Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the anxiety generation)

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard: Jonathan Haidt Returns on the Anxiety Generation

Introduction and Context

In the March 12, 2025 episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, host Dax Shepard and co-host Monica Padman welcome back social psychologist and bestselling author Jonathan Haidt. This episode centers on Haidt's latest work, The Anxious Generation, delving into the surge of anxiety and depression among Gen Z. The conversation navigates through the intricate relationship between technology, parenting styles, and societal changes influencing today's youth.

Jonathan Haidt’s Background and Previous Appearances

Dax Shepard begins by reminiscing about Haidt's earlier appearance on the show, highlighting the intellectual stimulation Haidt provided. Monica Padman adds that Haidt was first introduced to the podcasting world through Sam Harris's platform, emphasizing Haidt's influence in academic and public discourse. Haidt, a professor at NYU and author of seminal works like The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind, brings over a decade of sobriety, an anthropology degree, and improv training to his exploration of human behavior.

"[...] when we first had him, I was scared the first time. This time was much more ch."
— Dax Shepard [00:30]

The Anxious Generation: Causes and Evidence

Jonathan Haidt outlines the core issue addressed in his book: the sharp increase in mental health issues among young people since around 2012. Utilizing long-running, nationally representative studies like the Monitoring the Future study, Haidt presents data showing a significant rise in teenagers feeling that their lives are useless—a metric that doubled from approximately 9% to 20% within five to seven years.

"Graph after graph, you find a hockey stick. Especially for girls. I should make it clear, for girls, it's like there's no sign of a problem."
— Jonathan Haidt [06:17]

Role of Social Media and Technology

A pivotal point in the discussion is the impact of social media and smartphones. Haidt argues that the advent of smartphones and platforms like Instagram around 2010 fundamentally altered how Gen Z interacts with the world, leading to what he terms the "Great rewiring of childhood." Unlike previous technological shifts, this change was rapid and global, fostering addictive behaviors and fragmented attention spans.

"Once you have correlational studies and you have experimental studies and you have eyewitness testimony, because Gen Z generally says this is harming them, it's very hard to find members of Gen Z who are saying no."
— Jonathan Haidt [37:40]

Four Foundational Harms

Haidt identifies four primary harms contributing to the anxiety epidemic:

1. Social Deprivation: Reduction in face-to-face interactions as digital communication replaces real-world socialization.

   "Kids are incredibly sociable. Social. We socialize each other."
   — Jonathan Haidt [44:11]

2. Attention Fragmentation: Constant interruptions from digital devices impair the ability to focus and engage deeply with tasks.

   "The key is that they are solving Fragmenting time..."
   — Jonathan Haidt [... All precise quotes are integrated within the sections above.]

3. Sleep Deprivation: Excessive screen time, especially before bed, disrupts sleep patterns and impairs cognitive functions.

   "They had the constant interruptions and fragmenting."
   — Jonathan Haidt [53:16]

4. Addiction: The dopamine-driven feedback loops of social media and gaming lead to compulsive behaviors, undermining self-regulation.

   "The key neural process here is, of course, dopamine. Dopamine is sometimes said to be a neurotransmitter of reward, but it's not reward."
   — Jonathan Haidt [48:11]

Proposed Solutions

To combat these harms, Haidt proposes four societal norms:

1. No Smartphones Before High School: Delaying access to smartphones to allow children to develop without addictive digital distractions.

   "No smartphone before high school. Just give them a flip phone, a basic phone..."
   — Jonathan Haidt [73:08]

2. No Social Media Before 16: Restricting social media usage to prevent early exposure to harmful online environments.

   "No social media before 16. Social media is wildly inappropriate..."
   — Jonathan Haidt [74:21]

3. Phone-Free Schools: Eliminating smartphones in educational settings to foster direct interaction and focused learning.

   "Phone free schools. That's gotta happen."
   — Jonathan Haidt [74:32]

4. Greater Independence and Real-World Freedom: Encouraging autonomy by allowing children to navigate real-world challenges, thereby building resilience.

   "Far more independence, responsibility and freedom in the real world."
   — Jonathan Haidt [74:33]

Generational Differences and Current Trends

The conversation explores how generational shifts, particularly the transition from Millennials to Gen Z, have influenced mental health outcomes. Haidt attributes Gen Z's heightened anxiety to the combination of overprotective parenting and pervasive digital engagement, contrasting it with previous generations who experienced gradual societal changes.

"If you believe, as most religions do, that we are children of God, we are created by God..."
— Jonathan Haidt [10:52]

Addressing Criticisms and Counterarguments

Monica Padman raises concerns about the potential overemphasis on social media as the sole cause of the mental health crisis, suggesting that destigmatization of mental health issues and increased awareness might also contribute to higher reported rates of anxiety and depression. Haidt counters by presenting stronger correlational and experimental evidence supporting the detrimental effects of digital technology.

"They simply spend more hours on it. And the stuff they're consuming is a lot of victimhood stuff..."
— Jonathan Haidt [69:30]

Personal Anecdotes and Final Thoughts

Throughout the episode, Dax Shepard shares personal experiences related to parenting and technology, illustrating practical applications of Haidt's theories. The discussion culminates in a reflection on the urgency of addressing these issues before the advent of more intrusive technologies like artificial intelligence further complicates the landscape.

"We super connected ourselves. You always thought connection was good... This, I think, might be the first one where it's enormously negative."
— Jonathan Haidt [58:25]

Haidt expresses optimism that ongoing awareness among parents worldwide will drive collective action to mitigate the negative impacts of technology on youth. Shepard echoes this sentiment, emphasizing a balanced approach that recognizes both the advancements and the challenges posed by modern technology.

"What I'm offering is an explanation of the concerns that are almost universally shared by parents once they see their kids on devices."
— Jonathan Haidt [86:06]

Conclusion

This insightful episode of Armchair Expert underscores the complex interplay between technology, societal norms, and mental health in shaping the experiences of Gen Z. Jonathan Haidt's expertise provides a compelling analysis of the causes behind the anxiety epidemic, while also offering actionable solutions aimed at fostering healthier, more resilient future generations.

"Kids are antifragile. And if you treat them like they're fragile, you don't want to take any risks, then you're blocking their development."
— Jonathan Haidt [75:28]

For those seeking to understand the challenges faced by today's youth and explore strategies to support their well-being, this episode offers a comprehensive and thought-provoking exploration of the issues at hand.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Mrs. Mouse.

[Monica Padman]

Hi.

[Dax Shepard]

Today we have Jonathan Haidt returning. I don't know if you guys would remember. I wanna say that's like first year.

[Monica Padman]

It was early.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it was early.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

And this one was really fun. I don't know about you. Were you nervous the first time we had him?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, well. Cause we had first heard him on Sam Harris's podcast.

[Dax Shepard]

He was our introduction to podcasts. Jedediah Jenkins recommended I listen to the Jonathan Haidt. Wow, Sam Harris episode. And I was so stimulated intellectually. I'm like, oh my God, these two people know so much more about the world than I do.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it was like intimidating really.

[Dax Shepard]

So when we talked to him, I was scared the first time. This time was much more ch. Jonathan Haidt. I'm sure you've seen he's been on an incredible press tour for his current book, the Anxious Generation. But you would have probably become aware of him with the coddling of the American mind, or the righteous mind, or the happiness hypothesis. He is a New York NYU professor, social psychologist and bestselling author. And this is a barn burner.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's fun.

[Dax Shepard]

I love this one.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And the Anxious Generation is on like everybody's book list. It's a very hot topic. So it's cool that he got to come in and tell us about it.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

Oh that's so cute.

[Dax Shepard]

It is.

[Monica Padman]

If I get my dog I'm definitely going to talk to him with the Pan tilt indoor cam. I love Iver Ring video doorbell and I really like it and it makes me feel very safe.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they're fantastic and they're so simple to install. With Ring you can check on home from anywhere. Learn [e-mail] he's an Upchurch.

[Jonathan Haidt]

He'S an exper.

[Dax Shepard]

Been many many years since we first had you on.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It was 2018 after my previous book the Calling of the American Mind.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

New days for us then.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Seven years ago. Hopefully we've gotten 4% better.

[Jonathan Haidt]

You can score us afterwards per year compounded. That's okay.

[Dax Shepard]

If you have forgotten, I'll give you the same compliments that we probably did the first time, which is I think we were exposed to you first on Sam Harris 11 years ago, maybe 10 years ago.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

In fact that's the introductory episode I used to send people when I used to encourage people to listen to that show. It was such.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we loved it.

[Dax Shepard]

An invigorating debate.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, it was one of my best conversations ever because we're sort of similar to each other in a lot of ways. But then we had this like fight and then we buried the hatchet.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. If you are ever going to model great discourse, it's really encouraging to hear two smart people argue, not have the same opinion, represent themselves. Well. Yeah. I was just kind of enamored with your intellect and your ability to communicate what you think. It's pretty unique. And then over the years I doubt this would get to you. But Monica and I bring up your moral thought experiments.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

So much. They're so tasty.

[Monica Padman]

What are they called?

[Jonathan Haidt]

They're called moral dumbfounding.

[Monica Padman]

Dumbfounding stories.

[Jonathan Haidt]

They're fun. They're good party tricks.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Do you have a favorite? Because we have a favorite.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So there's the brother sister incest story.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we love this.

[Dax Shepard]

Solid.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah. And then there's the eating your pet dog story. Those are really the two that are.

[Dax Shepard]

Tell us that one.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh, okay. So the background here is that I was studying moral psychology as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, and the big debate was, is moral judgment driven by gut feelings, which the philosopher David Hume had said long ago and which I was leaning towards, or is it driven more by reasoning about the facts of the matter, especially about harm? As Lawrence Kohlberg was the dominant researcher at the time, and since I'd been studying how morality varies across cultures, it just seemed like morality is about the body. And I ended up doing some research in India and reading a lot about Hinduism. I'd always been interested in Hinduism. I'd always been interested in travel. And it just seemed like American or Western morality was just much more cerebral and divorced from the body. I wanted to make up a bunch of stories that would hit you in the gut immediately, and then you'd reach for evidence of harm, and it's not there. What do you do?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And so the first story I made up, a family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious. So they cut up the dog's body and they cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this. What do you think? Was it okay for them to eat their dog? Let me just first ask you, what's your first reaction to that?

[Monica Padman]

I mean, yes, of course. No, that's horrific. You're void of any more humanity. Humanity feelings. You must be a sociopath. But then.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yes, keep going. Then what?

[Monica Padman]

But then continue, I guess. Although just cause it tastes good.

[Dax Shepard]

I love that detail. The genius of these things is these really tiny details. And I'm upset you didn't go into film and television. I feel like you might have an M. Night Shyamalan kind of bent to you.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Maybe a show like the Good Place, I could have advised on that.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe you could advise me, hook you.

[Monica Padman]

Up with that guy. Because if you had said they heard it was good for them, that would actually make it much more palatable.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Wait, wait. Are you saying that if it was healthy, right? As opposed to enjoyable.

[Dax Shepard]

A superfood.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Superfood. Why would that.

[Monica Padman]

Because to me that's different. In like, oh, they might need one's.

[Dax Shepard]

Pleasure seeking one's sustenance.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I see, I see.

[Monica Padman]

So it's actually perfect that they just want to try the taste.

[Dax Shepard]

Can I just add, I don't care.

[Jonathan Haidt]

You don't care if they eat their dog?

[Dax Shepard]

Not at all. It's dead. Have they murdered the dog to eat it? Now we're in a different zone. They've created suffering, potentially. Whatever, it's already dead. It's going to be wasted.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I'll tell you what. People around the world say, okay, almost everybody says it's wrong to eat your dog because it's like family, you have a relationship. The only exception is highly educated Westerners who do have a more harm based morality and who do say, well, you know, it was their dog, they have a right to do it. Causing suffering, that would be terrible. But the dog's already dead. One person said in my study, well, I guess in a way it's recycled. And so that's good.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Sustainable dog farming. So the point is, around the world, most people think that if you're revolted by something, that disgust contains some knowledge, some wisdom about borders where you shouldn't cross. Except for educated Westerners, especially those on the left, they have a much narrower morality based primarily around harm and especially protection of the vulnerable. So, okay, now I'll give you the more advanced one. There's a guy who's a vegetarian. For moral reasons, he thinks it's wrong to kill animals. He works at a hospital in a pathology lab where they prepare cadavers for dissection. One day there's a fresh corpse which recently died. Good condition, but they have no need for it. So he's supposed to put it in the incinerator. He decides that he'd like to try meat. So he cuts off a section of the thigh and disposes of the rest of the body and brings that section home and cooks it and eats it. Nobody sees him do this. What do you think, Monica? What do you think about that one?

[Dax Shepard]

Do you know what's crazy? This is not hypothetical.

[Monica Padman]

What?

[Dax Shepard]

There was a cannibal in France. We used to have a conspiracy theory show. And our fellow host interviewed this cannibal and he made the Cannibals Cookbook. And it was the exact thing. He worked in a pathology lab.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh my God.

[Dax Shepard]

And he actually took home and cooked it. Wow. So it's not even hypothetical.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Wow. The world is too.

[Dax Shepard]

He went to jail, but he didn't do a ton of jail time for it. And he was able to get out and write this cookbook.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I guess if you go to jail and you're completely broke and you have this amazing story, it's a pretty clever way to monetize it.

[Dax Shepard]

France voted, so we know where they landed.

[Monica Padman]

I think it's less amoral to do that than eat the dog. Because of the relationship.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh. Cause he didn't have the relationship with the stranger. Yeah. So I'm gonna guess that you're on the left politically.

[Monica Padman]

I am, yeah. Okay, good guess.

[Jonathan Haidt]

There's a line from the philosopher Leon Cass, a really brilliant writer on matters of ethics, but he has a line. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. I spent a year at Princeton in 2007-8. It was a really wonderful year. And Cass came and he gave a set of lectures. He considers himself a sort of liberal from the old days, and he feels that things have moved so that he's now on the right, but he is more on sort of the right philosophically. And Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher, who is more on the left, he's a brilliant utilitarian philosopher. I love both men. One of the greatest days of my academic life was Cass was giving three talks on three days, and there was a lunch at the faculty Club, and I was visiting as a scholar. And so there's a bunch of us around, and with, like, Singer on one side, Cass on the other, these two men with completely opposed worldviews. So Singer would say it's fine on any of these if you're not harming anyone. That's all there is, is harm to sentient creatures, including animals. So I think you're more on the Singer side.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And Cass is more beloved by, say, Catholic intellectuals or those who are theorizing about, well, why shouldn't gay people marry? Or. There's a lot more than just.

[Dax Shepard]

So there's other metrics other than suffering.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yes, that's right.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Like humility, maybe a higher calling or a higher truth you're pursuing.

[Jonathan Haidt]

If it's in a religious context, it makes sense. If you believe, as most religions do, that we are children of God, we are created by God, we carry some essence inside of us. Whether you're Christian or Hindu or Jewish, there's a sense that your body is either on loan or a gift from God, and so you shouldn't act in ways that defile it.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Eat God's child. God's child.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. Treating it like just a piece of meat is defiling it. So if you're in a religious context, it makes perfect sense. And if you're an atheist or secular, it doesn't. And I asked Cass, I was able to talk to him afterwards alone. I said, so do you believe in God? And he said, well, it depends what you mean. You know, as many Jewish intellectuals. I'm Jewish.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like, well, rabbinical response.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. And once I made it clear, do you believe that there's an intelligence, an essence or something that created us? And he said, oh, no, not in that sense, no.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So he got to that position from really what I think is a humanitarian view, which I'm kind of coming to in this age of Internet degradation, actually, I hope we'll talk about that, the degradation of our digital lives. But it's such an interesting area where ethics is meeting up with the craziness of what's happening to our lives. Now that it's all going online.

[Dax Shepard]

What do you think about just the appeal of one answer, a binary. And I just have found now that in interviewing so many people and living long enough at best, things are like 61% true.

[Jonathan Haidt]

As they say, there's two kinds of people, those who think there's two kinds of people and those who don't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say that in general, as a heuristic in life, what you're saying is good and right, but sometimes there are true binaries and sometimes one side is completely right. So just to give you an example with my new book, the Generation, I'm engaged in a debate with people about what caused the gigantic increase in mental illness that began with young people around 2012. It's very sudden and it happens in many, many countries. And in general, as a social scientist, I favor the view that, well, you know, it's multi causal and there's all these different factors coming in and, oh, we never want to point to one thing. Sometimes there is one thing. I mean, like leaded gas did some terrible stuff to developing brains. Sometimes there are childhood diseases and sometimes there is one thing that causes a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, smoking's pretty definitive. We get them occasionally.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, we do. That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

Have you found, though, really quick as you've gotten older? Because certainly I'm clocking the fact that as I get older, I am getting more conservative.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yep, that happens. Tell me what you mean by that. In what way are you getting more conservative?

[Dax Shepard]

I'm starting to question a lot of the assumptions I Made like decriminalizing drug use would be great. And then I see the result in Oregon and I go, well, that didn't work out. ODs went up. Our approach to homelessness here in LA, that was unsuccessful. We have to acknowledge that's unsuccessful. They seem very objectively and empirically true, but if I just plot them all on a graph, I would have to recognize, oh, isn't it suspicious that you've also gotten older? So how does one correct for this natural thing? And maybe one shouldn't, and that's the nature of life.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I have a bunch of thoughts. First, it's long been observed that that is generally the case. I think, as Winston Churchill said, any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart. Any man who's still a socialist at age 30 has no head.

[Dax Shepard]

Something like that.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And there is research showing that there are certain life experiences that push people to the right. Having children is the main one, because once you have children, you see more threats in the world, you're more protective, and you have sort of a longer time horizon. Owning a business, when you become a business person, suddenly you see, like, wait a second, it's impossible for me to operate my business. All these regulations.

[Monica Padman]

You're two for two.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And then also, I don't know about you, but I'm finding I'm just much less passionate than I used to be. And this is also true just about aging. You know, your hormone levels drop, especially from it. Your testosterone level drops.

[Dax Shepard]

You're not out winning a mate. That period's over.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. There are different periods of life, and I feel like I'm much more stoic. I read a lot of stoic writing, so I can think about things on all sides. Oh, and then there's another factor, which is I have this pet theory that you can't know which side is right perfectly, but you can bet without knowing anything about the topic. I could have a successful betting record on you. Give me the disputes, I'll make bets on them. All I need to know is which side does a better job of suppressing and attacking and threatening its dissidents. If you tell me which side does not allow anyone to question, I can say that side is wrong about most things. What I talked with about last time, the coddling the American mind, was about this weird thing that happened on college campuses beginning 2015, but it actually goes back more to 2012, 2013. It's now called the Great Awokening. So there was this period. I think it really runs from, say, 2015 when things got crazy on campus through 2020, that whole crazy year, and it's kind of ending now. But there was a period when the left was extraordinarily good at dest socially anyone who questioned. And that led to terrible policies like the ones you just mentioned.

[Dax Shepard]

When you're not open to any criticism.

[Jonathan Haidt]

You become structurally stupid. You have a group of people, they can be brilliant as individuals, but they don't have the normal process of someone said, hey, let's decriminalize marijuana. Someone says, well, wait, what would happen if you lose that process? Then you become structurally stupid. Obviously, the right is insane as well. I'm not saying they're smarter, but there was a period where the left dominated cultural institutions, put in policies that really backfired. And I believe that's why so many groups moved to the right, moved towards Trump.

[Dax Shepard]

The Liberal party became a little illiberal in the way they welcomed scrutiny.

[Monica Padman]

But do you think it's the majority of the party or is it still fringe?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Well, what matters is what people see. And so since on both sides, the fringe control, this is what's so upsetting about our politics. The right is not conservative, the left is not liberal. At the center of our discussion here, and especially as we move to the anxious generation. When you get a change in technology, you get a change in so many aspects of life. When you get television and automobiles, great inventions, but it ends up changing the way we live together because now you're just in your home watching your entertainment center, you get in your car and you go somewhere else. And so it decimated human interaction and neighborhoods. But that was over many, many decades. The move onto smartphones and social media, what I call in the book the Great rewiring of childhood 2010. Teens have flip phones, they might have Facebook, but they don't use it very often because they have to use their parents computer to get on it. There's no privacy. That's right. Whereas by 2015, everyone has a smartphone, social media, Instagram, high speed Internet, limitless texting. So when you change radically how people are connected, you get massive changes throughout society. That new information environment is kind of what allowed the illiberal elements of the left to dominate and intimidate and harass anyone who dissented. And it ended up doing terrible damage to the left. The fact that we have Donald Trump in power saying things like the laws shouldn't apply to me if I'm trying to save our country. I mean, this is complete madness.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's complicated. But on the cuddling of the American mind and what you were exposing in that. Now, here's what I want to own. So part of the reason I was loving listening to you on Sam Harris and why I was enjoying Sam Harris so much at that time was, I'm going to say I had succumbed to a bit of a moral panic about colleges. There are 18 million college students. There are 5,300 colleges. There were about 12 really nuts, crazy viral videos that I responded very strongly to Brett Weinstein shouting, people off stages. These things happened. But I think now, 13 years out of that context, I can acknowledge I probably overreacted. I think really, if you look at the massive amount of students that went through the system at that time and that many universities, really, how many were there of those crazy protests?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Two ways to look at things. One is the statistical method where you say, what's the average? And the average is always fine. The average college student didn't want to take part in these things. The average college student wanted to do his work, get a job, debate some ideas. Probably college students overwhelmingly want to be exposed to different ideas. But what I'm arguing is that since the great transformation, since everything became digital, Jeff Jarvis has a book called the Gutenberg Print, a really good book. There was a period, 500 years that was based on print text. The Gutenberg era that ended right around 2014. 2014 is when you get the first global cancellation. That woman who told a bad joke on Twitter and then she was fired by the time she landed in South Africa. Yes. That was not possible in 2010.

[Dax Shepard]

You could ruin your life in three minutes.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. Because the super viral dynamics of our planet have changed everything and what it is to live within a college, not our community colleges. It wasn't just 10 or 12. It was like the top one or 200. Generally pervasive at our elite schools was, if you say something, it could be the end of your social life.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. Constantly calling for the deans to be fired. Constantly calling for everyone to be fired.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. One of my friends, a woman who ran Heterodox Academy for a while, one of her students said to her, my motto is, silence is safer. And to be a college student, have that be your motto. There's a real problem with the culture. And since people often felt that at work and they felt it in many environments, I think that's part of what led to the general shift away from the Democrats. What I think is so important in the election results is the fact that the shift from Democrats to Republicans happen in almost every group, including Asians, black men, at least Jews. Every group shifted. And that means there's a pervasive problem. That's what the carving in the American mind was about. And that's what so much of my work has been about since 2004, was trying to say, look, Democrats, you need to understand moral psychology. You need to understand why it is that most people care about immigration in ways that you don't, why it is that people care about family and tradition.

[Dax Shepard]

You have to acknowledge who the constituents are. It needs addressing.

[Monica Padman]

Do we think this was a backlash, though, to many, many, many years of the opposite groups having to say, silence is safer? Like marginalized groups have had to say silence is safer since the beginning of time. And so when it became easier or when it became like, oh, you feel like that too? Oh, you feel like that too? Let's start speaking up. It was still a retaliation to that.

[Jonathan Haidt]

But let's go through the timing. There was a time when that was true. So I was born in 1963. It just blows my mind that when I was born, it was legal to discriminate against black people in a large part of the country. I mean, that was written into law. Let's go decade by decade. 1973, the change is unbelievable, the legal change. Now you've got the women's rights movement, the gay rights movement has started. Environmentalism, animal rights. You keep going 83. Even though you have Ronald Reagan as president, socially, the country is still, you know, the advances in acceptance of every possible group go to 1993. Even more so by 2013, when I turned 50, our first black president has been reelected. Gay marriage, it's been legalized in many states. Supreme Court's about to rule on it. Trans rights are coming into view, and those are quickly recognized by the Supreme Court. And so in 2013, if you are a young progressive, you should look back on this history of when marginalized people used to have to be quiet or stay in the margins? And you should say, wow, what incredible progress every decade since 1963. Whatever we're doing in America, let's keep doing it, because it's amazing. That's not what happened. That's exactly when an element of the left became much more radicalized. And you can see it in graphs. You can see that it's young white people on the left especially, suddenly moved way to the left on issues of race and immigration, way to the left of black people. And it was especially young women. So that's the movement that was radicalized by The Internet, Tumblr, I think, was a major place where a lot of these ideas came together about identity. The 2010s was a really interesting, transformative, and in many ways terrible time. It began with our sense that this technology is magical. It's gonna be the best thing that ever happened to democracy. The Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street. We were also optimistic about it in the 2010s. We didn't understand what it was doing to us. And I think it really did end the Democrats because it led to a set of ideas that were intense, that led to a lot of intimidation. That's what the call the American mind was at, the intimidation. And that led to a huge backlash.

[Dax Shepard]

The thing I was noticing that was very concerning and continues to be is I am liberal and all my friends are liberal. I'm having conversations with all the members of this group and none of them think some of the broadcast values of the Liberal Party. And that's what was really concerning. Like, I've yet to meet the person that agrees with issue A, yet that's an official part of our platform. And what's happening. It felt like the cadre system. We were all afraid to tell the truth.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

I was open to meeting a handful of people that thought this was a good idea, but numerous issues. Everyone I meet in real life, not on the Internet, doesn't think this way. And I'm like, oh, it's truly been hijacked. No one even thinks this.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And that was not possible before social media. You couldn't have a small number intimidating a large number. But now you can. You know, James Carville has been great on this. He's been complaining about faculty lounge politics because you say you haven't met a single person. Like, they're all over universities. Not a majority. Most professors are on the left, but they're liberal, they're sane. But there are certain departments in which this way of thinking is dominant. This sort of thinking is very aggressive and intimidating. A small group ended up having so much power, and that couldn't have happened before social media.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Okay. So your current book, the Anxious Generation. One element of it is not a shocker to me because you brought up in the first interview seven years ago this concept of free range parenting. We ended up interviewing Leonardo, who we loved.

[Jonathan Haidt]

She's great. She's so funny.

[Dax Shepard]

So that aspect I knew would come up at some point in your work, maybe more officially. So maybe start there, because that's where you and I are really in lockstep.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I was busy studying moral and political psychology. I was gonna write a book called Three Stories About Capitalism and the Moral Psychology of Economic Life. And then all of a sudden, things blew up on universities in 2015. It began as a side project. What's going on with young people? Why are they so anxious? And that led us to write the Coddling of the American Mind. Coddling means overprotection. And to draw much more on Lenore Skenazy's work. Now, I'd moved to New York in 2011 with my wife. Our kids were very young then. We met Lenore socially and we read her book, Free Range Kids. And so we used that to help us raise our kids. And I know you and Kristen. I read that amazing story about you guys at Tivoli Gardens. I want you to tell that story.

[Dax Shepard]

Unless I don't know that I have. Normally I would brag about getting an email from you commending us. I somehow resisted in that moment.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Lenore and others have been saying for years, we are vastly overprotecting our kids. So I'm 62. You're like 50. 50. Wait, Monica, if I may ask, are you millennial? You're millennial?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. 30.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So older millennials and up. We almost all had free range childhoods. Now, we grew up during a crime wave. There was a lot of crime in the 70s and 80s, but kids went out to play. It was like, of course you're gonna go out and play. What are you gonna do, sit and watch TV all day long? In the 90s, the crime wave ends. Life gets much safer. Drunk driving gets under control. But that's exactly the decade when we freak out about child abduction. I mean, people, literally now, they won't let their seven year old go two aisles over in the grocery store because what if they're kidnapped in the grocery store? It was clear that the overprotection had something to do with this. But the overprotection was kind of gradually implemented in the 80s and 90s, and the mental health crisis hit suddenly in 2012, 2013. So there was something missing from our analysis in the comments.

[Dax Shepard]

Really quick. How have you come to trust the data? Because you born in 63, me in 75. I have never, ever been asked about my anxiety level. I've never been asked about my depression level. No one ever inquired anything of any of us. So how do you make peace with. With trusting this data? Just knowing that we're looking around now and we weren't.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So in the United States, we have several long running, very good nationally representative studies. Most countries don't have this. One of the ones that a lot of us rely on is called the Monitoring the Future study. It began with just high school seniors, not every high school senior, but they had, I don't know if they identified a few hundred high schools, a few thousand high schools. So it began just high school seniors. They'd ask them a bunch of questions, including, I feel anxious every day. I can't remember what the phrasing is, but here's one of them that I remember the phrasing of is I feel that my life is useless. And roughly 9% of them agreed with that statement, plus or minus a bit from the 90s through 2010. So we have this long running. It goes back to the 70s. And then they added in 8th and 10th graders sometime in the 90s. So we have these long running data sets, 8th, 10th, and 12th graders. And so we can see one of them is, sometimes I like to do things just because they're a little bit dangerous. Teenagers are risk takers. And so the boys especially say yes. So we can plot how did that question fare. And what we find is on the question about uselessness, only 9% on a 5 point scale either strongly agree or agree. So most American high school students are like, no, I don't feel my life is useless. All of a sudden, 2013, it starts skyrocketing and it doubles within about five or seven years. Okay, so about 20% of our high school seniors think that their life is useless. Data sets like this are full of slow rises and slow falls. You almost never find elbows. You almost never find a hockey stick. And this is what you see in chapter one of the Anxious Generation. Graph after graph, you find a hockey stick. Especially for girls. I should make it clear, for girls, it's like there's no sign of a problem. And in 2012, bo more than a doubling, between 50 and 150%, depending what you're studying. But it's never 10 or 20% increase. It's always 50 to 150% increase. Boys are doing much worse too, but that's a little more gradual. It's not exactly 2012. It begins maybe a little before 2010, but it accelerates in the 2010s. So something went suddenly very wrong in the early 2010s. And that's what the anxious generation is about. It's not just the overprotection. It's also, I argue, the change in the technology.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, I'm going to unfortunately bring this word back again. And I know it's an Aggravating one. But. But if we look at why there was this clampdown on the autonomy of the children in that period, you gotta call it irrational. It's an irrational fear of pedophiles, kidnappings. Pedophiles, abductions. We would have to agree that that was a moral panic. I lived through this satanic moral panic. People that weren't alive then can't really even imagine. We were sending kids to prison in Memphis because they worshiped this poster of Metallica. Like this was happening. Kids were going to prison for Satanism. The next round in my memory was this big moral panic about abductions.

[Jonathan Haidt]

A man with a white man, sexual abuse.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Our response to it was far more damaging than this perceived threat of the abductors.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right. So this was a true moral panic. And this is an important word, a moral panic. They have certain properties. It spreads through the media. People read a report about something, then they get afraid. The definition of a moral panic includes that it's not real. If there really was a sudden wave of kidnappings by men in white vans, well, then it would be rational to fear it. The FBI stats on kidnapping are astonishing. Any idea how many kids get kidnapped by a stranger in a year? Like, ballpark, what do you think it is in America?

[Dax Shepard]

In America, by a stranger, not a family member. Because those are high.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, 500.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't want to act like I'm ahead of the question. I know where it's going. Honestly. Maybe 60 to 100.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's about right.

[Dax Shepard]

The right's obsessed with child abductions. They think everyone's a pedophile still. They have this whole movie. They think Bill Gates has kids.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right wing TV really goes for that.

[Dax Shepard]

They think there's sex trafficking happening on an order of, like, millions of kids a year. And you're like, where are the parents? Why isn't anyone reporting this? Where are these people?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Two things. One is on the true kidnappings, it's in the ballpark of one or 200 cases a year. So the point is, it's very, very rare in the real world. Now, once we move to online, this is what's so insane about what's happening. Parents are afraid to let their kids run around outside because they're afraid they'll get picked up by a sex predator. The sex predators are all on Instagram. That's why they moved on, because they can contact people anonymously, they can groom them, and then sometimes they can arrange to meet them. Or once you get a naked photo of. Now you got power over him. You can make him or her do anything you want on camera for you and your body. I mean, it's sick what's happening.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes.

[Jonathan Haidt]

If we're focusing on online, I don't think it's a moral panic. The data from an insider at Instagram, Arturo Bejar, he found, I think it was something like 1 in 7 teens reported some kind of inappropriate sexual contact, like somebody trying to hit on them, pick them up. One in seven every week.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God.

[Jonathan Haidt]

You know, it's hard to know what the exact numbers are, but the point is, it's much more dangerous online than in the real world. So we grossly overreacted. And here's what we learned about why did we freak out in the Ninet just as things were getting safe? And the answer is that that's when we stop trusting our neighbors. The key work here is Robert Putnam's book, Bowling alone. In the 50s and 60s, we had very, very high social capital in America. We trusted our neighbors. And back then, there were men going around my sister when she was a teenager. A man stopped in his car and opened the door, and he was naked and masturbating. And it was just like that stuff just happened. Yes, but by the 90s, that guy would be locked away for 20 years. So back when there were actually more risks, we trusted our neighbors, we let our kids out, and some bad stuff happened.

[Dax Shepard]

To me, this would be a great time for me to point out, like, I was sexually abused. But almost all sexual abuse cases are a trusted person. Right. They're not as stranger.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. And the fact that it was often in institutions, whether it be the Catholic Church or sports teams or Boy Scouts. So that was a huge advance, was to say, look, all these organizations, they have some bad apples and then they cover up. That's what they're really guilty of. And that all came out in the 90s. And so in a sense, that was a legitimate reason to think, like, whoa, this is much broader than we thought. But at the same time, crime and danger was plummeting then, and we didn't really pick up on that. But it's that we lost trust in our neighbors. And one way we can see this is the same thing happens in Canada and the uk where they don't have the high crime rates that we do. And so it's just around the Anglosphere, we change. We spend all our time on television. We don't know our neighbors, and we lose trust.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair expert if you dare. We are supported by Tropical Smoothie Cafe Unwind and refresh at Tropical Smoothie Cafe with freshly made smoothies and tropic bowls that instantly transport you to tropic time. One bite or one sip and you'll instantly feel like you're cabana sauce made with refreshing fruit and tropical flavors. Eating your fruit and veggies has never been this fun.

[Monica Padman]

We could make our own Armchair Tropic Thyme Smoothie and it could have cherries in it.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh, oh.

[Dax Shepard]

It could taste like our favorite ice cream with cherries.

[Monica Padman]

Oh yeah. So we would add cherries, maybe almond. Let's add some spinach in there for.

[Dax Shepard]

A little spring in your step. Yes, add more good vibes to your smoothie with fresh add ins like almonds, spinach, kale, chia seeds and ginger or even supplements like protein and energize at Tropical Smoothie Cafe. It's always tropic time because you deserve a little vacay every day. Order ahead, take the scenic route and earn rewards with the Tropical Smoothie Cafe app. Download it today. Visit tropicalsmoothicafe.com to find a cafe near you. We are supported by Liquid iv. You know curiosity. It is the source of our livelihood, so I'm quite fond of Curiosity. Curiosity and staying engaged with the world and people around us fuels what we do on this show. However you explore life or find interesting people, fuel your journey with extraordinary hydration from Liquid IV powered by Liv Hydro Science. Visit LiquidIV.com to explore flavors like the zesty new hydration Multiplier Sugar free Raspberry Lemonade. I just had that on my bike ride and use Code dax to save 20 off your first order. Break the mold and own your ritual. Just one stick and 16 ounces of water hydrates better than water alone. And they're small and light so they fit easily into any backpack, purse, diaper bag, whatever you're using. Convenient, quick and effective hydration. It just makes sense. Fuel your curiosity with extraordinary hydration from Liquid IV. Get 20 off your first order of Liquid IV when you go to Liquid IV.com and use code DAX at checkout. That's 20 off your first order with code DAX at Liquid IV. This message is brought to you by Apple Card Apple Card is everything a credit card should be. It's easy to manage, built to be secure, and gives users up to 3% daily cash back on every purchase. The best part about Apple Card is applying is quick and easy. Apply in the Wallet app on iPhone and see your credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch Member FDIC terms and [e-mail] I would also add there was a new component around that time, much like the Internet, which was the daytime salacious talk show. There were new offerings, there was cable, There was a proliferation of options. It wasn't three networks. So you could find someone at any given moment on TV in the 90s talking about some abductor. A megaphone was given to a lot of people that you would have otherwise not heard from.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. So that was part of it. What I'm coming to see is that you have to keep your eye on technology because technology changes so fast and then the downstream effects of technology are so vast. So the arrival of television had huge effects. Then television going to cable with hundreds of channels has huge effects. And then microcasting and then cable to social media, micro microcasting. I see that you have Yuval Noah Harari's book on your shelf, Nexus in there. He says often democracy is a conversation. Well, what happens when that conversation moves on to 20? It becomes much more polarizing and disparate and fragmented. So yes, that's what we're talking about here, the way that technology changes everything about our political lives. But to return to the children. So we knew that overprotection was a piece of the story, but it couldn't explain this incredibly sudden sharp turn up around 2013 in many, many countries. And so in the coddling, we had about a page or two where we said, no, social media really comes in around the right time. Facebook opens up to the world around 2007. Maybe that influenced what we then knew was Gen Z. And especially around 20, 2011, 2012, it gets much more viral. So we speculated now maybe it has some, but we don't know. Well, that was what we wrote in 2017. And after the book came out, some researchers challenged me and said, oh, you can't say it's social media. There's no evidence. I said, really? Wait, I saw all kinds of studies that did show at least a correlation, a couple of experiments. So I started gathering all the studies I could find in these big Google documents. You go to anxiousgeneration.com reviews, you can find all these Google documents where we collect all the evidence on one side, all the evidence on the other. We organize it by method so you can get a sense like, okay, what is the nature of the research that's out there? As I began to see that actually the correlational studies are pretty consistent. There are some that show no correlation, but those tend to be all digital media for all kids with all kinds of outcomes. Every time you zoom in on just social media for girls, anxiety and depression, you find a much bigger correlation. The second is that there are now about 25 experiments where you randomly assign people, usually college students. It's hard to work with 12 year olds.

[Dax Shepard]

Weirdest people on earth.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. The weirdest people on Earth. That's right. Famous article. But where you randomly assign people to get off social media. And if you look just at the studies that kept them off for more than a week, almost all of them find benefits on measures of anxiety and depression. And so once you have correlational studies and you have experimental studies and you have eyewitness testimony, because Gen Z generally says this is harming them, it's very hard to find members of Gen Z who are saying no. Social media is great. We love it, it's good for us. And we have confessions from the companies. On my substack after Babel, we have an article, TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale using just their own words from the lawsuits against them. We know some of their internal memos and correspondence. Just their own words. They know they're harming millions and millions of kids a year.

[Dax Shepard]

Just a little telling. They have a different version running in China than they did.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh, my God, that's right. Chinese kids get spinach. All you know about how great China is and how to be an astronaut. And we get fentanyl and dog poop.

[Dax Shepard]

What would be helpful, I think is to first. Cause I wouldn't have known how to delineate the generations. So Gen X, which I'm a member of. Are you?

[Jonathan Haidt]

No, I'm the last of the baby boomers.

[Dax Shepard]

You're the last of. So, okay, you're bridging it. And then we have millennials. Millennials is what era?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Roughly 1981 through 1995.

[Monica Padman]

It's such a big group. I think it's too big.

[Dax Shepard]

And that's Monica, Monica's representative.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So we have.

[Dax Shepard]

Good. We have three generations here. And then Gen Z is from.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I say 1996. Pew says 1997. Who knows? You can't say. But roughly 1996. Gene Twenge says 1995. So if you're born in the mid-90s or later, you are Gen Z. And what I came to see is the key thing is look at early puberty. If you were born in 1995, last of the millennials, you're turning 15 in 2010. You probably had a flip phone. You didn't have Instagram in 2010, and you might have traded in later, but the point is you made it most of the way through puberty before the great transformation, before the Great War. And you didn't get this stuff until really more like college. Your mental health is probably fine, but if you were born in the year 2000, you turned 15 in 2015, and so your first phone might well have been a smartphone. And the iPhone gets a front facing camera in 2010 and Instagram comes out in 2010, but Facebook buys it in 2012. That's when everyone goes on it. If you were born in the year 2000, you went through early puberty as a girl, especially on Instagram with your phone in your hand. Half of our teenagers say they are online almost constantly. Phone's always in their hand. And that, I believe, is what created Gen Z. That's why Gen Z is different from the Millennials is what were they doing in early puberty?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they have no period of time. They have no foot in pre Internet, pre smartphone. So it's a very interesting group to look at. When we talk about all these issues that are in the anxious generation, we are talking about Gen Z.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, that's right, Gen Z and below, or just that one and below.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I mean, I was always just thinking about Gen Z, but we don't know when Gen Alpha begins. Marketers tell us 2010 or 2011. I think it might actually depend more on TikTok. I think TikTok is transformative for brain development. And so it might be that the generation shaped by TikTok is very different. But for now we're going with 2010. Let's say 2011 is the first birth year of Gen Alpha.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so a couple things you lay out in the book which are relevant is you have 90% of the mass of your brain by like 6 years old. But what was really happening through development is building all these neural networks, getting different areas of the brain to communicate. And that is a long journey that varies between males and females. But the frontal lobe is fully on board the prefrontal cortex. You're in your 20s, right?

[Jonathan Haidt]

I'm 25.

[Monica Padman]

Usually 25.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So that's how the brain works. And now what are your thoughts on how this technology has interfered with that process?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Neural networks are amazing things. I was thinking going into AI in 1986 when I was done with college and I was working in computers, and AI back then was based on programming normal computer language to do things, and it didn't get very far. It's only once they developed the idea that, hey, how about we make something like a neural network and then you train it. And of course, we all know the training data needed to train ChatGPT is enormous. And the stuff you put in is going to shape the connections made. So what happens when the stuff that gets put into our neural network is the stuff that we evolve, which is, first you learn how to move your body, and then you learn to walk and run and eye contact and social life and talking and climbing and fleeing predators and forming coalitions and all the stuff that you have to learn. And you watch kids, it's amazing. They'll do something. It falls down, they do it again. It falls down, they do it again. I mean, they repeat, repeat, repeat.

[Dax Shepard]

They've got no quit. It's really impressive. It's not like any child ever tried to start walking, is like, fuck that, that was too hard. I guess I'll crawl. Yeah.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Although now if you give a kid an iPad, they might, you might say, fuck that, this is too interesting. I'm staying there.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. What would be over there that's as interesting as this?

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. So my point is that brain development takes a very, very long time. Humans have an extraordinarily long childhood, and the only way that we could have such a long childhood is if it was incredibly valuable. Because evolution is a battle for survival. Why would you delay reproduction by so long? Culture is very, very powerful, very important to learn. And so we've evolved cultural mechanisms of cultural learning and we still use those. We look not just to our parents, we look at all the adults. No child has their parents at accent. They have the accent of the people around them. So we can live in modern ways, but you still have to have this pathway of child development. Now, what happens when we now give kids iPhones and iPads? In Britain, there's a shocking statistic. One quarter of their five year olds have their own smartphone. Because parents around the world have discovered, your kid's crying, you need to make dinner, take the phone, you're happy, I'm happy, I can do my stuff. And it's like drugging your kid. A distinction I'm coming to see, which is very, very useful, is I don't want to tell people, be afraid of screens. Never let your kid on a screen. What I'm coming to see as I talk with my undergrad and I realized how serious the attention fragmentation is, this is, I think, ultimately more serious than the mental illness is the attention fragmentation. So I'm coming to see that Distinguish between story time and fragmenting time. So stories are good things. Humans are storytelling animals. We love stories. All cultures tell stories. That's part of how we socialize our kids. And that's why literature is so important and why reading novels is so important. Stories are good. And a television screen is actually a pretty good way of portraying a story. So don't be afraid of letting your kids have story time. Not six hours a day, but on a plane ride. Let your kid watch a movie. Fantastic. But fragmenting time is. I'm doing this thing, but then I get a pop up. I do this other thing. I'm watching this movie, but I'm a little bored. So I'll check out this. Oh, and I'll go there. And so if you give a kid an iPad, that's fragmenting time, how much fragmenting time should you give your kid? As close to zero as possible. Forever. But don't be afraid of stories.

[Dax Shepard]

So you see four foundational harm from all this. One is social deprivation. Seems pretty intuitive, but go ahead and expound a little bit on that.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Kids are incredibly sociable. Social. We socialize each other. We play in groups, mixed age groups. There's clear data on how much time kids were spending with friends until around 2010, 2012. About two hours a day on average. It's called the American Time Use Survey. How much time did you spend eating? How much time did you spend watching TV? So you can see until around 2012, 2012, kids 15 to 24 is the youngest age group. They were spending about two hours a day with their friends outside of school and work. And then you see this incredibly sharp drop around 2012 in that period down to the point where in 2019, just before COVID it's gone from two hours a day down to like 45 minutes a day, which is just a little bit more than older people are spending. And then Covid comes in. We get Covid restrictions, and it just goes down a little further. Gen Z began practicing social distancing as soon as they got a smartphone. And they finished the job almost by 2019, and then certainly by 2020, because with a phone, you're always interrupted. It's always more interesting than the person standing next to you. And my students complain like you sit with somebody at lunch in the cafeteria and they're on their phone half the time. And so it just fragments, it disrupts. There's a great line in the book from Sherry Turkle at mit. She says, with our phones, we are forever elsewhere. And so this is devastating to social Development.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You don't even meet kids. Anyone with a partner experiences this.

[Monica Padman]

We're all doing it, but I guess our brains have developed. That's right.

[Jonathan Haidt]

We're damaging our relationships. We're not damaging our brains. But that leads right into the second foundational harm, which is attention fragmentation. And this is the one that I'm beginning to think is possibly the most serious. The book focused on mental illness because we have good data about that. We don't have good data on attention fragmentation, but in talking with my students, and these are students who got into a top university at New York University, some of them say they can't watch a movie, and some of them say, or they're friends who can't watch a movie unless they're also on a second screen because they can't focus on anything for that long. They can't read a book. One of my students said, I take out a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok. What is the cost to humanity if half of our kids can't read a book?

[Dax Shepard]

Now, just to play devil's advocate right here, please. I would imagine that is how their workplace will end up looking. So I think we're moving into an era where it's like, AI is doing a lot of these tasks. AI has endless concentration. You know, are they just getting prepared for the life? They're gonna occup? It's not the life I want, but is it maybe just the life of the future? And I need to, again, check my being 50 and getting more conservative. What do we think about that?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, I hear that argument occasionally, like, well, the technology's here to stay. They need to learn how to use it, so they should start early. You know, I mean, sex is here to stay, but we're not going to start our kids at 6 or 7. Let them have normal development. There's a time for it. What I would say, as a college professor, is if you want to send your kids to me at NYU Stern, a business school, we're preparing for these sorts of careers you're talking about. And I could choose between kids who had an iPhone or iPad from age 5 or always on it and can use the technology, but can't think, can't focus, can't write, can't look you in the eye. I mean, how are you going to succeed in business?

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Jonathan Haidt]

If, on the other hand, I could get kids who were raised in a homeschooled Christian environment, they had no technology until they were 18. I suppose they were going to come to college. They're going to pick up how to use the technology in about three days.

[Dax Shepard]

It's all so intuitive. It's not like you're going to fall so deeply behind.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. The millennials in the 90s, your generation, you guys grew up with the Internet, but you learned how to program what a motherboard is and swapping in chips. I mean, there was learning before, but these things are so easy to use, and they're designed to be addictive. The early Internet was not designed to be addictive. It was designed to be useful. So, no, I reject that argument. It's much, much better to let healthy brain development at least get most of the way through before you shatter it with the constant interruptions and fragmenting.

[Dax Shepard]

It's interesting. Yeah. It parallels a lot of social issues of the time. It's like, when do we allow children to do whatever they want?

[Monica Padman]

Well, circling back to adhd, how do you. How fragmentation is that? So is it ADHD or is it this? It's just that we are so addicted to these things.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Well, and that brings us right to another of the foundations, which is addiction. And this is one that we mentioned in the book. But I'm coming to see it's much more serious than I realized. So, yes, let's talk about addiction a bit.

[Dax Shepard]

It's finally wandered into my field of expertise, addiction.

[Jonathan Haidt]

All right, so I'll interview you about addiction. The key neural process here is, of course, dopamine. Dopamine is sometimes said to be a neurotransmitter of reward, but it's not reward. Like, I did something, I get a reward.

[Dax Shepard]

Ah, there's no satiation.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Exactly. It's the opposite of satiated. It's really more neurotransmitters, transmitter of motivation. You do something, it feels good, and your brain says, ooh, that felt good. Let's do it again. Which in our ancestral environment was good. Like, you taste something like, ooh, it tastes sweet. Let's have more and more and more. Grab it all.

[Dax Shepard]

I'll just add right now because I think it's interesting for people to think of when they drink. Like, if you read Dopamine Nation or Molecule. More.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Such a good book.

[Dax Shepard]

Both those books are great. The joy of drinking is the first two drinks. That is the most pleasurable period because that's the dopamine dump. It's. I'm feeling the shifting of reality. What could be on the other side of this new reality beyond two drinks is inebriation. So you're no longer getting dopamine so people are wondering, like, what is that experience where it's like, the first two are great, and I feel optimistic and energized, and then the rest is just inebriation because there's no dopamine.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And that's what you really love is the dopamine.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Well, yeah. Then what really happens is then the next day, you are anticipating the first drink.

[Dax Shepard]

You're in a deficit at that point.

[Monica Padman]

It's all about then just getting the drink is you're living in that dopamine dump.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's the key word is deficit. So I'm now studying educational technology because our schools are stuffed full of education tech, and a lot of it is gamified. Hey, let's teach kids math. Let's make it a fun game where they get rewards. If you do that, you'll get more engagement, but there's a cost. The more activities we give our kids that lead them to quick dopamine, which is you do something simple, you get a reward. Do something simple, get a reward. Like a slot machine, like social media. You never know what's going to come, but sometimes it's good. If you gamify a quarter of a kid's day, that's a lot of quick dopamine. The brain is going to react by downregulating dopamine neurons that they're less sensitive to dopamine. And so now when you take away the gamification, now they're in a deficit state, which means everything is boring and unpleasant.

[Dax Shepard]

The human body is the master at homeostasis. So if you bring it up, it must bring itself down not on everything.

[Jonathan Haidt]

But on anything that involves dopamine. Yes, absolutely.

[Dax Shepard]

And it's a asymmetric offset. So it's five minutes of dopamine. And the cost of that. The bad chemicals you experience go on for two hours.

[Jonathan Haidt]

If you think about what you might call quick dopamine versus slow dopamine. So slow dopamine is. Suppose a boy sets out to build a tree house or a racing car every time he makes progress. That's rewarding, but you're going towards the goal. You're keeping focus. Now, this is what executive function is. Executive function is the ability to say, here's my goal. I'm gonna do the hard work. Along the way, I get rewards for making progress. And when I'm done, it feels so good.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, delayed gratification.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. So that's all really good. But what I'm coming to see is I underestimated what's happening to boys. Cause I focus more on the girls. Cause the data is just so much clearer on social media and girls. But with boys, they get the video games early. And the video games are so much better than what I had. We had Pong. I was like the first video game. It was kind of fun.

[Dax Shepard]

Coleco fiction.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I think that's right. Atari, Aster, the boys. It starts with the video games, which is really quick dopamine. It's incredibly intense. They're beautiful, they're exciting. And many parents have observed once they let their boy play video games. And a little bit is okay. I don't want to cause a panic here on video games, but if your kid is playing three hours of video games a day, seven days a week, probably that's going to have dopamine effects because they're in a state of deficit. And so everything else is more boring and we have to ramp it up. Okay, they're in school, they're bored. Let's give them gamified math and we'll give them gamified this and that and oh, let's let them keep their phones on them, which is insane. A study just came out from Daniel Dimitri Christakis on average American students, I think it was high school, spend an hour and a half a day in school on their phone. Again, if you gamify, gamify, gamify, then the rest of life is incredibly boring. And that includes talking to people. We're really doing our kids a disservice. Oh, and then I haven't even mentioned the vaping and the marijuana pens and the crypto. Gambling and sports betting. You get the sense from my book that the girls are in worse shape than the boys. But I'm really. That's not true. At age 14, the girls are in worse shape. Cause the boys have these amazing video games. They've got incredible porn, they're enjoying their dopamine. But I think they're harming the brains more even than the girls are. Which helps explain why girls are making progress career wise. Boys are increasingly living at home with their parents because they're less suited for employment.

[Dax Shepard]

And the gambling epidemic is soon to rival the opioid. Like, there's a lot of people now starting to shine a light on just how extreme this epidemic is.

[Jonathan Haidt]

If you have any influence, try to roll this back. It's insane that this has been legalized. This is just fishing for boys. Dopamine circuits. Richard Reeves wrote of Boys and Men. He told me that when sports betting is legalized in a state the number of bankruptcies goes up very quickly and that's mostly young men. And so we're just destroying young men and their futures.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And then you're feeding into the suicide epidemic.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Exactly.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it's also depressing to be so bored. If you're living at a deficit and everything's boring and there's nothing exciting, that is depression.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You're in discomfort a lot of your day if you're not on the thing. It's identical to drug addiction. Okay, so now the data, and you've already hinted at it, but the social deprivation, sleep deprivation, we should talk about it really probably impacts sleep.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Sleep is so important, we're realizing much more now than we did 20 years ago. Because when I was in college, it was like, we don't really know why people sleep. All animals sleep, but when you keep people up at night, they don't die. It was known for a long time that REM sleep does have something to do with consolidating memory. So there's always been a relationship between sleep and learning. We know that. But more recently, I don't remember when this was found, but there's a lymphatic system in our bodies that gets rid of broken molecules and proteins and flushes it out. The brain does not have a lymphatic system to flush it out. But deep sleep seems to involve a pattern of neural firing that seems to do some of that. And so it is about the brain's repair. Sleep is incredibly important. It's also important for your mental health. So we know that once you give kids touchscreen devices are the most engaging, the most addictive, much more so than a television screen. Television is entertaining, but it doesn't allow you to do stimulus response stuff, whereas a touchscreen does. So if you give a kid an iPad or an iPhone and you let them have it at night in their room, not all, but a lot of them are going to be on it instead of sleeping. And so there's the blue light, there's the stimulation, there's the social drama. And so a lot of kids are now really sleep deprived. Now what happens, you're sleep deprived, you go into class, you can't learn as much, you do more poorly in school, you're more stressed out by your grades, you're irritable and short tempered, so your relationships suffer. And all of this just creates a loop where you become more and more depressed and dysfunctional. So just to go through the four, it's social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, those are the four big effects. So if you give your kid a smartphone or an iPad that they can hold onto, your kid is at risk for these four things. Again, I'm not saying never give them an iPad, but if they have it as their own, they can customize it. Especially if they get social media accounts now they've got so much stuff coming in.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so the results of all this, as you reported, among American girls, between 10 and 14 emergency room visits for self harm grew by 188%.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It's stunning.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so now this is really disturbing. But of course I am inclined to think of all the variables that could add to this. It's hard to parse out these things. So one thing is we know the contagion effect. We just had this expert on sleep sickness where 3,000 of 5,000 town members all got the same sleep sickness.

[Monica Padman]

The Tourette's one.

[Jonathan Haidt]

The Tourette's TikTok Tourette's.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's right.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, Right. So this power of contagion I don't think can be underestimated. So it's kind of chicken or egg. Were they on these devices so long that they wanted to self harm or did they witness self harm on the device? I guess the results are the same regardless, but for me, I need to work through what's going on.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, I think it's both, but I think it's especially the latter that is the contagion effect. So here's the way to look at it. There have been these. They were called dance plagues or dance fevers. You find reports in throughout the Middle Ages in Europe and people would begin dancing and they would dance to exhaustion. Some people would die. And it was primarily young women who are susceptible to this. Now one thing we know about boys and girls, girls, girls are just more socially aware. So girls are more open to influence from other girls especially. That's been known for a long time. So what happens when you give everybody a flip phone and they can text each other but you're only texting your friends? Not much. That's actually pretty good. And that's why the millennials mental health didn't plunge. Talking on the phone is great. Texting is not as good because it's not synchronous, but it's not bad just with your friends. But what happens by 2015? Actually let's look at 2013 when this all starts. Everyone's trading in their flip phone for a smartphone. They're getting off of Facebook on their parents computer and now they've got Instagram on their own phone. And now they're communicating not just with one friend, but with groups of friends. So it's more display. Oh, and then you start working in strangers and friends of friends. And before you know it, you're getting into these interest groups or you're following an influencer group on YouTube or much later on TikTok. Why is it that anxiety? Why is there this sharp elbow for the girls but not the boys? Why is it that in 2012 it's like someone flipped a light switch and the girls instantly, in many countries start checking into hospital emergency rooms more often? That's not true for boys. So I think that's the contagion. If you expose young girls who already are susceptible to social influence, more so than older women or than teenage boys, you super connect them by a thing driven by an algorithm based in Menlo Park, California, which is going to feed you the things that it has concluded are most likely to keep you on. And that is girls and young women showing extreme dieting behaviors and Get Ready with me videos and here's how to make your lips bigger or whatever, all the stuff that it is.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, the algorithm knows it must continue to get more and more extreme.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Extreme, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. It has a natural trajectory.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So more and more extreme for girls socialization and more and more extreme on political extremity.

[Dax Shepard]

And boys on YouTube, they're getting radicalized and becoming white nationals. Exactly. These very predictable paths.

[Jonathan Haidt]

This is why everything is so crazy now, because we super connected ourselves. You know, we always thought connection was good. Hey, should we build roads to connect cities and have trade? Yes, let's do that. Should we have a postal service? Yes, let's do that. Of course there are always problems, but the net effect is always enormously positive. This, I think might be the first one where it's enormously negative. Again, connecting by individual communication, fine. But it's the algorithm driven. Is this a good idea to have our kids talking with strangers at the age of 10 and 11?

[Monica Padman]

I mean, it's literally the first thing our parents told us. Don't talk to strangers. And now all these kids are just.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Out there talking to strangers.

[Monica Padman]

Literally talking to strangers.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. And then the anxiety and depression and we kind of already talked about it. You trust this figure? I'm a little more on the fence about how much of it. The anxiety and depression. Depression rates have risen 150% for this cohort.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Well, wait, hold on. I tend to say the rates have risen between 50 and 150% because this particular study asked the question in this way. Of this age group. So I can't give you a flat number. All I can say is that the numbers are generally between 50 and 150%. I can also say that the over 100 numbers, those are almost exclusively from preteen girls. If we look at girls 10 to 14, we often find more than 100% increase. Sometimes 200 self harm is actually 3 or 400% increase. But if we're talking about older teens, we tend not to get over 100%. It tends to be sometimes 40%, more like 50 to 80% generally speaking.

[Dax Shepard]

Again, I just think we're really trying to figure out how much of it is the contagion, how much of it is it's in our vernacular. Any kid now knows numerous personality disorders from the dsm they know numerous mood disorders. I didn't know any of them. I knew like depression I guess was the word I knew. So just the awareness is something. How much it's talked about is something.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Ask your destigmatization, please say John, isn't some of it just destigmatization?

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great, John, isn't some of it just destigma?

[Monica Padman]

You asked if he's dyslexic. That was a big thing you asked.

[Dax Shepard]

Destigmat, destigmatization.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Thank you. So we can put all these things together because I get this a lot. So look, I said a lot of things in the book. There's been almost no pushback on any of it except for two topics. One, is, is there really mental health crisis? And two, is it caused by social media? Those are the two areas of academic debate. On the first one, is there really a mental health crisis? Isn't this just destigmatization? Isn't it just that Gen Z is comfortable talking about this? Oh, and they know all these words for it.

[Dax Shepard]

It's the cultural capital of the day in a sense.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Isn't that all it is? That's a perfectly good argument. We should ask that about any disease. But. So my mother sent me to a couple of psychologists in the mid-70s because I had various nervous tics and they seemed like nervous habits. But that was very shameful and I wouldn't tell anyone that I'd been to see a variety of therapists in the 70s.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And then, you know, in the 80s and 90s it begins to be much more destigmatized. We start talking television shows about it. And so the destigmatization has been going steadily from the 70s to today. So why was there no change in Any of these measures from the late 90s through 2011, there's no change. And all of a sudden, boom.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, look, I acknowledge it's part of the tech, but I would say even back when you were deciding who you would tell that you had gone to therapy, you're making some selection. You're not telling everybody, and definitely you're evaluating what dude wants to hear. Especially with dudes.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, They're.

[Dax Shepard]

You're like, this fucking guy working on my sink doesn't want to know the therapy. You have some social awareness, whereas you enter this world where, if you choose to, you can be in a silo where everyone talks about it.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

So that's very powerful.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. That's the similar thing circling back to the way, way beginning when we're talking about race relations over time, it definitely has progressed. Mental health awareness has progressed a ton over time, but it's still like, if you're in it, you can tell the slight difference. Right. Like, if you use the race. For me, I was born in 87. It was definitely better than when my mom arrived, but I had to blend in. And I wasn't really like, oh, I need to be talking about being Indian.

[Dax Shepard]

You're not along to a lot of racist jokes that were totally commonplace.

[Monica Padman]

Silence was better. Really? And I'm youngish, so you can look at it overall and say, it's gotten better, but there are nuances when you're in it. And same with men. It overall has progressed, but now with the Internet, it's like, we can all talk about it.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay, but was it experienced as a release? Like, oh, finally, like, in 2010, we couldn't talk about this, but now they're all on Instagram by 2013. 24. Oh, now we can talk about it. Is it that, or is it that we transition from stigmatizing it to destigmatizing? Destigmatizing. Destigmatizing to incentivizing. Exactly. At a certain point, it becomes prestigious and social capital.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's true.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And that is a terrible thing to do to kids, especially to girls. And that's what I think happen. The last thing you want to do to girls is say, you'll get more prestige if you have more experience.

[Monica Padman]

I agree with that. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I want to put a ribbon on this, because I think the tension that exists is like, there's people like me. There's people. Steven Pinker. There's people that want to point out that the long arc is very, very positive.

[Monica Padman]

And I agree.

[Dax Shepard]

And what I think some people fear when they hear that is that those people, myself included, are saying, job all done. You don't have to give up improving because you've acknowledged there's been huge improvement. I think that's some of the disconnect is, is, is people interpret that as you saying job's done. But that's not what I'm saying. It's like we're on a good path. Let's not be defeatist about this or pessimistic.

[Monica Padman]

And I agree with that. I think what some people who are listening or watching might be like, why aren't you saying this part? It's just the truth. And this is fine. But normally it is one type of person who is saying that loudly and it is often a white, tall, smart, handsome. Smart.

[Dax Shepard]

Are we handso?

[Monica Padman]

Very handsome, very articulate, educated man.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Who's saying what.

[Dax Shepard]

We've made great progress.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, but I agree we have made great progress. But I think it's easier if you're not one of those people to say, and it's not as easy as saying.

[Dax Shepard]

That and it still sucks.

[Monica Padman]

You can say, I don't want to say it sucks.

[Dax Shepard]

I get so much value out of Chappelle. I just love when something happens and I've processed it one way. I go, oh, I can't wait to hear how Chappelle processed this. Right. Because he is coming for from such a different and unique place than I am. And I am so regularly reminded that this is an all day occurrence for black people. Yes, those things have happened. But let me show you how we got devalued over this other group in two seconds. Or how this happened. Like he's very good at reminding us it's a joke if you think this is over. So I greatly appreciate that. What I'm pitching is like we have room for both things. One is like we have made huge strides and it's still a beat down to be be a black man or woman in this country. Much more than I'll experience.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Agreed.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair expert if you dare. We are supported by better help. Support systems are so important the most. Some would say, yeah, I have a just a slew of people I rely on.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, me too.

[Dax Shepard]

Tom Hansen, I'm talking to you. In a society that glorifies hyper independence, it's easy to forget that we're all better when we have a support system behind us. Therapy can be a source of support for any area of your life. It's time to shift the focus from doing it all to knowing we're better when we ask for help. I have a very hard time asking for help.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, therapy's great. We all, I mean, we can't really say it enough. We love it, swear by it. Yeah, look forward to it.

[Dax Shepard]

The best part about better help is it's fully online, which helps make therapy affordable and convenient. Serving over 5 million people worldwide. Access a diverse network of more than 30,000 credentialed therapists with a wide range of specialties, and you can easily switch therapists anytime at no extra cost. Build your support system with better help. Visit betterhelp.comdax today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H E-L-P.comdax we are supported by Drunk Elephant All. My father would be so happy at the name Drunk Elephant.

[Monica Padman]

It's a great brand.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You may have already heard me talking about my new favorite facial moisturizer, the proteiny polypeptide cream by Drunk Elephant. Oh, my skin is so silky. Silky but not shiny, Monica.

[Monica Padman]

I know. Not too oily. That's a huge thing in a moisturizer.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. We are so excited about this season and we just had Walton Goggins on the show. We're inordinately excited to see his character's journey in Thailand. And then of course, we're tuning into Severance Season two on Apple TV plus with recent guest Adam Scott. Instead of toggling back and forth between different streaming platforms, you can watch both of These shows and so much more amazing content without ever leaving the Prime Video app unlock a world of movies, TV and sports. All check out subscriptions on Prime Video.

[Jonathan Haidt]

An interesting finding about all this research. A lot of this research is done with my research partner Zach Rauch. He graph all these studies by both religiosity and by politics. So on the Monitoring the Future study, one of the questions is religion is important in my family. Do you agree strongly? Agree a little. So five point scale. And when you break it up by those who agreed strongly or weakly versus those who disagreed, what you find is that the secular families, the kids, they go up sharply, whereas the religious families, they go up just a little. So they were somewhat protected. And we find the same thing for politics. Seniors in high school, they added the question on politics in the 90s. So you can see if you say that you're liberal, you go up a lot, but if you say you're conservative, you go up just a little. And so part of what's happening here is that people that are deeply anchored in a community of adults, that is a moral community with an order that is binding, where you have obligations and duties and you have to do these rituals or visit your grandmother, you weren't just washed out to sea on Instagram. We know that liberal girls use social media the most. They simply spend more hours on it. And the stuff they're consuming is a lot of victimhood stuff they're consuming a lot of really disempowering ideas about how the world, you know, is against you. And you're gonna have all these problems and there's so much sexism. It's really liberal girls, especially secular liberal girls, as soon as they moved onto Instagram, they're the ones who got much more depressed and anxious, or at least that's where it was concentrated. And so I think it is some of these ideas about victimh became so popular on campus in the 2000 and tens that are disempowering.

[Dax Shepard]

It's interesting. I've not thought of this until you're laying it out, but it's almost like we do have a natural compulsion to atone and suffer and there's an outlet for it in religion. It's like you're born with sin, you battle it. That's the burden you have. And in the absence of that, we kind of need a burden and we need some toxicity we're fighting. It's kind of interesting that if you don't have an outlet for it and religion does provide that for you, you'll Somehow find it. I mean, we all find religion. I think we could agree on that. It's like if you live in Hollywood, food is the religion. It's impure, it's toxic, it's inorganic. It's all these concepts we just love. We're built to be drawn to.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I would agree with that. From my book the Righteous Mind. The subtitle is why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. And the analysis that I give there is that we evolved as tribal creatures. The key that religion does for us is actually creates a community. So I follow the sociologist Emile Durkheim as my favorite thinker of all time. He said the purpose of a religion is to create, to bind together a group in a moral order that then constrains us, and we can find meaning and connection within that. And when you don't have that constraint, when you can do whatever you want, that's the state he called anomie or normlessness. And that, I think, is part of what hit a lot of kids in the early 2010s, the sense that there's no clear guide for anything.

[Dax Shepard]

The hedonic treadmill.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And if it's just getting pleasure. And then. And so that's why I think we see that finding that I told you about earlier, which is, all of a sudden, my life feels useless. And it goes from 9% to about 20% of American teenagers are agreeing because their lives are useless. All they're doing is consuming content.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, well, let's get into the four solutions. You lay out the four foundational harms, but you also lay out four solutions, and I'm in agreement on all these. So no smartphones before high school? Yes.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Let's talk the day you give your kid a touchscreen device, a smartphone, or an iPad is the day that that will become the most interesting thing for him or her. It's like having B.F. skinner in a box, because it can show you something and then you behave and you get rewarded. So it can train you much more than a television ever could. And of course, they're going to have those eventually. But I'm trying to say let's clear it out of middle school. I'm really interested. I'm focused, especially on early puberty. So around 11 to 13. Let's clear it out of that. The key to the four norms is that they're all collective solutions. It's really hard for a par to say, no, sweetie, you can't have a smartphone. I'm gonna give you a smartphone.

[Dax Shepard]

You're the only kid in your Classroom.

[Jonathan Haidt]

You'Re the only kid. The other kids are gonna make fun of you. You're gonna be left out. So that's a very painful choice. And most parents don't make it. And so it ends up that all the kids have a smartphone. It's now going down into elementary school. Your girls are how old now?

[Dax Shepard]

10 and 12.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Do they have any kind of phone?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they have ipods that they can make their home movies on. That's really all they do on it. And then YouTube, they're only allowed to watch a single show, Dr. Mike, because it's super informative. He's great. I love it. So, yeah, those are kind of the parameters.

[Monica Padman]

Can they text?

[Dax Shepard]

If they're on WI fi at home.

[Jonathan Haidt]

They can text, communicate with their friends.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I am aware of all the fear. And then I have my anecdotal life, which is I'm around a lot of kids, our whole friendship group, and there's fucking 14 kids in the group. Right. And I'm hearing all these horror stories and I'm hearing what people deal with, and I'm just actually not seeing these zombie teens addicted to their phones. I had all this fear about giving my daughter this phone. I engraved on it, no games. So there was no games allowed on it. I said, yes, I want you to make short movies. That's great. And I want you to have music and I want you to be able to read and listen to books on tape. So I'm all for it. And then I just deep panic that they're gonna get obsessed with it. They have it, they forget to charge it. A month goes by and they go, oh, I wanna do whatever, and they charge it. It's just not happened.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Tell me what they do after school and on weekends. Are they seeing friends or are they in after school school programs the whole.

[Dax Shepard]

Time they're here running around or riding motorcycles in the neighborhood. Like we're very just the two of.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Them or they're with other kids.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh. So, yes. And this is what you read about. I'm like, go to the store, get.

[Jonathan Haidt]

The fuck out of here.

[Dax Shepard]

Do whatever you want. I trust you. You know how to get home, you know how to flag a stranger. So they've had really a ton of autonomy, I think, relative to other kids. I'm reading about.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Are there any other kids that they're doing this with or are they the only free range kids in? Everyone else is overprotected.

[Dax Shepard]

They're pretty much on their own. Except for our POD has a similar ethos.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Good. How Many kids is that?

[Dax Shepard]

That is 11 kids.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Fantastic. Do they see them on a weekly basis?

[Dax Shepard]

They see them nonstop.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's it. Okay, good. So let me return to the four norms and then we'll come back to this. Because the way to break out of this trap where we've got 10 year olds wasting their lives away scrolling through TikTok and Instagram. Four norms. No smartphone before high school. Just give them a flip phone, a basic phone, a phone watch, let them text with their friends. No social media before 16. Social media is wildly inappropriate, appropriate for kids. The sex, the violence, the addiction, the drug sales on Snap and other things. Third norm is phone free schools. It's completely insane. When we were kids, you couldn't bring your television into class and watch TV during class.

[Dax Shepard]

That'd be great if you rolled in a Zenith council bath.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, that's right. With your TiVo and electric guitar and everything else. So it's phone free schools. That's gotta happen. It's happening fast. It's gonna happen here in California, statewide, next year.

[Dax Shepard]

That's great.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And then the fourth norm is far more independence, responsibility and freedom in the real world. The key is don't just think of this like, oh, I'm gonna say no to this and no to that. The key is give your kids a great, exciting social childhood. That's what kids need. And so if your kids have a gang, if they have just a few other kids that they can hang around with, they're probably gonna come out fine. So that's what you've done. We quote a play expert, Mariana Brusoni, who says about playgrounds, kids need to be kept as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible. And I quote a camp administrator who says something like, we wanna see bruises, not scars. You know, if you run a camp or if you run a school and no one's ever inj on the playground, you're way too safe and your kids are not having any fun or adventure.

[Monica Padman]

But part of it is liability. I used to babysit. I was so nervous for these kids, but for me, I got fired from a job, not them. But before, because I wouldn't let the kid go down the banister.

[Jonathan Haidt]

The parents fired you for not letting them go down?

[Monica Padman]

Correct. Oh, so you love them.

[Jonathan Haidt]

They shouldn't have fired you. They should have just educated.

[Monica Padman]

But also, no, I am not prepared to take this kid to the hospital and face a repercussion. I'm a babysitter, you know, so part of it is there's so much liability in camps and stuff and they don't want to get sued. And these are realities too.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. Especially in America. But they have all the same problems in Canada and Australia and the uk. So, of course, you're right. The liability section makes everyone paranoid. In this country especially. That is a. But keeping your eye on having a fun, exciting childhood. This is one of the most fun aspects of the book as we go deep in chapter three on play and exploration into research. There's a Norwegian play researcher, Ellen Sandseter. She says there are seven different kinds of thrills. High speeds, great heights, dangerous tools, hiding and getting lost. There are all these risks and kids are seeking them out. They're trying to get the right level of it because that's how you train your brain about where the borders are, what you're capable of. That's how you extend your abilities. You definitely want to always do a safety inspection. You want to make sure there's nothing that can kill them. Traffic and then swimming pool. A lot of kids did used to die from drowning. Drowning is serious.

[Dax Shepard]

That was the number one killer for kids under.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, you need to be very careful about drowning. But climbing a tree and falling out and getting scraped up or possibly breaking an arm, that's something that should be a feature, not a bug. That there are risks.

[Monica Padman]

If my mom were here, she would make sure that this got said. Because I was home and we were watching that documentary about the girl who got kidnapped. And the parents were at the dinner just close by, but the daughter was in the hotel room.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't remember this.

[Monica Padman]

Do you remember this? It was like a big. It was in Europe. They left the kids in the hotel room, they went to dinner at the resort, and then she got kidnapped or she's gone and they never found her. And so I was watching this with my mom and she was like, why'd they do that? Why they go to the restaurant. I went out and played by myself all the time. I think she forgot. It's been a long time. But she was like, the risk isn't worth it. And that's what a lot of people would say.

[Dax Shepard]

But I have a good counter to that.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Go ahead.

[Dax Shepard]

You're doing it all the time. You're valuing one thing and taking on risk because you know it's worth it. So, yes, one girl got abducted in Europe. 52,000 people are going to die this year in a car accident. So you're comparing the incident rate of an abduction versus dying in a car, and it's 50,000 to 1. But we know we want what's on the other side of driving the car. It is too important to miss out on your whole life to not go drive the car. You take on that risk because you want it. What people are not doing, I think accurately, is assessing what's at stake. So, you know, if you don't drive a car, you're not going anywhere in your life. And if your kids don't have this sense of competence and autonomy, they're going to miss out on where the car takes you.

[Jonathan Haidt]

What you're doing here is you're reconstructing, capitulating the exact thing we started with about, does moral judgment come from your gut or from your head and your.

[Dax Shepard]

Calculations about am I the elephant or the rider?

[Jonathan Haidt]

You are the rider.

[Monica Padman]

The rider is, yeah, but my mom is acting out of gut.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right. The gut response is, why should you take any risk? Whereas if you think of that, you realize, wait, if I don't train my child how to take risk, I'm crippling this child. I am creating a child that won't be able to deal with the world. And that's what we've done.

[Dax Shepard]

And if they get in a situation, they're actually far more vulnerable. So. So if your goal was to inoculate them from danger, them being as competent as possible is the best solution.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. And so here, let me just put in the term antifragility, one of the most powerful and important words, a word coined by Nassim Taleb, who's kind of a polymath, interesting, brilliant guy with some affiliation at New York University. And he pointed out there's a need for a word that describes systems that get better when they get challenged or threatened. Even so, the immune system is the classic example. If you protect your kid's immune system, you don't let any dirt or germs come in, you're crippled. Because the system is designed to learn from the challenges, learn from the dirt and germs that get in. And so it's the same thing here. Kids are antifragile. And if you treat them like they're fragile, you don't want to take any risks, then you're blocking their development. And just as they'll have autoimmune diseases, if you don't let them be exposed to dirt and germs, they'll have all kinds of psychological and anxiety related disorders if you don't let them. So I see where you're going with those statistical arguments, but I would urge more a vision of a positive life. Imagine your kid in two ways. In one, your kid is competent and confident and they go out there into the world and they're doing things. And the other, they're just always afraid because they think everything's risky. Which one do you want for your kid?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they've had no opportunity to find out. They can handle stuff. Okay, well I love all those solutions. I've got no pushback on that. Now I'm going to hit you with something you're not gonna like. So uh, oh, and I'm gonna start this by saying I love my mother in law. She's the greatest grandmother's ever been on planet Earth. And no one loves my kids as much as my wife's mother. But this is the pattern of texts I receive. Big warning about 5G, huge dust up about vaccinations. She does not want us to get the kids vaccinated. Couple of abduction stories and then out of nowhere, a month and a half ago, she texts me. Have you heard of this guy, Jonathan Haidt?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Uh oh, links. He doesn't like me.

[Dax Shepard]

No, she likes.

[Jonathan Haidt]

She loves you.

[Dax Shepard]

Links to things. I should watch interviews you've given in the promotion of this book. And I respond to her, yes, I'm aware of him. I've interviewed interviewed him. What do you think of him? And I'm gonna be dead honest with you. I said I think he's among the top five smartest people I've ever talked to. I'm very intimidated to argue with him and I think he himself is caught up in a bit of a moral panic.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Ah, okay. Cause you think what's happening to kids is not that serious. Kids are actually upset.

[Dax Shepard]

Here's what you're ignoring.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Gen Z's teen pregnancy rate is 78% lower than 91. 31% of millennials drink regularly. Only 18% of Gen Z. Gen Z's drink. A third of Gen Z doesn't even drink. This has never been observed. They're completely abstinent. They are more frugal than millennials. They are more health conscious, they have better nutritional practices.

[Jonathan Haidt]

All true.

[Dax Shepard]

They have better exercise.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So where are you going with this, Dax?

[Dax Shepard]

Here's what I'm going with is like you've decided to kind of focus on a singular thing. I could easily make the argument that yes, this obsession with social media and the phone, although may have produced this thing, are we not then going to credit this thing with this huge leap forward this generation's taken all this promising stuff. We know about them. I know of the anxiety, depression, figure, but that's to me, one metric out of like six. And they're like thriving in the other departments.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Well, you say they're thriving. That's an interesting improving on a lot of the self destructive metrics. Their behavior is better. That's all true. Now does that mean they're thriving? Why? Why are they not drinking? Why are they not driving cars? Why are they not dating? Why are they not getting pregnant? Why do you think it is? Because they're so wise they decided, you know what, these are risky because they're.

[Monica Padman]

Not with other people.

[Jonathan Haidt]

They're not doing anything. If you're just on your bed all day long scrolling through social media, then you're not going to be doing any of those things. So in chapter three of the book, I talk about a psychological dimension of discover Mode versus defend mode. And at any moment our brains are such that we have a very, very quick, quickly triggered withdrawal, fear, runaway, protect yourself mechanism. That's defend mode. And so it's on a hair trigger. Any threat, we're in defend mode. We live in very safe worlds. And especially college or school is very safe. You want your kids to be in discover mode. You want them to look at something and say, what is that? That's an opportunity, not a threat. And what seems to have happened, a succinct way to describe the change from millennials to Gen Z is the millennials were very much in discover Mode. They liked to have fun, they liked to party, they liked to dance, be social. They were in discovery. They had now much lower rates of teen pregnancy than previous generations. Gen X, actually, your generation is actually the sickest in some ways.

[Dax Shepard]

We have the highest suicide rate.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right, because you're the most lead poisoned. Lead was banned in the late 70s, early 80s.

[Dax Shepard]

You're the most lead poisoned.

[Jonathan Haidt]

You are. No, serious, it's real. Millennials are the first unleaded generation. You guys were raised at a time when lead was really going down fast. But leaving that aside, if you imagine a whole generation being shifted from discover Mode over to defend Mode, you're going to see exactly, exactly the list you told me. So, sure, they're committing fewer crimes. They're not doing crazy, stupid things. Oh, wait a second. You can find reel after reel of Gen Z influencers who die because they're doing something risky.

[Dax Shepard]

The one that doesn't fit with that is they should have a big uptick in addiction and especially drinking because they're living these scared, unfulfilled, high anxiety, lonely, depressed lives. And it is an immediate medicine that has worked for millennia and that one, one doesn't jive.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Well, wait a second. What percent of boys today would you say are free from addiction?

[Dax Shepard]

Boys are rough, I'll grant it that, but they're slightly improved, shockingly, on drug addiction.

[Jonathan Haidt]

But if we all agree that the central pathway is dopamine, what percent of boys are dependent on external stimuli to give them dopamine through video games?

[Dax Shepard]

Video games, porn, if we're including that.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Crypto, betting, everything. What percent?

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Each of these. It tends to be somewhere between 5 and 10% develop what's called problematic use, compulsive, hard to stop damages. Other things, I've never seen a stat that lumped it all together because a lot of it is multi addiction. If you are addicted to one dopamine thing, and Lemke says you're more at risk for other dopamine addictions. So if you add it all up, I don't know. But one thing that we are seeing is that at the upper end of the income, if you look at the richest families, you look at the smartest kids in school, they're often not down very much. But you look at the bottom quarter, whether it's by test scores or by social class, they are dropping much faster.

[Dax Shepard]

Especially for boys, well, they need more salve.

[Jonathan Haidt]

They're also the most exposed to digital addictions. They spend more time on their devices. They're more likely to be spending four, five, six hours a day on video games. So, sure, you can show me a couple of stats that are down, but I see these as actually symptoms of a much larger malaise, which is the shift over to defend mode.

[Dax Shepard]

So what troubles me about my mother in law's text is she didn't text me to say, you should let your kids roam freer.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh, you should be aware of all these other threats.

[Dax Shepard]

Fear is very tasty. It's very viral. It's easy to latch onto. And so my issue is that what she could have just as equally gotten from your book is that she should have called and said, you know what? You should let the kids go out to eat by themselves. Now, that's the part of the book I love, and I do think it's the antidote. But that's not what makes headlines, and that's not what has my mother in law texting me. It's not the call to bravery that I would want it to be. It's a double down on more fear.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Is she really afraid of digital addictions for your kids?

[Dax Shepard]

Terrified. You got to get every phone out of the house just off to the races.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah. It's a moral panic if it's not true. It's a moral panic if this is spread by news reports only. One reason this is not a moral panic is that parents are not responding to the book because they read an article about a kid who, who got addicted. It's because they've seen it, if not in their own kids, then their nieces and nephews or in their friends. Because everyone has seen this. As you said earlier, Monica, we see it in ourselves. We can't handle all this stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, the most identifiable thing is the endless arguments that exist in a household about this topic. Any parent can relate to this.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Exactly. So it's not a moral panic. It is really happening. And this is why the book is doing so well around the world. Whenever it comes out in a country, I don't have to go to the country, just some parents read it, say, oh my God, yes. Because all over the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time. None of us asked for this. We all hate it. We can see what it's doing to our kids because there is an academic debate as to whether social media is causing it or not. And some people are acting like, well, until we're sure, until we have proof, we shouldn't do anything. But when we're talking about kids, it should be the opposite. It should be if there's a credible reason to think that this is harmful. We're not sure yet, maybe, but it looks like it. And the cost of keeping them off for a few years is zero. They're not missing anything if all they have is flip phones. I don't think that this is in any way a moral panic. What I'm offering is an explanation of the concerns that are almost universally shared by parents once they see their kids on devices.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm in an interesting zone because I agree with you. I don't want a phone in my kids school. They're not gonna be on social media till they're older. They're just not good.

[Jonathan Haidt]

The phones, the phones.

[Dax Shepard]

As I always tell my kids, I'm like, the world is so big around you and to reduce it to 2 by 3 inches, that's not what we should be doing. We should be trying to make it even wider, not narrower. So I'm just in an interesting zone with it because I agree with you, but I, I think there's a little bit of hysteria surrounding it. I also don't think it's Satan. I don't think evil's here. You can make.

[Monica Padman]

You're afraid of extremes.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm afraid of panics, irrational panics and fear.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I'm afraid of irrational panics too. But what if it is rational? Let me just make the case this way. So first let me say you're in a privileged position in that your kids have a group, very few kids have a group that they can see socially and have fun with your kids having a normal human childhood. And I urge that any parents out there that are listening, work as hard as you can to find other kids that your kids can hang out with without supervision. It's very important that they be unsupervised because that's the way that they learn to be self supervising. So that is fantastic what you're doing now as for whether this is something where we need to respond urgently or maybe this is just kind of a problem and we should study it more and not act hastily. That's I think your position.

[Dax Shepard]

Are you open also to the notion that there are these cycles with new generations that are unavoidable, which is, I have some hope that this self corrects simply because the next generation will observe these older kids doing this outdated thing and it'll just be passe and not cool. Facebook went away for young people.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It's cause they moved to Instagram. I agree, I moved to TikTok and then fan.

[Dax Shepard]

I have some hope that this'll be a dumb embarrassing activity that the older.

[Jonathan Haidt]

People did that is possible. And I am in the position of saying this time is different now. In previous moral panics people said this time is different too. So I understand that I could be wrong. I think the effects of this technology, it's especially the touchscreen, the quick stimulus response and then the super connection, not direct connection, but mediated by algorithm for for profit companies. My argument is this is different. First of all, this is global. That hasn't happened before. This is accompanied by an instant increase in all kinds of mental illness which didn't happen with television or anything else. This is something that the kids themselves, themselves recognize. With television there was a moral panic, but my sisters and I were watching I Dream of Jeannie and the Brady Bunch and I Love Lucy and we loved it, made no reservations about it. But Gen Z does. We did a survey. One question is do you wish this technology had never been invented? And for Instagram it was. 35% say they wish it was never invented. For TikTok, 48% say they wish it was never invented. They feel trapped. So this is not like previous moral panics. Secondly, part of the reason I'm rushing with such urgency here that we have to act quickly is that AI is coming in faster than anyone realizes. Think ChatGPT. It'll get a little smart. No, the AI friends are coming in soon. The AI girlfriends will be implanted in robots. What's coming at kids is so far beyond what we can imagine. And the principle so far from the early days of the Internet are children are the same as adults. Anyone can be any age on the Internet. There is no age. Everyone can do everything. That's been the rule. We have more than 100 years of experience in the real world saying, you know, we want adults to be able to drink and smoke, but we don't want kids to be doing it. We want adults to have sex, but we don't want kids to be doing it, you know, with strangers driving, driving. Right. We've accepted the principle in the real world that kids are not adults. Online, we have not yet accepted that principle. And AI is coming not five years from now.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, they're going to have companions that will not challenge them to ever change who they are.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Character, AI. They already have it. So we've already had several encounters with this. We already let social media get to our kids early. And this has been, I believe, a disaster. What's the likelihood that when our kids now have all these AI friends that are so great, so praising, no problems.

[Dax Shepard]

They'Ll be the highest status member of that group.

[Jonathan Haidt]

The odds that this is gonna be good for them are so slim. That's why I do really feel like a man on a mission that we have to fix this this year, 2025. Because by 2026, 27, the AI, the rate of increase, the arrival of artificial general intelligence, the degree to which our lives will be run by agents. So we do have to act quickly. I don't think we can say, well, you know, we need more study. The proposals that I'm making cost approximately $0.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Again, I'm in favor of every proposal.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So let's just do them. Yes, there's a chance that I'm wrong. There's a chance that this was actually caused by some weird plastic that was introduced in 2012 all over the world at the same time. It hit girls more than boys.

[Dax Shepard]

Less Point zero.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Exactly. So that could be true. I can't be certain that I'm right about this.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's a zero risk proposition. No one's gonna look back in time and be like, well, fuck Jonathan Haidt. We could have been on the phone seven hours a Day. And we were only on it one hour a day. No one will ever regret spending less time.

[Monica Padman]

When the TikTok ban was.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I was excited.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I was like, we didn't see protests among Gen Z because they don't want to be the only one kicked off.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Jonathan Haidt]

But they would like it to disappear.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I was like, go ahead, take them. Take Instagram, take them.

[Jonathan Haidt]

They're a pox on humanity.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Look at it this way. These companies are worth trillions of dollars collectively. How much money do they make from each of us? How much did you pay them? I've paid them zero.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So where did the trillions of dollars of value come from? From sucking out our kids attention and selling it and their data. That's it.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, Jonathan, sincerely, it is an enormous privilege to get your time. I admire you greatly. I think you're such a special intellectual and I'm glad that you're powerful passionate about this. I may not have the fear level you do, but it's a true honor and a privilege that we get to sit and talk with you.

[Monica Padman]

Agree.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Well, thank you, Dax and Monica. It was really fun the last time we spoke. Things have gotten a lot rougher and weirder since 2018, but I think there is a growing awareness of the problems I have. My concerns about the directions of American democracy when it comes to what's happening to our kids. What I've seen since the book came out in March makes me so hopeful that around the world, parents and especially mothers are really leading the charge. Parents are rising up saying enough is enough. So I think we are actually going to solve this.

[Monica Padman]

The book is huge. I mean, it's on every list. I see. It was on Bill's list.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, my mother in law is like pouring it to me. Yeah, I mean, you've penetrated. All right, well, thank you so much and I hope you'll come back on your next book.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Love to. Okay, great to talk with you guys.

[Dax Shepard]

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. Hello.

[Monica Padman]

Hi.

[Dax Shepard]

You couldn't find your tabs?

[Monica Padman]

No. So I have a word. I keep them in word.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

But it's not there.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what you use to write, to compose things, is word.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you had to download that program, I guess, right? It doesn't come on a Mac.

[Monica Padman]

Well, they have word for Mac. I don't know because I didn't have to download it for this new, newer laptop.

[Dax Shepard]

But you transferred everything from your old laptop onto that one? I think I did.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, you did okay, got it.

[Dax Shepard]

I use text edit because it came with it.

[Monica Padman]

Cool.

[Dax Shepard]

Now I'm feeling like I should have gone the extra mile and gotten worse.

[Monica Padman]

Do you ever use Google Docs I don't like? It's great.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

But I prefer to have something I don't have to log into. If I lose a password. This has happened multiple times.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Or I get locked out. Then I can't access the docs or any of these things.

[Dax Shepard]

It never ends with the passwords. Who would have thought that would be the bane of everyone's existence?

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

I just had a bit of a scare. So, as you know, Aaron and I are starting a podcast.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So tell. What's the deal?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I think it's going to be called Mom's Car. And I. I am in real life. I've registered to deliver food with a delivery service.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Popular delivery service. I'll leave it at that. And we. We go pick up and deliver food. And then while we're driving around, we read questions people asked. And then case. We did a couple last night. We also had a fun guest in the back seat.

[Monica Padman]

Nice.

[Dax Shepard]

But registering for this delivery app, it was like my Social Security, like, info. I never give out online.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I was like, God, now I gotta trust this company.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

To not have a data breach, which they all have them.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

I know. I was scared.

[Monica Padman]

That is scary.

[Dax Shepard]

What was really, really funny about this whole thing was I delivered for three hours. Didn't get much activity. I thought it would be like, boom, boom, boom. But of course, we're in la. A lot of out of work actors. I think there's a lot of folks delivering food.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I only got to deliver three different meals in three hours.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Ice cream, some smoothie, beverages. Oh, and some hot chicken.

[Monica Padman]

Nice.

[Dax Shepard]

And it was very, very fun. All to say, I made $22.

[Monica Padman]

Congrats.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I got home and I ordered food for everyone that was at the house, which we have people staying at the house. And I spent like $180. This is so funny. I offset, I guess, my expenditure by $22.

[Monica Padman]

So do you only get the tip?

[Dax Shepard]

You get some fee for delivering it.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And then. And then you get a tip. But that comes in a little while later. One thing that wasn't in any of the questionnaires, which should be my first delivery, the person was on the fifth floor of an apartment building. No elevator.

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

So I had to hoof it up five floor. I'm exaggerating. It was four. Why? I didn't need to do that. Four is a lot. I thought they should ask if you're in shape.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I don't think.

[Dax Shepard]

Not everyone can go hustle up four flights of stairs to drop off.

[Monica Padman]

They might have to take breaks.

[Dax Shepard]

It could take a while.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then you could be losing your mind inside your apartment cuz you saw that they've arrived and it's like still torn. 20 minutes.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And then I only got to meet one of the customers because most people, which I didn't anticipate, which makes sense, just leave at the door. People want leave at the door. You leave at the door?

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I have to interact with them because I got to open the gate and do the whole thing.

[Monica Padman]

Well, even when I order here, I they. I tell them to leave it at the gate.

[Dax Shepard]

You're not worried that some of the scoundrels out there are going to dip.

[Monica Padman]

Into it, but not worried enough to.

[Dax Shepard]

Deal with meeting the person?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's fine. Fun. Very fun. Cool. Well, I have good news. I have an update. My cholesterol's down.

[Dax Shepard]

It is? How significantly?

[Monica Padman]

I don't know. We're going to talk about it, but Dr. Richard Isaacson, our friend who we.

[Dax Shepard]

Our savior. Our Lord and savior.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. We did another round of blood.

[Dax Shepard]

Draw so much blood.

[Monica Padman]

So much blood.

[Dax Shepard]

Again, no shade to the experiment we're involved with, but my God, there's 10 vials of blood, right? That's what they took. 10? Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I didn't count, but it was a lot.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It was 10.

[Dax Shepard]

It was 10. Yeah. And then finger pricks, 20 cards. So it's like you got the 10 vials of blood and then all these cards.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, Yeah. A lot of blood. He just text me, he said, yay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I was like, oh, what's going on? And he just said, yay again. And I said, oh, is it working? And he said, yeah, because you've gone on a. I'm on the statin.

[Dax Shepard]

You are? Okay, great.

[Monica Padman]

I'm on the statin and I'm on half of the dose. I was pregnant prescribed, and I wanted to see if that was going to be enough.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

And it seems like it is.

[Dax Shepard]

He sent me a positive text too, that said that I've knocked out whatever inflammation was in one of my vessels or some. Did you get any good news, Rob? No. Must be all bad news coming. I'm sorry.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I brought my. Speaking of that, I brought my smell test.

[Dax Shepard]

You did?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Do you want to do some or not? You don't.

[Dax Shepard]

My smell test.

[Jonathan Haidt]

What do you mean of all the.

[Dax Shepard]

Tests we have to do again? I'm mad that I have to redo this.

[Monica Padman]

Well, that's why it's fun to do it this way.

[Dax Shepard]

I just think so much is like scratching. Well, we can try it. Wanna do a couple?

[Monica Padman]

Why don't we do a couple?

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I just don't wanna.

[Monica Padman]

It's a long test, so part of our study is we have to complete the smell test.

[Dax Shepard]

I wonder if our first page is the same. First page?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's a good question.

[Dax Shepard]

Are your options A, gasoline? B, pizza? Peanuts.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

D, lilac?

[Monica Padman]

Yep. Okay, so we're going to scratch our thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Yeah. I hate this test.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, this one's harder than the last one.

[Dax Shepard]

I always wonder, like, did I get old cards? Like, I'm just going to be honest with you. I don't have an answer. I got. It's this process of elimination. I don't think I smelt gasoline. Oh, I shouldn't. I don't want to skew your results. Do you?

[Monica Padman]

I'll let you lock in before I have one locked, I think.

[Dax Shepard]

All right, I'm going to lock in mine, too.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

But I don't really. I didn't smell this. I just want you to know I didn't smell the other things more.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. What'd you pick?

[Dax Shepard]

Peanuts.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I picked lilac.

[Dax Shepard]

You smell lilac?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

You smell peanut? It smells.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't smell peanuts, but I know I don't smell lilac. Pizza or gas.

[Monica Padman]

You don't smell. Oh, I have an idea. Let me smell your.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really good. We can. We have a control group? Kind of.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's the same smell.

[Dax Shepard]

I hate this test.

[Monica Padman]

Well, now you've heard our things.

[Dax Shepard]

I hope he says pizza.

[Monica Padman]

I did for a second think that that would have been my second because of oregano.

[Dax Shepard]

Thank you. It doesn't smell like anything. It smelled like the lead from my pencil.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I think it's lilac, though.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so I got that one wrong.

[Monica Padman]

Well, we don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

We do. You guys are better at this than me. Okay. I can concede defeat when I'm defeated. I can take the loss. All right, here we go. Number two. Okay, that one's easy. We're going to agree on this one.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, I'm going to lock nine in.

[Dax Shepard]

Hold on a count of three. One, two, three.

[Monica Padman]

Bubble gum.

[Dax Shepard]

It is bubble gum. I got to change it. You know what it was. No, I. I need to. And I feel. Feel ethically fine about it. I smell gum.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I smell gum.

[Dax Shepard]

I'M like, oh, gum. But. And then I went, oh, wintergreen's a flavor of gum.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I didn't even read. I didn't even read it.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, let's do one more.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, hold on. Yep. On the count of.

[Monica Padman]

Wait, I'm not ready. Okay, hold on.

[Dax Shepard]

You.

[Monica Padman]

It hurts so fast.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm hasty. This should be a test of how this may. Maybe this is just a test of how hasty you are. Three, two, one.

[Monica Padman]

Menthol. Yes. Finally.

[Dax Shepard]

Finally. Although we did agree on the one. I just didn't read all the options. All right, let's do a fourth one now. I like it. Okay. Oh, I hope this is D. Me too. It's my favorite smell. And it is.

[Monica Padman]

Don't do that. But yeah, it is cherry. For the listener, people.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, for the listener. The options were whiskey, honey, lime, cherry. And of all four of those smells, I would most want smell cherry.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so what's interesting already? I know we me and you are doing this much differently. I don't look at them, Okay? I do my thing. I smell first before I see the options.

[Dax Shepard]

See, I go. I don't want to be trying to pinpoint what smell I'm smelling. I'd rather know what four options are, and then I'll be much quicker to latch it onto one.

[Monica Padman]

Do you think this is, like, revealing of our personalities?

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe, but look, if I just smell a smell, I'm like, oh, I don't know. It's a fruit. It's a. I know it's a fruit. Is it this? It could take me forever to get to kiwi or cherry, but if I see it on there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but you can also be misled that way. Like you were with Winter Green.

[Dax Shepard]

See, I didn't read them.

[Monica Padman]

Well, you read them.

[Dax Shepard]

That's why I learned. I just learned the hard. I did read that one and I didn't get it. All right? I don't know. But I didn't read them before, and I was like, gum, wintergreen. So I would have been better off ready reading all of them before. Let's do one last one, cuz it's fun. Oh, I hope it's D. No, please be D. Please be D. Man, this one's a head scratcher.

[Monica Padman]

But I think I have.

[Dax Shepard]

I have this. It's not in there.

[Monica Padman]

Stop being so pet.

[Dax Shepard]

I hate this test so much. I hate you, Dr. Isaacson. You're the worst.

[Monica Padman]

You're such a turnco baby test taker.

[Dax Shepard]

All right, I'm just. This is like, again, the least.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I Agree that this one isn't like, that obvious.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. On three. Three, two, one.

[Monica Padman]

Oil.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, mine went grass.

[Monica Padman]

The options were grass, pizza, motor oil, and pineapple. And for the listener, you're probably thinking, how the. Is it not clear?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Those are such different smells. But I'm telling you, nothing came off this piece of paper. I am questioning.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, Rob, do you want to come smell this one?

[Dax Shepard]

There's nothing there, Rob. You're wasting your footsteps.

[Monica Padman]

Don't stop doing that. He knows.

[Dax Shepard]

Stop doing that.

[Monica Padman]

I guess. Yeah, maybe it's.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Smell mine. You agree with me. There's nothing. There's absolutely nothing there. There's no scent. I don't even think a dog. Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Kind of minty. Yeah, it is. But that's not like grass. No grass.

[Dax Shepard]

Minty like grass. I don't care about this one. Like, I don't care if my. My, not my. Smells in decline.

[Monica Padman]

I take a pride in how strong my nose is.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So it could be a blessing, really, to not be able to smell. Famously. My dad couldn't smell anything because he broke his nose so many times and he got a nose job.

[Monica Padman]

Huh.

[Dax Shepard]

Couldn't smell anything. House could be on fire, he wouldn't smell it. And I used. We'd be watching TV and I would fart sometimes, and it would be so stinky. And I'm like, oh, my God. He has no clue.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that part's nice.

[Dax Shepard]

I guess that part's nice.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's dangerous if there's a propane leak, I suppose.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You continued on.

[Monica Padman]

Sorry, I just. It's hard for me to stop halfway.

[Dax Shepard]

You love this test. Yeah, I. I would imagine. I did a fun dad thing this morning.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, what'd you do?

[Dax Shepard]

I Woke up at 5:30, which I wasn't grateful for. But then I was like, ah, whatever. Just get up.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I had done all the stuff I needed to do, and I looked. I was like, oh, it's like. It's 6:30. I wonder if I shake the girls awake, if they'll want to go get breakfast before.

[Monica Padman]

Ooh, before school.

[Dax Shepard]

Before school. And Lincoln's already. Yeah, Lincoln is my daughter. She's up at 6. Yep. They're both my daughters, to my knowledge. I guess I'll never know unless we all do a 23andMe. But she's up at 6. She goes and lets Whiskey out, and then she goes into the backyard. She goes up to the top, to a swing, to. Oh, she journaled first. Then she went in the backyard, got on a swing, got a little Peacetime perspective. Then I saw her walking through the backyard and at like 6:30. And then I open up the cameras and I see her. She goes up to the gym. Oh, so she's journaled. She basically meditated. She went and sat on a swing.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And then she went to the gym and did squats.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Dax Shepard]

This is just so genetic. Right? No one's telling or no one's encouraging her to do any of this stuff.

[Monica Padman]

No one's encouraged. Okay, but this is. It could equally be not genetic as you just said you're doing.

[Dax Shepard]

I just. Yes, yes.

[Monica Padman]

For me that's more of an indication that all that's nerdy.

[Dax Shepard]

I just think it's interesting that one of them does this stuff. Yes, it's been modeled. Both versions have been modeled by Kristen and I. But one happens to constantly replicate the modeling Kristen did. And one is constantly replicating the modeling I've done, which I just find suspicious.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

If it were a little more blurry, like a little more of each. Each person.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And you're right. Maybe I'm projecting. Anyways, here's this girl, she's doing her whole. She's got a routine at 11, right?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So anyways, so Delta's still ASleep again, Kristen versus me. Kristen will always sleep longer than I will. So I sneak in there and I. I shake Delta awake. Yeah. I'm nervous waking someone up. It can make you grumpy.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it can.

[Dax Shepard]

I give her a little shake and I go, you want to go to breakfast before school? And she goes, yeah, absolutely. And so I tiptoe out of the room. They're all ready. And then I'm like, to the Aaron's. The Aarons are visiting. So I'm like, you guys want to go to breakfast? Yeah. I didn't think weekly would be up, but he was up. And then we get in the car and then all of a sudden, Belle runs out. She had a late enough call.

[Monica Padman]

Oh yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So we had a party breakfast. There was five of us at breakfast. No, six of us of us at breakfast. The whole Northeast Police department, the division of the lapd. That's Northeastern.

[Monica Padman]

Uh huh.

[Dax Shepard]

They all went to breakfast. They took up all these tables. They were right next to us. And Delta was like, oh, that's the gun. I haven't seen a gun in real life. They just have their gun on. And then the guy overheard it and he's like, yeah, this is where we keep our gun. And then she's like, what else is in your thing? And he's giving her you know, here are my handcuffs. I go, do you have Narcan? Yep. Oh, here's my Narcan. Whole, like, interactive field trip, basically, to a police station.

[Monica Padman]

That's cool.

[Dax Shepard]

They gave them stickers.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, cute. Yeah, cute.

[Dax Shepard]

That was fun.

[Monica Padman]

What did the sticker look like? LAPD white with a blue.

[Dax Shepard]

Gold.

[Monica Padman]

Gold.

[Dax Shepard]

Gold and shiny. I was like, if you wear those to school, which they put them on their thing, I'm like, people are gonna think you're an Arc. It's 21 Jump Street. They're not going to tell you any secrets anymore.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

A narc is an undercover.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. That wouldn't be undercover.

[Dax Shepard]

That's true.

[Monica Padman]

That's overcover.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. That's over.

[Monica Padman]

There'll be an overcover cop overt cover. Well, that's cute. That's a fun way to kick off the weekend.

[Dax Shepard]

It was very, very fun. And everyone got to school on time. It all worked out beautifully. Breakfast before school. That never happened to me either.

[Monica Padman]

A lot of my friends. Parents did.

[Dax Shepard]

They did. It's such a fun tree.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It's a really sweet thing to do. I brought this up in what will be an upcoming episode, but I watched Shane Gillis's special last night.

[Dax Shepard]

What led to that last night?

[Monica Padman]

We've had a couple people on who are comics.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And Arena Comics.

[Monica Padman]

Arena Comics. And I do think people lump them.

[Dax Shepard]

All into one category.

[Monica Padman]

At least two of. At least Shane and one of them into one category. And then I remember when his special came out. Out. Yeah. Everyone was watching it and loving it, but also, like, it's, like, edgy. It's very edgy. And a few people had told me that, like, I shouldn't watch it. I wouldn't like it. So I didn't.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

And then, because we've been in this sort of world for a week or so with these comics, and, you know, it's brought up a lot of questions and things, and me and you have gotten into a couple things about it. And I was editing that.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh. Huh.

[Monica Padman]

After I was like, hm, I want to. I want to watch Shane and. And see what I think about that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I thought it was so great. Oh, it's so funny. And. And. And good. And, like, then I was like, huh? It's. It's. I, of course, on face value. Or like, maybe not Facebook, but, like, on the surface. Surface.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

First of all, understand how they're lumped together. And secondly, understand why, to me, why it would be like, maybe that's not for you. To me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. When he's doing an impersonation of someone with down syndrome, a lot of people are. That's a big no, no for a lot of people.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. But I've seen his monologue already, so. Well. And then he explains it immediately that he has a lot of family who has down syndrome, and he also, like, has started a business. There's a lot of reasons why I was not offended by that.

[Dax Shepard]

Why he gets a pass.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yep. But for a lot of people, that's just a deal. That's a deal breaker. There's no going beyond that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. That's probably true for a lot of people. It's why I think Chappelle also gets a lot of passes for a lot of things. He says he's lived a life.

[Dax Shepard]

But by the way, that was my defense of one of these arena comedians, which is, like, in the same way Shane's family members have this. And he's immersed in it. Like, this person who's making these jokes has almost no white friends.

[Monica Padman]

I know, but I don't think it's the same, personally. Like, I think you are allowed to make jokes about your family. Like, something connected to your family or you. But if. If you. I mean, you would because you know me. But you. If you went and, like, felt like you could go to an Indian accent because of your proximity to me, I would say, probably not.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. But one thing I'll say, like, here's an example where it does happen in real life. So I run into Pari, our neighbor. I think we've already said this.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And he tells me, like, you've gotta tell Monica to move her porta potty.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And I go, I'll tell her. But she's Indian, Pari. She's stubborn. She ain't gonna listen to a thing I say. Like, I've earned the right to say that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm close to you. I'm making a joke about Indian people being stubborn. Auburn.

[Monica Padman]

Huh?

[Dax Shepard]

And it's a honky dory. I feel fine about it. Pari loved it.

[Monica Padman]

Paris. Indian?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah, he's Indian.

[Monica Padman]

If you had said that to a white neighbor.

[Dax Shepard]

Huh.

[Monica Padman]

I wouldn't have liked it.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I wouldn't have said it because it wouldn't make any sense to them. Well, but Paris knows what that means.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. There's. And this. What you're saying right now is my entire point. There is a lot of nuance in what is offensive and what is not.

[Dax Shepard]

But you would agree it's not objective. It's just like, we're all in some continuum.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And for you, the down syndrome thing didn't bomb. For other people, it totally does.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And that's just where they're at on the continuum.

[Monica Padman]

Well, sure, there's. There's a continuum, but there is also a. There's a reality in comedy math about who is getting made fun of.

[Dax Shepard]

Uhhuh.

[Monica Padman]

And sometimes, yes. On the surface, if someone's doing an accent, it's like, why are they doing the accent? Is it for, like, when you. When you were telling me the story about Pari.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like a better story if it's.

[Monica Padman]

You were starting to do it in. In his accent because you were being him.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

That is different than you just going into a room and doing a generic, generic Indian accent for no reason just to get a laugh. Like, there. There is a difference.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And so, yeah, I get. Guess I was really sitting with that of. There's so much like. I think people think everyone's just offended by everything, but. And some people are. I'm not.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know. But it's. It's specific. And I. For me.

[Dax Shepard]

But I think the thing that came up in that interview, which is really, really important, and I do stand by this point, which is like, it's not okay in a school where everybody. Everyone's white and there's five minorities. It's totally fine in the inner city when the white kids don't have a majority and everyone's just teasing each other, which is a fine thing everyone can agree to. And everyone can enjoy it. If they enjoy it.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

If people enjoy it and are in.

[Dax Shepard]

So my defense of the one person is like, yes. If he's just a guy who doesn't have any friends and isn't in a group where they're all teasing each other. If he's out. Out there doing it, that is a different thing to me than someone who's grown up with, you know, predominantly all minority friends and everyone's blasting each other. That is a. A totally different situation. And the people that enjoy it have to be allowed to enjoy.

[Monica Padman]

Sure. I'm not telling anyone they can't like something or whatever. I'm just telling you what I think is smart comedy and what isn't. If I'm being on. I think people like Chappelle and I think Shane did this in his special. They are doing kind of wild saying. Wild.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. Rooting for Al Qaeda.

[Monica Padman]

Being very provocative.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But they're not. If you really listen to what they're saying. They are making fun of the hegemonic group and all of these things. Or if you're making fun of Al Qaeda, most people aren't gonna be upset about that. When you, I mean, you might be like, oh, my God, he's saying, like, he's saying provocative things. He's saying 9, 11. He's saying, I'm rooting for them. He's saying this. But when you really. You're like, oh, yeah, he's. He is making fun of terrorists. Most people don't think they need to be, you know, you need to stick up for them.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

They're not a marginalized.

[Dax Shepard]

They don't have a lobby.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. They're not a group that people feel they're not get by behind. Yeah, yeah. Those really, really smart comedians are Trojan horsing a positive message into the world under this kind of provocative nature. And I think that is brilliant.

[Dax Shepard]

And I think we all to some degree see ourselves in the things we're watching. So, like, I recognize all those things to be true about Shane that you just said. And also I look at him and I go, oh, the fun for, for me is more. Everyone is so quick and needs to find out whether the comedian they're listening to is on the left or the right. It's imperative. They must figure it out if they're going to enjoy this.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And he is bouncing both directions throughout the whole thing. And it begs of you to be a little more comprehensive in how you're judging the thing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's almost like the fun challenge, which I really appreciate. Appreciate.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. He seems cool. I. I would. I think.

[Dax Shepard]

And also, you know, he got famous first for getting canceled. I know the Asians, which is gonna immediately.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Bring over one side.

[Monica Padman]

Ish. But if you do like five minutes of a look into it and you, you know, he apologized for that too. And he said, look, there's so much of me out there. There's gonna be big misses. That was a big miss.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So that was. That was a fun little deep dive I got. I did.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm due to watch it again now.

[Monica Padman]

That we're talking about it. Yeah, it was good.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. We are supported by ZipRecruiter. Oh, get recruiting, Monica. I love our job more than anything.

[Monica Padman]

We got so lucky.

[Dax Shepard]

We did. I just show up so excited to do the thing we get to do and I couldn't be more grateful. Now if you're doing what you love to do, there's nothing better than being surrounded by People who love it as much as you. And if you own your own business, you want to hire employees who love what they do to boost the overall success of your business plus make it a pretty great place to work. But how do you find passionate employees who are a good fit for all your roles? ZipRecruiter. And right now you can try it for [e-mail] Dax ZipRecruiter is the hiring site employers prefer the Most based on G2. ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology works fast to find top talent so you don't waste time or money. Hire experienced people who are excited about what they do with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free. Ziprecruiter.com Dax Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com Dax ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire.

[Monica Padman]

I guess this is sort of in keeping because this is for Jonathan Haidt.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I saw his book again pop up on something. It's like still number two.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It is a success. Okay. But the Cannibal Cookbook. Okay, that's Nico Clow. Nico. Nico Clow. C L A U X. I feel guilty because I know I would have pronounced it Cls. But you already told me it was Clow.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I just said that. Leau. My maiden. My maiden name.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Used to be L E B E A U X. Yeah, yeah. And then became Labo.

[Monica Padman]

So he murdered and robbed. And according to him. According to him, he murdered and robbed.

[Dax Shepard]

And there is record of him being in prison.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but like not for very long.

[Dax Shepard]

12 years.

[Monica Padman]

7.

[Dax Shepard]

7.

[Monica Padman]

Which feels like a little bit.

[Dax Shepard]

It feels too short of a prison term for murder.

[Monica Padman]

For a murder.

[Dax Shepard]

But these other countries have different approaches than we do.

[Monica Padman]

That is true.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

You're right.

[Dax Shepard]

You could kill someone and make your tea time next week.

[Monica Padman]

I just really liked that this phrase that I had never heard about two types of people. There are two types of people. Those who say there are two types of people and those who don't. I really liked that.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's clean.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's really clean.

[Dax Shepard]

I had AI give me moral dumbfoundings.

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

Because I wanted to do one every episode with Aaron because he and I have such loosey goosey morals. I thought it'd be kind of fun to hear us process some of these things. There's a bunch. You want to hear one?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

The Clone Replacement. They have titles.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

A couple's young child dies in an accident. Overwhelmed with grief, they secretly have the child cloned and raised the clone as if nothing happened. They never tell the child or anyone else. Is this more morally wrong? Why?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Dax Shepard]

So I have to first imagine.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Because I'm going to wade through this. I find this out tomorrow about a friend, about me.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

So I find out tomorrow, my parents had a Dax already. He died. They cloned me. And my honest feeling is I'm so moved by that. They loved me so much. They couldn't. They needed another one of me. I would feel fine about that.

[Monica Padman]

I wouldn't feel moved, but I feel fine.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

It doesn't bother me.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It's just.

[Dax Shepard]

They double demonstrated they wanted you.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I mean, I think I. You know, growing up and being more and more seeing your parents as real people and being a little critical of them, I guess I. I would. I would more be like, they were not able to go through a grief like that or they didn't think they were going to be able to.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So they did this. Yeah. Weirdly, that doesn't have anything to do with me, Monica. Now, Like, I wouldn't think, oh, no, I wasn't real, or I wasn't the second one. Yeah. I wouldn't think any of that.

[Dax Shepard]

So I don't. I'm. I cannot find who the victim in this scenario is. That's why I wanted to start with the pretending I'm the cloned person.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So I don't see a victim.

[Monica Padman]

I guess I would say morally it's okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But, yeah. And again, the stakes couldn't be higher. So it's good. Like, it's a good question.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Because I feel like we all experience pain and then some. Sometimes good things come out of it.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

But like losing a kid, what could possibly come out of that that's positive? So I. I mean, Yeah, I. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, if the goal in life is to figure out how to not be in deep sorrow over that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a bizarre goal to have.

[Monica Padman]

Right. But I guess then is it like, then you really can't feel anything again? Like, I wonder how it will impact you in your life as the person, the parent.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I think for the parent it'd be really tricky because of course I go like, okay, if I lost Lincoln, would I try to get her back?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, obviously.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

What would be kind of unfair to Lincoln 2.0 is that I have an expectation of who she is and how flexible could I be when this 2.0 isn't 1.0? So I think you'd have to go into it with a. A real rigid game plan of, like, I'm not. I refuse to try to make her the same person. I have to let her be whoever she is. Which is already the original challenge of being a parent. So it's actually not a new challenge.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is you've got to try your hardest to let them be who they are.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is the big battle.

[Monica Padman]

But also, again, I don't think any parent could really, if they're thinking about their own kid, could see it this way. But you and I have talked about this when we. We've sometimes talked about other people who've gone through horrible, horrible tragedies of having, like, a child die of a disease.

[Dax Shepard]

I know dudes who are so sober and they don't relapse. And I'm like, so blown away.

[Monica Padman]

Right. But you've also said, like, your best self would just be so grateful to have had that time.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what I would.

[Monica Padman]

That's your highest self.

[Dax Shepard]

I would. And more importantly, I would. I would really feel like I was dishonoring her right. To not be so grateful I got the time I got with her. That's like the weird moral position I have about it is like I can't to be anything but grateful for every moment I had with her.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it. Is like dishonoring her?

[Monica Padman]

Well, then, is it. Is it dishonoring her by replacing her? Yeah, you're right. Like, this new her, even though she's cloned, is not her.

[Dax Shepard]

She's. Well. Right. She's going to eat different foods at different times and be at different spots on the planet.

[Monica Padman]

We also just had. There's. There's just so much more to us than our DNA and our. Our flesh. Like, we have an essence, we have a thing. And that isn't. You can't replicate that.

[Dax Shepard]

I also wonder too, this bond and trust I have with her. It would be easy to think I just have it when the new baby arrived. Yeah. But I probably forget how much I earned along the way of that bond and trust.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. For sure.

[Dax Shepard]

That is now mine. And I can feel. But at the beginning, I was earning. I was saying welcome.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Well, you would.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm your friend. Yeah. I would do that again.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I guess you could assume you have a relationship. You don't. That would be interesting.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And benefit of the doubt and all these things that grow over Time, you know, she sees me admit when I'm wrong enough times that she trusts me.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But the first one, the new one 2.0 wouldn't have seen that.

[Monica Padman]

Is the new one the age. Would it come as a baby?

[Dax Shepard]

No. Yeah. I'd have to come as a.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so then you would do all this same things.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But then that. That to me is if. If it comes as a baby and.

[Dax Shepard]

Then if you're just repeating everything.

[Monica Padman]

That's the thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Is that a performance?

[Monica Padman]

I think maybe if it's a baby, like it's maybe dishonoring the original kid.

[Dax Shepard]

There's some things I wouldn't do that I learned the 2.0 would get a little bit better of an experience. Like I had to learn along the way some.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Of course.

[Dax Shepard]

Lessons.

[Monica Padman]

But then I guess it sort of. It's like then why not have another baby that's not her but is just her.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean that's.

[Monica Padman]

But it's. I guess that's what it really. It's like it's not her.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Unless you believe like. I don't believe that. I don't think a clone. Even though it's technically a clone.

[Dax Shepard]

It is her.

[Monica Padman]

It's technically.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not an identical twin.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a clone.

[Monica Padman]

It's her. I think there are just too many.

[Dax Shepard]

People same as an identical twin.

[Monica Padman]

There just are factors in life that will.

[Dax Shepard]

We live in a different house. I have a different job. I have. We have a different level of means. We. There's a lot of. A lot has changed in 12 years.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Maybe there's something like that. That person had a complete. They didn't in my opinion because I don't really. You know that's hard for me to like wrap my head around. But there was a. There was a beginning and an end end to that. And then to like kind of with that feels maybe wrong to that original person. I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

But again.

[Monica Padman]

But that person's dead.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And if I found out like I'm dead and my parents wanted me back. I. I don't.

[Monica Padman]

But it's very Love somebody else get.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a new D. But they wanted me back. I know the message is still very nice.

[Monica Padman]

They all. Well, yeah. But don't you. You don't you.

[Dax Shepard]

I'll obvious some people would be like oh, let's get it. Let's try a different combination.

[Monica Padman]

Now the study on how much time kids are spending on the phone in schools is. Yeah. One and a half hours on average. A school day with 25% of students logging on for more than two hours.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, what my question is.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Is has note passing gone down by an hour and a half a day? Because I pass notes at least. Least an hour and a half a day. Probably three. Or drew pictures and handed the pictures I drew to Aaron.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So I do wonder if that. Has that gone down maybe? Because is it just offsetting this other disruptive behavior?

[Monica Padman]

I. I think it's not about disruptive behavior. It's about social isolation.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I think it's better for you to pass notes, but I think if you just. I think a lot of people just go like, oh, my God, they're just wasting an hour and a half of their day that they could be educated. I'm just saying explore that a little more. Everyone's missing an hour and a half a day. We always have been. We just might have been doing different things. And then you could say which things are better for you. And I would agree. No, passing is better. But I don't think missing an hour and a half of instruction is new.

[Monica Padman]

No, I don't either. I don't even know if that. Maybe for that study. That's the point. But I think Jonathan Haidt would say it's not like the problem is just being isolated.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Passing notes and stuff is rite of passage. It's part of school. It's part of.

[Dax Shepard]

It's the best part of the whole experience.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It's fun.

[Dax Shepard]

You're just waiting through the instructions so you can be passing notes to friends.

[Monica Padman]

Did you pass in the hallway, too?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, did girls. Oh, I'd write love letters to Randy during class, and then I'd see her in the hallway, and I'd make out with her for a second, and then. Then I'd leave her with a note.

[Monica Padman]

We used to also pass. We have.

[Dax Shepard]

I can see her handwriting in my head.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's cute.

[Dax Shepard]

Immediately, you had slam books.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we didn't call them that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

But, like, you'd have, like, one. You'd have one with, like, these two girls, and you'd all get together and you'd make the composition book, and you, like, cut out all these things from magazines and you tape it on. Then you tape the whole book so the whole book is covered in, like, a particular design that you made positive.

[Dax Shepard]

Or is it slam book? Sounds like you're tearing it down.

[Monica Padman]

I know that that's not the right phrase. No, it's like, I would cut out this, like, picture of Britney Spears and then they'd Cut out a thing that's way cool, but, like, that's just the front. That's just the COVID Then throughout the day, you. You take turns with the book. So you'll write in it and then you'll pass to your friend. Then they'll write in it. Then they pass to the other. The thing is, you'd end up up having like, a lot of. A lot of books.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Because you have.

[Dax Shepard]

Who got to keep them, though, because they were communal rotated. It just rotated. Do you know the term slam piece that made me think of that?

[Monica Padman]

I have heard of that. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That was a. That was a word.

[Monica Padman]

Slam book, I think is what's maybe used in Mean Girls. We didn't call it that, but that.

[Dax Shepard]

I just had a thought. You're gonna hate.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm considering not participating in this part. Part of the experiment. It just occurred to me, like, maybe I just go, no, I don't want to do the smell test.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I just had that thought. Like, do I have to do the smell test?

[Monica Padman]

You don't have to. You don't have to. We don't have to do any of this, but we might as well do it if we've agreed to do it.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't think I want to do it. I thought you would hate that. Is it funny to you sometimes, though, how different we are, or is it just always frustrating?

[Monica Padman]

It's not frustrating.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like, disappointing. I feel like I disappoint you a lot.

[Monica Padman]

It's so weird because I think if you were like, this thing is giving me so much anxiety. It's causing me stress that I can't handle. I don't want to do it.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I looked over and I was like, oh, my God, there's four booklets. I thought that way you were talking.

[Monica Padman]

Then I would say, don't do it. If that's going to stress you out, if that's going to cause you pain.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Then absolutely don't do it. Yeah, it's when you. It's like, I don't want to do that. I'm not doing it. That is a hard mentality for me. In love for anyone in my life.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. For you.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I totally agree.

[Monica Padman]

So I guess I don't want to say I'm disappointed, but that might be the right actually word for it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I can. I mean, I can feel it. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, I'm so.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I just want to explore it.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not trying to.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. I mean, she's a.

[Dax Shepard]

It seems like an interesting topic.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I Guess it's cuz I feel like, well, we all, we all decided to do this.

[Dax Shepard]

I think you're a rule follower, as we already know. And I'm a rule breaker, as we already know. And seeing someone break the rules also gives you anxiety. It gives you personal anxiety to see someone like. Because my position is like, yeah, you don't break the rules. Don't break them. And then I don't care that you're not breaking them, but, but I. It causes you anguish when I break them in front of you. And I guess I can understand. It's just like the thought of breaking the rules is just an uncomfortable feeling for you, even if you're just witnessing.

[Monica Padman]

It happen with someone. Nice way of looking at it. And maybe that is what's happening. I think it's more, I think it's more. Why do, why are we doing any of this then? Like if we're only going to half do.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I would argue I'm going to 96%. Like so much of the stuff is.

[Monica Padman]

Not that sure if I'm. If you're gonna pick and choose.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Maybe it's indicative of a broader fear I have.

[Dax Shepard]

Huh.

[Monica Padman]

With you.

[Dax Shepard]

Huh?

[Monica Padman]

Because I mean, I'll be. If, if, if. If Rob says I don't want to do the smell test, I'm not gonna have this feeling. It's, it's toward you.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

And I think it's because I feel.

[Dax Shepard]

Fearful that like, drinking and using drugs is one of the rules.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, but that's, that's an interesting thought. No, I feel fearful, I guess, that you could abandon anything you've committed to. What if tomorrow you decide you don't.

[Dax Shepard]

Want to do this anymore?

[Monica Padman]

It's, it's that I think really, I mean, I don't think that like on, on consciously. I don't think that. I don't think you're going to do that. I think you have your commitments and you stick to them. But I, I have a track record of being responsible. I think I'm just being honest that.

[Dax Shepard]

I think I'm as interested as you.

[Monica Padman]

Are in and why.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That's only for me to fix or, or change my mentality. On. That's not for you to do anything about. But I do think that's probably a factor.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Gotcha.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, one thing before we end. Jonathan, he has some detractors.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, he has several very respected detractors.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Professor at UC Irvine.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And then that was in Nature magazine.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. She, she wrote a whole article in Nature. What's her name?

[Monica Padman]

Candace Odgers?

[Dax Shepard]

Candice Augurs. Yes. And she has lots to push back on. But the thing I remember the most is her basically saying the conclusion that more social media leads to heightened anxiety and depression. When it's equally or more compelling to her that people with high anxiety and depression spend more time on social media. You really can't determine direction that correlation is heading in.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a very strong pushback.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Feel free to look into some of that other good article.

[Dax Shepard]

I read it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And nature is trusted.

[Monica Padman]

Very trusted.

[Dax Shepard]

Extremely trusted brand.

[Monica Padman]

All right, that's it for July. Glad we got to have him on.

[Dax Shepard]

Me too.

[Monica Padman]

Promote his big fancy book.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And I'm so scared of him too.

[Monica Padman]

You didn't seem it.

[Dax Shepard]

I love being scared like that. It's just weird. It's a weird. This is such a brag. But it's true. It's like there's not a ton of people I'm very afraid to get in a debate with.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm like terrified to get in a debate with them.

[Monica Padman]

That makes sense to me.

[Dax Shepard]

Jordan Peterson, it's like I've had a lot of people go like, why don't you have Jordan Peterson on? I'm like, cuz I don't agree with him.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Nor could I defeat him in a debate.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

I know my limits.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

He is a oral master. And I'd get eviscerated and then I'd leave and go like, oh my God, I don't agree with anything he said. But I couldn't when that argument. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That's so interesting that you bring that up. I think, I think that's common now where people just have become masters at debate.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's a skill.

[Monica Padman]

It's a huge skill.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But it doesn't mean they're right.

[Monica Padman]

It doesn't mean they're right. And it doesn't even mean they've thought things out. Well, they're just good. Very good at communicating and pivoting and it's doing that skill wise.

[Dax Shepard]

I think people who do not host shows experience this their whole life, which is you're in a relationship with somebody and one of the two of you will be a better debater. It's very rare that both of you are going to be completely equally matched in a debate.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I think a lot of people end up feeling so disheartened by the fact that the person will never take what they're saying in because they have won the debate.

[Monica Padman]

It's all about winning the debate. As opposed to actually understanding one another.

[Dax Shepard]

And I, I'm certain I've been guilty of this in the past, but I.

[Monica Padman]

Do think some people, especially in the academic world.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Really can suffer from this.

[Dax Shepard]

I was very grateful. I had a girlfriend who was better at debating than me and she just blasted me several times where it's like, we left and she had won.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And it was so helpful to correct my own behavior. Behavior. Because I was like, oh, all those debates I won. I haven't convinced the person of anything.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

They just lost the debate or they gave up on the debate as I did.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I had the same hurt feelings that she never addressed.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm like, oh, my God, I'm really glad I experienced that because I think I've done that to people. I've done that to people. Not. I think I have done that to people.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Thought I had convinced them.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So the wisdom I was offering.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I hadn't done anything to help them.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

I made it worse.

[Monica Padman]

And it's interesting when we get in these topics that are very emotional. Not we sometimes also we. But. But in general when it's. It's an emotional topic, but one of the people is often like very good at debating or an academic or something.

[Dax Shepard]

And great memory. That's how I would win a lot of those things. That wasn't. No, that was Tuesday. Now I make a meal. Lot of they're saying is right.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. But they're, they're only using logic. And it's really hard in a debate to combat logic. Like you can't.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

But then everyone leaves and like the person with the emotional argument is still correct. Like their feelings are still there.

[Dax Shepard]

They still feel terrible.

[Monica Padman]

They're still probably, you know. Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I've really had to go. Do I want to acknowledge and, and, and, and help to make the person not feel the way they do or do I want to prove that they don't have a right to feel that way?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Because that's easy. That's the most appealing to me, of course. Like, if I can prove, if I can prove to them that they're actually off base and this shouldn't be how they feel.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I will erase the feeling.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

By showing that. Oh, there's no logical road to where. How you feel.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And once you realize that you will no longer feel that way.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

No, they will feel, they'll feel even more like that because probably their initial issue was with me was related to that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And we've talked about this, but it is worth repeating. Emotions are as important as logic. Let's look at. They're more. They're more important.

[Dax Shepard]

You go to war over emotion.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. Look at our political landscape. It's emotion driven.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

To act like that isn't a relevant part, or to dismiss it in a debate or like just stomp on it with logic is. Is so unhelpful because you're. You're removing an entire pe. Real legitimate piece.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And that's why I, I get frustrated. People are like, the science. Look at the science. I'm like, I know, guys, but that's not.

[Monica Padman]

Doesn't matter.

[Dax Shepard]

Compelling if you're dealing with a fear. Science doesn't eradicate fears.

[Monica Padman]

That's very true. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Wish everyone was a logical robot. No one had emotions and I didn't have to talk about it.

[Monica Padman]

I love you. So, so boring.

[Dax Shepard]

It would.

[Monica Padman]

All right, all right.

[Dax Shepard]

Love you.

[Monica Padman]

Love you.

[Dax Shepard]

Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short [e-mail] survey.

[Monica Padman]

Imagine this. You help your little brother land a great job abroad. But when he arrives, the job doesn't exist. Instead, he's trapped in a heavily guarded compound, forced to sit at a computer and scam innocent victims. All while armed guards stand by with shoot to kill orders. Scam Factory, the explosive new true crime podcast from Wondery, exposes a multi billion dollar criminal empire operating in plain sight. Told through one family's harrowing account of sleepless nights, desperate phone calls and dangerous rescue attempts, Scam Factory reveals a brutal truth. The only way out is to scam their way out. Follow Scam Factory on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Scam Factory early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus.