Parenting in the Age of Social Media and — Help! — A.I.

Summary

Summary of "Parenting in the Age of Social Media and — Help! — A.I." Episode of The Ezra Klein Show

Introduction In the April 1, 2025, episode of The Ezra Klein Show, host Ezra Klein engages in an in-depth conversation with renowned social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. The discussion centers on Haidt's influential book, Anxious Generation, and explores the profound impacts of social media and artificial intelligence (AI) on modern parenting, childhood development, and societal norms.

1. Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation The episode opens with Ezra Klein introducing Jonathan Haidt and his book, Anxious Generation, which has notably remained on bestseller lists since its March release. Klein highlights the book's controversial stance on the "rewiring" of childhood due to pervasive digital technologies.

“The subtitle of this book says it all... Causing an epidemic of mental illness. I don't think anybody can dispute that.” ([00:55])

Haidt explains that childhood is evolutionarily designed for extensive play and social interaction, which are crucial for brain development. The lack of these experiences, exacerbated by increased screen time, is linked to rising mental health issues.

2. Shifts in Parenting and Social Trust Klein and Haidt discuss the dramatic changes in parenting styles since the 1990s. Haidt attributes these changes to heightened fears around child safety and a decline in community social trust.

“We used to trust that if our kids were out playing without us, other adults would look out for them.” ([09:02])

This erosion of trust has led to more intensive parenting, with both parents, especially mothers, dedicating significantly more time to supervise their children.

3. The Explosion of Screen Time and Its Impact The conversation delves into the surge of screen-based activities following the advent of smartphones and high-speed internet around 2010-2015. Haidt correlates this period with the onset of increased mental health issues among children.

“Around 2012, it shoots up, it doubles within five or 10 years.” ([02:25])

Haidt emphasizes that solitary screen time, particularly with social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, disrupts healthy brain wiring essential for attention and social skills.

4. Policy Responses: Phone-Free Schools and Age Restrictions Haidt outlines a burgeoning policy movement aimed at mitigating screen time's negative effects. States across the U.S., regardless of political affiliation, are implementing measures such as phone-free schools to reduce children's exposure to digital distractions.

“We're seeing it all over the country... phone-free schools.” ([35:36])

Haidt discusses four key norms to combat the issues:

1. No smartphones before high school ([38:09])
2. No social media until age 16
3. Phone-free schools
4. Increased free play and real-world responsibilities

5. Moral Frameworks and the Loss of Paternalism A critical part of the discussion focuses on the decline of robust moral frameworks in modern parenting. Haidt argues that without a shared moral order, children lack guidance on virtues beyond academic success and niceness.

“We have lost any kind of independent and... paternalistic idea of what we want human beings to be.” ([15:28])

He contrasts conservative and liberal approaches to morality, suggesting that modern secular society has weakened the moral structures necessary for healthy child-rearing.

6. The Looming Influence of Artificial Intelligence The conversation shifts to the emergent threats posed by AI technologies. Haidt warns that AI can further erode childhood by eliminating friction in interactions, making it difficult for children to develop critical social and attentional skills.

“AI is going to be the collapse of all friction between you and any desire that can be fulfilled on a computer.” ([56:45])

Haidt expresses concern over AI companions and sex bots, which could distort children's understanding of real human relationships by providing unchallenged and adaptive interactions.

7. Recommendations for Parents and Education Haidt offers practical advice for parents striving to foster healthier development in their children. He recommends minimizing solitary screen time and promoting shared, story-based media consumption to enhance moral and social learning.

“Pretty good use of screens is to put on a long movie... They need moral formation.” ([43:51])

Additionally, Haidt suggests collective action among parents to establish consistent norms and support each other in enforcing screen time restrictions.

8. Educational Shifts and Future Success The discussion touches on the implications of screen and AI influences on education and career success. Haidt argues that traditional skills like sustained attention and deep work are being undermined by digital distractions, which are increasingly valued in modern metrics of success.

“If you want to be successful, you need to master the technology... but I'm teaching these kids to pay attention and read.” ([49:17])

9. Conclusion: A Parents' Revolution Haidt concludes by emphasizing the global "parents' revolution" against the pervasive influence of digital technologies. He urges collective legislative and familial efforts to reclaim childhood integrity and ensure the flourishing of future generations.

“We're a parents' revolution... and I think if most parents rise up and say, no more, I think we're gonna win.” ([69:54])

Notable Quotes with Attributions

• “Quality time. Yeah, that's right.” — Jonathan Haidt ([09:18])
• “Stoic Challenge. It's as though they're stoic gods and they're testing me to make me strong.” — Jonathan Haidt ([70:40])

Final Thoughts This episode of The Ezra Klein Show presents a compelling examination of the intersection between parenting, technology, and societal change. Through his dialogue with Jonathan Haidt, Klein underscores the urgent need to address the challenges posed by social media and AI to safeguard the mental and social well-being of future generations. The conversation calls for a reevaluation of current parenting practices and legislative measures to restore balanced, morally grounded childhoods amidst an increasingly digital world.

Transcript

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[Ezra Klein]

From New York Times opinion. This is the Ezra Klein Show. In March of last year, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published this book called the Anxious Generation, which caused, let's call it a stir.

[Jonathan Haidt]

The subtitle of this book says it all.

[Ezra Klein]

How the Great rewiring of childhood is.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Causing an epidemic of mental illness. I don't think anybody can dispute that.

[Ezra Klein]

What he says is controversial.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh my God. Enough with the panic about kids using smartphones.

[Ezra Klein]

Facing enormous pushback from other researchers, you.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Cannot disentangle cause from effect.

[Ezra Klein]

Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That many parents are primed to believe.

[Ezra Klein]

I always found the conversation over this book a little annoying because it got to me at one of the difficulties we're having parenting one of the difficulties we're having in society, which is this tendency to instrumentalize everything into social science. Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it's bad. It is to me a collapse in our sense of what a good life is, what it means to flourish as a human being. And so I stayed a bit out of that debate because on the one hand I couldn't settle it and on the other hand I didn't think I should come in and say it wasn't important. We're a year later though, and two things have happened. One is Hytes book has never left the bestseller list. That is rare. It has struck a chord. The other is that policy is moving in heights direction. Well, the governor of Utah has signed a sweeping bill to limit children's access to social media. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed one.

[Jonathan Swan]

Of the most restrictive social media laws in the country.

[Ezra Klein]

This asshole Ron DeSantis might have done something I agree with. The no cell phones in schools movement is going national. Florida classrooms, all schools in the Buckeye state, Michigan, South Carolina this morning. Virginia, we're talking statewide at all Arizona schools. And now nine other states are considering the bans as well. Power your phone. We are seeing a genuine policy revolution happening in places governed by Republicans, governed by Democrats in how we treat children in this era of social media. I feel a lot more confident as a parent we're going to figure this out by the time my kids are old enough for it to matter. And then of course, the truck of AI is about to t bone whatever consensus we socially come to, which scares, to be quite honest, the hell out of me. So I wanted to have Haidt on the show to talk about it. He is a professor at New York University Stern School of Business. He's also the author of the Righteous Mind, which I think is one of the best books on political psychology, as well as a bunch of other books. And he is also the author of the After Babel substack, which is free, where he and some co authors are continuing to prosecute the case and think through the research around social media. As always, my email Ezra kleinshowytimes.com John Haidt welcome to the show, Ezra.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It's great to be back with you.

[Ezra Klein]

So I want to just begin with the big question, what is childhood for?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Childhood is evolution's answer to how do you have a big brained cultural creature? You have to play a lot. You have to practice all sorts of things, all sorts of maneuvers, all sorts of social skills in order to tell your brain how to wire up to have the adult form. So if you focus on brain development, and especially for a big brained cultural species like ours, there's a plastic period, a period where stuff comes in and it shapes who you are. And then once you've got that now, you're ready to convert to the adult form, be reproductive, have a baby. But if you don't have play in the childhood, you're not going to reach the adult form properly.

[Ezra Klein]

You had one statistic in the book that I think I've actually read before, but every time I read it, it shocks me anew. And maybe now because I have a five year old who just turned six, but that at five years old, the human brain is 90% of its adult size and it has more neurons than it will when you're an adult.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right, because we're used to thinking of bodily growth as just time equals bigger. But the brain is this amazing thing that has all these neurons that have the potential to connect in all kinds of ways. And as neuroscientists say, neurons that fire together wire together. So if you repeatedly climb trees or do archery, systems will form in your brain that make you really good at that. Whereas if you repeatedly swipe tap, swipe tap and just respond to emotional stimuli, your brain's gonna wire to do that. So almost everybody over 35 or so. I guess you're an older millennial. How did you grow up when you.

[Ezra Klein]

I'm among the eldest of millennials, the elders.

[Jonathan Haidt]

The millennial elders tell me when, at what age you could go out on your bicycle with your friends and go around the neighborhood?

[Ezra Klein]

I don't remember exactly, but I do remember I spent a lot of time I lived on a cul de sac in a suburb. And I do remember I spent a lot of time as part of just a roaming pack of kids who lived on my street. And we would be playing kickball on somebody's garage door. And the other thing I remember about it that I feel like I see less of now, is that it was highly age diverse.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Exactly. That's right. So this is what human childhood has always been. There are periods, the Industrial Revolution, where maybe kids didn't have a childhood. But Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist who co founded Let Grow with Me, he has some writing on hunter gatherers. And hunter gatherers raise their kids in that way. There's no thought that the mother has to be supervising the 4, 5, 6, 7, 9 year olds. They're all off playing with the other kids. And there are nine and ten year olds there. And so they learn to look out for each other. The older kids learn to care for the younger kids. And the younger kids remember they're trying to wire up their brain to like what is a functional member of this society. And the best role models for them are not kids their age, it's kids a few years older. And so in America, in the west, we've got these factory kind of schools where we put all the eight year olds are together and then all the nine year olds are together. But the healthiest is what you just said. And so my point is, everyone before the millennials had this childhood. The millennials are the transitional generation. So you are on the elder side. You got it. Even though the rates are microscopic in this country and even though crime was plummeting in this country in the 90s, that's the decade. And you can see it in the charts. That's the decade. When we really pulled our kids in, we thought they'll get abducted. We can' let them go in a different aisle of a supermarket or a man with a white van. I mean, all this crazy stuff comes in in the 90s.

[Ezra Klein]

Something you mentioned about the 90s in the book is I am familiar with this statistic that parents today, despite working two jobs much more often than they did in the past, despite fathers being more involved, they both spend much more time with their kids than they did before. I hadn't realized that that was not a sort of steady increase over the decades, that it's sharply an increase in the 90s.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That' that's right. There's this weird graph that I have in the book which shows the number of hours that women spend in parenting. You know, what you would consider time with your kid doing something. And the astonishing thing is that in the 50s, 60s, 70s, women were not spending five hours a day parenting because the kids were raised the way that you just said. It's not the parents job to socialize the child all along. It's the parents job to provide the right environment, to provide certain kinds of moral frameworks. But the real work of brain development doesn't happen when you're with your parents. Your parents are home base, they're your attachment figure. When you feel securely attached, then you go off and explore. And that's the mammal way. That's what other mammals do. You go off progressively further from your home base. And that's where the learning happens. It's playing kickball, trying to decide what do we do today? Oh, he broke the rules. No, he didn't.

[Ezra Klein]

I want to get it a tension in there. With at least the culture of modern parenting. I think a lot of parents believe that the simplest way to ask were you a good parent this week? Is how much time you spent with your kids.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Quality time. Quality time. Yeah, that's right.

[Ezra Klein]

I feel that.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And you're saying here that's not true.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It's not true. It's definitely not true. You want to give your kids a quality childhood, you want to be a quality parent. But that doesn't mean that you have to spend a lot of quality time with your kid. You need a warm, trusting, loving relationship. You need to provide structure and order and discipline. But this is what changed in the 90s, and it's in part because we stopped trusting our neighbors. If you think of all the Robert Putnam stuff about bowling alone and the loss of social capital. We used to at least trust that if our kids were out playing without us, other adults would look out for them. If something really went wrong, they could knock on a door like someone would help. But we begin losing that trust. And this is really bad for the kids because the kids don't grow as much if their attachment figure is there. And it's really bad for the adults, especially the women. The mothers pick up a lot of this even though they're working outside the home. So yes, modern parenting is not good for the kids and certainly not good for the adults.

[Ezra Klein]

So if you're tracking dynamics here you have the 90s. We're getting more afraid of danger. You're having this deterioration in social trust, this deterioration in ease of the whole community parenting your kid. And it's right about now that you begin having an explosion in screen possibilities.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's it.

[Ezra Klein]

So I remember when I was younger, I remember Nickelodeon emerging. Okay, right before then, there wasn't a TV channel that was programming for children at all times. Right, Right before then it's like there are cartoons sometimes, there was kids shows, sometimes Saturday mornings, but not all the time. And obviously from there you get an explosion of cable channels, eventually the Internet, eventually iPads and iPhones and video game consoles and all the rest of it. So talk about the sort of handoff.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So it's the conversion over to this smartphone based, tablet based childhood. That's when all the indicators of mental illness start rising. Around 2012, 2013. Now I focused on the 2010-2015 period, but I think your question points out something I hadn't really thought much about, which is cable TV. I was born in 1963, so I grew up in the late 60s, early in the 70s on I Dream of Jeannie and Gilligan's Island. I showed this shows to my kids and I said, this is so stupid. Like they were really simple plots, but that's all we had. Whereas you had cable, which was more.

[Ezra Klein]

Engaging and console video games. Okay, I got a Nintendo. The nes, not the Super Nintendo. The first mass available console and mass adopted. You know, you could argue about the Atari or whatever, but the Nintendo Entertainment System.

[Jonathan Haidt]

What year was that?

[Ezra Klein]

I don't remember now, but I was young.

[Jonathan Haidt]

You're talking that, you're talking maybe 80s. Yeah. Okay.

[Ezra Klein]

To me that's a big dividing point because the things that Nickelodeon and the NES do is they make it possible to put something on the television at any second of the day. They'll entertain a child intensely.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, that's right. That's a good point. I've been more focused on the arrival of the Internet. But the Nintendo didn't require the Internet, right?

[Ezra Klein]

No.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

Okay, maybe you were not a gamer, John.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Well, I was because when I was a kid, the game was Pong. They were.

[Ezra Klein]

This is 8 bit Mario, man. This is the early stuff.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay, so the early stuff was great fun, but it was not multiplayer. Your friend had to sit next to you to play. Right, right. So I hope this will be a theme that I'm thinking a lot more about this. Like don't just think about screen time, think about what is it that makes it good or bad. Cause I remember just as video games was coming in and you'd Hook it up to your tv. So my friends and I would get together and we'd say, what do you want to do? Play video games? Like, okay, we'll do that for a little bit. And then we'd go off and do something else. Nothing harmful about. About that. What happens in the 2000s once you begin to get the multiplayer games? Because this requires not just the Internet, it requires high speed Internet in order to have these amazing graphics shared in multiple screens at the same time without a lag. So that's only 2008, 2009, it begins to get popular. But then in this great rewiring period, 2010 to 2015, this is when everyone's trading in their flip phones for smartphones. This is when high speed Internet is increasing greatly. So by 2015, boys are all on these multiplayer games. My son played Fortnite. I didn't let him on until he was 13. But they laughed their heads off. The boys at least had that synchronous laughter. They're not in the same room, so it's not as good, but they at least had that. Whereas the girls are each alone on their own Instagram account. They might laugh at something, but they're not having shared laughter.

[Ezra Klein]

One of the reasons I felt myself a little put off by the debate that emerged around your book with this sort of endless back and forth on the identification strategy of was this really the cause of anxiety or a correlate of anxiety? And what's going on in South Korea is it got at this feeling I keep having, which is that we have lost any kind of independent and I would positively say paternalistic idea of what we want human beings to be. And we have allowed it all to be dominated by metrics. So on the one hand, there is, are you getting good grades? If you're getting good grades, then you're fine. It's not really true. We definitely see it's not true now because we're watching kids, I mean, partially through grade inflation, get plenty of good grades, not get pregnant as teenagers, not do a bunch of drugs and they're doing terribly. The other side of it, though, is that then there's this, I would call it the logic of capitalism, the logic of the consumer economy, which is that if you enjoy doing it, if you want to do it, then we need to have a very high bar for a reason to stop you. Right? Our view is that kids should not free base crack all the time. We've decided that's not something we should let them do. But if we're playing massive Multiplayer online games all the time. And they enjoy it and their grades are fine. Like, what are you really gonna say? And somewhere in this, some texture is lost. Like, I think that I associate more with classical education or something. But we are trying to develop certain facilities that are part of being a human being. I always think about attention as one of them. What kind of attention? We hear all this concern now that kids are graduated in high school. Even kids going to good colleges can't read a full book.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Can't read a book, can't watch a movie.

[Ezra Klein]

But there's more than that. I think we care about if our children are nice or kind. We sort of have that. But there's a lot about all kinds of virtues that we've just lost the way to talk about and that we're not comfortable saying. I mean, I see it with parents all the time. You need some great reason to say the kid shouldn't be on the iPad. And maybe it's that you think their grades will be bad or their anxiety will be high. But you can't just say, like, nobody feels that comfortable saying it's just bad. I just don't want you looking at the screen all the time. I think it's bad. I think it's not the way to be a human being.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. What you're describing is the loss of any moral framework. And if you try to raise kids without a moral framework, it's not gonna go well.

[Ezra Klein]

So that's what I'd like you to talk a bit about. You have one chapter on this in the book. It's a little shorter. It's about spirituality. But your first book is all about moral frameworks. Connect these for me. Because we lost paternalism. I do think parenting lost an idea that it is confident about, about what we are trying to raise people towards.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And this. Yeah. And while I wanna stay away from politics and our talk in general, what you're bringing up is one of the divisions that I talked about in the Righteous Mind between. And that is that in general, the right conservatism conserve what we have. There's a wisdom to our ancestors. This is Edmund Burke. And so the right tends to see they have what's called a constrained view of human nature. If kids don't have structure and order and punishment for bad deeds, they'll come out badly. Whereas the left tends to habitually question existing arrangements and pull things down if they seem unjust. And the left is much more afraid to make value judgments and to impose a moral order on kids that's why it's always the right that's concerned about the garbage being placed on tv, because the right is very concerned about the moral diet coming in now. I think in the modern era, I think parents should be more like the conservatives in that respect. And here's why. We already talked about the way the neurons are growing, they're wiring up, and you learn to run, climb trees, do all sorts of things. But a big thing you're doing, especially in later childhood, is you're learning the moral order. And humans evolved within a moral order. And I'm a secular Jewish. I was always on the left. Now I'm nothing, I'm not on any team. But when I was writing that book, I was really sort of exploring ancient wisdom and discovering, wow. Every other society, they had this rich moral framework. They have a conception of the gods. There are reasons why you have to do things. And when you raise kids within a moral order, they have a sense of their place in the world and a sense of meaning. And when you take all that out and you say, you know, all that matters is what feels good, or all that matters is rights, or all that matters is some measure of material success. Basically what you have is what Emile Durkheim called anomie or normlessness. And there's a question on the Monitoring the Future study where since the 70s, we've asked high school seniors, my life feels useless. Do you agree or disagree with that? On a five point scale? And until 2010, it's like around 9% say yes. And then all of a sudden 2012, it shoots up, it doubles within five or 10 years. And so I think part of this is if you're immersed in stories that have a moral order to them, which is what I was immersed in when I was a kid, all the stories had some sort of moral. And even I Dream of Jeannie. I mean, there was a moral framework that was put in by the adults who made the show. But what you see on TikTok and Instagram, they're not really stories, they're really amoral or immoral. A lot of them are just horrible things. The boys are seeing lots of videos of people getting in accidents or violence. And so a long way to answer your question. Kids need moral formation. They need a structure, a shared moral framework. Morality only works like language. You can't have your own language and you can't have your own morality. It only works as a shared system and order. And once kids move onto social media, it's just a million little fragments of nonsense. There's no moral order.

[Ezra Klein]

I think it was you. I was listening to a conversation with you some years ago, and you said something like, it is just bad for teenage girls to be endlessly posting pictures of themselves on the Internet for other people to rate right through.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I stand by that bold assertion.

[Ezra Klein]

And I remember thinking, that's so unbelievably fucking obvious and so much not how we actually just talk about it.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

Because what you were making there was fundamentally a moral judgment. I know behind it there's evidence. But I do find that within the conversation about social media and the way we're constructing childhood, there is this demand to bring the studies. Right. And I've said this before before. I think if you could prove to me that it doesn't matter at all for anxiety at 16 or earnings at 23 whether or not kids spend 2.5 hours or 3 hours a day on TikTok, I think it would change my view of whether they should do that. Zero percent.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay.

[Ezra Klein]

Because I just think it's a bad way to live, and it's a bad way to live for other reasons. Right. I think it'll create by nature. It creates self obsession by nature, creates this management of the personal brand. And even if I couldn't find correlates there of bad outcomes, I have a view on what it means to be a flourishing human being that should not include too much of that. That wants to keep that boxed up a little bit in the human psyche. And this is where things feel like they ran aground to me in a lot of the debates. I feel like parenting and the culture parents come from now, unless you are in some form of church, basically is incredibly insecure about making these judgments.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

I don't fully understand why. I don't think it is just a loss of trust thing. I think it is some set of forces that I don't really understand. But I don't feel like it was like that as much when I was young. And it definitely wasn't like that as much in the past.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

And sort of separate almost from everything else. I think this is a huge failure in parenting culture, this just inability to say we have views on what is good or bad.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

And they don't require 16 years of randomized controlled trials. They're just actually our views on virtue.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And there I see this generational change. You can see sort of the tight moral order of the 1950s. And when you look at old movies like from the 30s and 40s, there was a really tight moral order, and it would be dramatic whether a woman could go into a man's apartment. That was like a. So there was a really intense moral order, including around gender, around all sorts of things. And that, of course, begins to loosen up in the 60s. And there are many good things that happen because of that. But one of the concerns about sort of modern secular society has been you gradually lose this moral framework within which to raise children. And I'm really aware now of how we each. We're all influenced by our parents and just maybe a little bit by our grandparents. Culture has always sort of come down vertically through generations, but that link is getting weakened. So I think there is a progressive weakening of a sense of a moral order which affects how you parent. And then we end up with a kind of an amoral focused on grades and I guess be nice and a few other things. But it's a very thin moral gruel, I'd say.

[Ezra Klein]

And you can, I think, see this spreading throughout society. The idea that this is just about the kids is wrong. I know you don't want to be political, and I know that the John Hyde agenda is being adopted in red and blue states alike. And we will talk about that. But you were saying earlier, look, liberals and conservatives have these different moral foundations, and conservatives care a lot more about the moral inputs. And maybe that was true. I look around, I don't see it. I'm not asking you to say whether Donald Trump is a moral, immoral person, but what I will say is that the Republican Party under him has become unconcerned with what was traditionally understood as vice in a very different way. So some of that is politeness and etiquette, but some of it is, what should the policies be about? Sports gambling. Right. There is a massive deregulation of sports gambling which is so bad for consuming young men. Yes, right. Crypto is an adjacency of that.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right. There's a gambling.

[Ezra Klein]

There's perfectly fine things about crypto, but what we are specifically permitting is crypto as a casino. I was somebody who was very supportive of marijuana legalization, and I think it's gone terribly. And it's gone terribly, I mean, among other things, because we have just allowed capitalism to get its hooks into it and create more and more and more potent products that are advertised everywhere. I don't know if either side is particularly concerned with vice right now, but the right has embraced a lot of this, too. And I think part of that is just a collapse. Right. There is no one left who has political power in this society who feels confident making, I would say, judgments that go against the market.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

There was a market for sports gambling, so we're gonna allow it. There's a market for crypto. I think about a lot of things in modernity as capitalism is itself a kind of moral logic. And it is a moral logic built on individual expression of wants in the moment. And it was counterbalanced by much more potent religious logics. And these two sort of forces held each other at a rough equilibrium for much of 20th century America. And at some point, the religious counter forces weakened so much that the system fell out of equilibrium. And now the religious forces are just not very powerful at all. I am not myself highly religious, but I do think that these were countervailing players and we just don't have them anymore. And the evidence of that being a problem is actually all around us.

[Jonathan Haidt]

No, I think that's exactly right. I'll just bring a couple of points to bear. One is there's an incredible book called the Age of Addiction by David Courtright. And he chronicles how people have always wanted sugar and they foraged for fruit. But then you learn to refine sugar, and now you get sugar based products and then you get candy. And then. So once we get a market based economy in the industrial revolution, we find more and more ways to make these products that our brains evolved to crave, but now they're limitless. You can have limitless quantities effortlessly, and the same is true for opiates. You get opium to heroin to fentanyl. A free market society, the best definition of it I heard was from a philosopher who said a good free market society is one in which you can only get rich by making other people better off. And for the most part, in our economy that is still true. But now let's look at the products we're talking about. If you're a sports betting company, if you're a crypto company, if you're a video game company, if you're a social media company, Are you making your money by making people better off? Or are you playing on addiction, manipulating social forces? Are you spreading enormous negative externalities around society? And I would argue that's what's happening. And partly it is due, I think, to the deregulatory impulse, to the fact that we have lost the ability to regulate things in a smart way. And so one principle I really want to make clear in all of this is we have to distinguish between children and adults. So we are a generally libertarian country compared to Europe, where they're happy to ban anything. When we're talking about adults, I think we're generally right. Generally we should let adults do what they want unless there's compelling evidence, some reason. But when we're talking about kids, it's entirely different. And when you have entire trillion dollar industries, where do they make their money from? I didn't pay them a penny. You didn't pay them a penny. Our kids didn't pay them a penny. That entire value is created by breaking up the day into tiny little bits and sucking out the attention and selling it to advertisers and sell.

[Ezra Klein]

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[Ezra Klein]

I want to think about this, and I guess I'm going to make this next point a little bit to be provocative. I'm not sure how much I believe it. I understand argumentatively and politically why you want to just say, look, it's fine for adults to do basically anything they want, but kids, the children are our future. We got to do something very different there. Fine. I think in practice it doesn't work.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Why is that?

[Ezra Klein]

Because if you are going to allow something to be both highly morally and legally permissible the moment somebody is 18 or frankly in a lot of your frameworks, 16. I'm not saying it is literally impossible that you will implement such a hardcore age verification system that it will be impossible to do. Beneath that, it's probably going to be pretty hard. Now, I think there are places where it works, but typically you want friction that is both moral and structural. It's a little bit more of a gradation throughout society. So what we have lost in a lot of places is friction.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

And there are things that you want to have some access to, but there'd be friction. Right. We had access to things like sports gambling, but yet to drive to Vegas. You know, at least on the west coast where I grew up, taking away all the Friction, making it available virtually everywhere and online has just then made it very, very, very dangerous to people because, you know, some percentage of people are going to develop a gambling problem. And we know that pretty well what we have done. And I mean, this is the genius of capitalism. What it does is it seeks out how to make the thing more interesting, more potent, more seductive, more alluring. And that's really great. Until a certain point.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, that's right.

[Ezra Klein]

At which point the friction between you and the thing becomes too low. And then it's very, very, very hard for the limited software of the human mind to regulate the wants, at least in some people. And so there's something about the loss of friction. And I suspect that. And again, this is partially moral frameworks. If we're going to be completely fine with it at 19, it's going to be very hard for it to not be too present at 17.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay, all right, hold on a second here. So in general, I agree with you that the technology makes everything easy. And for adults, that actually is often good. Not always, but often good. But for kids, it's disastrous because kids need to learn to do hard things. And the technology, technology makes it easy for them to not do hard things. But if I could just add on, you started this off by saying, oh, you don't think that we're not going to get an actual age verification system. The one real obstacle that I have faced, once I put the book out, parents love it, they're embracing it, Teachers are embracing it. The main objection I get is resignation. It's just people saying, what are you going to do? The technology is here to stay. The kids, they're going to have to use it when they're adults, might as well learn when they're kids. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, but actually we can, and we're doing it. So I just really want to make the point that we don't have easy age verification now, but if we incentivize it, we'll have it within a year. So my colleague at nyu, Scott Galloway, gives the example of how the social media companies, this industry, they put a lot of research and money into advertising. And so they figured out a way that when you click a link anywhere on the Internet, when you click a link and then the page loads in between that time, there has been an auction among thousands of companies for the right to show you. You this particular ad. This is a miracle of technical innovation. And they did that because there was money in it. And now the question is, do you Think maybe they could figure out if somebody is under 16 or over 16.

[Ezra Klein]

Also, that auction knows how old it thinks you are.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, that's right. Exactly. They know everything about us, and they're saying, oh, what are you gonna do? The kids are gonna lie. Like, what are we supposed to do? We're gonna get age verification. Australia is pushing it. It's gonna work. It doesn't have to be perfect at first, but within a few years, it will be very good.

[Ezra Klein]

So I will stop just trying to be provocative because I do believe you can do age verification. One reason I wanted to have you on right now is it feels like the world is tipping in this. So run me through. Let's stay. Not in Australia, but. But in the US I feel like every day I turn on the news and I see some other governor or mayor announcing no phones in schools. Tell me the scope of this at the moment.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So the way to understand why it's changing so quickly is to go back before COVID So Jean Twenge comes out with her famous article in 2017, have smartphones destroyed a generation now? At the time, the empirical evidence was not clear at all, and she was savagely attacked by other researchers that, oh, this is just a correlation. No, you have no evidence. It's not causal. So that's 2017. With 2019, we're beginning to see, actually, wait, there is some evidence. And everybody's now seeing something's creepy about this, and we're seeing our kids drift away. And then Covid comes in. What happens? What kids desperately need in 2019, Gene and I were saying, was more time outside playing, less time on screens. What happens? We freak out. We put in way too strict restrictions. We say, no, you can't. You know, in New York, they closed the playgrounds, they closed down the ball fields. So no playing outside. You might catch COVID So things get far, far worse over the next couple years, but the kids have to be on screens. So it's only as Covid began to clear away, people are sort of coming back to their senses about this, and that's why everybody's sort of ready to act. And that's why when my book came out a year ago, came out in late March of 2024, I didn't have to persuade anyone. Almost everybody saw, wait, something is going terribly wrong here. And so what's happening around the world is that legislators are mostly parents, and they've seen it and they're uncomfortable with it. It doesn't matter if they're Democrat or Republican, heads of state Mostly are parents. The way the Australia bill got started was in South Australia, one of the states. The wife of the premier was reading the anxious generation in bed and she turns to him and says, peter, you've got to read this book. And then you've gotta effing do something about it. Is the way that he described it at least. And I think mothers have felt it more keenly than fathers. Mothers just, they're more emotionally connected in ways where they could feel the kids being pulled away. So that's why it's happening everywhere, because it's obvious, it's common sense.

[Ezra Klein]

Most people see it, what is happening everywhere.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So I would say it's a parents revolution, saying, we're sick and tired, we're not gonna take this anymore. All over the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time. We're all fed up. We wanna do something about it. Okay, what do we actually do? I wrote the book as an American, assuming that we'll never get help from Congress. Now I hope I'm wrong. There are some bills that could get through, but I was just sort of assuming we have a dysfunctional Congress. Let's try to do this the way Tocqueville said that we do it. Like, let's get together, let's figure out how to do this. And so that means action among families and at schools and at states. I am finding states are incredibly responsive. States in the United States are either mostly red or blue, but this is a bipartisan issue. So the number one step that they're all taking is so easy and so obvious and it doesn't cost anything, which is phone free schools, check your phone in the morning.

[Ezra Klein]

What are some of the states that are doing it?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Well, Florida was one of the first, but they did it just during instructional time, which is worthless because then everyone rushes for their phone. They're on their phone in between classes, they don't talk to each other. So I'm not sure where they are now. Arkansas, Utah. But it's.

[Ezra Klein]

And Utah's interesting here because that of every state has still the strongest religious culture because of the Church of Latter Day Saints. And they have by far the strongest regulations on social media around children.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

I mean, you sort of see the way those two things, that sort of moral framework and that willing to regulate what feels like a vice is happening there.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. They also have a really excellent governor. Governor Cox has been just superb. He wants to make Utah the most family friendly state. And many states want to. And you know, if we feel that we can't let our kids out and our kids are rotting away on screens and there's screens all day in the school. That's not a family friendly place. So yeah, Utah's been great on this. Oh, here we are in New York. Governor Hochul has been great on this. We're going to get phone free bell to bell legislation here in New York. New Jersey is moving that way, Connecticut, so we're seeing it all over the country. That's the phone free schools. So in the book I say there are four norms. With four norms we can roll back the phone based childhood. The first is no smartphone before high school. Do not give your kid a touchscreen. This includes an iPad. Don't give them their own touchscreen before high school or age 14. And that's not a law, that's a norm that we're trying to promote. The second is no social media till 16. And that could be sort of a norm. I mean if enough of us do it, it gets easier. But we really need law. That's where we really need law. And that's why I'm so excited about Australia. Indonesia is, I believe, planning on it, a whole bunch of nations. If it works in Australia, it's going to go global very quickly.

[Ezra Klein]

I'm just the clarification and I actually don't know. Australia is no smartphone or no social media before 16.

[Jonathan Haidt]

The key is the age of Internet adulthood. At what age are you old enough to sign a contract with a giant corporation to give away your data and your rights and let them stuff stuff into you chosen by their algorithm? At what age? And current American law says as long as you're old enough to lie, you're old enough to do this. If you're 10, just say you're 13 and the companies can do whatever they want for you. Oh, and we can't sue them. They're freed from that by section 230. So that's the current law is that there is no age of Internet anywhere in the world. Like you just lie. But what Australia's saying is the companies are gonna have to figure out how to do this, that you have to do some sort of age assurance so that if you're 16, you can sign this away without parental consent. Your parents don't have to know. And right now 10 year olds are getting on Instagram and TikTok, even 8 year olds. So this has to stop. And Australia, they finally put their foot down and said this is gonna stop here.

[Ezra Klein]

Okay, so that was the second.

[Jonathan Haidt]

The third is Phone free schools and that I think we're gonna, I don't know how many, but I think it's gonna be the majority of kids. The majority are going to be in phone free schools within two years. Phone free away for the day. So many states have done it already and I think a lot of the rest are going to implement it by next September. So that one has moved. That's the main norm where there's been spectacular change around the world. And then the fourth is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. Because what I urge people to do is don't just focus on taking away the screens, focus on restoring a fun childhood as we were talking about before, a human childhood. A childhood spent not, not under your parents gaze doing homework or on a screen, but a childhood where you're having fun with your friends in mixed age groups.

[Ezra Klein]

So one of the things that I think is interesting and important about this, and it's very present in your book, is how hard it is for parents to do it individually. And it feels like it's why it's such an interesting and important place for legislation. Because it really is hard to be a parent saying your kid can't have what all the other kids have and be on these messaging systems that they're all using to plan things and. Right. Like you actually do at a certain point, isolate your child at this moment that you're trying to figure out a way to give them deeper social bonds. So legislation here, I mean, I find it very, very encouraging.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It would be freeing. That's right. What you're describing is a collective action trap. And so the reason why we have to give our kids phones and Instagram is not because we like it, but because they say, mom, everyone else has it. I'm excluded, I'm being left out. So the way you get out of a collective action trap is with collective action. And so that's what I'm really urging in the book. It can be as simple as just talk to the parents of your kids friends agree that you're all going to have these norms and then they're not the only one. And especially if you get the kids together a lot, then they have a fun childhood. But two horrendous statistics that I can't get out of my mind. The first is 50%, which is the percentage of American teens that say that they're online almost constantly. Almost constantly. They're not necessarily looking at the phone 16 hours a day, but if they're talking to you, they're actually thinking about the drama going on and if they can't wait to check. So half of our kids are basically their consciousness. Their lives are owned by a few big social media companies. Here's the other stat that I just Learned last week. 40%. That's the percentage of 2 year olds, 2 year olds in America who have their own iPad. Their own iPad. Because we've all discovered just give the kid an iPad or give him your old phone that you traded up from and she'll be quiet and you can do your email and you can cook dinner and you can do what you want. And so it's become normal to give kids this little babysitter, which is really like, I think giving them morphine or something like that.

[Ezra Klein]

I remember when I gave our kids an iPad to use and I remember what age it was, you know, called three or four. Probably one of them was sick. And I realized pretty quickly that YouTube was terrifying.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And I don't just mean because it would end up in weird computer generated garbage that sometimes turned very creepy. Although that happened too. But that it was the endlessness of it. They would never even watch a full thing because they were always hitting the.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Next thing on the cause there's always something more interesting.

[Ezra Klein]

And this was sort of when I began thinking a lot more about friction. Because the difference between me putting a movie on for them, a Pixar movie or something, and then having access to the algorithm.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, that's right.

[Ezra Klein]

You could really tell the difference in it, the difference in what it asked of them. Right. I think there's a place I want to bring in something that obsesses me, maybe just strangely, which is attention. When I think about what it is I want to try to parent in my children. I want them to be kind, I want them to be interested and curious about the world. But I want them to have healthy attentional faculties. I want them to have healthy bodies and healthy attention. And I don't really know how to do it. I have some theories, but this is one of these things that just terrifies me. Right. When I read these things about these kids graduating who can't read a book. It's not cause they're stupid. It's because we have raised them on technologies that have deranged their dopamine senses to develop the attention necessary to read A Tale to Cities. That is, you are developing an attentional faculty that changes the literal shape of your brain. And I think that was good. I think that the written word and creating the literal brain was good. And we are uncreating it now.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So two things. The first is in the anxious generation. I think I grossly underestimated the harm that's happening because I focused on mental illness. But the bigger damage, I think is the destruction of human attention in millions, possibly tens or hundreds of millions of kids around the world. You know, and you talk to pre K teachers, they say the kids are coming with language delays, social problems, because they were raised on iPads. So let me give a suggestion to parents like you with your young kids. I wish I'd understood this when my kids were young. Let's distinguish between a pretty good use of screens and a really, really bad use of screens. So a pretty good use of screens is to put on a long movie, like 90 minutes. They're gonna pay attention to a long movie about characters in a moral universe. So there's issues of good and bad and norms and betrayal. And it's part of their moral training, their moral formation. And they're watching it with another person. Now, that can be you, ideally. But it's okay if it's a sibling or a friend because it's social. Here's what's really, really bad. IPad time by yourself. Because that's exactly the opposite. It's solitary. It's not stories. And if they are stories, there are 15 second stories that are amoral or really immoral, really disgusting, degrading things, and people doing terrible things to each other. And then the other thing that I really want parents to understand is that this is not like tv. TV is a good way of entertainment. TV puts out a story. But a touchscreen is a behaviorist training device. A touchscreen, you get a stimulus, you make a response, and then you get a reward which gives you a little bit of dopamine, which makes you want to do it again and again and again. So a touch screen can train your child the way a circus trainer can train an animal. TV isn't like that. So iPad time, iPhone time for your 3, 4, 5 year old is just not a good thing.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, it trains us all. I mean, to go back to something I was saying earlier, one reason I am skeptical of this very sharp cut between kids and adults is I think adults attentional faculties are being deranged. Including by the way, mine. I professionally need to keep my attention healthy. And it is a day to day fucking struggle.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

And so for adults too. And also kids become adults, right? All these kids you're talking about from this generation you're talking about, I mean, 24 year olds were 16 year olds, not Very long ago. Right. They were growing up in this. And this is one of the things I worry about it for democracy, but I just worry about it. I think there are more and less healthy forms of attention and I think that we have tipped at some point into a societally less healthy form of attention. And we don't really know what to do about that. And we don't want to scold people about it. We barely even have the language for it.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, but I think we're developing it because everyone feels. Most people feel what you just said. I feel it. We all feel it. I focused on kids because in terms of policy, the ability of our country or states to put limits on kids for their own protection is very, very high. As soon as you turn 18, it's an entirely different game. So I don't think we're gonna ask for a lot of legislation to protect U.S. adults from the things on our phone. Johann Harry has this wonderful book stolen Focus. And I believe he's right when he says if we adults clear it out, well, take a Shabbat. Although a Sabbath is one day, that's not enough. You need a couple of weeks actually to get the dopamine circuits to readapt to levels. But if we adults clear it out, then we can regain our attention. I think he's right in saying that whereas if you go through puberty doing this, if we have 10 year olds on TikTok and they stay on it till they're 18, there's a possibility, we don't know, but there's a possibility that it will cause permanent changes and that they will permanently less able to pay attention to read a book.

[Ezra Klein]

This is a way in which I think we have trouble talking about it. Take the fight we've been having about TikTok. We are willing to have this debate about whether something as intentionally important as TikTok. Right. TikTok is, I would call it, critical attentional infrastructure. Should be owned by a Chinese company.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, that's right. It's the greatest demolisher of attention in human history.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, whether you even want to go that far, which I would too. But it is something that is capturing an almost unfathomable amount of the attention of Americans every single day. So we can have this conversation about do we think it should be owned by a Chinese company? We are not willing to really have a conversation about is it good that so many people are training themselves to have such fast attentional change? For many of them hours a day, the stickiness of TikTok use is Extraordinary. If you look at SurveyDad on its user base, and I mean, it's built to be that way, it is successful because it is sticky. And we've unleashed this or allowed this to be unleashed on the entire country.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I teach a course at NYU Stern called Flourishing. These are all business students. They're mostly sophomores, 19 years old. And I say, do you want to be successful? They all say yes. I say, well, if you give away all of your attention, I can almost promise you you're not going to be successful. You're not going to do anything. So step one in this course is you must regain control of your attention. And the students who are heavy social media users who cut down from four hours a day to less than one, they get transformative results. Results. They have so much time, they can do their homework. They're not as distracted. They're more open to other people.

[Ezra Klein]

But something you just said. It goes back to this question that sits for me about what are we connecting our judgments to? Because you said, well, look, these are business school students. You're telling them you can't be successful and not have control of your attention. I would say you absolutely can be successful and not have control of your attention.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Give me a layout of pattern.

[Ezra Klein]

Elon Musk is highly successful and is a man who's clearly attentionally.

[Jonathan Haidt]

You don't think. Wait a second. Yes, okay. But you don't think that when he was building these businesses, you don't think that he sometimes went hours at a time focusing on a problem?

[Ezra Klein]

I think probably when he was building. But this is a bit of what I mean, that everybody who is in these worlds can see people now who are by any measure successful, in part by dominating the attentional sphere and posting constantly. And I don't think Donald Trump has great attentional faculties. I do think you can be successful in the modern world. We are reshaping the modern world. There's a whole category of influencer. Right. I think part of being an influencer is almost by nature having truly adapted yourself to this intentional environment, in part because these systems, these platforms are building themselves to reward it. Right. They are encouraging this. You have to post enough or you're not going to get into the algorithm and get what you want out of it. I'm not sure it's healthy.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I'm sure it's not healthy.

[Ezra Klein]

I'm sure it's not healthy. But I think that part of how Elon Musk became the richest man in the world was harnessing all this attention, much of it negative. Part of how Donald Trump became the president of the United States twice is harnessing all this attention really embodying the attentional ethic of these sites. And even in a smaller way, there are fewer newspapers now, there are fewer stable jobs in institutional media. In many ways, it's probably more likely that you can become an independent creator, certainly than it was like 20 years ago. Is there a danger that the sort of way you want us to raise children is actually suffused in nostalgia for an economy, for a politics that no longer exists? It's not being deformed, it's being adapted.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right, right. In theory, yes. There is a danger of that and history would suggest examples of it. Every generation is wary of the technology that comes in, that the kids are. But if it turned out that our kids were flourishing, then I would just be an old man shaking his head at the clouds. But our kids are the least flourishing generation we know of ever. Certainly in modern times, if it was the case that our kids loved this stuff and they said, no, we love TikTok. No, let us keep TikTok then. Maybe I just don't understand it, but we did a survey with the Harris Poll. 50% of Gen Z said they would prefer that TikTok was never invented. Never invented. They feel trapped by it. So if you've got the kids, well.

[Ezra Klein]

They don't want to give it up.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Which is the paradox, but they don't want to be the only one. If we could all give it up, then actually most of them would do it. Well.

[Ezra Klein]

But the idea that they'd be banned was not greeted with flowers and chocolates.

[Jonathan Haidt]

No, but guess what? There wasn't much objection. There were creators, there were people making money from it. But I was surprised there was not a youth rebellion saying, no, let us keep doing it.

[Ezra Klein]

I think you're not on TikTok and you're not a legislator getting letters about this.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Well, right, because TikTok motivated a lot of it them to write to their legislators. But the point is that when you survey them, they feel trapped and they're looking for an escape. They're just terrified of being the only one. So in theory, I could be wrong and we will adapt to this. But I think the way you described it. Well, no, they're just. They've adapted to it. I would say they've been deformed by it. So there's a sense in which they fit. But they fit not as agents, they fit not as full human beings who are making a future of themselves. They fit. Fit as human Fodder that has been sucked into the machine and molded to what the machine wants out of them, which is their attention.

[Ezra Klein]

This is one of the tricky things about success right now, because visible success is almost definitionally constantly present, which is very different than the kind of success of a tremendous physics researcher whose work you can't read because it's very complicated and they're not. Not posting a lot of memes about it.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah. So what you're describing is a path that opened up to prestige. So teenagers are desperate for prestige. And what the social media companies did, and we know this from things that insiders have said, is they hacked that. They said normally throughout history to become prestigious, you had to become a good archer or a good leader or a good basket weaver. You had to do something in the world and then people would respect you and you would gain in social status. That's the way it always used to be. And what social media is able to do is say, you don't have to do anything, just do whatever it takes to get people to follow you and bingo, you've got prestige. And where does it end? I'll tell you where it ends. And one of the most disgusting apps I've ever seen. Well, there are lots of competition, but there's a thing called Famify and the idea is lots of young people are lonely, they're not able to get followers. They're putting stuff out there, nobody's watching. Well, that's really crushing. Imagine your 9 year old not getting any followers. But if you give her fameify, Famify will generate as many followers as you want. Millions. You got it? Millions of followers. And you can see them, you know, they're praising you, they're giving you hearts. So famefy is a way to take what you just said that. Oh, well, yes, well, they actually, they are searching for a way to be successful without any attention. No need, just give them Famify.

[Ezra Klein]

This is AI followers.

[Jonathan Haidt]

AI followers. That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

Oh, this is the most black mirror shit I've ever heard.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Exactly, exactly, exactly. And this is why I am so passionate about how we have to move quickly. This year, 2025, this is really our last year before AI really has a big impact on life. Now that we're moving not just from you can know everything to now we have agents, you can do everything. I mean, the Internet in a sense gave us omniscience, but now AI with agents is going to give us omnipotence and that would be horrible for children.

[Jonathan Swan]

I'm Jonathan Swan. I'm a White House reporter for the New York Times, I have a pretty unsentimental view of what we do. Our job as reporters is to dig out information that powerful people don't want published to take you into rooms that you would not otherwise have access to, to understand how some of the big decisions shaping our country are being made. And then painstakingly to go back and check with sources, check with public documents, make sure the information is correct. This is not something you can outsource to AI. There's no robot that can go and talk to someone who was in the situation room and find out what was really said in order to get actually original information that's not public, that requires human sources. We actually need journalists to do that. So as you may have gathered from this long riff, I'm asking you to consider subscribing to the New York Times. Independent journalism is important and without you, we simply can't do it.

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[Ezra Klein]

Let's talk about AI. If you ask me, do I think that by the time my 3 and 6 year old are in middle school, we will figure out the smartphones and social media in schools question? I think we will.

[Jonathan Haidt]

We will.

[Ezra Klein]

But AI and it goes for me back to friction. What AI is is functionally the collapse of all friction between you and any desire that can be fulfilled on a computer.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

So relationships are the one I actually think about the most. I've said this many, many times before. I'm a believer in transformational artificial intelligence. I think it's coming very, very fast. Ask me if I think we will see economic super growth anytime soon. I would say no. I think it is going to be more evident in its upheaval of relationships before it transforms our economy. Because our economy has all kinds of friction in it. It's very hard to rebuild firms around AI but what about when you can have any kind of digital friend you want, or for that matter, digital lover and that friend, that lover. There was a really good daily on this recently about AI sex bots.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, I listened to that. That was great.

[Ezra Klein]

The sound in that though was frightening to me. Because you got why the AI was a good partner.

[Jonathan Haidt]

More responsive than any man.

[Ezra Klein]

Probably more responsive than any man. And it is so much worse at doing that right now than it will be in two years.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yes, that's right.

[Ezra Klein]

Like it is going to be so good and it's going to endlessly adapt to what you want from that. And I think the friction of relationships between human beings is really, really important. It's good for me as a person that my wife just does not adapt herself into whatever I want her to say. Right. It is part of being a healthy human being that other people exist with friction to you. I was a very lonely kid. I did not have many friends. What if I'd had a lot of AI friends and that began to pattern my expectations of other human beings and then when they did not fulfill them, then that was a frustration to me and it made my AI community that much more alluring. This scares the hell out of me. I'm not saying that on a 20 year timeframe we won't adapt, but on a 5 or 10, we don't even know how to think about it.

[Jonathan Haidt]

The way we adapt is by preventing kids from having these friendships. So here I'll draw on a really insightful analysis from a Christian writer, Andy Crouch. I did a session with him at nyu. We had a conversation mostly on chapter eight of the Anxious Generation, on the spirituality chapter. And he said something so powerful, I always bring it up because it's so helpful. He said, what is magic? Magic is instant, effortless effect on the world. Snap your fingers, something appears. It's always been the human dream. And technology is essentially magic. Technology allows us to do things. You want a car to come pick you up? Press a button. Hey, here's this car. So the technology is magic. And he says, now let's look at how children are formed. How do you get an adult? And again, he's coming from a Christian perspective. So they care a lot about the moral formation, the religious formation of their children. And he says the three areas of formation for children are home, school and church or any religious organization. So he says those are the three areas. And he says all three of those areas are now colonized by text. All three of them. In all three of them, kids have magic available to them all the time. Even in church, I'm hearing from pastors, they say, pull out your Bible. They pull out their phone, they look at the passage, but then they go on and do something else. So I think we have to stop. This is not even about the content. We have to stop saying, oh, we just need better content, moderation. No, we don't. We need to realize kids have to go through a childhood in the real world with other kids within a moral universe where they experience the consequences of their own action. And they have to learn how to deal with real people who are frustrating. And if we give them AI companions that they can order around, that will always flatter them. We are creating people that no one will want to employ or marry. So we've got to stop.

[Ezra Klein]

As I alluded to, I was a pretty friendless kid. I had a lot of trouble socially. I would often have like one or two friends. But for a lot of my childhood I alienated people. And I remember at one point my mom saying she wanted to. This is kind of a sad story, but wanted to pay this nice older kid on the street to sort of watch me but function to be my friend. I sort of had the embarrassment or the presence of mind to say no to that. Okay. I try to imagine though, as I was like moving school to school to get away from bullying and was having that much trouble, my parents had no answers for me because they did not trying to keep that kid as that kid's parent from disappearing into the computer. Right. Disappearing into this world where, well, somebody will be. Something will be his friend, something will be his companion. And of course what's gonna be the thin edge of the wedge is AI tutors. Right. Which are gonna be very effective.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

And are gonna be positive too. It's not that this technology will have no good adaptations. Even now I sometimes use ChatGPT with my kids and we sit together and we make up stories and it illustrates them, which is like a really fun thing to do.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It's great.

[Ezra Klein]

It's all easy to sit here and say, well, I don't want my 13 year old having a sex spot or an array of sex bots in their pocket. But it's not going to come in like that much in the way that the Internet came in more benignly before it got jacked up to 11. It'll come in for kids who are having a lot more trouble socially, but now there's somebody for them to talk to. For kids whose parents work multiple jobs, neurodivergent kids. And a lot of it will be good. It will be good for some kids. But the more adoption there is and the more these companies are already in the door and competing with each other than for your kids attention, the more the sort of darker side of it will begin to flower.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

And that's what worries me here. It's all so new, but it's all so adaptable. I was talking with somebody who works at one of the big AI companies about this and he was saying to me, oh, but the good thing about AI is that it's really flexible. You can tell it, you can give it whatever value prompt you want to give it. Right. If you want to tell it to not just do whatever your kid wants. Right. You could do that. And yeah, it's sort of always true that you could. But when I look at the way the markets actually work here, that eventually what's going to happen is we're going to give people what they want, not what we think they should want. And that's the part I can imagine negotiating structures on this over a long period of time, as we have with social media. Maybe. But we're not gonna understand it for a long period of time.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. We'll never catch up with it.

[Ezra Klein]

And it's gonna be evolving very rapidly during this period of time. And it really frightens me as a parent.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah. As it should. So a couple of concepts here. One is the concept of entanglement. So Tristan Harris of the center for Human Technology points out that social media has gotten so entangled in our world that it's really hard to roll it back. Many schools communicate on Instagram. They require the kids to have smartphones. So it's really hard to rip it out once it's already taken root.

[Ezra Klein]

Both of my kids schools communicate with me by app.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, that's right.

[Ezra Klein]

It's like hard not to have a phone. It's by app. It's not even by the computer. It has to be on my phone.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It has to be your phone. That's right. So social media is so entangled, it's very hard to rip it out. It's gonna be very hard to get it out of our kids childhoods. But that's what we're working on. AI is not yet entangled. AI is just coming in, and in two or three years it will be entangled. And as you say, there are many good applications. Khan Academy uses AI very well. And if we could have a device that just did Khan Academy and nothing else that I can see would have a positive impact on education, maybe we don't have to throw out all the iPads from the schools. Maybe we could use them if we can reduce them to one function.

[Ezra Klein]

The one thing I worry about with using the AI to draw everything my kid wants to draw is that does it reduce the interest in actually drawing?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh, yes. Yeah, that's right, it does. I mean, kids are losing the ability to draw, to write these technologies. So far. Silicon Valley has a horrible track record at living up to its promises, especially for kids. So social media is going to connect everyone? No, it actually disconnected everyone. So when the purveyors of AI say, oh, there's all these amazing uses and AI, they're clearly will, and they already are. I'm finding that Claude and ChatGPT are just really helpful adjuncts to research. So I love AI as an adult, but we have to understand children are not adults. And given the track record so far, we have to assume that these AI companions will be very bad for our children. That's what the Silicon Valley people themselves say, in the sense that they have already voted to keep their kids away from social media and technology. They send their kids to the Waldorf School. So we have to approach all of this with a really skeptical eye, especially for our children. Start by assuming it's harming your kids, and then you can bring in some uses where it's not.

[Ezra Klein]

Let me ask you about another dimension of this, which I've found myself obsessing over recently. So you're a professor at business school, and you're a professor at an elite school, and we were talking about instrumental education earlier. I think that it was a pretty reasonable expectation. I think parents would raise their kids and push them to study with this sort of expectation that, you know, what if they could get to the NYU Stern School of Business, are probably going to be okay out there in the economy. And then you mentioned how good AI is getting at being an adjunct to your research. And I already see that. I've been playing around with deep research, and I can already see how good that is getting at research and how quick it is, and it would change what I needed in terms of research. It feels like an event horizon to me.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yes, it does.

[Ezra Klein]

Of what should my children be educated towards? In many ways, I would say it'll be much safer to be educated towards being an electrician than to be educated towards being a contract lawyer. And I doubt there has been a moment as a parent when what society the economy will want or value or reward in people in 15 or 20 years has been as liquid.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, that's right.

[Ezra Klein]

How would you think about this?

[Jonathan Haidt]

So the way I think about it is that I often hear the argument, well, you know, this is the world the kids are in, and for them to be successful, they need to master the technology, and it's going to be in the workplace. My answer is very simple. I'm teaching these kids. If you want to send me someone who's going to do well at NYU Stern, don't Send me someone who has mastered Instagram. Send me someone who was homeschooled, never had any of this garbage. They're able to pay attention. They're able to read a book, in a sense, our brains are LLMs, in a sense. And so don't send me kids whose LLMs were filled in by TikTok. Send me a kid whose LLM was figured in within a stable moral community. And that kid is going to be adapted for the future because he didn't have the current technology when he was growing up. The current technology is a giant obstacle team in development. And so if you want to prepare your kid for the future, think very carefully about the technology you immerse him in.

[Ezra Klein]

I do feel like this is a connecting thread in a lot of your work, which is that human beings need to develop as human beings around other human beings in little human societies.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yep. That's what we evolve.

[Ezra Klein]

And that the more we, particularly in childhood, pull them away from that, the worse they will turn out in terms of mental health, but probably a lot of other things.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I would never say that as a blanket rule, we don't have to raise our kids the way Hunter Gathers did. There are many aspects of modern life that are improvements. So I would not endorse a blind sort of, you know, well, this is the way it used to be. So this is what we should do. But when we begin to see evidence and it's just kind of obvious, what do you think? Do you think kids should be raised around other kids or around screens? Like, it's just kind of obvious. So, yes, I've always studied morality, but I've always done it from multiple perspectives. I've always been a developmental psychologist, a social psychologist, an evolutionary psychologist. I read anthropology. So you put all these together and you get this view of this amazing, amazing species that developed culture. No other species has culture. I mean, chimps have a tiny bit. And the miracle of our ability to develop these skills and the ability to communicate, and then we come in and we radically change childhood, and we think maybe it'll be okay. Well, it's not okay. It's pretty clear it's not okay.

[Ezra Klein]

We didn't radically change childhood. We didn't think about radically changing.

[Jonathan Haidt]

A few companies did.

[Ezra Klein]

A few companies have radically changed childhood. We've accepted that's right.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So we're not. And we feel we can't stop them. And they're able to stop bills in Congress and they're able to. They have giant PR budgets and they're able to manipulate the Narrative behind the scenes. So, yeah, it's a hell of a struggle, but what we're seeing is a parents revolution around the world. And I think if most parents rise up and say, no more, I think we're gonna win.

[Ezra Klein]

It's interesting that you've had to sit down and ask, what is a syllabus on flourishing?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

What is the syllabus on flourishing?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh, I can tell you in just a few words, the course is organized around making you stronger emotionally. So stronger, smarter and more sociable. Because if we can do that together, if we can, you have to cultivate new habits, make changes to your routine. If you can become stronger, smarter and more sociable, then you are likely to be more successful in love. Broadly construed relationships, in love and in work. And that's the modern formula for happiness, success in love and work, as Freud originally said. And if you are more successful in love and work work, then you will be happier. That's almost guaranteed. So that's what the course is about.

[Ezra Klein]

What that you assign connects the most.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh, this. Well, I know you're going to ask me about the three books. You know what, let's just do the three books right now, because this is the three books, okay? The three books for the undergrads especially. And this is what I would recommend to any member of Gen Z, any young person in their 20s, anybody who feels their attention has been fried and they want to get it back. Here are the three books. The first is the Stoic Challenge by William Irvine. It really makes stoicism just so accessible. When you get setbacks, the students learn to say, oh, I just missed the subway, now I'm going to be late. Like, stoic challenge. You just say stoic challenge. It's as though they're stoic gods and they're testing me to make me strong. And yeah, I missed my train, but am I going to also hurt myself by stewing for 20 minutes? Nope, I'm going to be calm about it. And so you develop that habit of more stoic reactions and they get stronger. They're not so anxious. They don't get angry or irritated at other people so much. So Stoic Challenge, the second book is by Cal Newport. It's called Deep Work. And this is why I'm so passionate about attention. Without your attention, you can't do anything. And as Newport says, a deep life, where you do a lot of deep work. A deep life is a good life. It is a rich life. And so Cal Newport, we work on that. To regain their attention, we Work on turning off almost all notifications, on moving social media off your phone onto your computer and then for some deleting, deleting it from the computer. So that's a wonderful book. And then the third book is Dale how to Win Friends and Influence People. It is timeless. He is writing in the 30s and he is such a great social psychologist. So I urge everybody, listeners, if you have not read Dale Carnegie how to Win Friends and Influence People, I urge you to read it, ideally in the 1936 edition. It's so charming. Don't get the modern one for the digital age. It's completely rewritten. The writing's not nearly as good. But those are the three books, books. So the first one makes you stronger. If you do the stoic challenge over a couple months, you get stronger. You're not as reactive to negative things. If you read deep work and take it seriously, you're going to spend a lot less time on social media. You're going to take control of your time so you have time for deep work. And if you read Dale Carnegie, you're going to be just much more effective in conversation and maintaining relationships. That's it. Those three books.

[Ezra Klein]

John of the Night. Thank you very much.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Thank you, Ezra.

[Ezra Klein]

This episode of the Ezra Clancho is Produced by Jack McCordick, Fact Checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair, Mixing by Isaac Jones with a famous Shapiro and and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. We have original Music by Pat McCusker, Audience Strategy by Christina Simuluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. Foreign.

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