← Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
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- [00:00]
Jonathan Haidt
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Mayim Bialik
Hi, I'm Imbialik.
- [00:06]
Jonathan Cohen
I'm Jonathan Cohen.
- [00:07]
Mayim Bialik
And welcome to our Breakdown. Today, in honor of Supporting Young Minds Month, we're going to revisit one of our very popular episodes from last year with Jonathan Haidt. So Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and he's the author of the Anxious Generation, which I think to this day remains on pretty much every bestseller list. Um, it's a must read not just for parents, but for anyone who is curious about what the heck is happening in the generation that grew up with phones in their hands. And his book started the conversation which led to phones being removed from schools. This was literally. This is the guy. It's Jonathan Haidt.
- [00:46]
Jonathan Cohen
He exposes the collapse of youth mental health in the era of the smartphone, social media, and big tech, including heartbreaking ways our technology is designed to make all of us, not just our kids, addicted to. And he shares his not so radical plan for helping kids lead a healthier, freer childhood. A lot like we used to live. I know Mayim and I lived like that. We were really the last generation to grow up without phones.
- [01:12]
Mayim Bialik
Please join us as we take a look back at the scientific evidence tracing the current global mental health collapse directly back to smartphone usage and especially revealing why Gen Z is in crisis. From anxiety levels and stunted social skills to a literal addiction to technology.
- [01:28]
Jonathan Cohen
It's really, actually fascinating when you track this back to see that the rise in all of these conditions starts right at the moment where people are exposed and people will say, oh, it was happening anyway. His evidence really breaks through and makes us rethink what actually happened at this stage of our lives. As a friendly reminder, please check out Substack. We put exclusive content there, not available anywhere else. And the community is growing. We encourage you to check it out. So check out Mayim B. Alex, breakdown on Substack.
- [02:02]
Mayim Bialik
And now we hope you enjoy taking a look back at our fantastic episode with Jonathan Haidt. Break it down. John Height. Welcome to the Breakdown.
- [02:12]
Jonathan Haidt
Thank you.
- [02:13]
Mayim Bialik
Mayim, you're a social psychologist, right? This is sort of what you do. I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about. You're not terribly old, but when you started out becoming a social psychologist at that time, can you tell us what you were interested in? And what about culture kind of fascinated you in terms of wanting to study it at this level? Because I'm curious what it was like then versus what our culture has turned into.
- [02:41]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, well, so first of all, I'm 60, which I think. I think is pretty old. But I'm glad to see that you think that I don't look that old. When I started graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, originally to study cognitive psychology and the psychology of humor, that was my original idea. I really didn't know what the hell I was doing. I just wanted to somehow be a professor. And just by a series of flukes of which advisors I happened to talk to, I really hit it off with one who studied thinking and decision making, Jonathan Barron. And he had a side interest in moral thinking. And I'd written about morality and free will for my senior essay in college. So I decided to study morality with him. And then I met an anthropologist who studied how everything varies across cultures, especially morality. And so Alan Fiske was a brilliant cultural psychologist. So I just ended up. By the time I was done with grad school in 1992, I had picked morality as my focal topic. I study morality and how it varies by cultures and how it develops from children onward. That's what I studied. And it was a very fortunate choice of topics because morality or moral psychology is kinda, it's kind of like half of the operating system of society. So anything that involves people, especially people who are having any kind of conflict or misunderstanding, moral psychology, can help you understand what the hell's going on. So I ended up looking at how politics is basically like culture, like left and right. We're becoming like two separate cultures. So anyway, that's how I sort of got into the study of morality. And later on we'll get to why am I studying adolescent mental health? Like, that was a turn that happened in the 2010s. But to answer your question about universities, there was never a golden age when they were perfect. There were always critiques from the inside. But something really, really changed in 2015, and things are really different since then than they were since, say, in 2012. And that's what my book, the Coding American Mind, was about when I, when I graduated from college in 85, and then when I went to grad school in 87, I thought, wow, they're paying me to learn. You know, in a PhD program, you often get a, you know, you get a stipend, you don't pay tuition. You, you teach. And I felt like a kid in a candy shop. And I thought, there's all these brilliant people here, all these brilliant professors, and all these people passing through, giving talks. And it was really know, I felt like a kid in a candy shop. And, you know, there was, there was politics, but. And almost everyone's on the left, but it was not overwhelming the way it became after 2015. So I'm happy to talk about what happened to universities, because that's a whole. That's a whole book. And it's related to what happened to the rest of society, and it's related to what happened to the kids. So actually, yeah, it's all relevant. It all connects.
- [05:31]
Jonathan Cohen
I think, you know, your work has just shown us the unintended consequences of good intentions and then some bad intentions underneath. You know, that maybe we missed warning signals. These larger companies have too great of a profit incentive to really look at any of the risks. And, you know, we really need to step in now. So I would, you know, I'm throw it back to you to say, why don't you start to lead us through? And for people who haven't really understood what happened, like, start to start to walk us through that.
- [06:02]
Jonathan Haidt
I'll tell you what, why don't I give you the big picture of the book, but I'll give it in a way that answers your question that kind of shows how a bunch of things are connected. So the story of the book, the Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. The story of the book is basically a tragedy in three acts. And the first act, which I only talked a little bit about in the book, we only realized this, especially after we've turned in the manuscript. Act one is the loss of community. And in the United States, we had enormous levels of social capital coming out of World War II. There are times of cohesion in society, and there are times of dissolution. So, you know, the 40s and 50s and into the 60s were times of extraordinary cohesion and social trust. Very high social trust. Of course, there's all kinds of political chaos and activism in the 60s and 70s, but even still, people mostly trust their neighbors all the way into the 70s. But it begins declining a lot. And Robert Putnam wrote a very famous book about this called Bowling Alone. And so this is Act One. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with adolescence yet. But as part of act one, we lose trust in our neighbors. But we also get television and air conditioning. And before television and air conditioning, people sat outside a lot. Like, especially in the summer, like life in a neighborhood was you're on your front porch, you're visiting people, you're, you know, you're eating outside. And both air conditioning and television move people out of the public space or the neighborhood and into their living room where the TV is the Hearth and they're comfortable in their air conditioning. And so happiness isn't going down, but social capital is. We begin to trust each other less. Everything gets weaker. People don't bother going. Joining community clubs, Rotary club, all that sort of stuff begins to decline in the 70s, Putnam says, and he says very clearly television is the second biggest factor. The biggest factor is the loss of the greatest generation. The people who remember World War II were stamped into them. You know, patriotism, work together. So this is act one. Act two begins in the early 1990s. Act two is the loss of the play based childhood.
- [08:13]
Mayim Bialik
Sorry, can we just. I want to pause for a second because this feels, this feels really, really significant because it already is sort of starting. You know, I'm hearing that the voice mainly of my 18 year old being like that didn't really matter. Like everything changes. This is pro. Sorry, I don't mean to use his voice and that's actually not what he sounds like, but in my head it is. But I think that this is, I think it's important to sort of, you know, underscore this because this is how things happen is it snowballs and it's never just one thing. It's a lot of things. Right?
- [08:51]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right, that's right. That's what's so exciting about being a social scientist. You know, people sometimes say, you know, we have a phrase, it's not rocket science, but actually rocket science is actually really easy.
- [09:00]
Mayim Bialik
That's right.
- [09:01]
Jonathan Haidt
I mean if you have to be really good at math, but if you're really, really good at math, like you can figure out exactly where the rocket's going to go. And in the social sciences we cannot do that and we will never ever be able to do that. And Jonathan, you're a futurist. You know, I'm sure you think about like chaos theory and the fact that you have all these interacting variables and anyway, so yeah, in the social sciences we have to speak with a lot of asterisks and we can speak about general trends and we have to always say we can't predict the future. I'm a big fan of Phil Tetlock. He has a book called Superforecasters. Even experts can't predict the future. Much better than a monkey throwing darts at a. Yes, no question. So this isn't about predicting the future per se, but we can talk about trends and we can talk about some variables that change that are really, really important and being able to trust your neighbors and being able to trust your institutions. Boy, are those important. And when you have that, you have a good country. And when you don't have that, you have a country in decline.
- [09:58]
Mayim Bialik
And. And also. And before you go on to the next point, like I like to say, I grew up in the 1940s in the Bronx, even though I grew up in Los angeles in the 1970s and 80s. But we did not have a huge television culture. I mean, I grew up on, like, a lot of, you know, sitcoms, because people do. But my. I never saw my mother sit down and watch TV ever, ever, ever, ever.
- [10:17]
Jonathan Haidt
And because she's always working, she was
- [10:19]
Mayim Bialik
always working around the house. She was always cooking and cleaning and, like, helping us with homework. My dad was a public school teacher, and we would watch Faulty Towers or Time Bandits if it came on. That was the only thing that my dad would be like, everyone's. Or sports. Right. But we would take a walk almost every night after dinner. We would sit on the stoop.
- [10:37]
Jonathan Haidt
Now, was this a Jewish community? An Orthodox Jewish community? What? Tell me about the community.
- [10:40]
Mayim Bialik
Yeah, so my, my mother was raised Orthodox. My parents are from the South Bronx. So they come from a very specific but not religious community. But there was absolutely, I would say, an ethnic, cultural component to this notion of you sit on the stoop. And I see it, I see it in black communities, I see it in brown communities. So I grew up like, you sit on the stoop, you talk to your neighbors. We would play in the street until the sun went down. I don't think I was the only one, but that was. When I talk to my kids about what's missing, when they're staring at their screens, there's this notion of, like, that culturally, this first step that really shifted things.
- [11:21]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, that's right. That's right. And so your son is free to say, you know, mom, things change. And that's true. Technology changes. Overall prosperity increases, which is great. Health increases, which is great. Our ability to communicate increases. You know, all these things are great, but we often miss sociological outcomes that no one's keeping track of. And social capital is a big one. So I'll go on with the story because it links to what you just said. Act two of the tragedy is the loss of the play based childhood. And it's what you were just describing. You're not being supervised by your parents. The old idea, until the 90s, the old idea was, parents are busy kids, get out of here, get out of my face, go out in the street. And the two things that people always say, I always hear this. Either don't come Down. Don't come back until the. Don't come back until the street lights come on. That's one thing that people said. The other was don't come back until dinner.
- [12:07]
Mayim Bialik
The third one was don't come back. Don't come back unless you're bleeding and need to go to the hospital.
- [12:11]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay, There you go. Can you imagine a parent saying that today? I mean, you'd be, you know, you'd be thrown in jail for that, for child neglect. So, anyway, my point is. And actually, what you're. What were you born, if I may ask?
- [12:23]
Mayim Bialik
I was born in 1975 and also 1941.
- [12:26]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. Right. Okay, so you're clear. You're, like, slightly late Gen X. Like, you're, like, very much Gen X.
- [12:31]
Mayim Bialik
And I have a brother who's four years older. And so I picked up on a lot of, like, I did whatever he. I listened to what he did. So I have a little. A slightly older, you know, demo for a lot of my cultural references because I just wanted to be born in 1972.
- [12:45]
Jonathan Haidt
There was a huge crime wave going on. Life was much safer before the 60s, and life is much safer since the 1990s. So you and I grew up at a time when there were real dangers. And kids. You know, I grew up in a suburb of New York City that, you know, nobody got mugged, but in New York City, all the kids played outside. And sometimes, occasionally, it was pretty rare, but occasionally you would get mugged. I mean, it was just the thing, like, somebody would say, give me your money, and you say, okay. So there were some real dangers, but everyone went out and played. Cause you have to play. That's what kids do. And in the 90s, in this second act of the tragedy, in part because we had lost trust in our neighbors and in part because cable TV was now bringing us constant news reports about the occasional kid who is kidnapped. It's extremely rare that there's an actual kidnapping, like, by a stranger. And they're bringing this constant reports about scandals in which strangers had molested children sexually, for example, in the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts. Some of those were real, and others, like in daycare centers, those were not real. That didn't happen. The point is, in the 90s, even though the world's getting amazingly safe, the crime wave is ending, the Cold War is ending. Peace on Earth. No more nuclear. I mean, the 90s was an incredible decade, but we stopped letting our kids out to play. And this is really important because kids need the kind of childhood that you just described. That I had. And you know where, you know, if you fall down and you scrape your knee and you're bleeding a little bit, like you wouldn't dream of going home, you don't want to stop the play now. Occasionally it happens. Someone is injured enough, you have to knock on someone's door and say, hey, can you call my mother? Or something. But that's very rare. But you could do it because you trusted your neighbors. So we take away free play now. Kids must play. They need to play. We're mammals. All mammals play. But an interesting thing happens during this period in the 90s. As we're pulling them indoors, something new comes in, and that's the Internet. And so I remember first seeing a browser in 1994, and it was absolutely miraculous. You could just ask any question and you get the answer instantly. I mean, people have dreamed about this for thousands and thousands of years. The godlike power of omniscience. So we were all just mesmerized by the Internet. And it was and is fantastic, incredible. And the kids were fine. Some bad stuff happened on it. But the millennials who grew up with the Internet, they're fine. They turned out fine. A lot of them learned to program, they learned about computers, they started companies. Some of those companies are doing terrible things. But anyway, the point is, the millennials was they're an amazing generation. Every generation makes fun of the one after. But the millennials are successful, creative, they travel the world, they're doing things.
- [15:17]
Mayim Bialik
They don't like to make phone calls, though, and talk to customer service agents.
- [15:21]
Jonathan Haidt
Oh, really? Oh, okay. Just wait till you see Gen Z. So, yes, because they grow up texting, but their mental health is fine. And we all think the Internet's amazing. Okay, so now that's act two, the loss of the play based childhood. But it's okay, because now the kids have the Internet. They can grow up online. They have screens that entertains them. And we think this is okay.
- [15:41]
Jonathan Cohen
And this episode is sponsored by Wandering Jews, an open door media brand.
- [15:47]
Mayim Bialik
If you've ever found yourself feeling like you have more questions than answers, you're in good company. The Jewish people have been like that for thousands of years. Wandering Jews with Michal and Noam is a podcast where two of today's most dynamic Jewish voices, Michal Bittone and Noam Weissman, dig into the biggest questions about life through a Jewish lens. It's the kind of conversation where you'll laugh, learn something new, and probably shout in disagreement at least once. Michal and Noam tackle the tough topics like antisemitism in America, what happens after we die, and the future of religion. With guests like Bret Stevens, Michael Rapoport and Sarah Hurwitz. And this past month, in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, they've been celebrating some of the Jewish lives and institutions that have shaped American life, from food to music and comedy. Thoughtful, joyful, and always honest. That's Wondering Jews with Michal and a production of Unpacked. Find it on your favorite podcast app or or on YouTube and make sure to hit subscribe. Check out Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam podcast and subscribe at Unpacked Bio NMX
- [16:49]
Jonathan Cohen
My Ambiox breakdown is supported by BiOptimizers.
- [16:52]
Mayim Bialik
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- [18:17]
Jonathan Cohen
Make 2026, the year you finally start sleeping again.
- [18:21]
Jonathan Haidt
First it was okay, right?
- [18:23]
Mayim Bialik
And if I can also just kind of underscore this, like, play as we know it. That's also, I mean, if you want to like kind of. If we want to sort of tip our hat to the mental health conversation. One of the things that I most lament about the way my children are, you know, and I don't just blame my children by the way, like by all intents, like. But by all assessments, we don't have it as bad as I know some parents are struggling with. But what they don't do is move their body every day for many hours because that's a huge component of play. So obviously. And we could talk just about play if we wanted to and about, you know, the social engagement that involves and the negotiations and the lack of, you know, kind of parental supervision and how important it is for children to, you know, figure things out on the, on the, on their own. And also Jonathan, I can't speak for Jonathan, but I raised my kids with sort of the Rye philosophy. The, you know, sort of like, what's that? It's basically like to some extent, let them figure it out. Meaning do not constantly intervene. Allow toddlers to tussle a bit. They generally figure things out, if no one's being hurt or oppressed. Not to constantly narrate, which again.
- [19:32]
Jonathan Haidt
Ah, yes, yeah.
- [19:33]
Mayim Bialik
So I, I was one of the only parents I knew who didn't constantly narrate the world to my children. And my children also spoke very late and people were like, that's cuz you kept breastfeeding them and didn't talk to them, but for whatever reason. But anyway, so ry Rye philosophy, that's r I e, you know, kind of was, was that notion. But what is missing if you do not play a huge component which we know is critical for mental health is, is moving your body, you know, shifting that, like, metabolic level. And so for me, this is. And obviously we had an obesity problem since, I mean, we had Johann Hari on. He really feels like the 70s was the tipping point. Yeah, yeah, but, but that's an important notion of what happens when you lose that kind of play and move to the computer. You're not moving your body.
- [20:21]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right.
- [20:21]
Mayim Bialik
I was always moving my body.
- [20:23]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. You're also not getting sunshine. It turns out sunshine is, is much more important than we thought. I just read something in the Atlantic about how we thought vitamin D conferred all these advantages. But actually it's the sunshine more than vitamin D. Andrew Huberman's always talking about sunshine.
- [20:39]
Mayim Bialik
Huberman telling me to look at the sun when I wake up.
- [20:42]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. Look at this. I know. I never look. I mean, I look around it, I look a little below it.
- [20:48]
Mayim Bialik
I stare dead at it. I just Stare straight at it and say, let's see what happens.
- [20:54]
Jonathan Haidt
I would just do it with one eye so you have one in reserve in case Huberman is wrong. But right. This is very important. When kids start doing something five or 10 hours a day, anything that's going to push out everything else. I mean, if you take five to ten hours a day out of anyone's day, there's not everything else has to give. And so time outside, time with, you know, time with other kids, time with parents, everything has to give. Reading, you know, kids began reading a lot less. No one reads, no one reads books. That's right. That's right. So that begins going down with the early Internet. And so the early Internet, there's no high speed data, so there's like no video. You know, you can, you know, you can communicate with people, you can find all kinds of stuff. There are some rudimentary games, but it's not so engaging as it's about to become.
- [21:35]
Mayim Bialik
You've still got to buy your porn at the 7 11.
- [21:38]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, that's right. Although you could find ways to download static images of porn. You couldn't get video, but you could get static images. So. And all this again, the millennials turn out fine. Okay, so this brings us to Act 3, which again builds on what you just said about what you're losing. So Act 3 is the arrival of the phone based childhood. And when I was coining terms, I kind of meant to plan, like, there's carbon based life. And I used to love Star Trek. So occasionally they'd find a planet with silicon based life, which is like totally incompatible with carbon based life.
- [22:11]
Mayim Bialik
Only spatulas. Spatula only.
- [22:14]
Jonathan Haidt
What spatula? What are you talking about?
- [22:16]
Mayim Bialik
Like, you know, like medical grade silicone spatulas.
- [22:19]
Jonathan Haidt
Right, right, right, that's right. So, so, so just, I'll just walk people, walk you through the incredible transformation of human life that happens between 2010 and 2015. And we'll focus on teenagers. So if you were born in 1990, you are 22. When Instagram really becomes popular, which is 2012, is when Facebook buys Instagram. So 2012 is really the tipping point for a lot of reasons. You're born in 1990, you're a millennial, you're 22. Before you go into this whirlpool of social comparison and everything else that we know about the model, you're 22, you're done with puberty. But what if you were born in the year 2000? Now you're Gen Z, which is 1996, and later birth year is 1996. And later, if you're born in the year 2000, you're seven when the iPhone comes out. But very few teenagers have an iPhone. Then you're nine when social media goes super viral. That is, social media before was much calmer. It was just, I connect to you, you connect to me. They were social networking systems. It was fun. 2009, you get the like button, the retweet button, the share button. Everything is now about virality in the newsfeed. So social media becomes insane. The features come in 2009, but it's really more 2011, 12, 13, when it really goes insane. And now you begin to get global cancellations. Justine Sacco was the first global person who got canceled on a plane before she landed. That wasn't possible in 2008, but it was common by 2015. So if you're born in 2000, in 2010, you probably didn't have a phone at all. But if you did, it was a flip phone. And kids began getting flip phones in high school, of course, they all had flip phones. But in middle school, maybe some kids began to have a flip phone, but you couldn't spend eight hours a day on it. It was really just, you could text and you could call. That was pretty much it.
- [24:01]
Mayim Bialik
There was a level of laboriousness to it, which I. Which I sort of appreciate because when texting, I remember when you used to have to hit the letter three times to get to the third letter on the thing. So, like, everything took longer, which meant it was somewhat of a deterrent. And I.
- [24:18]
Jonathan Haidt
Exactly.
- [24:19]
Mayim Bialik
And I. My kids were born in 2005 and 2008, and, you know, I was starting to sort of get back into a little bit of acting when they were little. And I. I remember the day that my manager said, I cannot have you not reachable when you're at the park with your kids because I need you to be able to receive auditions, script. And that was when she said, it's real. And I had held out. And she's like, it's really time. Like, it's time. You have to do it. And I can tell you, and I'm sure you're not surprised, that was the moment that my life as a parent changed forever. From that moment on, I was never able and have never been able. They are 15 and 18. I have never been able to truly separate myself from the accessibility of other people having access to me. So they have shared me. They have shared me with that device for their whole. Pretty much their whole lives. And when they say, mama, you're always on your phone, mama, you tell me to get off my phone. And, and also, I've placed a lot of limits. I'm off social media now. Like, I just am. I don't even lie about it anymore. So I've made changes. But you know, when I'm sending my, my oldest off to college, it's like I feel the need to, to purge myself of this dirty fact, which he doesn't listen to this. But the fact is my mental health has been compromised because my attention has been divided and I am an addict for that accessibility.
- [25:56]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. So what you said illustrates so many principles in the book, so many principles of what's going on. There's a beautiful, haunting phrase from Sherry Turkle at mit. She says, because of our devices, we are forever elsewhere. And what that means, obviously, is we evolved to be with people and we want to hang out with our friends and we want to be with our family and we want to be with our lover. And, and those are the physical, embodied people that we interact with. And as you said, the flip phone, there was an obstacle to doing it. So you couldn't, you didn't, you could just use it as a tool to be with your people. Like you'd use it to say, I'll see you at three o'. Clock. And it's a tool to connect, to actually connect in person. But the smartphone now makes us so accessible, it makes it so easy to communicate now that there's dictation. Now it's actually, you know, it's really fast to type. So the smartphone becomes an alternative to being with people, not a tool to be with people. And now we get young people now are spending numbers are between seven and 10 hours a day on their phones. Now that includes, that includes video games. But the point is screen, you know, screen time, the newest numbers are around five hours a day just of social media. That's the average half of all kids say that they're online almost constantly, meaning they're always monitoring something, they're on one of the platforms. So a lot of our kids basically have given away all of their attention. They have no attention to do anything. They're never fully present.
- [27:23]
Mayim Bialik
Right? Everything is boring. Everything is boring.
- [27:25]
Jonathan Haidt
Everything off the phone is boring, it's slow. And they have no ability to be present when they are with people. And so this is a huge loss of human experience. This is a huge loss of social capital and trust. And just as television pulled people away from the streets, so we know now then our neighborhoods change, our streets change in the same way. Phone based life pulls us away from the people around us. So we might as well just be walking around with goggles. We might as well not even bother going out. So anyway, there's this profound transformation, I say between 2010 and 2015. The other things we need to add here are that in 2010 is when you get the first front facing camera on the iPhone 4 or 5, I forget which one. And then Samsung copies it right away. And then you also get high speed Internet is really coming in in this time. So in 2010, teenagers still had a recognizably human childhood where they used a flip phone and slow data plans to text each other to get together. In 2015, that's not happening anymore. In 2015, 70 or 80% have a smartphone, most people have high speed Internet, everyone's got a front facing camera, everyone has Instagram or other platforms. And now we have the fully phone based childhood. And it's exactly in that period, 2010 to 2015, when teen mental health plummets. Not just in the United States, it plummets in the same way at the same time in all the English speaking countries. We're looking into Europe, it plunges. Overall, it drops. In Europe, there's some variations. Eastern Europe not so much, Northern Europe, much more so. But the point is, this is not just an American story, this is a developed world story. When teenagers, especially in very free countries, when they move their social lives onto smartphones and social media, it pulls them away from, they have no more roots, they're not anchored in community, they're not connected to real people as much. They're not playing outside, they're not moving their bodies as much, they're not getting sunshine, they're not reading books. You take away from all that and you put them on platforms that have been designed by the biggest companies, most powerful companies in the world, who are hiring the best psychologists and who have seminars internally. We know this from Francis how in the whistleblower who study brain development. So they know how to maximally hook kids when they own childhood. Oh, and by the way, we can't sue them, we can't sue them for whatever they do to our kids. Congress gave them special immunity. We can't sue them for whatever they show to our kids. So we have this insane legal environment in which companies, these, a few companies especially, can run roughshod over our kids in their competition to hook the kids before another company does. And this is why mental health collapses between 2010 and 2015 in many, many countries around the world. At least that's my claim in the book. I can back that up with experimental evidence as well, although that's much harder. That's very rare.
- [30:10]
Jonathan Cohen
I want to get to more of the mental health stats because I think people are still grappling with just the suffering that many of the kids are experiencing. But when you talk about the rewiring of childhood and you talk about the lack of play based experiences, I'm not sure that everyone really understands the huge downstream ramifications of that. And you know, one, one of those things is about building resilience and cooperation that happens and how that impacts leadership in the future. Mayim and I had a funny conversation yesterday. My son forgot his socks. He went to the beach with a camp he was at and he left his socks there and he had to go in the afternoon and play tennis. And of course he texts me because I'm like seven minutes away. He's like can you bring me another pair of socks? And mime is like I wouldn't bring him a pair of socks. And I was like, well I'm seven minutes away and you know his, he going to, he's going to spend the whole day in tennis shoes without socks. His feet are going to get ripped up. And then I thought about it this morning and I was like, when I was his age, I lived in Toronto, Canada. I was rollerblading, carrying a hockey net over my head for half an hour to go play with a group of boys that we would then play until our legs were so sore it was dark out and I would like catch the last bit of daylight carrying this thing back sometimes in so much pain that I was like, am I going to leave this hockey net here? And like that inner battle of like am I going to get myself home? There was no one to save me. And when I face adversity now, I don't necessarily connect it to those times, but there were enough times in my childhood where I was in situations I didn't know how to get myself out of and I had no one to help me.
- [31:58]
Mayim Bialik
The, the other thing that I have noticed happens not just with Jonathan and his son, but in general is these kids, this, I hate to say this generation, but kids who are sort of phone centered like this, their ability to tap into creative ideas for resources is literally next to nothing. So this is a tennis camp. I would not be surprised if they have like some socks on standby. But it would involve a 16 year old saying to a grown up, hey, I'VE got a problem. Can someone other than my dad help me fix it? And to me, it's like I see it with my kids too. If the solution is not directly there or if I'm not providing it, it doesn't exist. They'd rather go hungry, right? Then have to think of, oh, can I go to the cupboard? In a house that has a ton of food that I like to eat and that's good for me, that is easy to assemble. No, they'd rather literally not eat. Then they're grumpy. It's six o' clock and everyone's miserable because no one fed themselves because Mama didn't do it. Now I want to hear your answer.
- [33:06]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay. Yeah, no, that's right. So there's so much going on in free play that leads people to. Free play is essential for kids to develop the ability to face obstacles and overcome them, to have conflicts and resolve them to face a lack like, oh, we don't have a net, or we don't have any food, or it's really hot and we're all thirsty. What are we going to do? And when we were growing up, you would sometimes have to ask strangers for things, like directions. You always had to ask strangers for directions. We all got used to saying, excuse me, can you tell me how to get to the library? We all grew up talking to strangers. But in a world where kids are told, stranger danger. Never talk to strangers. Here's a phone. Always be on your phone. You have. Everything you need is here. I found that in my own children. Even though I've tried to really minimize, I tried to put all kinds of limits. So I had. My daughter took a train to New Jersey. She's 14 now. She took a train to visit a friend in New Jersey, and I'd encouraged her to do it entirely on her own. Let's talk through it. You go to Penn Station, where it's a direct subway line. Here's how you find the train. And she didn't want to do it entirely on her loan the first time. It was a big step, maybe a little too big. So I said, okay, I'll go with you and I'm going to still go 10 yards behind you and I'm not going to talk to you. And so she gets to Penn Station, gets roughly in the right area, doesn't know where to buy the ticket. She's looking around, doesn't know where to buy the ticket. I say, ask someone. Ask. She will not do it. She will not do it, because that's so awkward. To ask someone. And ultimately, she ultimately did find it. And then she looked back at me triumphantly like, mm, see, I didn't have to ask anyone. But there's a real. I hear lots of stories like this that they're afraid to talk to people in person because there's no texting someone, you know, that's effortless, no problem. But to talk to a person, much harder. And, you know, I teach in a business school, so I talk to people in the corporate world a lot. And I always ask them, how are your Gen Z employees doing? And they almost always say, it's really bad, it's really hard. You know, they're anxious, they. They don't take initiative, they don't have good social skills, they don't make eye contact. And let's just put in a disclaimer here. We are not blaming Gen Z. None of this is their fault. All of this is that we took away their normal childhood. We gave them phones and the Internet. We thought this was okay. We were completely wrong. There was no research on this. Everything changed between 2010 and 2015. Even as late as 2011, 2012, we still thought, the Internet is amazing. It's going to take down dictatorships, the Arab Spring, the Internet's the best thing. And smartphones and social. So we really didn't know. We began to get an inkling that something's gone really wrong in the late 2000 and tens. And that's when I got into this, into really doing the research on this. In the coddling the American Mind. That book was all about overprotection. And we speculated. We had like two pages on, like now. You know, the timing is such that social media, you know, early Facebook, you know, this might have affected Gen Z, but we don't know. We don't know. And then Covid comes in and we all get confused. And it's hard to make any conclusions about teen mental health and smartphones from during COVID But I think it's only because now Covid has retreated and the kids are not getting better. We now see the wreckage. We see the wreckage in education. The kids know a lot less. Their educational scores are down, and it turns out it's not since 2020. It's since 2012. Scores began dropping. Educational attainment began dropping around the world after 2012 because that's when kids no longer could sit in a class and be bored. But sometimes, listen to the teacher. You don't have to be bored anymore in class. You have your phone. So you're always entertained all during the school day, you've got something to do and very little of it is listening to the teacher.
- [36:39]
Mayim Bialik
Well, and even if, even if teachers are limiting your access to it, as we've talked about, what happens to a grown woman, you know, like you're, you're never really there. You're never really there even if you're not on it because it is always about what's coming next.
- [36:55]
Jonathan Cohen
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Jonathan Cohen
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This is a limited time offer and while supplies last, you can't get it on Amazon, you can't get it in stores. This offer exists in one place. Our link, our code. That's it. So maybe you were already thinking about it. This is the sign. Go to bioptimizers.com breaker use the code breaker. Grab it before it's gone. Make 2026 the year you finally start sleeping again. With Verbal's last minute deals you can save over $50 on your spring getaway. So whether it's a mountain escape with friends, a family week at the beach or sightseeing in a new city, there's still time to get great discounts. Book your next day now. Average savings $72. Select homes only. What I've noticed and I wonder if you can speak to this a little bit. It seems like we are all Kind of framing the real world as if it's a phone. Meaning. I think part of the resistance in speaking to people is that the fear of rejection or saying something that isn't likable is, is a threat that feels as if we are literally operating in an interface of the phone that everything is determined by likes. What do I look like? Am I wearing the right thing? It's like everything that that is on that little screen seems to be getting projected. And honestly, I see it with adults, I think even more than I see it with kids. I wonder if you can speak a little bit to that, not just how it affects kids, but adults as well.
- [39:40]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about a couple of things. Let's imagine a few childhoods. One is the kind of free range childhood we've been talking about, which is basically filled with you and a few friends working things out, having adventures, getting into conflicts, resolving the conflicts, etc. That's historically what childhood was mostly like. Another childhood is you grow up in a minefield. Like literally a minefield. Like your entire life, everyone is in a minefield. And a lot of kids get their legs blown off. You're not going to be running around frolicking very much. You're going to basically be so careful about everything because people are getting their legs blown off. That's the minefield childhood. The third childhood I want you to imagine is growing up on a stage where it's like the Truman show except that, you know the audience is there and everything you do, people are watching you and they're either applauding or booing everything. Now this is going to, again, as with the minefield, this is going to really, really change. You're going to be a very, very different person. If everything you do is being evaluated all the time with instant feedback, you can see what the audience says about you. So these are really, really sick ways to grow up. But I would say that the phone based childhood is both of the latter two. So one thing that I hear from a lot of college professors, I don't have this problem so much in my class because I'm talking very explicitly about this. I teach a course on flourishing here at NYU Stern and we're really talking about exactly these issues. But one thing I hear from many other professors is they can't get their students to disagree with each other. They can't get them to say anything controversial. And that's in part, I believe, because they've all grown up in a minefield. They all know that if you say one Thing that someone takes offense to. There's no limit to how bad this can be for you because it can get picked up in a viral world, super viral world. It can get picked up, it can go beyond the school, it could become a national thing.
- [41:25]
Mayim Bialik
And you can want to kill yourself from the blowback of that. I mean, like, literally.
- [41:29]
Jonathan Haidt
That's different from the shame, right? Shame makes people want to disappear. Shame makes people want to die. When kids are being publicly shamed, everyone's laughing at them, pointing to them, adding on. Most of those kids, I believe, at least, are considering suicide. A third of girls say that they've considered it seriously in the last year. Anyway, a quarter of American teenage girls say they've made a plan, a specific plan, on how they would kill themselves. So suicidal think is now very, very common. It's a normal part of being an American girl. And I think it's in part for this reason. So it's both the growing up on stage and the growing up in a minefield, of course, that shapes you in really bad ways. We gotta stop that. And that's why what I'm calling for is like, let's stop with this stuff about, well, each kid is different. Well, there's no, you know, I can't tell you an age at which your kid can have a smartphone. Some may be ready for it at age 8, some maybe not till 16. I think what. What's kind of new about my book is that I'm. I have not been studying adolescent development my whole career. I don't come at this saying, each kid is different. Let's tailor it for each kid. Let's, you know, let's meet the kids where they are. I say, if the kids are playing on the train tracks, I'm not going to meet them where they are. I'm going to take them off the train tracks first, and then we can do everything else. And so, because I come in as a social psychologist and I'm totally attuned to the social forces, I'm totally attuned to the fact that this is a collective action problem, that the reason why the kids are trapped, the reason why they have to be on TikTok, is because everyone else is. And everyone's Talking about the TikTok videos they have to watch. The reason everyone has a smartphone, Even by age 10 now, most kids are getting a smartphone by then, is because the parents felt like they're in a trap. Each kid says, mom, I'm the only one. I have to have a smartphone. The kids are laughing at Me for my phone watch or for not having a smartphone. So I came at this from the point of view of a social psychologist saying regardless of individual variation, the only way out of this is collective action with clear norms. And the clear norms that I propose, there are four of them in the book. Maybe I'm jumping the gun here, but I'll just list them now, we can come back to them later. But is no smartphone till 14, no social media till 16, phone free schools and a lot more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. With those four norms we can roll back the phone based childhood. Not all the way to where it was when we were talking about in the 70s and 80s, but we can restore what would look like a kind of a humane version of childhood where kids are not in a minefield, they're not on a stage, they are getting together unsupervised to do things like walk down to a store and get ice cream. Like that's a good thing for nine year old kids to be doing. And right now they're not allowed to do that. If a 9 year old kid tries to do that, some neighbor could call the police, the police come, they call in child protective services. It's a complete nightmare when this happens to your family. So we've got to change all of that so that eight, nine year old kids can have a sort of a human childhood again.
- [44:23]
Mayim Bialik
I want to ask why. I mean there's a, there's a phrase that I'm pulling from, it's from the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous that, you know, half measures avail us nothing, right? I've tried and my kids, just so you have a point of reference, my kids got smartphones for their bar mitzvah
- [44:44]
Jonathan Haidt
which is 13, age 13, that's better than most.
- [44:47]
Mayim Bialik
So that's what I said to my ex husband. I felt it was too early, I felt it was unnecessary and everybody knows that, including my children. But as a divorced parent it's like you don't want to be on that side of that conversation. So I, I stated and I tried to put. So basically, you know, so I've got, you know, I've got a 15 and 18 year old now. So for the past five years, for the older one I have been trying to do half measures and I have tried like again, I'm going to start to cry again. I've tried to cut this cheesecake every way you can cut it. I've tried to cut it in slivers, I've tried to take off the top, I've tried to take off the bottom. I've tried to like make it in muffin tins so that it's smaller bits of cheesecake. I've done everything that I have known and a tremendous amount of my relationship with my children is talking about this and I don't appreciate that. Meaning I in many cases have given up because the strain is so great on our relationship and especially my, my younger one is a little bit different. He's not really interested in social media with other humans, but he likes it for looking at videos and things and, and a lot of times it's educational stuff. A lot of times like it's stuff like that. But to me, you know, and of course I get to pull the neuroscientist card. Like it's not really categorically different. Meaning it's about time. Meaning it's about a time commitment. It's about an intention commitment. It's about of. Here's what's not happening when you do whatever you're doing on it. Commitment. But I really feel like the reason that I'm encouraged by you, by your book and by some of the recent conversation that, you know, I believe has come from the work that you've done, which is a tremendous contribution you have made to our society. I really, I cannot, I cannot overstate it enough. But you know, we're talking about bands in lausd, you know, here, where I live in Southern California. So these are exciting things. But I wonder if you can explain what is going on that it's, it seems impossible to put any real limits around it. I've tried the apps like it is just a non stop fight.
- [47:04]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. So there's so much of what you just said. I'll start with you just crystallized what parents all over the world, all over the developed world are feeling since about 2013-2015. Since then, family life all over the developed world has been a fight over screen time. And we're all like, what the hell happened to why is this happening? I don't want to be doing this. So that's why things are changing so fast now because we're all in the same boat. Most people have either given up or they feel it's impossible. And my message is, yeah, it's really hard to do this if you're acting alone. If you're the only one, it's really hard to do this. But if we act together, if you just team up with a few of the parents of your kid's friends, if you get the whole school to go phone free. If you do it in a collective way, you can break out of a collective action trap. So I really want to recognize for everybody listening who has kids, we've all been sort of sucked into this place, which is very hard. It's a trap. It's very hard to escape from. We have to do it collectively. And that's why things are changing so fast all around the world. In Britain, they're actually ahead of us. Parents are rising up, joining together, signing pledges. And groups are breaking out in Australia, Brazil, Germany, all over the place. If you go to anxiousgeneration.com that's the website for my book. So especially if you're not in the United States, go down, you'll find, look for a page on aligned organizations. We have a map showing all these groups popping up. So there's a parents rebellion and there's a kids rebellion. Gen Z doesn't like this either. Okay, but now I want to go back. You said something very interesting about half measures. And my mind is such that if you say something, if you assert something, I'll sort of take the opposite of and just think like is the opposite true. And when you say, you know what half measures get us nowhere. What was that? Yeah, avail us nothing. And I was thinking, I don't know, sometimes half measures get you halfway there. And let's say for exercise, I would much rather make a half measure towards exercise than give up. Because a half, you know, doing half of what I should do is like pretty good. And so then I realized as you were talking, I was thinking, ah, the key is addiction. If it's an addictive process, then you have to go all or nothing. And so, and that's why sleepaway camps are so successful. Because a sleepaway camp, like if you send your kid for four weeks to a sleep wake camp. First of all people, sleepaway camps are amazing. Never ever send your kid to a sleepaway camp that doesn't have a very strict phone policy because this is the best.
- [49:34]
Mayim Bialik
His phone is in his bedroom and he is not. I'm like, it's, I'm in heaven.
- [49:38]
Jonathan Haidt
That's great. And what that means is that on the bus, on the bus out to the sleepaway camp, your kid was talking to other kids.
- [49:44]
Mayim Bialik
He was not, he was reading and his neck was sore because his face was in a book because he didn't want to engage with other kids. But yes, in theory, on the way
- [49:52]
Jonathan Haidt
back, but, but I bet you on the way back tell me what it was like then he probably was talking with other kids. Okay, okay.
- [49:58]
Mayim Bialik
Mostly, maybe the counselors, but yes, you're right.
- [50:01]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay, all right, all right. So the point is it's the addiction. And you know, and, and in my debates with people, you know, who say, oh, you know, you know, you can't ban things and kids have rights and parents, you know, you're telling parents what to do. And what I realized is there are three areas. There are three reasons why we put on age limits. The big three. The reason why we, almost all the age limits we have, they're because of sex, violence and addiction. We've generally reached a consensus in our society that sex, especially hardcore, you know, genitals coming together and people choking each other and stuff like that. Like, you know, we don't just let nine year olds watch that. Like we try to stop that. And extreme violence, I mean really brutal violence. Like, you know, we don't let them see that and you know, in kids shows and cartoons and, you know, we don't let them see X rated movies or even R rated movies. So sex violence and then addiction. We don't let kids into casinos, we don't let them try drugs that are legal for adults. Addiction is, you know, really serious because they don't have the frontal prefrontal cortex, they don't have the executive function, they don't have the maturity to resist addiction. Those are the three reasons. What happens on the day you give your kid a smartphone, you've got a 10 year old, let's say it's a 10 year old girl, you give her a smartphone, she downloads Instagram that day. Now what do you have? You have sex, they're gonna find pornography. If it's a boy, they're gonna find violence. Girls aren't watching beheading videos, they're not watching really brutal stuff. But boys, based on what they click on, boys end up getting shown a lot more violence. People being run over by cars, people falling out of windows. I mean horror, you know, clips, you know, people. And everyone has a camera. So people record all kinds of deaths. So sex and violence, they're gonna find. And social media is particularly addictive for girls. Between 5 and 15% of girls, you could say are addicted. The technical term is problematic use.
- [51:49]
Mayim Bialik
Yeah. What do you define that as?
- [51:52]
Jonathan Haidt
So problematic use means it's compulsive use and that's what makes it look like addiction. Like they feel they have to do it. They can't just put it aside. So it's compulsive use that interferes with other areas of life. So they're not getting their homework done, they're not seeing, seeing their family, they're not seeing their friends. And wait, there's a third feature?
- [52:12]
Mayim Bialik
Well, I noticed withdrawal behaviors.
- [52:15]
Jonathan Haidt
I mean to me that's, that's the third feature. That's the third feature. Yeah, that's right. So when you take it away. So like, like a boy on video,
- [52:21]
Mayim Bialik
they look like addicts. They look like addicts.
- [52:23]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. If they're heavy users, right. So the majority of boys, they can go away for three days without symptoms, but 5 to 15% of them will have severe, will have symptoms of withdrawal. And if they have withdrawal symptoms, and those are. Anna Lemke talks about these. It's what, it's anxiety, insomnia, dysphoria and irritability. So if your kid is showing that when they're detoxing, that directly tells you that their dopamine, the dopamine neurons, I mean, I'll let you come back here. But the dopamine neurons that have been accustomed to very high levels of sort of cheap, quick dopamine and therefore have down regulated to become less sensitive. So, so that a three day period with no video games is the opposite of the pleasure. It's, it's withdrawal and it hurts and then they need to go back. Is that basically the story with dopamine? You please fill it out any more than.
- [53:14]
Mayim Bialik
I just mean. Yeah, I mean the, the sort of layperson's way to think about it is if you are accustomed to a certain level of stimulation that for your brain and your nervous system feels so good, comfortable, whatever it feels like when you remove it. Yes. The system will essentially go into revolt and nothing can match it, right? Nothing can match it feels good, nothing feels good and nothing takes the place of it. So if you've ever been around, let's say a, a very, very problematic drinker, someone who really, really needs to drink, for example, to function in a social situation. If they don't have that, what it looks like is they cannot wait to get away. They cannot wait to get their fix. They will sneak off to another bar, right? They will find a way to get it. That sort of sneaking behavior, that sort like, that's literally. That is the dopamine system being like, someone save me, save me from what it feels like to be sober. Right? That's what it is to be without my drug is unbearable. Give it back to me.
- [54:16]
Jonathan Haidt
Yep, that's right. So if we imagine a large percentage of our kids are literally addicted, I don't know whether we Want to call it 10% or 40%, whatever percent you want to call it. This helps explain why family life all over the world has become like as if your kid was an alcoholic and you were constantly struggling. And that's why half measures get us nowhere. And that's why the advice that I give in the book is really different from that of most other experts. Most other experts give you all kinds of things and talk to your kid about this and try this and monitor this.
- [54:46]
Mayim Bialik
They don't want to talk about it.
- [54:48]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, no, that's right, that's right. So those I think are half measures. And, and I think the only thing that really works when you have such an addictive and it's physically addictive, it's also socially addictive. The social pressures is just delay, delay, delay, delay. Just don't give any kid a smartphone before high school. Let them have a flip phone or a basic phone or a phone watch. Don't let any kid open a social media account until 16. Now for Instagram, I think that we can get done. TikTok would be a little harder because they can watch TikTok videos even if they don't have an account. Snapchat is going to be tough to change because that's what they use and they would be so much better if they use texting. Snapchat is a little different from Instagram in terms of the harmfulness. But let's remember about Snapchat. It was designed for disappearing pictures, which basically says it's the perfect platform for sending nudes and for doing drug deals and other criminal activity. And since there's no age verification anywhere on the Internet, at least any of the places our kids go. And there's no identity authentication. So all kinds of strangers can reach your kids on Instagram, on Snapchat. And that's where a lot those two platforms are, where most of this extortion happens, all kinds of sexual solicitation. So yeah, the day you give your kid that phone is the day that the phone moves to the center of their life. They will develop a phone based childhood. Strangers can reach them, they can reach strangers. Sex, violence, sex and horrible violence can reach them and they will consume some of it. So I'm saying let's not try to regulate this and modify that and put a screen time limit here. Let's just say this is just wildly inappropriate for children. Just like children should not be doing this stuff. We need to treat this like alcohol or driving a car or shooting a gun. Well, shooting a gun. I mean, kids can legally Shoot guns. But, but certainly, you know, public drinking and gambling. I mean, there's just a lot of things that are just wildly inappropriate for children.
- [56:49]
Mayim Bialik
And, and if, first of all, I agree with you, I would like to live inside of your brain. But just to play devil's advocate here for, for those other things, there's. There's nothing positive, meaning, like, there's nothing I'm gonna say is positive about, let's say, access to pornography for children. There's nothing positive about that, right? There's nothing positive.
- [57:08]
Jonathan Haidt
I think boys would disagree with you.
- [57:09]
Mayim Bialik
No, no, but, but in, in terms
- [57:11]
Jonathan Haidt
of, in terms of healthy development.
- [57:14]
Mayim Bialik
In terms of like healthy development. No, I'm not saying it's not pleasurable. Like plenty of things are pleasurable that I don't want kids to have access to. But just to kind of devil's advocate it here, you know, there are positive things. I mean, my kids loved, you know, my kids loved Red and Link and my kids loved, you know, John Green and you know, my kids loved sort of like learning.
- [57:35]
Jonathan Haidt
What are these things? Are these videos?
- [57:38]
Mayim Bialik
Yeah, these are things that are entertaining slash educational. They're so. Of infotainment.
- [57:43]
Jonathan Haidt
And this was sort of videos.
- [57:44]
Mayim Bialik
Yeah, yeah, they're videos. So I'm saying.
- [57:46]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, I'm not saying don't have access to videos.
- [57:49]
Mayim Bialik
Right. So this was sort of my question. But a lot of these things, that's where they're being shown. They're being shown on social media and as, as Instagram and as everything sort of. You know, it used to be that you could only put like pictures and then it was like, oh, a short video. And now it's like you can put your whole life on there. So th. This is sort of the challenge I have for you is with, even with social media, there are aspects that could be supportive, educational, helpful. Interesting. That's where many of us started saying, okay, you can have two hours. Right. But. But what, what is, what is different about how we approach this? That, let's say, needs to be different from just saying it's all bad or there's some good stuff but we don't know how to regulate it.
- [58:32]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. So two things. One is, let's first talk about age. So, so if we're talking about being a 16 year old, are there some things that are good for 16 year olds about being on social media? And there we can definitely have a discussion. I'm totally willing to grant that there are some good things. I think the bad still outweighs it, but I totally grant There are useful things. Now let's talk about 10 and 11 year olds. No, I really don't see anything. Anything that is uniquely. They can't get it elsewhere. And so now this brings us to what Cal Newport calls the any benefit fallacy. So, Cal Newport, everybody who feels overwhelmed, if you feel overwhelmed by the technological age, please read Cal Newport's book, Deep Work. My students love it. He's got a new one. I think it's called Slow Productivity. I haven't read it yet, but Cal points out in Deep Work, most of us suffer from the any benefit fallacy. Like, oh, I signed up for this newsletter thing and they email me three times a day and you know, maybe there'll be something like there might be a special, like, I don't want to miss something. And you do that a few dozen times and before you know it, you're spending half an hour each day deleting all this stuff you got. Because maybe there will be a benefit. And yet we have to always look at the cost and we have to be. There is now so much coming at us. We have to basically say, is the benefit so great that I'm willing to let this take a portion of my very limited amount of attention? All right, so now what you just said before is some of these videos are useful. I totally agree. And the way they're getting them is on social media. Well, is that enough of a benefit that we should have our 10 year olds on social media? YouTube is technically social media, but we use it more as a video repository. So I'm not saying kids should not be on YouTube. What I'm imagining is a family raising kids. You have a computer, ideally a desktop computer. It's in the kitchen or it's in the living room. You have, you know, limits on the hours. But kids can explore. They can watch videos on YouTube. They can watch whatever these video. If everyone's talking about some, some video, they can, they can watch it. Stories are good. This is the important thing. Stories are good. Humans live in stories. We've always told stories. Movies are good. Watch movies with your kids. The screen is not the danger, it's the short form videos, they're not stories. They're not good. They're little tiny hits of dopamine customized for your brain by a Chinese algorithm. And so what I would say is, sure, your kids, maybe they found something on social media, but what if we simply raise the age? What if we require, what if we just required companies to respect existing law, which is you can't give an account to a kid under 13, which they don't do because they don't want to know the age. They don't have to know the age. What if we just enforce existing law? What if we raise it to 16, which is what I want. You have to be 16 to open an account. What would happen? Would kids never see videos again? No, they would just not see them on Instagram. They would have to go to YouTube where they could either have a child's account. YouTube does have YouTube. There are, you know, you could have account of a certain sort or, you know, YouTube videos would still be accessible to the world so they could watch it on YouTube. You don't need an algorithm driven news feed focused program designed to addict you in order to find those few benefits that you can point to.
- [61:45]
Jonathan Cohen
And I think it's extremely important to understand that these companies, similar to the cigarette companies, similar to oil companies, when they had lead in their gas and didn't want to to be regulated. These companies are designed to maximize attention at all costs and they do not have the benefit of the user in mind. We can say, oh, we like, like I like funny animal videos, but I also know that my feed, even as an adult quickly divulges and goes towards the most extreme type of content and that's intentional by them. Can you speak a little bit to some of the knowing that has come out recently that these companies are promoting or you know, have turned the blind eye to some of the damages, especially for young girls, and encouraging sexploitation and real extreme danger, Putting these young girls in danger.
- [62:52]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. So this is the business model pioneered by Facebook. You know, originally they had no business model. Mark Zuckerberg understood that the value of a network grows. I forget this is called somebody's law. The value of a network grows of communication network grows in proportion to the square of the number of people. It's not linear, it's the square. And more recent research showed that on social media it's actually the cube. So it grows incredibly fast. He understood that and he said, growth at all costs. We'll figure out how to make money later. And then they did and they developed the advertising driven business model. And then once they developed the like button, now they have so much information coming in from each user that they can really customize things. And now the newsfeed becomes more central. So. And all of this was done in a competitive, you know, free market environment. You know, God bless the free market. I'm all for it. I'm a professor in a business School. I. I've traveled in Communist Europe before the wall fell. Like, you know, that's great that companies are competing to deliver a better product. But this only works when the person that you're dealing with is your customer. And under this new business model, the kids are not the customers. They are the product. I mean, all of us are the product, and the customers are the advertisers. So this is a very unusual business model. I mean, I guess you could say, well, you could say newspapers and magazines, they had both. You had to subscribe, but also they had advertisers. So, you know, it's not. This was out of nowhere, the idea of advertisers paying for the thing. And because, of course, in television, you might say, well, you know, a lot of television other than PBS is designed to maximize your attention. Like they're trying to keep you on. You know, like, news flash, you know, tune in at 11. I'll never forget the line from a Kentucky Fried movie. I'm in middle school. One of the scenes was Moscow in flames. Missiles headed towards New York. Film at 11. So, you know, they're trying to keep you on, but there's a qualitative difference between trying to keep you on by having really entertaining programs that you're going to want to watch and that they put out and that hit everybody versus an algorithm that learns your behaviors and your preferences so fast that kids learn, like, wait, am I gay? Like, why does this algorithm think I'm gay? You know, I mean, it can tell what they're looking at. It can often know your sexuality before you do. They are so customized per customer that it's a level of hooking beyond anything that television could ever have accomplished.
- [65:19]
Mayim Bialik
I wonder if you can speak to. There was an article that you wrote why the Mental health of Liberal Girls Sank first and fastest. And I actually sent this one to my son because I just, I thought it was so powerful. And I thought also my kids were homeschooled until high school. And so, you know, my son, who entered high school at 11th grade, you know, was interacting with a very different kind of population, a larger population, you know, of girls and boys than he had ever really been exposed to before. And of course he did other activities and model UN and this, that. But I sent this to him because was so powerful. And of course he was like, I think he's a fear monger. And I said, well, that's okay, read it anyway. But I wonder if you can speak to not only the mental health of, of liberal girls and sort of the difference between girls and boys when we talk about these things. But I would argue that women versus men is also another sort of very different kind of algorithm. Generally speaking, I don't mean to say that I know everybody's gender, blah, blah, blah, but there's something different because look, women are more social creatures typically. So things like comparisons are things that come more, more easily. They're more part of the vernacular of the, the female experience. And again, some men and non binary people. But I wonder if you can speak to sort of the specificity of girls versus boys. But let's expand it out to adults because I think social media is horrendous for adults, not just children.
- [66:55]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. That's right. Okay, good. Let's do both of those things. So the first I didn't put this in the book, but a way I've begun talking about it recently is what is a trap? What does it mean to be a trap? And I'm taking this from Yasha Monk, his book the Identity Trap, he shows how identity politics is a trap that lures some students in and then they can't get out. And in the same way, you know, if you want to catch, if you want to trap a raccoon, you need to use food that the raccoon will be attracted to and then once he takes it, he can't get out. That's what a trap is. So if you want to trap girls, what are you going to bait the trap with? It's not going to be naked men. It's not going to be videos of war. It's going to be what Susie said about Sally. It's going to be what Mary said about you. It's going to be who's dating who, who, who just broke up with who. Girls want more social information. Their mental map of social space and who's related to is much more, much more refined than men. This is, you know, endless jokes within heterosexual marriage about like, the guys are so clueless about everything and their wives have to tell them what's going on with their own friends. So if you want to trap a girl, give her social information and the lure of some sort of connection, then the girls go in, they get that, they grab that, and now they can't get out because now that everyone's in, if you go out now, you're isolated, you're alone. So Facebook originally, but then especially Instagram, girls went, when everyone rushed in, to the online life in the early 2010s when they had, they had constant access with their phones the girls go for the visually oriented platforms. They go for Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, are the big three early on. Whereas the boys, they're on social media, but not so much those platforms. They're more interested in YouTube and YouTube videos and in video games and in pornography. So you trap girls that way, and now they'll never get out. And now, basically, for the rest of their lives, they're going to be facing thousands of social comparisons every single day to girls who are prettier than they are, or at least who appear prettier than they are because of the filters and the careful editing. So the girls are really in trouble. Again, not all, but I'd say a majority are being harmed by living this way.
- [69:01]
Mayim Bialik
And also the. The. Sorry, the. The hardcore feminists have been saying this for a very long time, and people were like, you just don't like fun. You're just jealous of pretty girls. But now when John Heights says that, everybody's listening.
- [69:13]
Jonathan Haidt
Well, there may be some people out there who like me more than they like feminists. So. So. But now let's switch over to the boys. So the boys, how do you trap a boy? Well, pictures of naked girls or if they're straight, and obviously pictures of naked men if they're gay. So sex and violence. Boys are much more interested. Not in gore per se, although maybe some, but they're just much more interested in conflict. And if you let boys do what they want, they're going to organize to have a conflict. Like, that's what sports and games. It's fun. And the most nutritious part, this was shown by Jean Piaget, the famous Swiss psychologist. The best part of games is the rule violations and all the jurisprudence and legislation that comes afterwards. How do we work this out? And this is new rule statistics.
- [70:00]
Mayim Bialik
They love stats.
- [70:01]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay, yeah, there's that, too. There's that, too. But. But the key thing to keep your eye on is the conflicts. Okay? Those are important. Now what happens? So what do you do if you want to trap a boy? Video games and porn. So they go in. They're spending. Now a lot of them are spending four, five, six hours a day on video games and porn. That pushes everything else out. It's not a majority, but a lot of boys are spending more than four hours a day on video games and porn. And now they're trapped for the dopamine reasons that we said before that they can't now live without it. And that's where all the boys are. So if they quit, they're alone. Because all the boys, everyone they know is hanging out on the video game platforms and so they're trapped, but they're having fun. Video games are fun and porn is fun. So if we look in at the boys and the girls at age 15, it looks like the girls are doing worse. And that's sort of what I said in my book. But it only occurred to me over the last few months, what if we check in on them when they're 28, which is what the oldest Gen Z are. What if we look at them in their, in their mid-20s now? What's happening? Well, the girls are still more anxious and fragile and employers say this, but the girls went to college, they graduated from college, they got a job, they moved out, they have an apartment, okay? The girls are still functional, whereas the boys, all they ever did was video games and porn. They have no life skills, no social skills.
- [71:22]
Mayim Bialik
They don't understand how relationships or women work. Right.
- [71:24]
Jonathan Haidt
Oh my God, that's right. That's right, right, yeah. Which, you know, and pretty soon they'll have AI girlfriends, so they won't ever need to learn how to deal with a girl or a woman. My point is, if we look at them at 28, the boys are less educated, less employed, less wealthy, less independent, more likely to be living with their parents. So I don't have any clear data on this, but I would guess that the happiness gap between girls and boys, which is very big at age 14, I'm guessing that it's going to narrow somewhat because the boys are generally, a lot of them are miserable because they're failures, they're losers, they become losers. They never went through all the stuff that Jonathan was talking about, the toughening, the realizing you can get hurt and not break down. You just keep going, you just keep going. Oh, another thing, just a detail on the video games. Video games are a lot of fun, but there are no conflicts. There can't be a conflict because the platform enforces all of the rules. So you never can say on a video, hey, that was out of bounds, or oh, you're not supposed to do that. You can't say that on a video game because there's no dispute, which means you're taking out the most nutritious part of play. So for all these reasons, I now think the phone based life ends up being even worse for boys in the long run than it is for girls because it really, really blocks their development even more than it does for girls.
- [72:36]
Mayim Bialik
It's been so great to talk to you. I really appreciate your time I guess I'd like to close out our time with you just with one question. Are you fun? Do you feel like.
- [72:52]
Jonathan Haidt
Am I fun?
- [72:53]
Mayim Bialik
Do you feel like, as a social psychologist, especially one who studies morality, are there things that feel like you can access them as a parent in ways that you understand what people. People like what your kids are going to want when they go out there, or does it feel like it's just like all rules all the time?
- [73:12]
Jonathan Haidt
Oh, oh, am I fun as a parent?
- [73:14]
Mayim Bialik
Yeah. I mean, or as a human, but, you know.
- [73:16]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. Well, I'll start. I'll start with the negative one, which is am I fun as a human? I guess the answer is actually no, because I am so. I'm so deeply into what I'm doing. I love what I'm doing. I'm so focused on the research on this project. I feel like I've been tracking down a mystery. I feel as though our institutions are decaying, democracy is decaying, universities are falling apart. Childhood, I mean, I feel like we live in a time of sociological disaster. And my skills as a social psychologist can allow me to address. So I'm incredibly engaged. But I think what that means, you know, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So I have noticed I'm. I'm pretty boring to talk to because all I want to talk about is this, according to my wife, at least, and she's right. So I think I've gotten less fun as I've got older because I've also gotten much more serious, I think, you know, I feel like I'm looking at existential threats to our society, and I'm really focused on those. So I'm incredibly engaged, but I think I'm not that much fun as I used to be. All right. But as a parent. As a parent, I think I'm pretty good because I love to play. Love to play with kids, love to play with dogs, always have. And like many fathers, and there's research on this, you know, mothers don't throw the kids up in the air. Fathers do that. Mothers don't jump out and say boo and surprise the kid and chase them. Fathers do that. Fathers have much more vigorous play, play, fear. And that's important because kids are practicing their predator avoidance skills. And as the father, if you chase them around pretending to be a monster, that is just. That is thrilling for them. That is heaven. That's what they want to do. So I think I was that kind of dad. And as the kids got older, I read Lenore Skenazy, who wrote the book Free Range Kids, she had a huge influence on me and my wife. So I was always pushing to give them more of a free range childhood. Push them out the door, make them do errands, let them walk to school, give them independence. So I think that while over time, like the picture of Dorian Gray, you know, I've become less fun, but I think I did an okay job as a father preparing my children to be more engaged with the real world.
- [75:14]
Jonathan Cohen
John, can you also speak to that? This is a reversible impact on our, on our kids that when we take them off, tell us a little bit about what you've seen about how we bounce back as a society.
- [75:28]
Jonathan Haidt
So. Right. So this is, this is really encouraging. You know, I'm used to dealing with problems that are almost insoluble. Insoluble, especially about the state of liberal democracy and the way technology is affecting democracy. Those are huge problems. Don't know how to solve them. This one, because we got trapped in by a collective action process. I can see the way out. And any school that goes phone free and schools are going phone free all over the country, all over the world, it's really exciting. So we can give our kids six hours a day away from their phones just by snapping our fingers. And LA just did it. Announced they're doing it. Just this morning. David Banks, the chancellor of New York City Public Schools, said in an interview that he's likely to do it. And I spoke to him a couple weeks ago, him and his team, he's heard from the principals. They all say get rid of the phones. It's making our lives impossible. So the schools are really going to change quickly. Like this year in 2024, this is happening. And especially once that happens, since almost all parents are fed up with what's going on. When you show them a way that you know what, just band together, all agree, no smartphone till high school. That's happening also. So I have never seen social change happen so fast because everyone was ready to change. Everyone hates what's going on and that even includes Gen Z. It's not that they want you to take the phone out of their hands, but if you take the phone out of everyone's hands, most of them are gonna say, oh, well, actually, yeah, that's a pretty good deal. So I'm wildly optimistic that we're gonna roll this back. Now, you asked specifically about kids who are older, who've already been through this. And what I can tell you is that as we know, the brain is sort of rewiring more rapidly during puberty. From age 1112 all the way through about 25, the prefrontal cortex kind of finishes. I think those numbers are roughly correct. And so I'm especially focused on early puberty because that's where. If we can keep this all out of middle school, that's our biggest bang for the buck. We got to just delay it till at least age 14. That's the most important thing. But my students at NYU are all mostly sophomores. My class is limited mostly to sophomores. They're roughly 19 years old. And most of them, the first thing they do in the morning is they check their notifications. And the last thing they do before they close their eyes is check their notifications and text things like that in between. It's a lot of what they do is that. And so most of them, by their own admission, are to some extent, either addicted or at least dependent. They watch too much TikTok, they know this. And once I sort of guide them through. And again, Cal Newport's book Deep Work is so. Is so powerful once. And these are business students. They want to be successful in life. Once they see, wait, like, we've given up all our attention, which means we can't do anything like, no, I don't want to do that. So once they see that we work together to find ways for them to regain their attention, the number one thing is turn off almost all notifications. I tell them, think about Uber. Do you want Uber to be able to interrupt you to tell you that the car is coming in five minutes? Yes, I want that. I want to know the car's coming in five minutes. Do you want the New York Times to interrupt you with breaking news about something? I can wait till the evening. I'll just sign up for a. Let them email me once a day, and I'll see the top stories. That's a choice you can make now. You might feel like, no, I need to know if something is happening somewhere in the world. But once you see that, wait, it's not any benefit. Don't keep on that newsletter just because you might maybe find something urgent. Be incredibly selective. Take back control of your attention. And once they do, oh, take social media off your phone if you must. If you can't go cold turkey, then just leave it on your laptop. Check it when you're home, but don't have it with you in the elevator. Don't be checking Instagram in the elevator, because you have 45 seconds.
- [79:09]
Mayim Bialik
Oh, my God. Thank you.
- [79:11]
Jonathan Haidt
So the point is, if these things, these programs they're able to grab even 45 seconds. They will grab every bit of human attention. And if you can imagine that from now on in, humans will have no attention at all. That means we have no society, we have no innovation, we have nobody taking risk, we have nobody being creative. Everyone just is anyway, that's a distraction. My point is they get amazing results. We get transformative stories. Not everyone in the class is transformed, but a lot of the students are transformed. They find like some of them say, like, I have so much time now, I've started playing guitar, like, cause they didn't realize, like, yeah, five hours a day, like that's a lot of your day to be giving to social media. And if you stop doing that for five hours a day, you can do your homework and you can go out with a friend and you can take piano lessons and you can get more sleep and you can exercise. So it all starts with taking back control of your attention. So what I'm saying is, you know, if you're in your 20s and you were a heavy video game or social media kid all through puberty, there probably are going to be some permanent changes. You probably will not rise to the level that you would have had. You had a sort of a toughening childhood on average. But you can rise a lot. And this is of course true in all of psychology. The brain is not that plastic after 25, but it's a little. And human habits are hard to change, but we can. So it takes more work. You have a bigger challenge. If you're in your 20s and you went, you had a phone based childhood, you're gonna have to be much more intentional about this. You're not just going to get better on your own, but if you change your habits, you're going to change your mind.
- [80:46]
Mayim Bialik
Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you.
- [80:49]
Jonathan Cohen
Thank you for all of the work that you've done. I really believe that it is going to change the lives of millions and millions and millions of people, if not billions. And we're going to get our attention back and we're going to hopefully reverse some of these horrific impacts that are happening. So thank you.
- [81:05]
Jonathan Haidt
Thank you so much, Jonathan. Thanks so much. Mayim Just again, if people want more information, anxious generation.com my substack is afterbabble.com where Zach Roush and I write all kinds of news updates. And for parents with younger kids, letgrow.org It'll give you all kinds of ideas for how to give your kids more of a free Range childhood. So the information is out there. Other people are out there waiting to work with you. The ideas are out there. This is the year we make the change. 2024 is the year we change childhood for the better.
- [81:37]
Mayim Bialik
Jonathan, do you feel hopeful or less hopeful after speaking to John Height?
- [81:44]
Jonathan Cohen
I feel hopeful that people are starting to identify this behavior and the impacts of our phone use in a way that I think was easy to ignore. We were like, oh, kids are just annoying or kids don't want to be around their parents, or kids are just moody and anxious. And what we're doing now is actually measuring with more quantifiable data. He didn't get into that many of the specifics about the data, but self harm has increased. Not only just reported incidences, self reported incidences of anxiety, depression are up. And some people will fight back. They'll say, well, kids are just too sensitive these days and you know, we're giving them too much therapy and we're not telling them to suck it up enough. But when incidences of self harm increase the way that they have, when kids are in depressive episodes to the point where they can't function, it's beyond simply providing them too many resources or asking them about their feelings too much. What we're seeing is that they are missing significant developmental milestones by being stuck to their screens. And so I'm hopeful that we're starting to address that by, you can't fix a problem until you address it and talk about it honestly. And I'm hopeful and have hope that by doing this we can take the next steps that are needed. You know, we wouldn't have stopped smoking as a society. The amount of decrease, the decrease in our smoking rates only happen when we could get to the bottom of actually what are the real risks and health harms associated with that.
- [83:33]
Mayim Bialik
And that's what the surgeon general is talking about. He's saying, we were able to do this. I mean, people didn't used to wear seat belts. It wasn't a notion that you should not drive when intoxicated. Right. These were all large public campaigns to educate people. Smoking is a huge one. We really, you know, as a, as a sort of, you know, society that that was significantly shifted and turned around. You know, it's, it's even. I never thought I'd see a day when it was unfashionable to smoke or when anyone would express that not that was a young person. Like the notion was always like, okay, but it's like still really like cool to smoke. Right? And I understand there are still people who absolutely still believe that, and there are kids who believe that. But sometimes when I hear kids in their 20s or teens being like, ew, they. That person's smoking, it's so unpleasant. I'm like, there's hope.
- [84:28]
Jonathan Cohen
Literally. The other day, my son and I were driving, and there was a woman who was probably early 20s smoking a cigarette outside of a restaurant. And my son commented to me, he's like, what is she doing? It's so rare that you see that in major cities. A little bit more so. But.
- [84:46]
Mayim Bialik
Well, and look, it's a. It's a much bigger. It's a much bigger change to ask young people and adults to stop looking at their phones. I mean, my kids love to point out, well, you're on it. And the fact is, it. It is different in some ways. It is different in terms of the, you know, brain development and. And social impact, but in a lot of ways it is similar, you know, and so I think that is something also to address. But it is going to be a steeper climb. It just is, because it's not simply stop smoking. It's find a way to rewire your brain so that everything doesn't bore you anymore and that you don't hate interacting with humans and that you don't have attention. P.S.
- [85:26]
Jonathan Cohen
the other really big complicating factor is that the phone can be used in so many different ways. Some of it has similar patterns of distraction, numbing, lack of focus on the present, lack removing us from community interactions with other people. However, playing the spelling bee and endlessly doom scrolling on TikTok are different activities. They both can be addictive, they both can be distracting, but fundamentally, they're giving a different sense of dopamine.
- [85:59]
Mayim Bialik
Well, I think the question also, the question with like, for example, spelling bee, which I do enjoy, or Wordle, you know, which swept the nation. When I think when I was on Call Me Cat, I was like, what are people talking about? Why is everybody obsessed with this? Like, the whole crew was like, into Wordle and it was really fun for everybody. But those do have a beginning, middle, and end. And of course, when you finish Wordle, then you go on to, you know, then your. Your drug use expands. That's your gateway drug, right? Then you'll go to spelling bee. I mean, I've tried tiles and Vortex. Like, I've literally tried the other games. You know, I like connections a lot, but, you know, my older son and I, we started doing the mini crossword on the New York Times, but that Wasn't enough for me. I went on to Sudoku. I went on to Sudoku easy because I don't want to have too much of a challenge. And then, you know, sometimes when I really want, like, more, I do the full crossword on my phone, right? And I think, like, that's where for me, that's that kind of slippery slope. It went from I'm going to do the spelling bee or I'm going to do the wordle to every free moment I have, I'm going to pull open spelling bee and see if I can find another word. And that's different. You know, it really is different. I do enjoy crossword puzzles, and I do them on, you know, I have, like, a little book, you know, and I've started doing that, like, before bed. I'll do do that. It. I have a need for my brain to be kept busy. I know that if you don't keep it busy with something and give it something to chew on, it will just start chewing the scenery, you know? So I understand that that's a desire of mine, but the notion of scrolling, I mean, I have to say, I never thought I'd be able to stop. I never thought I'd be able to stop. And then I was really embarrassed. And then it was like, well, who's running her social media if she's admitting that she doesn't do it? So for a time, I was like, I have an account and I use it for business. But, like, now I. I don'. I can't pretend anymore. And when people are like, did you see this thing? No, I did not. I sometimes don't even know how to work what someone sends me. Like, that's how far removed I am. I really am very far removed from understanding the difference between a real and a post and a thing. Like, I don't understand how to share things because they changed the way I used to do it 8,000 years ago. Like, that's how far removed I am. And honestly, like, I'm glad I don't. I don't miss. I don't miss it anymore. I did it first and I felt really pulled. And now I was like, oh, is this what it feels like to break an addiction? I don't miss it. I don't want it.
- [88:27]
Jonathan Cohen
When John was talking about, you know, we used to ask people for directions and because I think about this is related to what you're saying, because, you know, I'm listening to how you removed yourself from social media, but you had developmental skills as a child that weren't thwarted by, you know, your constant attachment to this screen. And I used to believe that you could basically get any piece of information you needed by asking about six people, you know, the six degrees of separation. I used to think that anything I needed to know was within six degrees of separation. And, you know, I wasn't a researcher. I wasn't. If I needed to find something out, I wasn't going to the library and sifting through a book and sifting through the next book and asking like, that wasn't how I was going to get information. I was going to ask. And, you know, what struck me almost most about the conversation was our children's inability to start to solve a problem. They just assume that the answer isn't there. And they're being placed in so many rules, situations where the rules are predefined for them. I remember in fifth grade, I went to a school that didn't have its own playground. So we went to a public park. And for some reason, that public park had a little plot of land, and it had a sign that said, no soccer. I guess they didn't want ball. You know, they didn't want the ball. I don't know why. Why. But the thing that we did the most as. As like a group was play soccer. So I took a bunch of old hockey socks, and for those who don't know what hockey socks are, they're like very long pieces of fabric that go from, you know, underneath your foot all the way above your knee, and they enclose your shin pad. So they're. They're quite large. I had a bunch of old.
- [90:25]
Mayim Bialik
Wait, is it a sock?
- [90:27]
Jonathan Cohen
It's a sock, but it goes over your shin pad. So it's like.
- [90:30]
Mayim Bialik
I think it's funny how you described it that it goes under your foot. Do you mean it's a soc back?
- [90:36]
Jonathan Cohen
Well, it doesn't go over your foot. There's a little band that goes underneath your heel, and then it goes up over. So it's not. It's.
- [90:44]
Mayim Bialik
It's like, okay, it doesn't go over your toes.
- [90:46]
Jonathan Cohen
We're getting a little in the weeds.
- [90:48]
Mayim Bialik
Is it go over your toes?
- [90:50]
Jonathan Cohen
It does not go over your toes.
- [90:51]
Mayim Bialik
Oh, okay. Got it.
- [90:52]
Jonathan Cohen
It's a special band underneath your heel, and then it goes over your ankles. Foot is free to be in the skin.
- [90:58]
Mayim Bialik
It's like a shin pad without the pad. But then it goes higher.
- [91:02]
Jonathan Cohen
It's a shin pad tube cover that gets taped above the shin pad.
- [91:07]
Mayim Bialik
Got it.
- [91:07]
Jonathan Cohen
So I had a bunch of these old hockey socks from playing hockey for a long time. So we balled them up, covered it in tape, made our own ball, which was not a soccer ball, and we played soccer. And I would just, and I would think like, if it would my son in that situation, would he see the sign and just be like, oh, guess there's nothing to do. I'll just sit on my phone, be
- [91:31]
Mayim Bialik
like, the man is keeping me down. I need to protest and speak to a congressperson. I'm trying.
- [91:38]
Jonathan Cohen
Definitely wouldn't protest, but it's your point. I'm like, did he ask anyone at camp if they had an extra pair of socks before calling me?
- [91:47]
Mayim Bialik
The school, the camp has extra socks for this express reason. And also if his feet were hurting so much because he left his socks and then he would do other stuff that day, not get to play and learn a lesson and find a way to always have an extra pair of socks in his bag for this reason. Because you're going to be an adult soon.
- [92:10]
Jonathan Cohen
I went, I used to take kids on canoe trips as, as a young, older, older teen, young 20s and the best, it was one of the best experiences of my life because number one, you're going out in the woods, caring for a group of six children under your care and reading a map, planning food, food prep. But the biggest learning curve was in packing out the trip. You would start two days, three days ahead of time. You'd have to make your inventory list and talk to the kitchen and request certain foods. There wasn't that many options. If you forget toilet paper, there's no toilet paper for the group. Like you quickly learn to rack your brain. What have I forgotten? What have I forgotten? What have I forgotten? Because you're going out for those five days and if you don't take the things you need, you're on your, no one's coming to help you. And I just think that, you know, we don't put ourselves a lot of these, a lot of kids are not being put in situations that have non dire consequences that help them have foresight and planning and, and putting them in situations where, yeah, my son walks around the house on his phone trying to pack up for the day and then forgets things. And I'm like, put your phone down and go through that mental process. But he's never had to pack out a canoe trip. He's never had to think like that and have that, that planning and you know, so how do we do that collectively? Because it's not just about packing and planning, but it is the thinking ahead and, and the resource to problem solve.
- [93:50]
Mayim Bialik
And I think these are all, I think they are all related. You know, there was, I think there, I can't remember, was a book that came out. It might have been like the helicopter parent, you know, kind of. I don't know, it could have been a tiger mom conversation. But I remember there was this, you know, like, if your kid forgets their violin, do not take them their violin. They will have to have that day without their violin. And like pretend that I'm not a text away. Right. I do think that all these things, they are, they're. If not related, they're interrelated because it is, as Jonathan, you pointed out, it's about resiliency, it's about drawing on resources, it's about interacting with people. It's about having the attention to think that way and the presence of mind to problem solve. And I don't blame our kids, you know, like, if everything is instant, everything is shiny and beautiful, they don't want to deal with any. Like, I wouldn't want to deal with anything that's not that way. And as adults, we kind of know, well, let me just do the things I can do to make my life more shiny and beautiful. Whereas I think for kids it's like, let's only deal with the things that we want because everything else feels really bland and boring.
- [94:59]
Jonathan Cohen
John was talking about in a different interview that I, I heard of his. The idea of play as conflict resolution. And I was telling my son, you know, when we would find a street and play hockey, like, people were upset about the teams, their teams are uneven. Or this player played with this person last time, that was a cheap shot. You brought your stick above your waist and, you know, it hit my face like. And then there's a whole group conversation. Well, did that happen? Was that person's view of the situation right? You know, who's, who's right or wrong. And how do you navigate that? When you're playing a video game and you get in a conflict and the person is a remote and person, you've never met them, they're only an online friend. You just hang up. You don't go through any of that conflict resolution.
- [95:50]
Mayim Bialik
Well, and I think also I don't mean to like, over, you know, over romanticize what play is like. I remember being excluded from a lot of games, teased, crying, like, getting hit by things, people throwing things at me. Like, that was a lot of what my experience was playing, you know, in school. Because I think that's the truth. That's the truth. Too, is that, you know, I think about the kids who were mercilessly teased. I think about the kids who were bullied. I think about the kids who, you know, didn't have a body type that met what the athletic needs were of the activity. And it was just like, shitty and bad for them. And, you know, so, like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, a lot of stuff here that, that feels grayer. But those kinds of interactions, you know, are the way that, that it's true. We do a different kind of learning and, you know, animals play and primates play a very specific way. I also, you know, took issue with, like, I mean, look, I think he, he was, you know, speaking broadly about certain kinds of play of like, dads throw you in the air. Moms don't like, some moms do, you know, and like, some moms like to chase you and say boo. But I get generally speaking what he's saying. But, you know, it was really, really excited to get to speak to, you know, to someone whose articles I've been following. And yeah, Jonathan, you and I both were pretty vulnerable. And, you know, I think it's important, as you said, to kind of really get honest about what's going on so that we can try and find a solution. So make sure to, make sure to share this. If it, if it moved you, please share it like us. Make sure you're subscribed and leave comments. It really matters to us and we want to know what you think, especially with an episode like this one. Very curious what this brings up for you. So, yeah, from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.
- [97:37]
Jonathan Haidt
It's Maya Bialix, breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience, science, PhD or two fiction. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.