The 12 Books of Christmas | The Anxious Generation: Jonathan Haidt on How Smartphones Rewired Childhood

Summary

Podcast Summary

Intelligence Squared:

The 12 Books of Christmas | The Anxious Generation – Jonathan Haidt on How Smartphones Rewired Childhood
Host: Sarah Montagu
Guest: Jonathan Haidt (social psychologist and author)
Date: December 15, 2024

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Episode Overview

This live episode features a conversation with Jonathan Haidt about his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The discussion explores the profound impact of smartphones and social media on Gen Z’s mental health and development, the decline of independence and risky play in childhood, and how both technological and societal changes have created a youth mental health crisis. Haidt and Montagu debate the evidence, dissect causality vs. correlation, and examine both personal and collective solutions for parents, schools, and policymakers.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. How Haidt Came to Write The Anxious Generation

[05:04]

• Initially, Haidt intended to write about capitalism’s moral psychology but was consistently sidetracked by rising campus tensions and then by societal changes after 2012.
• Noted the sudden, global rise in youth mental health problems—particularly after 2012—which was too urgent to ignore:

  “It was like someone flipped a switch in 2012 and all the rates of anxiety, depression, self harm, they go shooting, shooting up, especially for girls.” — Jonathan Haidt [07:34]

2. The Scale and Patterns of the Problem

[09:22 – 13:27]

• In-depth look at U.S. and U.K. data on rising rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide among teens since 2012, with sharpest increases among young girls.

• The trend isn’t explained by greater willingness to self-report, as behavior-based and hospital data mirror self-reports.

• Haidt dismisses the “kids are all right” argument through behavioural evidence and international consistency.

  “For self harm, that’s right. So something happened that especially... when girls got super connected and began sharing the idea of self harming and the idea of anxiety became just much more widespread.” — Jonathan Haidt [10:38]

3. The "Great Rewiring" of Childhood

[13:39 – 16:38]

• Between 2010-2015, children's lives transformed: smartphones with cameras, unlimited data, and social media became ubiquitous.
• Boys generally gravitate toward video games and YouTube; girls toward visual social media (Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest).
• Social comparison and cyberbullying for girls become “magnified tenfold,” while boys become physically isolated and withdraw into gaming.
• Haidt likens the shift to “children plugged into the Matrix,” radically removed from traditional, in-person childhoods.

4. Causality: Is Social Media Directly to Blame?

[16:49 – 18:54]

• Montagu presses Haidt on the classic correlation vs. causation debate.

• Haidt explains his rigorous methods: collecting and synthesizing hundreds of studies, including experiments and longitudinal data, to make a causal case.

• Most experimental evidence, he asserts, points toward social media use increasing depression and anxiety.

  “Those who say I have no evidence and I’m mistaking correlation for causation simply haven’t read my work…” — Jonathan Haidt [18:19]

5. Benefits vs. Harms of Social Media

[21:02 – 23:25]

• Montagu challenges whether no positive outcomes are acknowledged for social media.

• Haidt describes the “tin can on a string” scenario: even when kids say they feel closer to friends via social media, it’s only after real-world contact has been replaced by isolation.

  “The mere fact that they say it makes them feel closer does not mean that it’s been good for them.”
  — Jonathan Haidt [22:20]

6. Parents’ (In)Ability to Regulate Device Use

[24:18 – 26:19]

• Despite attempts to monitor and restrict usage, most parents struggle—only about 5% in the live audience said they found it manageable.
• For many, withholding devices risks isolating their children further.

7. Social Media, Not The Internet or Smartphones, is the Culprit

[26:29 – 29:32]

• Haidt frames social media as a distinct hazard, unlike the broader internet or smartphones, using an audience hands-up demonstration.

• Technology is valuable; social media, designed for addictive engagement, is uniquely harmful for youth.

  “Social media is an entirely different animal, engineered to hack into young people’s insecurities about their position in society and keep pressing on it and pressing on it to keep them paying attention. I don’t think that’s a good deal.”
  — Jonathan Haidt [29:25]

8. Institutional and Societal Solutions

[29:32 – 51:25]

• School policies: Strong advocacy for school-wide mobile phone bans and a collective push to restrict social media use to ages 16+.

• Norms over bans: Changing cultural and familial expectations is preferred to outright legislation.

• Reclaiming risky/independent play: The reduction of physical and risky play, combined with overprotective parenting, has “weakened” children—making them especially vulnerable to digital harms.

  “If you deprive animals, including children, of play, they come out anxious and socially unskilled, which is what most people say about Gen Z on average.” — Jonathan Haidt [31:06]

• Parental fears and societal paranoia: Decline in “adult solidarity” and trust makes it harder to let kids roam free—addressing this is seen as a major challenge.

• Practical steps: Shared “play club” initiatives in schools (letgrow.org) are proposed to help reinstate independent play in a modern context.

9. Holding Tech Companies Accountable

[54:00 – 57:53]

• Haidt claims certain social media companies algorithmically exploit children’s insecurities and attention (“persuasive technology”).
• Legal approaches: U.S. states are pursuing lawsuits alleging product liability and design harms (not just content).
• Haidt sees these moves as potentially more significant than tobacco litigation, arguing social media's peer pressure makes it more addictive, with near-universal uptake among teens.

10. Are Gen Z "Permanently Damaged"?

[58:03 – 60:03]

• Haidt expresses pessimism that, on average, Gen Z will be less happy and less flourishing throughout life due to the rewired childhood, but:

• Hope is possible: Individual change, especially intentional reduction in device/social media dependence, can bring significant improvements—even for young adults:

  “Once they realize this, they start turning off notifications... they start doing social media only on their computer, not their phone... we’re getting remarkable results just by changing their habits at the age of 19. So yeah, I think there is hope.” — Jonathan Haidt [59:25]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the 2012 “switch”:
  “It was like someone flipped a switch in 2012 and all the rates of anxiety, depression, self harm, they go shooting, shooting up, especially for girls.” — Jonathan Haidt [07:34]

• On evidence for causality:
  “The curves for self harm match the self report. Now you’re saying even self harm could be. Sure, there could be generational differences, but why would it be between 2012 and 2013? Why would it suddenly change that year... everywhere at the same time?” — Jonathan Haidt [11:22]

• On social media vs. internet/smartphones:
  “Social media is an entirely different animal, engineered to hack into young people’s insecurities about their position in society and keep pressing on it and pressing on it...” — Jonathan Haidt [29:25]

• On play and antifragility:
  “If you deprive animals, including children, of play, they come out anxious and socially unskilled, which is what most people say about Gen Z on average.” — Jonathan Haidt [31:06]

• On practical hope:
  “Once we go through this about how you’re giving away all of your attention... we’re getting remarkable results just by changing their habits at the age of 19.” — Jonathan Haidt [59:25]

• On parent efforts:
  “...less than 10%, less than 5%... it was about, I’d say 5 to 7% of the people that raised their hand said that we’re all really trying and we’re failing. Unless you’re willing to put on spy software and watch over your kid’s shoulders and monitor them…” — Jonathan Haidt [25:34]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [05:04] — Haidt explains how he came to write The Anxious Generation
• [09:22] — Data on rising youth anxiety, depression, self-harm (esp. girls 10–14)
• [13:39] — 2010–2015: Technology’s transformation of childhood
• [16:49] — Correlation vs. causation: Haidt’s defense
• [21:02] — Social media’s claimed benefits, Haidt’s analogy
• [24:18] — Parents’ struggles to limit phone and social use
• [26:29] — Haidt’s clear distinction: internet/smartphones vs. social media
• [29:32] — “Norms, not bans” approach to reform
• [30:37] — Loss of risky/independent, developmentally crucial play
• [44:39] — Solutions segment begins: school phone bans, collective parent action
• [49:27] — Fostering independent & “riskier” (self-governing) childhoods
• [54:00] — Tech companies’ responsibility and pending lawsuits
• [58:03] — Are Gen Z “permanently damaged”? Haidt’s qualified hope

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Tone & Language

• Haidt is direct, data-driven, and at times conversationally provocative (“the harder you push, the better I get” [23:30]).
• Montagu is a skeptical, thoughtful interlocutor, continually challenging Haidt to clarify, defend, or broaden his arguments.
• The dynamic is energetic, with a mix of analogy, audience engagement, and rigorous science.

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Summary

Jonathan Haidt presents a deeply-researched, urgent case that smartphones and social media have fundamentally “rewired” childhood—leading to skyrocketing anxiety, depression, and social skill deficits among Gen Z. While challenged by the host on nuances and generalizations, Haidt substantiates his claims with cross-national data, argues that social media’s effects are distinct from the more benign influence of the internet or smartphones, and asserts that lost independence and risky play have made youth uniquely vulnerable. Solutions proposed focus on restoring play, limiting devices in schools, raising the age for social media, and coordinated parent initiatives. He sees hope in collective action and intentional behavioral change, while warning of possible lasting effects for an entire generation. The episode provides a comprehensive, critical, and constructive view of the current youth mental health crisis and what might be done about it.

Transcript

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[Leila Ismail]

Welcome to Intelligence Squared where great minds meet. I'm producer Leila Ismail. Our third pick of the year is an event we staged in April with best selling author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He is the author of numerous books including the Righteous Mind and the Coddling of the American Mind. He was live on stage earlier this year to talk about his latest book the Anxious how the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness which is an urgent investigation into the crisis of youth mental health today. Joining him to discuss it all is BBC journalist and broadcaster Sarah Montagu.

[Sarah Montagu]

Thank you so much and what a treat to be here now. Almost everywhere you turn at the moment you you will see hear read discussions about whether we should be getting our children off social media and off phones, much of it, of course, driven by this man. His book, the Anxious Generation has been on the New York Times best seller list for the past four weeks. He argues that a whole generation has been damaged by growing up with unrestricted access to social media and to an adult online world, but also by being so overprotected and over parented that it's a generation of young adults unable to cope with the rigors of normal life. His book, the Anxious how the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness may be doing so well because he is tapping into something in society, a concern, a very widely held belief among parents that there is something going wrong. He is very much the man of the moment. He is, of course, Jonathan Haidt. And now listen, I should explain to both our online audience and to those of you here in the room, I'm hogging things for almost the next hour. After that, though, you will get your chance. And I know if you're online, you will be able to send some questions in which get through here to here and we'll be able to get a discussion going in the room as well. But as I say, I'm kicking things off now, Jonathan, I mean, the response in the room when you walk on stage, it's just an illustration in a way of what you're tapping into. But I was astonished to read that actually you didn't intend to read this book. I mean, of course you had, you know, Hannah mentioned the Righteous Mind, you had the Happiness hypothesis, you had the coddling of the American mind. It didn't come out of anywhere. But you set out to write a different book, didn't you?

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. Yes, I did. But I first just want to say just what a pleasure it is for an American to come to Britain and to be able to speak, to be hosted in a room like this, because we have rooms like this in America, but they were all built about 100 years ago as copies of this. And in so many ways, you know, in so many ways coming to Britain is kind of like seeing the platonic forms of the things we have copies of in America in a lot of ways, not just our architecture, but our political institutions as well. And so to get such a warm welcome in such a beautiful space. So thank you. Now, to answer your question, yes, I actually set out to write two other books that haven't been written because I wrote this one. So in 2015, I got a contract to write a book called Three Stories About Capitalism, the Moral Psychology of Economic Life. I Had recently moved to a business school, to the NYU Stern. And I thought I'd continue the Righteous Mind, which was about social left right and let's do economic left right. Got a contract for that, went to Asia for a semester, did a lot of research, came back, published the Coddling the American Mind article. Thought I'd go back to work on the capitalism book. And then our universities blew up in 2015, and that was such a change of my home institution. I've been focused on that. What the hell happened? Why are we now all afraid? We're afraid of our students. We're afraid to speak. We're afraid of social punishments for expressing ideas. So that led me to work with Greg Lukianoff to spend the whole time writing this other book, the Coddling the American Mind. And then I had a sabbatical in 2020. I said, okay, now I'll get back to the capitalism book. But my country was blowing up and dividing, and things were just getting weirder and worse. And I kept having ideas for why. Why it has something to do with social media. Something's changed about the way we're all connected. And so then I had the idea to write eight essays for the Atlantic on, like, eight different reasons why everything is going to hell. And the editor of the Atlantic said, Write eight, write one. And so I wrote one, which was titled, Ultimately why the Past 10 Years of American Life have Been Uniquely Stupid. So that was my first, and it's gotten much worse since then. So that was my first pass at what then became a book contract of this really should be a book. And that book is going to be called Life After Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share. I got the contract to write that book. So I have two. You know, they give me a lot of money here to write two books that I still haven't written. And I started writing that book. And chapter one was going to be what happened to teenagers when they moved their lives online. Because I'd done all this research on teen mental health, but that was a side project. I study moral and political psychology, but I have this side project on what's happening to Gen Z. And I had all this data and it was. The story was really becoming clear. So, okay, chapter one, we're going to show how when teenagers moved onto social media around 2012, almost instantly they became depressed and anxious. And then the rest of the book is about what happens to democracy when your public life moves on to social media. But by the time I finish that first chapter and you'll see the Graphs in it, they're absolutely unbelievable. It was like someone flipped a switch in 2012 and all the rates of anxiety, depression, self harm, they go shooting, shooting up, especially for girls. And I realized I can't just like drop this and say, all right, now let's move on. Once I wrote that chapter, I had to write another chapter on explaining how did this happen and what is childhood, why don't. And then I had to have a chapter on girls because that's a special story. And then I have to have a chapter on boys. And so by the time I had four chapters, I realized I'm never going to finish this book. It's going to be gigantic. I need to cut the book in half. So I got a contract for another book. So finally, so I have three book contracts and now I actually have written one of them. So that's where we are.

[Sarah Montagu]

Ok, well, let's try and unpick that very first chapter, which is the scale of the problem which you write this chapter and you realize, I mean, there are some terrifying graphs in there. I mean, the best way to illustrate the scale of the problem, how would you set it out? And I'm talking about the harms first.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yes. Okay, let's talk about the harms. So when we track in the UK and the US we have very good long running studies, better than most parts of the world. And so you can track how rates of depression, anxiety and self harm, those are the clearest ones. The central problem is anxiety and it's related to depression, that's related to self harm. So let's focus on those three. From the 90s through the 2000s, we're talking the millennial generation, which many of you in this room are. If you're born between 1981 and 1995, you're a millennial. Your mental health was actually fine, a little better than Gen X before you. So all the numbers are going along, they go up, down, up, sort of moving along. And then all of a sudden those numbers all start rising right around 2012, 2013. And the level of the rise, especially for boys, it's a little slower. It's, it's not such a sharp elbow. That's a different story. But for girls, it's a very sharp elbow. And when we look at the younger teen girls, ages 10 to 14, that's where we see the hugest rises. So those younger girls, they didn't used to be hospitalized for self harm. It was very, very rare. But after 2012, the numbers go way up for the older teen girls. I think it's like 70 or 80% increase. For the younger teen girls, it's more like 1ft. That's in America. In Britain you have data that 10 to 12 year old girls are up a 380% increase. It's more than a quadruple for self harming. For self harm, that's right. So something happened that especially well when girls got super connected and began sharing the idea of self harming and the idea of anxiety became just much more widespread.

[Sarah Montagu]

Okay. Now there is definitely something going on which is to do with people being more open and more likely to report. And there will be plenty of people, old people, who will say, look, I self harm when I was in my teens.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh, I see.

[Sarah Montagu]

Can you strip out that factor? The fact that people are more likely to come forward?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yes. So there are a couple of critiques that I get. One of them, the important null hypothesis is nothing's going on. The kids are all right. This is just changes in their willingness to report and changes in diagnostic criteria. Concept creep. We consider smaller things to be problematic. Now, perfectly reasonable hypothesis. But the fact that the behavior curves match the self report curves. So the curves for self harm match the self report. Now you're saying even self harm could be. Sure, there could be generational differences, but why would it be between 2012 and 2013? Why would it suddenly change that year in America, Canada, the uk, Australia, New Zealand, Northern Europe? You can't explain why it changes everywhere at the same time.

[Sarah Montagu]

And hospitalizations went after.

[Jonathan Haidt]

These are hospitalizations like psychiatric emergency department visits.

[Sarah Montagu]

There's something else going on with suicide, isn't there? Because in girls I don't think suicide's gone up, but in boys it has.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Now hold on. In the US it's up a lot for both boys and girls. And the increase percentage wise is actually fairly similar. Boys, boys have a higher rate because when boys make attempts, they don't make as many attempts, but they tend to use irreversible means. They tend to use a gun in my country or a tall building. So boys have much higher rates, about three times the rate they both are way up. It starts a little bit earlier than 2012. The suicide rate begins going up a couple years earlier, but both sexes are up a lot in America. Now then I'm in a debate with people who say, oh, but suicide is depressed, declining around the world, which is true. Suicide rates have been going down since the early 2000s. That's great. But if you break it out by age and sex, you see all these different Groups going slightly down, down, down for 20 years. And then right around 2014, you see one line going way up. And this is a graph you can find in the Economist. It's the teen girls. Even though the world's going down, teen girls suddenly start going way up. And a little later, teen boys go up somewhat. So in Britain. So what you should look at is whatever the rate is, if you zoom in on your younger teen girls, you'll see they are much worse off than everyone else.

[Sarah Montagu]

Okay, so you are now talking 2012, 2013, 2014. Something happened. Now I know you are convinced about what it is. What would you posit is the cause behind this?

[Jonathan Haidt]

So the cause behind it is that we change childhood more radically than it has ever been changed in just a few years. I mean, the change from agriculture to the industrial revolution, that was a pretty radical change, but that was over 100 years. Whatever you want to say. So what I want you to do is those of you who had children, or those of you who were children in 2010, what was your technology life like? You had a flip phone. You had to press the seven key three times to make the letter S. Some of you remember that. Okay, so did you spend all day typing about your feelings with your friends? No. You say, see you at three, you meet up. So technology for millennials was a tool that they could use to improve their social lives. They might have had Facebook, which they used on their parents computer. You couldn't use it on a phone. So there was Facebook, there were cell phones, but you were not spending five hours a day social media or on your phone. Also your phone didn't have a front facing camera. Also you had to pay for text. Also you didn't have high speed Internet. So all the way up to 2010, children had what we might recognize as a human childhood. But between 2010 and 2015, the technology changes such that by 2015, almost everybody, you can see very sharp adoption curves. By 2015, almost all teens now they've traded in a flip phones for a smartphone with a front facing camera, unlimited data and Instagram or Tumblr or other social media platforms. Now the boys and the girls all rush on. The boys go for video games in YouTube especially. The girls go much more for visually oriented social media. So Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest. So what is a boy's life? A boy's life is more video games which are not particularly harmful. But we'll get back to that, I hope, because it ends up taking them out of life. The girls on the Other hand, their life now revolves around photographs, ratings of photographs. What people are saying about the photographs, why someone like. So the girls, you take all the worst parts of being a teenage girl and then you multiply them by 10. Because now all of that is magnified, the bullying, the social comparison. So that's why I'm calling 2010-2015 the great rewiring of childhood. What childhood now is in our countries and in most of the developed world, if you're a boy, you're sitting at a video game console because you can't go to your friend's house. If you go over to a friend's house, you can't play video games. You have to go home alone. You can put on your headset your video game controller. So boys are sitting alone playing video games, girls are sitting alone. They might be next to another girl, but they're sitting alone, they're on social media. So this is not a human childhood. This is if you remember the opening scene or that key scene in the Matrix where you see, suddenly the matrix is revealed and you see all the people lying in pods with something sucking out their brain juice. That's kind of what happened.

[Sarah Montagu]

So Jonathan, the graphs are amazing and in a way they look like posh. They match. Look what's happening at that point, look.

[Jonathan Haidt]

What'S happening to across countries.

[Sarah Montagu]

So you have a correlation, but the charge that you will know that is often levelled against you is it doesn't necessarily mean that you have causation.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Sarah Montagu]

And in a way, I don't know, perhaps you would argue, perhaps you can't. I don't know how one would ever prove because you can't sort of take the group of people that aren't on social media who've never self harmed. But that is a particular challenge for what you're positing, isn't it?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yes, but it's one that I've been addressing since 2019. So as everyone knows in the social sciences, correlation doesn't prove causation. There are consistent correlations in which heavy users of social media are two or three times more likely to be depressed. And you might say, oh well, maybe depressed people just like to use more social media. And that could be true. And so that's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. So we have to move on and look at longitudinal studies where you track people over time and does an increase at time one cause an increase in time two? That gets you closer to causality, but it's not proof of causality. And then the real gold standard is experiments. And there. So what I've been doing since 2019 is collecting all the studies I can find on all sides. I don't want to be accused of cherry picking. I want to say let's take everything because it's so confusing. There's so many studies. People point to this study, that study, let's put them all together in Google Docs, invite the world to come comment on them. So I've been incredibly transparent doing this since 2019 with Gene Twenge. So in one of our Google Docs we have 150 studies, mostly correlational. That's true. But we have, I think, 25 experiments and eight quasi experiments, which are a different category of experiment. And they don't all show an effect, but the great majority of them do. And that's the way the game is played. If you have the experiments, then that is evidence of causation. Now we can argue about the quality of the experiments and that's where we are. So those who say I have no evidence and I'm mistaking correlation for causation simply haven't read my work because from the very beginning I've been very clear. I have many writings on this about how do we tease out causality. So we're in a debate, but I believe I've shown causality.

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[Sarah Montagu]

And to be very clear throughout the book, you keep flagging up that there is going to be an online version that you will update as more information comes out. But you do appear to I mean, I think you're pretty open about it. You set out to prove something and reading it, I was thinking there are positive experiences. I mean the boy that you mentioned sitting on who goes home alone on playing video games, he's chatting to his friends on the headphones. That's right, the girl. There might be a girl who is struggling to make friends at school, but she'll find somebody online who she can connect to and realize she's not alone. And there is no representation of the positive side of social media in your book.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Actually, I do have a short section called on the benefits of Social media. But as you maybe you've actually read it or maybe you just know what's coming. And I talk about that the pluses and minuses school, which is, you know, people say, well, you know, there's these pluses, there's these minuses, you know, and the pluses are really the only real evidence they point to is, you know, kids say that it makes them feel closer to their friends. That's true. But does that mean it's actually good? Imagine this situation. You take kids who are playing with each other every day. They're getting together, they have clubs, they do this they do that and you say, hey kids, come each to your individual cell. We've got amazing stuff for you in your individual cell. You're all alone in your individual cell. Now here's a tin can with a string. You can use it to talk to your friends. And then you do that for a few years. And then someone comes along and says, how do you feel about your tin can?

[Sarah Montagu]

Oh, I love it.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It makes me feel closer to my friends. So the mere fact that they say it makes them feel closer does not mean that it's been good for them. Because as soon as the girls moved onto social media, they began saying they were much lonelier, their lives felt pointless and they were more depressed. When the boys moved on to multiplayer video games, which is more like around 2007, 8, 9, as, as Internet speeds are picking up, that's why the boys curve, I believe starts earlier. It's not as sharp. At 2012, the boys, when they move their social life much more onto multiplayer video games, they become more lonely, more depressed and they too say their lives are pointless. There's no purpose. I feel useless. So sure, you can say they say they like it, but I think the evidence is pretty clear. If these things were good for them, we'd have seen an increase in well being in the early 2000s, not a collapse.

[Sarah Montagu]

Okay, I mean, I'm going to keep pushing on this, please.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Because the harder you push, the better I get.

[Sarah Montagu]

Most children, most parents I know do, don't, or at least let's put it, most children don't have unrestricted use. They might not be allowed to have their phone in their bedroom. They might be limited by their parents. You paint a picture of this sort of unrestricted, uncontrolled hours on, and there are cases like that, but they are at just one end of the spectrum. And I. So the challenge, this challenge to you is on whether you're being fair, whether you're being fair to the actual use.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So there are big demographic differences. I don't have the data for the uk, but I can tell you in the US if you just look at hours of time on their phones, if you have two college educated parents who are married, it's something like seven hours a day. And if you're white or I think Asian, but if you're black or Hispanic or have a single parent or are low social class, it's a couple hours higher. The phone, the iPad, it's an incredibly effective pacifier. It turns out now it's really more like giving your kid morphine to shut them up. But it's true that many kids have, have tight restrictions. But talk to parents. Okay, look, parents in the room, raise your hand. If you were a parent of a kid over the age between 8 and 22, raise your hand. Okay, just you in the audience, just you who raised your hands. How many of you felt like it was pretty easy to control? We actually, we were able to keep a lid on it. We were able to raise our kids the way we wanted. Raise your hand high.

[Sarah Montagu]

It was Easy to Control.

[Jonathan Haidt]

1, 2, 3, 3, 4. Parents.

[Sarah Montagu]

5.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay, 5, 6. All right. But less than 10%, less than 5%.

[Sarah Montagu]

We haven't even gone up.

[Jonathan Haidt]

For those of you watching on the video, it was about, I'd say 5 to 7% of the people that raised their hand said that we're all really trying and we're failing. And unless you're willing to put on spy software and watch over your kids shoulders and monitor them. Oh, and by this way, if they go to a friend's house, they can can just use a browser there. So at present there is almost no way for parents to raise their kids the way they want because the tech companies have put us in a trap where if we do what we think is right, we're isolating our kid. I mean, Apple gives us good screen time controls. There are tools out there, but we're trying and most of us are failing.

[Sarah Montagu]

Okay, we're going to come on to solutions with regard to tech companies a bit. I just want to just nail something. Of course you talk there about going on a browser. Your complaint isn't with the Internet.

[Jonathan Haidt]

No, I love the Internet.

[Sarah Montagu]

Okay. And it's not with children being on the Internet unless they're on adult areas. It's mainly social media is the target.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay, now can I just demonstrate that with this audience. I can show you. This is a very important distinction because I often hear this. Oh, you know, without social media, kids would have been so isolated during COVID all. Oh, thank God they had social media. All right, let me thought experiment for you. So imagine it's the early 90s and a genie comes to you with three glowing floating boxes, magical boxes. And the genie says to you, you can open 0, 1, 2 or 3 of these boxes. If you open it, it's going to take 15 hours a week of your life. Here's the first box and he opens it. It's the Internet. You will have omniscience. You will be able to know everything instantly. Now it's going to take 15 hours a week. Do you want It. Raise your hand if you're glad we opened the box. You're glad we have the Internet? Raise your hand. Hi. Okay, the great majority, it's not all of you, but it's the great majority. Okay, so great. We got the Internet and remember the early 90s was amazing and we thought it was going to save democracy and mental health was fine. Okay, now let's move up. Now let's move up. And the second box, he opens it and it's the iPhone. It's this incredible digital Swiss army knife which can do all these functions. You know, you used to have to buy a radio and a flashlight and a map and. No, it's everything is in this one thing. But remember, you have the Internet and the iPhone. So now you're up to 30 hours a week you're going to be spending on these two. Raise your hand if you're glad that we opened that box. You're glad we have smartphones, Raise your hand. Hi. Ok, now it's maybe around half, maybe a little less than half, but it's still a lot of people. Okay, and now the third box, he opens it. It's social media. You already have the whole Internet and you have your smartphone. Do you also have want to have social media where you get to post stuff and comment on people's stuff and get sucked into spending many hours a day doing that? I'm sorry, I shouldn't bias the survey, but honestly, if you already have the Internet and an iPhone, how many of you are glad we opened the social media box? The world's a better place because we have Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. Raise your hand, hand high, if you think it was good that we opened it. 1, 2, 3, 4. So probably about a dozen. So this is my point. Technology is amazing. Technology is the way we've advanced for many thousands of years. The Internet is incredible. We can't imagine life without the Internet. The Internet has so many benefits. Social media is an entirely different animal, engineered to hack into young people's insecurities about their position in society and keep pressing on it and pressing on it to keep them paying attention. I don't think that's a good deal.

[Sarah Montagu]

Now the headlines have largely been about the sort of banning of social media or restricting.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, you British, you just love to ban things. I'm not talking about banning. Every conversation is about banning phones.

[Sarah Montagu]

What do you want then?

[Jonathan Haidt]

I want norms. I want to change norms.

[Sarah Montagu]

You want to ban. We'll come back to this, but just on those Specific things. Let me. Banning phones from schools during the school day.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, that I would do. Yes.

[Sarah Montagu]

And restricting social media to over 16. Okay. But there is a second. The second half of your book is actually about a whole other aspect, which is that while our children, this generation, are on their phones, they are not doing things in real life. And you have suggested that both that combination of phones and not doing other things in real life is deprived them of their childhood. Just talk about the importance of what you think they're missing.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Sure. So humans have these gigantic brains. So within any group of animals, if there's some that have gigantic brains, it's going to be because they're super social. And so among the primates, we're the huge brain champions because we're super duper social, much more than chimpanzees, we're ultrasocial. And in humans, part of our sociality is culture. We develop culture. When we develop culture, well, we develop culture. And culture requires a much longer childhood. This seems to be the explanation for why we have this unique growth path pattern, which is human children grow quickly and then we slow down after two or three years, and then we grow very slowly from like five to ten, growing very slowly. All other primates, they just grow and grow and grow until they can reproduce, and then they reproduce. Why do we have this long slow period? It's because our brains need to wire up. They need a lot of cultural training from either older kids or older people. We're guided all around the world, we're guided especially, especially at puberty, we're guided through how do you make the transition from a girl to a woman or a boy to a man? So humans have this incredible developmental process that we've evolved to have. And like all mammals, play is the main way we do it, especially early on. We play at roles. We play at roles that we'll have as adults within our gender. So play is an intrinsic part, a crucial part of life. If you deprive animals, including children, of play, they come out anxious and socially unskilled, which is what most people say about Gen Z on average. So when you deprive young mammals of what they most need, you're blocking human development. And my argument is that between 2010 and 2015, we blocked human development at a level never before seen in human history. Imagine for those of you who are older, those of you who are born before 1994, especially before 1981. Let's talk gen X and older. Think back on your childhood. Think back on all the things you did all the adventures. Now imagine removing 70% of the time, hanging out with friends, at least 70%. Just imagine you didn't have that, that was gone. Imagine you had any hobbies that you had. If you did something physical, imagine that's gone. Imagine thrills, adventures, adventures where you might have gotten hurt. 80% of that's gone. And in its place you have vast amounts of content. You're consuming short videos, 20 second videos, TikTok videos after a few hours of which you might stop. And then you say, what did I just do for the last three hours? Is what people say to me. So what I'm saying is let's imagine almost all the good stuff from childhood. Take out 70% of it and now imagine growing up with just the remaining 30%. And that's what we've done to Gen Z.

[Sarah Montagu]

One of the things that you say that you set out in the book is that there's a particularly risky form of play that is important, which I think the word you use is antifragile. The example is a tree needs wind as it's growing in order to become stronger. And this is what you suggest, which I suppose is the coddling of childhood from earlier, but which you think has been what replaced by people sitting by actually not even necessarily being on their phones, by their parents saying, you can't walk home from school, you can't climb that tree, you can't go to that. And that is what, doing as much damage as phones or doing a considerable.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, so there's two parts to the story. And let me just mention that the thrill part is something which is really important and really interesting. So there's a number of play. Researchers have pointed out that kids, when they're naturally playing, they will, if they master something, they'll make it more dangerous. If they learn to skateboard down a hill, they'll then go for a really steep hill, then they'll go for a jump, then they'll go downstairs and they're going to fall, they're going to hurt themselves. Why do they do this? Why would you choose to hurt yourself? If you learn to swing, you're going to jump off the swings and you're going to go higher and higher and you might hurt yourself, you're not going to kill yourself, you might hurt yourself. Why do kids try to hurt themselves? Well, they're not trying to hurt themselves directly. They're seeking out just the right level of thrill. And thrill requires fear, the fear of actually getting hurt. And it turns out kids need this. This is how we overcome Childhood fears. I have a great little story in the book about my dog. While I was writing this, I got a pilot named Wilma. And I have a video and you can find@ anxiousgeneration.com I just put it up. Wilma was this little tiny thing. She was £7 when we got her. And I took her to Washington Square park near where I live. And there was a German shepherd, an area where dogs run. There was a German shepherd, big German shepherd. And I let Wilma off the leash, which was probably foolish at that age because she might have run away. But anyway, so Wilma goes, like going up to the dog, and then as soon as the dog makes a motion, she goes running away. You might think she's terrified she's going to run home. No, no. She was afraid, but she was also intrigued and she was thrilled. She goes running away, comes to me, runs around me and runs right back to the dog. And then the dog moves again. So she's playing this game. She's trying to adjust the level of fear and master it. And then she runs away and she comes back for more. She's dosing herself with fear. And that's how you become fearless. And that's what kids do. When you're climbing a tree and you're a little scared, you go a little higher and then you did it. And now you're not as afraid of climbing trees. So, anyway, my point is, as we began to focus on physical safety and then emotional safety, we said, let's not let our kids do anything that could be dangerous. Nothing that could be dangerous. We have to watch them or they'll do something dangerous. And in doing so, it's as though we said, how about if we don't let them have anything with vitamin C? No vitamin C. And then of course, they get scurvy. So we have to recognize that fear, that kids are seeking out the right level of fear. And I just want to point out about video games. Yeah, they look like great fun. I watch my son play Fortnite. You know, he's jumping out of planes, he's having knife fights. They're killing people. They're competing. It's very exciting. Is he ever afraid? Is there a moment of fear? No, there's no fear. Boys are not getting anything from video games that will help turn them into men.

[Sarah Montagu]

Okay, now, what you're talking about, that concern about safety predates 2012, doesn't it? I mean, it goes back decades. This sort of. This idea of overprotective parents. So it doesn't contribute to the concern.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right, so this is the puzzle, this is the puzzle that we began taking away the play based childhood gradually from about 19 in my country, about 19, 1980 to 2010. You started a little later, but you started in the 90s. But yet mental health doesn't get worse. So it's not as though the loss of play didn't make kids anxious and depressed directly, but it weakened them I believe. So that then when they move on to smartphones then they are very vulnerable and then they get knocked over. And this I think can explain why. It's especially northern Europe and the Anglo countries where we see the biggest effects. It's places that had a lot of freedom. Southern Europe and Eastern Europe, especially Eastern Europe, the increases are not as bad. In fact, in Eastern Europe numbers have gone down a little bit. My point is just that it's not a one factor thing about phones make you ill. It's if you're rooted in communities and you have a normal childhood with some risk in three and then you get an iPhone, you're probably not going to be that much more depressed. It's probably not going to really affect you. But if you have not had a normal toughening human childhood and you're not rooted in communities, then you're going to be swept away. And that's what happened, I believe.

[Sarah Montagu]

Okay, I asked you about the sort of contributing, I don't know if it's possible to give some sense of, look, social media is this bad and actually overprotecting our children.

[Jonathan Haidt]

You just can't, can't take them apart.

[Sarah Montagu]

But you think that sort of the remote removal of risk from childhood in the real world is a serious contributing factor to a damaged generation?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yes, I do. And here what I'd like to do is say we're talking mostly about the mental illness as the dependent variable, as the outcome. That's where you have good data, that's what everything's focused on. But Gen Z isn't just marked by having higher rates of anxiety, depression, self harm, they're marked by worse social skills. At least this is what people say as they supervise Gen Z is that they're more anxious and shy in the office, they're afraid to try new things, they have more expectation of accommodation, they are multitasking, their attention is fragmented, they can't stay on target. So we have so many different outcomes. There's cognitive fragmentation, there's the inability to focus which is very similar. So there's, there's, some people are saying there's a lack of creativity because Gen Z, My students in my class at nyu, they don't have any extra attention to do anything. It's all taken up by the phone.

[Sarah Montagu]

So it's what do your students think of you? I mean, you're dumping on their whole generation.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay, I'll show you. I've given talks to many, many high school and college audiences that are full of Gen Z. And I say these things. I've seen said that you are painting a very bad picture of the generation. And I always do this. Raise your hand in this room if you were born after 1995. Raise your hand high if you were born after 1995. Okay, so we have a lot of Gen Z here. Okay, Just you. Just you raise your hand if the question is, do you think I got this generally right or wrong? Do you think I have I misunderstood your generation? Am I slandering you? So raise your hand if you think I largely got this right, Gen Z. Okay. And raise your hand if you think I largely got this wrong. Okay, actually. Wow. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Okay, this is the most I've ever seen now, but this is great. So when we get to questions.

[Sarah Montagu]

Hold on a second. When we get to questions, I'm going.

[Jonathan Haidt]

To give you a chance if you.

[Sarah Montagu]

Want to contribute, but I'm going to put the case because I'm listening to you thinking, just hold on a second. I certainly know some Gen zers who would be screaming frustration and listening and thinking, you know, because they might have heard some of this. And their argument would be that it's a sort of nostalgia trip from somebody in a different generation who just thinks things, you know, it's the things were better in my day, you know, actually, and this is a phenomenal generation whose lives are lived online now, who find partners online, who find jobs online, who run their whole lives. That is their real world. And guess what? They can spend 20 minutes on TikTok and then go and do some work because they know what it is and they manage it. So I'm going to put that defense on the behalf of. I'm sure you guys have got better defense because you're Gen Zers.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay, Perfectly reasonable hypothesis. This time is no different than every previous moral panic. Perfectly reasonable hypothesis. Let's look at that. Is this just like every other generation? First of all, when you. In previous moral panics, when adults were freaking out about kids with comic books or young women reading novels in the 18th century, there are many of these moral panics. We didn't find young people advocating to have the stuff taken away There were moral panics among adults who would point to stories in the news about a terrible thing that happened because some kid read a comic book and then became violent. What's happening now isn't like that. What's happening now is we all see it. Everyone sees it within their friend group. So the problems, the costs are incredibly visible. And that wasn't true in the age of television or anything else. So this is very different from previous ones. On the question of nostalgia though, there's a wonderful British woman, Freya India. Freya, are you here? Is Freya in the audience? Oh, where is she? Someone pointing over there. Oh, Freya, there she is. Freya is a really beautiful Gen Z writer who has an incredible essay on my substack at After Babel on what Anemoia. Was that the word? Yeah, anemoia, which is a Greek word for nostalgia for a thing you never had or never knew. So many of us are nostalgic for our childhoods. How many of you are nostalgic for your parents childhood? You are longing. You have this intense nostalgia feeling for your parents childhood. Raise your hand if that's you. Okay. What Freya shows is that many Gen Z long for that. They're looking at videos from the 90s and 80s and they're like looking like, wow, the kids are hugging, they're talking, there are no phones, they're interacting. So the report from Gen Z, it generally contradicts what you're saying. Gen Z doesn't think its childhood is great. Gen Z in general thinks that they missed out.

[Sarah Montagu]

Do you think they should be nostalgic for those days?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Absolutely they should.

[Sarah Montagu]

There's a lot of those days that they really shouldn't be.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh sure. No, that's right. Look, we have huge social progress in every decade. So each decade we have huge social progress on equality, on women's rights, gay rights, animal rights. So we have huge social progress all the way up to about 2013. So each generation could enjoy the progress, the benefits of technology and growing rights. Until this one. This one I think is not getting that benefit.

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[Jonathan Haidt]

There.

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[Sarah Montagu]

Okay, I was worried this was going to have to be too long and I can see the end encroaching and I haven't even got. We've got to do solutions next. Let's talk solutions. We've already touched on some, which in a way are the easy ones that everybody's talking about. You would say all schools, let's try and hop through them. All schools need to ban mobile phones during the school day from beginning to end.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Absolutely. So these devices are engineered to grab attention and hold it. There's no reason why kids should be able to text during class. We got tricked because kids had flip phones and they brought them into class and they were sometimes texting during class on their flip phones. But once it switched over to smartphones, which a flip phone wasn't engineered to hold your attention forever, but a smartphone is. And so kids are now they're watching videos, the boys are watching porn, they're communicating with their parents during class. Why are we doing this?

[Sarah Montagu]

Okay, but sometimes a teacher or a school would say, look, you know, I know that we need phones because I mean, some classes will have iPads and things like that, but they need it for Google or for going online or for answering questions. And they're confident that their class will be doing that.

[Jonathan Haidt]

You'd say, wait, what? They're confident their class will be doing that and not texting? Really? Have you spoken to teachers? If you give kids a device that can text, they will be texting. If you give kids a device with a browser, they will be browsing. This is true from element from younger school all the way through my MBA students. I used to make them sign a pledge or stand up and pledge. You can use your computer if it's only for class. That's what I did. I trusted my students. And then the TA told me a couple years ago, everyone in the back row is shopping, texting. You know, the whole we're all addicted. Like, it's not just the young. Like, we're all addicted. So if they have a way to text, they will be texting. So we got it. Just, okay, so that's it removed from.

[Sarah Montagu]

The school day locker. Social media to 16. Now that is something that I think you make the point it's got to be collective action. Yeah, I'm just. Now you have had a phenomenal response to this book. Do you think that's going to happen? Because some people would say, look, it's, you know, horse is bolted.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So collective action means, you know, if you're the only parent who says to your kid, no, you don't get social media. As I said to my kids, you know, no social media. When they were 11, 12, 13, when everybody was getting on Instagram, no. And so they were somewhat cut off. Now, they weren't the only ones, but the great majority had it. It's hard when you're the first one. But guess what, if you coordinate with just a few other families, just the families of your friends, kids, and you don't just take away something you say, and here are five families, we're all doing this, you're just going to get a flip flop when you're independent. You're not going to get Instagram or TikTok or any of those things. But guess what, you guys get together, you know, every week you get together, you have sleepovers, you play, you go out, you know, here's money, you can go to the amusement park together, you're going to have an exciting childhood together. Now you can solve it. Just a few families. And so what I'm doing in the book, as an American, I'm assuming that my congress is so dysfunctional that they will never do anything to help us. And I wrote the book saying, here are four norms that we can do just with a few families cooperating and then ideally with the school, if you can get the school. So do I think this is going to happen? Hell yeah. It's already happening. There's been an explosion in Britain, began February 15 or so. Daisy Greenwell and Claire Reynolds, are they here? Daisy and Claire, they started Smartphone Free Childhood and Hannah Ortel started, started delay smartphones. So you're actually in Britain, you're already doing it. It's a spontaneous grassroots movement because parents are fed up, they're sick of this and they want to change. So yeah, it's going to happen. It is happening.

[Sarah Montagu]

Okay. There's something else you want, which in a way is harder, is this kind of like you want, and you mentioned it earlier, I sort of moved you on. I said we'd come back to it. This idea that at certain stages in your life growing up there would be certain things like walking to the shop on your own or. I don't know, you want a sort of a way to ensure a riskier childhood. Explain how that can work.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So how about if we just say I want to ensure a more independent childhood, which will include more risk than we currently let them have? I'd rather put it that way. Risk is good. I'm not saying we. Well, okay, maybe I'm kind of saying we need to risk your childhood. Because if we have zero risk. Childhood. Yeah, I'm saying we need to risk your child childhood. But the key thing is the independence and then also the risk. In America, we refer to our country, we refer to the American experiment. And what that means is an experiment in self governance. The question in 1776 and all the way through 1787 and all the way through the 19th century was, can people govern themselves without a king? And you all said, no, you can't do it. Have you seen Hamilton? The song? You'll be back. Like before, everyone thought, you can't govern yourself without a king. People can't do that. But we did, we did it and we got better. We had all kinds of moral flaws early and we have a long history of correcting those. So the whole point is to become self governing. And the way you become self governing as a people is by becoming self governing during your childhood. And that's what childhood used to be about. The job of a parent is to work him or herself out of a job so that by the time your kids are 17 or so, they can function independently, they can go off to university, they can get a job. So yeah, we need to start that before they leave our home.

[Sarah Montagu]

And part of this I think involves the state stepping back. Because I know I've had plenty of conversations over the years where you're thinking, can I pop to the shop and leave the child? And if I, you know, if something happened, how much trouble would I be in? I mean, obviously your first concern is for your child. Not necessarily, but there is a little bit. And actually there's a friend of mine who always used to say, imagine you've got CCTV on you the whole time, but you want the sort of slight removal of the bad parenting thought.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah. So in the United States, we're much more insane about this than you are. We have much greater fears of abduction in Britain. The reason why parents say they won't let their 10 year old kids out to go to a shop is they're afraid they'll get hit by a car, they're afraid of traffic. And in Some parts that's a reasonable concern. We have a built environment around a car culture, but that even happens in areas where it isn't really a concern. We're basically just afraid. We're afraid of each other. We've lost trust in each other. There's a wonderful British sociologist named Frank Faredi who wrote this brilliant book called Paranoid Parenting. And he traces the collapse, what he calls the collapse of adult solidarity all over the world. Until recently in our countries, kids went out and like when I was growing up, if I fell on my bicycle and you know, and got somewhat hurt like an adult, you know, I could even knock on a door, like somebody would call my mother and she'd come pick me up, like somebody would help. But now we think if our kid goes out there and there's another adult, stranger danger, this, this person will take you and sexually abuse you. When you don't trust the people around you, you have to protect them yourself. And that's no way to raise children. So what we're facing here is a really difficult sociological challenge. So look, the first three reforms are about the phones. Those I think we can do. The hardest one is the fourth one. Far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. Because we need to trust each other more and that's going to be really hard. What I propose in the books is some ways we can give our kids more independence even if we don't trust each other. The simplest way is the school playground. And so I co founded an organization called let grow go to letgrow.org with Lenore Skenazy who wrote the book Free Range Kids. And one of our simple programs is called Play Club. Parents who wouldn't let their kid walk three blocks to a store, they will let the kid play on the playground after school. So with Play club, let's say 10 or 15 students, they sign up for Monday. Every Monday they're on the playground. Let's take 7, 8, 9 year old kids who really want to play with each other. Every Monday, these 15 kids are on the playground. There is no supervision. There's an adult nearby. If someone gets hurt, but there's no supervision. They work out games themselves, they enforce the rules themselves, they get into fights, they work it out. That's what they need to do. So parents are willing to let that happen. That's a baby step towards giving your kids some independence. So I recognize we can't just say kids should have the same childhood I had in 1975. You know, the world has changed. We have to be much More intentional. But man, we've got to be intentional. We have to give our kids independence, otherwise they're going to come out not fully developed. And that's, I think, what's happening.

[Sarah Montagu]

Well, let's turn to the tech companies. When you were talking earlier about what these, what social media apps are designed to do, the very fact, the one saying they're designed to do that, you think, do you think the tech companies want this?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, they said so. Yeah, we have, you know, there's a talk. What's his name? I have it in the book. Yeah, Facebook. The first president of Facebook, Sean Parker. I think it might have been Sean Parker. You know, he describes, he describes the thinking pattern. A lot of these people took a specific course at Stanford in persuasive technology. How do you capture people's attention? How do you influence them? One of the developers of Instagram took that course. This was the culture in Silicon Valley in the 90s and the 2000s. They're all competing for attention because what's the revenue model? The revenue model is advertising for a lot of them. So the advertising based businesses are in a fight to the death that the corporate. Corporate death to grab the eyeballs more firmly and younger. And they admit this. I mean, they said that's what they were doing.

[Sarah Montagu]

Okay, so. And there are states now that are trying to find ways to ban social media up to 16. Is there something that you are confident that could be done to rein in the tech companies on this or to change the model?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, there are a couple of. So first of all, we should be clear. There are thousands and thousands of tech companies. They make our lives better. They're not hurting children. There are five or 10 that I believe are hurting children. And most of them, a few of them, I'm confident they actually do care and they're trying a few of them. And a few of them I think don't really care and have been impervious to suggestions from their own employees. So what's going to make them change? Only new legislation or if these lawsuits succeed. I don't know what's happening here, but in the US we have 45. The attorneys general of 45 states are suing Meta and Snapchat just for the medical costs, for all sorts of problems they're causing for the states. School districts are suing because our test scores are going down. Chaos is happening in the schools. Hundreds and thousands of parents whose kids are dead and they believe it wasn't just correlation. My child was sextorted and then the next day he Killed himself. Is that just correlation? I think that's causation. So even though the tech companies have immunity from Congress, they can't be sued for what they show your child. The argument that the lawyers are making is we're not suing on content, we're suing on the designs you made, the architecture of your platforms that you consciously created or you knew eventually were doing this. So product liability. We have an unsafe product that's harming millions and millions of children. I am hopeful that some of these suits will. They're being consolidated in a district court in California. If those succeed, then we have something so much bigger than the tobacco settlement. We have something in the. I don't even know how much it would be that I think would finally get there attention.

[Sarah Montagu]

Do you think it's like tobacco?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Do I think it's what like tobacco? Well, tobacco, it's like it in some ways. But here's the big difference. In 1997, which was the peak year of teen smoking in the United States, I just found this number. 37% of American high school students smoked cigarettes, which means two thirds didn't smoke because smoking is biologically addictive, but it doesn't force everyone to smoke.

[Sarah Montagu]

Right.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Whereas once a bunch of kids are on Instagram at a much younger age, now there's pressure on everyone. So now it becomes 90, 95%. So in a sense, social media is much more addictive than tobacco or heroin. You could never get 100% of kids on tobacco or heroin, but you get 100% on social media. It's different.

[Sarah Montagu]

I'm going to come out for questions in just a minute. Just one thing. Are Gen Z' ers permanent damage?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay, so I'll start with the pessimistic side, but there's a lot of optimism here too. The pessimistic side is if you miss out, I mean, the whole point of childhood is to prepare your brain to take the ideal configuration for your culture. So to some extent there is going to be some lasting effect. That seems very likely. I can't say 100% that that's the case, but it seems very likely. So I think what we're going to see, we're already seeing gen Z as 20. The oldest are 28. We are already seeing less marriage, less dating, less sex. They're already behind where previous generations were. The levels of anxiety and depression are much higher. So it's not like they get over it once they reach 21. So I think we will see, on average, I think we will see Gen Z less happy, less flourishing than previous generations throughout their life, on average. But there's huge, huge individual variability. Many in Gen Z are flourishing, many are doing fine. I'm a social scientist. When I say I don't mean 100%, I mean on average, it's different. Here's the optimistic side. When members of Gen Z change their habits, they change their consciousness and they get back control of their lives. This is what happens in my class at nyu, my students. I have a teacher course called Flourishing. And it they're mostly 19 years old. I want the sophomores, the second years, I want them to get this pretty early. And once we go through this about how you're giving away all of your attention, all of it, you don't have anything to do, anything of any significance because it's all given to these platforms. Once they realize this, they start turning off notifications. They start doing social media only on their computer, not their phone. They start having moments. They start having five or 10 minutes of a time with no interruptions and then they can lengthen to 20. So we're getting remarkable results just by changing their habits at the age of 19. So yeah, I think there is hope, but it's going to be Gen Z. You'll have to be much more intentional about flourishing because you were denied the normal childhood. That would have made you stronger and more open, more in Discover mode.

[Sarah Montagu]

You have been an amazing audience and I think that's because Jonathan Haidt's been so interesting. Thank you all very much.

[Leila Ismail]

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Leila Ishmael. Make sure to stay tuned for the next episode as we look back to 2024 and select the 12 best conversations from the year.

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