise when puberty is interfered with in various different ways or the experiences of puberty are interfered with.
So in the book, you talk about slow growth childhood. And you make this really useful observation for a layperson like me about the fact that children grow very rapidly in the first two years of life. And then they slow down, kind of take it easy for a while. And then there's another rapid period of growth when they pass the age of 10 or 11 and they start entering sexual maturity. And you talk about puberty as a period in which the brain gets rewired quite rapidly. So things really start to
fry and really start to happen. And then of course, if you introduce certain forms of technology or certain experiences that either, well, we literally have puberty blockers for some groups of children, right? So, you know, we have medical interventions that physically prevent the onset of puberty, which I think is very problematic. But there are other ways in which that period of
life is interfered with as well. So explain a little bit about why you thought it was important to have that in your book, the importance of puberty and what happens when that moment in life is meddled with to a dangerous degree. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to write a short book. I want to have a chapter on play and then I wanted to get right to the stuff about phones. But I had to keep expanding the chapter on play. And then I realized, wait, you know, I really focused on like,
you know, early childhood over protection play, risk taking. I need to talk about puberty and I put a little section in on puberty, but there's so much to say about puberty that I broke it out into its own chapter. So the two things we really need to focus on are brain changes and inculturation and identity. So the brain changes are that the human brain and body grow very quickly early on. The brain reaches about 90% of its adult size by the age of six. So it's not about like,
we don't want our teenagers great brains to grow bigger. They're already about full size. It's all about pruning and tuning. It's all about they have too many neurons. The brain, the idea is let's put too many neurons in there. And then the ones that end up being used and forming circuits those get reinforced. And in puberty, they're going to get myelinated. They're going to get wrapped in a fatty sheath that cements the connection, makes it faster. Whereas the ones that don't get you
so much, those are going to literally die and fade away from the brain. Same thing with dendrites, you know, and synapses growing together and connecting. So childhood is a long period of wiring up the brain. It's not about total growth. It's really about what do you connect, what do you cut out. And so the childhood form of the brain has all that stuff in it. At puberty, it's sort of like, okay, now we're going to lock down into adult configuration. Like now we know how to be,
now let's make it final and make it fast, make this a much more effective brain. And that rewiring, as I understand it, it begins more in the back of the brain as the first parts to change over to the adult pattern. And the prefrontal cortex, which is the seed of executive function, unconscious thinking, well, you know, a whole bunch of activities, higher mental activities. The prefrontal cortex is the last one to really finish. And that doesn't finish until your late
teens are early 20s. So, you have all this very, very rapid brain growth going on, a brain tuning going on during late childhood and then into puberty. That's the first thing. So right there that tells you, you know, what we should probably be like, this is probably not a good time to be drinking heavily when you're like, you know, six, seven, eight, nine years old. This is probably not a good time to have lead hit your brain. Like, you know, the developing brain,
you really want to protect it. And so that's the first thing is just the brain is extra sensitive at puberty because it's like, frantically, you're not frantically, but it's like, really in our eight ways, getting the microstructure of your adult brain. Okay, now let's talk about culture. At puberty is when kids get, they get more competent, they begin to have adult urges, they are, I shouldn't quite say competent because they are smarter, but they don't have executive
control. They don't have much self control yet. But all around the world at puberty, the parents don't crack down and take more control. Actually, the human pattern is the parent step back and elders of the same sex step in. So all around the world, traditionally, not in modern times as much, but traditionally, when a girl menstruates, that's taken as the start of womanhood. So for
girls, there's a very clear biological signal. And on that day, you know, a woman is appointed, you know, if it's someone, it's not never the mother, another woman is appointed for this honored role of basically taking this girl through the puberty rights and leading the rituals and the trials and the dancing and the sacred knowledge and all the things that it takes to turn a girl into a woman. All that is done by older women. And then she is welcomed into the world of
women. For boys, it's a little different because boys don't have anything like menstruation. So for boys, it tends to be more like you take all the kids who are a certain size or all the kids who are, you know, around 11, 12 and they become a class of initiates and then they go through various rituals or deals in a warrior culture. It can be quite brutal to toughen them. So human wisdom and human evolution, cultural evolution, usually has this thing about helping kids
make the transition from boy to man and girl to woman. Now we dropped that a long time ago in the West. We don't do much of that. That was commented on the early 20th century that we don't do that much anymore. I had a bar mitzvah, which we had a little bit of that, but it wasn't that deep, it wasn't like a big, you know, it was, it was something. It was a right of passage, you know, you're said to know today you are a man, not that you're really a man, but you have taken on certain
responsibilities of a Jewish adult. So there's a little of it in religion, but not much. And so we already stopped guiding our kids through. Then something terrible happened. Rather than them getting it from other kids and from television, now television was all created by older people, by adults. And there were sensors. You wouldn't see the headings on television. You wouldn't see a cat in a blender on television. But instead, we say, how about if the internet
raises them? How about if the internet tells them what is, you know, what's the way to be? How about if TikTok guides them through literally tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of very short little videos, depending on your feed, you know, for some of the boys who tend to, who are more likely to click on stuff, it'll have car crashes, people getting punched in the face, a lot of violence, a lot of sex, a lot of really degrading content. For the girls,
there are many of them are on either Instagram Reels or TikTok, mental health channels. So they're being raised by young women, a little older than them, who have very extreme psychiatric symptoms. Not exactly faked, but sort of trained by the audience, audience captured to be more extreme. So our children are now being socialized, not by elders, but by random weirdos on the internet,
who are selected by algorithm, with the extremity of their illness or their views. And then pushed down the throats of our kids almost not quite in the same way that we fatten up a goose for, for, you know, fwagra, but it's just a terrible way to have kids go through that delicate time of
puberty. Yeah, I mean, when you put it like that, it's, it's so clear. And like you, I had some of those kind of rituals of childhood and teenage life, I had a Catholic confirmation, which was the moment at which you become an adult in the eyes of the church or kind of an adult. So there was an element of that. And they were, they were very helpful experiences. There were these kind of signs in the road as you steered your rocky way from childhood to adulthood. And the
adult world was generally there to kind of push you in the right direction. And when that goes missing, obviously lots of things can potentially go wrong. I want to ask you about your phrase, experience blockers. Because I think it's such, it's a very useful way to understand some of the problems that you talk about in the book. And you talk about overprotection as an experience blocker. Because kids, you say kids are anti-fragile. And therefore, it's useful. It's good in fact,
for them to be exposed to conflict and tension and fear even. And all these things that we think are in the real world. Yes. In the real world. Yeah, exactly. In the real world, in the, in the concrete world of things and people, it's good for them to have those experiences because it helps them to develop further their skills of anti-fragility and their strength and so on. So you talk about overprotection as an experience blocker because it prevents them from having
those experiences and stunts their moral growth as a consequence. And you talk about, you have a section in the book, experienced blockers, safetism and smartphones. And it's a really interesting section. And we've touched on safetism. So, and we've touched on smartphones. But I want to ask you a bit more about those two experienced blockers in particular. Well, I firstly, what exactly do you mean by an experience
blocker? And out of those two safetism and smartphones, which do you think is the more problematic? Or is it an equal relationship with those things? Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to quantify. But let me, I'll say a few words and then I'll give an opinion about which is the more powerful one. So you know, the theme of that I can summarize the book by saying we have overprotected our children in the real world. We have underprotected them online. When we overprotected in the real world,
we are denying them experience. So I'm all for making kids wear a bike helmet. Go out and ride your bicycle. But ride wear a helmet. So you don't get a concussion. That's great. But I'm opposed to saying don't ride your bicycle because you might be abducted. And that's what a lot of parents are doing. So the fear, the overprotection is blocking our kids from riding bicycles used to be part of life. A lot of kids commuted to school on bicycle, Iberto school on my bicycle for part of
my education. But that's rare now. Parents drive their kids to school. And so, so overprotection clearly blocks out most of the exciting, thrilling, interesting, independence building aspects of life. So that's pretty clear. Safetyism is an experienced block in the real world. Now, when you give your kid a phone, they're and it's same thing for an iPad. If you give your kid a personal device, so they keep with them, they can customize, they can text, they get their feed, they can create
Instagram accounts, a TikTok account. They have 15 different channels of stuff coming in. It's all so interesting and it evolves in the business world. There's the cultural evolution of products to be more and more addictive, hooky, enticing. So it's far, far more appealing than television was when I was a kid. You know, there are about five channels and they're mostly for adults and it wasn't that interesting. So when you give your kid a phone or their own iPad,
that's going to basically take up most of their attention. Like literally most, the numbers in the US now are five hours a day is the average amount of time that American teenagers spend just on social media. That's just social media five. When you add in all the other stuff,
numbers go from seven to nine, something like that. But, you know, half the kids say that they are online almost constantly, which means if you include the time that they're not literally looking at the phone, but they're thinking about it and then they bring it out again back and forth. You know, it can add up to something like 16 hours a day of basically living in the virtual world. And what does that come at the expense of? If you're going to spend 10 to 16 hours a day on something,
there's no time for anything else. And so everything else has to get squished down or eliminated. Here are some things that we know get eliminated. Friends, time with friends has plummeted. It's down more than 50 percent. I think it's over 60 percent since 2010. So, Americans teens don't spend very much time physically with their friends. And if they're with their friends, they're both on their phone. So they're not really even talking. So time with friends, you lose out on all of that.
Reading books. Reading has been declining since the 70s reading books, but it really plummets after 2010. Because again, there's no time. Religion plummets, who has time to go to church. And here, we're talking about adults as well. Oh, we're really surprising finding. You know, you may have heard that sex is declining, that young people having less sex. And okay, you know, something about dating, like maybe changes in dating, what's going on there. But one finding I've come across
is that married people are having less sex. So married people have more sex than single people because they have a reliable partner there every night. So married people tend to have regular sex and single people don't. But if you just look at married people, married people are having less sex because no one has time. Everyone is giving three to five hours a day to these various digital pursuits. There's no time. If people are fragmented, exhausted. So that's what I mean by an experience
block. It's an experience blocker for adults too. It's obviously a sex blocker. I think a lot of adults will recognize the sex blocking effects of phones. So, you know, what we need is our kids to have more experience in the real world. So let's stop being so safe to us. Unless it less total experience in the virtual world. So let's not give them a phone until they're much older. Absolutely. I think, yeah, I did want to ask you about, you mentioned their television.
And when you were growing up and while I was growing up, we watched a lot of TV. And I've heard you get a little bit frustrated when people say to you, isn't too much time on your phone just like us, when we spent too much time watching TV. And our parents would often say to us, turn off that TV and they'd unplug it and send you outside, which sadly parents are less likely to do today. But you will know that there were previous conversations about too much television.
And before that, you know, yeah, and before that reading comic books in the early 20th century, you know, why are boys reading these terrible comic books? So there have always been conversations about the role of media in young kids' lives. So explain to us. And I've heard you explain that phones are different. Phones play a different role in a kid's life than a television set or a comic
or anything else that they might have had in the past. So explain a little bit about why you think looking at a phone for numerous hours a day is different to the things that we got up to with media when we were younger. Sure. This is the main argument against me. There are about six or eight researchers who claim that I have mistaken correlation for causation. I'm fomenting the moral panic. This moral panic will be just like the others. Comic books didn't lead anybody to kill their parents.
You know, there might have been some story in the news about a kid who did it, but that it was going to be in the garbage press and it wasn't probably real. So there have been many moral panics and that's a perfectly reasonable starting position. And in the before COVID, in 2018, 2019, when I really started getting into this research, that was the dominant view among researchers that this is just like all the previous ones. And so, you know, let's not, there's no need to do
anything. Well, this is different for a lot of reasons. So I'll just give you two differences that tell you that this is really different. One is that in previous moral panics, almost nobody actually knew anyone personally who was harmed. It was, I read a kid about, you know, I read a story about a kid in Surrey who chopped up his mother, you know, I like, you know, there's stories like that propagated by the media. But this time around, everybody
knows someone who's been harmed by social media. Most parents that I talk to, you know, about half of them say they're, they see it in their own children, especially their daughters. Everyone is at a school where someone committed suicide, someone killed themselves because not everybody, but you know, most, you know, I mean, suicide is very, very common. It's, it's up more than 50% since 2010 for American teens. Everyone knows someone who's been severely bullied, who's been
sex-storted, who's been sexually harassed. So this is everywhere. That wasn't the case with previous moral panics. The second difference is that in previous moral panics, you know, when you talk to the kids, they didn't generally say, oh yeah, you know, we, this is, this is really destroying us. You know, we might have joked on it and said, yeah, yeah, it's rotting my brain, but we didn't
really believe it. We liked television. Now also, we were playing outside as well. So, you know, I mean, you know, two or three hours of television a day, as long as you're also playing outside, it's probably fine. But this time around, talk to members of Gen Z. They are not in denial. They see that this is messing them up. When you survey the older gen, older members of Gen Z, they generally say they wish that TikTok and Instagram were never invented. They say these things are, these things
harmed us. My life would have been better if I hadn't been on it. It was a very sad profile in the times, the UK, you know, the times of about 10 UK kids talking about their online lives. And all of them were tragic. Not a one said, oh, it's so exciting and wonderful. I get to meet up with my friends. It was, it was especially the girls were saying, you know, when I was 11, I got onto this platform, oh, megly. And it was like Guy's master bait. And like, I really, I wish I had not been
exposed to that when I was 11. So this is really different from previous moral panics. You know, and it stands to reason. If you think about, you know, watching television when we were kids, you know, I spent a lot of time watching television. We had limits on it, but I'd spent a lot of time watching television with my sisters or with my best friend. And so you're joking about, you're talking about it, you know, you're teasing each other, you go get food, you, you know, you
go outside. I mean, it was part of the day, but we were together. Contrast that with a boy today. The boys are all on the multiplayer video games. So if you want to see your friends, you can't go over to their houses. You have to go home alone because then you have your headset, your control, your screen. And then you can interact as part of a team in Fortnite or any of the other games.
So, uh, so these new technologies are much more powerful. They're totally customized. I mean, sure, television is trying to keep us on, but like they're showing us advertisements for a Chevrolet, you know, or for laundry detergent. Like, that's not going to keep us on. Whereas, you know, TikTok is as super customized as it can possibly be to keep you, you, exactly that person
hooked. So this technology is very different. Um, and we didn't see a huge sudden increase in a single year, um, in mental illness, the way we do with the social media here. If you're a regular listener to this show or a regular reader of spiked, why not become a spiked supporter? Spiked supporters is our thriving community of people who donate to spiked. Anyone who gives five pounds or more a month or 50 pounds or more a year can become a spiked supporter and get
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for your generosity. If you don't give to spiked yet, now is the perfect time to start. Just go to spikedhyphenonline.com slash supporters to set up your donation and your spiked supporters account. That's spikedhyphenonline.com slash supporters. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's just undeniable that television, and I'm sure some kids did watch too much television and, uh, but television was a collective experience. It was a family experience. It was more collective. Sometimes,
yeah, sometimes kids would have edge out, but it was more collective. Yeah. Yeah. We, you know, I grew up in a large family and we watched TV together, all, all eight of us. That's a large number of people talking about it, making jokes about it, eating food while we watched it as you say. And it was a collective experience because often it would be the big show that everyone in the country was watching. So then you could talk to your friends at school about it as well and what's
going to happen next. So there was a collect a shared experience on TV, whereas with a lot of social media and a lot of phone use, it's, it's, it's, it facilitates a retreat from the family and a retreat from the social sphere into a world in which you are bombarded as a fragile or as an exposed individual to all these different dangerous weird ideas. Um, but you mentioned their
causation and correlation. And I did want to ask you about that specifically. And I guess one of the questions I had for you was I find so much of what you write about in the book in relation to the changing nature of childhood and the changing experience of childhood so convincing. And I wanted to ask you about what happens in 2010 and 2012 and you get phones and then you describe that there is this quite sudden and quite rapid change in the, in the mental health of
young people in particular. I wanted to ask you, I guess it is the, is the iPhone the cause of those problems or is it itself a response to those problems? So is it, is it exacerbating these tensions within modern childhood or is it a technology that has molded itself around a pre-existing problem in kids, which is, you know, the, the, uh, uh, uh, Molly Coddled and exposed to ideas about mental ill health and so on. So what exactly do you think the role of the iPhone is in
contributing to all these problems that you've been talking about? Sure. So, um, so the iPhone is one of the greatest inventions in human history as is the internet. Um, the iPhone is an amazing digital Swiss Army knife and when I got mine in 2008, the second year of the iPhone, um, I was in awe. Um, you know, I love gadgets. When I was a kid, I was had a Swiss Army knife. It's got like the magnifying glass and the fish scaler and the tweezers and it was so much fun to have all these tools
and it's, it's also a real boy thing like boys want like a toolbox. They want a tool thing. And so I found the iPhone to be just amazing. Um, and in 2008, there was no app store. Um, there was no push notification. It was a, it was a digital Swiss Army knife that I used when I wanted something. If I wanted a flashlight, it had a flashlight on it. So I don't think that the iPhone, and when we say iPhone, we're including obviously all the Samsung, it's just a different ecosystem. Um,
but the smartphone was an amazing technology. Now, then some things change. Um, the, you get the the app store, I think does come out at some point in 2008. Um, push notifications begin, I think maybe 2009 plus or minus. Um, and social media goes super viral where it becomes super viral in 2009. Before the retweet button, you couldn't blow up the world in a few hours. Um, people had a copy and paste and resend. Um, so when Twitter invented the retweet button, Facebook
invented the like button. They copy each other's innovations, everything that gets super viralized. Everything's very explosive. Social media is no longer about me connecting with your page. It's now about the news feed and can I make my post go viral. Um, so is this the fault of the iPhone? Well, the iPhone certainly was a platform that allowed extraordinary innovation. And, you know, as is Jeremy the case with the internet, it starts off as this dream of distributed everything
and everyone is welcome and it's free and no one can control it. We've had a conversation with a friend of mine in 1995, trying to explain, he was looking for an investment angle and I said, well, that's, you know, that's the great thing about the internet. You can't make money with it because, you know, like people put things out for free. You can't charge people for it. It's
just information. Boy was I wrong. In any case, the point is that once you get, once you get companies competing, you get a few companies rising to dominance and the internet that emerges by 2010, controlled by a couple of companies. It's very different than the utopian dream, the libertarian dream that we had of the internet in the 90s. Um, so that's why so much is changing. I don't exactly, but I don't exactly blame the phone. I think Apple, you know, I think I get to say that Apple is
at least trying. I mean, the, you know, the screen time controls get better and they do get better. Apple could really help us out a lot. They could make phones that parents could designate as a child's phone. There are all kinds of things I suggest in my book. There's a lot that Apple and Google and Microsoft could do to help us parents get some semblance of control and raise our kids the way we want to. But I think it's really, you know, it's really more about the,
it's the applications and then it's the total life. That's why I really, I really try to say over and over again, I'm not talking about social media destroying a generation. I'm talking about the phone-based childhood. If you have a phone-based childhood, you're not going to have healthy children. If you have a play-based childhood, you will have healthy children. So it's the, it's the transformation of life. And I could, I forgot to answer your question before you said, which one is bigger?
I didn't really know, but, but as I've been doing the international research with Zach Roush, my lead researcher, what we found is that in Scandinavia and in New Zealand, where they let, they still let their kids out. Those are places that didn't go in for the overprotection. They have very high trust, very high social capital. Kids in New Zealand, that's the only
English-speaking country where kids are allowed to climb a tree at recess. Everyone else has been banned because it's too dangerous, but New Zealand is still let their kids out and Scandinavia into the Nordic countries. But when we look at the mental health stats, the same thing happens at the same time. The girls in all those countries begin self-harming a lot more by 2014-2015,
even though they were let out as children. So that's why I think that both matter, but, you know, in terms of which one really pushed them over into mental illness and, you know, just miserable, lonely lives. I actually think it's the, it's the move onto the phones is the bigger one. Okay, I'm going to ask you the question that one is not meant to ask, which is,
how real is the mental illness crisis? Now, it's very real in the sense that there are significant numbers of young people who experience their difficulties in life as a form of mental illness who feel lonelier than before, and you describe it all in your book. I mean, that's a very real phenomenon, and most listeners will recognise what you're describing straight away.
But is what the anxious generation suffering from? Is it mental illness or is this part of a pattern that you will be familiar with of pathologising experiences that were traditionally seen as part of the human domain? Sadness, happiness, anxiety, shyness, awkwardness, even depression, I don't mean in the clinical sense, but kind of feeling very down one day and feeling quite up
the next. One thing that really worries me about TikTok, and I talked about this on BBC Radio a couple of years ago, is that there's now this trend on TikTok, alongside all the other crazy stuff that boys see and which girls are exposed to, and the kind of very strange gender fluid
ideologies that are tempting children to supposedly change their gender and so on. Alongside all of that, there's another trend of TikTok where there are these very short videos that will say, do you have the four following symptoms, and it will list perfectly ordinary symptoms, like sometimes I feel like crap, and then if you have these four symptoms, it says you may have bipolar disorder. So how do you distinguish between, I mean, it's not a nice thing to say, but
a kind of genuine mental ill health and a kind of pathologised experience of life. Is it important to maintain that distinction? Oh, no, we have to focus on that, and that is such an important question that we addressed in the Carly and the American mind, because we have a whole chapter on anxiety, and we show the beginnings of the graphs. Then we had data up until about 2016, 2015, 2016, because we book him on 2018. So we show the graphs, and then we consider that
hypothesis. And we also have a long section on concept creep, concepts in psychology have creeped, and they generally interestingly, they always creep in a leftward direction. So they creep towards, you know, more mental illness, more racism, more bullying, and it has, Lema, a great Australian psychologist coined the term and shows how this has changed in clinical psychology. So that is certainly what you're saying, certainly, is happening, and that could explain
some of the rise in self-reports of mental illness, especially anxiety depression. So then you compare that to behavioral, to behavioral measures that are not self-report, and the clearest one is self-harm, and because there we have, in Britain, there's a study that looked at doctors' records, these were filled up by the doctors, not by the patients. In America, we have the CDC keeps track of reasons for hospitalization, so they can pick up if suddenly kids are people
are coming in with this thing, the CDC can catch it. So they have good coding of self-harm behavior, and there too we see the same shape curves. Now then some people argue, well, but you know, the diagnostic criteria changed, and it was global. There was a global change. Yeah, in 2015, the ICD, the International Consortium, whatever it is, there was, there are some changes in diagnostic criteria that the clinicians are supposed to use, but the only one that was really global is
2015, and this thing is really underway by then. So, you know, if listeners go to after babble.com, that's my sub-stack. We have so many posts there addressing all of these criticisms and showing that none of them can explain what happened, none of them work from multiple countries, none of them, almost none of them have the timing right, and so, you know, there's like so many people
are motivated to deny that there even is a mental health crisis. Talk to anyone who works with kids, talk to any teacher, talk to any principal, talk to psychologists, talk to the track coach, talk to employers about their Gen Z students. We're not all imagining this. This is not just that the kids are self-reporting. Something really changed for people for humans in the developed world, born after 1995. Okay, John, my last question for you, I want to just ask you about where you think
things are at on university campuses. So, the cobbling of the American mind was such an important contribution to this discussion. The things that you've written on, cancel culture, the things that
Greg Lugianov has been doing with fire. And I've always seen cancel culture as an extension of precisely the trends that you've just been talking about and that you write about in the anxious generation because like the more that young people see themselves as hyper fragile and vulnerable, the more they're going to use the shield of censorship against anything that they
might see as harmful to their self-esteem. So, it's very intimately related. I did want to ask you about what you think is happening with some of the protests that we've seen on American campuses and British campuses as well in relation to Gaza because it does seem to me on the one hand, I'm quite happy to see that some university administrators and some student radicals are finally standing up for the ideals of freedom of speech in relation to the right to protest against Israel.
But these are the very same people who for a long time said, you know, shutting it down for anything else. A white guy wearing a sombrero was a crime against culture and, you know, if you go on campus and say men can't become women, you have to be banned. So, there's a staggering level of hypocrisy. So, do you see any positivity in the fact that people are standing up for freedom of speech? Would you just think there is a real cynicism to what's
going on on campuses? Yeah, no, they're not standing up for freedom of speech. They're standing up for their cause, not for freedom of speech. So, I'll just give you two thoughts about what's happening. One is, you know, I've been in this from the beginning. I co-founded Headerax Academy in 2015. Nothing to do with campus protests, nothing to do with students. It was a faculty issue that everyone's on the left. And I said, wait a second, guys, we're not getting the right answers
here in psychology if everyone's on the same team. So, that was 2015. And then everything blew up. At beginning at Yale, the Halloween costume protest, all that stuff. Every year since from 2015 to 2022, things got worse every single year. It never got better. There was never a turnaround. We never saw university administrators setting limits, you know, saying, you know, yes,
you can protest, but you don't get to shout down speakers. They never said that. They never punished anyone who shouted down speakers, who blocked other people's freedom of speech. And so, since they didn't set limits, then they're finding it very hard to set limits now on disruptive protests that are often, you know, of course, most are peaceful. But, you know, if you're a Jewish kid on campus, it doesn't matter that most are peaceful. You know, if you're
wearing a Yarmica, you might well get spat on, pushed, punched. So, you know, we're accepting a level of aggression and intimidation that, as you said before, you know, if anybody wears a sombrero or says the wrong word, they're a danger to the campus and they have to be expelled. So, this is extraordinary hypocrisy. But what I can say, things began to turn around in 2022 and especially 2023. I wrote my, I write an annual letter for heterodox academy for the annual report.
And I think my title in January 2023 was the fever has broken because for the first time, we were beginning to see it was like, because what happened was George Floyd, like things were getting crazy before George Floyd. And then they went like completely bonkers and all the push for, you know, all the, you know, much more DEI and much more mandatory training and all the stuff, things went bonkers in 2020. And the business world went all in on it. And then the business world
realized a year or two later, like, wait a second. This is really backfiring. This is not helping our culture. This is causing constant conflict. Progressive organizations were discovering that they were paralyzed by internal conflict. Everybody was mad at somebody for saying something. So, outside the university, the fever broke and they dialed that back a lot. And I was finally beginning to see some signs of it in 2023. There was an incident at Stanford where Speaker was shouted down with
the help of an administrator. And the dean said, no, that was wrong. Like, finally, an adult in the room said, like, no, we don't support shouting down the speakers that we've invited. So, there were some signs of hope in 2023. It's also important that trust in higher ed used to be very high, even up to 2015, even on the right. It was, I mean, not very high, but it was, it was above 50% approval of higher ed in 2015. It's plummeted, not just for the right, but for centrist and
moderates as well. Americans have lost trust. A higher ed used to have a great brand. We've destroyed our brand. That's encouraging, actually, because when we hit rock bottom in December 5th of last year, when those three presidents testified and they couldn't explain anything about why it's wrong to call for genocide of Jews, that was so shameful. That I hoped was rock bottom. And now people feel much, I feel much freer to speak. I can speak more honestly than I did before. I knew I was
walking on thin ice with a lot of my work. So, the fever has broken. Things are changing. On the other hand, the Gaza protests are so passionate. Now, a lot of the kids are very misinformed. A lot of them don't understand that they are literally supporting a group that's calling for the elimination of Israel and the death of the Jews. But it is a very passionate activism and the images on the
news, I can understand a large part of the passion. And so that is probably going to change this generation for the rest of their lives, because there's research showing that whatever, however, the world looks to you between about 18 and 24, it's kind of a sensitive period for politics. So, this will shape many members of Gen Z, especially elite schools for the rest of their lives. So, we will see the echoes of these protests in much more radical politics on the left. And I think
that means that the right is going to be much more successful because of it. Because the reason why so many people are moving rightward in America now, I mean black men, Asians, working class people, people are leaving the Democratic Party, which was their traditional home, and they're moving to the right, not just in America, in Europe as well. And I think a lot of it is because of the excesses of the left. The right is traditionally historically generally a response to the excesses
of the left. Now both sides are crazy in my view. We've got extremism and illibits on both sides, but I do see the campus protests as being even if the war in Israel and Gaza was resolved very quickly, I think this generation now because of these protests are going to be radicalized for a long, long time to come. John, thank you very much. Brendan, always a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for listening to the Brendan O'Neill Show. We'll be back with another guest and more
discussion. Don't forget to subscribe and in the meantime, keep reading spiked at www.spiked-online.com.