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Welcome back to the Daily Show. My guest today is an.
Author who've laid This book is the Book of Iron.
Please welcome Lexi Freeman.
Welcome, Thank you, welcome, thank you, thank you so much.
Lexi. Yes, I love this book.
This book is so funny and seering.
Do you like Syring?
Yeah?
I love Syrious. You love Syring? Yeah? You want a seering novel. It gets into the ship.
It makes fun of a little bit of everything and reveals something about yourself. I mean, it reveals nothing about me. I don't see myself at any kind of literature. But I love this book.
I think.
This book starts it follows somebody who gets canceled. Yes, and then one of her first moves is she finds the writings of Ain Rand.
Yes, and you.
Describe her initial her initial thoughts about Iinrand as the character says, and the main character says, I had always considered her the gateway drug for bad husbands to quit their jobs and start online stock trading.
Yeah, yeah, true.
What is a compelling about Iinrand for you and starting a novel like this?
I mean, to me, she was, you know, basically the worst person I could write a book about, which really appealed to me. She's so contentious within the culture. But I had recently watched a documentary about her when I started thinking about this, and to be honest, I mean, her ideas are provocative and difficult, but she also just
had like a crazy sex life, which I found. You know, she was essentially in an open relationship at the end of her you know, in her sixties, she was having an affair with like a man twenty five years younger than her. So, like iron Rand was basically a polyamorous, Like she had a polycule, which I think people sort of like don't know about her, and it kind of destroyed her in the end. She ended up sort of like having a nervous breakdown when he was cheating on her.
It kind of undermined her whole philosophy of selfishness in a way, and I found that incredibly interesting and funny.
She's just funny, funny.
If there's one thing that's gonna take Iran down, who thought it was going to be polyamorous.
It was polyamory.
It was polyamoring that did it in the end, which I just find delicious.
I think it's fun I think your book sort of looks at what it means to be selfish. It sort of examines narcissism, Like what to you is interesting about the idea of narcissis and if you can make it about me, well.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, you know, I'm not the first person to say this, but the culture is pretty narcissistic, and so you know, wanting to write a satire about the culture, you know, you want to write something that's going to speak to all sides. And I kind of felt like, you know, narcissism is also something that speaks to the nature of the artist, which this book is about someone who's grappling with this idea of selfishness and wanting to be the best and wanting to be interesting and special
and have you know, contrarian opinions. But then there's also this desire to be empathetic and to do good in the world. And it's the kind of the conflict between selfishness and altruism that is ain Rand's whole philosophy that I feel is kind of distilled in the artistic temperament, in the artist's personality. That feels like this really interesting kind of paradox to me, and narcissism plays into that really beautifully is and is also funny.
It starts, it starts to unpack, start to unpack this idea of cancel culture, Like, how do you see that?
Is there an upside to cancel the culture?
I mean, yes, sure, there's you know things, things it moves the needle, There's there's cultural change in a way
that can be good. And then there's also just you know, I had a conversation about this with a canceled person, and the conversation when in the sort of direction of you know, what being canceled kind of affords you the opportunity to do is to kind of kill your ego and not give a shit anymore about like what people think, and because the ego is all about reputation and trying to succeed, and and when that's not a possibility for you anymore, then you get to pursue enlightenment, which I
think is the other thing we could all be doing with our lives if we want.
You're saying, in order for me to get enlightened, I have to first get canceled.
Is that what I need to do tonight? Tonight? Maybe? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna hold off. I want to. I want to hold out too, that ego just a little bit longer.
Yeah.
I think enlightenment is good for you know, as you get older, and you know, we are all supposed to be sort of shedding our egos and not caring about these things that preoccupy us in our youth. So I feel like getting enlightened is something you could put off for time, you know, retirement slash enlightenment and that that seems.
Like a good thing.
Yeah, working at Walmart Mark, go go, go work at enlightenment, right, that's the time.
Yeah.
Yes, Now this is a sattire. I think it's.
I think it's it's it's fascinating how you're so specific in this book and you're able to satirize the left and the right as you move this character through these spaces. I guess I'm curious. I always view satire and the Daily Show. We dabble in it here and there, but more other than me, it seems like satire is a broadsword. It's rarely uh, it's it's a scalpel.
Yeah.
It seems as if you find complexity in it. How do you find complexity and satire?
I think you just have to be really specific. You have to be really generous. Like the reader is smart. You can't try to trick them with easy kind of ideas and jokes.
I you can. I mean sometimes it can be very rewarding, yes, and a lot of people will fall for it.
But if you want to kind of if you want the reader to really come on side with you, and especially with your most transgressive material, then you've got to really not take them for granted, and you've really I
edit the crap out of my books. I go in there, I try to see it from all different sides, and I really try to get as specific as possible, you know, so that the reader feels like I respect their intelligence and I you know, I'm thinking of the thing they might argue back with me about, and I get specific. You know, there's a scene in the book, a sex scene where the character is pretending to do the locker room scene from Jerry Maguire.
Do you remember that fit?
Yeah, So you know, I watched that scene a lot, and I really got very specific about how you might perform certain sexual acts while doing the Jerry Maguire locker scene. So you know, you just you do it, You just you you commit and you and you really go all the way with it.
If obsessing it and thinking about sex scenes from movies could make you a great author, I think I would be a great author.
I'm curious. I'm curious what you say about the editor. That's all it is, right, I'm.
Curious when you talk about editing too, like are you are you having a conversation with yourself as you're writing that with like more extreme points of view than you don't know if you fully believe and you're writing that thing out, and then your editing process is a chance to essentially see if it if it holds water exactly.
That's it.
I'm always, in a sense trying to cancel myself as I'm writing. I'm thinking of like what would someone who thinks the opposite of this say? And then what would the counter argument be? And like how would I destroy myself if I wanted to? That's how I write. I'm just constantly thinking of these other arguments, and in a sense, it just makes your writing better and better, and in a weird, corny way, it makes you better because the more you think about what the other side might think
and try to make your argument better. You know, the smarter and the more kind of compassionate you become. And I think that's why I get away with saying some of the things I say in the book, because it's done with you know, I'm not I think I'm respecting these characters and their complexity and their wholeness and understanding why they think what they think and looking for the funny, funny parts really and the absurd parts, which you know, who do.
You imagine your audiences when you're writing?
Oh God?
I mean, I think it's just like this mean voice in my own.
Head you're trying to quiet.
Yeah, it's literally just me being as mean as I can to myself. I don't know's there's probably a few. I think there's a couple of critics I think about a little bit. Ones I respect and ones I don't. They're in my head, some of my friends who are writers that are kind of in my head. But yeah, and yes, definitely like these people I imagine holding really different opinions to me. I feel like there's like an avatar of that person that's sort of they're saying, but
what about you know this? And why aren't you thinking about this? And I'm like, okay, okay, and then you know, you go back in. So I don't know. It's a whole there's a whole parliament of people in there telling me that I'm getting it wrong.
Well, I would say, I think you got it right. I find this book hilarious, fantastic. Congratulations. I hope at least one of those voices in your head is happy with the product. The Book of ID is available now. Lexi Freeman, We're going to take a quick Greg.
Right back after this. Welcome back to the Daily Show.
I guess tonight is a social psychologist who teaches ethical leadership at New York University. He's here to talk about his latest best selling book, The Anxious Generation. Please welcome Jonathan Heit. Jonathan, I see people walking all over Brooklyn holding this book. It's talking about.
The Great Rewiring. Talk to me, what is the great Rewiring?
So something happened to young people born after nineteen ninety five. All of a sudden in the early twenty tens, their mental health collapsed. Rates of anxiety and depressions skyrocket it self harm is up like one hundred and fifty percent for younger teen girls. Suicide is up fifty percent. Something happened in the early twenty tens. And my argument in the book is a tragedy in two acts. The first act is the loss of the play based childhood. It's
what anybody over forty in this audience had. You were out with your friends after school, there was nobody supervising. You had to learn how to work out conflicts, how to face adversity. So that's what kids have had for tens hundreds of thousands of years. It's part of being a mammal.
You play, you.
Develop skills. We began to crack down on that to lock kids up in the nineties, to not let them out. So we're restricting what they most need, which is play, from the nineties through the two thousands. But mental health doesn't collapse, then it's actually pretty stable. Then we get act too, which is the arrival of the phone based childhood. And what that is is in twenty ten, everybody had a flip phone. The iPhone had come out, but most teens had a flip phone, no front facing camera, no
social media on the phone, no high speed data. And by twenty twenty fifteen everyone's got all those other things. Now suddenly everyone has a smartphone, front facing camera, high speed internet, social media, especially Instagram on the phone, and almost like someone turned a switch in twenty thirteen, girls in America and many of the countries suddenly become very anxious, depressed, and self harming. And so that's what the book is about.
Something changed between twenty ten and twenty fifteen, and I'm trying to explain what it is.
You say, in an act to they introduced Chekov cell phone. Yeah, and we know what ends up happening after that. You look at sort of the adolescent brain. How dumb and stupid is a thirteen year old brain?
I would say, not dumb and stupid at all. I would say it's in the process of remodeling. And it's right, it's still in the early phases. So we have you know, children have a brain which is actually almost full size. By age six, the brain is almost full.
Oh, fact check that. I don't think that's I don't think that's right. Okay, can you must be right?
Yes, the rest of childhood is not about growth. It's about picking which neurons surviving, which ones get eliminated. It's all about wiring up, and that happens slowly in childhood, but then around age eleven twelve, for girls. Puberty starts a couple years later for boys, and you get this massive, quick rewiring of the brain to sort of locked down into an adult configuration. It starts more in the back
of the brain. The prefrontal cortex is the last part to develop, and so around the age of thirteen, kids emotional areas are rewiring. They have the beginnings of sexual urges and lust. They're very emotional passionate, but they don't have the self control to say, like, no, I'm not going to spend a fifth hour on TikTok. I'm just going to keep going because I can't stop myself.
And when does that stop?
Because I'm looking for that and like eight, like when does that part of my brain close off and I can put the phone down?
Well, in your case, I really can't say. But for most people buying.
A sequel again Smart Smart.
Twenty five is when when the front of cortex is done rewired.
I'll tell you when that happened.
Well, it's interesting how you're talking a lot about not only these phones come in and they change the way kids think in the way society thinks, but you talk about raising a child an anti fragile child, and you make some bold claims in this book, one of which is right here. You claim that this Merry go round playground spinner is the greatest piece of playground equipment ever invented.
Defend yourself? How is it? How person all?
Okay? What is better?
I mean it? Teeter totter. It's just a metaphor.
You're down, you know, It's just it's what life is all about, you know, work with somebody else.
One's up, ones down. There's no way to stay in the middle.
Oh yeah, yeah, the.
The key.
Okay, While I have no citations to prove my claim, the psychological thing I'm trying to get at there is thrills. This is something I talk a lot about in chapter three that kids need to play, but they especially need risky play. Kids literally need to face risk. If you don't give them risk, they'll find a way to get it. They'll climb up on walls, they'll climb trees, if they skateboard, they'll skateboard downstairs. Kids need to sort of need to
have some actual risk. And so, yes, you're right, A swing a teiner drip. It's really big and you could come crashing down. There is risk and to hurt these kids well, because you have to put kids in a situation where they can get hurt, because only then do they learn every day how to not get hurt. And what we've done since the nineties is we've put them in places they are so safe there's no chance to get hurt, which means they don't learn how to not
get hurt. The human program of evolution is kids face risk that they're a little scared, they have to be a little scared, they overcome it, and then they're more confident the next time around, and that's the path to adulthood. But we stopped that in the nineties. We said no more of that. We're going to keep you overprotected forever, and then we're going to send you to universities like mine where you're coming in still not ready for independent living.
Now you take that, and then you also then fast forward to this modern era where kids are obsessed with phones, they're on the internet, they're on social media sites. Is there an argument, though, that the anti fragile way in which kids need to it's not to pull this thing away that they need to be exposed to the risk that the internet has. I mean, this is the world that they're going to be born into anyway. Shouldn't they be learning and how to navigate that at an early age?
Yeah, in theory, yes, but let's look at say sexuality. We want them to learn how to have sex. Does that mean we should give them running start at age eight? There are certain things that are not appropriate at that time.
I didn't. Just to be clear, I did not say that this was not.
This is that that's not Thenically yeah, that was yeah, yes, yes, boy, yeah. So I've heard this before in theory, like, oh, you know, are you why are you? You know you're you're saying we're where we need to protect them less in the real world, but you're saying we need to protect them more in the virtual world. Isn't that contradictory? Not at all, Not at all. Kids where mammals. Kids need to be out playing, rough housing, putting their arms around each other, touching,
out in nature. This is the way a lot of us grew up. You play outside, and when you put kids in an environment where everything goes through the phone, as soon as you give your child the phone that they're going to use that. Now, the latest stats are around nine hours a day they're on their phone, and a lot of them, it's almost all the time because they're always checking. That blocks out time and nature time with friends. Time with friends is down sixty five percent
since twenty ten. Kids need time with friends. Texting and sending emojis doesn't compensate. It's done instead of time with friends, and that I think is why as soon as they moved on to social media and the boys onto multiplayer video games, they got so lonely. Loneliness surged along with depression and anxiety.
It's interesting you talk a little bit about in childhood discover mode versus like defensive mode, and even in a world of the arts, I did improv comedy forever, and I think the mindset of that is a discovery mindset, right, and so you're constantly looking for something. It was interesting in reading this in terms of how to raise a child and to put them in that open mindset.
But it seems.
Remarkably reflective of just how society feels right now. And I don't know if that's because partially because of our connection to social media and the anxiety that is there, but do you see parallels there as well that we are inadvertently too in defensive mode because of these devices that we have in our pockets in our hands.
Well, right now it does seem like everything is going to hell, because it actually is.
Oh that's o kind. Yeah, it's not just my phone telling me that.
That fut I'm great. But it wasn't that well, it wasn't that way in twenty twelve. So the fact that this happened in so many countries at the same time, and a lot of people say, oh, well, you know the global financial crisis, that must be what it was like there were real economic difficulties. Yeah, that was two thousand and eight. Why do the numbers not begin going up until twelve twenty thirteen, when the economy is getting
better and better. So you can't make the claim that things were so terrible in Obama's second term compared to his first, that all of a sudden, teens, especially teen girls, suddenly fell off a cliff. That just doesn't work. So, you know, if this had all started in twenty twenty, we could say, well, yeah, you know, COVID and all the craziness that's going on, But this started in twenty twelve.
There's no other explanation that anyone's proposed for why it happened so many countries and hit girls the hardest.
It was interesting.
You have a chapter in here that looks at also faith and I'm an atheist. I know you mentioned that you are an atheist as well, but you speak to or of this this God shaped hole. I think it's a Blaze Pascal quote. God shape hold everybody's every human heart right, and that this lack of religion is something that is affecting childhood in a way that I get as an atheist. I always had my dukes up when that comes about. You said you were one, so you
you earned yourself a pass. Okay, But this lack of sort of religious institutions in this modern media landscape, how do you see that as something that's affecting like a childhood.
So the way to think about this as as an atheist without getting defensive.
Is good luck.
No, I've been I've been working on this professional for many years. I finally got it down. Let's se it, okay, just just looking at it descriptively. Psychologically, religious people are a little happier than non religious people. That's been true for a long time, just as married people are happier than non married people.
On average.
Your milage may.
Vary, but.
People need to be tied in, locked in in a community. I'm a big fan of Emil dirkhim the Sociologist is my favorite thinker of all time. When we're not tied and locked in, we're free. But that doesn't make us happy. We don't have we have nothing to push against, we have no sense of meaning. It's like if you try to raise a plant not in the ground, but just like up in the air, and it just can't be done. And so religious kids are rooted in traditions, faith, rituals, community,
They go to church every Sunday. The Jewish kids have Shabbat. They literally can't use electronics for a day. So they were always happier than the secular kids. But what happens after twenty twelve, It's quite remarkable. In all the graphs, the religious kids get a little more anxious and depressed. The secular kids get much more anxious and depressed. So what I'm saying is, especially if you're an atheist, you're
gonna have to work much harder. You're gonna be much more intentional about rooting your kid in stable social relationships. If you give him an iPad and then he graduates to a phone, and it's all this network, that network interacting with strangers and weirdos and bots and ais. That's not a community that's crazy making.
It might just be easier to get him to believe in angels.
Well, then take away the iPad.
I've had it there. I do want to You've written a lot of very interesting books.
The book you wrote before this, The Coddling of the American Mind, you co wrote, sort of looked at safetyism. It looked at the college, the college landscape. And now what we see on college campuses, these protests are breaking out. I wonder, as somebody who looked closely at that and the ways in which students kind of moved through it, what you see now in these campuses.
Yeah, so you know, I don't want to comment on the substance of the protest. This is a complicated issue. I respect people on all sides. We all agree on campus, we all agree students have a right to protest constitutionally protected it. But two things I see going on is one is the protest and this is boo. Greg lukian Off, my co author, first notice in twenty fourteen that the shouting down of speakers, the activism on campus that was really illiberal, and it was intimidating, and it was stopping
people from speaking. It was based on arguments about fragility, about my mental health or her mental health, like we can't let this person on campus because it'll be dangerous, it'll be harmful. Speech is violence. So that's a new idea that comes in with gen Z because they haven't been given an anti fragile childhood. They've been given way too much therapy. They think everything is trauma. So we see that by beginning in twenty fourteen twenty It wasn't
there in twenty twelve. It was a very new in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, and so the protesters. Now I don't know the details, but like, you know, just one thing I read this morning. Someone sent me a quote from a student at Harvard where she was in the encampments, and she said, if Harvard cares so goddamn much about my mental health, why don't they just divest and you know, do all the things that we're demanding, Like, yeah, you know, you should do you know, Harvard, you do these because
our mental health is at stake. That's something new, and it's just not going to get them very far. In political life going forward once they leave campus, Like, it's.
Here, I read this book.
I want to do this right. How do I helicopter parent my child correctly? Like, what are some tactical things I can take away from this?
Well, you just push them out of the helicopter.
Sorry, learn how to fly right. That's not anti fradul for birds.
It works, I guess, not for us. So the key thing, okay, So the key thing to the solution. So even though you know a lot of my books, a lot of my writing is very dark about things are actually going to hell in a lot of ways. But this one, we can solve it in a year or two. Because the reason it got so bad so quickly is that we're trapped in a it's called a It's a social trap. It's a collective action trap. The reason why we all feel we have to give our kid a smartphone by
the time they're ten is because everyone else did. And your kid says, you know, dad, I'm the only one. I'm being left out. So we're all we're you know, we're all doing that. And the reason my students are spending so much time on TikTok, they say, is because everyone else is and I have to keep up. I have to know what's happening. So we're all trapped in this. What that means is that if we decide to escape, we can escape together. So I proposed them in the book.
There's a lot of suggestions, but four norms that will break these collective action traps. First, no smartphone before high school. Just clear this out of the lives of elementary and middle school kids. Send them out. Give them a flip phone, a dumb phone, a phone watch so you can text them, but don't give them the entire internet, including strangers all over the world who are trying to get at them sexually. Like this is just craziness. So no smartphone till high school.
The second is no social media till sixteen. You know, the things that are sent around on social media, the things they're exposed to, Like I just recently learned about the video A Cat and a Blender, which was popular while ago. I know it is exactly it is exactly what it sounds like, so you know, and this is just this is just part of childhood. Is hardcore porn, animal cruelty, beheading videos. So you know, let's just at least wait till they're sixteen before they see that stuff.
I was gonna say, that's the appropriate age to watch a canital lenders.
At sixteen, it's like, ah, you get to drive a car and then what you shit? Worst thing out? Yeah?
Yeah. What I'm after here is not the optimum age. It's what's in a minimum age that we could actually all do together, because that's the key. If most of us do this, we solve the problem. The third norm is phone free schools. This is the most powerful one that we can do instantly. So if you're watching this and you have kids that go to a school that lets the kids keep the phone in the pocket, send well, buy a copy of my book for the principal note
to you. I have you know, I have videos. Send them a video of my talks on phone free schools. Every school needs to go phone free by September. The phones are They don't just make the kids anxious and lonely, they make them less intelligent. Test scores have been dropping around the world since twenty twelve. Once the kids bring a phone in school, they're doing this they're not listening to the teacher. So get rid of phones in schools. And then the fourth norm is far more independence, free play,
and responsibility in the real world. We have to. So it's this is not just about let's take away, take away, it's let's give them a real childhood, the kind of childhood that us older people, the kind that we look back on. So so if we love our children, the best thing we can give them is a real human childhood. And if we do it together, we can get this done in the next year or two.
I love it.
Just give your kids some space, a beer and a bag of glass.
And this should be.
It's a fascinating reading and an important one. The Anxious Generation is available now.
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