Speaker 1: There has never been a global synchronized collapse of mental health.
Speaker 1: This is far larger than anything we've ever seen in
Speaker 1: terms of its effects on kids. This is way way
Speaker 1: larger than COVID.
Speaker 2: How much buzzed about book The Anxious Generation is available
Speaker 2: now is of course Jonathan Hite.
Speaker 1: Girls are extraordinarily anxious and depressed. Boys are extraordinarily undeveloped.
Speaker 1: We shouldn't have kids with a massive entertainment center in
Speaker 1: their pocket by which strangers can reach them. This is
Speaker 1: complete insanity.
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Speaker 1: The number one health and wellness.
Speaker 2: Podcast, Jay Sheety Jay Chetty see dyet, Hey everyone, welcome
Speaker 2: back to On Purpose to place you tune into to
Speaker 2: become happier, healthier, and more healed.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for investing in your growth and
Speaker 3: your journey by being here today as I'm about to
Speaker 3: interview one of my favorite authors, a researcher, a professor
Speaker 3: that I'm so excited to talk to. I've been wanting
Speaker 3: to have this conversation with him about many of his books,
Speaker 3: and we're finally here for his latest installment. It's called
Speaker 3: The Anxious Generation, How the great rewiring of childhood is
Speaker 3: causing an epidemic of mental illness. Please welcome to On
Speaker 3: Purpose Jonathan Heit. Jonathan, thank you for being here, Thank
Speaker 3: you for making the time and spending this energy with us.
Speaker 1: Oh my pleasure, Jay, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: This is a conversation that I feel, as I was
Speaker 3: saying to you offline, which is so critical and central
Speaker 3: for our listeners. I know that everyone who's tuned in,
Speaker 3: whether it be right now on YouTube or listening to
Speaker 3: us on an audio platform, this is of the number
Speaker 3: one concern in their life, which is their personal mental
Speaker 3: well being and then the mental wellbeing of their children
Speaker 3: and the people that they care about and love. And
Speaker 3: I think when I first saw the title the Anxious Generation.
Speaker 3: I was thinking about how there's this rhetoric that has
Speaker 3: become quite normal in society around how every generation has
Speaker 3: had their anxiety, whether it was the World Wars, whether
Speaker 3: we talk about, oh, we have social media, but you know,
Speaker 3: kids back in the day had black and white TVs
Speaker 3: and then color television, and then they had video games,
Speaker 3: and so I feel like there's been this rhetoric that
Speaker 3: social media is just the latest installment in a host
Speaker 3: of previous technologies that have made old people worried about
Speaker 3: young people. Why is this different?
Speaker 1: So that is the main counter argument I get is
Speaker 1: from people say, oh, we've been through this before. When
Speaker 1: I was a kid, we watched too much television, but look,
Speaker 1: it didn't do anything to us. And it is true
Speaker 1: that ever since modernity began, so beginning in the seventeenth century,
Speaker 1: when the pace of change really begins to accelerate, generation
Speaker 1: and generation, the next generation actually is a little different
Speaker 1: from the previous one. And generally we think the next
Speaker 1: generation they're kind of soft, you know, they don't have
Speaker 1: our virtues, they have funny habits. So that's always been
Speaker 1: going on, and that's what I'm a late baby born
Speaker 1: I was born in nineteen sixty three, so that's what
Speaker 1: we thought about, you know, you know, the millennial generation.
Speaker 1: You know, oh, there are always just you know, folks
Speaker 1: on their coffee and their avocado toast. They're not serious.
Speaker 1: But actually, and you're a millennial, I believe, right, Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's correct. Some millennials are born in nineteen eighty one
Speaker 1: through nineteen ninety five roughly. But the millennials, their mental
Speaker 1: health was actually pretty good, better than Gen X actually,
Speaker 1: and they're an amazingly successful generation. They were creative, they
Speaker 1: traveled the world, they start companies. So that's the normal
Speaker 1: intergeneration difference. This time is really really different because all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, in twenty twelve twenty thirteen, it's like
Speaker 1: someone flicked on a light switch, and all over the
Speaker 1: developed world. We don't have data from the developing world,
Speaker 1: but all over the developed world, certainly the English speaking
Speaker 1: countries Scandinavia, girls in particular, began to get depressed, anxious,
Speaker 1: they began to cut themselves, they began checking into psychiatric
Speaker 1: words right around twenty thirteen. In the US, it's very sharp.
Speaker 1: Right around twenty thirteen. It sometimes is a little bit,
Speaker 1: but it's basically the early twenty tens. This has never
Speaker 1: happened before. There has never been a global synchronized collapse
Speaker 1: of mental health. This is far larger than anything we've
Speaker 1: ever seen in terms of its effects on kids. This
Speaker 1: is way way larger than COVID. This is affecting most kids.
Speaker 1: So I'm engaged in debates with other scholars about, well,
Speaker 1: why did this happen? And what I'm marshall in the
Speaker 1: book is the evidence that it's not just a coincidence.
Speaker 1: It's not just a correlation that, oh, that's exactly when
Speaker 1: when kids basically switch from flip phones to smartphones was
Speaker 1: between twenty ten and twenty fifteen all over the world.
Speaker 1: But I'm showing that there's a lot of experimental evidence
Speaker 1: that shows causation. And another film makes us different. The
Speaker 1: kids themselves say it. So when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: we watched too much TV. But you didn't see kids
Speaker 1: organizing to keep kids off TV. You didn't see kids saying, oh,
Speaker 1: please save us from TV. You know we're stuck watching it.
Speaker 1: We don't want to be watching it. But that's what
Speaker 1: young people are saying about social media. I just saw
Speaker 1: a survey the majority, the majority of people of all ages,
Speaker 1: including young people, say they would rather that TikTok was
Speaker 1: never invented. They're spending time on it because everyone else is,
Speaker 1: but they see that they're trapped. So this is so
Speaker 1: different from any previous moral panic.
Speaker 3: That's so fascinating to hear that. It's the first time
Speaker 3: that people are actually saying, well, kids are actually saying
Speaker 3: that this experience is something that we're feeling, yet we
Speaker 3: feel so trapped, addicted in exactly.
Speaker 1: And that's what my students say at NYU. That's what
Speaker 1: students say on surveys when you ask them, why do
Speaker 1: you think mental health is so bad in your generation?
Speaker 1: The most common answer is social media. They see it happening,
Speaker 1: The parents see it happening to the kids, the teachers
Speaker 1: see it happening to the kids. So there's all kinds
Speaker 1: of eyewitness testimony, like people see this happening. It's not
Speaker 1: just like hmm, I wonder if it's the phone. It's like, no,
Speaker 1: we see the evidence of it.
Speaker 3: I'm fascinated.
Speaker 1: Why are people debating you, Well, there are so you know,
Speaker 1: I'm an academic and we publish our articles and journals,
Speaker 1: and there are some people who have been studying media
Speaker 1: for a long time, and many of them are very technophilic.
Speaker 1: They like technology. They some of them like video games.
Speaker 1: Have been writing about the benefits of video games, and
Speaker 1: there are some And so I think they come to
Speaker 1: this prepared to believe that this is just another moral panic.
Speaker 1: We've been through this with television and video games and
Speaker 1: before that comic books. The eighteenth century was novels. People
Speaker 1: didn't want young women to read novels because stimulate their
Speaker 1: sexual appetites. So they sort of approach it with like,
Speaker 1: you know, this is just another one of those moral panics.
Speaker 1: And then I keep in this work with Gene Twangient
Speaker 1: and Zach Rausch, we keep showing like no other explanation works,
Speaker 1: this time is different. This is not just some artifact
Speaker 1: of kids being more willing to talk about it. This
Speaker 1: is the same curves and self report you see those
Speaker 1: same curves and hospital admissions and psychiatric emergency department business.
Speaker 1: So this is not just some illusion. But you know,
Speaker 1: there's about four or five the five or six researchers,
Speaker 1: you know, they're serious researchers, and they look at the
Speaker 1: same data I do, and they they say, well, the
Speaker 1: correlations are too small to explain it, or they say,
Speaker 1: you know, it's mostly correlational, they're not enough experiments, and
Speaker 1: I say, okay, look, I found twenty five experiments, sixteen
Speaker 1: of which do show a causal effect. You know, with
Speaker 1: a random assignment. The kids who are the young people
Speaker 1: who are assigned to do less social media in the
Speaker 1: first few days, maybe the mental health is bad because
Speaker 1: they're addicted, but if you wait three or four weeks
Speaker 1: on average, they feel better. So I say, look, here
Speaker 1: are all these experiments, and they say, well, the experiments
Speaker 1: aren't good enough. Here's a flaw in that one, here's
Speaker 1: a flaw on that one. So this is a normal
Speaker 1: academic debate. I'm not going to change their minds ever.
Speaker 1: They're not going to change my mind ever. This is
Speaker 1: just the way these things go. But as we argue
Speaker 1: it out in public, the rest of the world can
Speaker 1: look and they can say, what are my arguments? What
Speaker 1: are their arguments, and then they'll decide.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. And from reading your book and your work,
Speaker 3: what I understand is you, actually, I'm not saying social
Speaker 3: media doesn't have benefits either. That's not really what you're saying.
Speaker 3: You're not saying that there is no validity to it.
Speaker 1: Well, well, what I would say is for adults, social
Speaker 1: media has many benefits. So you know, obviously many people
Speaker 1: start their businesses. Look, I use Twitter to get my
Speaker 1: research out. So for adults, so think about this. These
Speaker 1: are these These used to be called social networking sites
Speaker 1: because originally they were just ways to connect people. And
Speaker 1: as an adult, I have a need to network and
Speaker 1: it's useful to me. And LinkedIn is useful, Twitter is
Speaker 1: useful many you know, Facebook groups are used. These are
Speaker 1: all useful for adults. But let's talk about middle school kids.
Speaker 1: So in America, middle school is roughly ages eleven to thirteen.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about kids just beginning puberty. How much need
Speaker 1: do they have to network? How much do they need
Speaker 1: to meet strangers, strange men who are approaching them? How
Speaker 1: much do they need that? How much do they need
Speaker 1: social media to connect with their friends? The telephone was
Speaker 1: an amazing invention. You pick it up, you press some numbers,
Speaker 1: and you can talk to your friend anywhere in the country,
Speaker 1: anywhere in the world. So we already had that. How
Speaker 1: much more help did eleven and twelve year old need
Speaker 1: to connect with their friends? And so I would argue,
Speaker 1: then when we look at middle school, this is my
Speaker 1: main focus is early puberty. Early puberty, the brain is
Speaker 1: extremely vulnerable because the frontal part of the brain is
Speaker 1: rewiring very rapidly. Growth is slow during childhood, but it's
Speaker 1: very rapid in puberty. And so I would say that
Speaker 1: for eleven, twelve, thirteen year old kids, I'm willing to
Speaker 1: say there aren't really any benefits and the harms are extraordinary.
Speaker 1: So that's why I say we need to just raise
Speaker 1: We need to raise the ages. We should have a
Speaker 1: norm that no one gets a smartphone before high school.
Speaker 1: We shouldn't have kids with a a massive entertainment center
Speaker 1: in their pocket by which strangers can reach them, companies
Speaker 1: can reach them. And we should raise the age of
Speaker 1: social media opening account from thirteen, which is at present
Speaker 1: not enforced, to sixteen, and enforce it. If we do
Speaker 1: those two things, we'll really get at Lisa handle. We'll
Speaker 1: protect kids during early puberty.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I want to get on to all of
Speaker 3: those points. I think one thing before that, I think
Speaker 3: the word anxiety. In some cases, we've become so numb
Speaker 3: to it. Yeah, it's become so normalized. It is the
Speaker 3: norm to hear someone you know as anxiety, someone you
Speaker 3: love as anxiety, children have anxiety, and I feel that
Speaker 3: word has been so repeated over the last five to
Speaker 3: ten years, maybe that we've become numb to it, and
Speaker 3: because of that, we don't really understand, and which you
Speaker 3: do spend a lot of time in the early parts
Speaker 3: of the book not only defining what anxiety is an experience,
Speaker 3: but the extent to which anxiety affects our normal, everyday functioning.
Speaker 3: Could you give us a short summary on that, which
Speaker 3: I want people to dive into the book to read
Speaker 3: the deeper research on, but could we at least explore
Speaker 3: what are the implications what is anxiety and what are
Speaker 3: the implications of anxiety in the long term, if not
Speaker 3: for some of these recommendations you're suggesting.
Speaker 1: So, the most important emotion for animals is fear. Fear
Speaker 1: is across all the different species vertebrates and vertebrates. There's
Speaker 1: a very you know, huge lung evolution. A lot is
Speaker 1: known about fear because if you've ever been snorkeling or
Speaker 1: out in the woods, you know that life for animals
Speaker 1: is you're looking food. You're looking for food, and then
Speaker 1: you're dead because someone jumped on you. So all of animals,
Speaker 1: including us, have a hair trigger alarm system. That's normal,
Speaker 1: that's healthy. So that's fear. Now, sometimes that's when you're attacked,
Speaker 1: you're threatened. Now, sometimes you're in an environment where you
Speaker 1: don't see a threat per se, but it's you're very
Speaker 1: wary of it. And so let's say, you know, so
Speaker 1: humans are much more afraid in the dark because in
Speaker 1: the dark you're much more likely killed by nocturnal hunting animals.
Speaker 1: So we have an innate fear of the dark. It
Speaker 1: doesn't mean we're necessarily for it, but we're just a
Speaker 1: little more on edge. And so that's your brain saying, okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna shift the alarm system over. We're gonna make
Speaker 1: you a little warier. If anything happens, you're gonna jump,
Speaker 1: whereas if it was broad daylight, you would just look
Speaker 1: and say what was that. So our brains are these
Speaker 1: incredible survival machines that have very very deep circuits for fear,
Speaker 1: which mobilizes us to fight or to flee or fight,
Speaker 1: and then for anxiety, which is more diffuse, just a
Speaker 1: general sense of threats. Now, when the fear system is
Speaker 1: triggered and then you take action and then it shuts off.
Speaker 1: That's normal, that's healthy. But as many of your listeners
Speaker 1: will know, chronic stress causes an increase in circulating cortisol.
Speaker 1: It keeps your stress system on. Stress is not bad.
Speaker 1: Kids need stress, but short term stress, but we have
Speaker 1: long term stress. Now you have hormonal dysregulation, You have cortisol,
Speaker 1: which has many functions in the body, but high levels
Speaker 1: of court is all exposed you to all kinds of
Speaker 1: health problems, joint problems, immunity, I mean, I forget the
Speaker 1: whole list. Of course, has so many effects. So what's
Speaker 1: happening is young people they've always been anxious young people.
Speaker 1: Some people are set to anxious, some people are set
Speaker 1: to more calm. That's always been the case, but there's
Speaker 1: a shift so that more and more kids are closer
Speaker 1: to the anxiety side. Now part of this is they're
Speaker 1: told there's a lot of talk actually just this week
Speaker 1: or two, there's a lot of talk about how these
Speaker 1: programs that teach kids to label their emotions, and they
Speaker 1: talk about, you know, where you're afraid, where you anxious.
Speaker 1: They seem like they're well intentioned. It seems, you know,
Speaker 1: social emotional learning There is some basis to that decades ago,
Speaker 1: but it seems that it's moving in a direction of
Speaker 1: teaching kids to dwell on their own emotions, always be
Speaker 1: looking in word, how did that make you feel? How
Speaker 1: do that make where you anxious?
Speaker 3: You know? What we know?
Speaker 1: Where can you go for help that this there's actually
Speaker 1: not much evidence that this is helping, and there's some
Speaker 1: new studies suggesting that this stuff backfires, This is actually
Speaker 1: making kids more anxious. What kids would I argue in
Speaker 1: the book is what kids really really need to overcome
Speaker 1: anxiety is exposure. Go out and play, and sometimes you
Speaker 1: will be afraid, and sometimes you'll climb a tree and
Speaker 1: you'll go too high and you're afraid. I remember those
Speaker 1: feelings from my childhood. But that's how you get over
Speaker 1: childhood anxieties. We're sitting inside in a classroom with a
Speaker 1: teacher giving you an emotion circle and saying, which of
Speaker 1: these emotions are you feeling right now? Johnny? You know?
Speaker 1: And sometimes they're asked, have you thought about suicide? Have
Speaker 1: you thought about harming yourself? And they ask this over
Speaker 1: and over again. So this suggests to kids that they
Speaker 1: are weak, that they have these emotions and if they
Speaker 1: have these emotions, it's a problem. So I think we're
Speaker 1: you know, the mental health community, you know, I think
Speaker 1: we're just we're not we're not recognizing what's driving the epidemic,
Speaker 1: and we're not doing things that would effectively reverse it.
Speaker 3: What is the root of that? Because I feel like
Speaker 3: the research oscillates in some cases, or at least as humans,
Speaker 3: we like to oscillate. There's this idea of the past,
Speaker 3: and I human it's the opposite of what you just said,
Speaker 3: where when you were young you weren't allowed to feel.
Speaker 3: I think everyone's experienced that idea of oh, don't worry,
Speaker 3: everything will be okay, or oh it doesn't matter that
Speaker 3: you feel pain, like everything will be fine, let it go,
Speaker 3: or you know, don't cry or things like that. And
Speaker 3: so that was one extreme, and then the other extreme
Speaker 3: is what you're saying now, where it's like, well, let's
Speaker 3: talk about every emotion and give it equal waiting and
Speaker 3: give it equal priority. What is the middle?
Speaker 1: And Yeah, so I'm saying kids need adversity, they need
Speaker 1: to sometimes be excluded. So all of that is necessary.
Speaker 1: If you ask any parent, how many times would you
Speaker 1: like your child to be excluded? You just have a
Speaker 1: newborn child. Your child's going to turn eighteen eighteen years.
Speaker 1: In those eighteen years, how often do you want your
Speaker 1: child to be excluded and to feel excluded? And anybody
Speaker 1: who says zero, they're speaking from their heart, but they're
Speaker 1: not speaking from their head. I would never hire someone
Speaker 1: who's never been excluded. This person is going to be
Speaker 1: very difficult to have normal human relationships. Sometimes they won't
Speaker 1: be included, and that's not a big deal. So we
Speaker 1: need adversity now. I think what you're saying is it
Speaker 1: used to be we were too insensitive, and that's true.
Speaker 1: And there are a couple of categories, especially so bullying.
Speaker 1: Bullying is really really bad. But what we have to
Speaker 1: be clear about is bullying is not aggression. Bullying is
Speaker 1: aggression or humiliation directed at a kid day after day.
Speaker 1: It has to be over time, because aggression is a
Speaker 1: normal and necessary part of childhood. You have to let
Speaker 1: kids experience aggression, express aggression, express hostility. You have to
Speaker 1: allow that and let them work it out now now,
Speaker 1: and then there will be a problem. There'll be one
Speaker 1: kid who is picking on another kid, and that kid
Speaker 1: doesn't want to go to school. And if that goes
Speaker 1: on for more than a day. Now it's bullying, and
Speaker 1: now we need to be responsive. When I was a kid,
Speaker 1: we weren't. In the seventies that we weren't and in
Speaker 1: some countries I know at the time, you know, in
Speaker 1: Japan and Korea there were horrible I mean, the culture
Speaker 1: around bullying and English boarding schools I've heard. So it's
Speaker 1: great progress that we're being more SENSI about bullying. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the shaming of LGBTQ kids that it was constant when
Speaker 1: I was a kid, but now it's much much better.
Speaker 1: So in many ways we do need to be more sensitive.
Speaker 1: But I think the gist of your question is have
Speaker 1: we overshot?
Speaker 4: Have we?
Speaker 1: And I would say yes, we have really overshot. You know,
Speaker 1: if there's any you know, recess in America is often
Speaker 1: very heavily monitored, and as soon as there's any kind
Speaker 1: of conflict, adult comes in. When my kids, my kids
Speaker 1: went to New York City public schools, they go they're
Speaker 1: still there in high school, and so that kind of
Speaker 1: attention to let's make sure no one's upset, let's make
Speaker 1: sure no one's excluded. You know, my daughter and her
Speaker 1: friend they formed a little club, but they were, you know,
Speaker 1: on the playground. They were like, no, you can't do that.
Speaker 1: You can't exclude anyone. That's crazy. Kids need to play
Speaker 1: with that. So anyway, that's I think we've gone too far.
Speaker 3: Yeah, talking about recess, I believe is in your book
Speaker 3: that you said that the average recess time will outdoors
Speaker 3: Thomas thirty seven minutes.
Speaker 1: The numbers vary, it depends on but in elementary school,
Speaker 1: I've heard numbers as low as twenty seven minutes as
Speaker 1: the average average. Yeah, across the day, and sometimes that's
Speaker 1: combined with lunch. Some kid it's only yet twenty five
Speaker 1: minutes including lunch, and so you go to you know,
Speaker 1: you're kids need to run around, they need recess. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of research on this play helps them learn,
Speaker 1: helps them attend later. But in America at least, and
Speaker 1: in East Asian countries, I imagine we're so focused on
Speaker 1: test scores on that we think what five and six
Speaker 1: and seven year olds is needed is more math, and
Speaker 1: they don't. They don't need more math. What they need
Speaker 1: is more play time and then they'll learn more in
Speaker 1: a shorter amount of math. In the United States, if
Speaker 1: you are in a federal maximum Security penitentiary, you are
Speaker 1: guaranteed two hours a day of yard time. You can't
Speaker 1: keep it inhumane to keep them in their cells all
Speaker 1: day two hours of yard time. But if you're an
Speaker 1: elementary school student the United States, you have no guarantee,
Speaker 1: and it's it's very often as little as twenty seven minutes,
Speaker 1: including lunch, which means you have to stand in the
Speaker 1: lunch line that takes ten minutes. You get your lunch,
Speaker 1: you have, you know you will fit down in five minutes.
Speaker 1: You have whatever five minutes left to play. This is
Speaker 1: complete insanity. If we want to get to handle on
Speaker 1: the mental health crisis, I think we need to back
Speaker 1: off on the adults instructing kids about their emotions, do
Speaker 1: a lot less of that, and take all the money
Speaker 1: and all the time we're spending on that and give
Speaker 1: kids more play.
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Speaker 3: You talk about what we need as children, you're talking
Speaker 3: about the need for play. Is play truly just play?
Speaker 3: Or is there certain parameters, certain ideas, certain thoughts that
Speaker 3: make play more effective.
Speaker 1: Yes, play is a mammalian universal. So mammals, you know,
Speaker 1: the first mammals whenever it was that some females began
Speaker 1: to secrete milk from glands in their skin. It's kind
Speaker 1: of an amazing evolutionary adaptation for having a longer childhood.
Speaker 1: You know, other animals they lay an egg and that's it.
Speaker 1: Animals on their own. But mammals, we have this long,
Speaker 1: long childhood and that allows us to have much larger
Speaker 1: brains and much more complex social behavior compared to say, reptiles,
Speaker 1: and so we have this long childhood and especially the
Speaker 1: social animals, so dogs more than cats. But you know
Speaker 1: dogs and humans and are incredibly playful creatures. We have
Speaker 1: a puppy at home. She's now a year and a half.
Speaker 1: She still looks like a puppy. She wants to play
Speaker 1: all the time, and she has to play. That's the thing,
Speaker 1: since all mammals play when they're young, and they take risks.
Speaker 1: So evolution isn't stupid. Evolution didn't say we're going to
Speaker 1: let these these baby animals practice jumping out of trees
Speaker 1: and practice getting in fights for no good reason. No,
Speaker 1: there's a very good reason. That's what you have to
Speaker 1: do to train your brain to reach adulthood. And that's
Speaker 1: why for hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years,
Speaker 1: you could say, all human children played unless they were
Speaker 1: being seriously deprived of play and stuck in a factory.
Speaker 1: So we and in America, we had play all the
Speaker 1: way up through the nineteen nineties. That's when we begin
Speaker 1: to lose it. In the nineties we freak out in
Speaker 1: America and Britain in Canada and we say it's too dangerous.
Speaker 1: You'll be abducted, you'll be sexually molested. No, you stay home,
Speaker 1: or you stay under supervision. Oh, and there's this fabulous
Speaker 1: new Internet, So why don't you spend more time on that.
Speaker 1: That's what happened in the nineties, and that's when childhood
Speaker 1: really departed from the human need for play and independent
Speaker 1: activity and became oversupervised, helicopter parented, restrained, restricted, And you
Speaker 1: can play on a video game in a way, but
Speaker 1: it's not embodied. Whereas we're physical creatures. We need to run, jump, touch, wrestle, hug.
Speaker 1: You know, I remember doing all those things with my
Speaker 1: with my friends when the second or third grade, we
Speaker 1: would sometimes hug each other or pick each other up,
Speaker 1: or wrestle.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: It's children are physical like puppies. But but now you
Speaker 1: know kids, they're on their screen all the time. There
Speaker 1: can be a playful element, but there's no risk, there's
Speaker 1: no physicality. They don't learn the social skills that you
Speaker 1: do from face to face encounters.
Speaker 3: When you were saying that, I was actually thinking back
Speaker 3: to a trip I took to Rwanda two years ago,
Speaker 3: and I was thinking about our gorilla friends who we
Speaker 3: share I believe over ninety six percent of our DNA
Speaker 3: with and watching the young gorilla's play outdoors and even
Speaker 3: you to about wrestling, and.
Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah, and it was such a huch because
Speaker 1: we're primates. Primates have arms, and primates use their arms
Speaker 1: in play, and you see it with all you know,
Speaker 1: with chimpanzees and bonobos and gorillas. Yeah, and it's so cute, right.
Speaker 1: We love watching it because we mammals as adults, we
Speaker 1: are primed for cuteness because that triggers in us a
Speaker 1: protective instinct over the kids. So we have this protective
Speaker 1: instinct and unfortunately it's kind of run rampant.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: It used to be the kids are out of the house,
Speaker 1: you don't see them, but now we can monitor kids
Speaker 1: all the time, and we're just we're swooping in too quick.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, I mean I think we all resonate with that,
Speaker 3: even as adults. There's this beautiful quote from George Bernard
Speaker 3: Shaw where he said that we don't stop playing because
Speaker 3: we get old. We get old because we stop playing. Beautiful, Yes,
Speaker 3: And I think that we can relate to that. I
Speaker 3: can relate to the as this idea that I misplay.
Speaker 3: I think the challenge is that, as you said, in
Speaker 3: the nineteen nineties, when things started to veer off course,
Speaker 3: now children given the choice generally are going to choose
Speaker 3: indoor video games, phone time, ipadd and they're not going
Speaker 3: to choose play. So I think the challenge becomes, now
Speaker 3: that our taste buds have become technological, how do we
Speaker 3: rewired that taste bud when we've been so diverted. That's right.
Speaker 1: So it's not clear whether it's that the taste buds
Speaker 1: have become technological or that the technology has adapted so
Speaker 1: profoundly that it now knows exactly what we most want.
Speaker 1: So I was born in nineteen sixty three. I remember
Speaker 1: when the game Pong came out. It's the first video
Speaker 1: game you could get on your home television. So it
Speaker 1: was very, very crude, but it's amazing. You turn a
Speaker 1: knob and you can play tennis. And I'd sit there
Speaker 1: with my friend and we'd do that for you know,
Speaker 1: twenty thirty minutes, then we go do something else. So
Speaker 1: these video games were not immersive. They were fun and
Speaker 1: you played with a friend. But once you get you know,
Speaker 1: you get graphics cards, you get color monitors, you get
Speaker 1: high speed internet, you get multiplayer video games. These games
Speaker 1: are incredible. I mean, my son plays Fortnite. I didn't
Speaker 1: let him on in sixth grade when he was eleven,
Speaker 1: but I did let him on thirteen around COVID time.
Speaker 1: These games are incredible and as a boy, what's most
Speaker 1: is wargames, and so the games just get better and better.
Speaker 1: And this is actually something we need to talk about.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: So much of the talker is about social media and girls.
Speaker 1: With boys, it's a different problem boys. There are many
Speaker 1: that are harmed by social media. Many are driven to suicide.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say it's okay for boys, but
Speaker 1: social media is is not so correlated with depression and
Speaker 1: anxiety for boys it is for girls. For boys, what's
Speaker 1: happening is the technology is so amazing and the real
Speaker 1: world is getting more and more inhospitable to them. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've been really trying to reduce prejudice against girls and
Speaker 1: open up girls and bring them into every that's all great,
Speaker 1: but girls are just so much better in school. They
Speaker 1: just do better in school. They school is made for
Speaker 1: more of a female child than a male child. You
Speaker 1: sit still, you learn, you please the teacher. And we've
Speaker 1: we've pushed out rough and tumble play. We've reduced recess.
Speaker 1: There's no more shop class, So boys aren't enjoying school
Speaker 1: as much as girls. Boys are enjoying the technology more
Speaker 1: and more. And it's not just the videogainst also the pornography.
Speaker 1: So you know, war games and sex those are deeply
Speaker 1: appealing to boys and young men. And as the technology
Speaker 1: gets better and better. Now, you know, if you're a
Speaker 1: boy with budding sexual urges and you have two choices,
Speaker 1: one is the most incredible pornography you've ever seen, and
Speaker 1: then soon there'll be goggles. Soon they'll be put into
Speaker 1: sex dolls and robots. I mean, you can have this
Speaker 1: amazing sex life that you can customize. You can customize
Speaker 1: the body size, you can customize the personality. You know,
Speaker 1: you can have virtual girlfriends and boyfriends now, so boys
Speaker 1: are finding a video game, play in pornography more and
Speaker 1: more satisfying. And it's just difficult to arrange a soccer
Speaker 1: game with your friends, that's just difficult, where let's just
Speaker 1: meet online, And it's difficult to flirt with the girl
Speaker 1: and develop a relationship and fall in love and have sex.
Speaker 1: That's really hard. So I think we're losing boys. And
Speaker 1: it's not just because their taste buds are rewired. It's
Speaker 1: because the technology is amazingly good at learning. What do
Speaker 1: we most want, Let's deliver that. But it's not what
Speaker 1: we most need, it's what we most want.
Speaker 3: And what's the cost of that. What's happening to boys'
Speaker 3: brains and minds?
Speaker 1: So the big picture is that boys are failing to
Speaker 1: have the kinds of experiences that will toughen them, teach
Speaker 1: them skills, teach them virtues, and turn them into men.
Speaker 1: Boys development is different from girls development. All around the world. Traditionally,
Speaker 1: boys generally initiation rights involve more toughening toughness demonstrations. And
Speaker 1: we can say this is terrible and patriarchal, but I
Speaker 1: actually think it's important. So you know, all kids start
Speaker 1: off in the female sphere we live. We're all raised
Speaker 1: by mothers and girls and aunts traditionally around the world,
Speaker 1: and so girls stay within the female world, and girls
Speaker 1: initiation rights are usually pegged to puberty to menstruation, and
Speaker 1: then they're taught all the secrets of being a woman.
Speaker 1: All that boys have to make the transition from the
Speaker 1: women's world into the men's world and less. So today,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying it needs to be this way, So
Speaker 1: I'm just saying it generally is to some extent, boys
Speaker 1: development is different from girls development. And boys if you
Speaker 1: give them the easy way out all the time, many
Speaker 1: of them will take it, and then they don't grow,
Speaker 1: they don't toughen, and so I think what we're seeing
Speaker 1: now is a generation gen Z born after nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: six and later, in which the girls are extraordinarily anxious
Speaker 1: and depressed, much more so than the boys. But the
Speaker 1: boys are extraordinarily undeveloped. Many people say they have no
Speaker 1: social skills, they don't look you in the eye, they
Speaker 1: don't know how to behave in public. They certainly don't
Speaker 1: know how to talk to a girl. So I think
Speaker 1: we're seeing just a massive, massive blockage of development. And
Speaker 1: you know, gen Z the oldestar twenty eight. We'll see,
Speaker 1: we'll see if they come out of it. But when
Speaker 1: the millennials were twenty eight, they had already invented so
Speaker 1: many companies, they were inventing technologies. I mean, the millennials
Speaker 1: by twenty eight they were like, you know, a meeting,
Speaker 1: you're streaking across the sky. And gen Z seems much
Speaker 1: more to be hunkered down, like you know, talking about
Speaker 1: their anxiety. So I'm not blaming them at all, it's
Speaker 1: not their fault. We deprive them of play, we put
Speaker 1: touch screens in their hands. Then they had the bad
Speaker 1: luck to you basically come out of college, the eldest
Speaker 1: of them, right into COVID. So those in their twenties now,
Speaker 1: their work experience was truncated. What they need is mentoring
Speaker 1: in a real office or a real job, and they
Speaker 1: didn't get it. So again I'm not blaming, but man,
Speaker 1: we have to have a lot of sympathy and we
Speaker 1: have to make sure this stops. We have to stop
Speaker 1: this right now.
Speaker 3: And I think that's the challenge. Right. A lot of
Speaker 3: people say, well, people are going to have virtual girlfriends
Speaker 3: and we are going to live in the virtual world,
Speaker 3: and everyone's going to go home and put their headset
Speaker 3: on and you know, disappear, disappear into the abyss and
Speaker 3: then we'll be wearing it all day, not just in
Speaker 3: the evenings. And so there's that belief system that actually,
Speaker 3: we're just getting better at using the technology that will
Speaker 3: define our future success anyway, or future failure if we
Speaker 3: don't know it. But you're saying that, there's just what
Speaker 3: are the I guess the harsher implications of what does
Speaker 3: this look like in twenty years time.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I'm very influenced by. One of the puzzles
Speaker 1: that I first tried to deal with is why, you
Speaker 1: know what made gen Z?
Speaker 3: Why?
Speaker 1: Because when I started this work, when I started writing
Speaker 1: The Carlie the American Mind with Greg Lukianov, we first
Speaker 1: wrote an article in twenty fifteen in the Atlantic, and
Speaker 1: we thought college students were millennials. You know, the millennial
Speaker 1: generation started in nineteen eighty one, and it was expected
Speaker 1: to be if you're born all the way up through
Speaker 1: two thousand, you're a millennial. That's what we thought. But
Speaker 1: then Gene Twangi came out with her book Eye Jen
Speaker 1: and her research showing that kids born around nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: six and later are very different, much higher rates of
Speaker 1: mental illness. And so when you look at the millennial generation,
Speaker 1: their mental health is actually pretty good. You know, the
Speaker 1: youngest millennials are a little bit more like gen Z.
Speaker 1: But for the most part, the millennials mental health is fine.
Speaker 1: They made it through puberty before they got their first
Speaker 1: smartphone and social media account. So if you didn't get
Speaker 1: a so you know, millennials, like a lot of them,
Speaker 1: got you know, Facebook, when they were in college. In fact,
Speaker 1: originally Facebook was only for college students. You had to
Speaker 1: be in college to get Facebook. So what we see
Speaker 1: in the data is that if you didn't get a
Speaker 1: smartphone in social media until you were eighteen or older,
Speaker 1: your mental is fine.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 1: You know, let's say you're a thirty five year old.
Speaker 1: Right now, you might feel overwhelmed. You might feel that
Speaker 1: this thing was stressing you out, but you had normal
Speaker 1: brain development. You you used technology when you were a kid.
Speaker 1: You had a flip phone. You used it to connect
Speaker 1: with other kids. You used it. You know, you'd have
Speaker 1: to text, and it was hard to text, and you
Speaker 1: had to use your thumbs and press number keys. But
Speaker 1: you use the technology as a tool to help you
Speaker 1: meet up with your friends where maybe you called them
Speaker 1: on the phone. That was it. That's all your phone
Speaker 1: could do. But if you got a smartphone in social
Speaker 1: media at the start of puberty, which is what almost
Speaker 1: all kids do now, that means you're going through puberty
Speaker 1: on social media and with a massive entertainment, with a
Speaker 1: supercomputer and an entertainment system in your pocket with you
Speaker 1: all the time. So my point is this, if we
Speaker 1: can protect childhood and let kids get through puberty and
Speaker 1: then we give them the goggles and the virtual girlfriends
Speaker 1: and everything else. Their lives are still going to be
Speaker 1: kind of messed up by this stuff, but at least
Speaker 1: their brains matured and they're probably not going to be
Speaker 1: depressed anxious for life if we keep giving it. You know,
Speaker 1: it used to be at you know, ten eleven is
Speaker 1: when kids get their first smartphone. Now it's more it's
Speaker 1: going down to five or six. If we keep giving
Speaker 1: little children a touchscreen device, including an iPad, and using
Speaker 1: it as a babysitter and saying, oh, yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: just you know, here, here's here's your device. I'm busy,
Speaker 1: I'm doing email, I'm cooking, here's your device. If we
Speaker 1: keep doing that, we're not Our brains are not going
Speaker 1: to adapt to that. Children's brains are not going to
Speaker 1: somehow evolve so that that becomes okay. It's not going
Speaker 1: to be okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's it's it's such a harsh reality, but
Speaker 3: it's true that people have less time. We have less,
Speaker 3: we are doing so much more. It seems we are
Speaker 3: living further away from family. There's so many reasons why
Speaker 3: the iPad is becoming the babysitter that feels validated because
Speaker 3: we're not living in bigger family spaces. We don't have
Speaker 3: the support of our neighbors. We don't have we don't
Speaker 3: have the resources or the funds to have a paid
Speaker 3: babysitter or whatever it may be. So there's so many
Speaker 3: almost valid reasons for why we even say take the iPad.
Speaker 1: No, that's right again. You know, in my book, I
Speaker 1: have almost no really no criticism for parents. And some
Speaker 1: people say, you know why, it's the parent's responsibility. It's therefore,
Speaker 1: why aren't you blaming the parents, to which my answer is,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a parent. I know a lot of parents,
Speaker 1: a lot of us are really trying and it's really hard.
Speaker 1: I mean, the technological environment now is such that you know,
Speaker 1: if you don't give your kid a smartphone, she's left out,
Speaker 1: and she, you know, says dad, I'm the only one.
Speaker 1: I'm left out. So parents are trying. And as a
Speaker 1: social psychologist who studies morality, I know that if one
Speaker 1: person does something that seems evil, well maybe they're maybe
Speaker 1: they're evil. But if an entire society and if an
Speaker 1: entire planet change is at the same time in the
Speaker 1: same way, it's not individual's fault. And so if parenting changed,
Speaker 1: certainly across the English speaking world, we can't blame the
Speaker 1: parents for that. There must be some reason why we
Speaker 1: all freaked out and began overprotecting. So yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: blame I don't blame the parents. I say we're stuck
Speaker 1: in systemic problems, and I'm proposing norms by which we
Speaker 1: can escape.
Speaker 3: And I think anyone when I've been mentioning you were
Speaker 3: coming on the show, I was talking to people about
Speaker 3: your work, and I was talking about your recommendations of
Speaker 3: no social media before sixteen, no phones before fourteen. And
Speaker 3: I don't think there's any adult that I spoke to
Speaker 3: that had any debate with either of those. I think
Speaker 3: everyone looked to me. You know, I'm talking to everyone
Speaker 3: twenty five and up, But anyone that I talked to
Speaker 3: twenty five and up, when that makes perfect sense, I
Speaker 3: think that's a great idea, and what a brilliant recommendation.
Speaker 3: Like when do we get started?
Speaker 2: That's right?
Speaker 3: Right, that's right.
Speaker 1: People are ready to get started because everyone sees it,
Speaker 1: everyone's sick of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And obviously in the book you hold, you say,
Speaker 3: here's what governments can do. Here's what technology companies can do,
Speaker 3: his what schools can do. I think my question is,
Speaker 3: and I know you've talked about what they can do
Speaker 3: in so many other places, which is fantastic. My question is,
Speaker 3: how do we actually get that to be a reality?
Speaker 3: Like what does it actually take to change norms? Because
Speaker 3: I was trying to think, and I'd love your take
Speaker 3: on this, like when was the last time we tried
Speaker 3: to do that in any sphere of life? Oh? Sure,
Speaker 3: and how did it go? Oh and so did it work?
Speaker 3: And where did it fact?
Speaker 1: So we have a lot of experience with norm changes.
Speaker 1: So one of the clearest is smoking. It took twenty
Speaker 1: or thirty years. When I was in high school in
Speaker 1: the seventies, you know, a bunch of kids smoked. Most
Speaker 1: of us didn't put a bunch of high school kids smoked,
Speaker 1: you know age, you know, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, And beginning
Speaker 1: in the eighties or nineties, there was an anti tobacco
Speaker 1: campaign and it took a few decades, but the rates
Speaker 1: of smoking are very very low. Now now there's vaping.
Speaker 1: Kids moved on to vaping, which is bad, but not
Speaker 1: as bad as smoking. Norms around LGBTQ and shaming and
Speaker 1: bullying and using racial slurs. These norms have changed radical
Speaker 1: in the last twenty or thirty years. So norm change
Speaker 1: normally happens over the space of a few decades, and
Speaker 1: we have many, many examples we've been studied. So some
Speaker 1: things get more moralized, like smoking is now seen as evil,
Speaker 1: whereas homosexuality, which used to be seen as evil, is
Speaker 1: now seen as perfectly okay. So norms change over the
Speaker 1: course of decades. What's happening now is very different. What's
Speaker 1: happening now The digital world has put us into an
Speaker 1: environment in which things can spread within minutes. I mean
Speaker 1: this has never happened in human history. Norms can spread
Speaker 1: around the world in days, and not norms, but ideas
Speaker 1: or means can spread around the world in days. And
Speaker 1: what that means is that norms can change very quickly too,
Speaker 1: And so all over the world, all over the develop world,
Speaker 1: in twenty ten, kids had flip phones, no social media
Speaker 1: on their phones. In twenty fifteen we have now the
Speaker 1: phone based childhood. All over the world. Kids are behaving
Speaker 1: the same way. So that changed very quickly, and that
Speaker 1: put pressure on everyone else to do the same thing. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we're stuck in this collective action problem that emerged
Speaker 1: very very quickly. But by the same token, we can
Speaker 1: escape very very quickly, because wherever I go, the main
Speaker 1: counter argument I get is parents who say, ugh, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just it's too late. The trains left the station.
Speaker 1: What are we going to do? This is the way
Speaker 1: of the future. So resignation is really the only obstacle
Speaker 1: I'm facing. But most parents, so many parents are upset
Speaker 1: by this that they're ready to act if only some
Speaker 1: way can be found to coordinate them. So in the UK,
Speaker 1: I just got back from London a few days ago.
Speaker 1: In the UK, the Parents' Revolution started in February. A
Speaker 1: couple of mothers, Daisy Greenwell and Claire Reynolds, they just
Speaker 1: put up on an Instagram post. They put up that
Speaker 1: they'd started a WhatsApp group for parents who wanted a
Speaker 1: smartphone free childhood. They were going to delay giving their
Speaker 1: kids smartphones, and like overnight, tens of thousands of British
Speaker 1: parents signed up. There's a limit on WhatsApp groups they
Speaker 1: had to form locally. They had to form hundreds of
Speaker 1: WhatsApp groups. It's spread like wildfire and what I'm finding
Speaker 1: I've been involved in a lot of efforts to change
Speaker 1: ideas and norms. It's very hard, takes decades on this one.
Speaker 1: I don't have to convince anyone on this one. It's
Speaker 1: like everyone's ready to act. They just need to know
Speaker 1: what to do. And so you know, I'm proposing these
Speaker 1: four simple norms as you said, the two that I
Speaker 1: would add that I add that we haven't mentioned our
Speaker 1: phone free schools. We must keep the phones out of school,
Speaker 1: just lock them up as soon as you come in.
Speaker 1: That is doable. This can be done by September.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the fourth is give far more free play and
Speaker 1: independence in the real world. That's the hardest one, actually,
Speaker 1: but that's incredibly important. So let me actually just take advantage.
Speaker 1: I'm actually very excited that you have this gigantic global audience.
Speaker 3: Next question, Okay, how can we help?
Speaker 1: Great?
Speaker 3: What can we do? Because I want to be a
Speaker 3: part of the mission.
Speaker 1: Great? Great, So here's what I can say. First, let
Speaker 1: me just give a little background, which is is this
Speaker 1: just happened in the United States. No, if listeners, if
Speaker 1: you so all over the world, please go to after
Speaker 1: Babbel dot com. After B A B. E. Al it's
Speaker 1: my sub stack. It's free, nothing's behind a paywall. That's
Speaker 1: where we're putting our research out and you'll find articles there.
Speaker 1: We have one post on how the mental health epidemic
Speaker 1: is hitting all the Anglosphere countries, and so Zach rouse
Speaker 1: this was his first international post. We've gathered all the
Speaker 1: mental health data we can from around the world. Most
Speaker 1: countries don't have any, but the developed countries often do,
Speaker 1: so we can show that the same thing is happening
Speaker 1: at the same time in all the Anglo countries. And
Speaker 1: then he moved on to Scandinavia. Same things happening at
Speaker 1: the same time in the Scandinavian countries. Now that's very
Speaker 1: interesting because I just had an interview with a Finnished
Speaker 1: journalist this morning and she said, you know, in Finland
Speaker 1: we let our kids out, like our kids at seven
Speaker 1: eight they're out playing. But even still, she says, they
Speaker 1: go outside to play and they sit down and they're
Speaker 1: on their phone because they all have phones from the
Speaker 1: age of you know, six or seven. So this is
Speaker 1: happening all over the developed world in Europe. Zach has
Speaker 1: a post on the rest of Europe. It's especially northern Europe.
Speaker 1: It's a little less so in Eastern Europe in southern Europe.
Speaker 1: So first, there is variation around the world in mental
Speaker 1: health that is definitely important. But what I'm finding is
Speaker 1: parents everywhere are seeing their kids not playing. They're seeing
Speaker 1: them sit on their phones at recess. In countries where
Speaker 1: the kids can have a phone in their pocket at recess,
Speaker 1: the kids are often sitting down on their phones. They're
Speaker 1: not running around and yelling and laughing. So, wherever you
Speaker 1: are in the world, figure out, you know, figure out
Speaker 1: whether you have this problem. You probably do that. Your kids,
Speaker 1: even if they're not depressed, they're missing most of childhood,
Speaker 1: They're missing adventure. There, probably have fewer hobbies, they probably
Speaker 1: don't read books, they probably don't spend much time with
Speaker 1: other people. So this is going to influence them in
Speaker 1: a bad way around the world. And then start talking
Speaker 1: to other parents. The simplest thing. Most of us are
Speaker 1: on a text thread with the parents of our kids friends.
Speaker 1: Because you had to arrange for this birthday party, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll pick them up and you know, so we're all
Speaker 1: in contact with the parents of our kids friends. Just
Speaker 1: start with that, say do you know, do you see
Speaker 1: this problem? Are you concerned, and especially if you have
Speaker 1: younger kids, you can delay when you know, you can
Speaker 1: delay when you give your kid a smartphone. If your
Speaker 1: kid's friends are in the same boat, then it's not hard.
Speaker 1: That's the point of this collective getting out of the
Speaker 1: collective action problem. I would also urge anyone around the
Speaker 1: world bring up the subject of phone free schools if
Speaker 1: you're child. So a number of countries France, Australia, a
Speaker 1: few countries have and Britain just have guidance that schools
Speaker 1: must go phone free. They must either lock them up
Speaker 1: or lock up the phones in a locker, special locker
Speaker 1: or in a yonder pouch of lockable pouch. But if
Speaker 1: your country doesn't do that, start advocating for it. If
Speaker 1: you go to Anxious Generation dot com, that's the website
Speaker 1: for the book. We have a whole research page. Look
Speaker 1: at that. Send that to people. I have all kinds
Speaker 1: of talks I've given on YouTube. You can find my
Speaker 1: YouTube channel lectures about why we need to go phone free.
Speaker 1: So that's right, that's the thing we can do this year.
Speaker 1: We can do it in twenty twenty four is make
Speaker 1: all our school's phone free and that will allow our
Speaker 1: children to learn more because when they're sitting in class,
Speaker 1: they don't have the world's greatest entertainment center in their hand,
Speaker 1: and they're not texting, and they're not bullying each other,
Speaker 1: and they're not doing TikTok challenge. They're actually listening to
Speaker 1: the teacher or passing notes with other kids, which is fine.
Speaker 1: They're interacting with other kids. That's actually okay with me.
Speaker 3: Why school's done it already? I feel like it's.
Speaker 1: Because a few parents complain. In the United States, the
Speaker 1: only problem, the only reason they don't do it is
Speaker 1: that American parents are so overprotective, many not all so overprotective,
Speaker 1: and they've gotten so used to being able to text
Speaker 1: their kids throughout the day. So it could be you know, hey, Johnny,
Speaker 1: how did your math test go? And they might even
Speaker 1: text that during the math test, and the kid checks
Speaker 1: his phone during the math test, you know, or oh,
Speaker 1: I'm going to be late for pickup, like okay, did
Speaker 1: the kid need to know that during English class?
Speaker 4: Like why not?
Speaker 1: Just you know? Let when he gets his phone back
Speaker 1: he can see, okay, you'll be late for pickup. And
Speaker 1: in America we have the problem that because we do
Speaker 1: have school shooting. Now they're extremely rare, but they're happening
Speaker 1: more so. Some parents think, oh, if there's a school shooting,
Speaker 1: I want to be able to talk to my child.
Speaker 1: And this is a huge mistake because if there actually
Speaker 1: was a shooter on a school campus, what you want
Speaker 1: is the kids to follow directions and do what they
Speaker 1: were trained to do. You don't want every kid pulling
Speaker 1: out their phone and crying to mom and dad. So
Speaker 1: I've spoken to many principles or heads of school and
Speaker 1: I ask them, why don't you ban the phones and
Speaker 1: they always say the same thing. They'd be right among
Speaker 1: the parents, well, only among some parents. And so if
Speaker 1: you're listening to this podcast and you have kids in school,
Speaker 1: talk to the head of school and say, no, I
Speaker 1: want my kid to be in a phone free school.
Speaker 1: I want my kid to listen to the teacher and
Speaker 1: to interact with other kids. So that's something we can
Speaker 1: all do right away.
Speaker 3: And do you have resources on how to have that
Speaker 3: conversation effect?
Speaker 1: Yes, I do so. At Anxious Generation dot com we
Speaker 1: do have some You go to resources, you take action,
Speaker 1: and then there's a tab for parents. There are also
Speaker 1: two organizations in the United States, the Smartphone Free Schools
Speaker 1: dot org and Smartphone Free Schools Movement dot orgs. We
Speaker 1: have two different organizations that are they show you here's
Speaker 1: a sample letter that you can say, here's what you
Speaker 1: can do. In the UK there's Smartphone Free Childhood dot
Speaker 1: co dot UK. So within a number of countries there
Speaker 1: are already movements. But you know what, you can just
Speaker 1: use the resources from the American or the British one
Speaker 1: and you know what, this global audience start your own.
Speaker 1: Come to anterest generation dot com. We have a list
Speaker 1: of aligned organizations, mostly in the US and the UK,
Speaker 1: but there are a couple in Canada, there's I think
Speaker 1: one in Germany there's one, and somewhere in Latin America.
Speaker 1: So people are starting, These parents are rising up all
Speaker 1: around the world. Let's join them.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about before we dive into spirituality, because I
Speaker 3: was curious to see you at a chap to dedicate
Speaker 3: it to that inside the book, talk to me about
Speaker 3: the differencing girls in the use of social media versus boys,
Speaker 3: because like you said, and I'm glad we talked about
Speaker 3: young boys because often they can get forgott conversation. But
Speaker 3: let's talk a bit about young girls and how social
Speaker 3: media is having a far more adverse effect on their
Speaker 3: mental health.
Speaker 1: First, the evidence of a link is just very clear.
Speaker 1: For girls. With girls, their mental health was very stable
Speaker 1: until twenty twelve, and then in twenty thirteen it starts rising.
Speaker 1: It really is a light switch. For boys, it's not
Speaker 1: so sharp, it's more gradual. Secondly, the correlations for girls
Speaker 1: are much higher. The correlation three time spent on social
Speaker 1: media and mental health problems. So for girls the evidence
Speaker 1: is much clear. Now why the connection. In the book,
Speaker 1: I go into the psychology of motivation, and there are
Speaker 1: two categories of motivation. They're very important to understand. Agency
Speaker 1: and communion. So agency is the desire to be an
Speaker 1: agent to make things happen. You know, when I was
Speaker 1: a kid, it was so exciting to take a BB
Speaker 1: gun and shoot at tin cans because I pull a
Speaker 1: trick and the thing falls over. It's an incredible thrill.
Speaker 1: So that's agency making things happen. Communion is connection, being
Speaker 1: with friends, bonding, sharing story, is sharing emotions. I really
Speaker 1: enjoyed that too. Everyone has both motives on average. On average,
Speaker 1: boys and men have a little bit more on the
Speaker 1: agency side. It matters more to them when you let
Speaker 1: them choose what to do, they're going to go out.
Speaker 1: They're going to build a tower and then knock it over.
Speaker 1: My friends and I we used to build model airplants,
Speaker 1: like World War two fighter jets, and then we'd put
Speaker 1: like rubbing alcohol in them and then we'd light them
Speaker 1: on fire. Like that was really fun to do. So
Speaker 1: that's the agency making things happen. Communion is connection girls.
Speaker 1: If you let kids play, the girls are much more
Speaker 1: likely to sit and talk. They want to connect. And
Speaker 1: what are they talking about other girls? They're talking about relationships.
Speaker 1: They're developing their mental map of space. So girls are
Speaker 1: a little more sophisticated about social relationships. They think more
Speaker 1: about them, they share emotions more, and that's the strength.
Speaker 1: That's something that's why women excel in certain professions and
Speaker 1: men excel in other professions. But the differences aren't so
Speaker 1: much how good they are. They're what they enjoy doing.
Speaker 1: And so when the companies come along and they say, hey,
Speaker 1: do you want to see what everyone's doing? Do you
Speaker 1: want to see what everyone's saying? Do you want to
Speaker 1: see what they're saying about you? This is like catnip
Speaker 1: for girls. This is this is they really target this
Speaker 1: at girls in securities and they get girls to come on,
Speaker 1: and then there's drama which brings more girls on. Now
Speaker 1: boys are affected by this too, but it's just not
Speaker 1: as alluring. And if you give so when everyone gets
Speaker 1: multiple screens, you know, by twenty ten, twenty eleven, the
Speaker 1: iPad comes out multiplayer video games. Everyone is tempted by screens.
Speaker 1: The boys go rushing into multiplayer video games and porn,
Speaker 1: they do a lot more of that. The girls go
Speaker 1: rushing for Instagram, Pinterest, Tumbler, especially the visual platforms. Okay, so,
Speaker 1: now why is this so bad for girls? And I
Speaker 1: go through I think five reasons in the book. So
Speaker 1: one is just the social comparison. Girls are always judged
Speaker 1: more on their looks. I just came across a quote
Speaker 1: from Epictetus I read Stoic writings in the Mornings. Epictetis
Speaker 1: commented an ancient about how when they turn fourteen, girls
Speaker 1: are are judged as sexual partners and they focus, They're
Speaker 1: made to focus too much on their looks. And you know,
Speaker 1: this is a sad thing that these girls are just
Speaker 1: becoming focused on their looks. What's happening now? Because girls
Speaker 1: it's constant social comparison with other girls who get praised
Speaker 1: for being not just beautiful but sexy. So, whether they
Speaker 1: know it or not, they're copying porn star type poses,
Speaker 1: porn star type looks. They're being hyper sexualized, massive social comparison,
Speaker 1: and on average they don't measure up because if everyone
Speaker 1: on Instagram is actually appears much more beautiful than in
Speaker 1: real life, well then everyone else is below average. So
Speaker 1: the social comparison hurts girls more than boys. The nature
Speaker 1: of aggression is such that boys aggression is more physical
Speaker 1: and it's ultimately about who can dominate, who, who can
Speaker 1: beat up who. If it came to that, Girls aggression,
Speaker 1: of course, are just as aggressive, but it's different. Girls
Speaker 1: aggression historically, and a cross cultures and even across species,
Speaker 1: is more relational. Girls will damage another girl's reputation or relationships,
Speaker 1: and boy to social media allowed them to do that
Speaker 1: anonymously and on the weekends too. It used to be
Speaker 1: the girls were safe from bullying on the weekends, but
Speaker 1: because they're out of school, but now they're not so.
Speaker 1: And then there's the sexual predation. You know, there're sexual
Speaker 1: predators that are going for boys, but if you're a
Speaker 1: boy on the internet, you're not being constantly sexually propositioned
Speaker 1: by older men. I mean, it happens, but it's not
Speaker 1: that common if you're a girl on the internet. We
Speaker 1: just published an article from Antonio Bihar, who was a
Speaker 1: Facebook whistleblower, and his research within Facebook, within Instagram actually
Speaker 1: was that thirteen percent of teenagers thirteen to fifteen year
Speaker 1: old teenagers had gotten some sort of a sexual proposition
Speaker 1: or someone coming on to them, a stranger coming on
Speaker 1: to them in the past week. In the past week
Speaker 1: thirteen percent. So if you're a girl online, it's just
Speaker 1: you're just living among predators. You're like, you know, the
Speaker 1: animals we talked about before, in the woods after dark,
Speaker 1: you're more frightened. So for all these re when kids
Speaker 1: shifted from a play based childhood to a phone based childhood,
Speaker 1: it was more devastating for the girls.
Speaker 3: Vianna, we're talking about this yesterday. What's your take on
Speaker 3: He was suggesting this idea of everyone on social media
Speaker 3: being verified. Oh yeah, having to be verified.
Speaker 1: Oh oh my god, of course that has to happen.
Speaker 1: So think about it. You know, we're in America. We're
Speaker 1: afraid to let our kids out in part because we
Speaker 1: think they'll be abducted, There'll be a stranger hanging out
Speaker 1: by the playground luring them into a car, and that
Speaker 1: has happened in America. It's very very rare. If there's
Speaker 1: only about one hundred, one hundred and fifty cases of
Speaker 1: true kidnapping by a stranger in this country every year,
Speaker 1: so it's extremely rare, but it does happen. We're very
Speaker 1: afraid of strangers approaching our children. But guess what. The
Speaker 1: strangers are not at the playground anymore. They've moved to Instagram. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the idea that we're going to put our kids
Speaker 1: on platforms where strange men can reach them, flirt with them,
Speaker 1: say that they're a twelve year old boy or fifteen
Speaker 1: year old boy, change fake photos, including a photo of
Speaker 1: your daughter in a bathing suit or less. This is
Speaker 1: complete insanity. I don't think we should be having children
Speaker 1: interacting with complete strangers. The sextortion rings now it used
Speaker 1: to be just ten or twenty thousand a year reported
Speaker 1: in the United States. It's way more now. There's a
Speaker 1: Nigerian gang, the Yahoo Boys, I think it's called. They've
Speaker 1: industrialized it, so we don't know but you know, hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands, millions of boys are getting sextorted now and
Speaker 1: dozens are known to have committed suicide. It's probably hundreds
Speaker 1: who've committed suicide. Most we don't know about because you know,
Speaker 1: they're flirting with what they think is a girl and
Speaker 1: then this criminal gang tricks them into sending a nude
Speaker 1: photo and at that point then they say, I have
Speaker 1: what I need to ruin your life. Send us send
Speaker 1: me five hundred dollars right now, or I will send
Speaker 1: this to all of your contacts. This is complete insanity
Speaker 1: that we let our boys and our girls interact with
Speaker 1: criminals day and night. So what I would like to
Speaker 1: see is, first we just have to raise the h
Speaker 1: so you know, below six they just shouldn't be on
Speaker 1: it at all. They need to be in contact with
Speaker 1: each other over sixteen. Okay, this is the nature of
Speaker 1: the world. People are going to be interacting with strangers.
Speaker 1: There are some benefits to that. There's networking issues, but
Speaker 1: if you were on a platform like LinkedIn. LinkedIn people
Speaker 1: use their real names. You don't hear problems about LinkedIn.
Speaker 1: The problems are especially on Instagram, Snapchat, any platform that
Speaker 1: has anonymous strangers interacting. So if we had both age verification,
Speaker 1: which is essential we have to get age verification eventually,
Speaker 1: and then also identity verification now here. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: that the government needs to mandate identity verification on all platforms.
Speaker 1: The world would be a much better place if we
Speaker 1: did that. There would be many fewer threats to democracy.
Speaker 1: If we did that, Russian agents and Chinese agents couldn't
Speaker 1: like just drop crazy rumors and make us hate each
Speaker 1: other in America the way they do. So I would
Speaker 1: prefer that we live in a world where every platform
Speaker 1: has mandatory I dedentity verification. You could still post with
Speaker 1: a fake name, but in order to open an account
Speaker 1: you have to show I'm a real person in this
Speaker 1: country and I'm old enough. But I would be content
Speaker 1: even if it's not mandated. I would be content if
Speaker 1: platforms just made this the default. What if meta or
Speaker 1: let's say not meta. They're not going to do it,
Speaker 1: But what if there was an alternative to Instagram in
Speaker 1: which people had to be verified and then they had
Speaker 1: all kinds of other safety features if they have an
Speaker 1: immune system built in. Now, how would I feel about
Speaker 1: letting my sixteen year old daughter on that much better
Speaker 1: than on a platform where she's interacting with criminals from
Speaker 1: around the world. Have you spoken to Meta, Yes, I've
Speaker 1: spoken to They don't. Well, they say they're working on it.
Speaker 1: They say they're working on age verification, but they I've
Speaker 1: seen nothing from them. They have I shouldn't say that
Speaker 1: they haven't done nothing. They've done a few things. One
Speaker 1: thing is they, at least I think they set the
Speaker 1: privacy defaults to high for under sixteen. I think it
Speaker 1: is whereas it used to be. You know, you know
Speaker 1: you're a nine year old, you lie, you say you're thirteen,
Speaker 1: and what you say is public. That's completely insane. So
Speaker 1: they have taken a few steps, but not much. And again,
Speaker 1: Antonio Behar's testimony to the Senate last year was I
Speaker 1: showed them what's happening, the sexual solicitation of teens. I
Speaker 1: told them a simple way to have this reported. They
Speaker 1: didn't do anything. So I think Meta in particular has
Speaker 1: shown itself resistant to changes suggested by people within. And
Speaker 1: that's why we have a couple of Facebook whistleblowers. So
Speaker 1: I'm hoping that market competition will help. I'm hoping that
Speaker 1: Congress will repeal the mistakes it made in the United States.
Speaker 1: We created this problem for the world. Our companies created
Speaker 1: this stuff. Our Congress said that we're not allowed to
Speaker 1: sue them for what they do to our kids. They
Speaker 1: can show our kids whatever they want and we can't
Speaker 1: sue them. It's a special law that says we can't
Speaker 1: sue them. But in other countries they can. And so
Speaker 1: I'm really hopeful that all around the world people initiate
Speaker 1: lawsuits when their kids committed suicide because of things that
Speaker 1: happened on social media. I hope that people will initiate
Speaker 1: proceedings if they can, if it's clear that it was
Speaker 1: caused by online activity. And then Congress, the US Congress
Speaker 1: created this very ridiculous law that the age at which
Speaker 1: you can sign a contract with a company and give
Speaker 1: away your data without your parents' knowledge, without your parents'
Speaker 1: consent is thirteen, which is insanely low. It should that
Speaker 1: that I think needs to be sixteen or eighteen, but
Speaker 1: it was set to thirteen and nineteen ninety eight with
Speaker 1: no enforcement. In fact, the way the law is written,
Speaker 1: as long as Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat, as long
Speaker 1: as they don't know you're underage, they're fine. But if
Speaker 1: they ask, and then they find out that you're under thirteen. Well,
Speaker 1: now they're responsible. So it's very important for them that
Speaker 1: they not know how old their users are, and we
Speaker 1: have to change that. We have to get to the
Speaker 1: point where they have to know. Of course, they do
Speaker 1: know how old their users are. They know everything about
Speaker 1: their users, but they don't kick them off. So we
Speaker 1: have to get to the point where the companies are
Speaker 1: held responsible for underage use in the physical world. It's like,
Speaker 1: it's so absurd, you know, people say, tell me, well,
Speaker 1: it's the parents job to keep them off. Okay, imagine
Speaker 1: a world in which we generally think kids should not
Speaker 1: be exposed to hardcore sex, to drugs, to violence, and
Speaker 1: to addiction. So we have age limits on bars, strip clubs, brothels.
Speaker 1: There are you know, the brothels in Nevada and in Europe,
Speaker 1: and casinos we have age limits on those. What if
Speaker 1: someone said, you know, it's the parent's job to keep
Speaker 1: the kids out of that. If they don't want their
Speaker 1: thirteen year olds in a brothel, they should stop them
Speaker 1: from going into brothels. Like no, that's not the way
Speaker 1: it works. Like no, this is a business. This business
Speaker 1: is hurting kids. This business is responsible for checking IDs,
Speaker 1: for keeping out children. Yet in the online world, we say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, what are you going to do? You know,
Speaker 1: nine year olds are going to be watching beheading videos.
Speaker 1: They're gonna be watching anal sex, They're gonna be watching
Speaker 1: the cat in a blender video. Have you heard of
Speaker 1: this one? Captain a blender one? That's exactly what it
Speaker 1: sounds like. And this is something that kids are exposed to.
Speaker 1: It's an actual cat put in a blender and killed.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I have not watched the video because I don't ever
Speaker 1: want to see it because I'll never unsee it. But
Speaker 1: I did enough research to know this is not just
Speaker 1: an Internet rumor. This actually happened, and it was in China.
Speaker 1: So you know, this is the world that our kids
Speaker 1: are now inhabiting. And I'm saying no, no, wait, at
Speaker 1: least till you're sixteen, get part way through puberty before
Speaker 1: you immersed in this garbage, and that is a great
Speaker 1: transition to our spiritualities discussion.
Speaker 3: Well, it's an ironic situation where we were glorifying the
Speaker 3: millennials to have been much more productive and effective, but
Speaker 3: a lot of the millennials who created amazing companies of
Speaker 3: the companies exactly now creating.
Speaker 1: This challenge, right, that is an irony.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But I read something around over ten years ago
Speaker 3: and it talked about how humans defined what was most
Speaker 3: important to a community, a city, or a town based
Speaker 3: on the tallest building that was built. And so previously
Speaker 3: it was the church or the place of worship. A
Speaker 3: few years later that transformed. A few decades later that
Speaker 3: transformed to the government building. Yeah, and then decades later
Speaker 3: that transformed to the corporate offices, and now the tech
Speaker 3: companies or the financial institutions. And so we saw how
Speaker 3: society has shifted its north star. I was curious to
Speaker 3: see why you brought a chapter on spiritual elevation and
Speaker 3: degradation into this conversation, and how is it connected.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So my first book was called The Happiness Hypothesis,
Speaker 1: Finding Modern Truth and Ancient Wisdom. What I did in
Speaker 1: that book it grew out of my teaching psych one
Speaker 1: oh one introductory Psychology at the University of Virginia. I
Speaker 1: noticed when I was trying to explain psychology to three
Speaker 1: hundred students, I would quote Shakespeare. You know, there's nothing
Speaker 1: good or bad, but thinking makes it so well that
Speaker 1: insight is actually also Marcus Aurelius and Buddha. Buddha says
Speaker 1: we are what we think with our minds, we make
Speaker 1: the world. And so I realized that, wow, you know,
Speaker 1: across the millennia, across the continents, people have come to
Speaker 1: these deep insights about psychology, about happiness, about love, about consciousness.
Speaker 1: So I collected, I read a lot of ancient wisdom
Speaker 1: all over the world, and I took out every psychological
Speaker 1: claim and I organized them and I made it into
Speaker 1: ten chapters. And you know, so some of them are
Speaker 1: you know, like, you know, be slower to judge, quicker
Speaker 1: to forgive. You know, Jesus says, judge, not that se
Speaker 1: be judged, you know. And I have a whole chapter
Speaker 1: on how our moral psychology is such that we jump
Speaker 1: to judgments. We care about our tribe, we don't care
Speaker 1: about the truth, you know. So so that was my background.
Speaker 1: I wrote that book on ancient wisdom, and then I
Speaker 1: wrote The Coddling the American Mind with Greg Lukianov, and
Speaker 1: we've talked about these three great untruths, the ways that
Speaker 1: students are being taught, you know, that they're fragive. Ancient
Speaker 1: wisdom is you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Speaker 1: There's quotes from all over the world about that. But
Speaker 1: kids are being taught no, you're fragile, like you know,
Speaker 1: if someone says a word or a name, that can
Speaker 1: be violence against you. So we're making mistakes here. So
Speaker 1: that's sort of my background's thinking about ancient wisdom and psychology.
Speaker 1: All right. So then I end up writing this book,
Speaker 1: The Anxious Generation, and it's July of last year, and
Speaker 1: I'm way behind deadline, and I'm already really stressed about like,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm so far past the deadline in order
Speaker 1: for us to get the book out. But I felt like,
Speaker 1: you know what, I just read this whole book about kids.
Speaker 1: I haven't said anything about adults, but we're all feeling it.
Speaker 1: Most of us at least are feeling something is wrong.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: You know, when I got my first ifelhe it was
Speaker 1: so amazing. I loved it. But these technologies have become
Speaker 1: our master They're changing our lives. And I decide, you
Speaker 1: know what, I'm going to write a chapter for adults.
Speaker 1: I'm just going to stick in a chapter what is
Speaker 1: it that's happening to all of us? And I just
Speaker 1: started making a list. You know, it keeps us indoors,
Speaker 1: it keeps us distracted. And I suddenly realized, Wow, almost
Speaker 1: all the ancient insights into how to live the phone
Speaker 1: based life is the opposite. And once I saw that,
Speaker 1: I said, oh my god, that's the structure for this chapter.
Speaker 1: So I opened it with my earlier work on moral elevation.
Speaker 1: I studied moral emotions. I used to have writings on
Speaker 1: moral elevation which everyone will recognize when you see a
Speaker 1: story about you read a story you see you know
Speaker 1: on the news, or anything about heroism, about loyalty, about devotion.
Speaker 1: You know a dog that you know was so devoted
Speaker 1: to its master and it keeps coming to the train
Speaker 1: station to greet him. I mean, you know, we're easily
Speaker 1: moved and we feel it. We feel it in our
Speaker 1: chest and it's the vagus. Nerve gets activated, our heart
Speaker 1: rhythms change. There are hormonal effects. There's oxytocin is released
Speaker 1: women lactate. I showed that experimentally in the study with
Speaker 1: Jennifer Silvers. So I did all this research on moral elevation,
Speaker 1: and the key to it is the psychology of up
Speaker 1: and down. Some things make us feel closer to God.
Speaker 1: Some things make us feel further from God. That's the
Speaker 1: way cultures talk about it. And it's always a vertical metaphor.
Speaker 1: God is up, the devil is down. So this is
Speaker 1: my view. I'm a Jewish atheist myself. I don't I'm
Speaker 1: not a believer, but I've had some religious experiences. They've
Speaker 1: had a number of spiritual experiences, so I know these
Speaker 1: are an important part of human psychology. And once I
Speaker 1: put in that framework that ancient traditions are trying to
Speaker 1: move us up. They're saying, you know, meditate, you know,
Speaker 1: Hindu traditions, Buddhist traditions, you know, everything out of India
Speaker 1: is much more. Get control of your attention, get control
Speaker 1: of your consciousness. Otherwise it just gets drowned in trivia.
Speaker 1: But no, you know, meditate, live purely, do your work
Speaker 1: with mastery. Come out like the moon, come out from
Speaker 1: behind the clouds and shine. That's a loose translation from
Speaker 1: the Dama Pada. But what does a phone based life do?
Speaker 1: Constant notifications, constant interruptions. My students at NYU, you know,
Speaker 1: they get two or three hundred notifications a day on
Speaker 1: average on their phones. Many of them never go ten
Speaker 1: minutes without interruption. So I just made a list, and
Speaker 1: it was things like spiritual practices involve making something sacred
Speaker 1: and we all agree this thing is sacred and we
Speaker 1: worship it. We have sacred days. On the Jewish religion,
Speaker 1: we have the Shabbat, you know, Sabbath. You're not supposed
Speaker 1: to use electronics if you're Orthodox. Things are sacred and
Speaker 1: it's sharing. The sacredness binds us together. That's what every
Speaker 1: religious community does. But a life online nothing is sacred.
Speaker 1: There's no there's no sacred time. There's the internet never closes.
Speaker 1: It's global, there are no holidays, there are no holy days,
Speaker 1: and the constant demand for you to post about your brand,
Speaker 1: what you're doing. Look at the amazing life I have.
Speaker 1: So we have a posted after Babel. We were just
Speaker 1: taking on this really wonderful British writer. A young woman
Speaker 1: named Freya India gen Z, a writer and she has
Speaker 1: a post which starts with you see a photo of
Speaker 1: a young woman posing for a sexy selfie on the
Speaker 1: train tracks in front of Auschwitz. Here she is, she's
Speaker 1: on some tour of Auschwitz, the concentration camp. But it's
Speaker 1: a nice day in Poland and so she poses in
Speaker 1: a sexy way in front of the gates of hell.
Speaker 1: And so you know, if everyone's a brand manager all
Speaker 1: the time, nothing is sacred. Oh, and it's all about you,
Speaker 1: whereas one of the keys to spirituality is it's not
Speaker 1: all about you. You actually are not that important. It's
Speaker 1: only when you can transcend yourself, transcend yourself interest, that
Speaker 1: you can open your heart to God, to our higher motives,
Speaker 1: to love to other people. So you know, you just
Speaker 1: go through the list. Whatever the ancients urge us to
Speaker 1: do to achieve spiritual progress, a life lived online, even
Speaker 1: for us adults, pulls us in the opposite direction.
Speaker 3: I could agree with you more, and I think, what's
Speaker 3: really interesting when I'm hearing that? And that's primarily why
Speaker 3: I started this show. The goal and the intention behind
Speaker 3: this show was how can we avoid gossip? How can
Speaker 3: we avoid the juiciest scoop? How can we avoid the
Speaker 3: lowest hanging fruit and still get as many or more
Speaker 3: views than everyone else on the inter and beautiful because
Speaker 3: my belief system was that if you were able to
Speaker 3: make wisdom go viral, then you could actually raise consciousness.
Speaker 3: And if we keep feeding people junk food and junk content.
Speaker 3: It's actually not that hard to get clicks and views.
Speaker 3: But if you actually just as if you've retrained your habits,
Speaker 3: when you put a healthy meal in front of someone,
Speaker 3: it can taste like the tastiest meal in the world
Speaker 3: because you've retrained. And we've seen that, Like I know
Speaker 3: that the audience that listens and watches us, which is
Speaker 3: all across the world, every age bracket and every demographic,
Speaker 3: is choosing to do something healthier with their time. But
Speaker 3: I wonder, when I'm listening to you, Jonathan, I'm hearing
Speaker 3: the challenge again goes back to the ironic point I made,
Speaker 3: which is, if creators are not informed and trained in
Speaker 3: sacred creation, you end up creating things that have the
Speaker 3: flaws of the creator and.
Speaker 1: So beautifully put right when I look at what the
Speaker 1: flaws of the creator's beautiful.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like I've always thought when everyone's like, oh, do
Speaker 3: you think AI will be manipulative of off, I'm like,
Speaker 3: of course, because we're manipulative, Like it's it can't not
Speaker 3: be anything that we've seen, so we'll like AI is
Speaker 3: going to take over the world, and it's like, yes,
Speaker 3: because humans did, Like, it's not it's not that surprising.
Speaker 3: And so when I think of the challenges that I
Speaker 3: see in even TV content and streaming content and how
Speaker 3: dark it's got. And whenever anyone says to me in
Speaker 3: my coaching practice that I have anxiety, the first thing
Speaker 3: I asked them is what did you watch last night?
Speaker 3: And it's there's such a direct correlation between these cliffhanger
Speaker 3: chemicals that are released in everyone's brain in order to
Speaker 3: keep them addicted. And so I go, where does this
Speaker 3: education come in? Because we can take away and I
Speaker 3: agree with you, by the way, I'm fully with you.
Speaker 3: We take away what is currently causing an amplification of insecurity, envy,
Speaker 3: ego and the accelerat it. But the challenge is that
Speaker 3: the seed of that still remains and then gets exercised
Speaker 3: in adulthood.
Speaker 1: What do we do well? So the first thing is
Speaker 1: we need to understand what's happening to us. And this
Speaker 1: is all so new. And my argument is that the
Speaker 1: world changed. Life changed between twenty ten and twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: and my book is about how it changed for kids,
Speaker 1: but it changed for all of us, and we're confused,
Speaker 1: we don't understand it. These things are powerful tools we adults,
Speaker 1: We benefit from them in many ways, but we don't
Speaker 1: understand what's happening to us. And so my hope is
Speaker 1: that you know, with my book, with your show, with
Speaker 1: a lot of people who are writing about this, I
Speaker 1: think people are coming to realize. You know, we were
Speaker 1: confused in the twenty tens. It was so new, and
Speaker 1: I think we were beginning to get there to see
Speaker 1: this is a problem, and then COVID hit and we
Speaker 1: all got super confused by COVID and we needed our
Speaker 1: online devices all the time in COVID. But I think
Speaker 1: the reason why things are changing so fast now is
Speaker 1: because now that we're coming out of COVID, now everyone
Speaker 1: sees the wreckage. They see it in the new patterns,
Speaker 1: and their children they see it in the new patterns,
Speaker 1: and themselves. They're sick of being on zoom calls all
Speaker 1: the time. They want crave human contact. So let's just
Speaker 1: see how far we can get just by raising awareness
Speaker 1: of this, as you're doing on your show, as many
Speaker 1: people are doing. So two things I would urge people
Speaker 1: to think about are you need to control your own attention.
Speaker 1: Your tension is the most precious among the most precious
Speaker 1: resources you have, So once you see your attention as
Speaker 1: a precious resource. You can stop letting companies just steal
Speaker 1: it from you. This is perhaps the most effective thing
Speaker 1: I do with my students that at New York University,
Speaker 1: and they're mostly nineteen years old plus or mine is,
Speaker 1: and I show them how important attention is. They're business students,
Speaker 1: they want to have an effect on the world, they
Speaker 1: want to create something. And I show them if you've
Speaker 1: given away all your attention to notifications, to TikTok, you
Speaker 1: have no attention left. So you're not going to be
Speaker 1: able to do anything in this life. Do you want that? No,
Speaker 1: they don't. Well, okay, how about if we turn off
Speaker 1: almost all your notifications. How about if we take social
Speaker 1: media off of your phone. So I'm hoping that some
Speaker 1: of them will quit entirely, But let's just start by
Speaker 1: just don't have it on your phone. You can use
Speaker 1: your laptop at home, whatever, if you need to check,
Speaker 1: you need to keep up with things. Just by making
Speaker 1: a few changes, they regain their attention. Now Suddenly they
Speaker 1: have the mental capacity to think, to think big, to
Speaker 1: do things. So we need a global aware and a
Speaker 1: global recognition that our attention is being drained away as
Speaker 1: if there was a like a giant mosquito, like a
Speaker 1: giant drill stuck into our brain, sucking out our attention,
Speaker 1: we got to say stop. We've got to pull the
Speaker 1: needle out. That's the first thing. Another is to recognize
Speaker 1: that we need to be rooted in real communities, with
Speaker 1: real relationships and face to face and touch, and so
Speaker 1: we need to resist taking the easy way. It's so
Speaker 1: much easier to set up a zoom meeting than it
Speaker 1: is to get in your car and go to visit someone,
Speaker 1: and there's many times we need to do that. But
Speaker 1: we need to rehumanize our lives, and that means more
Speaker 1: time with real people, not feeling so rushed, and being
Speaker 1: able to be open to people and sharing experiences. So
Speaker 1: that's another There's so many I could list. I'll just
Speaker 1: list one more area where I want to really raise awareness,
Speaker 1: which is time in nature. So the modern world, we're
Speaker 1: further and further away from nature, and as we get
Speaker 1: busier and busier, we have no time. And so after
Speaker 1: twenty twelve, when everyone's on social media all the time,
Speaker 1: everyone's on their phones, people are spending less time. In America,
Speaker 1: church attendances has plummeted. Since twenty eleven or so twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: because no one has time. Everyone's so busy with their
Speaker 1: notifications and they're in their posts. So exposing ourselves to beauty,
Speaker 1: to nature, going out for all walks, go out for
Speaker 1: a walk. I have my students go out for a
Speaker 1: walk in a park with no phone and no headphones.
Speaker 1: They can't listen to music. They have to go just
Speaker 1: walk slowly, and the effects are amazing because many of
Speaker 1: them they've never noticed, they've never noticed how beautiful the
Speaker 1: world is. So we can we can take steps to
Speaker 1: rehumanize our lives, and.
Speaker 3: How do we respiritualize it? Like how do we going
Speaker 3: back to that chapter, I feel like it's also spiritualizing
Speaker 3: of intention, right if someone's creating something, and I'm assuming
Speaker 3: when you do your research and the books you've written,
Speaker 3: and even the one happiness hypothesis that you started with
Speaker 3: and the journey that you've gone on, it seems like
Speaker 3: your intention has been to uplift people through your work.
Speaker 1: Certainly my early work I used to study positive psychology,
Speaker 1: and the goal there was very explicit. The whole movement
Speaker 1: started by Martin Seligman in the nineteen nineties. The whole
Speaker 1: movement was psychology is pretty good at taking people from
Speaker 1: negative six up to zero. We have some ways to
Speaker 1: bring you up to zero, but most people are actually
Speaker 1: above zero. Most people are actually doing reasonably well, and
Speaker 1: they want to go from plus two to plus seven,
Speaker 1: and psychology had nothing to say to them. So yes,
Speaker 1: a lot of my early work was about how do
Speaker 1: we get to plus seven, But especially with the Carling
Speaker 1: the American mind and now the anxious generation, I'm now
Speaker 1: talking about how do we get from negative ten up
Speaker 1: to up to zero? I mean, that's the first step.
Speaker 1: Just help kids, help the next generation get out of
Speaker 1: defend mode, out of performance mode, and into a more human,
Speaker 1: real childhood.
Speaker 3: It's almost like your students and the you know, the
Speaker 3: people that will go on to become entrepreneurs and business leaders.
Speaker 3: It's almost like the challenge still becomes that even if
Speaker 3: people think big and think successfully and think scaled and
Speaker 3: are open minded, it's almost like without the inherent belief
Speaker 3: that I should create something to help others, without that
Speaker 3: no matter what you create will in some way harm
Speaker 3: or cause difficulty to others, because it wasn't therein not
Speaker 3: saying that you can do something perfectly and not saying
Speaker 3: you could build something without any flaws completely that's no
Speaker 3: one can do that. But this idea that at least
Speaker 3: if that's my intention, if that's at least my north star,
Speaker 3: if that's my compass, and I'm wondering where people are
Speaker 3: getting that from.
Speaker 1: If tool Yeah, I'll take what you said and I'll
Speaker 1: just make it a little bit more business friends, what
Speaker 1: you said seem to be something like, if you intend
Speaker 1: to make something that's good for people, or you know,
Speaker 1: if you have a positive intention, this is going to
Speaker 1: help people. And so you know, many people think like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, I should go into a nonprofit work, I
Speaker 1: should go into charity work. You know, a lot of
Speaker 1: young people are headed towards nonprofit work, and a lot
Speaker 1: of the nonprofits don't do very much, and they're wasting
Speaker 1: their talents there. Since I moved to a business school
Speaker 1: in twenty eleven, I used to teach in the psychology
Speaker 1: department at University Virginia, but I've been at the Nyustern
Speaker 1: School of Business since twenty eleven. What I've come to
Speaker 1: see is that is that almost all businesses make the
Speaker 1: world better because they're creating something that people need. And
Speaker 1: I once heard a philosopher say, in an ideal capitalist society,
Speaker 1: the only way to get rich is by making other
Speaker 1: people better off. And so you don't have to be
Speaker 1: all pro socially. You can just say, look, there's a
Speaker 1: need for this kind of ranch. I invented this ranch
Speaker 1: the world's better off people needed, and and then I
Speaker 1: make money. That's great. You know, if I tell my
Speaker 1: students of all you do is create goods and services
Speaker 1: that increase the general welfare of humankind because it's a
Speaker 1: useful product, that's great. You're you're part of progress. But
Speaker 1: now when we look at it that way, now we
Speaker 1: get a new view of social media, because social media
Speaker 1: is not a normal consumer product. A normal consumer product,
Speaker 1: if it hurts the customers, they'll stop buying it unless
Speaker 1: they're addicted. But with social media, and especially the advertising
Speaker 1: driven business model at Facebook developed originally, now many of
Speaker 1: them are copied. The customer is the advertiser, that's who
Speaker 1: pays the money. The consumer is the product. They're the
Speaker 1: victim in a sense of this, and that explains why,
Speaker 1: especially for TikTok and Instagram. I've seen a couple of
Speaker 1: surveys now and I did with my own class, you say,
Speaker 1: do you use TikTok? So let's do it this way.
Speaker 1: I asked my students, how many of you use Netflix?
Speaker 1: How many've watched Netflix least once a week? Almost all
Speaker 1: hands go up. How many of you wish Netflix was
Speaker 1: never invented? Nobody? Nobody, Netflix's stories, full length stories. We
Speaker 1: enjoy it. Maybe we watch too much, but we don't
Speaker 1: feel it's ruining our lives. Okay, how many of you
Speaker 1: use TikTok once a week? Most hands go up? How
Speaker 1: many of you wish TikTok was never invented? Most hands
Speaker 1: go up. Same thing for Instagram. So we have this
Speaker 1: bizarre situation where a couple of big platforms, especially TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter,
Speaker 1: a few others, they're sucking up most human attention. Billions
Speaker 1: and billions of people are spending hours a day. Most
Speaker 1: human attention is being drained away for a product that
Speaker 1: most people wish never existed. So this is I think
Speaker 1: the greatest destruction of human value in human history. These
Speaker 1: products should not exist, or at least they should not
Speaker 1: exist in their present form, unregulated, not responsible for the
Speaker 1: harm they cause, causing massive harm. The people who use
Speaker 1: them don't overall wish they didn't this. Something is deeply,
Speaker 1: deeply wrong with our society and the nature of these companies,
Speaker 1: which are now some of the biggest richest companies on Earth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you could argue that fast food companies and
Speaker 3: young food companies have done the same for years and
Speaker 3: got away with it too.
Speaker 1: Well, that's true, that's true. But at least there people
Speaker 1: are making a decision. Now, it's a part of it
Speaker 1: is addiction, but at least they're you know, like I
Speaker 1: really enjoy freedoms. I just love FreeDOS. It's just, you know,
Speaker 1: it's something an M and M is there a few
Speaker 1: consumer products that I love and you know, I know
Speaker 1: they're bad for me to make a decision about it,
Speaker 1: and I don't think and now they are. Of course
Speaker 1: they are adding to obesity. But I think social media
Speaker 1: is so much more pernicious because if I eat FreeDOS,
Speaker 1: that doesn't make anyone else eat FreeDOS. But if I
Speaker 1: get on social media that you know, the more of
Speaker 1: us are on, the more pressure there is to be
Speaker 1: on and that's especially hitting our kids.
Speaker 3: We've got to break that up absolutely. Jonathan, It's been
Speaker 3: such a joy talking to you and so insightful. I'm
Speaker 3: so glad you gave our audience so many great call
Speaker 3: to actions, and will make sure we put them in
Speaker 3: the caption and the comment sections so people can find
Speaker 3: them easily. We end every episode of On Purpose with
Speaker 3: a fast five or a final five, at least to
Speaker 3: be answered in one word to one sentence, so you
Speaker 3: have something to play. Okay, drink of water.
Speaker 1: Let me compose myself. This is be difficult, Jonathan and I.
Speaker 3: These are your final five. The first question is what
Speaker 3: is the best advice you've ever heard or received?
Speaker 1: Well, what comes to mind. I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: the best, but it comes right away to mind is
Speaker 1: what my father said when he dropped me off at college.
Speaker 1: And he said, John, the most important things you learn
Speaker 1: you're not going to learn in the classroom. And it
Speaker 1: was just, you know, it's just advice to go have experience.
Speaker 1: And and that's actually something I tell my students now.
Speaker 1: It's just you take risks, have experiences.
Speaker 3: Beautiful. Question number two, what is the worst advice you
Speaker 3: had to receive?
Speaker 1: The worst advice I ever received? Hard to say, but
Speaker 1: I think generally a piece of bad advice that young
Speaker 1: people receive is you know, just follow your passions. That's important.
Speaker 1: But I think many young people now think that they
Speaker 1: need to be engaged in work which is not just
Speaker 1: rewarding but socially valuable. Like as though, my first job
Speaker 1: after college has to have all these features. And what
Speaker 1: I try to tell on them is no, no, you
Speaker 1: want to end up there. You want, you know, in
Speaker 1: a decade or two, you want to have work that
Speaker 1: you love. That doesn't mean you have to love every
Speaker 1: moment of it. You know, think long term. Think about
Speaker 1: the skills you need, think about the toughening you need,
Speaker 1: think about the experiences you need. And it might even
Speaker 1: be unpleasant for a while, but think long term.
Speaker 3: Great question number three an experience that you never thought
Speaker 3: you'd ever try, but you're glad you did.
Speaker 1: I'm really pro experience. I'm very high in openness to experience,
Speaker 1: and I always kind of wanted to try everything, so,
Speaker 1: you know, whether it was psychedelic drugs or you know,
Speaker 1: travel all over the world. So I actually can't think
Speaker 1: of anything.
Speaker 3: You've done them all.
Speaker 1: I've done it. I mean, I've done a lot of
Speaker 1: different things in my life. I think I saw that yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: which I've talked about on some podcasts. Now that now
Speaker 1: that Michael Polland has written a book on it, now
Speaker 1: that people can talk about psychedelic experience that is you know,
Speaker 1: I mentioned before I've had a number of spiritual experience
Speaker 1: and some of the most intense ones were on psychedelics.
Speaker 3: Question number four, An experience that you're excited to try this.
Speaker 1: Year experience I'm excited to try this year. Well this well,
Speaker 1: actually going to Wimbledon my son.
Speaker 3: It's going to be amazing.
Speaker 1: My son is graduated from high school and I wanted
Speaker 1: to give him something special, and I said, what's something
Speaker 1: that that you know, what's the experience you want to have?
Speaker 1: And he said Wimbledon. He loves tennis. We go to
Speaker 1: the US Open in New York, but he's never been
Speaker 1: to Wimbledon. Yeah, so I was able to scrounge up
Speaker 1: a few tickets and we'll go a couple of days.
Speaker 3: Fantastic. That would be great. Okay, Fifth and final question.
Speaker 3: We asked this to every guest who's ever been on
Speaker 3: the show. If you could create one law that everyone
Speaker 3: had to follow, what would it be.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm thinking kind of practically here, you know, yeah, please,
Speaker 1: you know, one would be that businesses that impose costs
Speaker 1: on others that are not party to the exchange should
Speaker 1: have to bear the cost. So basically, get rid of externalities.
Speaker 1: And social medium poses so many externalities. But if I,
Speaker 1: if I have just like one dart to throw, one
Speaker 1: thing to ask right now, I'm just going to say,
Speaker 1: let's get effective mandatory age verification on the Internet so
Speaker 1: that some sites are actually like porn sites are actually
Speaker 1: not open to children. I think a law like that
Speaker 1: would be that's going to be the big hard one,
Speaker 1: that would be a real game changer. So again, not
Speaker 1: very you know, hoping, you know, great if I could
Speaker 1: come up with, you know, some version of Kant's categorical
Speaker 1: imperative here, but no, I'll just go with those are
Speaker 1: the ones I've been thinking about.
Speaker 3: Fantastic everyone, Thank you so much for listening. The book
Speaker 3: is called The Anxious Generation, How the great rewiring of
Speaker 3: childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Jonathan h
Speaker 3: thank you so much for joining us on purpose. I
Speaker 3: really am encouraging everyone who's been listening and watching to
Speaker 3: go ahead to the sites that Jonathan recommends. See if
Speaker 3: we can be a part of the mission support the
Speaker 3: work that Jonathan and his team are doing because I
Speaker 3: couldn't agree with you more. I think this will This
Speaker 3: is what I love about what you've done is often
Speaker 3: I find a lot of thinkers and thought leaders create
Speaker 3: fear based arguments and without any concrete solutions, and I
Speaker 3: feel that only adds to the fear and anxiety in
Speaker 3: the world. And so I'm very grateful that we have
Speaker 3: very tangible, specific things that we're fighting for here, and
Speaker 3: I really really hope that you'll lean on us to
Speaker 3: help you and help be a part of this with
Speaker 3: you so well.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Jay. I am wildly optimistic that this is
Speaker 1: a problem we can solve in a year, at least
Speaker 1: get most of the way towards solving. I really appreciate
Speaker 1: your help in getting the word out. I'm so excited
Speaker 1: to reach a global audience because this is this is
Speaker 1: a pan human this is a global problem.
Speaker 3: I'm so thank you Jay, Thank you, Jonathan, thank you.
Speaker 3: If you enjoyed this podcast, you're going to love my
Speaker 3: conversation with Michelle Obama where she opens up on how
Speaker 3: to stay with your partner when they're changing and the
Speaker 3: four check ins you should be doing in your relationship.
Speaker 3: We also talk about how to deal with relationships when
Speaker 3: they're undistressed. If you're going through something right now with
Speaker 3: your partner or someone you're seeing, this is the episode
Speaker 3: for you.
Speaker 4: No wonder our kids are struggling. We have a new
Speaker 4: technology and we've just taken it in hookline and Sinker,
Speaker 4: and we have to be mindful for our kids. They'll
Speaker 4: just be thumbing through this stuff. You know, their mind's
Speaker 4: never sleeping.