← That Can't Be True with Chelsea Clinton
That Can't Be True with Chelsea Clinton
How to Manage Your Family’s Screen Time with Jonathan Haidt
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A
Hey, it's Hassan Minhaj here from the Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know podcast. Among other things. And I hate the smell of rotting food almost as much as I hate wasting it in the first place. Thankfully, now I have mill. Mill is a food recycler that is odorless, guiltless and completely effortless. See, I've always wanted to reduce my food waste. It is one of the easiest ways for an individual to make a big impact on the environment, but I just cannot stand the mess of a compost bin in the kitchen. But with mill, all you do is drop in your scraps and you let it go. It works quickly and quietly, turning your food, even small bones, into nutrient rich grounds. Now I take out the trash way less, yet my kitchen smells way better and I don't have to feel guilty when my zucchini gets moldy. Plus it looks cool. Yeah, this trash can alternative is so fly. People keep asking me where I got the giant Alexa. It's chic and savvy, but you have to live with mill to really get it. Good thing you can try it risk free for 90 days right now and get $75 off with code HMDK visit mill.com HMDK that is mill.com HMDK I am Michelle.
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And I am Craig. Craig here is my big brother.
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C
We are so excited for you to
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listen to our brand new podcast. It's called IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson.
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C
Together, Craig and I are going to take your questions about the challenges you're
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B
grappling with in life. So get in touch, send us your questions and join us on IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson.
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C
Subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to that Can't Be True, a show that sorts fact from fiction, especially on issues impacting our health. I'm Chelsea Clinton and we spent some time on this podcast talking about the very real advancements and also the very real dangers, even harms of a world increasingly informed by, influenced by and shaped by technology. Technology for kids, social media and mental health, phone use in schools. And also how do we as adults and parents understand what the best norms are around these things for ourselves and for our children? And then how do we implement those norms in a way that feels safe and liberating for kids rather than just restrictive and old fashioned? And my next guest is certainly someone who's been a real leader in elevating this conversation and informing parents and increasingly kids on how to navigate all of this. Jonathan Haidt is a social scientist at NYU and the author of several books, two of which we'll certainly talk about today. His bestseller, the Anxious Generation came out in 2024 and explored how phone based childhoods are negative impacting our kids mental health and general well being. He then turned the lessons from that book into a graphic novel to help empower kids called the Amazing Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World. Jona, thank you so much for being with me today. And I just have to start with telling you that my mother says hello.
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B
Oh, very good. I love your mother.
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C
She loves you.
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B
Well, she's. I mean there's so much one could say about your mother, but the fact that she's taken on this issue as well, we're really happy about that.
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C
I know that will bring her tremendous joy, so I will pass that along when I see her later today.
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B
Very good.
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C
There's so much I wanna talk to you about and kind of jump right in. A question I'm sure you've been asked before, but I just think is one where we have to start. You know your two latest books are Anxious Generation and the Amazing Generation. And I'm curious kind of how you hold those two truths simultaneously.
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B
Well, the Anxious generation is describing what is and the Amazing Generation is describing what could. We cannot yet say that Gen Alpha is amazing. They're not yet amazing. Many of them have been raised on iPads since they were two. And that wasn't true about Gen Z. So just Gen Z for listeners is those born in either 96 or 97, depending how you count it, through about 2011, roughly. And my definition of Gen Z is if you went through puberty with Instagram and a smartphone, then you're Gen Z. Whereas if you made it through, if you made it to about age 18 or so by 2012 when those became popular, then you're a millenn. And the millennials have much better mental health. Gen Z's mental health tanked almost immediately, and that was especially from Instagram. Early Gen Z was shaped by Instagram, especially the girls. Later Gen Z and Gen Alpha were shaped by TikTok. And we're just beginning to see the damage. So the Amazing Generation is a book for them. It's a book for Gen Alpha for kids 8 to 13. And it's not a lecture. It actually reveals the secrets of what the tech wizards are doing to them. It has a lot of quotes from older kids, from older teens who, having given up so much of their childhood and it seems to be working, young people read the book, they go to their parents and say Mom, I don't want a smartphone when I start middle school. Just give me a flip phone.
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C
You know, I remember when I got my first email account. I was a junior in high school.
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B
Oh, right. Cause you're a millennial. You are like the oldest. You're 1980s.
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C
Yes, John, I once was asked in an interview, the preamble to the question was, as a geriatric millennial.
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B
Yes, Correct.
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C
Taken back by that framing, even if it's, I guess, accurate on a relative basis.
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B
Yes, relatively.
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C
I want to turn now to something call that Can't Be True, where we play some tape of something that's happened recently and get your reaction.
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B
Oh, God, anything can be true today. Go ahead.
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C
Well, this is part of a recent Saturday Night Live skit that really tries, kind of through poking fun, to help underscore the very real harms of something that's been happening a lot on TikTok recently, specifically targeting young men called looks maxing.
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B
Oh, yeah.
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C
So let's take a listen and then I want to get your reaction.
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B
Okay. And we got guest homie joining us this week, my 16 year old cousin who is lowkey famous on Twitch. Micah, it's an honor.
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C
Nah, chill. Yeah, now honor's all mine, fellas. Big fan of the pod.
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B
So, Micah, you're obviously like, cool as hell. Tell us about your stream, bro.
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C
Like, you talk about facial structure. Yeah, so I'm like, I'm a looksmaxing gigachad, basically. I discuss mogging mandibular growth and achieving sigma status by breaking my jawbone and pulling high level talent. So sick.
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B
Fuck.
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C
So sick, bro. So I know that the term looks maxing originated initially in the online manosphere, but now seems to have kind of grown beyond the manosphere. Yet it seems just so evident to me that it promotes a deeply unhealthy body obsession with body dysmorphia and clearly some really unhealthy choices potentially to follow. As we saw in the Tongue in Cheek skit there, where the kind of protagonist rather blithely talks about breaking his jawbone.
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B
That's right.
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C
What's happening here, John?
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B
What I see happening among young people is this, once you reach puberty, the overriding motivation is to increase your mate value. Okay? Now what I mean by that, it's unconscious. You don't realize you're doing that. But, you know, elementary school, like, my kids loved elementary school. It was really fun. I loved elementary school. It was really fun. Suddenly you're dumped into middle school. Suddenly, you know, like, as a boy, like, you realize Wait, it wasn't enough to just be fun or playful, like, oh, I have to like start dressing nicely and I have to look. And so it's always awkward when you, you know, you discover and you discover quickly where you rank. And for girls it's even more harsh. For girls, of course, it's much more about appearance. And so that's always been the case to some degree. And what the evil wizards of Silicon Valley figured out long ago is by preying on teens insecurity about where they rank, they can rope them in, sell them stuff, hook them. And so, you know, it was one thing if you were just like an average attractiveness, male or female in your middle school where there are a couple hundred other, you know, middle school kids. But now that you're growing up online, your reference group is not the average. Your reference group is the guys who have good bone structure and who are said to be the most, you know, they're the. That's what a gigachad is.
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C
It's like the pixelated Adonis.
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B
Yeah, that's right. That's a good way to say it. The pixelated Adonis. That's right. And you know, boys are very aware of the statistics that in general, like what is it, 10% of the guys get 90% of the girls? That's not literally true, but it's on dating apps. That's roughly the story. And so this is of course what powers the incel movement is most guys feel they don't have a chance. And it's because women are X, Y or Z. Women are too selective. Women are, they only want whatever.
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C
It's always our fault, John.
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B
That's right.
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C
Yeah, it's always our fault.
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B
That's right. And that's what Richard Reeves says. Richard Reeves wrote this wonderful book of boys and men and he runs the American Institute for Boys and Men. He says that, you know, the male female alliance should be the greatest one in history. It's what we needed to survive to civilizations. And now what Richard points out is now the boys are being told that it's the girl's fault and the girls are being told that it's the boys fault. And you know, they're all victims of this insane attention economy that no child should be stuck in. I mean, yes, if you're Coca Cola or Pepsi, you're stuck in an attention economy. You've got to compete and you got to get brand recognition. My God, an 11 year old. So this is why I'm so adamant that there is no way to make social media safe. For children, there is just no way you're interacting with strangers. You're ranked and quantified. Everyone's commenting on you. This is an adult activity. The age should be 18 or 21. But my goal as a social psychologist was not to say what's ideal, it's to say, how can we change the norm quickly? Like, what could we get? And I don't think we get 18. I began pushing for 16. It looks like it's working around the world. Countries are going to adopt 16 this year as the age for social media.
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C
Well, I mean. And it's already happened, right, in Australia and in many countries.
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B
That's right. Australia's went into effect. Indonesia should kick in in the next few weeks. France has committed to doing it. The Macron got a bill through the national assembly in January, and all of Europe, most of Europe is going to follow within a year, I believe.
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C
And what do you see kind of some of the early results in Australia saying to you as a social psychologist?
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B
Well, so it's too soon to tell about the results. All we know is what the. The press release put out by Julie Inman Grant, who's their eSafety commissioner, she's. She's very thoughtful.
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C
Yes.
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B
You know, she's really on top of this. So she put out a press release in January that said all 10 platforms complied. There were 10 platforms that were required to do this. It's important to note there. There's no obligation put on the parents or kids. No kid is going to get arrested for going online early. It's all put on the platforms, which is where it belongs. They're the ones making money. They're the ones hurting kids to make money. So all 10 platforms complied and they closed down 4.7 million accounts belonging to Australia's 2.4 million preteens. So there were a lot of accounts out there that were for underage kids. So the initial rollout process went very smoothly. I'd been worried that there'd be all kinds of problems, but it went very smoothly. Now, of course, a lot of kids are using VPNs to get around it, but what I heard from the professor who's evaluating, who's leading the evaluation, is that, yeah, they all downloaded VPNs on the first day, but after a while, they're not using them as much because it's a little bit of friction if you have to load your VPN every time you want to check, you know, and they're checking dozens of times a day. And so what we're seeing I believe is the beginning of behavior change, the beginning of norm change. But it won't be until we get like a 50% reduction, it won't be until we get a big reduction in use that we could begin looking for some sort of mental health effect. And Julian Mangrant says in that press release, she says we won't know the full of effects of the ban for 20 years. Because where it's really going to help is today's 8, 9, 10 year olds who normally would be getting Instagram and TikTok at that age, 8, 9, 10, certainly TikTok by 9 or 10, today's 8, 9, 10 Year olds are going to be much less likely to go through puberty on social media, whereas today's 16 year olds and 15 year olds, they all went through puberty on social media.
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C
You know, John, one of the things you just said is something that I'm particularly grateful for, you know, highlighting the mental health effects. You know, this is a, you know, a public health focused podcast. I think that for so long the conversation around tech and kids was largely rendered just on, on time. Like they're just spending so much time, you know, on screens, therefore they're not spending time doing something else. You know, I mean, and we've had reports on kind of the physical effects of screen time. You know, I think the first came out in 1985 about how right for television. Right for television. And then the rise in obesity and lack of kind of physical activity for kids.
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B
Yeah, so many people are interpreting this in terms of what happened in the past and it's not appropriate.
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C
So maybe unpack that for us a little bit. Like why is this so different than the conversations? You know, I remember I had very strict strain, like, you know, my mother. You're not surprised by this, I can imagine. I was allowed to watch 30 minutes of television after I'd finished all my homework. But what I could watch was largely confined to like old fashioned Nick at night television or er. I was allowed to watch er, and as a little kid I was allowed to watch unlimited cartoons on a Saturday morning, which was pretty genius because I went to ballet and girl Scouts on Saturday morning. So it was an unexercisable. Right, basically.
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B
And that's why your interest in human rights today. Cause yours were violated. Yes.
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C
No, but the conversation is different today. So for people listening to us, who grew up in the 80s and 90s as I did, why is it so different today?
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B
Yeah, yeah. So it's important that people understand this is nothing like television for three reasons. The first is television was at least somewhat social. That is, well, you were an only child, but, you know, my memories of television are always like arguing with my sisters over what we're going to watch and then making fun of the show, and my friend would come over. So television was gen. Was off. Not always, but was often social. Whereas anything on this device is very, very antisocial. In fact, you, you know, you see kids sitting around. When kids are together, they're usually just doing that separately. They're not even interacting much. So that's 1, 2. This is even more important. Once you get a smartphone, it's ubiquitous. You and I could not take our TV sets to school. We couldn't take it into the bathroom. We couldn't, you know, take it well and watch while we were walking to a friend's house. But you look around and kids, you know, you and I both live in New York City. Everyone's walking around looking down at their phone. That includes the kids. So social media and anything on your phone will expand like a gas to fill every available moment, whereas TV couldn't do that. Then the third, which I think might be newer to people, is television was entertainment, but it couldn't train you. There was no behavior that it could periodically reinforce. Whereas a touchscreen is BF Skinner in a glass rectangle. So BF Skinner, one of the founders of behaviorism, he showed that you could train pigeons or dogs or rats to do amazing tricks if you could give them a little tiny food, a little tiny reward. But very, very often, like, you get a little bit of the behavior, you get the reward, you get a little bit of the behavior. Maybe you don't get the reward this time, but you'll get it next time. So a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. If you get rewards, not every time, but, you know, you swipe and you see something really funny, and then you swipe, and it's kind of dumb. You swipe, it's kind of dumb. You swipe. It's something really funny or shocking or horrific, but still grabs you. So, please, nobody should think of this as being like television. This is much more like a slot machine, a porn theater, a telephone by which you can talk to strange men. It's all sorts of things. That's one, is that this is much, much more damaging than television ever was. Next, in terms of how it's not just about the time. The debate that I'm engaged in with other researchers has somehow focused itself almost entirely on the question of does time spent on social media correlate with or cause depression? And anxiety. Okay, so that's an academic debate. We argue about whether the effect size are large enough, but that's just one of many, many things. So just for starters, there are so many direct. Nobody disputes that literally millions of teens and preteens are being sextorted every year. Snapchat itself, we know from memos that came out in the, in the lawsuits. Snapchat itself, in 2022, they were getting 10,000 reports of sextortion from their users. Not every year, that was every month. And every one of those cases is a kid who is now horrified. You know, it's usually a boy, you know, 13 to 15 year olds old on a sports team. That's their favorite target. It's a boy who was tricked into sending a naked picture of himself from what he thought was a sexy girl. But it turns out to be a sixtortion ring in Nigeria or Southeast Asia. And so a boy who was happy at breakfast can be dead by 2 in the morning. So that direct harm. There are the challenges. Some of the lawsuits coming up are for parents whose kids are dead because of the choking challenge and things like that. And then there's just the sexual harassment. Arturo Beccar worked for Instagram. It was 15% of teenage boys and girls were approached or sexually harassed. Like a creepy approach. 15% every week. Every week in the last week. And so he says it's the largest scale sexual harassment to have ever happened. Instagram is the largest scale sexual harassment to have ever happened. So those are some of the direct harms. Then there's also, of course, the social comparison. There's the cyberbullying. It takes away sleep. You stop reading books. I've begun saying that the proper age to get your kid a smartphone is the age that you want them to stop reading books and sleep less and see their friends less. So when you put a smartphone into a child's life, you're going to change almost everything. Not for all of them. There are kids who are fine, but I think it's more than half, more than half of the kids are going to be diminished by when you give them a smartphone.
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C
What do you think? You know, really though hopefully has changed to now focus on, you know, hopefully a positive effect of all of the work that you and the other researchers that you mentioned or the, you know, people who have left the tech companies to come forward to help ring the alarm bell about the harms. You know, what do you kind of see has changed in the last couple of years?
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B
Yeah, well, I can tell you what's changed in the last two months, because that's a big change. Last two months. So the last two months have been incredible. It's now a different world than it was a year ago. What happened, I believe, was this. Australia's bill went in. Australia's law, raised in the age of 16, went into effect on December 10. There was a lot of news coverage around the world, but it wasn't just, oh, Australia's doing this. Will it work? It was almost always or often accompanied by people saying, hey, why can't we do that here? Or, hey, Prime Minister, are you looking at what they're doing in Australia?
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C
The race to be second. That's what I always call the race to be second. Right. Someone has to go first. And then there's the race to be second.
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B
That's right. And the second is the person who established it as a pattern. It's not just one off. And so the fact that so many citizens stood up and said, wait, why can't we do that? And journalists said, why can't we do that? And then some leaders, some leaders realized, wait, we don't, you know, because in general, politicians don't want to get too far out of the head of the public. You know, if, like, you know, if you're Michael Bloomberg and you ban large sodas, most people don't want that. You're going to have a problem. And that's, that's why people, I think politicians were afraid to take bold action on this because they thought, you know, the kids love social media, like, oh,
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C
and the parents are fine with it.
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B
Yeah, that's right. So in December was when the people whispered to each, like, wait, oh, you want to do what Australia did? Oh, you want to do? I do, too. And so by January, the whole world was ready to raise the age. And that's why we have seen more than a dozen countries just in January, a dozen countries with France and actually Indonesia actually had already done it. Their law takes effect in the next few weeks. But all over Europe now, leaders are going to raise the age to 16. So we are in a very different world. And this makes me very hopeful that we can, as citizens, it is possible to shift politics on an issue that people had been hopeless about.
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C
That's not yet the reality here in the United States. And so I'm curious, absent political leadership, what leadership are you seeing from parents who I think many of whom have kind of deeply, kind of absorbed your message, that we were overprotecting kids offline and underprotecting kids online? How have you Seen like anecdotally or more robustly, parent behavior changing. Are there fewer parents buying smartphones for kids? Are there more parents restricting usage? Maybe only to the weekends. Are there parents who say maybe you get a smartphone but you don't get social media until 16?
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B
What are you observing? That is all happening. I'll start big picture and then move in. When I wrote the Anxious Generation, I wrote it as a social psychologist and as an American. As an American, I know that we don't have a functioning legislature. We have a legislature that can be bought very, very easily by international standards. It doesn't take a lot of money to stop legislation in the US Compared to what you'd have to give to in other countries, I'm told. And as I understand it especially Meta gives so much money to the Republican caucus that the Republican leadership was able to stop a bill that had passed the Senate 93 to 3, the Kids Online Safety Act.
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C
Cosa.
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B
That's right. So it is true that the Republicans can stop anything. Now, of course, the Democrats can stop things too, when they're in power. But on this issue, Meta seems to have a lot of influence with the House Republicans. So I assumed it was all going to have to be done by local action. And so the two things that I didn't count on are one, most of the states have acted because most governors are parents, and some of those governors are women. And so two of the very first that I spoke to was Kathy Hochul in New York and it was Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas, my original home
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C
state of Arkansas and my current home state of Arkansas, state of Newark.
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B
That's right. Of course. That's right. And they've both been wonderful. I work closely with both of them and they got moving right away. And most states have taken action on phones in schools. So yes, you and I are cynical about what might happen in Congress, but the 50 states are acting and there's a new bill coming out. So both Representative Houchin and Auchincloss, Republican and Democrat, they each have complementary bills. Hochen's would raise the age age to 16. Aucking clauses would establish the obligations of the app stores to begin the age gating process. The two work together very well. They're introducing those bills in the current Congress. Now, they're not going to pass this Congress, but.
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C
But they put a stake in the ground.
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B
They put a stake in the ground. It'll get talked about and I think there's a good chance in the next Congress and that's Even if the Republicans keep control? Because it is. What we found is that while Republicans are adamant about any regulation of speech online, they're actually okay with protecting kids. That's a bipartisan issue.
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C
You just mentioned Governor Hochul and Governor Huckabee Sanders, both of whom are moms. And I've read that you noticed while talking about your book in the real world that your experience was that moms seem much more kind of activated.
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B
Absolutely.
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C
And seem to intuitively understand more the real actual and potential harms.
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B
Yes.
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C
Why do you think that is?
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B
Well, so. So dads are very supportive. They read the book, they agree with it, but they didn't jump into action. And I think what's happening here is mothers now, just as in my own family giving birth is the woman has had a relationship with the child for nine months, and the father is. It starts on day one. And it's not biological, it's not nursing. So just women are just so much more connected to their kids. And then they're all. They're just average gender differences about the nature of relationships between men and women. So I believe what happens is that when you see, when. When the child gets taken away by a device, you give the kid their first iPhone and. And now they're addicted and they don't make eye contact anymore. Mothers felt that. They felt it like a stab in their heart. They felt the kid being ripped away. They could. They. They felt the kid being made stupid or corrupted, whatever it is. And so I think mothers felt it, whereas fathers, I don't think they felt it as much. So when the anxious generation came out in 2024, Mother's Day were all ready to go. They just didn't know what to do. And so the book comes out, it says collective action. It says, talk to the other parents of your kids, friends, talk to the parents groups at school, activate at the school level. Boom. They just did it right away.
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C
So how do we best engage the fathers and also the grandfathers or the uncles or the other adults who want to be supportive of. Of the kids in their lives?
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B
Oh, you're only the second person who's ever asked me that question. I'm so glad we get to talk about it. Yeah, people don't think of that for some reason.
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C
Well, I love my dad and I love my husband.
- [26:12]
B
Yeah. And I'm sure they love your kids, and your dad certainly loved you. Okay. So in the anxious generation, I propose four norms that if we do this, it'll break the collective action problem. So the first is no smartphone before high school. The second is no social media before 16. The third is phone free schools. And we've already talked about those three. The fourth is far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. And here, part of the problem is that beginning in the 90s, we got really afraid that if we ever let our kids out, they'll be abducted, they'll be hit by a car, something terrible will happen. And of course, in the 90s was just when crime was plummeting, as you know, as your dad was in the White House. Crime was going down and down and down. But that's the decade that we freaked out and we stopped trusting our neighbors. We lost a lot of social capital, as Robert Putnam describes in Bowling Alone. So there's that combined with the fact that mothers are naturally more protective. More threats, they see threats. Men are more risk taking than women, especially when it comes to their children. And so dads really need to lead the charge on risky play. And I have a whole, and I use the word risky deliberately, the human developmental program. You start off with a very strong attachment to one or more adults. That's your, you have internal working models of your attachment system. And I'm sure you saw this with your three kids. Kids just gradually, they just wander a little further away from you. And then if something goes wrong, they come running back. And so dads are really good for encouraging things that are challenging physically that might be even a little risky. But of course, you have to look out like, you know, if you fall, will you die or might you just break an arm? Kids used to sometimes break arms. When your parents and I were in, you know, elementary and middle school, there were kids with cast. You don't see. Nobody has a cast anymore. Nobody breaks an arm. There's. Nobody does anything that could break an arm. Because what is happening all around America and all around the world is everyone has discovered that if you just give the kid your phone or you give them an iPad, they're quiet. It's the most powerful digital babysitter or pacifier ever. Everyone's discovered this. And of course, we're all on our phones all the time. The kid reaches for it. We're always taking pictures. We show the kids. So the kids really, really want the phone, and it works. The problem is if the kid is bored and they demand the phone, you give it to them. Now you've taught them after a few repetitions, that if you're bored, you get the phone and if you beg loud enough, you'll get it. So once you, you kind of have to keep going. And what that means is that your kid's going to be an iPad baby. And you know, I think you're old enough to remember looking out a car window on long drives, but a lot of Gen Z don't have that experience because if you're in the car you get the iPad and certainly if you're on a plane, you get the iPad. So travel means you have a screen. And what that means eventually is like many of my students at nyu, you know, they've made it into an elite school, but still they're just always taking stuff in. So they actually have, they don't have a moment to think, they don't walk around outside without something coming into their ears. So what you're doing is you're teaching your kids that boredom is a natural part of life and when they're bored they should look for something to do. And that's the sort of person that is going to be effective as a partner, a romantic partner, an employee, a functioning adult who can self regulate his own consciousness rather than always requiring a screen to do it.
- [29:26]
C
You know, you just mentioned romantic partners. You know, certainly John, I think. Keep reading. Reporting on studies done by I'm sure even some of your colleagues on the decline in kind of romantic exploration, romantic entanglements, hookups, sex between even older teenagers and people in their 20s. I find that deeply troubling as a parent who very much hopes that my children at an age appropriate time that they can, you know, go on their first date, fumble through an awkward first kiss, like navigate with training wheels like those early moments so that they discover of course always what feels safe and what feels comfortable and also what feels, you know, right and healthy and affirmative. Because you know, I'm so thankful to be married to my best friend and to, you know, be madly in love with my husband. And it's such a meaningful cornerstone of my life and I want that for them. But if you don't have the first experiences at, you know, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, you know, how do you, how do you get there?
- [30:40]
B
Yeah. So yes, let's take it in two stages. This is one of the biggest problems facing us. It's, it's not as immediate, like it's not going to be a disaster in the next year or two, but it's a long term disaster. The devices have been interfering with sex and love and childbearing for a little while now. Now you bring in Gen Z, who's growing up much more anxious and who's growing up in the way that we talked about before. The boys are blaming the girls and thinking that they're inaccessible and haughty or whatever it is they think. And the girls find the boys to be revolting troglodytes with horrible political views and a lot of misogyny and cruelty. It's not. The average boy is not cruel or misogynistic. But if you're a girl online, that's what you see is boys saying and doing awful, awful things, trying to outdo each other. So there's a level of savagery in humanity. Life online, I think, renders you unfit for being a good partner. And then your entire sex life has to go through the apps. You know, many boys are afraid to approach a girl for a lot of reasons. You know, of course, the, you know, just watching old movies where guys would, like, hit on girls or remembering what high school and college was like, where, you know, if you're going to meet a girl, you had to approach girls. Like, you had to, you know, make a lot of approaches and hope that something would work. And that's very, very rare now. And every year in my class, I always ask the women, would you rather that guys were a little more forward and made more approaches? And they almost all say yes. They wish there was more of that. So there are a lot of reasons why young men won't approach young women, but one of the biggest, I think, is Gen Z has been trained to not do hard things. If you have a choice between a hard thing and pulling out your phone, you just pull out your phone. You don't have to do the hard thing. And you used the metaphor of training wheels before. It's hard to ride a bicycle. But you go out there, you start with training wheels, you take the training wheels off, and you fall. We all remember the feeling of that. The scraping on the pavement of your elbow or your gosh.
- [32:35]
C
I remember learning to ride a bike.
- [32:37]
B
Yes.
- [32:37]
C
From the tricycles to the training wheels to my dad running behind me with the bike without the training wheels and me feeling so excited and then, you know, shortly thereafter tumbling off.
- [32:46]
B
Exactly. So that's. And that's a good metaphor for learning how to be a boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife. You know, I mean, at least in Western culture, you need training relationships. In some. In many traditional cultures, it's arranged marriage. But we have to learn how to date, how to seduce each other, how to appeal to each other, and that's hard. And I think that the central lesson here is that kids have to do hard things millions of times. But smartphones and social media give them an easy out and AI is coming in to do everything else. Look, if everyone's spending two to five hours on social media a day, teens are spending five or more adults less. But if everyone's doing that, that pushes out everything that's not essential.
- [33:29]
C
John, every time I hear it that stat or read that stat, it still boggles.
- [33:33]
B
It's my boggle.
- [33:34]
C
Which, I mean, maybe it shouldn't be so surprising because I have heard this before. And yet five hours a day is just.
- [33:41]
B
Well, you have to see. It's the social, it's the short videos, because the five hours, it includes YouTube and YouTube is now TikTok. What the kids are watching is the shorts and Instagram Reels and TikTok. So the short videos, the vertical videos, are complete garbage. They seem to be the major driver, or one of the major drivers of the recent declines in test scores in ability to read books. There's an article in the Atlantic on how, how even film majors find it difficult to watch a movie because you can't. How do you go 90 minutes without checking social media? This again is why it's just so important. Just keep your kids off of all of this stuff till 16. Do not let them on social media till they're 16. And that includes Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok. And I, I now have to say YouTube in the sense of YouTube shorts. I'm not saying never watch YouTube, but I think you should try to insist that your kids can't watch anything shorter than five minutes. No video that's less than five minutes.
- [34:54]
C
John, you mentioned AI earlier and I wonder in this moment where I think there are a lot of parents who have absorbed kind of your diagnosis and recommendations around delaying phone usage, delaying social media usage, supporting the Phone Free School movement, supporting the Kids Online Safety act, if they knew about it, are now concerned about how they prepare their kids for an AI world, whether from just an educational standpoint or a future employment standpoint, or also a kind of social and interaction standpoint. What advice do you have as parents? Try to navigate that, or is actually the advice still the same?
- [35:37]
B
The advice is a little. Well, it ends up being similar, but I think here's the way to think about it. Please, everybody, you must drop entirely the idea that if you give your kid an early start on something, they will end up further along. And so if we give our kids social media early, like at age 8, 9, they'll learn how to use it and then they'll be better off when they're 21. Like no, if they go through puberty on it, they will have lasting diminishment. They will be changed in ways that are bad. Or the idea that, well, you know, AI would be in the future. So I want to get my kids started now because then he'll be better able to use light. No, it's just the opposite. The more you raise your kid with these technologies, the less they'll be able to pay attention, think for themselves, read books, learn, tune up their neural network. They're just going to consume lots and lots of little 15 second bits of garbage. You want your kid to tune up their neural network the way an LLM does by exposure, by taking in lots of high quality stuff. That means books, novels, high quality movies, nick at night cartoons instead of TikTok. And so the, the simple way to say it is if you want your, you want to prepare your child for success in the digital world, keep them the hell away from the digital world until they're done with puberty. So until 16. I'm not saying of course they can use Google, they can use a computer, they can do word processing, they can watch some YouTube. I'm not saying total, but what I'm saying is deep exposure seems to be interfering with cognitive development, social development, sexual development, even language development for the little kids. So keep them away. And guess what? When they get on it, they're not going to fall apart. Part. How long does it take to learn how to use Instagram? A couple days, maybe a couple weeks before you're an expert. How long does it take to learn to use chat? GPT? I mean, maybe a month of practice. So the technologies that you're exposing your kid to now, first of all, they'll be long gone by the time they're in the workforce. So there's no spillover effect. All there is is the brain damage.
- [37:18]
C
That's really helpful. You know, Jonathan, I know we're approaching our time and normally we end every episode with a fact or fiction segment where I normally like toss something and you say if it's fact or fiction. But I actually thought we could maybe do a little something different where we could talk about your digital hygiene and I'll happily share mine.
- [37:36]
B
Okay, let's go.
- [37:38]
C
Do you set screen time limits for yourself?
- [37:42]
B
I'm 62 and I just began, I just began putting on some limits two weeks ago, so let me just explain.
- [37:49]
C
Okay, great.
- [37:50]
B
Please. I actually have no problem with my phone. I do not have a phone addiction problem. At all. And the reason is because I'm always at a computer. I don't like to type on. I hate typing on the phone. So I don't. I never do social media. I don't do email on the. My phone is as it was when I got the iPhone2 in 2008. Whenever it was now. For me, the issue was on my computer. I'm always on a computer. I work a lot. But what I find is that when I'm trying to write and I get to. And writing is really hard.
- [38:16]
C
Writing is hard.
- [38:17]
B
So when I get to, you know, I need to write this paragraph. Let me go check the weather. Is it gonna. Is it gonna be warm? You know, maybe I'll go for a walk later, you know, and then I, you know, oh, how's the amazing generation? Because it's been on the best list recently. So I like, I'll check that like five times a day because it's pleasurable and you never know where it's going to be. So it's a variable ratio reinforcement schedule for me, and it's about my status. How am I doing in the eyes of the world? So I totally understand what my students are going through about always checking their status and checking who like their posts and checking how they're doing. So my digital habits aren't too bad. But I'm working with an executive coach and she said, john, you have to stop checking Twitter in the morning. That's your writing time, and you have to stop checking your. So we put on a blocker.
- [39:02]
C
I also am not, thankfully, knock on wood, addicted to my phone. I also, though, keep myself honest. I look at my Sunday usage for the week before, and if I found, oh, wow, I spent more time reading the news than I was mindful of, or if I spent more time checking Twitter, if I spent more time. Also, we've had a lot of weather in New York, and I did find, you know, there was like one week where I'd spent like two hours looking at the weather. I'm like, how is that even possible? Like, how. How is that even possible? I find that a healthy check. Do you take your phone to the dinner table?
- [39:41]
B
No. No. We have a rule. My wife has always been very good at enforcing that. Like, no phones at the table. You know, even if you want to just check something that's part of the conversation, just don't. Just don't bring it in. That's very important. And I would add the. The most important rule that I wish I had implemented in my household. My. My wife urged me to do, but I felt it was too late. And no screens in the bedroom ever. You know, our kids went through Covid. They were on computers all the time. So, you know, we did, we, we did a really good job keeping them off social media, but they just develop habits with their computers of consuming stuff that I wish we had kept a lid on.
- [40:14]
C
I think that's probably good for all of us to hear. Do you think all screens are equal? Like, if someone's reading on a Kindle, is that the same as looking at your phone?
- [40:21]
B
No, no, no. The issue isn't the screen itself. The issue is, first there's the brightness, model, color. So that's more dopamine. So a black and white Kindle is much more like a piece of paper. It emits very, very little light and it's reading. So the key thing is, while you're reading, are you tempted to do something else? And that's why I'm having trouble on my computer, because, you know, I try. Like, I don't know about you. I almost never read long articles anymore. Like, even, you know, David Brooks, his farewell essay, it's long and halfway through, I stopped and I was going to do something else, and I said, no, wait a second. You know, this is your friend David Brooks, who's writing this brilliant column. Commit to finishing that. Don't click away.
- [41:00]
C
So even Jonathan Haidt sometimes has, has challenges with his attention.
- [41:04]
B
That's the thing. That's also another thing that's happened in the last year is I think it's now become common knowledge among adults that it's not just the kids, that we all are feeling overwhelmed, fragmented. It's harder to read books, harder to, harder to read along things. Now, of course, there's been a lot more news since, you know, since November of 2024, and that's part of it. But I think people are just much more aware now that there's just way too much coming in. We're overwhelmed. We can't find focus. Do you feel that way?
- [41:30]
C
I, I, I, I feel that way kind of intellectually, but not emotionally. Like, I feel that way intellectually insofar as I definitely. There's an enormous amount of news every day, you know, across our country and around the world. And I want to be a good citizen and, and to keep abreast of it. I also try very hard to not emotionally absorb kind of what I have done. No influence over acceptance so far as a citizen right now. So I try.
- [42:01]
B
That suggests that you've actually done a pretty Good job of defending yourself, of keeping your digital habits in check.
- [42:06]
C
Well, I also train it for the Boston Marathon and go for very long runs and I think that's helpful.
- [42:11]
B
Wow. Yeah. That's discipline. Good.
- [42:13]
C
Do you think that screen breaks work? Like, have you ever taken a week away from your phone? Would you recommend people who maybe need a reset do one of some duration?
- [42:24]
B
Well, yes. So what's very clear is that if you are agitated or anxious, if your kid is agitated or anxious when you take the device away, that shows that the dopamine circuits have adapted to high levels of stimulation. And if you take it away, they will get better. Now the problem is that if it's like that, if you have a mild addiction and you have withdrawal symptoms, it'll get worse first. So the first couple days of each, take your kid off video games when he's been playing five hours of a day. The first few days are going to be horrible and he might even break things. But if you go two or three weeks, that will go away. So detox really works. There's the universal story of summer camp. I sent my daughter to summer camp. She had been addicted before. She goes to summer camp. She has a great time. She has no trouble adapting because she's doing things with other girls all day long. She comes back and my 12 year old is back to the beautiful, sunny, wonderful 10 year old that I used to have. And then she gets her phone back and within a month she's back to the sullen, anxious 12 year old that had gone off to camp. So it's very clear that a few weeks away, especially if it's time out in the real world, will work wonders. Now there's only one one day detox I know of that I think is effective and that's Shabbat. The fact that Jewish communities, so I've been since I returned to New York. I grew up in the suburbs, but I was away for a long time and returned in 2011 when I came to NYU. And I've gotten to know a number of Jewish communities and they've been amazing on this issue. They really have jump, jumped in. They made their schools phone free. But Jews have a built in advantage which is Shabbat. So religious Jews, I'm not religious, but religious Jews have, they've all grown up with the idea that, you know, from sundown on Friday to sun sun down on Saturday, you're not touching your phone, you're not touching any devices, but you're with family and friends. So it's intensely social. That works. Whereas if you try to do it just on your own, I mean, it might still be good, but it's really hard. But if you can do it with a group and it's a social thing. One of my great regrets in my life when look back on how I lived my life with regard to all these things is that I wish that I had honored Shabbat from the time the kids were little. And if I had simply structured the week around a full day away from work for people and books and kids, I wish I had done that well.
- [44:38]
C
And that we can always make different choices in the future. Which I think is part of what's so powerful about your work. That even with all the challenges that may exist, as parents we can make different choices. As citizens we can make different choices. We can expect our leaders to make different choices choices. A different future is possible than our present.
- [44:55]
B
That's a beautiful way to put it to end on human agency because that's what we've discovered in the last year is that it looked like a tidal wave was rolling over us. People said two years ago when the book came out, people said, oh, trains left the station. You know, you can't put toothpaste back in a tube. But what we've discovered is that if our kids lives depended on it, we actually would find a way to put toothpaste back in a tube. And that what we're doing, we're pushing back on, we're passing laws, we're suing the companies and we're going to get change.
- [45:24]
C
John, thank you so much for helping lead the charge and for your time today.
- [45:28]
B
Chelsea, what a pleasure to meet you in this way and to talk with you about these topics. Thanks for your interest. Thanks for your work.
- [45:34]
C
Thank you so much. You can follow John Haidt onathanheight on Instagram. His new graphic novel is called the Amazing Generation. I highly recommend gifting it to any pre teens in your life. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week. That Can't Be True is a production of Limonada Media and the Clinton Foundation. The show is produced by Katherine Barnes Mix in Sound design by Ivan Korayev. Kristin Lepore is Senior Director of New Content and Jackie Danziger is VP of Narrative and Production. Maggie Kralshore is our Managing Director, Director of Partnerships. Executive producers are Jessica Cordova Kramer, Stephanie Whittles, Wax and me, Chelsea Clinton. Special thanks to Erica Goodmanson, Sarah Horowitz, Francesca Ernst Kahn, Caroline Lewis, Sage Falter, Barry Lurie Westerberg, Emily Young and the entire team at the Clinton Foundation. You can help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. And if you can think of someone who might benefit from today's today's episode, please go ahead and share it with them. There's more of that can't be true with Lemonada. Premium subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. You can also listen ad free on Amazon Music with your prime membership.