Conversation with Jonathan Haidt — The Kids Are Not Alright

Summary

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The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway

Episode: Conversation with Jonathan Haidt — The Kids Are Not Alright
Date: March 28, 2024

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Episode Overview

This episode features a compelling conversation between Scott Galloway and renowned social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. The main theme centers on Haidt’s research and new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Together, Galloway and Haidt explore how smartphones and social media have “rewired” childhood, catalyzing a rise in anxiety, depression, and social dysfunction among Gen Z. The discussion covers the science, the consequences, and actionable solutions for parents, schools, and policymakers.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Haidt’s Sudden Cultural Impact (18:46–20:29)

• Galloway lauds Haidt’s growing prominence, crediting him as one of the world’s most consequential scholars.
• Haidt explains his “intuitive sense” for picking timely research topics—previously polarization and now the crisis facing kids—and agrees that universal concern for this issue means he’s “pushing on open doors.”
• The central argument: Today’s epidemic of mental health problems among kids is visible to everyone, crossing ideological lines.

The Portal in the Pocket: Why Puberty Matters (20:29–24:25)

• Haidt elaborates: Gen Z is the first generation to experience puberty while tethered to a smartphone and social media—what he calls “an open portal… to an alternative universe” (20:29).
• He contrasts this with millennials, whose relative mental health was better because they got smartphones after puberty.
• “Puberty is a period of very rapid brain change… That’s when other cultures have initiation rites… but we give them TikTok instead.” (22:13, Haidt)
• Sensitive periods: Early exposure to social media can make negative effects stick—but the brain always has some ability to adapt and recover, so it’s never too late to make positive changes.

Four Foundational Harms of a Phone-Based Childhood (24:25–29:05)

Haidt outlines four key harms and ranks them:

1. Social Deprivation:

   • Most damaging. Kids’ social skills erode as screen time replaces real-world interaction.
   • “Kids used to spend a lot more time with their friends than their parents did. But now, they spend only a little bit more time with their friends than their parents do. Something’s really wrong there.” — Haidt (24:54)
   • Online communication is “asynchronous, performative, one-to-many. It does not substitute.”

2. Sleep Deprivation:

   • Devices in bed mean less, poorer quality sleep; critical for teen development and mental health.

3. Attention Fragmentation:

   • Notifications and multitasking make it impossible to develop focus. “One study found 257 notifications a day on average.” (28:03)

4. Addiction/Problematic Use:

   • Up to 10–15% develop compulsive “problematic use.” No other consumer product this damaging to such a large share of kids would be allowed.

The Lost Art of Forming Real Friendships (29:05–32:20)

• Galloway: “When we were kids, we slowly shaped the people we were hanging out with… that friend group played such an enormous role...”
• Haidt:
  • Humans are tribal; we evolved needing a tight, in-person “crew.”
  • In-person groups mean learning to tolerate differences, resolve conflict, and invest over time. Online groups are “low-cost-entry, low-cost-exit,” eroding these vital skills.
• Video games, often a social outlet for boys, now involve isolated solo play online—more convenient, but less skill-building.

The Decline of Free Play (32:20–34:38)

• Haidt: For millions of years, mammals develop through risky, unsupervised play.
• 1980s–1990s: Parental fear (abduction, academic pressure) erases free-range childhood, even as crime rates go down.
• Millennials lost some play, but it’s Gen Z who get hammered by the arrival of phones and social media around 2010–2015.

Durkheim, Anomie, and the Rise of Meaninglessness (34:38–37:37)

• Haidt references sociologist Émile Durkheim and his concept of “anomie”—a state of social normlessness and disconnection linked to suicide and despair.
• “Freedom isn’t the maximum possible… we need to be bound in to flourish.” (35:25, Haidt)
• The digital world “atomizes everything.” Kids’ sense of meaning and belonging plummets as social connection fragments.
• Graphs show sharp increases (post-2012) in teen agreement with statements like “my life has no meaning” and “I am no good.”

Adults Aren’t Immune—Social Media Hurts Everyone (37:37–41:27)

• Galloway admits online attacks are his #1 trigger for downward mental health spirals.
• Haidt: Even ancient Stoics suffered from reputational pain. For kids in puberty, the impact is vastly worse.
• Social media “supercharges” the pressures of adolescence, making kids spend most of their time “managing their brand.”

Overprotection vs. Underprotection (39:17–41:27)

• Galloway: “We’re overprotecting our children offline and under protecting them online.”
• Haidt:
  • The most painful human experiences (status loss, public humiliation) are now built into digital platforms.
  • Platforms knowingly exploit vulnerabilities for engagement.

Solutions — Four Collective Norms (43:14–45:55)

Haidt argues that personal restraint isn’t feasible—collective action is necessary.

1. No Smartphones Before High School:

   • Only give flip phones; don’t let middle schoolers have smartphones.

2. No Social Media Before 16:

   • Social media isn’t suitable for early puberty. “It’s like inviting kids to stick their head in a toilet bowl and flush every day, forever.” (44:07, Haidt)

3. Phone-Free Schools:

   • Phones locked away all day. Distraction and cheating are rampant. “It’s completely insane...that allow kids to keep their phones in their pockets during the day.”

4. More Free Play, Independence, and Responsibility:

   • Eliminate “play deserts”—kids need unstructured, unsupervised time together to grow.

• Haidt: “If we do these four things, I’m confident we would see these lines [of anxiety and depression] come down. We’re going to actually reverse the mental health epidemic.” (45:40)

Progress on Policy: Schools Are Moving (45:55–47:35)

• Galloway asks if change is happening.
• Haidt:
  • “This is happening… The UK just mandated phone-free schools. Australia has done it. Florida just did it.”
  • Kids may object at first—what bothers them is being offline while others are online.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the state of Gen Z:

  “The world’s going to hell, our kids are in big trouble. And I hope, I think my book is the clearest and fullest statement of what happened.” — Jonathan Haidt (19:20)

• On the “portal in their pockets”:

  “We give them TikTok and say, here, kid, your brain’s about to start rewiring. Let’s have random weirdos on the internet, selected by algorithm for their extremity—let’s have them do the socialization for us.” — Jonathan Haidt (22:13)

• On parental action:

  “The reason our 10- and 11-year-olds have iPhones is because everyone else gave their kid an iPhone. We’re all in a trap… and it’s very hard to get out as individuals.” — Jonathan Haidt (43:25)

• On friendship and “crews”:

  “You don’t learn any skills… [Online], you don’t develop abilities that transfer outside that closed digital world.” — Jonathan Haidt (32:05)

• On meaninglessness and atomization:

  “Freedom isn’t like… we don’t need the maximum freedom possible. We actually need to be bound in to flourish.” — Jonathan Haidt (35:25)

• On adult vulnerability:

  “My mental health… anytime I’ve had episodes in the last three years, half of them have been triggered by something online, by a total stranger.” — Scott Galloway (37:56)

• On necessary reforms:

  “Phones need to be locked up… It’s completely insane that most of our schools allow kids to keep their phones in their pockets during the day.” — Jonathan Haidt (44:32)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [18:30]—Jonathan Haidt joins the conversation.
• [20:29]—Why puberty is the critical window for smartphone/social media exposure.
• [24:25]—Four foundational harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.
• [29:05]—The importance of offline friend groups vs. online “posses.”
• [32:20]—The lost art of free play and rise of supervised childhood.
• [34:38]—Durkheim’s concepts of anomie and their relevance to today’s teens.
• [37:37]—Social media’s impact on adult and child mental health.
• [43:14]—Haidt’s actionable four-part solution to “re-normalize” childhood.
• [45:55]—Evidence that real change (e.g., phone bans in schools) is underway.

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Tone

The discussion crackles with urgency, empathy, and frustration—both speakers blend Galloway’s trademark brashness (“it’s completely insane…”) with Haidt’s academic clarity and moral seriousness. The tone is conversational, at times humorous, but ultimately focused on catalyzing real change on an urgent sociocultural issue: the mental health of our kids.

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For anyone invested in the future of children, education, or mental health, this episode is an essential listen—and a call to action.

Transcript

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[Scott Galloway]

Episode 293 Route 293 is a highway located in Orange County, New York. In 1993, the film Jurassic park was released. True story. Me and my buddy were masturbating to some hardcore dinosaur pornography. Unfortunately, my mother saw us. Got it. Mother saw us.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Go, go, go.

[Scott Galloway]

Welcome to the 293rd episode of the Prop Teapot. I'm especially proud of that joke. It kind of thread the needle between my favorite things. Talking about parenting, porn, history, dinosaurs. The last one was a lie. Just really. I'm not that into dinosaurs. Anyways, in today's episode we speak with Jonathan Haidt, my colleague at NYU Stern, where he serves as the Thomas Cooley of ethical leadership. Professor Hyde is a role model for me. He's fearless, just does the work. Beautiful writer. It's weird. I think as you mature you get a little bit. One of the things you realize is. Or you know, or maybe you're just a better person as you get older. Or maybe I've become less of an asshole is I'm generally happy for people to recognize the type of success that I aspire to and haven't yet achieved. Jonathan is having just so much impact on a ground level for really important things around cancel culture, addiction to technology, the impact that social media is having on our kids. I would argue that Jonathan is the most influential scholar in the world right now. Anyways, we discussed with Jonathan the research from his book, including how we've ended up in this situation and what leaders, parents, and companies can do about it. His book is called the Anxious how the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Okay, what's happening? Da Dog is back in London. That's right. Back in the uk. I just asked our nanny. Is that a hate crime, calling someone a nanny? Are they, what, some sort of domestic engineer or something now? Anyways, I just asked her to make tea. It's rude. You come into uk, I do not drink tea, and I come back into UK airspace and boom. Tea and biscuits, please. I eat these things called McViddles McVitties biscuits. Oh, my God, that shit is genius. I mean, okay, whatever. The economy here hasn't grown in five years. 7 to 10 of IPOs are below their offering price. God, they make a good. Just a great fucking cookie. Anyways, a lot going on. The DOJ is suing Apple. Adam Newman made a $500 million bid to buy back WeWork. Trump's True Social went public under the ticker of DJT. Walmart is trying to reach affluent customers, and Boeing CEO will step down by the end of 2024. That's going on the news. It just keeps on coming. Boeing has obviously been in the news the past several months after there's been countless malfunctions with their planes. And the big one being when a door flew off an Alaska Airlines plane mid flight back in January. That reminds me of, you know, that great notion or that great saying that when God closes a window, he opens a door, said Boeing. Get it? Anyways, so in addition to CEO Dave Calhoun handing over the reins, board chair Larry Kellner will not be running for reelection, and Stan Deal, who leads the commercial part of the business, is retiring immediately. So one of my classes is crisis management and brand strategy. And let me save you 80 minutes. And what is $180,000? What's the $180,000? I have 300 kids. They pay 7,000 bucks to take my class. That's 2.1 million. I teach 12 sessions. That comes out to about $180,000 per session. Think about just how outrageous, slash corrupt it is that I walk into a place where the certification is so powerful that I walk into a room that is a basic room with artificial lighting that looks like where you would go. It has the kind of design, I don't know, the design aesthetic of where you would go to get your second round of chemotherapy. I mean, it's really weird. We overhaul or revamp the business school every Seven or eight years and it literally, it looks like a hospital. Anyways, that's neither here nor there. So let me give you $178,000 worth of value here. We do a course or a session on crisis management. There are only three things to remember. One, acknowledge the problem. Two, you know, we fucked up, this door came flying off or you know, whatever. We've had problems with the 737 Max, including some tragic accidents. This is unacceptable. This is a problem. Acknowledge it. Don't try and cover it up. Don't try and make excuses, rationalize it. This is what's happened and it's unacceptable too. The top guy or gal has to take responsibility. Airlines are usually very good at this. Airlines are used to crisis management because there are crises on a regular basis in aviation. Fewer and fewer. And I'll come back to that. And then third, and this is the hard part and you gotta overcorrect. You gotta overcorrect. Americans in the west love to forgive and you gotta show you're serious about it. Typically, real scandal is not about what happens. It's not about the actual infraction. It's about how you handle it. It's about a willingness to admit what happened. Remember all the bullshit with Tiger woods because he kept slowballing it even with it's not really a crisis. But think about what's going on. Well, I guess it's a crisis for her. But think about what's going on with Kate middleton. She's a 42 year old woman battling cancer. That is awful. She deserves privacy. Except she's not going to get it. She chose to marry into royalty, which means that if she disappears there's going to be a lot of conjecture. And who really fucked up there was the Palace Comms people who don't understand crisis management. This is a crisis. I don't even know her actual name, but Kate is very sick or has to have surgery, has to be out of the public eye. But to think that they weren't going to. There wasn't going to begin a frenzy around this was just naive and stupid. They should have come out right away, acknowledge the issue, have her deliver it. She's done that. And then I guess it's impossible to overcorrect here. But just to say this is what's going on, to be transparent, but this is something companies consistently forget. The Exxon Valdez, when it struck, I forget what happened there, but basically it poured, you know, a couple million gallons of oil into Prudhomme Bay or whatever it was called Prudhoe Bay up in Alaska, A huge environmental disaster. The thing that got everyone just batshit angry beyond the environmental impact was the CEO wasn't delivering the news. It was some head of comms. And they kept slowballing the goddamn thing. They kept saying, oh, this was a minor infraction. Do you want to know who is the. The ultimate case of crisis management that you'll learn if you go to business school? Tylenol. There was a tragic incident, I think it was in Napier, Illinois. Is that right? Anyways, E. Somebody had tampered with Tylenol bottles and put cyanide in a bottle. And somebody took the cyanide, dropped dead. And then the poor folks who went, who obviously had to deal with this situation then went home after they went to the morgue, after identifying the person, went back to their house, took more Tylenol, and dropped dead. What did Tylenol do? What would the temptation be? The temptation would be to use terms like isolated incident and to talk about how this was a bad actor and that they didn't need to be worried. Instead, they said, we're gonna clear overnight, literally overnight, every bottle on every shelf of Tylenol. Because JJ's core attribute of being in the business they're in, providing healthcare and products that are very important to people's lives is trust. That cost a lot of money. They took an earnings hit that quarter, but they came back even stronger. They overcorrected. They overcorrected. And a lot of good firms do the same thing. There's a lot of cases where people overcorrect. But Boeing is attempting, I think, I think, to overcorrect and overcorrect. They need to do. Their stock is at 189. As we record this podcast. That's down 50%. The stock has been halved in the last five years. And also, Boeing is kind of a national treasure. They're kind of the old school Microsoft in the sense that they're in Seattle and they sort of set the tone or really indicated how superior technologically America was. And then you combine it with manufacturing and technology, and boom, you have the best commercial jetliner in the world. And the reality is it no longer is that Airbus, the consortium of European companies, now has a superior plane. And this has cut the stock in half. And they needed to overcorrect. They fired the CEO, or the CEO's leaving. Could he have fixed it? We don't know. He's only been there since 2019. In which, in the world of manufacturing commercial aircraft is probably not enough time to turn around the culture. But here's the thing. CEOs are constantly in the right place at the right time and get very lucky a lot. 3 to 400 times the average worker's salary. And in this instance, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And they need to overcorrect here. And I think it's great that he's stepping down as well as the board chair. They need to send a signal to their workforce, to their customers and to investors and to the marketplace that this shit is unacceptable and they are going to overcorrect. Now what's the learning here is about how to manage your stock price in a crisis? No, the learning here, the learning here is how to manage a crisis in your own life. And this is where I have really fucked up. And that is when someone important to me in my life is upset or angry at me. My initial reflex response was to get back in their face. You weren't nice to my parents. They came for graduation or they came down for the weekend or they're staying with us and you weren't nice to them or you didn't spend any time with my dad. And I'd immediately kind of rear up and go, well, you know, your dad doesn't like me, I don't like him. Which is not true. I love my in laws but. And then kind of go on the offense. Well, how much time have you spent with my mom? Right. That is not the right thing to do. Here's the crisis.

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It's not about whether or not you.

[Scott Galloway]

Spent enough time with your girlfriend's parents. It's about whether she's upset about it or he's upset about it. And if they are, that's all you need, is that they're upset. And you care about this person. You don't want them to be upset. Because here's the thing, this is what people want. They want you to provide evidence to their life. I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a good friend or a good spouse. And this is what it means. It means you provide. You're there. You notice their life. You notice their achievements. You notice their sadness. You notice when they say something funny and you laugh out loud when something wonderful happens to them. You notice them and you call them. You give evidence to their life. And that's what we want in a partner. We want someone that sees our life, that makes it real. I still have this. Nothing good ever really happens to me. What do I mean by that? Until the age of 40, anytime anything good happened to me, right? I made the baseball team in high school. I got my first job at Morgan Stanley. I got my first bonus. I got into Berkeley for graduate school. I got engaged. Anything that happened to me that was good, I'm in the paper. I'd call my mom and my mom would just bask in it. She would provide evidence of my success or my achievement. And it was easy to call your mom. Your mom never gets sick of hearing you boast about how good things are going in your life. She provide evidence to my life. And the thing is, now that she's not there, it's really strange. As if nothing really good happens to me. Now what do I mean by that? Of course good things happen to me, but they never feel cemented, they never feel like they actually happen. And that's a wonderful thing because I had someone who noticed and gave evidence to my life. And now I have new people who notice and give evidence to my life for the first time. My son came home the other day and said, hey, one of the kids father wants to take us to a Tottenham game. Cause he listens to your podcast and I could tell he was impressed by that. He's giving, you know, evidence or notice to my life, if you will. But that's your job. That's your job as a friend, that's your job actually as a boss, that's your job as a girlfriend or a spouse. You want to notice their life, you want to give evidence to them, you want to listen to them. And you don't get into immediately an argument around whether they have license to be upset or not. You don't want to be walked all over. It's okay to point out some things. I'm sorry, I haven't been feeling well or whatever it might be, or I think you're being unreasonable. Okay, fine, but. But first, your reaction should be this person is upset. That's the issue. And I don't want them to be upset. So by virtue of the fact that they're upset and it's a function somewhat or wholly based on my actions, I'm going to acknowledge that. I'm going to acknowledge the issue. Two, I'm going to take responsibility. Okay, if you're upset that I didn't spend time with your parents while they're here, I am going to take responsibility. That was my decision, or lack thereof. That was me. And then three, overcorrect. Okay, you're upset. That's all I need to know. That was me. That was my decision and I will reach out and maybe, you know, go golfing with your dad or something. Although I don't golf. But that's the key right at the end, it doesn't matter how fucking amazing your life is if there's no one there to take notice, if there's no one there to give testament that this is what happened. These are the good things that happened in your life. These are the bad things that happened in your life. And I noticed and I was emotionally invested in them, then you haven't lived a life, you've just been an organism. Give evidence. Provide notice. Notice when people do good things. Acknowledge the issue, take responsibility, overcorrect. Give evidence to the life of the people who matter to you.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Foreign.

[Scott Galloway]

We'Ll be right back for a conversation with Jonathan Haidt, Fox Creative support for this show comes from AWS Generative AI Accelerator Program.

[Tom Elias]

My name is Tom Elias. I'm one of the co founders at Bedrock Robotics. Bedrock Robotics is creating AI for the built world. We are bringing advanced autonomy to heavy equipment to tackle America's construction crisis. There's a tremendous demand for progress in America through civil projects, yet half a million jobs in construction remain unfilled. We were part of the 2024 AWS Gen AI accelerator program. As soon as we saw it, we knew that we had to apply. The AWS Gen AI Accelerator program supports startups that are building ambitious companies using gen AI and physical AI. The program provides infrastructure support that matches an ambitious scale of growth for companies like Bedrock Robotics. Now, after the accelerator about a year later, we announced that we raised about $80 million in funding. We are scaling our autonomy to multiple sites. We're making deep investments in technology and partners. We have a lot more clarity on what autonomy we need to build and what systems and techniques and partners we need to make it happen. It's the folks that we have working all together inside Bedrock Robotics, but it's also our partners like Amazon really all trying to work together to figure out what is physical AI and how do we affect the world in a positive way.

[Scott Galloway]

To learn more about how AWS supports startups, visit startups. AWS.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. We say this all the time on our show, but it bears repeating. Running a small business isn't just a full time job. It's about a dozen full time jobs.

[Scott Galloway]

That you rarely if ever get to clock out of.

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[Scott Galloway]

That you rarely, if ever, get to clock out of.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

At least until you get to the point where you can start hiring the dream team. And if you've made it that far, you already know there's no time to mess around. That's where at least LinkedIn jobs comes in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. And LinkedIn's new AI feature can even help you write job descriptions and then quickly get it in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. And if you decide you want to go the extra mile to find the perfect candidate, LinkedIn says that promoted jobs get three times the number of qualified applicants. It's all these little things that let you find help fast without compromising on quality, which add up to you finally having extra time in the day for, I don't know, relaxing or knowing my listeners. You'll probably use that extra time to expand your empire even further. Post your job for [e-mail] Prof. That's LinkedIn.com Prof. To post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

[Scott Galloway]

Welcome back.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Here's our conversation with Jonathan Haidt, the.

[Scott Galloway]

Thomas Cooley professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU Stern School of Business and the author of several books, including his latest, the Anxious Generation. Jonathan, where does this podcast find you?

[Jonathan Haidt]

It finds me in my office at Stern. You can see from the purple wall behind me.

[Scott Galloway]

So I won't say I'm jealous or envious, but I'm like massive jealous and envious. I think you're arguably the most influential scholar in the world right now.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Do go on. As you would say.

[Scott Galloway]

I mean, you're every. To resist. To resist, Professor Haidt is futile. Right now, you are literally everywhere. I mean, you're in my Instagram feed, all these famous people are talking about you. I see you on Joe Rogan, which is obviously, you know, I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing, but I know it's mostly a good thing. Congratulations. This is. You're everywhere.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Well, thank you. I think I can explain it like this. Over my life as I've picked stocks to invest in. If I simply always did the opposite of what I actually did, I would be a much richer man. I have no ability to pick stocks, but when it comes to picking academic topics to study, because I have a. A kind of an intuitive sense that the world's going to hell for this reason. And I'm going to dig in here and I want to look and I want to trace this out. I have a pretty good track record of that. Looking at polarization, looking at emotions like moral disgust and looking at the overprotection of kids and the coddling the American mind. And now what I'm finding is, even though a lot of that other stuff had culture war overtones and there was always a left right dimension, now I've hit on a topic which everyone is seeing, everyone is concerned about Republicans, Democrats, anyone with children has seen it. And so I find I don't have to persuade people. I just walk in and people say, thank you, yes, tell me, what do we do? What's going on? So, yeah, I think I'm really riding. I just, I came along with, with this at the right time. The world's going to hell, our kids are in big trouble. And I hope, I think my book, the Anxious Generation, is the clearest and fullest statement of what happened.

[Scott Galloway]

Yeah, you described it. I read on, I think one of your feeds that you're pushing on open doors. So let's talk about this. When you say the Anxious Generation, you're talking about Gen Z. You explain in the book how this generation is the first generation to go through puberty with a. And you say this open quote portal in their pockets that can take them into an alternative universe that's exciting, addictive, unstable, and unsuitable for adolescents. Why do you highlight puberty specifically For.

[Jonathan Haidt]

A couple of reasons. One is what the data shows us is that millennials are actually doing okay. So if you were born in, you know, millennial Generation goes from 1981 to 1995. If you were born in 1992, 93, you're a late millennial. Odds are you don't have issues with anxiety. Your people in that year generally have pretty good mental health. But if you were born on the other side of the divide, 1996 and later. So if you're born, say, 1998, 99, you have a much higher likelihood of having depression or anxiety disorders. And I what I've come to believe, and here I'm drawing on Gene Twenge was one of the first to call attention to this. The millennials are okay because they didn't get smartphones and Instagram and social media until they were largely done with puberty. They got it in late high school or college, and they're fine. It's the kids who got it in middle school. It's middle school is the beginning of puberty. In puberty, your brain is rewiring very rapidly. It's a period of very rapid brain change. And that's exactly when we should be helping kids to make it through. That's when other cultures have initiation rights and they, they, they bring kids into the knowledge of what they need to do as adults. But we give them TikTok and say, here, here, kid. Your brain's about to start rewiring. Let's have random weirdos on the Internet selected by algorithm for their extremity. Let's have them do the socialization for us. And that's why I think kids who go through puberty on social media, that's where the damage is greatest.

[Scott Galloway]

Can these things be undone, or is it that these, this neurosis or anxiety or desperate need for affirmation, does it get cemented? I mean, is it especially dangerous to be exposing them to this at this sort of formative point in their lives?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Well, it is. So the period from around age 8 or 9 through about 15, 16 might be a sensitive period for cultural learning. That is, it's a time when things you learn really stick. That's true for language. If you move to a different country, you're exposed to a language before puberty, you'll speak it like a native speaker. But if you don't move there till you're 14 or 15, you probably will never speak like a native speaker. So there are sensitive periods. But with that said, I don't want parents whose, whose kids are older Gen Z. I don't want them to despair because with the brain, very little is ever set and submit. It can be easier or harder to change, but it can still be changed. And so I teach a course called Flourishing, a positive psychology course. It's 35, mostly sophomores. They're 19 years old and a lot of them have anxiety issues. Most of them spend several hours every day on social media and we get amazing results just by working through how do you get control of your life, how do you regain control of your attention? How do you take that last hour before you close your eyes and make it something that's going to recharge you, not that's going to just, you know, keep you up on what so and so is saying about so and so and so by working on their morning routine, their evening routine, and especially by shutting down almost all notifications. You know, I tell them you can leave on 5, Uber and Lyft probably you want to leave those on. You want to know if the car's coming. But you don't need breaking news alerts about somebody getting a divorce from somebody else. That's just not something that is worth you giving away your attention to. So anyway, my point is there's a lot we can do for young people and they want to do it. A lot we can do to help them regain control of their attention and improve their moods.

[Scott Galloway]

You talk about specific foundational harms or four of them of a phone based childhood, sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction. Walk us through each of those and if you could stack rank them, what are you most concerned about?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Well, sort of the biggest and most obvious one that hits everybody is what's called in economics the opportunity cost. And so this is kind of like the foundation of the foundations, the opportunity cost. It's everything that you give up when you commit to something else. So recent Gallup data shows that American teens spend five hours a day just on social media, mostly TikTok and YouTube. You add in all the other stuff they're doing on screens, video games, all that, you know, you're up to 8, 9, 10 hours is where the estimates are on this is the average. And if you can imagine, you know, anybody listening to this program, imagine that you suddenly started spending 10 hours a day on anything that pushes out everything else. There really isn't room. There's no room for books, there's not much room for talking to friends. You have to do it all through the app. So I think the of the four foundational harms, I think the biggest one is social deprivation. Kids really, really need to be spending a lot of time with other kids and with adults, but they need to be developing their social skills. That's gotten crushed once they move on to phones. You see it in the data. Time with friends plunges. In the 2010s, young people used to spend a lot more time with their friends than their parents did. But now they spend only a little more time with their friends than their parents do. Something's really wrong there. Now you might say, oh, well, you know, sure, but they're spending all this time online together. No, no, it does not substitute. It's asynchronous, it's performative, it's one to many. So I think the most important one is the social deprivation. The second one, which is also very serious and just really the easiest is sleep deprivation. Sleep is so important for all of us. In fact, if I could go back in time, I think I'm 60 and I never needed a lot of sleep, but I kind of skimped on it because I was so psyched, like, oh, I can have a longer work day and only need to sleep four, five hours a day. But now it looks like when you are sleep deprived, it has long term effects on your brain and your memory. Certainly for teenagers, they're going to be in a better mood, less anxious, they'll be better at social relationships if they get a good night's sleep. But when kids bring a device into bed with them, and many of them do, the last thing they do before they close their eyes is check their mentions, check their texts. So these things disrupt sleep very briefly. The third one is attention fragmentation. And we all experience that. You and I have our frontal cortices. You know, the frontal cortex developed. I think we're about the same age that they. Ours developed in the 70s now. Yeah, there was, you know, too much drugs and alcohol and drunk driving. There were all sorts of bad things then. But we got to develop normal executive function. That is, you make a goal and then you set out to achieve the goal and then you do it. You stay on task, you learn to focus and that ability really gets locked in in puberty. But if you're constantly being interrupted and kids get. One study recently found 257 notifications a day on average. If you're constantly getting pinged and distracted, even while you're talking to people, even while you're trying to do your homework, you never develop the capacity to stay on task. So attention fragmentation, even if it doesn't make them depressed, it's going to make them less successful in life, poorer, they won't make as much money and just unable to achieve things. And then finally, the fourth is addiction. Now there's a debate in the academic literature whether it's truly an addiction like cocaine or heroin. And it certainly is chemically not exactly like cocaine and heroin, but behaviorally it's very much the same as gambling, if you can call gambling an addiction, and many do. I think social media and video games become an addiction. Now, the research is actually pretty clear it's not the majority who are addicted in that sense, or let's call it a behavioral addiction. The research uses the term problematic use. What percent develop problematic use? A compulsive use that's interfering with their ability in other life areas like friendships, the ability to get schoolwork done. And so the numbers generally show anywhere from 2 or 3%, like heavily addicted or intense dependency, to around 10 or 15% problematic use. That's a lot of kids like there's no other consumer product where we said, well, you know, it's not necessarily an addiction, but it's going to kind of damage the life prospects of 10 or 15% of our kids. We would never let them use use it. But this one we do.

[Scott Galloway]

One of the things I love about.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Your work and I think is a.

[Scott Galloway]

Decent description of insight or even genius is you'll say something and it seems so obvious, but at the same time you weren't thinking about it. And I had one of those realizations reading your work about this book where you said that online we have these friend groups that have very low cost or easy entry and then low cost exit. Whereas when we grew up, you had high barriers or high cost entry and then high cost exit. And it just reminded me when we were kids, we kind of slowly but surely shaped the people we were hanging out with. And then we just hung out with them all the time. We had our crew and some of us didn't like each other or some of us liked each other more, but you got into trouble together and that was your crew. And I just look back on that friend group I had in junior high school and high school and it played such an enormous role in. I just got lucky. Everyone in my crew was going to college, so that meant I was going to college. But speak more about the importance of kind of your crew or your posse and the difference between developing them or having them online versus offline.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So we are a tribal species. This is a major theme of my own research, which I cover in my Book the Righteous Mind. We evolved to live in small groups. These small groups hang together, especially when they're in competition with other groups. This is why sports is so much fun. Remind me, Scott, what athletics you did in high school?

[Scott Galloway]

I did everything in high school, but not very well. And then our road crew in college.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay, but you were on teams and I assume a lot of your friends and your crew was overlapped with your sports activities, right?

[Scott Galloway]

100%, yeah.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So especially for boys, girls tend to have more intense pairs. Girls do a lot in pairs and smaller groups. Boys tend to. When you let kids do whatever they want, boys tend to form larger groups. And then part of what they do in those larger groups is compete with other groups. And that can sometimes even escalate to violence. But usually it's more sports, it's ribbing, it's competition. That's incredibly helpful. We're a tribal species and the crew you were describing, it's like this is junior tribalism. This is master those skills. And as you said, an important part of it is that you don't necessarily like everyone in the crew. You could have tensions with someone and you learn to live with it because you can't just press a button and expel them. And it takes a lot of time. This develops over years. And so you wouldn't just burn your bridges, you wouldn't just quit because it's going to take you years. You may never get another crew. Contrast that with what Gen Z has gone through. We don't let them out very much, so they don't get to hang out with other kids very much. For boys, you know, if they, they really enjoy playing video games, the video games are amazing. But for boys, they can't go over at each other's houses if they want to play video games, they literally have to go home to their own house and sit alone with their headset, their controller, their screen, if they want to play with other boys. So over and over again, this could be a major theme of our conversation today. The Internet has made almost everything that kids need to do super easy to do. Low cost, easy, low embarrassment. And in the process, you don't have to exert much effort. You don't learn any skills, you don't develop abilities that transfer outside of that closed digital world.

[Scott Galloway]

Talk about the decline of free play.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So that's the other half of this. You know, my basic argument in the book is that humans had a play based childhood from hundreds of millions of years because we're mammals and that's what mammals do. So Play is extremely important for brain development, for developing skills. That's why animals play. That's why they take risks. That's why human children seek out risk. So we must have play and risk and thrill and excitement. Boys especially need rough and tumble play, physical play, wrestling, things like that. And we had that until the 1980s or 90s. You and I grew up during a giant crime wave. There were risks, there were drunk drivers, but kids still played outside, got into trouble, and learned to get out of trouble. In the 90s, we freaked out about child abduction. We started focusing much more on the competition in our economy to get into a good college. Childhood became as it is in East Asia. Childhood becomes test prep for some circles of Americans. We lose the interest in free play. Kids get less and less recess. We think they need more math, less recess. That was wrong. So for a whole variety of reasons, we greatly cut down on what kids really desperately need, which is unsupervised free play, where they will learn how to make rules, norms, develop relationships, manage relationships. We cut down on all of that. And the millennials were victims of that. The millennials, the older millennials had free range childhoods generally, but if you're born in the early 90s, you probably had some restrictions. Even still, they didn't get particularly depressed. It's only when the second piece comes in, which is the phone based childhood, and that just sweeps in in the blink of an eye. It wasn't there in 2008, 2009, in the first years of the iPhone, but by 2015, most kids have a smartphone, not a flip phone. And so what I'm calling in the book, the Great Rewiring of Childhood. It has a backstory in the 80s and 90s about the loss of play. But the peak of the action is 2010 to 2015. That's the period when human childhood, not just in our country, but in many developed countries, human childhood leaves the real world and comes to take place primarily through phones and other digital devices.

[Scott Galloway]

In the book you mentioned or you reference French sociologist Emile Durkheim. I'm not sure if I'm saying that correct.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Thinker of all time.

[Scott Galloway]

That's so interesting. Really? That says a lot when you say that. But the concept you highlight is nme, I'm not sure or normalness in English. Say more about this research and how it helps illustrate some of the things that you're discussing.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So the reason I'm so grateful to Durkheim, I never took a sociology course in college. And then in graduate school at Penn, I said I Took one course on criminology. It was just. I don't know why I picked that course. But the professor assigned Emile Durkheim's classic text, suicide, where Durkheim had studied suicide statistics in Europe in, like, the 1890s, when they were just beginning to gather statistics. And he observed certain patterns, and he observed that people are tightly bound into communities like Orthodox Jews, religious Catholics. They had much lower levels of suicide. Whereas people who had a lot of freedom, especially in the Protestant countries, they were more likely to feel disoriented, not tied in, not connected, and they were more likely to suffer from anomie or normlessness. It's not a good feeling of freedom to be freed from social norms. It's disorienting. And so this was just a revelation to me that to see that actually, you know, freedom isn't like. Of course, we need freedom in many ways, but we don't need the maximum freedom possible. We actually need to be bound in to flourish. And so Durkheim has just helped me see that a lot of what we're doing is we're trying to create groups. That's what religion is for, he said. That's why we love sports teams and sports and sports super fandom. And it really helped me to see that the digital world has atomized everything. It's split everything. It's allowed me to see that even television used to be social because you sit there, you watch it with your sisters or brothers, you fight, you argue, you eat food, you talk about it. But now kids, even if they go over each other's houses, they might be sitting separate on their separate screens, watching separate, separate videos. So Durkheim really allowed me to see atomization, splitting, the loss of meaning. And this is something you see in the data. This is the saddest part of all the graphs. I've got, like, 30 graphs in the book. There are several graphs of what young people say in response to questions. One of them is a statement. Sometimes I feel my life has no meaning. Do you agree with that? Disagree with it? And for all these questions, or sometimes I think I'm no good at all. And on all these questions, the lines were pretty flat in the 2000s and pretty low. Most students don't agree with that. But all of a sudden, around 2012, 2013, all of those lines go up. As soon as our kids moved their social lives online, they began to wallow in despair, disconnection, anomie, normlessness, depression, and suicide.

[Scott Galloway]

I mean, it's just, I think of this, we don't like to. It's especially rough, I think, on adolescence. But I wonder, and I'm curious if you feel this way. I don't like to admit that a lot of the things you're talking about have impacted me.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Tell me more. Which ones did you recognize in yourself?

[Scott Galloway]

Well, I don't like to admit this, but my mental health. When I think about any mental health episodes I've had in the last three years, half of them have been triggered by something online, by a total stranger. Someone comes after me for some of my work or tries to discredit me, and I don't even know if it's a bot. And a bunch of people who, for whatever reason agree or don't feel good about me weigh in, and it just triggers a downward spiral. And I think a lot of times that successful people and men who have some weird notion of masculinity and success and like to think that we're immune from these types of body blows. You know, I think about how much it's impacted me, and then I think about my kids and the fact that they haven't built up scar tissue or they have no real ability or perspective or life experience to be able to deal with this. And you just think, jesus Christ, how are we letting this happen to our kids? Talk about the disconnect. It seems so obvious. And I think that your work and Gene Twenge's work is sort of bringing us into the light or the realization of just how damaging this is. But what's interesting is the contrast. And you talk about this. One of the things you said that I just thought was so illuminating. You said, we're overprotecting our children offline and under protecting them online.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So I'll pick up first your point about how vulnerable we all are to someone saying something about us on social media. So, you know, I read. I love stoicism. I use stoicism in my flourishing class. Marcus Aurelius has some great quotes about that. You know, why do you make yourself vulnerable to whatever anybody would say about you? Many of us like to think that we're tough and maybe you're physically strong. Maybe you can handle a lot of physical pain. But even the ancients, you know, Roman times when their reputation was sullied, that's painful in a way unlike anything else, unlike physical pain. And when you feel like you've lost status massively and people are laughing at you, that is one of the most painful things that humans can go through. And that very often leads to thoughts about suicide. We just naturally think about, well, let me just vanish, let me disappear. This is unbearable. Nobody likes. So this is true for adults. And these were, you know, Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of the Roman Empire, you know, he was subject to these, these feelings. Now let's look at a, you know, 11, 12, 13 year old girls and boys, they're coming out of childhood, they have to renegotiate their status, who's cool, who's attractive, who is high, who's low. And kids always did that. But in this sort of the slow, local way that you and I were talking about before. Now you suddenly, it's like you supercharge it. It's like you say, let's take all the, all the difficult parts of middle school, let's multiply all the bad parts by 10. And this is going to take up almost all of your life. Most of your time in middle school will be spent not having fun, not learning in class. It's going to be spent managing your brand. You are going to be desperately, desperately managing your brand. One false move and you're down. These are natural, normal psychological processes that these platforms have knowingly hacked. And there are quotes from some of the early people at Facebook and elsewhere. You know, we, you know that they, that they, these were hackers tricks to play on our insecurities. See what someone said about you. Click here. So, yeah, we all care about our reputations and social media makes us all live on thin ice. It's not a happy way to live.

[Scott Galloway]

We'll be right back.

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[Rudolf Botha]

Every great company's story is defined by moments when the founders make bold decisions. These are high stakes moments that risk the business, but can lead to greatness. I'm Rudolf Botha, managing partner of Sequoia Capital. And the host of Crucible Moments. We're returning from a brand new season. Join us as leaders from Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna Supercell and more. Share what it's actually like to navigate the make or break decisions. Crucible Moments is back on October 23rd. Until then, catch up on seasons one and two wherever you find your podcast.

[Scott Galloway]

One of the things you do in the book, and I think the thing that's getting arguably the most play, is you've outlined a series of pretty actionable solutions. Speak to those.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Jonathan yeah, so I'm not doing any of that. I'm not doing that stuff about how to make the time less toxic. What I'm saying is the reason why our 10 and 11 year olds have iPhones is only because everybody else gave their kids an iPhone. We're all in a trap and this is called a collective action problem or a commons dilemma in the social sciences. And they're very hard to get out of as individuals because if you say no, sorry, I read this book by John Haidt and I'm not giving you a phone until you're 97 or I'm not going to give you, I'm not giving you a smartphone until you're in high school. As Height says, well, if your kid is the only one without a smartphone, the only one without social media, then yeah, your kid will be isolated. It's going to be tough. And so the solutions that I propose are all things we can do together to liberate our kids from the social action problems. Very briefly, four steps, four norms. No smartphone before high school. Just give them a flip phone. The millennials were fine with flip phones. Two is no social media till 16. Social media is just not suitable for minors. Frankly, it certainly isn't suitable in early puberty. Let them get most of the way through puberty before you invite them to stick their head in a toilet bowl and flush every day, forever and ever. Third norm is phone free schools. The phone is the greatest distraction device ever invented. Kids text during class, they watch videos during class, they watch porn during class. It's completely insane that there are schools in this country, namely most of them, almost all of them, that allow kids to keep their phones in their pockets during the day and they just say don't take it out during class. But they do take it out during class. So the phones need to be locked up in a phone locker or yonder pouch. First thing, they get them back at the end. They have six hours, seven hours a day to listen to their teachers Talk to each other, make jokes, flirt, have fun. That's the third norm. Phone preschools. And the fourth norm is far more free play, independence and responsibility. In the real world, this is the harder one because we have to overcome our own anxieties. But if we're going to take away the phones from, especially in middle school, if we're going to reduce their time on screens, we have to give them something to do. And the healthiest thing they can do is hang out, play with each other unsupervised, let them learn how to work out conflicts and choose activities. If we do those, I'm confident that we would see these lines, these incredibly surging lines of anxiety and depression. They just go up, up, up. They never go down. Since 2012, if we do these four things, I'm pretty confident we're going to see those lines come down. We're going to actually reverse the mental health epidemic.

[Scott Galloway]

Do you feel like you've gotten any traction? Do you think it's realistic to think we might have this outbreak of schools banning phones? Do you think it's a real possibility?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh, it's happening. It's absolutely happening. So in fact, this is the easiest one to do because this is one where schools can just make the decision themselves or boards of education for school districts can make the decision themselves. All the principals hate the phones, all the teachers hate the phones. It's making their lives miserable. It's interfering with learning. So they want to do it. They just, I say, well, why don't you do it? They always say the same thing because some of the parents will freak out. They feel they have to. They have a right to communicate with their child during math class all the time. So it's just overcoming parental objection. But now that more parents are seeing the problem, now that we're past Covid, now we can see the mess is not because of COVID It was baked in before COVID Covid actually didn't have a long lasting impact. Now that parents are turning and supporting this and the research is getting stronger and stronger and it's clear that there are huge. No, that there are learning deficits now around the world, not just in the us. Now the appetite has turned and phone. Many schools are banning phones. The UK just mandated phone free schools throughout the school day. Throughout England and other parts of the uk, Australia has done it. Florida just did it a couple days ago. DeSantis signed the bill. I think that was yesterday. So this is happening. This will improve educational outcomes. And guess what? The kids love it. Some of them object at first, but what they're most afraid of isn't being off social media. It's being off social media when everyone else is on Jonathan Haidt is the.

[Scott Galloway]

Thomas Cooley professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business. His research focuses on moral and political psychology, as described in his book the Righteous Mind. His latest book, the Anxious how the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, is out now. He joins us from New York University. Professor Haidt, I look forward to seeing you. All of your colleagues are just so proud of you. Anyways, congratulations on everything, Jonathan.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Thanks so much, Scott. It's always fun to talk with you. I really appreciate your work and your friendship.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

This episode was produced by Caroline Chagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our Associate producer and.

[Scott Galloway]

Drew Burrows is our Technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prophecy Pod in the Box Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for no Mercy, no Malice as read by George Hahn and on Monday with our weekly Market show.