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- [00:02]
Bari Weiss
From the Free Press, this is honestly and I'm Bari Weiss. It's no secret that smartphones and social media have transformed childhood and most would say for the worse, making kids more anxious, depressed, exhausted and addicted than they ever have been before. But one man has given moms and dads across the country a reason to hope. And that man is Jonathan Haidt. Few people have been more influential in both sounding the alarm and offering real solutions to the crisis that our kids are facing. You probably know him as the man leading the movement to restore play, to get phones out of our schools and to free kids from the grip of screens scrolling and endless social media. And his book, the Anxious Generation has sparked a global movement to against the worst excesses of the digital age. I sat down with John Haidt live in New York City in front of a packed crowd to talk about the progress happening in our homes and schools, how to impose accountability on tech companies, and what steps we must take to protect our kids. So without any delay, a quick break and then Jonathan Hite. Stay with us. Honestly is proudly supported by the Jack Miller Center. At a time when our democracy faces real challenges, one question matters more than ever. Are we preparing the next generation to understand and uphold the principles that define America? At the Jack Miller center, they believe the answer begins in the classroom. They their mission is to revive the teaching of America's founding ideals, documents and history on college campuses, in K12 schools and beyond. Since 2004, the Jack Miller center has built a national network of over 1300 scholars who are bringing the American political tradition to life for students across the country. And through their Teach for Freedom campaign, they're working to reach millions more by 2026, our nation's 250th anniversary. Why? Because a strong democracy depends on informed citizens. The Free Press is really proud to partner with the Jack Miller center on Old School, a new podcast about how great books can change your life, hosted by the brilliant Shiloh Brooks. To learn more about their work or to get involved, visit jackmiller center.org Again, that's jackmillercenter.org
- [02:41]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
I want to thank all of you so much for being here tonight. My guest tonight needs no introduction because Will really handled that for me. But if you're here, you know that Jonathan Haidt is the man trying to save all of our children from smartphones and social media apps and really from a kind of technology that threatens our souls, which is one of the things I want to talk about tonight. If you're here, I suspect you've Read the Anxious Generation, and if you haven't, I don't know where you've been. It's been translated into 40 languages. It has sold 2 million copies. John Haidt is like Elvis for 21st century moms who don't know what discord is. But the thing is, when John Haidt gets written about, decades from now, it will be about much more than phones and this powerful movement that he is leading. I really believe, and you will find this, if you go deep into the Jonathan Haidt oeuvre. I never can pronounce that word as I have. You will understand that he is one of the most important thinkers and writers of our era. And that is because he has the remarkable ability to understand and explain our common social condition. I think of his work as holding up a mirror to all of us. So in a world gone mad, I really think that you have made common sense a radical mission. And tonight I see it as my job to mostly shut up and allow him to bring that wisdom to you. So, please, one more round of applause from John Haidt, and then we're going to get into it. Okay?
- [04:14]
Audience member or brief interjection
Okay.
- [04:15]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
We can assume that if we're here on a Wednesday night for a ticket that people have paid for. Most people know your work. For those who have just stumbled in here, I want to give kind of. I want to give them the briefest overview of what this push is about. You have made the argument that childhood as we know it was destroyed, and it began to be destroyed in the 1990s when children stopped playing outside, when the thing that Lenore has called free range parenting, which really was just parenting, stopped. That's right. And then there was another major cause in the destruction of childhood, and that began around 2010, when kids became addicted to smartphones and social media, leading to increased anxiety and depression and all of the things that all of us know about because our kids or people we love are suffering from it. So speak to me as somebody with a one and a three year old at home raising children in a world that has been transformed by what happened in the 1990s and that what began to happen in the 2010s, what should I be doing to ensure that they have a childhood as we always thought of childhood? Yeah.
- [05:24]
Jonathan Haidt
Now, thank you for focusing on childhood rather than the phones, because that's what this mission is really about, is to reclaim childhood. The book, I can summarize it as a tragedy in two acts. In act one, we freak out about our neighbors crime, child abduction, just as crime rates are beginning to plummet in the 90s begins a little earlier. But in the 90s is really the decade of transition. When we stop letting kids out because we think someone will kidnap them, we stop. As Lenore has shown, it's not just that people are afraid of them getting hit by a car. They're afraid of them going to another aisle in a grocery store because someone might kidnap them from the grocery. I mean, so we really freaked out for a lot of reasons. I blame the media, I blame the mainstream. Do it.
- [06:08]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
We're three minutes in. I mean, but how much of it was like the Satanic panic and the McMartin? Like, were there specific media stories that really created this fear in people's minds that you can point to?
- [06:21]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, there were. There were a lot of stories about the sexual abuse of children. Some of them were completely manufactured crazy. Nothing like the McMartin. Young women who work in daycare centers are not sexually abusing children. On the other hand, there were football teams, there were churches, there were religious leaders who were and were covered up. So I don't want to make it seem like, oh, this was all unnecessary, but the point is we basically change childhood by not letting kids out, supervising them. And this is the millennial generation, those born in the 80s, and. And we think that the millennials are soft and everyone gets a trophy, but actually their mental health is pretty good. And if we get into education before, I'll say the millennials are the smartest generation in human history.
- [07:06]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
That's right. Elder Millennial. Yeah.
- [07:08]
Jonathan Haidt
And we'll get to that.
- [07:10]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Measured how?
- [07:11]
Jonathan Haidt
Either by IQ tests. So there's what's called the Flynn effect, where IQs have been rising and rising and rising until the 90s, early 2000s, and now they're actually going down. So we're all getting stupider. But the millennials were the peak of human intelligence because we were born before the emoji. Yeah, that's right.
- [07:27]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Replace words. Yeah.
- [07:30]
Jonathan Haidt
So act one of the tragedy is we lose the play based childhood. But people don't get so alarmed. Other than Lenore, who saw it coming. We don't get so alarmed because there's no crisis of mental health. All the numbers are pretty stable. Some are getting a little better in the 2000s, all the way to 2010, 2011. And then I'll draw every single graph in the book. There's like dozens of them, but they all are. This whatever bad thing you measure, it sort of bounces along in the late 90s, early 2000s, you get to 2010, nothing. You get to 2011, nothing. You get to 2012, 2013, and it's that. So that's all the graphs in the book. And that's anxiety, depression, loneliness, self harm. And in the US at least it's suicide. So what happened in that? Right, so that's act two of the tragedy. And this is the much more dramatic act. And this is 2010 to 2015. We get the rise of the phone based childhood. The clearest way I can explain, I think it's worth taking the time to do this, is to focus on puberty. If you were born in 1990 versus 2000. So suppose you're a girl born in 1990, you're a millennial. You start puberty around age 12, plus or minus. So 2002, you had the Internet, but the early Internet was fun and it doesn't seem to have damaged people. And you're kind of out of puberty by age 16. So now we're at 2006. You're done with puberty. Yeah, maybe you were on Facebook a little bit on your parents computer, then the iPhone comes out and then Instagram comes out in 2010. But you're done with puberty, so your mental health is fine. Now imagine that you weren't born in 1990. Imagine you were born in the year 2000. The older girl, she went through puberty with a flip phone. If I just say the word razor. I know millennials get this welling of something. I do, you know, and you know, you want to play Snake, I hear. I never saw that. But that was like the big thing that you could do on a. I
- [09:21]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
mean it's so quaint. I think back to summer camp and I had this very amazing feminist counselor and I remember like the thing she did was cover up the mirrors. Like that was considered like this radical thing. Now that just seems so quaint to me to think back to that time.
- [09:37]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. What you don't want kids, especially girls, going through puberty. You don't want them looking in the mirror all the time. And even the mirror is private. You don't want. There's a phrase that the English have, like, don't raise your daughter on a stage, Mr. Something or Other. I forget. But the point is, girls are uniquely vulnerable to just the world judging them constantly. So anyway, if you're born in 2000, entirely different. So you're born in 2000, you start puberty around 2012, which is the pivotal year because the iPhone comes out in 2007, but very few teens have one. And the early iPhone is Just a tool. It's an amazing Swiss army knife. No problem. It's once you get the app store and push notifications around 2008, 2009, then you get super virality. You get the retweet, the share button. Now you get social media super viral people pushing things to you. It's not about what your friends did, it's about what someone said that someone else is attacking. So you go through all this drama. The first front facing camera is the year 2010 on the iPhone 4. Facebook buys Instagram in 2012. That's the year all the girls go onto it. And so if you were born in 2000, all of your puberty is spent as a pawn in the attention economy, being deluged with notifications. Thinking this new thing about talking with anonymous strangers, some of whom are men who are masturbating, that's what this Omegle like a lot of you know will remember this. There was this platform called Omegle where you would just talk with video talk with anonymous people. This is insane for children to be like chat roulette. Yeah, that's right. Just like that. So your puberty was entirely different and you are on average more depressed and anxious.
- [11:13]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Right. And when you think about the idea of allowing 20 strangers into your 12 year old's bedroom, that seems insane. But that's what people were doing online and there were no social mores around it.
- [11:26]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right.
- [11:27]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Okay, so there are two major calls to action in your book and in the movement around it. One is banning phones in schools. The second is making sure kids aren't on social media before the age of 16. And I want to just allow you to talk about two stories that I think bring the necessity of those two policies to life. I've heard you speak to a mom named Kirsten Ryan whose daughter developed a pretty serious eating disorder after she was bombarded with content on her TikTok for you page. Can you tell me a little bit about her and her daughter and why that story is so emblematic to you?
- [12:05]
Jonathan Haidt
These stories often start the same way. It starts with a girl and we'll get to the boys later because the boy story is different and it's terrible. I mean, but it's different. So we'll have to talk about that separately. But like so many of these stories, it starts with a girl who's 10 or 11 and, you know, bright and sunny and happy and reads books and does all sorts of things. And then the parents give her, sometimes it's even an ipod touch. When you go back a while, but they get something that lets them get online. And the thing is it's with you all the time. That's the big transition. When it was on a computer, you couldn't be on it 12 hours a day. But when it's in your pocket it can take over your consciousness. And I think she, I can't remember whether she first started looking for just like she was into sports or something. I think she was talking about exercise. I don't remember all the details but. And this is what you find when you go onto these algorithm driven platforms. If a girl puts in exercise or sports, the algorithm has figured in the past. Girls who did that wanted to lose weight. So I'll send them a lot of diet stuff and then more extreme diet stuff and then pro anorexia stuff. And she very quickly from this happy Sunny. I forget 10, 11. Within a year or two she was in the hospital. Her heart rate had dropped to 25. Her family was told she's going to die, get people in. And she did pull through, but she had to. She'd been fighting it for a very long time. And so the point is that these are consumer products that have a very long history of hurting children. They have a huge body count. There are hundreds, I'd say thousands of deaths that we can definitively say it was because of this. It wasn't a correlation. It was a kid was sex dordid and then they killed themselves that night. It wasn't just like it was. So there are these consumer products that we know are incredibly bad for kids and there's no regulation of any kind.
- [13:54]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Can you tell the story about Amy Neville and her son Alexander and what happened to him as an example of
- [13:59]
Jonathan Haidt
what you're talking about? Drug overdose, Snapchat. Yeah. So let's talk about Snapchat because Snapchat is trying to say they have an advertising campaign less social, more snap. Like, less social media use. Snapchat. It's not social media. But that's a lie. First of all, Snapchat was presented to me when I first met Evan Spiegel long ago. Oh, it's just like texting, only with photos. And I was, oh, well that sounds pretty good. But we did a deep dive into it. My research team is here. Bennett Sipple did a deep dive into all the lawsuits from parents like Amy's who are suing Snapchat because their kids are dead. Because Snapchat makes it super easy to talk with strangers because there's a quick add feature. It pushes you to Add the friends of friends. It erases all the evidence. There's no record. So Snapchat is perfectly designed for drug dealers to reach children. It's very safe for them. It's not safe for the children. And since kids can so easily buy drugs and have them delivered like Uber Eats or something he bought, I forget what this Percocet or what drug it was, but it's laced with fentanyl. And then he died. This is not just like a few dozen kids a year. This is again, I cannot believe with the body count that these platforms are just anyone can use them.
- [15:19]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
No guardrails in time. In the same way cigarette companies were held accountable. Do you believe that these social media companies will be held accountable? What will justice look like for these families?
- [15:30]
Jonathan Haidt
So it can come in a few ways. One would be regulation that they're taken to task as the tobacco companies were. Right now Meta has so much power over the US Congress and over its leadership in the House that it's going to be hard to get really anything through in the House for a long time. But what's exciting is that the states are acting, the governors are acting, legislators are acting. So we are going to be getting regulation through the states and other countries. Meta has less influence in other countries and so that's going to happen. A sense of justice will come more from when the first court cases win. The companies have been hiding behind section 230 which says they can't be held responsible for what someone else posted. If someone posted, here's how you kill yourself and your kid watched it and killed himself.
- [16:14]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Not our fault because they're platforms, not publishers is what they say.
- [16:17]
Jonathan Haidt
But the Amy Neville case is important because. And some of us are working with social media victims. Law Center, a new legal theory which makes a hell of a lot of sense, which is, we're not suing you because Snapchat or TikTok, whatever, we're not suing you because that she saw this video. We're suing you because you designed a platform that preferentially sends kill yourself videos to kids who are depressed. Like, how can you be doing this? And so I think I'm very optimistic that the court cases will succeed. And once they do, the floodgates are going to open because this is damaging children at an industrial scale around the world. We're talking about hundreds of millions of victims.
- [16:51]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
What do you say to people that work at these companies that say, john, listen, there are always a certain. It's priced in. There's always a certain number of 14 year old type A girls who are high IQ, who are going to be anorexic and bulimic. There's always gonna be a certain number of boys that are gonna find a pill and take it and it's gonna be laced with fentanyl. It just so happens to be that they found it this way, but it's not particular to the platform. It's the choices they make. What do you say to that criticism?
- [17:18]
Jonathan Haidt
So it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis to investigate. You know, teenagers have died from drug overdoses for a long time, but when you develop a consumer product that vastly increases the degree to which kids, even 12, 13 year old kids, are buying drugs. And when the death toll doubles or triples or quintuples in a relatively short time, I think that's pretty clear evidence that this isn't just same old, same old. And it's the same for suicide. I mean, yes, kids have bullied kids for a long time and some of those kids kill themselves. Yes, that's always been true. But why does the suicide rate for 10 to 14 year old kids especially, why is it stable and actually a little dropping in the early 2000s and then you hit 2010, 2011, 12, and it goes way up? Why is that? And my God, I mean, the cruelty, the brutality. Just at this event that I was at, where I met Kristen Ryan, I met another woman, the mother of Selena Rodriguez. She had had this dissent. She was being cyberbullied. She was online all the time. She committed suicide by taking an overdose of pills. She livestreamed her suicide.
- [18:32]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Oh my God.
- [18:32]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay, Now I knew that part because I talked to her when I was writing the book. The part I didn't know until I met her last week is that the bullies that were torturing her child, they took over the Zoom funeral because this was during COVID So they took over and continued the bullying. And I heard another story of the bullying continues after death. And what I want you to think about is not these horrible, evil kids who did this. What I want you to think about is almost all of these kids were normal kids. These were our kids. But you put them into an environment with anonymous bullying and you get credit for being extra cutting, extra sharp. And it's turning all the kids into monsters. It's not their fault, it's the platform's fault.
- [19:11]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Want to stay on this just for another beat and have you just broadly talk about, you mentioned this, but the differences in the way that this technology has affected girls and boys, because I find this Incredibly interesting. One of the things that's popped out of your research and has stuck with me is the idea that liberal girls are the most affected by what has happened online. Why is that? And if you can briefly characterize the differences between the way this technology has affected girls and boys.
- [19:44]
Jonathan Haidt
Sure. So let's start with what the difference is. So girls and boys, if you let them do what they want to do, they make very different choices. They choose to talk about different things. This is not social pressure to be gendered. This is just what they enjoy. Girls are much more interested in the social map. They're much more interested in who said what about whom, who knows whom. Boys are just much more clueless, and they're more interested in. In pretending, you know, in basically, you know, pretend war. So boys will spontaneously organize. Like, when I was a kid, my best friend and I, we, you know, we organized. We got into a skirmish with some kids at a nearby church school, and we just, we decided to start throwing rocks at each other. But we had rules.
- [20:24]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
He did stone other children.
- [20:26]
Jonathan Haidt
Yes, but it was exciting and we had rules. My point is, girls and boys make.
- [20:31]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Wait, just what was the rule like? No rock over a certain size.
- [20:34]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. It had to be under a certain size, and you couldn't aim for the head. And if someone gets hit, we take an automatic time out.
- [20:42]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Very practical. Yeah.
- [20:45]
Jonathan Haidt
So this is the kind of free range kids I want free range I want for your childhood.
- [20:50]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Whereas girls are just sizing up the thigh gap of their friends endlessly. Yeah, that's right.
- [20:54]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. So since boys want to be out doing physical things and doing play, play war, play competition, video games take over their life. Video games are not as toxic overall as social media, but there's so much else we could say. And again, Ben, it's Sipple's report. If you go to afterbabble.com, our substack, it's horrifying the things that happen there. But the point is just that for girls, their aggression, their status, everything is about this social network. And so many of you women in the audience who remember how terrible it was to be a girl in middle school think about all the worst parts of that and then make them five times worse. And that's what growing up on Instagram will do, and the bullying and the comparison. So for girls, the central technology, I believe, is social media. There's a lot else going on, but the data wasn't showing that for boys, it's not just like time online. So the boys, it's really more about boys are easily drawn away to anything flashy or shiny or mechanical. They're more easily distracted. They're a year behind brain development, as Richard Reeves points out. And so for boys, what happened, I believe, is once they all had devices, now it was open season on their dopamine systems and it was hugely lucrative. If you could get a boy's dopamine system, that would stop it from another company getting it. And so the battle among video games, and then when they're older, it's porn and then there's vaping and then there's sports betting and there's gambling within video games. And then even investing, if you're a young man, even investing is gamified on Robin Hood. All of these things. It's mostly boys that are having the addiction problems. And so what we're doing to our young men is we are addicting them in such ways that it makes it, as Anna Lemke says, if you get addicted to one thing, it's easier to get addicted to everything else. And so now we're surprised that our boys are not turning into men as much. They're not finishing college, they're not getting jobs, and they're less likely to move out of the parents home and they're
- [22:48]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
not having sex and dating.
- [22:50]
Jonathan Haidt
Exactly. That's right. But don't worry, there's a fix for that. As Mark Zuckerberg says, young people want more companions, and so we'll make them for them. AI friends. That's right. AI and AI friends and sex bots. That's right. Okay, so now to your question about the all right girls. Once we've established that boys and girls are doing different things and what the girls are doing, if you're communicating with your friends on a small group, that can be pretty healthy, that's not necessarily a problem. The large groups are much, much worse. And it turns out, as Jean Twenge, who was really the first to ring the alarm here, as she showed long ago, girls spend a lot more time on social media than boys. Liberal girls spend a lot more time than conservative girls. That didn't used to be the case. But as we get into the 2010s, when everything gets so politicized, we get into the great awokening, we get into the polarization, the illiberalism that is, you know, that you and I have really been writing about and talking about for a long time. As we get into the era, the feeds of the liberal girls gets much more taken over by how terrible the world is. Everything's Sexist, you're not going to get ahead. And. And this is like the greatest era of female progress that we're going through. But liberal girls are sort of caught in a set of disempowering ideas. And my previous book, the Coddling the American Mind with Greg Lukianoff, was exactly about that. Here's three terrible, terrible ideas, and if you believe them, you're almost guaranteed to be a failure in life. It's what doesn't kill you, makes you weaker. Always trust your feelings. And life is a battle between good people and evil people. And for liberal girls, a lot of them got sucked into that kind of mindset. And it happened on Tumblr in 2013. That was the transition point when certain ideas were developed. So that's when girls mental health takes a tumble. Zach Rauch, who made all the graphs, did the main quantitative research in the book and helped write it. We found early on a graph that we published in the Free Press long ago, which was when you graph out the various mental health illness indicators, if you graph out liberal boys and liberal girls and conservative boys and conservative girls, it's the liberal girls who really rise first and fastest on depression. And the conservative boys are not up that much. So everyone is worse off. But being conservative seems to root you. You're not as easily pushed into this crazy world. Being in a religious family seems to root you. And those two things seem to be protective.
- [25:10]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Okay, let's turn to some bright spots, and then I want.
- [25:14]
Jonathan Haidt
There's lots of them.
- [25:15]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Okay. But then I wanted to get your advice for different cohorts that I know are in this room. 35 states have enacted some form of student cell phone restriction. This is unbelievable. It has happened in under two years. When I think about changing of social mores, changing of cultural norms, I can't think of something that's happened that fast. A lot of people genuinely credit you for that. I think one of the things that's kind of remarkable about your movement, it's maybe one of the only bipartisan movements in the country that's left. You have both Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kathy Hochul signing up to what you're doing. So how did you do it? Both from a strategic perspective, but also for people in the room that are interested in just political and social movements and their success. What lessons can we draw from that?
- [26:08]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, well, so I look at it. I'm a social psychologist, and I look at how we influence each other. And so there's a couple of key things. I mean, the biggest single Thing was the timing. It's almost never happened that there was an issue where almost everybody could see that it was a problem, but they just didn't know what to do. And what they really needed was a coordination device. Because the key to this whole thing, and here's where I think I did bring something special, is as a social psychologist, I was able to see something that the people who've been studying this for 15 years didn't seem to see, which is that this is all a giant collective action problem that every kid has to have a phone because every other kid has a phone and every you have to let me on mom because I have to have Instagram because I'm being excluded. So a lot of other researchers were saying, well, you know, talk to your child, see what they're, you know, some are ready at 8, some not, you know, like, no, that is not good advice. What we need is a clear norm that parents can follow. And once I came out and said sort of near the end of the book, I realized we've got 30, 40 suggestions. That's not going to change society. We need a small number. When we went through it, there's really four norms. If we do these four norms, we roll back the phone based childhood, we restore the play based child. Here they are. No smartphone before high school. Let's just clear it out of middle school. Let's make that the target. So not wait until 8, it's wait until the end of 8th, preferably wait until the summer before 9th. Give your kid a flip phone, a basic phone. If you need to text with them, that's okay. Do not give them this thing in your pocket that allows companies to get to them and strangers to get to them all day long. That's the first norm. And that's happening. That's a norm, not a law. So there's movement towards that. The second norm is no social media till 16. And that's also happening that there's more delay, but that's slow and that's hard.
- [27:57]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Although Australia I think passed a lot.
- [27:58]
Jonathan Haidt
Yes, that's the game changer. So the two giant successes we've had are the phone free schools that you just mentioned and that Australia is raising the age to 16. It goes into effect December 10th. And it happened because the premier of one of the states read, his wife read the Anxious Generation. She was reading it in bed, she turns to him and says, peter, you've got to read this book and you've got to fucking do something about it. And he did. And so that I Thought we'd have to do it as a norm because in America we don't have a functioning legislature. But if Australia does it.
- [28:30]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
But don't worry, congressmen are still getting paid even though there's a government shutdown.
- [28:34]
Jonathan Haidt
The military is not. But the congressman, it's unbelievable. So raising the age of 16, if that happens by law in multiple countries, that's a planetary change or that's going to do a lot to keep kids off.
- [28:46]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
So no phone until 9th grade, no social media until 16.
- [28:49]
Jonathan Haidt
Until 16.
- [28:50]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
What else?
- [28:50]
Jonathan Haidt
The third is phone free schools. And the fourth is really important. It's far more free play, far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. Because again, this isn't just like technology bad, keep it away from kids. This is childhood good, give childhood to kids. And so if we. And the thing is, if you just send them out to play and they got their phones, they're gonna walk around or sit down and look at their phones. So you have to give them a phone free period through most of puberty in order for them to remember how to play without any guidance or supervision or coach or guard. So it's those four norms. And so back to like, how did this happen so fast?
- [29:31]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Were you shocked by how fast it happened?
- [29:33]
Jonathan Haidt
Yes. I knew that the book was going to sell very well because there was such demand. Everybody who heard about it, me writing it was saying, I need this book tomorrow. So I knew, I was confident that we were going to make the bestseller list. And I thought we have a chance of staying on for a long time because parenting books.
- [29:49]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
How many weeks has it been on the bestseller list?
- [29:51]
Jonathan Haidt
About 82. And half of those, For half of those weeks, it's been in the top three. And so that never happens for a nonfiction book. And the reason is because mothers around the country and around the world jumped into action. Fathers are a little slower.
- [30:11]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Fathers care too, as established boys are.
- [30:14]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. More clueless. That's right. The men are more clueless, but. That's right. But the mothers, they felt. Because, you know, for a mother, when the kid veers off and is head down or boys just on video games, I think mothers felt that it's like being pulled out of their chest, like their child's being pulled away. And I think dads, again, that's just. Men are just a little different. On average. We're not. We don't notice as much stuff. So the reason why it all happened so fast, I believe, is there's never been a situation in which the mothers of the world were Already primed for action. They were at their wits end. They were desperate. And when I gave a coordination device, like they all knew they had a delay, but you can't because now she's the only one. So I gave coordination devices and boom, boom, boom, we're doing them. So we are rolling back the phone based childhood. And by we, I mean all of the parents, the legislators, governors, almost all have kids. They're in a stage of life where, you know, there are governors, state legislators. So that's why this is this major bipartisan issue, because there is no left right here. These companies are destroying Republican kids and the companies are destroying Democratic kids.
- [31:21]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
You've noted Mark Zuckerberg and Meta several times in this conversation. Evan Spiegel as well. Have any of the companies that you've mentioned and the technologists that we've been talking about, that category of people, have any of them played ball? Have any of them come along in this movement in ways that have some surprised you?
- [31:37]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. So yes, one surprise which kind of makes sense when you think about is that the tech industry is thousands of companies started by a lot of people. What percent were idealistic? 30%, 60%? I don't know, but a lot of them were idealistic. And so right away, the CEO of Pinterest reached out to me. He read the book, he said he wants to help, he wants to be part of it. I've done a few of events. Bill ready, he raised the age to 16 for having any social context. He said, if we think you're under 16, you can't talk to strangers. Look for patterns all you want, but you can't talk to strangers. And people say, oh my God, you're gonna lose customers. When he did at first. But guess what? Teenage girls would rather be on a platform where men are not sending them pictures.
- [32:21]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Pictures, pictures.
- [32:22]
Jonathan Haidt
Yes.
- [32:23]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Let's talk about AI for a second. For the past decade, I think you would say two decades, we've basically run a massive social experiment on kids by giving them unfettered access to smartphones and social media apps. Now comes AI. Give us your riff on AI, how this is going to change the game and what we should be doing preemptively about it now that we actually sort of stand a chance.
- [32:51]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. So one way to think about what happened is we allowed some of the biggest, richest, most powerful companies to test their products on our children with no guardrails, no control condition and legal protection against liability. Do whatever you want to our kids. If they get depressed and kill themselves, you're off the hook, that's what Section230. Section230 is not a bad rule as written, but it's been interpreted so broadly as to say, hey, we just showed you stuff. We didn't write this stuff. So we allowed this to happen. And it took us a long time to realize what was happening, and it wormed its way in so that it's now very hard to remove it, to remove social media from childhood. This all happened over about 15 years. We're about to make the same mistake in a much bigger way in the next two or three years, which is kids are going to have more and more AI friends. AI is already being put into stuffed animals and dolls and all sorts of toys. And as we know, AI is an incredibly powerful tool. We adults use it, need it to learn things, find things out. But children need to learn how to do hard things in the real world, with real people before we should ever let them develop a relationship with an artificial intelligence that shows ever more signs of being willing to lie to protect itself, and that does really psychotic things once you get into several hundred rounds of conversation. I mean, the metaphor that I'm working with now in my mind is suppose tomorrow a spaceship landed and aliens came down. And at first it seemed they were here to help us, they're here to serve us. But then things start getting weird and these aliens are really different. Every six months, they're totally different, and they're much more powerful and smarter and things seem weirder. Six months in, when this is happening, would we say, hey, kids, run off with the aliens, go play with them, they seem nice. We would not do that. But that's what we're doing. That's what we're about to do in a very, very big way. And so what we need to do is we need to establish the principle that relationships with artificial creatures should not be available to anyone under 18 until these are proven safe.
- [35:07]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Do you mean even chatgpt? Would that count as a creature?
- [35:10]
Jonathan Haidt
Right, so it's tricky, and I need to talk with my policy team about how you do this. I'm not saying none, but I'm saying to the extent that it becomes a long running conversation and a relationship develops.
- [35:22]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
But that's what it is. I mean, there's a relationship.
- [35:24]
Jonathan Haidt
Wait, do you have a relationship with your chatgpt?
- [35:26]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
My wife does.
- [35:27]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay, well, she's old enough, she can have.
- [35:29]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
I know, but I'm saying. Okay, just think about it this way. You go on ChatGPT as a 16 year old to do research for a Paper, and it's very helpful. Then all of a sudden, you find yourself talking to it. I mean, there's this crazy statistic that something like three quarters of American teenagers say they have some kind of companion relationship with an AI chatbot.
- [35:49]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right.
- [35:50]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
And if you use GPT, you understand why it's so. So powerful.
- [35:54]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. And we were already Situation.
- [35:56]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
So you draw the line between, like, the creature and the chatbot.
- [35:59]
Bari Weiss
Yeah.
- [35:59]
Jonathan Haidt
So I don't know how to draw it exactly, but the key is we have to have age verification, age gating. We have it in the real world and online. We just said you could do this, but it would be hard. So let's not bother. I think we're at the point now where we have to realize with social media, it was a terrible mistake. We need age gating. Once we get age gating or age verification to open an account, then if you're under 18 or 16, you could put the line either way. Once you're under a certain age, the company has to have all kinds of guardrails, and one might be after 30 rounds of conversation, the memory is wiped. I don't know. I'm just making that one up right here as I'm talking with you. But we need to say children cannot be having relationships until these things are tested. We would never let drug companies just throw the drugs at kids and say, we'll see who dies. So we've got to get that principle out. And so our strategy is, AI is coming so fast and so big and there's so much money. The way to win is to win on social media because right now there is no protection and no liability at all for anything. And if we can win on social media, that will be a proof that we actually. We don't have to just accept whatever the companies want to do to us and our kids. We can actually change things. And that is happening. So we're working on some possible AI legislation. They're working with governors all over the country, but it's also new. We have to win on social media. And if we do that, it's going to be much easier to win on AI.
- [37:28]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
So for parents in the room that are listening to this and like reaching for their Xanax, let's do some quick fire. Like different age groups, what parents should do. Parents with kids from 1 to 12. Quick advice for those people.
- [37:45]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay, yeah. Childhood in the real world. The most helpful piece of advice I give that seems to resonate is don't be afraid of screens, per se. Screens can be good methods for portraying a story. Humans are storytelling animals. Every human society has raised its kids in stories. So if you want to have movie night or even just let your five and seven year old watch a Pixar movie together, if it's a 90 minute movie, they have to pay attention. There's moral issues. So don't be afraid of screens per se, don't be afraid of stories.
- [38:20]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
But family movie night better than on iPhone alone.
- [38:23]
Jonathan Haidt
That's that. Those are the two polls. That's it right there. Family movie night a good thing. You should do this. Okay, the absolute other poll is a child alone with a touchscreen device, which usually is going to end up eventually at YouTube, TikTok and Instagram Reels. It's going to end up with the short videos and a touchscreen device. It can train you the way B.F. skinner always advised, which is stimulus, response, reward, stimulus, response, reward. If we parents could do that to our kids, we could get them to clean up their closets, but we can't. But the companies can. They do the stimulus, response, reward. So be very afraid of your child alone with their touchscreen. Not that you can't give them an iPad on a long flight, but don't give them their own iPad that they expect to use when they're bored.
- [39:12]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Teenagers, maybe the most sensitive ears.
- [39:14]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. So teenagers, if you've already given them a phone and social media, it's very hard to take them off. And I'm not saying if you just gave it to them, you can. And if you're in a community where people are doing it, you can. But if you're going to take your kid off when everybody else is on, that is incredibly painful. And I don't know what to advise about that. But I wouldn't say just go ahead and I just don't know. But what you can do is you can stop it from taking because it will push to take over every available moment. Waiting for the elevator, sitting on the toilet, in the shower. My students tell me now that the iPhones are waterproof. They take them in the shower. So it will take up every moment of your child's consciousness unless you put on some limbs. So for teenagers I would say certainly you can put on limits on when they can have access to it. The phone lives on the kitchen counter or in a box. It's complicated because they'll need access to their computers and they can do most of the stuff on the computer. So it's hard. But you can put restrictions. No screens of any kind at the table because these things will push until they grab every single moment.
- [40:14]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
I want to give you a scenario. I was at a dinner the other night. It was mixed generations, it was a Shabbat dinner. So there was at least in my mind an expectation that there wouldn't be phones and somebody else's Gen Z kids were at the table and they were just like that at the table. And it took all of my self restraint not to reach across the table and like freak out. And how can we create a sort of like social more around no screens in a social context like that without humiliating people.
- [40:51]
Jonathan Haidt
But so here's one of the positive signs. It's not like we have to fight Gen Z and try to somehow make them give up their phones and their social media. They actually know it's bad for them. We've done all kinds of surveys of older Gen Z, younger Gen Z, they know it's bad for them and a lot of them want to change their habits. But either they're a biologically addicted, like the dopamine is such that if they stop doing that then everything's boring, they have to go back on or they're socially addicted, meaning everyone is sending stuff and I have to keep up. So again, focus on the collective action solution. Collective action problems call for collective action solutions. So what you do with your own teenager will be hard. Maybe you should still do it. But if you can just get a couple of families and you all do it, then they don't feel left out. A lot of studies show they're looking for a way out. They just don't want to take that alone. And just one more thing to add, and this I think is very important. Teenagers used to be out in the world. They had jobs, they rode bicycles, and some still do, but not nearly as many as used to be. So again, don't focus just on the technology. Give your kids a lot more chances to test themselves, prove themselves. There's a whole chapter in the book on puberty and the incredible importance of initiation rights. And puberty is the transition from the child form of a human to the adult form of the human. And in almost all societies there were adults to help them make that crossing. And the adults controlled what was coming in about identity and morality and what your duties are. And over a couple years the child makes that transition. And what we've done instead, we've said, how about if we adults completely abdicate our responsibility? We're busy, you've got a phone. And how about we just let you spend your puberty on a Phone. And then weirdos on TikTok are gonna be the ones that set your brain. So I think we need to find ways to have our kids apprentice with other adults. Like send them for sleepovers at your cousin's house or your sister's house or something. Get them out of just living with you, get them a job. When my daughter started babysitting, it was like, it just like she was just glowing from the new responsibility. And the money, the money really helped too.
- [43:02]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
But what about for those of us that are older in the room? What about us and our own behavior? Like, you're describing everyone, like, was shocked with the person with the phone in the shower. Like, I don't do that. But, like, I'm very bad. I'm very bad. I consider myself fully addicted to the technology. I don't. You know, I'm sure B.F. skinner could study my brain and see that it's some kind of dopamine response. I tell myself that it's for work and that I need to do it. How should we be modeling? What are the rules that we need to adopt as adults with kids watching us?
- [43:37]
Jonathan Haidt
First, let me just understand, are you watching Brain Rot? Are you watching short videos? Or is it all work related?
- [43:41]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
I'm not watching slop. I don't have TikTok on my phone. I consider it. No. But I am constantly responding to a deluge of emails and texts and work. It's all work.
- [43:54]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. So for people like you and me and for a lot of people in the audience, because we care about our jobs, we're very mission driven and we're just incredibly intrinsically motivated, which is a good thing. And life needs some sort of balance. And the devices mean that it's possible to always be working. So for you and me, it's not a dopamine, it's not an addiction in the way that other drugs are, but it is a behavioral addiction that makes us block out other people and other activities and fun. So we need to recognize what we've been losing.
- [44:29]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
What do you do?
- [44:30]
Jonathan Haidt
What do I do?
- [44:31]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Yeah. What are the guardrails you set up that other people can adopt? Well, you know, asking for a friend, you know.
- [44:37]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, well, my wife has always been, you know, extremely clear. No phones at the table. Even if, like, oh, but we just wanted to look something up. Like, no, just the table. Family meals is just an absolute inviolable space. The main rule that I'm proud of that worked is we just said to the kids, no social media till you're 16. And even though they said, everyone else is on it, we just stuck to that because it was clear even back then that, no, this is just so bad for you. And my son did open up an Instagram account when he was 15 without telling me. But by then he'd really proven himself and he was on the track team and he doesn't post. It was just. So that was okay. That was okay. There was a little bit of teenage rebellion, like, he didn't tell dad, but that was fine. So, anyway, keeping the kids off of social media, it's imposed a cost on them. But my kids actually say they're glad that they see the value of it, as so many kids do. In our surveys, hardly anyone says parents or children. Hardly anyone says, oh, I wish I'd gotten this earlier. But a lot of people say, I wish my parents hadn't given them to me. I was so young.
- [45:41]
Bari Weiss
More with John Height after the break. Stay with us.
- [45:56]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
There is a writer, a young writer who writes for you and has written for us named Freya India. If you guys don't read her, look her up.
- [46:03]
Jonathan Haidt
She has a book in the audience, although we can't see it. Yeah, Freya, you're here somewhere, right? I can't see a darn thing, but
- [46:07]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
maybe we'll find you. Freya, I'm now going to quote from you, one of many pieces you've written that I think are brilliant. Here's what she's written. I've noticed the rise of a distinct Instagram personality. Girl. They have the same mannerisms, opinions, and sense of humor. They wear the same clothes, use the same hair accessories, have the same home decor. They love the same films, the same music, the same celebrities. Even the language they use is alike. There's a way in which I don't think we fully appreciate that our lives are a performance. Like the way that this technology has made our every movement into a kind of performance that's recorded forever, maybe, like, if we can zoom out beyond the phone and what it's doing to us. Talk to me about the way it's transforming what it means to be a human being.
- [47:01]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, I think that's the key word. Human humanization, dehumanization. I focus so much on the mental illness because that's where we have the best data. And then I was moving out to the attention apocalypse, because we have good data. Education levels are dropping, IQ is dropping. So I've sort of, by following the data, I've done those areas, but all along there are these voices, and Freya's is one of them showing us this is not some quantifiable thing. This is a change in who we are, change in our humanity. And so I'm reminded. Your question, the way you put it, reminded me of a line I used to quote a lot I'd forgotten about for a long time. There's a Kurt Vonnegut novel called Mother Night, and it's about an American who pretends to be a Nazi. But it's complicated. And the prologue, the first line of the book is, you are what you pretend to be. So beware what you pretend to be. And what I just pulled out here because I read stoic writing sometimes in the morning. And the stoics, I mean, they basically warned us about social media. Like, everything they wrote is like, don't do social media. And so here's one from Marcus Aurelius.
- [48:04]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Marcus Aurelius is like, don't download TikTok, no matter what.
- [48:07]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. You gotta face down the German hordes. Don't be on TikTok. The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts. And if you immerse yourself in little stupid videos. And for the boys, a lot of it is people falling out windows, getting hit by cars, getting carved up by drug dealers. I mean, there's horrible, horrible stuff that the boys are fed, so that's going to dehumanize them. And it reminded me. And so, actually, because I thought we would talk, like, this is such a good area for us to talk about. And so I looked up Freya and I wrote an article. We have an article on, I think, how social media degrades the dehumanizing effects of social media, where I wrote the first half, she wrote the second. But there's a line in there that I quote from Leon Cass, who, an ethicist at University of Chicago who wrote, shallow are the souls who have forgotten how to shudder. And if you're raised on TikTok and Instagram Reels and you just see animals being killed, you see all kinds of horrible things. You forget how to shudder, and it becomes entertainment. And Freya's article is so powerful because she goes through how all these girls are posing with selfies, like, in front of their dad's casket. The funeral is happening. I look great. Let me do a selfie because I'm an influencer. And the most horrible one. Freya shows this a woman who's, I think maybe on her dating profile, I can't remember, but part of her social media Presence. She's posing on the train tracks into Auschwitz. She was, you know, I guess she was on a class trip. I'm on a class trip. We're at Auschwitz. It's a sunny day. I look great.
- [49:45]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
First trap, right? Like a thirst trap. Like taking a hot picture.
- [49:50]
Jonathan Haidt
Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay, whatever. I don't know about that.
- [49:52]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Yeah, so I'll show you backstage. It'll be okay, but just repeat the line so everyone can walk home with it. Shallow are the souls that have.
- [50:03]
Jonathan Haidt
Shallow are the souls who have forgotten how to shudder.
- [50:06]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
I love that.
- [50:07]
Jonathan Haidt
And so Cass wrote that back in the 80s about medical technologies which. Including, like IVF, which now we think are good. So again, it's complicated. I don't want to just be anti technology, but what we need to do is, is this a technology that helps us live a full human life? And I would argue that ivf, boy, is that a technology that has helped so many people have families. So that's the case, like so many, where technology helps us be human. But social media is a technology that cuts our social relationships. Substitutes.
- [50:39]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
But you're not saying, unplug the Internet. You're not a Luddite. You're simply saying, we need to approach this in the way that we would never give our children a handle of vodka. Like, learn how to have a nice cocktail when you're. Whatever the.
- [50:54]
Jonathan Haidt
I think a good analogy is with the invention of the automobile.
- [50:57]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
It should be 18. I'm sorry, I really know.
- [50:59]
Jonathan Haidt
I grew up in 18. Yeah, it was great because you could go into bars at 16. A better analogy, I think, is the automobile. When the automobile was invented, I don't even know what the laws were early on, but all the way from the 1890s through the 1960s, they were really dangerous. If you got into an accident, glass would puncture you. And there was no seat belts. And a lot of people died in automobiles because they were competing on looks. There was no competition on safety. And Ralph Nader comes along and says, unsafe at any speed. And he brought about legislation and a competition on safety. But the analogy I want to get to is this. If automobiles are invented and every eight or nine year old can drive a car, you check them out, they're free. And you just say that you're 18 and you're off. And these cars have no seat belts, no safety glass, they break down all the time. And lots of kids are dying. Would we say, well, talk to your child? Some kids are ready to drive at 7, some not till they're 14. No, we would say, how about we have an age limit? This is an intrinsically adult activity. Driving in a motor vehicle at high speed is intrinsically for adults and not for kids. So let's do an age. Let's hold the companies responsible if they design their products in ways that kill people when they don't have to. So if we held the car companies liable, we instituted a minimum age for driving, we tried to make the car safer and safer and safer and they are getting safer. And death rates were going down until very recently. Why? No, we're walking around texting and getting hit by cars and we're driving while texting and hitting other people.
- [52:40]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Can we talk about God for a minute?
- [52:42]
Jonathan Haidt
Let's talk about God.
- [52:44]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
So in your earlier work you talk about the philosopher Emile Durkheim, who. I think you consider yourself a Durkheimian.
- [52:52]
Jonathan Haidt
I do. I love saying that. It's very obscure, but I love saying that.
- [52:55]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
And you'll correct me, but I think one of the things that Durkheim talks about is the God shaped hole in our hearts, that we are God seeking creatures, for better or for worse. And I wonder to what extent the death of God, the death of organized religion and civic religion too, we can talk about that has to do with all of this. In other words, if all you worship is pleasure and prestige, your whole life will become about likes and status games.
- [53:29]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right.
- [53:29]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
And I wonder to what extent religion serves as a bulwark against what is a modern form of idol worship. You could say maybe that's putting it too strongly.
- [53:42]
Jonathan Haidt
Right. So I'll just break it into two, because there's two different things going on here. So the phrase there's a God shaped hole in every human heart is a paraphrase of something from Blaise Pascal.
- [53:52]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
I got it from you, though.
- [53:54]
Jonathan Haidt
Well, you read it from me, but I said that I read it from you. Okay, fine.
- [53:59]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
I'm a Haitian and I'm going to make that into a thing.
- [54:02]
Jonathan Haidt
All right.
- [54:02]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Haitian.
- [54:03]
Jonathan Haidt
Very good. Just don't say Haitian.
- [54:04]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
That's fine.
- [54:05]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay, good. So Durkheim is so important. He wrote the elementary forms of the religious life. From Durkheim, what I learned, and this was just mind blowing revelation that the great challenge of human social life is forging a community from individuals that are not biologically related. How do we create communities? And Durkheim showed how religion does this all over the world. And the thing to keep your eye on religion is not the beliefs, it's the rituals. Yeah, it's the rituals. The doing things together. Physically, the binding together around a sacred object. That's what creates communities. Okay, so as religion fades out, we don't have that anymore. Now you could still have all kinds of missions. You're fighting the Nazis in World War II. There's all kinds of things that can give life meaning. But as religion fades away, our communities get weaker and weaker and weaker. Religion is the gigantic source of social capital in the United States. We're a very religious country compared to Europe. Durkheim's important for showing us that religion creates cohesiveness in communities. And what's behind all of this? A lot of this is the loss of a sense of community, which is related to the loss of the stepping back with the loss of God and religion and such practice, the loss of embodiment. We don't have rituals together. So that's the Durkheim piece. From a sociological perspective, God does really good things for societies. Not all over the world, there are all kinds of problems. But in America we had a free market in gods and religions. They had to compete by being nice and attracting people. Our religions turn out to produce a lot of social capital. This is the Robert Putnam argument. The Pascal argument is I think more central to where you're going with this, which is if we do have a God shaped hole in our heart. And I wrote in the Righteous Mind, I'm a Jewish atheist, I don't believe in God. I was never able to believe in God. But studying moral psychology convinced me that we evolved to be religious. This is part of our biological and cultural evolution. We want sacredness. We need to bind together. We have a God shaped whole. And if it doesn't get filled by God or something noble, it can be some quest for being a chivalrous gentleman, just something uplifting. And if instead you just pump it full of garbage like TikTok garbage, if that's what is going into your heart, you're not going to come out right. You're going to come out not fully human. And so I think social media is the ultimate technology that makes us less human across many, many dimensions. And again, can't we just stop? Especially for the kids, just put on a minimum age.
- [56:41]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
I want to take some questions from the audience. If we can maybe bring the house lights up a little bit. There's going to be a microphone somewhere. I can't see you guys yet. But we're going to fix that right now. And we specifically would love to hear questions from parents or if you are a member of Gen Z or younger. We would really, really love to hear from you. So the microphone is right there and. Yes.
- [57:08]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. And let me just also say.
- [57:10]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
We'll bring the microphone to you.
- [57:11]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. We've been talking about what happened to people born after 1995 to Gen Z. And my whole book is about what happened to your generation. And so especially if there's anyone in the audience who was born after 1995 who thinks that I got this wrong, who thinks I've mischaracterized what's been happening, please do come up and tell us. And that makes for a good discussion.
- [57:31]
Audience member (parent)
Yes, I am definitely not born after that age.
- [57:35]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay.
- [57:35]
Audience member (parent)
I have 20 and 21 year old boys. And in many ways video games were their thing. They were less concerned with other sort of the things that I think have tormented girls. But a new app has. Has sort of like flooded colleges and it's called the T. Yeah.
- [57:57]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Oh, yeah.
- [57:58]
Audience member (parent)
And I had this very interesting interaction with both my sons which was on the one hand it was like, am I on it? And the other hand was like, I don't know if I want to know. And then it's obsessive.
- [58:12]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Explain what I'm saying. For people in this reset, it's a,
- [58:15]
Audience member (parent)
it's only for women. It is an anonymous. And women, girls, anyone can put anything up there. And it can be terrible things. About a young man, it could be, oh, he's a great guy. There's slightly less of that. Oh, do you know the tea about this person? And then this cavalcade of horrible things will follow. As a mother of a son who had mental health issues when he was younger, I remember Dr. Kopowitz saying his frontal lobe was not gonna close. 24 to 26 is the age you gave me. So I first of all, thank you for what you're doing. I feel like my children missed a little bit of this moment, but as a 55 year old, I know I need to step away. So I'm listening to you for myself too, but I'm watching the devastation of what an anonymous mob. I think it was supposed to be well intended, but what young men are now worried about. That's right. And I was wondering how you feel about that. And as we take that older.
- [59:18]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, that's right, sure. Thank you. So in social psychology, we know that people care a lot about accountability and managing the reputation. And if you give them, if you let them be anonymous and interact with people completely anonymously or wearing masks in such a way that within this weird, closed fake economy of prestige, they get points by being more cruel. You're going to turn people into monsters. And that's what we're doing. It's like with the kids who took over the Zoom funeral. So any sort of app that encourages people to say mean things about others is a terrible thing. And I especially don't want children to be exposed to it. Of course Once you're over 18 you can make those choices, but now we have to persuade them, like just don't be. Well, of course boys aren't allowed. This is doing something to the girls. But I'd rather answer your question in a broader way because I know, you know, what I found is that people with kids under 10 love the book. They're so excited to get started and families with kids over 18 are like, oh my God, what did we do? We didn't know. And we really didn't know. Five, 10 years, we really didn't know. So the hopeful thing I can tell you is that because I teach a course at NYU called Flourishing and it originally started for MBA students was at how to have better work, life balance and what should you do to enjoy your job and find your. All that. But once it was clear that our undergrads were depressed as they are everywhere, just high rates, I made it into an undergrad version. And These are all 19, 20 year old students at NYU and most of them have problems with too much social media, other things and they want to change, they know it's bad for them, but they just haven't been able to do it. But when we do it together and they do certain readings and I challenge them to just, just get it off your phone, just try that. And they say, oh my God, I have so many hours a day more now there's not on my phone. So what I'm saying is Gen Z is not in denial. They see the problems and many, most of them want to change. They're afraid of separating, they're afraid of being alone. So if your son agrees that there's a problem with this way of living, or if any of us parents especially have daughters that are on this, Gen Z movements are arising. Gen Z is really getting into the act now. If you go to our webpage, anxiousgeneration.com, we have aligned organizations. There's like a hundred organizations and dozens of them are now run by members of Gen Z. So you're right that the frontal cortex finishes myelinating around 24, 25. You can still change your habits at any age. But it's really important that people in their late teens and early 20s change their habits now, because that really will help their brain get into the functional shape of being more effective socially and being happier.
- [61:47]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
But is there a role, forgive me for shame, like people that are joining anonymous online mobs, that should be a shameful behavior in our society.
- [61:56]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, I agree. I'd like to make it that because there are certain activities that will turn you into a monster, at least they'll push you that way. They will dehumanize you. And, you know, it's tricky to advocate bring shame back, but bring shame back. Well, hold on a second.
- [62:15]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Like, there's good kinds of shame.
- [62:17]
Jonathan Haidt
Well, that's right. And this is, again, this is, you know, the anthropologists know this, that societies, if you don't have rule of law and all that, I mean, societies are kept together by shame.
- [62:25]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
And there are certain things that should be taboo.
- [62:28]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. What we have to realize is that a little bit of shame at the proper times is a necessary and healthy thing. You would not want to raise a child without any sense of shame ever. But shame is one of these emotions that so easily gets ramped up because it's so fun for people to shame someone else. So that's where you get the cruelty, and that's where you get the savagery and the bullying and the scarring for life. So shame is volatile stuff. So I'd have to do a lot of thinking about that, about how could we have a system that has just the right amount of shame.
- [62:56]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
This is a good essay.
- [62:57]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay, well,
- [62:59]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
let's go in the middle.
- [63:01]
Jonathan Haidt
Do we have any Gen Z?
- [63:03]
Audience member (young adult or student)
I'm just wondering if you see a socioeconomic disparity in Gen Z. Because I grew up in a very impoverished part of the deep South. And what I've noticed is that the people that I went to school with who are on the same socioeconomic level as me, tend to live pretty healthy lives. And the rich kids that went to private school are the ones who. We've witnessed struggle a lot since then because we didn't have those technologies growing up, whereas they had those in excess.
- [63:28]
Jonathan Haidt
Ah. How old are you, if I may ask?
- [63:31]
Audience member (young adult or student)
I'm 27.
- [63:32]
Jonathan Haidt
27. So you're just the very beginning of Gen Z. Got it. Okay, so let's get the other questions.
- [63:35]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Let's do two questions together.
- [63:40]
Audience member (young adult or student)
I'm 18 and I grew up without social media. And we're still there.
- [63:48]
Jonathan Haidt
Where's your mom? Applause for the mom or for you?
- [63:51]
Audience member (young adult or student)
Shout out, where's your mom?
- [63:52]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Right here. Right here.
- [63:53]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay.
- [63:54]
Audience member (young adult or student)
And homeschooled. So, like, very like. And I Just got to college.
- [63:59]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
You sound like a future free presser.
- [64:04]
Audience member (young adult or student)
And I just got to college and obviously, obviously, everybody uses social media, uses it to find out events. A lot of clubs communicate through that. And I was wondering if you guys had any advice for how to navigate college while trying to stay off social media.
- [64:16]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. So first, let me just ask, when people hear you don't have social media, do they feel pity or contempt or admiration? What do they express? Do they say, wow, are they more
- [64:28]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
weirded out by the homeschoolness or the social media?
- [64:32]
Audience member (young adult or student)
Pretty weirded out by the homeschoolness. There's contempt. There's a lot of people definitely want to. Want to change, want to be like. To be off it a little more.
- [64:42]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. So this is what I'm hearing more and more because I'm encouraging students to just quit. Just quit. TikTok in particular. And one of the things that persuades them is it turns out whenever someone says, oh, I don't have social media, almost always people are like, wow, that's really cool. I wish I could do that. Now, when my. My daughter doesn't have social media, but she tells me that her friends will clue her in if there's something, you know, because she texts. She has a phone, she's on text, she has email, she, you know, so if you have a friend who will clue you in when there's something important. So, yeah, I don't want to. I mean, at some point, well, I don't want to offer advice about whether you should get social media, but only use it sparingly. I just don't know at that age. So remember that in the long run, you're going to be so glad that you went through these years and these difficulties, and a lot of your friends are going to deeply regret that they gave up half of their conscious childhood to garbage. Now to your question about social class. So the dose makes the poison to some extent. And the rich kids who were born in 1996 or so like you, or six or seven like you, they were more likely to get the phones early. And so you're going to see the mental illness hit first there. Perhaps that might be what's happening. But I can tell you we've looked. Gene Twenge and I have looked at all kinds of graphs. You cut it any which way you want. Everyone is doing much worse. Other than the religious factor and the conservative factor and the gender factor, those are differences. But social class, everyone's doing much worse. The crucial thing we need to understand about social class is that rich kids and kids whose parents make technology have all kinds of limits. As your wife wrote, the parents in Silicon Valley make their nannies sign contracts pledging that they will not let the kids see this stuff because they know this stuff is so bad for them. What happens is rich kids or kids with two married parents, college educated parents, they generally have some controls and they're on two hours less a day compared to if you're a single mom, low income, two jobs. The iPad is the opposite of what
- [66:44]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
you're saying you're seeing.
- [66:44]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right now it's the working class kids, the lower class kids who have it worse. And that's one of the reasons why phone free schools is so important. If you care about equity. And of course, that might be a controversial word, there's all kinds of meanings of equity, but we all care about everyone having a chance. Whatever this technology is coming in the upper quarter, the upper half of the country has some protections from it, and the bottom half has none. And they're on it a lot more. And this is why what we're seeing is in educational stats, we're seeing, it's not so much by race or ses, but we're seeing the most able students are not doing much worse. They're not getting stupider, but the bottom half are declining. They literally know less since 2015. Not since 2020, not since COVID So whatever's happening, that's really hurting low SES kids even more for a lot of reasons.
- [67:37]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Is there anyone here that works at a big tech company that wants to push back on something John has said tonight? Let's go right over here to the corner.
- [67:44]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay. Please
- [67:48]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
make it spicy.
- [67:50]
Audience member or brief interjection
So for the last, the last few years, I've been the special advisor to Jimmy Donaldson.
- [67:55]
Jonathan Haidt
To who?
- [67:56]
Audience member or brief interjection
Mr. Beast.
- [67:57]
Jonathan Haidt
Oh, okay.
- [67:58]
Audience member or brief interjection
So he's the biggest content creator in the world.
- [68:00]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah.
- [68:00]
Audience member or brief interjection
So I'm going to be a little bit of a devil's advocate.
- [68:02]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
We know who Mr. Beast is.
- [68:03]
Audience member or brief interjection
Okay. Firstly, I think you do terrific work, Jonathan. Amazing work.
- [68:07]
Jonathan Haidt
Thank you.
- [68:08]
Audience member or brief interjection
But I think our argument, our average, our average post is about 104.2 million. That's the average post. Our target audience is Gen Z. Okay. That gives us a captive audience, which is, you know, it's a large sample. When we speak to these kids, they're saying, you're right, they know that. Exactly what you're saying. But they're saying you're treating the symptom, not the disease. Meaning once you take issue with certain things that social media is disseminating which are wrong. And it's causing depression and anxiety. For example, that money and fame will bring happiness, or sex, drugs and rock and roll will bring. That's the real message. In other words, what they're saying is that it's amazing work that you're doing. You know, this is a hypodermic needle in my pocket. But all you're doing is saying, start using it later. What about taking issue with the disease? Which is. That's the real issue.
- [69:04]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay, no, thank you. So the question is sort of design versus content. Well, I'm talking mostly about design, and you're asking, well, what about the content being sent out? And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is the fact that in the United States, Section 230 and the First Amendment have been interpreted so such that anything about the government telling platforms what can and can't be said is censorship. And as we know, that actually has happened. So it's a complicated issue. We have to be very careful about that. But the other reason is because I'm a social psychologist who studies intuition. And my research shows that people are influenced by information, if they need a fact, but they're much more influenced by prestige, not by what is being said. And so if people are pushing something or other and they're super famous and everyone's talking about it, they're gonna copy that. They're not gonna necessarily listen to the facts being said. It's like that's what they're locking onto. This is called prestige bias. It's a learning technique that speeds up our learning as cultural creatures. And so, well, I shouldn't go on air saying anything bad about Mr. Beast. So you know what? I think I just won't. There's a lot of good things he's doing, but I do what little I've seen. I do wonder about the fact that so many people aspire. They see him as a role model, and in some ways he certainly is. But they see that, you know, being big on YouTube, being an influencer is the thing that is.
- [70:23]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
The number one career that Gen Z wants to be is influencer.
- [70:28]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right.
- [70:29]
Audience member or brief interjection
We asked a sample group, would you rather be famous or happy?
- [70:33]
Jonathan Haidt
And they said, famous. They all said famous. Yeah, that's right, exactly 97%. We did not evolve to be happy. We evolved to be socially successful. That's what our circuitry is designed for, not happiness.
- [70:45]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Let's take one more question, and then we're gonna end with a question about happiness. Who do you wanna hear from? What's the kind of. Okay, you. But then we'll have a lot of front row bias privilege. And I want somebody maybe in the back, maybe right here on the end. Yeah. Gray sweater. As a parent of a tween female, what advice would you give? Like an elevator pitch to your child saying, how come I can't have it? All my friends are on it. Is there something that would resonate that you. I mean, listen, I know it depends on the kid, but a quick elevator pitch? We're not going into all the science, we're not going into all the research that we can really tell our kids.
- [71:30]
Bari Weiss
Yes.
- [71:31]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Yeah, I need a TikTok video version of what to explain someone's film right now so that it's not a fight. And it hasn't gotten there yet, but
- [71:42]
Audience member (parent)
this would be helpful.
- [71:43]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay. And the issue is phone or social media.
- [71:46]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
We're not at either yet. So I guess the issue would be, I mean, do we have time to do both? Can you give a little vote?
- [71:54]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay. Yeah. So I would say first, prepare for the elevator ride by talking to the parents of two or three of your kid's friends. Because if you can say so, if you can say, you know, we've all been talking about this. We all want the best for you. We see what's happening. Do you see what's happening? Do you see that something changes when your friends got on Instagram? And we've decided we're going to delay till 16. This is what's happening across the country. Lots of families are doing it and we're doing it. As long as they know they're not alone. The resistance is probably going to be not as bad as you think. And that's what we've seen with phone free schools. Everyone expected, oh, my God, the kids are going to panic. They're going to have breakdowns. They're going to be so upset. But it turns out, hey, if everyone else doesn't have it, I'm fine with not having it. So again, be a social psychologist here and think about. She is totally focused on her relationships and her status. So try to put that at ease.
- [72:50]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
But what's the why?
- [72:52]
Jonathan Haidt
What's the why?
- [72:52]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
What's the the why that we're explaining to them?
- [72:55]
Jonathan Haidt
Because I want you to grow up into a competent, capable, smart person. And kids who are growing up online turn into shallow morons.
- [73:05]
Audience member (parent)
Sold.
- [73:11]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
I want to ask you one last question, and this has been amazing, and thank you to everyone for these incredible questions. I wish we could get to all of them. We will find ways to Answer your many questions. It's really a question about human flourishing, which I feel is at the basis of all of your work. And that statistic that most young people would rather be famous than happy didn't seem to surprise you based on what human beings go for. And I don't know, I feel that the question of meaninglessness in our age is maybe the most profound one that underlies all of this. Leave everyone here with a little advice, not for the tween and the phone, although that's really important. But the question that all of us face, which is how do we live a meaningful life in an age of constant distraction, in an age where there's so many things that feel like they're. We haven't talked about polarization and politics and all the things you and I talk about all the time, but what are just the ingredients for a meaningful life that the Stoics would believe in and that we can take with us even in the 21st century?
- [74:24]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. So as a social psychologist who studies evolution and culture, I start from the position that we're ultrasocial creatures. We evolved to be almost hive like bees, in a sense, a little bit. And when we are made to live in other ways, we can still flourish if we're able to keep close connections. We can live in giant cities, but we still have to have our hive, our group. And we're also an industrious species, and we judge others for being lazy. We want people who are making a contribution. We need to feel useful. And the way that you feel useful is because you do things for others. And people depend on you, and they rely on you. And kids who grew up in rural areas or farm areas, they're given duties from the time they're 7, 8, 9, they know they're useful, everybody needs them. And they're immersed in kind of a stable set of concepts and ideas and religions and traditions. So we have to see ourselves as being kind of like plants almost, that have to be rooted in soil, and that soil has to have some nutrients. And to the extent that technology has basically been causing us to raise our children as planned, plants just floating in the air where there are no nutrients, there's no water, they're going to wilt. And the more we can plant our kids in a real world community of adults who will still be there three years from now, whereas everything online, they're gone the next day. I mean, there's no stability. You're trying to raise your kids in the middle of a whirlwind. So if we see Ourselves as kind of like plants that need certain conditions to flourish. And the two major conditions, this is like the two pillars of, of clinical psychology are love and work. That's what Sigmund Freud said memorably when he was asked about what is mental health. And he said, if you can love and you can work, that's basically, that's most of it. And so if the technology means that the next generation will not be working much because there won't be many jobs, but don't worry, they'll have ubi, that's the worst possible world because now we're saying the technology is going to make all of you useless. We'll give you life support. You can spend your days watching short videos and porn. This is an incredibly useless, meaningless life. And that's where we're headed if we don't stop this now. That's why we have to stop it with social media. And that will give us the courage and the knowledge that we can do it for AI, because AI is going to do that. But I'm glad that you ended on the concept of flourishing, because it's like you have to see things embedded in things. If our children are not flourishing, flourishing because we ripped out the roots, we don't let them root again. Everyone should read Lenore Skenazi's book, Free Range Kids. Everybody should go to Anxious Generation. Applause for Lenore. Everyone should go to anxiousgeneration.com that's the central website for our movement. Sign up for our mailings, become part of the movement. Support us. If you're philanthropically inclined to push for phone. Well, in New York we've got phone free schools, so we're done with that. That's great. But then we're embedded in a larger ecosystem, our democracy, which is in trouble, which is in big trouble. And I feel like, well, that's a much harder problem to solve. But if we can solve this one and it's bipartisan and we show that we actually can do hard things when we work together, that'll just make me much more hopeful about the democracy issues if we can get this right.
- [77:52]
Interviewer (possibly Bari Weiss or host)
Ladies and gentlemen, Jonathan Haidt.
- [78:01]
Bari Weiss
Thanks for listening. Of all the things that we do here in the free press, these live events and debates are, I think, my favorite. And I hope you got a sense of why, when you listened to the kinds of questions, the kind of brilliant and thoughtful and nuanced questions that people bring to these conversations. So catch us at one of these events around the country. And last but not least, if you want to support these kinds of conversations. If you want to support this show more broadly, there's just one way to do it. It's by going to the Free Press's website@vfp.com and becoming a subscriber today. Thanks, and I'll see you next time.