How Modern Life Is Making Us Less Happy - Jonathan Haidt

doesn't every generation complain about the next one that's coming along is what we're seeing at the moment not just more old hat that's occurred for every generation previously um well yes and no yes every generation complains and the complaints tend to be similar and that's gone on not since the dawn of history people always quote you know Socrates or something but really that begins when you start getting modernity you start getting each generation is changing you know around the 16 Century in in Europe so yes that's been going on a long time but it's never before been the case that the mental health of the Young Generation suddenly was really different and really bad so you know the main argument I get against me is just the one you just said that oh this is just another moral Panic there's nothing going on here this is what always happens no this is not what always happens you don't ever before get a doubling of the suicide rate of pre-teen girls you don't ever get and across the board across many nations plummeting of mental health all beginning right around 2012 2013 so no this time is really different what is it that children need to do in childhood like we don't think about it that importantly it's just it's just the thing that you do before you get to puberty where you start to become a person but those experiences are very formative what does a good childhood look like yeah now thanks for just setting it up that way because there's so much focus on the phones and social media and and I was focused on that too but what I decided to do in writing this book and writing the anxious generation was I'm not even going to talk about the phones and social media until I've taken readers through what is childhood why do we have it how is human childhood different from every other animal including chimpanzees and so you know if you start just with mammals all mammals have the same life plan which is huge investment from the parents or the mother in the in the baby long childhood big brain how do you wire up the brain play play is the thing your brain doesn't grow from nursing your brain grows from moving away from your mother trying to climb something uh you know anyone who's had a a puppy or a kitten knows they want to play all the time because they have to practice the skills to wire up the brain so we have to let our kids wire up their brains now humans are different because we have much bigger brains and we have culture this is crucial other animals they grow as you know sort fast as they can and then they reproduce humans we grow fast and then we slow down right age seven to 12 13 we're not growing very fast and it's thought that that period is a critical period for culture learning um all the way through puberty we're really trying to soak in how do we do things around here um what do adults do how do I approach the opposite sex or sexuality so there's a lot of learning that has to happen and the problem is we've taken that learning period we've said instead of learning from grown-ups around you or even from you know older kids in your neighborhood how about if we just hook you up here's a phone or an iPad we'll just hook you up and you can get socialized by random weirdos on the internet were selected by an algorithm for being really extreme how about that well that's kind of what we've done yeah I uh I'm around kids more and more as my friends um finally become less Manchild and actually become fathers themselves of of actual children and it's so interesting like my my group of friends largely are pretty redpilled on this the concerns about exposure to technology but you know when you go for dinner at the sort of times that you do with guys that have got families you end up going a little bit earlier which means you're also around other families and we go to these restaurants and I'll get to see you know how other families that probably just aren't aware of this uh are anesthetizing a boisterous child and a lot of the time at the table you know it's the kid starts to act up they're a little bit bored and the parents are trying to have a conversation or the adults at the table are trying to have a conversation and one of them just goes You know open up the phone pass the phone and the the maddest thing that I've seen from sort of two to three-year-old children is their ability to skip ads on YouTube like they understand the difference between an advert right and the button and how they can get past it and I'm like well first off look if you're giving your kid this to antiz them buy YouTube premium it's 10 10 bucks a month and it's it'll change your life gets rid of the ads yeah um but also the this level of Engagement with you know the capitalist system of of of of Facebook pixel tagging and and all that stuff from two years old it's crazy yeah that's right that's right you know we're very protective of our kids and you know if I said to people how about how about if we have this thing that we have a special door a special window and we're going to put it on your child's crib and advertisers and corporations can come and they can just communicate with your kid and you have nothing to do with it what do what do you think is that okay like no we would never let that happen and then suppose when your daughter is 11 12 13 we put a special window on her bedroom and strange men can come and they can talk to her through the window they can look at her through the window how about that would you do that like no of course you wouldn't do that but that's kind of what we're doing you know we're we're we're saying here companies can have access to our kids they can train them with the stimulus response Paradigm and strangers can have access to our children once they get a social media account and they can try to convince them to meet up in the real world they can try to sell them things all kinds of stuff like that actually I want to pick up you use the word anesthetize which is a very good word here because you know as many people know like 150 years ago there were a variety of medications for children like that had opiates in them to calm the child and help them sleep uh or we'd give them alcohol we didn't know that these things interfered with with their development and we all discovered as soon as we got our first iPhone I mean I have video you know like my my son was born in 2006 and so many of our videos of me videotaping him and with him reaching for the phone and saying iPhone iPhone like he you know he wants it he needs it because it's so stimulating back then in the early days of all this stuff you know 2008 to 2012 we thought the technology was magical and we thought you know yeah let's let our kids get stimulated by like stimulation isn't that going to be good for their brain development like so yeah it it seemed okay to do it it'll give them a head start he'll be you know digital natives he'll be comfortable with this technology and besides everyone else is doing it so must be okay so yeah we ended up anesthetizing them let's back out of the technology thing we're going to get onto that but let's just talk about like what has changed with regards to Parenting Styles outside of Technology MH over the last few decades how has this created the raw material foundation for the kids that would grow up no that's a great question it's one that I don't write enough about because I am focused on the technology but Greg and I did write about this in the coddling of the American mind that um there is a long-term transition over Generations as when life is hard and families are big um and religion is an important part of life you tend to have a very structure there you know kids are growing up a lot of structure there are dos and don'ts there are punishments if you misbehave um and there's a big liberal conservative split on this in general conservatives want more strict childbearing progressives want more lenient liberal now called gentle parenting and in general as as our societies have gotten wealthier and safer and our families get smaller we've all kind of moved over to the gentle side uh you know when I was a kid spanking was normal but it was like only for the very like my my sisters and I we got spanked like a few times when we did something really terrible uh but now it's you know at least in you know educated circles like that's almost unheard of whereas a couple Generations before there would have been a lot more physical school teacher would have yes that's right schools would would hit the kids that's right so you know so in many ways it's progress on the other hand if you take out if you take out the threats the punishments all the negative stuff and you kind of leave it with like what you see a lot of parents doing like now Johnny was that A wise choice or an unwise Choice as opposed to saying no you do not hit your sister um so I think we become a little too gentle too unstructured and this might also help explain a really interesting twist in the data that it's not really in the book I found a lot of it even afterwards um is that the Mental Health crisis is much worse for children in families on the left than on the right um so liberals or progressives have always had slightly higher levels of neuroticism anxiety depression just a little bit more than conservatives it's a big you know long studied thing conservatives are a little bit happier than liberals adults and children and if you plot out the levels of you know of happiness or the negative stuff like meaninglessness on all the graphs in my book you'll see like you get a straight line until around 2011 2012 and then all of a sudden the lines go up like a hockey stick well if you break it out by uh are you a liberal or conservative which is asked on one or two surveys um it's the liberal kids especially liberal girls they go up first and fastest something happened whatever it was that changed in the early 2010s it hit liberal kids especially Lial girls the hardest and I think part of it is what we're talking about if you are rooted deeply in structure and community and you have to go to church every Sunday or you know you're an Orthodox Jewish kid you've got Shabbat you've got you know 24 hours where there are no devices and you're with your family moving to the digital technology didn't wash these kids out to see but if you're a more Progressive family usually a smaller family uh more econ more mobile you move around more perhaps um you have weaker ties a lot of freedom a lot of creativity but those kids seem to be especially vulnerable to being washed away in the early 2010s it's not just left right it's also religious conservative religious or secular so so secular religious I'm sorry uh secular conservative kids show the least increase everybody goes up but they show the least increase whereas uh Progressive non-religious kids or families that's where you see the biggest increase in mental health problems I wonder how much of it from the liberal Progressive side comes from this very softly softly gentle approach to discipline and parenting because you know I I hesitate dropping into bro psychology this early in a podcast but it like if you think about your level of discomfort exposure what you're what you're comfortable being uncomfortable with how often has someone told you no how often have you been told that you're in the wrong how often has someone raised their voice at you how often has someone been Stern you know all of these opportunities are are times where you learn okay I can self-regulate this is this can happen to me and I'm still safe this can happen to me and I'm still loved no one's going to abandon me this isn't a comment on my moral character or my worth as a human this is an inbuilt part of being a fallible flawed human that makes errors and Mom and Dad are going to say you don't hit your sister you don't do that go your own timeout go sit on the step and sit on the step until you've calmed yourself down and if you've never experienced that and you Contin it like you don't even need you don't need need to know anything about human psychology to know that if you train a system on a type of stimulus it will become hyper sensitized when you get outside the bounds of that stimulus yeah and that's where we are that's right no I think that's perfect um I can just add a little psychological color to it in two ways uh one is to bring in the concept of antifragility which I hope many of your listeners are already familiar with um you know some things are fragile a glass is fragile you don't let kids play with it it'll break so we give them plastic which is resilient uh if a kid drops it it won't break but it doesn't get better uh but some things are antifragile um they need to be stressed and strained and dropped and and and suffer setbacks in order to get strong uh and this comes from my NYU colleague Nasim TB so bones and muscle are antifragile if you raised your kids by saying I never want you to put stress on your bones you know never go down stairs take the elevator you know their bones are going to get weak same thing with muscle the immune system is antifragile and kids are antifragile so that's that's like the psychology underneath a lot of what you were just saying but then there's other one which I haven't really talked about publicly because it sort of can easily get taken out of context maybe that'll happen here when I never we have the most unreasonably reasonable audience on the internet you'll be fine okay it's really important for kids to learn how to accept Injustice now let me quickly keep talking so that that doesn't just get taken out of context um you know oh you know John height you know white guy says that people need to just suck it up and accept Injustice no but but the situation that you just talked about you know like you know no you do not hit your sister time out and it might be the case that your sister hit you first and maybe there's more to the story and so maybe your parents are actually treating you unfairly and in general we would say you know authoritative parents would always hear them out like why did you hit your sister tell me why you know if you can't justify it we'll punish you but sometimes sometimes things are unfair and if you're a child who is raised where in general your parents you know you trust them in general they they're fair but sometimes they're not sometimes they're just not and you just learn like okay you know it happens I'm a little mad and I'll get over it okay now fast forward 15 20 years imagine you're an employer hiring two recent College grads one of them has never had to face Injustice one of them everything was always fair and if they thought it wasn't they could say I think that's unfair and then they could work it out another kid had authoritative parents who sometimes made mistakes and sometimes was treated unfairly who would you rather hire and I think what we're seeing in universities is that there's a certain kind of activist young person who who sees flaws in the world and thinks that they see everything as it is and they should never have to accept any unfairness and they can just become very very difficult to to work with because they're used to getting their way so yeah we're doing kids no favors with this sort of you know gentle you shouldn't have to do anything that doesn't make you comfortable like no sometimes in life you do have to do things that make you uncomfortable or that you know or that you think you have to respond to situations that you think are unfair I spent a lot of time running a big events company in the UK so I ran nightclubs for for a decade and a half and one of the things that I've very quickly uh realized stepping into that industry is it's full of scumbags I was train in the art of scumbaggery but uh you know if I'd gone into that I had this really interesting experience because I was at University right so I was seeing and I was doing two business degrees did a master's in and a bachelor's in business stuff but I was running a business and from doing NTI you get to see HR marketing B2B b2c hiring firing every you see the full works right it's a full gamut of everything so I was getting to learn about business 101 but I was also experiencing business and what I was being taught thought and what I was experiencing were diverging very quickly but the interesting point here is up until you leave University most people can campaign their way out of situations that they don't want to be in this is wrong the uh standards that this professor is holding me to are too high you know we've seen this happen a good Bunch etc etc etc right people when you enter the world of business someone doesn't need to play by your rules they can they can bring you up to the brink of signing a contract your balls deep in lawyer fees everything's ready to go you bet the business on it and they can go uh by the way this is It's called Crank on confirmation is is the the actual tactic and they just crank the out of you and they go hey um yeah we're going to pay 20% less are this Deal's dead in the water and you go no wow you can't I've got I I'm I'm and yeah we know that you're this deep in it which is why we want to pay 20% less like that's business works like this is what crank on confirmation is and it happens in night life over and over and over and over again my point being if you like if you're unable to deal with someone coming and twisting you or you going all right well I know that you need me let's let's play a game of chicken here with who needs who the most you're just going to be so disregulated that you can't deal with anything my point being this sort of hyper I think of it like an Overton window of sensitivity you know you have the entire gamut of human experience and then you have this range within which you're familiar the tighter that you make that any small movement outside of that is going to feel like like disregulation and I suppose as well this gets into something I've spoken about with Dr animation and and and tons of people to do with child rearing the importance of risky play and why that's so important yes that is such a key word and that this is something I think that won't be as familiar to uh to listeners um you know even listeners who might have read the cing the American mind or might know about the importance of play there's really interesting research there's a a play researcher from Norway named Ellen sanser and she has a couple of papers from 2010 and more recently on the need for risk specifically risk and thrill and the key word that I really resonate with is thrill so you know we know that even if you know kids need to play but we don't want them to play in any place dangerous we don't want them to climb any trees as far as I can tell um New Zealand is the only English speaking country left in the world where children are allowed to climb trees you know like I remember you know at recess when I was a kid if there's a tree you know sometimes we climb a tree um but we we sort of decided we have to keep kids safe from danger so nothing that could have any real danger but what s Ceder points out is why are kids seeking out danger why is this almost a universal feature why are kids doing things that they're almost certainly going to make them get hurt you know why are boys doing jumps on their bicycle they know they're going to get hurt why are kids skateboarding down steep hills they know they're going to fall at some point and the reason she says is because part of our evolutionary programming is to test our abilities learn to manage risks that are small risks uh because life is full of R once you're not protected by your parents boy is life dangerous out in the jungle out in the wild out in the world of nightclubs um so we have to part of our our mandate as a child is try things that are a little bit dangerous and you get to select how dangerous it is and so you know when I would take my kids to Cony Island here in New York City you know big you Mum Park area um there the kids like in the car there would be so much discussion of like are you gonna do the Thunderbolt today or the you know the slingshot like oh no that's no that's too scary for me you know everyone they're all trying to adjust but then once they do it they come off I mean they are jumping they are exhilarated The Thrill is what they've been craving and what sand Cedar says is it's that process of being afraid being really afraid like the roller coaster it's about to go over the top and it's about like you're really afraid and then on the way down you're screaming and it's thrilling and pleasurable and fearful and then when you get to the bottom and you you make it off the other end it's just thrilling and when you do that you're actually changing your brain you do that over and over again and you develop the brain of a person who can face down some scumbag or some person threatening them who can actually deal with threats and stand their ground and think quickly and not just panic and melt down so our kids need risk and thrill that means they're going to get hurt they're going to sometimes break bones um but the alternative is to keep them soft so that they're going to break their minds what this obviously rolls from um infancy parents into preschool School Secondary School what's happening to children when they get into school and they are first faced with test scores and assessment and and structure you have to get to school at this time and no you can't do that and the teacher like how much of this is laid at the feet of parents and how much of this is laid at the feet of the education system yeah it's a kind of a yeah it is a mix um the sort of the normal human progression is up until age six seven maybe even eight um there's really no value at all to homework or having too much structure you know by 8 n10 you know they they they can really learn um you know to to fit in to conform but the early grade especially kindergarten in first grade here in the US um there's really very little evidence that they benefit from being pushed to read faster or to learn math faster we have this naive idea that if they start learning multiplication in kindergarten they will end up in high school further ahead it's kind of a naive notion we give them a head start and they'll end up further ahead but that's not true in Scandinavia especially Finland where they don't really start kids until age seven they don't really do any academic stuff until age seven and their kids are among the best in the world in all these academic measures so um so I guess I would say at a certain point yeah they do need to learn all that stuff uh they do need to be self-regulating and if they're going to fit into a free market capitalist economy and be functioning people and be prosperous they need s they need all those skills but that doesn't mean you have to really start them very strictly early on what kids need in kindergarten first grade is especially a lot more play than we give them uh we need to really back off on the homework and the heavy academics uh in kindergarten in first grade is my opinion what's happening to test scores with regards to students so uh there are two there's a global measure of test scores around the world that's Pisa the program for international something assessment um Scholastic I suppose and uh with Pisa what we see is that scores were going up from the 90s I think it started in the 90s scores were sort of going slowly up um from the 90s to the 2012 assessment it's every three years and beginning at the 2012 assessment some of them start to go down and then they go down further in the most recent and everybody points to that says oh co wow Co was so terrible and it was it was terrible that we took kids out of school it was terrible that we took kids who weren't any danger and said you don't get to go to school uh because what if you bring home the virus to an adult um and so it's true that covid you know being out of school did hurt test scores but what people are only just beginning to realize when you look at those graphs it didn't start with covid it started when kids and everybody got on phones around 2012 in America we have the neep NA national assessment of educational progress It's called the nation's report card same thing there we have data back from the 70s so we were making progress like kids literally you know in fourth or eighth grade whenever they measure it kids literally were learning more about math science and and better and reading there was progress for decades slow but steady progress until 2012 and then it begins to reverse and yes it reverses even more during covid but the reversal started around 2012 so um I think the main thing we should be focusing on here is phones in schools um we you know we'll talk more about what phones are doing to all of us but the idea that a child has access you know like a seven you know seventh grader has a smartphone in their pocket they're going to text if any if the phone is available someone is texting and if someone is texting or group texting or posting on on on Instagram then everyone has to be checking otherwise at lunch they're going to be the one who doesn't know the thing that happened during third period so once kids uh around 2012 is when we get the phone based childhood that's rough that's roughly when teens switch from flip phones to smartphones right around them as soon as that happens they're not paying as much attention in school they're not learning enough they're not learning as much as they did they're not paying as much attention to each other and they start getting lonelier so after 2012 our kids are getting stupider and lonelier and I think a lot of it not all but a lot of it is because of the phone what was that article that you tweeted about jenz reading books for play pleasure or them not doing it yes so Jean twangy uh who's been fantastic she was one of the first to really call attention to this in 2017 that something big is happening to our kids and Jean is a master of these four giant data sets that we have in America long running surveys monitoring the future goes back to the 1970s every year they uh they interview repres large samples of 12th graders 10th graders and eth graders um and so we have DEC of data and one of the questions they they ask a lot of questions one of them is uh you know have you how often do you read books for pleasure or have you read a book for pleasure in the last month I can't remember the exact timing and what what jean shows is that the number who have read no books I think that's how it is like how you know how many of you read you know zero in the last year for pleasure or you know one to three or five to 10 the number who have read zero books in the last year uh has been going up for a while it didn't start in 2012 um as kids are watching more television cable TV going on the internet book reading has been declining being replaced by by other screens that's been going on for a long time but it accelerates after 2012 because again once you have a smartphone and you have social media which is going to suck up all of your time there is no limit to how much you need to consume or post or monitor so um life on a smartphone what I'm calling the phone based childhood takes up so much time there is no time for hobbies or reading or anything and so Jean shows these dramatic graphs of you know the number who never read a book those go up and the number of books people read on average goes down we have a nation of young people who have read very very few books is there anything else that we need to say about the education system and what it's got wrong maybe from a disciplinarian standpoint we know about this sort of um early th of academic achievement onto kids in the hopes that it kind of starting earlier pushes them out ahead more late is there anything else aside from the technology that the education system got wrong oh my goodness yes so um one of the you know in this book I'm trying to be totally not political and and just really just focus on the kids but since I'm talking with you Chris I'll I'll share some other thoughts Rel here it's fine Jonathan um so educ schools have been accused of being ideologically Progressive since the 1930s uh and they are they lean left um the military leans right the police lean right the Arts lean left education education schools lean left that's just the way it is that's not necessarily a problem but what I've been focused on since 2011 as a social scientist is the loss of viewpoint diversity when everyone trying to figure something out if everyone's on the left or the right you don't get conf you don't get your conf information bias is challenged and you start getting what I've called you start getting structural stupidity that is you know someone can say something really stupid and and no one dares to challenge them because if you challenge them you look like you're a conservative or you know a sexist or a racist or something you'll be accus is something so people just keep their mouth shut I get emails from students in uh grad programs in education periodically and they say basically help I came here to learn how to teach all we learn how to do is racial Justice and equity like we never learn you know everything is oppression everything's racism we don't learn how to teach so I can't say this is true for all ed schools but for the elite schools I think they are largely they become very very ideological they were that before 2015 but in the kind of the great awokening that we've had in the real intensification of of sort of the Left Right culture War uh you know we can see the right going off the deep end in a lot of ways but you know for talking about schools it's really it's you know the left and the education schools so I think that um there's always been a debate between sort of progressive educational ideals and conservative and I've always seen that as a yin-yang sort of thing like you actually need the tension of them pushing but since there are very few conservatives left in higher education um you know in the social sciences and in educ and in education schools it's all now very very ideologically Progressive and that means you have a lot more the gentle parenting the focus on equality of outcomes by race um regardless of inputs let's get rid of tests let's get rid of honors classes uh so I think education schools have been working very very hard to lose the trust of centrists Republicans uh and anyone who actually cares that their kids get an education um so again you know in the current book on Mental Health I I'm not I don't want to get get into it but if we're talking about what's happening to our kids schools in education I think I think the educational establishment is becoming structurally stupid um and we saw clear evidence of this in San Francisco during Co where the school board was you know they were totally Focus on pulling down statues of ab Lincoln and renaming schools um you know um and the the citizens of San Francisco who are you know very far left were so fed up with it they voted out the school board um so yeah I think the education system is is becoming in this country very very ideological talk to me about the newest data that you found around smartphones you know you've been circling this wagon for quite a while uh spent a good bit of time on this book since your last one which was something not too dissimilar what what are the primary harms of Technology on kids and and what's the latest data about that sure so there's been you know a lot there's a huge academic literature on whether we all agree that there's a correlation we all agree it turns out even there's a few major sort of Skeptics and critics and then there's Jee twangy and me on the other side and that's sort of the where a lot of the debate has been and it turns out we actually agree on the size of the correlation between how much time you spend on social media and how anxious and depressed you are when you say we agreed do you mean you and Jean or you and the other side no me and the other side they've done a number of met analyses and they say you know the correlation is around 0.1 to 0.15 uh but that's for boys and girls together whereas Gan and I and many others have found the correlation is much bigger for girls social media harms girls much more than boys so uh Gan and I found that the correlation for girls is about 0.2 well that's actually pretty much the same if they say it's 0.1 to 0.15 correlation for everyone that means they're basically saying the correlation is around 0.15 maybe even higher for girls so we actually agree and that that correlation is actually pretty big in public health effect it's not big in a mathematical sense of variance explained but it's about the same size as you get from many other public health things you know calcium consumption and later osteoporosis I mean all sorts of effects are around that size so we actually agree on that but then the debate they say it's small we say it's actually as big as everything else um uh the big debate is okay there's a correlation but correlation doesn't show causation you know we have to prove causation and so I've been uh collecting I I started this in 2019 after I I was challenged on the codling the American mind um I said well let's get to the bottom of this is there a mental health crisis because back then the critics were saying there isn't even a mental health crisis it's just you know self-report stuff it's it's not it's an illusion well now it's clear no it was not an illusion the rates have been going up since 2012 um now the question is what caused it and I've been collecting experiments these big Google Docs if you go to Jonathan hey.com reviews you can find all of our Google Docs create with Zack Rous uh and we have one that lists all the studies we can find that are cor you know correlational studies the longitudinal studies the experimental studies sorry and this is like getting too geeky and all but the point is there's like we have about 20 25 exper true experiments that we found and uh the Maj and the large majority of them do show causal effects and the ones that don't show causal effects is very interesting if you look at the six or seven that fail to find an effect of like taking kids off phones they all use a very short time period so if your experiment is we're gonna make kids St or college students stay off of social media for a week you know or three days and then we're going to see how they're doing and guess what you take somebody who's heavily addicted you take away their drug and you check in on them a day later or a week later how are they doing not well but the studies that waited a month almost all find they're doing a lot better they're much happier so you know I don't know what else we can do here like we've got the correlational evidence we've got the experimental evidence the experimental evidence shows a clear pattern where if you refine it to the ones that match theoretically what's happening the effect gets bigger you've got the Quasi I mean you know people should go look at this Google doc I mean I don't know what else we can do to convince people that it's not just correlational there's a lot of causal evidence what ways could you be wrong about this evidence um so on the experimental evidence the published experiments uh my critics say that if you look at each of these studies they're mostly pretty weak um some of them have small sample sizes just one or 200 um some of them there's some other flaw and so you can you know you can find you can definitely find flaws in most of the experiments um so it's possible that they're right and that only experiments that find in effect get published um that is conceivable but um there are so many different lines of evidence here and so I I would ask uh listeners to think about we have a situation in which the parents see the problem the parents whose kids are dead think that it wasn't it was only because of social media the you know that the kid committed suicide they can they can see the harassment taking place on online so you have the parents saying this is this is causal I don't know many parents who say oh no it's wonderful for my kid to be on social media the teachers see it the principal see it the psychologists see it um the kids themselves see it uh you you had Freya India on she is one of the best writers on what is happening to girls uh and Freya published a great essay on on my substack I think she referred to it on on your show uh on the the algorithmic conveyor belt of just you know once you express an interest in something the algorithm is going to pull you all the way to eating disorders or self harm or whatever it is um so given that I can't find I literally cannot find anything written by someone in gen Z that says no we love our phones our phones are great we're our phones make our world better you know smart social media is so good for like I can't even find anyone saying that but we have lots of people like Freya we're saying this is destroying us so when you look at the experimental evidence that uses very limited manipulations one very particular operationalization of the question finds a effect size you got to ask yourself which is more plausible that everyone is wrong and all the experiments are wrong or maybe it's the case that something is really happening here what is the proposed mechanism by people that say smartphones don't have this big of an impact on mental health because the mechanism is what's being debated the change in mental health is pretty undeniable we have very very high rates of whatever it's like the the most cataclysmic language about girls between age 12 and 16 it's like persistent feelings of hopelessness or listlessness or something like just this like awful apocalyptic language what are the people who disagree with you saying is the mechanism that's causing this to happen right they don't they don't that's the amazing thing so you have you know you look at the graphs and they go up in very much the same way same time in the US the UK Canada Australia New Zealand uh Scandinavia we've got graphs of all this I hope you're listeners will go to after babble.com that's my substack it's free we've got all the graphs from all these countries we've got the world's repository of data internationally it all starts in the early 2010s and so my critics say well the amount of variant explained is very small so you know the so you using social media can only explain a small amount of variance therefore it can't explain the explosion and we're done here and then I said well what do you think does explain it no one no one even offered there's no alternate Theory the global financial crisis is at least Global but that was 2008 so why is it that nothing happens to Teen Mental Health until 2012 2013 by which time unemployment is dropping stock market's Rising everything's getting better you know it so the global financial crisis doesn't work there is no other explanation that I can find not even one that's been proposed other than the loss of the play based childhood to be replaced by the phone based childhood and that really happened between 2010 and 2015 is when the phone based childhood came in that explains the globalness of it it explains the suddenness of it it explains the gender difference it explains everything that I found and you know my critics say well we're not convinced but we have we're not even going to offer an alternative explanation so boring super lame all right what are the primary harms of Technology on kids uh so once you see that kids have to grow up in a physical world we evolved Outdoors nature and animals people um when kids grow up on screens so it's not just about social media when you grow up with what what I'm calling a phone based childhood where you're spending the latest data I think is nine hours a day average for American Kids uh 11 hours Freya just said there's a British study it was like 10 or 11 hours a day for British kids on their phones which includes other it includes tablets I think and and video games I think in any case it doesn't include homework or school work just recreational time 9 to 11: hours a day that pushes out everything else and so what I say in the book is that there are four foundational harms once you see that it's it's taking up 10 hours a day pushing everything else out what matters the most important thing is time with other kids time with friends that's crucial I all of your in person that's right in person uh and we'll talk about whether virtual is is good it is not but time actually with other kids other with with your friends and that has plummeted um since 20 12 it was dropping before in the earlier internet age but boy it really speeds up in the in the smartphone social media age um and so kids the the most nutritious thing your kid can do is be out playing with other kids and this is even true for teenagers hanging out with no adults telling them what to do um so that's crucial that's really nutritious as it were now if kids you might say well but you know they spending of this 10 11 hours a lot of that is spent virtually interacting you know like on video games well let's look at multi player video games now those are at least synchronous synchronous is good you're talking so that's actually a good thing the girls on social media it's asynchronous I comment I wait anxiously for you to comment on my comment and so we're not really connecting we're actually performing and we're anxious um video games are at least synchronous but you actually you tell me I've I was never a gamer it seems to me that I'm you look at me and just guy that wasted a lot of hours playing video games am I wrong I wasted a lot of hours playing video games your okay there you go stereotypes sometimes have a basis in reality um so oh look basically you know you're a healthy male that means you almost certainly were playing video games I mean that's just the way it's been since the 90s um so but you tell me in video games do you ever get in fights like like you get mad at each other because someone broke a rule Co oh how does how does that happen because I assume that the game itself regulates all the interactions how fights in game right no no no I mean you just have disagreements you have disagreements you shout and you say that that was that was totally stupid like it's more oh yeah fine no but what I mean is like think about when you when you and your friends played a you know pickup soccer game or baseball game or whatever when your kids and someone says no you know it was out of bounds no it wasn't yes it was no it wasn't like you argue about it and what I'm trying to say is the arguments are really nutritious the arguments uh Jean P the great developmental psychologist really talked a lot about this when kids play marbles they get in all kinds of disputes and that's crucial they learn how to work it out so you tell me when you when you're playing video games in an average day you know four hours of video game playing do you get in those kind of fights about yes it was no it wasn't yes it was no it wasn't everything the game the game is the game mandates the rule set for you ex there there is no mediating needed that's right there you go so it's just like if I said we're going to replace all your kids food with rice white rice and then someone said yeah that that should be just as good I mean it's got just the same number of calories you know you might say yeah but it it's missing all the other nutrients and that's what we do when we put Boys on video games yeah it's social it's great fun it has some benefits it gives them some social calories they're talking but it's missing a lot of the nutrients that you get from face- tof face interaction okay face to- face interaction that gets squeezed that's one that's just one I'll go faster on the rest of them number two sleep deprivation um when kids have a screen in their room again these things are designed to be addictive and when you let your kids spend hours with a device designed to be addictive sometimes they get addicted and so the kids who have a who have dependency they're going to take their phone into bed with them under the covers you know Mom can't see that the light is still on because it's under the covers so social media in particular and browsing the internet takes away a lot of sleep and if you take away sleep from teenagers who are already not getting enough they're going to be crankier less healthy they're going to gain weight there's all kinds of things that happen physiologically and emotionally uh which exacerbate the mental illness epidemics that's two the loss of sleep uh the third is attention fragmentation one of the main things kids need to do in as teens your brain is reiring throughout childhood you know your brain is sort of pretty big by the time you're five or six and then a lot of is just the rewiring the myelination of circuits uh in your teen years the frontal cortex myelinates the the prefrontal cortex especially is the seed of executive control can you set a goal keep your eye on the goal do the things necessary to reach the goal even though there are distractions and as adults we've all learned to do that to some degree but crucial in that learning was those teen years when the frontal cortex is really laying down you know like how do you do this and instead what we do is it's like we put little distractors you know if a lot of the kids are getting interrupted every couple of minutes for their whole life they never even spend 10 minutes without an interruption this appears to interfere with their development of executive function so we're creating uh young people who when they come to the office they can't just pay attention to something they need more stimulation and then they don't pay full attention so attention fragmentation is devastating to their ability to be productive and creative and then the fourth foundational harm is addiction um you know I get in big arguments with this with some of the researchers who are who study video games who think video games are good um and they point out you know you know most boys are having a great time and there's no sign of TR problem well and that's true that's true most boys who play video games I can't say that they're damaged by it but five or 10% are um the ones who develop problematic gaming who are compul have compulsive use when they're not playing they become sirly their brain is deficient in dopamine they are addicted they have a a dependency um if you're going through your puberty years as a boy getting this incredible amount of fixed stimulation you know from you know fortnite or you know whatever game you're playing this is uh in addition to messing up your life you're not you're not spending time with friends you're not learning how to talk to girls whatever it is um this is likely to have some very lasting possibly permanent effect so those are the four foundational harms they affect boys and girls girls on social media not so much video games um and then there's all the specific harms that affect boys and girls we can get into those but if if all you knew was here's this consumer product it's going to take your kid away from his friends it's going to deprive him of sleep it's going to fragment his ability to focus um and it's going to addict him what do you say do you want this for your kid like who would ever say yes but we did is it right to call social media use an addiction I had this discussion with Andre hubman a couple of years ago and um I sort of yeah what did he say he said it looks to him more like a compulsion than an addiction it feels like compulsive behavior um he said you know if you if you saw an animal uh scratching scratching scratching in the corner looking for food scratching scratching scratching scratching scratch You' think that animal's sick and it it feels to me you know I you're on a plane how many times it's such a great example you're on a plane you have no signal you know you have no signal you pull your phone out you open it up you go through the the little cycle of apps or whatever it is that you do and you go yeah goes back down so to me that seems compulsive now obviously yeah addictive things can have a compulsion that's the reason I haven't got anything long and thin that I can use but that's the reason that smokers will get pens and you know chew down on pens it actually satiates I think I saw something that's saying that uh people who have smoking addiction can satiate a little bit of the uh desire for the next cigarette by actually putting a replacement cigarette in their mouth cuz so much of it is about the like physiological the movement of that habituated thing yeah um so I and I mean the semantics of what is an addiction where does that cross across into a compulsion can something which is addictive lead you to have this sort of obsessive compelled Behavior the way you kind of Pol it kind of doesn't really matter um but have you got have you got any insight on that sure no I I I do you know I know that among addiction researchers there's a debate about whether behavioral addictions are true addictions and if you look at what happens in the brain when a person is addicted to heroin or to cocaine you know there's that's incredibly well studied you know I don't know the details this is not my Arab expertise but that's incredibly well studied and then I think some of them are saying when you look at behavioral addictions it's it's a little different it's not quite the same fine I can totally accept that but to me the question is just let's just take gambling addiction you know mo most of us have been to a casino the great majority don't have any problem don't have any addiction but a small number I don't know what the percentage is I'm guessing it's probably you know 2 to 7% because that's what I keep finding for Behavioral addictions um for for some number they uh when they get into a Zone it's straight Behavior psychology stimulus response variable ratio reward schedules they get into a Zone and they lose track of time and they forget their troubles and of course their troubles are in part because they're blowing all their fam's money on slot machines but they can't stop so um uh I think would you say that a person who compulsively uses slot machines spends most of her family's money so the family is now bankrupt and yet she still keeps doing it would you call that a compulsion or an addiction both okay what you even if you call it that's fine with me if you want to call it just a comp that's fine my point is whatever that is for gambling addicts word yeah call it whatever you want whatever you want to call it that is what is happening to social media compulsive users you know whatever you want to call it it's the same thing and it's I mean in a sense it's literally the same thing because some of the features of our life on phones were directly copied from casinos the thing where you pull down to refresh and then it kind of bounces up and you see things like that was literally copied from slot machines shout out Tristan Harris yeah he was a yeah that's right yes oh Tristan is a hero in all of this telling everyone about this yeah for sure all right so you know there's been a lot of talk recently I've got Daniel Cox coming on the guy that did that really fantastic study about young boys breaking to the right and young girls breaking to the left I've got him coming but we're seeing a lot of sex differences in worldview in belief in mental health yeah what mental health is is declining but the ways that it's declining the sort of usages of technology so talk to me about the sex differences in technology how do boys and girls use technology differently sure yeah so the master variable here I believe is is a set of motivations uh that we've talked about psychology for 50 years um called um agency and communion so everybody has needs for agency to be an agent to make things happen you know a child knocks over block tower it's thrilling I did that I caused that to fall so that's agency and then communion is connection being part of a group being welcomed and embraced and and connecting um uh so everyone has both motives but on average boys have stronger agency motives and when you let boys and girls choose what to do the boys are going to gravitate more towards games that allow agency and so fake war is one of the best examples they want to practice their skills boys I think are evolutionary programmed for hunting and War to enjoy hunting and War I found this out when I was 29 years old and for the first time in my life played uh paintball with my buddies and hunting each other we were mixed in with other other people but hunting each other in small groups and shooting guns to try to hit each other was the most thrilling thing we'd ever done get you yeah yeah yeah so that was really cool like wow there like a room in my heart for being a hunter and a warrior like I didn't really know it was there but it was so anyway boys choose to pursue agency motives girls choose to pursue more communion motives they talk more with each other as Richard Reeves this you wonderful wonderful British man who has this uh who has been been making the case for boys have you have you had Richard on the show of course yeah he's great he's coming back on again soon yeah his new initiative that the center for boys and men American Institute for boys and men yeah thank you uh that sounds awesome I I'm fully Richard Reeves pilled I'm on board with all stuff me too we're all Richard Reeves pilled yes um so Richard points out uh uh girls like to do things face to face boys like to do things shoulder Tosh shoulder like we're next to each other but we're doing something in I've got I I need to bring this up so in in a robin dunbar's book friends which came out maybe 18 months ago he's got this phenomenal study so the next time that you're at a party look at the angle of the feet that women have when they talk to each other and look at the angle of the feet that men what what do you mean what do you what do you see women will talk uh perpendicular 180° they'll be pretty much straight on like this oh men talk at about 120 degrees oh that's fascinating so they blade and the reason being that this is a bit of sort of evolutionary bro psychology coming in but I think it's true if you if even try it you can try it the next time that you you're at a party just you know you'll be stood sort of like this with a guy just blading on and just turn yourself so that you're actually straight onto them and there's this just Rises up inside of you because really the only time that two guys would do that is if they were going to fight or they were going to kiss and if you don't intend on doing either of those things and you just feel you're like this feels right there's something about that angle it's like two magnet two North Poles of a magnet they kind oh good example di it away they don't want and yeah dude look at it 120° for men 180 degrees for women it's and it you can't not say once you see it you can't unse it it's so I will look for that and actually that this could suggest a really cool difference between real and virtual you know virtual interactions are not embodied like we can see you know we can see each other's upper bodies here but but I think what we would find because I don't at all feel freaked out by you you know your face on to me on my yeah but I don't at all feel like oh we've either got to kiss or fight like because we're virtual well wait until we finish yeah yeah you you are you are pretty handsome I must say um so so again something you know we are embodied creatures we're physical creatures we're animals we evolved Outdoors you we we we had fights we had hunts we're physical creatures and when we interact now virtually we have only it's you know it's like the white rice thing we have just like a little few of the nutrients but we're missing most of them um so anyway on to boys and girls sorry I'm taking too long on this but the the point is boy so when when uh you know laptops and then especially smartphones come out all the kids love them all the kids gravitate all the kids are on them the boys head straight for video games and YouTube um the boys are spending more time on video games and YouTube and porn um the girls go straight for the visual social media platforms especially Instagram uh Tumblr Pinterest in the early days uh and so what are the effects the girls are now on these platforms that are all about I post a picture of me and my life and then I wait for strangers to comment on it and that's really really bad for mental health and that I think is why the girls as soon as we hit 2012 2013 the girls have very sharp elbows in the graphs very hockey stick lines in the graphs um boys on the other hand um they're playing video games especially video games aren't making them depressed now the boys are getting more depressed and anxious they are roughly twice as depressed and anxious as they used to be but it's more gradual it starts a little sooner it starts more like 2009 2010 and it and it's more gradual so I think what's happening and what you know what Z rush and I concluded in our in the book and here we drew Richard weaves is you know for girls boom they get on social media they get depressed for boys they've been withdrawing from The Real World since the 70s and 80s you know it used to be a male World there used to be a patriarchy you know but boy would has it been dismantled and as everything shifts towards girls and as schools get more and more structured towards girls and girls needs and girls ways of learning and as we all freak out about gender gaps and we think that it's the girls we have to help in the 9s which wasn't true girls had already passed boys um boys are finding that they don't do well in school they don't like school but man these video games are just getting better and better and and you know it's it's hard to approach a girl but man the pornography is getting better and better um and now you've got AI girlfriends and soon AI girlfriends will be put into incredibly sexy robots so what we're seeing is the progressive withdrawal of boys from effort in the real world that will pay off in the long run and instead boys prodigious energy and their desires are being directed into a virtual world that generates nothing absolutely nothing of any value in the real world yeah the audience is going to know what I'm going to bring up but I'm going to do it again it's my I've only had two citations ever in Academia and this is one of them so um you'll be aware of young male syndrome uh no tell me what just that they're you know more violent and yes correct yeah High proliferation of young sexless men high tea high risk-taking they set on fire and push over Granny it's not good totally agree we have the highest rates of loneliness and sexlessness amongst young men at least in the modern world maybe ever uh apart from in maybe some like crazy gerontocracy style like tribal 10,000 years ago um where's all of the incel violence like this isn't a request but why we not seeing more mass shootings why are we not seeing rest that's a good point so it's my contention that men are being sedated out of their status seeking and reproductive seeking Behavior through a combination of social media video games and porn so they're not given a sufficient dose to make them happy or satisfied but it is enough to dampen down and Nerf that um that impulse so and this is what I've called the male hypothesis and this is being studied uh so why have we not got this uh yeah I'm legitimate illegitimate academic now um but this is and there's there's a question to be asked there but you know everything that you're talking about there that it's triggering it's playing off the back of this desire for them to um work together as a team to have intertribal Warfare to uh create Mastery to increase in status to be able to accomplish things okay but it's within the virtual world and you can become an eamer and so on and so forth but how how much can you cash out that status into the real world but then a more interesting question comes which you know the game is very well may do and say well if I'm enjoying it why do I need to cash it out into the real world what is real and what isn't why you why is there this sort of weird axiomatic value judgment about the fact that the real world is better than the virtual world it's all part of a world it's all just in dopamine serotonin ticking around in my brain who cares same thing goes for porn you know I I worried about getting me toed or I don't have to this thing or whatever whatever whatever like all of these things allow them to do that couple of white pills that me and a friend William Costello think with regards to the AI girlfriend virtual relationship thing uh first one being dating and flirting is something that is incredibly anxiety inducing for men the guy that created CBT made it so that he could overcome approach anxiety I don't know if that's oh really that's supposedly Aon Beck or was this the other guy the other dude um oh right what's his name I forget the name yeah David David B told me about him it was created to to help with approach anx maybe Aaron back was it too I everyone just has approach I don't think so yeah um but the uh the primary challenge that you have in dating is that there is no such thing as practice dating if me and you want to get better at pickle ball we can go to the local pickle ball court and you can just hit drives at me and I can practice my drop volley right I can't it is one of the few things where you practice in public you learn out uh so there's always this high pressure to to not fail and what that means is that men often have really really they never get Beyond they never go zero to one they never actually get that first step done so me and William think that a really phenomenal and this you don't even need to wait for the sex robot thing or the whatever the inperson robot you could do this with Apple's VR headset if it was sufficiently well trained on a good data set so you have a virtual interaction with a woman like a computer game and in this virtual interaction the Avatar is able to see your movements they can hear what you're saying they use natural language processing to work out the intonation and and you know they're able to go back and forth and they can you know you can program in like consent and you can program in like uh flirting and and and I want to know increase the difficulty the disagreeability of this girl I want her to make me work and you level up and level up and level up and if you can form that on actual human psychology you can have guys practice playing the video game in the safety of their own home and then go and deploy this in the real world it's like you know tonal one of these like at home gym things it's like or wi sports right like you know you're playing a video that's a better example you're playing Wii Sport at home you're playing tennis or whatever and then you go into the real one you're like hey I played a video game but I'm kind of fitter and this is the same I I played a video game but I'm kind of better at flirting yeah I think uh uh um I think having practice flirting in the virtual world is actually a great idea I think um you're right that it I remember you know when I was in seventh grade and the adults would organize a dance it was terrifying you know and occasionally I would ask a girl to dance and either she'd say yes or no but it was terrifying but again that's that like fear and thrill when she does occasionally say Yes um I I agree that in theory we could do that that the headsets that the virtual reality you really could give boys practice flirting with realistic girls and the difficulty could get harder and harder now how would this actually play out in the real world um I fear that it's not really going to be hey let's try to make you into the best possible romantic partner likely to find a really wonderful woman and they get happily married I fear that it's going to turn into either here's you know the game is to get the woman in bed and then move on to the next woman and here you know we'll learn teach you how to how to bed women um or it's going to be design the woman you want and you're going to you know let's make her even Lovelier let's give her an even better sense of humor How about if she never gets mad at me you know you program in all these things that are just going to take you in an unrealistic way so well you over and over again you you've got an evolutionary background I have to say I I want to bring you back and once this tour is done I want to bring you back on and if you can remember it to talk about the happiness hypothesis because it it was one of the three books that got me into the world of EP and and and and really sort of made me fall in love with it but with given that background again me and William have spoken about this an awful lot we talked about this AI girlfriend Revolution one of the problems that you have and one of the reasons that I don't think we need to fear the AI girlfriend thing quite as much is no guy brags about the fact that he has subscribed to some woman's only fans the reason that you don't brag about it is that there is no status associated with being selected there is no makes you look like a loser and but not only that that even if it didn't even if it was neutral in the like loser oh I see trick because you haven't been pre-selected by the the the gatekeeper is the price of a cheeseburger per month yeah therefore anyone has access to this and because of the access it's you know maybe if you have a $30,000 sex robot it's a flex of your wealth but it's also like dude you spent $330,000 on a sex robot how weird are you so and I just I I don't I don't know what's going to happen but I certainly know that that pre-election the status associated with a woman who is the gatekeeper choosing a man who is the protagonist yeah that accounts for so much of the bragging rights of the guy yes great so this brings in a key a key word we haven't mentioned is status and boys are boys and girls are each competing for status but uh boys competition is really much more it's about ultimately about like physical toughness dominance originally and S the Primeval State ultimately backed up by the ability to physically beat the out out of somebody um but in modern times that gets converted into other other ways of contesting and we've had a long slow evolution of our economy uh such that such that it we've harnessed male ambition for status and turned it in productive directions in fact I was going to write a book I got a contract to write a book called three stories about capitalism the moral psychology of economic life I was going to write a book on like the psychology of capitalism and then the universities melted down and I wrote the coddling and I got drawn off into all these other other things but one of the key insights um is there's a uh um is you know Adam Smith realized that when you get an economy set up the right way it's not from the benevolence of the Butcher and the Baker and the Brewer that we expect our dinner but from their regard for their own self-interest when people can get money for doing something that helps others well then men try very hard to make money but it's not just money when you can get status by doing something productive that's going to challenge like men are like rockets like they have this they have this incredible capacity for work but they're often Mis aimed and so I think it's quite remarkable that you know when you know Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to face off how do they do it who can build the more effective rocket launch system into outer space I mean that's a great way for men to compete so that's productive um and I think what you're saying what you're pointing out is part of dating I mean part of is very intrinsically motivated you want a girlfriend you want sex you want love but you also yeah you want a hot girlfriend you want someone that other guys will respect you for because yeah I got this woman so any discussion of boys yes we must consider status especially what are other men going to think of me and also what are other women going to think of me based on who I date um women are extremely concerned with what other women will think of them as as well separate status competitions but yeah that's a key and video games give them an alternate World in which they can gain status within that alternate world but I keep coming back to the metaphor of the black hole you know black hole is a place where anything gets sucked in but nothing comes out and so okay here here's another controversial idea I'll air it with you maybe you can you can disprove it um here I'll just put this as a contention I don't know if this is true my contention is that nobody or is that hardly anyone in gen Z has re has done anything yet that has really made an impact on the world let me just qualify there are always going to be athletes always there always going to be singers coming along that's not the issue the issue is did you start a company did you make some Discovery did you write an amazing book did you do something that the world notices and says like oh wow you know that's impressive and when I ask this of audiences they only come up with two names so I'll ask you who are the members of jenz who've really you know dented the UN they've really done something when does jenz start and finish jenz is now 28 years old so everybody who's 28 years old or younger starts in 1996 I'm one year old I was going to say buan slat the guy that founded and was the CEO of the ocean cleanup you know that huge uh thing that cleans plastic out of the ocean but that would count yeah he's 29 he's 29 so we missed him he's the Millennials are creative and productive and mentally healthy but j z so wait try again I'm sure you're gonna come up with the one name that everyone comes up with what's one person under 29 who really has changed the world Greta tbug that's it that's when everyone comes up with and then there's a second that people sometimes come up with Mala who Mala uh the woman pakist from Pakistan she was shot by you know fundamentalists but she survived and she's a you know right activist I was never gonna get that okay anyway so Greta Greta is the one that everyone comes up with um but that's it so there are no Americans um they no men um and I started thinking this two or three years ago and I keep waiting someone's going to find me a person who's really done something big now a lot of them want to start their own business as an influencer they want to create an app so it's I'm not saying they're not lazy what I'm trying to say here is as far as I can tell they have been raised in an economy where what you're desperately trying to do is get more followers get more influence and it's all Quantified and as long as you're working hard at that you're not generating anything that will leave the black hole of social media nothing that will affect the world out side of your closed world of I'm sure that you're aware of it but the percentage of primary school kids that say that they want to grow up to be a YouTuber or an influencer so you know you have they're being fed in on the front end with this presupposition and then they're being spat out on the back end too with this lack of impact in the real world yeah well I mean you know maybe this is one of the white pills of uh Automation and Ai and Le what's a white pill I haven't heard that term thatan so a a black pill is uh something that's IC and it's an Insight that makes you feel kind of apocalyptic and and and fatalistic and a white pill would be a reason for hope it's a justification for Hope oh nice okay I've got to start developing a few of this because my talks can get kind of dark so all right white pills go ahead yeah just talking about a white pill so a white pill from you and it's particularly useful to use in contrast to something that people see as something that's bad AI is going to come it's going to take all our jobs and everyone's going to be it's going to be the Matrix but one of the advantages is that if we're in this current lull of real world invent invention from gen Z maybe um the increase in leverage that we have through code means that a smaller number of people can have a larger amount of impact so the few that break through from gen Z and do do great things can maximize and magnify their impact on the world in a way that might be able to compensate for the rest of their generation's lack okay that that's a good point I agree that that's possible um but this just sort of slots right into one of my main concerns about what's happening which is that digital technology and now artificial intelligence is likely to usher in an era of material Prosperity if we all have an infinite number of servants to help us make whatever we want yes there's going to be a rise of productivity and all these people who point to the coming Golden Age they're looking at Material Prosperity they're looking at physical health discoveries will will cure cancer yeah materially things are going to get better as they have been continuously um you know Matt Ridley pointed this out Steve Pinker pointed this out but I'm a social psychologist and I play sociologist in my spare time because I think what we're heading into is a sociological apocalypse that is all the things it takes to make a stable Society they're not visible uh I learned this from Mill durkheim and from Reading conservative writings um institutions structures Traditions all the things that make our Society possible but many people don't see and these are being rotted out and this precedes this precedes the internet I mean there you know there's always you know there's the thing uh Hard Times create strong men strong men create good times good times create weak men weak men create hard times so you know there's been kind of a decline since the World War II was a huge stimulus for all kinds of amazing After Effects um and there's a decline since then so it's not all caused by by the recent Technologies but I think it's been accelerated by it and so what you're pointing to is yes more material prosperity and yeah that's true but if we have collapsing institutions no trust in anything um and we're willing to consign a generation to just wasting their time struggling for status on you know on Tik Tok because as long as 12 of them are creative and create gigantic new things will be just this as good off as we were you know 10 years ago yeah so yeah okay maybe that's a great pill that's a grill pill perh yeah oh good you know what great pill that because it's both it's black and white I like it okay a zebra pill a zebra pill perh it's striped it's striped Okay so we've spoken about boys and what's happening with them you know there's so much conversation around young teen girl mental health give me the latest data what are you seeing what's happening with with the young girls sure so I mean Freya covered covered this beautifully and and she writes about this beautifully on her substack girls um but sort of you know the big picture here is let's start with the mental health but there's a lot more going on uh with the mental health it's very specific for girls it's what's what are called internalizing disorders it's especially depression and anxiety um you know other things are up but like you know schizophrenia bipolar disorder they're all up a little bit but it's really depression anxiety um uh girls have what are suffer more from what are called internalizing disorders so if there's stresses and problems they kind of turn it inwards and they suffer anxiety depression boys historically um suffer more from what are called externalizing disorders when there are problems with their development they act out they make other people miserable crime you know deviant violence um so so that's historically the way girls and boys were but what's happened is actually both girls and boys have moved more in the direction of internalizing disorders but girls especially so the numbers are hard to believe but they're up around 30 or 40% of girls uh teenage girls with qualifies having depression or anxiety disorders um it used to be more like 10 or 15% so uh it's now a normal thing to be an American or British teenage girl it's just a normal thing that you think about suicide and you have your anxiety and you manage your anxiety it's part of your identity it's part of uh it's it's it's with you all the time so it's tragic it's it's so sad you know um it used to be the case that middle-aged people least happy it's a well-known thing called the youth shaped curve of Happiness the happiest people used to be young adults you know teenagers and young adults and then people in their 60s and 70s they're done with the hard work they get to enjoy their lives but there's always people in the middle you know taking care of kids and parents that's not true anymore in Western countries the young people have plunged and especially the girls so we have a graph in the book Canadian data uh Canadian young Canadian women used to be the happiest now they're by far the least happy uh group of people in Canada so uh for girls the mental health the anxiety depression that's like the central finding but there's a lot more um oh you question about that go on go on go on okay um so you know so much of the debate is just about the mental health data but there's so much else that's warping girls development and making them less happy um the the hypers sexualization the pornification of everything the fact that you've got these young girls on Instagram aping these Millennial women with gigantic boobs and butts and fillers and all kinds of things this just this is just really really bad for them so even if they don't get depressed and anxious when they do but even if they didn't the fact that they oh my God the number of girls now Middle School girls who are using skincare products and who are concerned about their skin um and you know and doing makeup tutorials you know like no your skin is perfect go have fun you know yes you you you'll care about how you look girls have always cared about how they look that's part of life it's part of for boys to but to take to take these you know Wonderful sprightly funny you know fifth sixth grade girls and then suddenly to have them Focus so much on on their face and their beauty because they're on social media is a tragic loss of girlhood there's that there's the exposure to older men uh creepy men who want to watch them dance who want to talk with them there's the the whole economy of nudes from the boys in their class if the boys will send them a dick pick and then say come on send me one of yours come on come on you know don't be approved don't beud um and if a and then if a girl does send anything now the boys really got something valuable and we cite uh you know there's a a book American Girls you know she the author documents how Middle School boys will get a a nude photo of a girl and then they can give it they can trade it to high school boys for beer and so the girl's nakedness the girl's humiliation is valuable to the boy because he can get alcohol and Prestige by giving it to an older boy who can buy him beer or get him beer somehow or other so you know the commodification the hypersexualization the humiliation of girls once they enter the world to social media you know it's just I mean it's just on so many fronts the phone-based childhood is not a human childhood and kids are stuck in it you have an evolutionary background you titled the book The anxious generation of all of the Litany of different human emotions that we have anxiety is the one that's very prevalent which hearing about anxiety disorders and things that are Downstream from it there's even a disorder now where people can't distinguish between anxiety and depression uh and and it it means that then what the f I literally learned it yesterday from David Brooks God damn it anyway it's it they they struggle to work out the difference between anxiety and depression so it's bleeding into Wow first off from an evolutionary perspective I think it's a bit of a cope by people with my intellectual interest background of EP to say well well you know we're built to be vigilant you know we've got the smoke detector principal blah blah blah I'm like yeah but it's really tuned up now it's not just tuned up it's like super charged and okay my my my question being why anxiety what is it about the soup the cocktail of stimulus that we have at the moment that's causing anxiety to be the prod outcome yeah so I think it's two M there many contributing factors but two big ones one is the loss of thrilling play in childhood which we talked about if kids don't get to take risks they don't learn to manage risks and then any little thing seems threatening this is why students were suddenly asking for trigger warnings in part because the idea that a book that describes a Greek myth in which Zeus rapes a woman can we expect young women to just have to read this like so one is just exposure if kids don't have exposure when they're young and they don't have Thrills and they don't have risk then any little thing is going to be much harder for them when they're older that's one piece the other is growing up on the stage um you know when you're growing up you make a lot of mistakes you say something stupid to your friend and then your friend might criticize you your friend might even get angry at you and then you make up but when that happens on the stage you say something and before you know it everyone is talking about it and they adding on their own comments and you're the butt of the joke and as anyone ever knows who's been through any kind of a cancellation attempt or any kind of public online thing it's painful in a way beyond anything that we know in in terms of physical suffering U it it really makes people want to disappear and it is a Spur to Suicide so when the entire school is laughing at you you know or the you know the photo you sent of your of your genitals or the thing you said somebody caught and then added a you know so kids should not grow up on a stage the British I'm told have a saying don't put your daughter on the stage Mrs Worthington is this something you've ever heard no okay older British people I believe it's a no coward song from like a hundred years ago but uh don't put your daughter on the stage Mrs Worthington um is good advice especially for girls and girls are much more anxious than boys so if a girl grows up everything she says can be Amplified every image of her is commented on she never develops just the basic security to move from minute to minute and hour to hour in person to person like because anything could blow up at any time people are always judging you so we have to give kids a normal human childhood if we expect them to develop normal human strengths what can we do ah good because I was just noticing we are our time is running out let's turn to the solutions and here's my white pill um if we were talking about democracy and American democracy I'd be all black pill like I think we're you know know how we get out of this in American democracy but when we're talking about the Teen Mental Health crisis we can get out of it in a year or two uh and they've already started in Britain uh and here's what you do um because it's all a series of collective action problems the reason why fifth graders now are getting smartphones is because all the other fifth graders are getting them the reason why my students can't quit Instagram and Tik Tok even though they know it's wasting their time and making them anxious is because everyone else is on it so they have to be on it so it's a these are all Collective action problems and the way you deal with a collective action problem is with Collective action so if we just have four clear nors four Norms we can solve this first Norm no smartphone till high school if you want to High School uh uh in America it's around age 14 so in Britain the movement is 14 because I think you don't have quite the exact cut off we have a very clear almost all schools it's like you know 8th grade is still middle school early puberty but then 9th 10th 11th 12th is is high school roughly age 15 to 18 um or you know 14 15 to 18 so if if we just delay smartphones till High School give them a flip phone let them communicate with each other and with you as the parents but to give them the internet in their pockets so that when they're on the bus they're not talking with other kids they're flipping through stuff at lunch they're flipping through stuff um so no smartphone till high school at the earliest two no social media till 16 this one is going to be a little harder to get a norm but you know if most of us parents would say like no you're not getting until 16 they can't say but I'm the only one I'm excluded they have to say you know half the kids have it but half don't then you say well you know you're going to be in the half that don't and before you know it it'll be a lot more than half that don't uh the third Norm phone free schools this is a must and this one we can do this year this year like this September um the teachers hate the phones the principals hate the phones I ask them why don't you ban them why don't you have the kids lock them up and they say because some of the parents will freak out they demand to be able to contact their kid anytime during class text them anything but most parents are now beginning to see this is messing up our kids so I'm urging if if you're listening to this if you have kids in school and the school allows kids to have phones on them please contact the principal of your kids school and say please go phone free it's it's messing up their education it's making them lonely there's no good that comes from kids having phones in schools same thing with access to anything that can text that's the third Norm the fourth Norm is more Independence replay and responsibility in the real world because you can't just take away the phones and the screens or you know reduce it you can't just like reduce it 80% let's say and then say now sit in your room and look at the wall or you know learn how to knit or something what kids really want I once read a long ago I read a book on like the secret life of dogs like what do dogs really want the answer is each other like they they're pack animals they really want to be with other dogs and the same true for kids um what do they really want to hang out with other kids and so doing that on a video game isn't nearly as satisfying but try to arrange it so that your kids can really spend a lot of time with other kids unsupervised no adult telling them what to do no adult resolving the conflicts um so if we do those four things no smartphone till High School no social media till 16 phone free schools more Independence responsibility and free play in the real world do those four things we will roll back the phone based childhood this childhood only really came in around 2012 we've only had it about 12 years it wasn't like this in 2008 2009 um so it's not permanent you know we can change it and we have to change it uh because it is devastating our kids there's no other explanation for the multinational Mental Health crisis and with four Norms of collective action we can act collectively to reverse it how's that for a white pill I like it I and I also love the fact that you've inculate this new lexicon is just is swimming through you it owns you now and it's staring Through Your Eyes um that's what happens when you write a book I'm going to guess that there'll be a lot of parents listening who have got kids that maybe going to be getting to that age that probably kids get phones now maybe like eight nine something like that maybe even earlier I suppose um yeah they get through an iPad yeah you can't do we we don't have a God's eye view and we can't coordinate perfectly would a small scale solution be something like try and speak to your your child's friends parents and say yep let's go cartel let's have this I've I listened to this phenomenal episode with this great psychologist and this very handsome British dude and they said that we really need to do this why don't we hey do you have a watch or read the book anxious generation can can we get together we can't do this nationally but can we do this locally presumably that's a good first step absolutely that's right that's exactly the thing to do um and there are a number of organizations almost all started by moms um who are helping so if in the UK um I've only recently learned about delay smartphones. org.uk and smartphone free childhood. co.uk so those are two organizations that are trying to help parents do exactly that now of course if you simply know the you're in touch with the parents of your kids best friends which usually you are you can just text them you can just call them you can just talk to them at school pickup or whatever so yes coordinating on a small small scale will really really make it easy for you and your those other families to give your kids back a play-based childhood the goal isn't just to delay the phones the goal is to give them a play-based childhood if the school can help and say we're going phone free and if the principal could say and parents given the latest research you know I urge you to consider delaying you know try to at least wait till high school if the school could give some guidance that really helps set the norm so this is why I'm so optimistic because the Revolution began in the UK last month literally I there was an article in the guardian you know the these these two women the the women who run smartphone free childhood um they you know had a WhatsApp group there was a little publicity you know huge numbers of parent like everyone the parents hate this stuff the parents are ready to act and in Britain they are rising up and taking matters into their own hands and my hope is that is that we're ready to pop in the United States that in in March and April of 2024 everyone will really understand like you know we know something's wrong here let's try to really put our finger on it and then what do we do what we do is enact these four Norms hell yeah Jonathan height ladies and gentlemen Jonathan I love your work I've been a fan of it for a very long time it's great to finally have you on the show you're officially a modern wisdom alumni now uh where should people go they want to keep up to date with all your writing and you did a really like interesting writing process for this where it was sort of very transparent in in a way that that is pretty typical yeah I started a substack um I thought I would never do that because I don't have time to write but I started a substack at after babble.com and Zack Rous and I we put out all our findings all our research all our graphs invited comment invited criticism um and now we're bringing in voices like Freya India and and Ricky schlot um we're bringing you know Jen Z so just please go to after babble.com sign up subscribe to the substack uh the website for the book is anxious generation.com and of course I hope you'll buy the book itself uh anxious Generation Um you know sold wherever books are sold hell yeah Jonathan I really appreciate you thank you for today Chris what fun thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode there is something else you will absolutely love right here go on give it a tap