The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt" on What Now? with Trevor Noah

Introduction

In the May 15, 2025 episode of "What Now? with Trevor Noah," host Trevor Noah engages in a profound discussion with Jonathan Haidt, a renowned social psychologist, NYU professor, and author of "The Anxious Generation." Alongside co-host Christina, they delve into the escalating issues of anxiety, depression, and loneliness among today's youth, exploring the underlying causes and potential solutions.

---

The Rising Tide of Anxiety and Loneliness

Trevor Noah opens the conversation by highlighting a significant societal shift: today's children face unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. He reminisces about the early days of digital access, recalling the moment he first encountered age gates in computer games like Leisure Suit Larry.

Trevor Noah [00:00]: "We've created a world where the barrier to entry, for some of the things that we've agreed on as some of the most harmful to younger kids, the barrier to entry is zero."

Jonathan Haidt emphasizes that this surge in mental health issues is not merely a transient phase but a profound transformation affecting family dynamics and societal structures.

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Impact of Technology on Childhood Development

A central theme of the discussion revolves around the transition from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood. Haidt articulates a "tragedy in two acts":

1. Overprotection and the Decline of Free Play (1990s):

   • As societal fears about child abduction and safety surged, children were increasingly confined indoors.
   • Haidt [07:48]: "Family life changed and people couldn't like, what the hell is going."

2. The Advent of Smartphones and Hyperconnectivity (2010-2015):

   • The introduction of smartphones with addictive features like social media and apps transformed how children interact and develop.
   • Haidt [07:48]: "Childhood is transformed into a screen-based or phone-based childhood that... is just not conducive to human development."

Christina underscores the stark contrast between her memories of outdoor play and today's highly supervised, screen-dominated childhoods.

Christina [06:45]: "We went from having a play-based childhood where kids were outside unsupervised... to a phone-based childhood."

---

Parenting Styles: Concerted Cultivation vs. Natural Growth

Haidt discusses the shift in parenting approaches:

• Concerted Cultivation:
  • Originated in higher socio-economic classes, this style involves actively fostering and assessing children's talents, often leading to overscheduling.
  • Haidt notes that this approach has now permeated middle and working-class families, blurring former class distinctions.

Haidt [18:29]: "We're basically denying children the main training they need in childhood."

• Natural Growth:
  • More relaxed, allowing children to explore and learn independently.
  • This style is dwindling, replaced by the more structured concerted cultivation across diverse socio-economic backgrounds.

Christina reflects on her own experiences of over-scheduling her children, highlighting the cultural shift towards intensive parenting.

---

Gender Differences in the Impact of Technology

The conversation then shifts to how technology affects boys and girls differently:

• Girls:

  • Haidt points out that social media disproportionately affects girls by exacerbating issues related to body image, self-esteem, and emotional well-being.
  • Haidt [60:24]: "Girls really need role models that aren't purely based on looks... exposing girls to models that show them what matters about you is your looks... is a terrible thing."

• Boys:

  • Boys face challenges related to excessive gaming, exposure to violent content, and decreased physical play, leading to issues like ADHD and lower educational attainment.
  • Haidt [32:41]: "Boys are on a trajectory where their whole community exists online... their brains have been gamified and the dopamine circuits have been changed."

Trevor Noah adds personal anecdotes about gaming addiction and the loss of in-person social interactions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trevor Noah [43:03]: "What this is, what I realized it does, is it reminds you that the connection is not coming from the game. It's coming from the people you are playing the game with."

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Consequences on Mental Health and Social Skills

Haidt explains how the lack of unstructured play and real-world interactions impairs children's ability to develop essential social skills. The overreliance on reporting conflicts to adults instead of resolving them fosters authoritarian tendencies rather than democratic self-governance.

Haidt [16:05]: "We're training them to report each other to the adult... we're training for authoritarianism."

Christina and Trevor Noah discuss the absence of physical play and its effects on learning to navigate interpersonal conflicts, leading to heightened anxiety and decreased resilience.

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Solutions: Restoring Play and Community

Haidt offers actionable solutions to mitigate these issues:

1. Implementing Norms for Technology Use:

   • No smartphones before high school (age 14).
   • No social media until age 16.
   • Phone-free schools: Encouraging schools to confiscate phones during school hours to foster attention and in-person interactions.

2. Promoting Free Play and Independence:

   • Let Grow Movement: Initiatives like Play Club and the Let Grow Experience encourage unsupervised play and gradual independence.
   • Haidt [69:51]: "No smartphone before high school... phone-free schools... far more free play, independence, and responsibility in the real world."

3. Community Engagement:

   • Third Spaces: Reclaiming neighborhoods by organizing community activities that allow children to play together safely without excessive supervision.
   • Trevor Noah shares his experience of organizing block parties and street closures to facilitate communal play.

Trevor Noah [73:54]: "We just have to claim it back."

Christina and Haidt emphasize the importance of collaborative efforts among parents, schools, and community members to create supportive environments for children.

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Hope and Moving Forward

Despite the grim outlook, Haidt remains optimistic. He cites examples from his "Flourishing" class at NYU, where students successfully reduce their screen time, leading to improved focus, better relationships, and enhanced well-being.

Haidt [66:34]: "If your kid is 15, she or he has already been on the video games, the social media... but do not give up hope."

Christina reflects on overcoming parental fears and the importance of gradual trust-building in allowing children to explore and grow independently.

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with a hopeful message: by collectively recognizing the challenges posed by excessive screen time and taking deliberate steps to restore play-based and community-oriented childhoods, society can reverse the trends of rising anxiety and loneliness among the younger generation. Haidt's insights offer a roadmap for parents, educators, and communities to nurture resilient, socially adept, and emotionally healthy children.

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Notable Quotes

• Trevor Noah [00:00]: "We've created a world where the barrier to entry... is zero."
• Haidt [07:48]: "Childhood is transformed into a screen-based or phone-based childhood that... is just not conducive to human development."
• Haidt [32:41]: "Boys are on a trajectory where their whole community exists online..."
• Trevor Noah [43:03]: "The connection is not coming from the game. It's coming from the people you are playing the game with."
• Haidt [16:05]: "We're training them to report each other to the adult... we're training for authoritarianism."
• Haidt [69:51]: "No smartphone before high school... phone-free schools..."
• Trevor Noah [73:54]: "We just have to claim it back."
• Haidt [66:34]: "Do not give up hope."

---

Final Thoughts

Jonathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation" serves as a crucial examination of the intersection between technology, parenting, and child development. This episode of "What Now? with Trevor Noah" not only sheds light on pressing societal issues but also empowers listeners with strategies to foster healthier, more connected future generations.

Transcript

[Trevor Noah]

We've created a world where the barrier to entry, for some of the things that we've agreed on as some of the most harmful to younger kids, the barrier to entry is zero. It's literally you click a button that Sundays, I am 18 or older. And I remember the first time I saw that button when I wasn't 18. It was on a computer game called Leisure Suit Larry. I don't know if you've ever heard of this.

[Christina]

No, I haven't heard.

[Trevor Noah]

So it was a story of this man, Leisure Suit Larry, who. Whose only goal was to have sex. That's all he was trying to do.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And you get points for the number.

[Trevor Noah]

And you. You played. I remember the first one. You were just at a. Like, a bar, and you would type on the computer, like, open door. Knock on door. And the bouncer would be like, what's the code? And you're like, what is the code? But, like, when I think about, like, this world, I think about the option is like, in the game, it would say to you at the beginning, are you 18 or older? And I said, no. I was honest. I was like, no. And the game was like, you're not old enough to play. I remember being like, oh.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And you went away.

[Trevor Noah]

And then I booted it again. And then I went, I am 18. And it was like, welcome to the game. Something is happening to our kids. Anxiety, depression, and loneliness are on the rise. And it looks like it's not just a phase. Parents are overwhelmed. Young people feel lost, and no one's quite sure what or who is to blame. But today's guest has spent years trying to answer just that question. Jonathan Heights is a leading social psychologist, a professor at nyu, and the author of the Anxious Generation, a book that's sparking urgent conversations around the world today. In this episode, we unpack what's going wrong and what we might still be able to do to get it right. This is what now with Trevor Noah. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. You want to run a successful business? Well, get ready to put in the work, because no matter what your company does, no matter how big or small it is, it takes a lot of effort. Just look at what it takes to create even one episode of this podcast. We have to plan. We coordinate with guests. We find time to sit down and record. We have to edit, we have to market, and so much more. Now, of course, it helps to have a good team, but even finding the people for your team is a challenge because that's extra work. You need to do on top of everything else you're already doing. And when you need to fill a role right away, it can feel impossible. Thankfully, there's a place you can go for help. ZipRecruiter. It does the work for you to make hiring fast and easy. The reason it works so quickly is because ZipRecruiter has amazing matching technology. Immediately after you post your job, it finds and sends you top candidates for your role so you can get back to running your business experience faster. Easier hiring with ZipRecruiter. Try it free at ZipRecruiter.com Trevor that's ZipRecruiter.com T R E V O R this episode is brought to you by mgm. If you love high stakes drama, Godfather of Harlem delivers. Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker returns as Bumpy Johnson, facing his deadliest battle yet for Harlem's future. When ruthless newcomer Frank Lucas arrives, everything changes as power shifts and new threats emerge. Will Bumpy forge an uneasy alliance with his enemies? Or will he stand tall as the undisputed Godfather of Harlem? Find out in the new season of Godfather of Harlem. New episodes streaming Sundays on mgm. So when you wrote Anxious Generation, did you think you were tapping into the. I mean, arguably like one of the, the most. What would you call it? The most pertinent moments of, of this generation did. Because, I mean, you, you've written a few books and every author who's writing, especially someone as learned as you, is thinking about the world. But this feels like it tapped into every single parent and everyone who's in the zeitgeist. It completely, I mean, it's still, you know, the last I checked, it's still on the New York Times bestsellers list. It's, it's, it just stays there as.

[Christina]

Much as moms are still talking about it.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you, what do you think it is about the topic that connected with people as much as it has?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah. Well, what, you know, what I discovered once the book came out and even before it came out was that there is a desperation among mothers in particular that all over the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time. Everyone hates it. We didn't ask for it. It wasn't like this in 2010. I mean, of course there are always arguments over TV, but once kids got touchscreen devices which are much more addictive, you have a stimulus response loop, which is much more addictive than watching a story on a screen. And so family life changed and people couldn't like, what the hell is going. My sense is that mothers felt their kids being pulled away much more than fathers did. Fathers were often like, oh, you know, cool video game, hey, let's play. But mothers really felt it. And so that's what's driven the success of the book is it's mothers around the world and all the political changes, all the laws that are being introduced. Oftentimes it's either a female governor like Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas, or it's the governor or prime minister's wife who reads the book and says, you know, and this is what happened in Australia. The wife of one of the premier of South Australia read the book and she said she was reading it in bed and she turns to him and says, peter, you've got to read this book and you've gotta fucking do something about it. Wow. So he did. And that's what started the process in Australia.

[Christina]

Do you know what? There's probably some people listening now who haven't read the book. And I've read the book, so has Trevor. And one thing that you do in the book, you make the distinguishment between a play based childhood and a phone based childhood. And you said there's been a rupture. And we went from having a play based childhood where kids were outside unsupervised, breaking bones, doing crazy stuff. Their parents get really afraid of these things that maybe aren't things we should necessarily be that scared about. And children go back into the home and it coincides with them having phones and having this phone based on childhood. Tell us more about that.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Sure. I can summarize the whole book by saying that we've overprotected our children in the real world and we've under protected them online. Another way to say it is the book is a tragedy in two acts. Act one, we lose the play based childhood and this really kicks in the 1990s. So older millennials, people who grew up in the 70s and 80s, there was a huge crime wave at that time in America at least, but all kids played outside. It was just, you just go outside and play. And then it's the 90s, which is actually when crime is dropping and life is getting safer and drunk driving is going down. We freak out in the 90s and we start saying, oh, it's too dangerous out there, it's too dangerous, you know, stay home. You have to always be supervised or you'll be abducted. We freaked out about child abduction. So that's act one of the tragedies. We pull the kids indoors, we don't let them have play and free play is crucial for development. And then Act 2 is very, very sudden. It's between 2010 and 2015. In 2010, kids are going through puberty with a flip phone. And a flip phone or basic phone, you can text your friends, you can call your friends. And there was a game called Snake, I think.

[Christina]

Yeah, I love Snake.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay. But that's about it. You weren't talking to groups of 50 strangers. You weren't talking to strange men who wanted sex from you. I mean, it was like, you know, it was a communication device. So if you're born in 1995, that's the last year of the millennials. Suppose you're a girl born in 1995, you, in 2010, you're 15, you're through early puberty, but you did it on a flip phone without Instagram. But suppose you were born in the year 2000. So now you turned 15 in 2015, which means that your first phone was probably a smartphone with a front facing camera. Cause that comes out 2010 with Instagram because that becomes popular in 2012 with high speed Internet. So you went through early puberty constantly on your phone, taking photographs of yourself, people talking about you, communicating with strangers. The phone moves to the center of your life. So anyway, in all these ways we had this five year period where childhood is transformed into a screen based or phone based childhood that I believe and I argue in the book is just not conducive to human development.

[Christina]

And what I do love that you do in the book is that you really, you kind of preempt any arguments because there's some people who say, well, the world was always bad, we had TVs. And you actually pin it down and you say the depression and the anxiety and the loneliness we're seeing, I believe it's due to the smartphones. Could you talk more about that? Because that I'm one of these people, I say to Trevor all the time, Hitler didn't have screen time and he turned out to be a pretty horrible person. So I think there's been some moral panic around phones and screens. But you make the case that no, you think these things are really dangerous.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah. So the main criticism I get is that this is a moral panic. Just like we freaked out about television and comic books and radio and everything else. And there is some truth to that, that the older generation always thinks the younger generation is being harmed by whatever they're doing. And sometimes that's wrong, like with comic books. And sometimes it's right, like with smoking or you Know, drug use, where we think, you know, kids shouldn't be doing this. So the question is, am I warning people? Am I raising an alarm that doesn't need to be raised, and I'm just frightening people and there's really no problem, or am I calling attention to what I think is the biggest threat to children's mental health in modern history? So that's the question. Am I right or am I wrong? And some people say, oh, you know, correlation doesn't equal causation. The fact that mental illness rates all go up around 2012, 2013, it could be because of school shootings. They say, like, because we had this horrible school shooting. 2012, the Newtown massacre. And after that, our kids had these lockdown drills. Okay, so 2012, that does fit the timing. But then why did girls in Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, across Europe, why did they start cutting themselves in 2012, 2013, why did they start checking into psychiatric emergency wards? And so the fact that it happens all over the developed world, we don't have good data from the developing world, but all over the developed world, these rates go up. And they were pretty stable for the years before. I don't know of another explanation for that.

[Trevor Noah]

Let's talk a little bit about the two different worlds, because, you know, to Christiana's point, I actually love that you broke them down on the play side. Christiana will tell you, I don't have any kids, but I. I'm vehemently against the way I see kids living now. And one of the big ones for me was just, like, when I moved to New York, I don't know why I've been so, like, I'll be. I'll be at, like, playgrounds. No, I won't be, like, at the playground. Let me not say it that way. I'll be walking past a playground. You walk in New York, you know, and every time I'm there, I see every. Every parent with a kid or every child minder with a kid or every nanny with a kid, or every. And I look at the.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Not playing with each other.

[Trevor Noah]

Exactly.

[Jonathan Haidt]

The parents are playing with the kids.

[Trevor Noah]

Exactly.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And often they're on their phones at the same time. Yeah, they're monitoring the kids.

[Trevor Noah]

They're not.

[Christina]

Surveillance.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, that's what it is. And I go, guys, this is a prison yard. I keep saying it, I go, find me the difference between this and a prison yard.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Well, I'll tell you the difference. Federal prisoners, they're guaranteed two hours a day of outdoor time.

[Trevor Noah]

But I watch this, and I think to myself, where are the kids learning how to resolve conflicts amongst themselves? Where are they learning what games they do and don't want to play amongst each other? Where are they learning none of this. One kid cries, parents swoop in. One kid falls, parents swoop in. Kids argue with each other, parents swoop in like it's the dogs at the dog park have more freedom than the children do at a children's park.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And the biggest actually wrestle and bite each other.

[Trevor Noah]

It really, it really is interesting. And I see this. And then parents would say to me, oh, but you don't know what it's like to have a kid. And I go, yeah, but I remember being a kid.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. And those parents were kids. All of those parents had free range childhoods. All of them got to play outside. And the most exciting. I always do this with older audiences. Think of the most exciting things in childhood, call them to your mind. Remember what it was like to be a kid. Were your parents there? Were you watching the screen? No. It's outdoors, running around with friends, hanging out. And that's exactly what we've sucked out of childhood and replaced it with mindless entertainment. 15 second videos.

[Christina]

One of my core memories is I'm the eldest of four girls, but my younger sister's like 11 years younger than me. So there was a bit of distance between us. But it's taking my two younger sisters to school. I was like nine years old, I had one in each hand. And we'd walk up this thing, this hill called Beulah Hill. It's a big hill. And then we'd walk back with other friends and their siblings. And it's one of like, I always recall it when I think of like a certain time in my life. It's just the image of me and my sisters walking up Beulah Hill with our friends, you know.

[Trevor Noah]

So now let's talk about what it robs you of. Because when I say this to people who have kids, people think I'm doing the grumpy old man thing. In my day, you ran around and you scraped your knee and it didn't, you know. And I'm not trying to say that I believe that it's helping you assess risk. I believe that it's helping you understand, you know, hierarchies. It's helping you understand social dynamics. It's preparing you for the world that you're gonna live in, is what I always say. But you've actually done the work and you've done the research. So if a parent out there saying to You? Oh, Jonathan, I. I don't want my kid being bullied at a playground. I don't want them being punched by someone or getting hurt. They're gonna fall off the bars and they're gonna like, they're gonna hurt their knee. How can I allow this? What are they losing by not allowing this?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, well, let's start with the big picture, which is what is childhood for and what is play for? And because we're mammals, mammals have this really interesting evolution of having much more investment in the child. I mean, our women literally make food off of the skin of their chest and feed it to, you know.

[Christina]

Oh, I know.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So it's a huge sacrifice. It's a huge gift to the kids. And so mammals have this long childhood, and the reason, what it does is it makes possible having a large brain. And especially really social mammals like chimpanzees and humans, how do you wire up that brain? And that's why we have this very long childhood. And the way you wire up a brain is by exploring, trying things and failing. Explore, try, fail, over and over and over again. So when a kid tries to build a block tower, it falls over, they do it again. So play builds brains. It's all the things you just said. Once they can master their building block towers and running and that stuff, then it becomes social. And it's exactly that. It's basically these are the skills of democracy. In a democracy, the whole idea is we are self governing. We make the rules ourselves, we enforce them ourselves. That was the amazing innovation of the American experiment. It's called. And how do you learn to be self governing? By being self governing as a child.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, interesting.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So when the kids are on the playground, it's the things you said. They have to choose what to do. Like what game should we play? Well, some of us want to play. Well, let's work it out. Okay, we'll do yours today, we'll do that one tomorrow. You have to make the rules and you have to enforce the world. Wait, that was out of bounds. No, it wasn't. And you adjudicate it. But what we've been training our kids to do since the 90s, since we got them hyper supervised all the time, is we're training them to report each other to the adult. So if there's a conflict. He hit me. Yeah, and that's training for authoritarianism. There's always an authority who will enforce things. We don't have to work it out ourselves.

[Trevor Noah]

Damn. We're training kids. That's like a scary. We really Are it sounds like we're priming them. That's a wild way to think of it, actually is. Like you're not teaching them to be a part of a society, you're teaching them to be a part of a monitored power structure within authority.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Christina]

Trevor. Something that you say, that you also bring up in the book, Jonathan, is that this kind of rise in intensive parenting, like these super scheduled kids, right? And I'm guilty of this myself, right? So I don't want to pull myself out of the equation. Like I think about my eldest son's schedule right now. I'm like, well, he's got something on Monday, he's got piano on Wednesday, he swims three, four times a week, fortunately in the school. And I'm a parent that's trying to not over schedule this child, right? And then I'm like, and then my daughter who's like 19 months, she's got gym on one day, she's got music class on her, you know, they're just singing songs in a circle. She's got that on Tuesday, she's got park dates on Wednesday. And it's like, these are kids that have like sometimes my parents try and FaceTime me, they're like, where are the kids? And I'm like, oh, they're at their things. And my mom was like, what things do children have? And I'm like, and then when I'm like, I want them to play with other friends, their friends also have their schedules. The schedules are clashing. Listen, when they get to eight and they get into ballet and they get into stuff like baseball, which is in, and then the travel teams, even if I wanted to break out of the schedule I'm already creating for my kids, there'd be no other kids for them to play for. Cause I think culturally all parents are over scheduling their children.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. There are two parenting styles that have been discovered and they used to be class differentiated, but now they're not so much. And this is unequal childhoods. I've forgotten the name of the sociologist who, who did this. But she, she found in the 90s that sort of, you know, college educated cultures, they did what she called concerted cultivation. Parenting.

[Trevor Noah]

Cultivation.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Cultivation, yeah, like you're a little plant and I'm going to do all these things, I'm going to give you these experiences, I'm going to, you know, make, you know, make you grow. Whereas a working class families had what she called natural growth parenting, which is, you know, the kids are running around, they get in some trouble, they get out of trouble. And so there used to be that class difference. But what has been found in more recent research is that now even middle class and working class, we're all doing the concerted cultivation.

[Christina]

And it's across race groups, racial groups as well. That's right.

[Jonathan Haidt]

There's not any big race differences, I found. That's right, yeah. So we're basically denying children the main training they need in childhood. And that's actually how I first got into this, was noticing that the students who arrived on campus in 2014, 2015 were different than anything we'd ever seen.

[Christina]

And what were you noticing? Like, what was the difference for you?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Very high rates of anxiety and depression. They filled up the mental health centers. They would sometimes be very anxious or. Or even get upset if there was a speaker coming to campus that they didn't like. They thought this could be dangerous. And we're like, what do you mean, dangerous? Like, what do you mean? You need a safe space.

[Trevor Noah]

But so this was. So this was a distinct shift that you noticed. So it wasn't like a gradual thing. It was like all of a sudden, bam.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. That's right. Because we thought at the time that the students coming were millennials. We thought, the millennial generation starts in 1981. We'll go maybe to 2000, we thought. But it turns out that if you're born in 1996, you just. On average, of course, there's a huge difference. On average, you're more anxious. And so you come to school, and now you see, like, someone has a very different opinion, and you're like, you know, this is dangerous. This is terrible. I don't want to engage with this person. And so that's how I first noticed it. And so this is. It's, you know, just the things you guys are talking about. It's like, if you block the kids from having these interpersonal skills, you put them into a space where they see more things as threatening, they're not gonna thrive in college. In college, you need to be in discover mode. I have a whole chapter on discover mode versus defend mode. And it was a very sudden switch. Kids born in 1996 and later were more likely to be in defend mode.

[Trevor Noah]

It's interesting that you bring that up, because I've often wondered how much we devalue exposing children to, for lack of a better term, adverse events in life. You know, And I think to myself, like, when we were at the playground when we were kids, there were kids I didn't want to see there were people you didn't. You were like, oh, God forbid that kid is there on the swing. They're not gonna let anyone swing or let them catch you swinging. They're gonna start coming and swinging you, and you won't be able to get off, and then you're gonna have to jump, and you might hurt yourself, and it'll be a whole thing. But what I did enjoy about it afterwards was the fact that it taught me how to navigate these situations in life. Right. Because life is gonna be filled with. With people you don't agree with or people who are making your life adverse or people who are. Do you get what I'm saying? Oh, yeah. It just creates. It. It creates a realistic expectation of what life is going to be, whether you like it or not. And it actually, I'm sure you've seen this. I think it was Canada who sort of like their surgeon general or something, who said they're gonna switch it up when it comes to children now. They are now encouraging schools and playgrounds and everything to allow kids to engage in what they call, quote, unquote, dangerous play. So they said they've sanitized playgrounds too much. You know, like, even in America, for instance, there's playgrounds that have, like, a soft, spongy ground.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right.

[Christina]

A lot of them have that. Soft, spongy.

[Trevor Noah]

You know, they found that that's not good for kids.

[Christina]

Oh, yeah. You know, I'm in the crunchy pipeline.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Christina]

It's like.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It's terrible.

[Christina]

It's terrible for you.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

They said because it's like, falling is something that you need to learn. You need to understand the consequences of falling.

[Christina]

Yeah, exactly.

[Trevor Noah]

And it also. This is the part I didn't realize. I knew. I would have thought intuitively. Oh, yeah. It's good for kids who fall and know that falling can hurt them. But what I didn't know was it encourages them to take risks and to. And to think of what risk means.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Exactly.

[Christina]

Also learn how to fall well, which is something that I had to teach my son to do. Your hands.

[Trevor Noah]

Brace yourself.

[Christina]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So Canada was able to do this because they have a wonderful researcher professor at the University of British Columbia named Mariana Brassoni. And I talk about her work in chapter three of the Anxious Generation. And she's been pushing this for a long time, that kids need risky play. Risk is a feature, not a bug, of childhood. And as she says, playgrounds should be as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible. Whereas in America, in part because we have so many Lawyers, everyone's afraid of being sued. And so playground guidelines will say things like, there must not be exposed roots of a tree near the playground.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, wow.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Because the kids might trip. Which, of course, teaches them to expect no obstacles. Everything should be clear and easy and safe. And then you go out into the world, and it's full of obstacles. And so that's part of the reason, we think, why the kids began to freak out. Those who were born in 1995, they weren't prepared for life.

[Trevor Noah]

I often think that when I look at dating for younger generations now, and I'm often intrigued by how they'll see dating, and not all of them, but oftentimes they'll see dating as a. You know, it's like a binary that failed. It was bad and it was good. Like, you know, red flags, like that type of thing. And then I always say to people, I go, well, I think because dating is still interpersonal communication and interpersonal relationships, they're gonna be bumps. Yeah, there's gonna be bumps. So when people. That's a red flag. I go, like, yeah, everyone is a red flag. There are no red flags. Do you know what I'm saying? But the red flag does not mean that you shouldn't be doing the thing. It just means that this is something that you might need to be aware of. It's the roots. And I love that you said that, because it's like, do we want kids to live in a world where there are no roots, which isn't gonna be the world? Or do we want to prepare them for a world where there may be roots? And so they learn what tripping means, they learn what falling means, and they learn what getting back up means.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. And this is the dilemma that we're in as parents, because we love our children. We see something bad happening to them. We see kids picking on them or excluding them, we want to swoop in. And it used to be when we were out, away from our home, they couldn't swoop in because they weren't there. But now, either they're there, or we're all connected by text or they're tracking us. And so a question that I would ask is for everybody to think about, okay, you've got three young kids. What is the ideal number of times that you want each of your children to be excluded socially by the time they reach 18? Is it 0? Do you hope that they're never excluded from anything and suffer the pain of exclusion? Or would you like it to happen, you know, several times a Month or.

[Christina]

I mean, it depends who's excluding them. Honestly, there's some people. I don't want my kids around. It's like, if people don't want to hang with you because you don't want to do the things that they're doing that aren't perhaps not very good, I'd be like, oh, I'm doing a good job. You should probably be. It's a good lesson. If there's consequences of maybe somebody hitting or being mean, I would. I would want that to be an occurrence. Do you know what I mean? So I. But I wouldn't want it to happen all the time. One of my kids was struggling with making friends. And I remember it really, they were. They were into parallel play for a longer time than should be. They. They were struggling with cooperative play.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay.

[Christina]

When I'd go and pick them up and the teacher would say, oh, they played alone today. It really would hurt. Like, I. Maybe it was my ego, but I was like, saddles.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I don't.

[Christina]

I don't want them playing alone.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Wait, wait.

[Christina]

How old were they at the time? They were. They just turned three. And so, like, the thought of my kids being alone does scare me a bit. So, of course it scares you. So when you say, how many times do you want them to be excluded? Not so much that it would give them a complex, but enough that they would know that, oh, you have a responsibility to other people.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. So the principle of inoculation is really powerful here. We all understand the immune system now, especially since COVID that if you're exposed to a little bit of something, your body then develops antibodies to it. It learns how to defend against it. And so this is called antifragility. There's a couple of words for it. Antifragility. If we think our kids are fragile, then we're going to protect them. We don't want them excluded. It'll hurt. They might traumatize them. But if we realize that they're the opposite of fragile, that they actually. They need to fall down, they need to be excluded sometimes to feel the pain of exclusion, this then causes in them first a better understanding of how to be included and excluded and. And sympathy for the other kids who are excluded because they know what that pain is like. So in all these ways, these negative childhood experiences are essential. Now, to be clear, bullying, especially if it goes on for multiple days, that's the most horrible thing. And there's no evidence that that's beneficial. But conflict is normal. The kids have to learn how to have conflict and cooperation. They go together.

[Trevor Noah]

We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break. This episode is brought to you by World Ever Missed out on Concert Tickets because of Bots? World ID is a digital identity that anonymously proves you're a unique human online, Creating a priority lane for humans in the age of AI. It lets you easily and privately verify you're not a bot and access things only humans should like event tickets, dating apps, financial services and video games. Join millions of humans across more than 160 countries and get your free world ID by visiting world.org this episode is brought to you by SurveyMonkey. Picture this. You're about to launch your new product or you're trying to improve a customer's experience and you need to know what people think. So how would you do that? SurveyMonkey is the easy, powerful way to get the answers you need. We're talking AI powered next level genius mode. All you have to do is type your idea in a little box and boom, it builds the whole survey for you. That way you get to ask questions the way a survey scientist would and they're really smart. Plus, SurveyMonkey doesn't just show you the responses. It uses powerful AI to dig in deep, find patterns and spot trends so you can go ahead and make decisions with speed and confidence. So whether you're a business owner, marketing manager, or work in HR, go get real insights with SurveyMonkey. Head to surveymonkey.com results.

[Christina]

Thing I want to ask, and this is maybe a controversial question, but like me and my sisters when we were kids, we used to fight.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Like me. Y. I have two sisters every day.

[Christina]

Pull hair, scratch punch. Oh my God. We were. They used to call us the, the jungle girls.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

I hope these weren't white people.

[Christina]

No, fortunately, no. It was like my, it was, it was my uncles and aunties.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. Cuz otherwise you're like, oh man, these people in trouble.

[Christina]

We would have these like what? You took my top power. I was, it was. I mean now that doesn't happen. Right. And I think about this like role of violence among children. Now if a child hits another child, like it's, you can be suspended, you can be excluded and you're on the track to occupational and behavioral therapy which is a. It's a very normal primal response. What do you think about like the role of violence and now that like the absence of even like pushing and pulling and things that kids just used to do to learn limits.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Christina]

Is it something you think is good that we've lost it completely or do you think it still has a place.

[Jonathan Haidt]

To describe it as violent? I'm not gonna say that. Oh, there's a. Kids need violence. I would never say that. But we're mammals, we love rough and tumble play. When I was a kid, one of the main, you know, like, what do you want to do? Should we play this? Do you want to wrestle? Sure, let's wrestle. And then we just like go at it and we try to pin each other and you know, so kids are physical. And if you ban some schools, I've heard they have a no touch policy. You can't touch another child.

[Christina]

Yeah. And for boys, I think it's affecting a lot of boys.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Christina]

And I don't want to be stereotypical, but like the roughhousing that a lot of boys want to engage in is being really demonized.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Exactly.

[Christina]

And boys don't know how to like. I think especially between like 3 and 11, they don't know how to engage in play with other kids right now.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. So I'm sorry, you have a son.

[Christina]

And then two daughters.

[Jonathan Haidt]

A son and then two daughters. Okay. So when we look across mammal species, especially across primates, the young males do a lot more rough and tumble play. They wrestle more. That's just a, you know, it's a biological difference. It's an effect that prenatal testosterone has on the brain. And what we've done in our schools is in the 1980s, we freaked out about how American test scores were behind those of some other nations. There was a report, a nation at risk. Oh, we need to get rid of most of recess and art and summer vacation. Let's lengthen the school year, give them more math, more science. And this was especially bad for boys. And this is when boys begin to drop out. Boys don't do well just sitting and listening. They're more physical, they're more subject to adhd, for one thing. Schools have become increasingly non receptive or hostile to boys even. And I would say having an absolute ban on any sort of pushing or physical, that would be really bad for boys.

[Christina]

I think we're seeing the consequences of that with like boys not really being a big feature on college campuses. We're just seeing like educational attainment and employment attainment is going down. Especially for Gen Z men.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Exactly.

[Christina]

They seem like almost like a lost generation.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Well, that's right. So so much of the attention is on girls. And in the book, I focused especially on the data showing that social media is particularly harmful for Girls. And that's actually what got me into the book. Those were the scientific findings that were most solid that sort of got me studying that. And I thought the story of the book was going to be especially social media's hurting girls. And I didn't know what the story was for boys. When I started the book, I thought, is it going to be video games? Is that going to be the same thing for. And what we learned, and this is work I did with Zach Rauch, the lead researcher on the book. We drew on a wonderful book by Richard Reeves. It's a book called Of Boys and Men. And he is really leading the charge for a totally non politicized effort to help boys. Because of course, everything gets. In this country, everything gets culture war. Anyway, the point is, the story that we took from Richard and adding on a lot more about technology is that boys, of course used to dominate the world was made for boys and men. But as societies change, as physical strength no longer matters so much, as America shifts to a service economy, that's bad for men, good for women. So that's great that women are rising up. But as schools and workplaces are becoming less hospitable to men, they're investing less of their effort. And boys are about six months to a year behind girls anyway, especially for emotional development. And so girls are outperforming boys at every level from kindergarten through PhD.

[Trevor Noah]

Wow.

[Jonathan Haidt]

There's more girls who are succeeding, more girls going on at every level. So boys are dropping out, but at the same time that they were dropping out in the 80s and 90s, the technological world was getting amazing. So when I was a Kid in the 70s, the only video game that you could play at home was Pong. Whereas when you, you know, you were younger than me, what video games did you have when you were playing?

[Trevor Noah]

So the first games I was playing, I would say was around like what was. It was Asteroid, I think was what I was playing.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That was an old one.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Asteroid is what I was playing. And then I was stepping into the generation of, let's say when I was at a gaming age. Like that's when it's like Mario, Super Mario Bros. You know, Street Fighter. All of these things are happening. Yeah. Contra, Mortal Komb, Sonic, et cetera. That's now you're in like the, the prime time of images moving across a screen in a way that looks quote unquote real.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. So. So the videos are getting better and better now at this. When you were growing up, the porn was still on Paper. There wasn't porn on your computer.

[Trevor Noah]

Could you find it anywhere? You've just tapped into my childhood, my friend. You could not find it anywhere. This was the.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I guess he didn't have an older brother or anything.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, no, I was the older brother. I was the pioneer. You. You couldn't find. Let me tell you something. I try and explain this to my younger brothers now. And I often say to them, I go, I am not against porn. I think the porn industry is terrible in many ways. Not against porn itself. I think it's as old as time. However, I think we have too much porn now and I think we have too much access to porn. Right? So for me, porn was still like this magical thing you would bump into. It was this unattainable. There would be a magazine in a random store somewhere that had it on a shelf wrapped in plastic so you couldn't even see what was happening. That was porn. So, yes to your point. Video games, yes. Porn, no.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay, right. But let's trace it on now. For people younger than you, suppose you're born in the late 90s. Well, the multiplayer video games only come in after we get high speed Internet. So it's only the late 2000s, 2008, 2009 that you're really beginning to get these incredible multiplayer games where you're in your house with your headset and this avatar on the screen. They're amazing. And they go through many product iteration cycles to figure out what can we do, what's the point structure to keep boys on the longest? Because if we keep them on, they don't go to another platform. So the dose makes the poison. So when you get these incredibly immersive games that are designed to keep you on. And for boys after school, if you want to play with your friends, you can't go over to their house. You have to go home so that you can be on your headset. So the boys are having fun, they're enjoying the video games. And once you get high speed Internet, you get porn. Not just pictures, but video. Anyone can go on pornhub. There's no identification.

[Trevor Noah]

You click a button. You click a button that says you are over 18.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Which I love, by the way.

[Trevor Noah]

I love that you pointed out how flimsy and fake the checks and the protections are, which is a paradox to what you're saying. It's the same generation that won't let their child go down a slide that is beyond a certain degree of angle because they've deemed it unsafe. And there's no roots of A tree. But then at the same time, your child can go into a world that can completely obliterate their brain. And the way they see themselves if they just click a button.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, that's right. The way to understand how we got into this insane situation is to trace it out from the 90s on. So when the Internet came out in 1994 was when I first saw a web browser. It was miraculous. I mean, it was like God came down to us and said, do you want to know everything? Instantly type it in. You'll get an answer. We're like, are you kidding me? This is amazing. And so the early Internet really was amazing. And your generation grew up. You were a kid when the first Internet came out, and you played on in all sorts of ways. Sure, some bad stuff happened, but your day wasn't dominated by a few companies that were experts at addicting you.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, they did.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yes. So you could wander around, you saw a lot of stuff, you saw some bad stuff, but it was mostly good stuff.

[Christina]

And it was also really slow. That's the other thing.

[Trevor Noah]

Like a web page would be like, there was friction.

[Christina]

And then you're like, oh, forget it.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. And the other thing that happened in the 90s was as you get the fall of the Berlin Wall and the spread of democracy, and then you get the rise of the Internet. We're all convinced that the Internet is gonna be the best thing ever to happen to democracy. What dictator could possibly oppose the people connected in this way? And you go all the way from the, all the way through the Arab Spring. We still think that. We still think by 2011, 2012, we're still thinking, oh, the Internet's amazing. It's great for democracy. And we're still thinking, I think it's good for kids. I mean, it's the future. I mean, the kids need to be on it because, like, that's the technology. So as late as 2012, 2013, we're still all techno optimists. And so, you know, we kind of know that our kids. All you have to do is click a button and you can be talking to strange men. There was this. Did you ever see Omegle? It was. There was a site. It was like their motto was talk to strangers.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, wow.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah. And a lot of them were naked men masturbating and trying to find kids to talk to, masturbate and so a lot of, you know, 1112 year old girls remember these experiences. And the fact that we're so careful about letting our kids to a place where Maybe some man will molest them like Boy Scouts or anything else. We're so afraid, you know, or the playground. The child molesters are not at the playground. That's too dangerous. They're all on Instagram, they're all on Snapchat. That's where you can use a fake name, find kids, get them to send you a photograph, and then once they send you a photograph, you've got them. You can now extort them. So terrible things are happening to our kids online and I think it's finally coming to us. The Internet is actually overall a pretty risky place. We let adults do what they want and take their risks. But my God, how the hell are these companies able to get to my kids and your kids without our knowledge or consent? We need to have some age gating on the Internet or we can't just let kids wander on it.

[Christina]

Yeah, I just want to go back to the boys piece because I feel very invested because one, I have a son and two, I have two daughters. And this affects the husband market 20 something years from now.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yes.

[Christina]

Right. No, it does. Like just being true. And I'm like, you know.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah. So it's going to be a seller's market for the boys that are functional.

[Christina]

I don't know what's going to happen. What did that Pornography exposure and the excessive gaming and the use of social media.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Christina]

And the absence of play do to boys in particular in a way that it didn't do to girls because girls also can watch porn.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Christina]

You know what I mean?

[Jonathan Haidt]

But there are almost no girls who are having a porn problem. There are almost no girls who are addicted or watching it every day.

[Trevor Noah]

Do we know why?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, I mean, you know, the evolutionary speculation is there's a whole bunch of research on differences in mate searching and selection. And, you know, men are more attracted to youth and visual. And so there's all kinds of reasons why this would be. But you find this over and over again. Just the nature of male sexuality and female sexuality, whether you're gay or straight, doesn't really matter. It's, you know, it's a male. Female is just different about visual stuff. In any case, the way to understand what's happening to boys I've come to see really more since writing the book is imagine your boy is out there in the world and these sort of these fish hooks come down from the sky and they've got all kinds of bait on them. So the first hook is video games. And then you're a little older, down comes incredible porn. And so Again, you know, some boys can just enjoy it with no problem. But again, you find usually between 5 and 15% for each of these get addicted, they have a behavioral addiction. And then they get a little older, they find ways to gamble even before they're 18. And that's all set up to catch boys. You got the crypto investing, you got stock investing. All of it is gamified for boys. Oh, and you got the vaping and the marijuana pens and all of that. And so imagine a boy whose day is filled mostly with video games, porn, you know, watching TikTok and YouTube videos, especially the very short videos. And a lot of. For the boys, their feeds often have a lot of violence. They often have, you know, funny videos of people falling out a window, like 10 stories and dying. Yeah, like. Or being run over by a car, things like that. And so imagine if that's what your boy does for half the day. His brain, his dopamine system, the reward motivation pathways, respond by dampening down so that they require more stimulation just to be normal. Which is why if your son is playing a lot of video games and you take him away, if he becomes anxious and irritable and possibly even violent, that's a definite sign of dopamine change, that your boy's brain has been changed now it'll change back. But what happens if boys are doing this from the age of 5 through 18? Those might be permanent. We don't know. But there's a good reason to think that if you go through puberty with these distortions of your dopamine system, that it could well change the way you are for the rest of your life. And the way you'd see it is that everything off of the screen is more boring. So your boy comes into class. Now, half of the school day or third of the school day is on a screen nowadays, which is horrible, and that's a Covid thing. But what we're finding is that kids are having a lot of trouble paying attention to anything that's not on the screen. And it's because their brains have been gamified and the dopamine circuits have been changed.

[Trevor Noah]

You know, I think of, you know, personal anecdotes. I played video games my whole life, and our version of multiplayer used to be you'd have to be at somebody's.

[Jonathan Haidt]

House when they were split screen next to each other.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, but it's social.

[Jonathan Haidt]

You were having fun.

[Trevor Noah]

It was so much fun together.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Trevor Noah]

And it was split screen and you hung out together and you literally were in the same room. And they would find a way to put you all on that. You know, I think Mario Kart still does it. Like Nintendo, in my opinion, might be the healthiest gaming company out there. So I didn't play these games. Covid hits. We all locked up. And then a few friends of mine said, hey, we played this game Call of Duty, Warzone. I was like, I haven't played Call of Duty in years. I'm not really a big first person shooter guy. Whatever I got on. Let me tell you something. Even say now to like, my friends, because I've made friends from around the world because of this game. But many of them who are a little bit younger will go like, hey, where are you now? And I go, guys, the only reason I'm not addicted to this game the way you are. The only saving grace was that I've experienced grass in my life before this game came. But I don't understand how anyone would not be fully addicted to this. Because I come from a hybrid childhood. Half my childhood is swing, seesaw, jungle gym, merry go round. That in my brain is still like a lot of fun. Even when I walk past playgrounds now, which I don't stare at for too long.

[Christina]

You wanna spin?

[Trevor Noah]

I just.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Look.

[Trevor Noah]

I actually think it's terrible that adults can't just go and swing on things. I'm just gonna put it out there. But anyway, I still look at that with like a. Oh, man, that's a fun place. But if you, as you're saying, Jonathan, if you're the now generation, let me tell you something. I sat on that console. I've spent an embarrassing amount of money playing these games because to what you're saying, they use a drug dealer model. Brilliant. First and foremost, the game's free. Now, they never used to do that in my day. You had to pay for the game.

[Christina]

So you just download the game.

[Trevor Noah]

No, no, Game's free. Go Fortnite. Free.

[Jonathan Haidt]

For free.

[Trevor Noah]

Go, go. Take it, Warzone. Free, free, free. All of it. Take it, Take the game, play it. And then what they do is they just like, sort of like just give you these little drops of dopamine, as you say, sounds, upgrades, levels. And you're trying to get somewhere and you're trying to unlock a new gun or a skin, a pack a. And then they deny it all the time. But some of them are better than others. And so now you're going, I'm getting left behind. And you're competitive, so you want to. And the amount of time and money that young Boys will spend in this world where now, to your point, your whole community exists.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, that's right.

[Trevor Noah]

If you're not in that world, you don't have a community now.

[Christina]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

You know, but now if you, if you get left behind in that world, you also don't have a community. So now you have to pay to stay a part of your community. And so now there's kids who I can only imagine are raiding their parents credit cards or like finding ways to get money because the game perpetually wants from you. And if you talk to game companies now, they'll say, oh no, but it's free to play. It's like, yeah, that's the same thing.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Just give us your soul.

[Trevor Noah]

Exactly.

[Christina]

But Jonathan, you say something in the book about the importance of communities that have a cost to join and a cost to leave and are also embodied. So you need to physically be there. And these video games are the opposite of that. Because it's free to. Yeah, it's free to join.

[Trevor Noah]

Free to join.

[Christina]

Free to leave. Free to leave. And it's not embodied. And those things are really, really terrible for like a growing and emerging.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, so what does, what does that do? So let's say you're a parent of boys listening to this right now, or you may be one of those boys. Tell us why it's so bad. Because I, I, in Covid, for instance, I loved it. And then now, because it's not in my life in the same way, like literally, I think this morning a friend sent me a link, one of the crew, and he was like, oh, they're bringing back for dance. Are you coming? And I was like, ah, we'll see. I don't know. But for somebody who's really in it, and they go, no, Jonathan, this is my community, my life. I have fun, I enjoy myself. I see nothing wrong. What is the wrong that we may not be seeing?

[Jonathan Haidt]

So girls really thrive if they have a couple of close friends. They tend to get together in small groups and talk. Boys tend to choose larger groups and then they'll break up into teams to do sports or competition. That's what kids do when they can do what they want. And with the girls, what happened was once they all got onto Instagram, now it's not just you and a couple friends, now you're communicating with all these so many more people. And we thought maybe 10, 15 years ago, maybe this is good, they're super connected. But it turns out that if you're having hundreds and hundreds of communications each day with lots of people Then there's no time for you to have those close friendships. And so for the girls, social media seems to connect them virtually, but at the cost of connecting them in real life. And so the girls got lonely, even though social media is supposed to be so. You know, it's supposed to help you find community, but the girls get lonelier once they get on it. With boys, the video games are better than social media in that at least it's synchronous. That is, if you. You know, my son, we finally let him have Fortnite when Covid started, and I'm very glad we did, because that was the only way that the boys were getting together. And I would hear him laughing his head off with his. He had his headphones on. So at least for the boys, what they're doing is at least synchronous. And so that's good. And they're laughing, which is good. But what we're seeing now is that there's really something special about being together in person. A lot of us, we've seen this since COVID Now we do a Zoom. You know, like what we're doing now. Like, I've done a lot of interviews on Zoom. Like, this is so much more fun to be sitting on just the table.

[Trevor Noah]

That's what we talk about. That's why we did this, because we go, like you, nobody. We haven't been able to quantify it, right? And I know people will be like, oh, but we can do it over Zoom. And it's efficient. And I think. This is what I think people have missed. And I know I was guilty of it at some point as well. Yes, it is more efficient. It is way more efficient to have a meeting over Zoom or to run your whole business day from Zoom. It is more efficient. However, there's something we forget. Life is not only about efficiency.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Trevor Noah]

Life is not only about getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Life is about sharing connections with other human beings, sharing a vibrancy, sharing a resonance, sharing a frequency. It's literally about that. And people don't realize this, and I'm sure you've experienced it. Think of all the Zoom meetings you've had, and think of how little connection you share with the people. Right? There's very little fluff. And I think we forget. And I've often said this. Look, I think most office work is fake, and it's fine. I don't care about that. I think it's good that it's fake, because I think people just need to come together and have a purpose. But the thing that makes the meeting the meeting is, yes, there's a little bit of work, but it's more just about these people coming together, looking into each other's eyes, which I think helps us as people. And we see micro expressions and we regulate each other and we laugh together and we get sad together and then we think together. And that collectiveness of people, I think we lose. And so you're right. If we were having this conversation over zoom, you give us information, but you give us no feeling. And we give you no feeling. And we don't, you know, And I think we have yet. It's almost impossible to quantify. But I love that you said that.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So, no, my brain is going really fast here because I'm making a connection. I wish I had this. In the book. In my book, the Righteous Mind, I cover the work of Michael Tomasello on joint attention. And Tomasello did this amazing work with children and chimpanzees. And he found that even though chimpanzees are really smart, and when you compare a chimpanzee to a two year old child, that's solving physical tasks, like using tools, they're equal. But when you have a social task about, like, the experimenter gives you a signal, like, open, like, look at that cup. It's there. The reward is under that cup, not that one. The monkeys have no clue. The apes have no clue. They don't take signals. Whereas the kids are communicating even before they can speak, they understand what is being communicated. And he points out, and I think this is really important here, he points out that we have this ability to do joint attention, which is where, like right now we are all totally aware that we are doing a podcast together. And we all kind of know we're dividing the labor and we're taking turns. All of that is happening like chimp. So Tomasella says it is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimps carrying a log together so they could easily escape from their enclosure if they could pick up the log and go. And they're brilliant as individuals, but they can't do things together. So we humans, we have this magical ability. And you know this. If, you know, you traveled a lot, sometimes you're in a country where you don't speak the language, but you can still kind of like, you can still kind of communicate because we're all, we all understand. Oh, yeah, I think he probably is trying to find the bathroom, whatever. So we have this joint attention and it just Occurred to me now as you were talking about zoom. Zoom. That kills that. Like, you don't. I mean, you don't. You don't. At least you don't have it as much. And then to bring it back to the kids, you know, my son was laughing his hat off, but he wasn't in the room with anyone else. And so I think there's really something missing. You don't have the joint attention, and the shared laughter is not as good if you're not in the room.

[Trevor Noah]

Now it's time for a segment we call where in the World, Brought to you by Uber. Whether it's your best friend's wedding or your niece's first ballet recital, Uber is on their way, so you can show up for what matters most.

[Christina]

So, Trevor, where are you right now?

[Trevor Noah]

Ah, I'm in South Africa. South Africa. Johannesburg. Josie Maboning.

[Christina]

I want to whistle. Some people call it I want to whistle.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, you should. Some people say J Burg. Don't ever do that. Whoever you are, whoever started Jburg, if I find you, I'm going to hurt you. There's been a random. I don't know, how do the people say Joburg? You say Josie. You say Johannesburg. Don't say J Burg. Whoever this person is, just please don't do that. It's like saying. It's like saying, are you from NY City? Don't do that. Just don't do that. Yeah, that sounds like.

[Christina]

If ChatGPT became a human, then be like, are you from NY? Yeah.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

You're like, this is weird. Yeah, but it's been good. I've been with my people, eating my food. I started cooking. Have you ever heard of pap? I started cooking pap.

[Christina]

What is that?

[Trevor Noah]

It's like our version, our maize dish.

[Christina]

It's like pounding jam, right? Sort of.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. But then we use maize meal for hours. So I've been doing that.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That.

[Trevor Noah]

I've become like fufu.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It's exactly fufu, actually.

[Christina]

Yeah, it's the same thing.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, it's pretty much exactly fufu.

[Christina]

So you've been, like, on the stove, like, pounding.

[Trevor Noah]

Ah, no, I found. I found a. I found an automatic.

[Christina]

Oh, my God. Trevor. Trevor, come on. You're not making it, then. You're not making it. That's not real.

[Trevor Noah]

Wow.

[Christina]

No, that's not real.

[Trevor Noah]

How quickly we went from joy to judgment.

[Christina]

No, you need to make it the way the grandmothers made it. Outside the real deal.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. And then. I don't know. I mean, you're right, but I don't know, I don't have the forearm strength that my grandmother had. You have. You have to have, like, a specific technique when you're making any type of maze related. You. Yeah, it's.

[Christina]

I know.

[Trevor Noah]

You know what? I'll try. I feel like you've guilted me enough, and now I'll try. In fact, right after this, I'm gonna try. Well, that was today's word in the world, brought to you by Uber. Whether it's your best friend's wedding or your niece's first ballet recital, Uber is on their way. So you can show up for what matters most. Uber on our way. Can I tell you the most fun we had during COVID was, you know, like, everyone was in the bubble phase. The most fun we had, and this I stole from my younger days was there used to be what they called Internet cafes when I was growing up. And these were little stores that had a bunch of computers connected to the Internet because you couldn't get Internet at home. And what would happen is people would host gaming tournaments there. And that I found was the perfect hybrid. Right. So. But what I did for the COVID thing was. Cause we were already in a bubble. It was me and my bubble people. We put all our PlayStations in the same room, in the same room, and we connected them up. Let me tell you something. All that laughter, you thought you were laughing before.

[Christina]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And I will encourage any parent who has kids who play these games, like, don't kill the thing. Try and find the hybrid. I know it's gonna be work. I know it's gonna be a mission. But I promise you now, put these kids in the same room still with their screens, little monitors, and their video game consoles. Put them in the same room doing the same thing. The exponential gain in connection, laughter, love, joy, everything that you experience. I can't even. Like, I can't. Because. Because what this is, what I realized it does, is it reminds you that the connection is not coming from the game. It's coming from the people you are playing the game with.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. The game should be a sort of a thing that brings you together in person.

[Trevor Noah]

That's what I felt every time I took off the headset and I turned off the console. There was a deep sadness I felt because I was like, ah, my community's gone. Because they were during COVID But when I had the bubble and we did that, it was like over the Christmas period, you turned off the console, and now you went and sat on the couch together, and now we laughed and we talked and it reminded me that. No, no, no, no. The community was the thing. The game was just something we did together.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Oh, good. So let's bring in Bob Putnam here because I listened to your conversation.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, right.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That was so good. I mean, he is. He's absolutely amazing.

[Trevor Noah]

He's phenomenal.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So for everybody listening, he wrote the famous book Bowling Alone. And. And so, you know, we social scientists, we all love his work. We've been citing him for, you know, certainly for 25 years. His work is really important here because, you know, Putnam describes how up through the mid-70s, America had a lot of social capital, a lot of trust. So even though there's a lot of crime, we all played outside. And, you know, we all knew, like, if I wipe out on my bicycle and I'm badly hurt, my friend could knock on any door and say, can you call his mom? Yeah. But after the 70s, it begins declining our trust in each other. And so the reason we don't let our kids out in the 90s is not because the world's getting more dangerous, it's actually getting safer. It's because we're losing trust in our neighbors. We're losing the sense of community. And once we lose the sense of community, the sense that all of us are at least a little bit responsible for other people's kids. Now it's like as we just as we joked about, like, you know, you say, I walked by a playground. Oh, no, you're a man. You can't go near a playground. You're going to molest a child.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah. So as we all freaked out about that, and it's not that there was nothing to freak out about, but boy, did we overdo it by saying, like, let's just not get involved in anyone else's child. Now it falls all on the mother. Now the responsibility falls especially on the mother. And if a kid is seen playing outside without supervision, all the blame goes to the mother. How dare you. How he could be abducted.

[Christina]

There was a recent case where a woman sent her child to get milk or something. And I think someone.

[Jonathan Haidt]

She was arrested, put in, which is insane. The boy was 10 and she didn't even send him. The boy was 10 and he decided to walk, you know, a little bit to a store, which is a credit.

[Christina]

To her, by the way. That 10 year old's like, oh, I'm gonna go to a store.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, that's right. So a lot of the fear in America is not just of abduction. Some people are afraid of abduction, which is almost unheard of in this country. But others of us are afraid that a neighbor will call the police on.

[Christina]

So it's safer.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It's safer.

[Trevor Noah]

Right. But it's funny you say this, and I'm always cautious in how I say this, but I. But I feel like Americans really need to be aware of this. So much of what America's experiencing and doing right now is akin to what you would hear in, like, communist, like Soviet, you know, USSR Times. Like, it was like, where it was like, neighbor might call the police on you. And it was all about that. It was all about, like. It wasn't just that the police were surveilling. It was that you didn't know who even your family was surveilling you. It was. And I literally think about what you're saying, and I go, if we live in a world, if you call the police to tell your neighbor that their music is too loud.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, that's right.

[Trevor Noah]

Then, like, you don't understand that you are furthering a society where you are destined to be governed by some autocratic power and some. Because you can just knock. Yeah, you can literally knock and say, hey, the music is very loud. Are you guys gonna turn it?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Just. Just.

[Trevor Noah]

Because I don't think your neighbor's trying to destroy your life by playing music. Do you get what I'm saying?

[Jonathan Haidt]

But if we don't know each other, we're afraid they'll yell at us, they might be armed. Who knows?

[Trevor Noah]

Yes.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

It all becomes it all. But now to your point, now, the next generation hasn't even met people in person. They haven't even. They've never had a conflict in person. And so they live in a world where they go, oh, no, you just report for offensive content, report for, you know, report, report, report. But they themselves have never actually said to another human being, hey, would you mind not doing that?

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. There's a really interesting observation about America from Alexis de Tocqueville, the French sociologist or aristocrat, but who traveled in America in the 1830s, and he wrote Democracy in America, which many American kids used to read in middle school. And de Tocqueville observes that in America, it's the most amazing thing when a town. When they need to build a bridge over the stream, they need to build a school or a hospital, the townspeople get together and somebody figures is going to lead it, and they figure out how to raise the money, and then they do it. Whereas in France, we wait for the king to do it. And in Britain, you know, they wait for the Nobles to do it. And this is an amazing thing about America. And this is like the whole Ben Franklin thing, like, let's start institutions. There's a problem, and let's solve it. And this is part of what made America amazing and special and different is that we had such a vast country and such a weak central government that you couldn't really count on government. So that was part of the American character. But now we're blocking children from developing that. We're blocking children from having the ability to say, hey, we've got a problem. Let's figure out how to solve it. Let's just call in the authorities. So once again, we're preparing our kids for authoritarianism, not for democracy.

[Christina]

I wanted to talk more about girls.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yep, let's go back to that.

[Christina]

And the thing that really leapt out to me, and I knew this into it intuitively because I think social media has destroyed millennial women's sense of self esteem. And the reason a lot of us are getting certain surgeries and Botox and because we're like, on our fees, we're like, oh, I feel like I look bad. Let me fix it. We have the disposable income to fix it. I want to talk a lot about the. The self harm that we're seeing about with girls and their exposure to certain images on social media was affecting their body image. And you mentioned another thing about role models. Basically what we are telling girls to look to via Instagram, et cetera. Can you talk more about that? Because I was really struck by it.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, yeah. So for girls, the central harm, the most important harm, comes through social media. And so one way to think about this is if you're a company and you want to trap girls, what you would do is you would say, hey, here's social information. Do you want to see what so and so said about so and so? Do you want to see who's friends with who, who's dating who? So that's much more appealing to girls.

[Christina]

Gossip.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Gossip.

[Christina]

That's right.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Gossip. That's right. Girl. Girls and women have a more developed sense of social relationships. They have a map in their head. You know, it's a common joke where it's like, you know, a lot of men have to, you know, say, honey, how do I know that person? Like, my friend, like, you know, so. So girls and women, they're more interested in it. They're more social savvy, and so they all rush onto Instagram, especially around 2012, and now they're in it. Okay? But once they're in it. And this is pushing out real world relationships. It's pushing out gossiping with two friends in person. What are they looking at? They're looking at photos of each other who are often enhanced or at least carefully selected to look at their best. So on average, the average woman is below average, at least compared to what she sees. And so that's the healthy stuff, just seeing your friends. Okay, then there's all the influencers. Kids need role models. I have a whole chapter in the book on puberty. Part of what's happening at puberty is you're making the transition from child to adult and so you're looking desperately for role models. I'm a girl. How do I become a woman? Oh, I should, you know, I dress this way, I wear makeup. And if girls are exposed to inappropriate influencers, this is why we now have nine and ten year old girls going to Sephora buying, euthanizing. Yeah, that's right. So it's completely insane. So just exposing girls to all these models that show them what matters about you is your looks. What matters about is your skin, your hair, your breasts. That's what matters and that's what you have to be conscious of. This is a terrible thing to do to girls during the most difficult period of their lives. But it gets darker. So suppose a girl wants to be thin because there's so much pressure to be thin. So she types in something about dieting on Instagram or TikTok and many reporters and attorneys general and law enforcement agents have done this. You create an account, you say you're a 13 year old girl, you say give me stuff on dieting and before you know it you're getting eating disorder stuff, you know, like no food tastes as good as being thin.

[Christina]

The new mantra is lean is law, which is coming across.

[Jonathan Haidt]

What does that mean?

[Christina]

Lean is law. Like being lean is the thing that you have to adhere to. That's the social.

[Trevor Noah]

That's the new thing they say.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, right.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh yeah, the one is. What is it? Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Thank you. That's what I was trying to remember. Yeah. So this is a really sick thing to do to girls. And at the same time the screen based life is causing them to be more obese. So we have a whole generation that I think the average is 12 minutes of vigorous exercise a day and 8 to 10 hours of screen time a day, not including school. The phone based childhood is making them heavier while at the same time telling the girls you have to be thinner, which is almost impossible to do. The other thing that is important about girls is that they're more emotionally connected, they're more emotionally savvy. They pick up more when someone is feeling something but doesn't express it, whereas boys are a little more clueless. So the point is, boys are on together. They're not really picking up each other's emotions. They're just laughing about sports or war or sex or funny videos. When girls get on, they're just much more sensitive to the emotions being expressed and they take on each other's emotions more. And I think this can explain a mystery in the data. When we graph out all of these mental illness stats, the boys are doing worse too. No question about it. But the boys curves are gradual, whereas the girls, it's stable from the 90s on most things through 2011. And then 2012 is like a hockey stick and it goes up very sharply. And I think it's because before then the girls were connecting on their flip phones and then getting together in person. And that's perfectly healthy. When you get a sudden movement of everyone onto social media and now you've got all this social comparison and all this people expressing anxiety, and if you're expressing anxiety, I'm gonna be more anxious. So I think that's why we see such a sudden change for the girls is the. Is the contagion of emotions.

[Trevor Noah]

Don't go anywhere. Cause we got more. What now? After this. This episode is brought to you by Zendesk, introducing the next generation of AI agents built to deliver resolutions for everyone with an easy setup that can be completed in minutes, not months. Zendesk AI agents resolve 30% of interactions instantly, quickly giving your customers what they need. Loved by over 10,000 companies, Zendesk AI makes service teams more efficient, businesses run better and your customers happier. That's the Zendesk AI effect. Find out [e-mail] this episode is brought to you by Brooklinen. We're coming up on summer, and those super hot days are starting to sneak in there when an unexpected hot day crops up. I am so grateful for my Brooklinen sheets. They're breathable and lightweight, but still have some comforting heft to them. You know what I mean? You want to feel like the sheets are hugging you but not suffocating you. And during the season transition, I have my down comforter paired with linen sheets and quilts. That way I can kind of mix it up and I can match it up depending on the temperature and my vibe for the night. You can also shop award winners and Fan faves in store or [e-mail] that's B R O O K L I n e n.com and use Trevor the code Trevor for 15% off your online order of $100 or more. That's Brooklinen.com use promo code Trevor for 15% off.

[Christina]

The mums and dad listening to this at home, they're panicking. Now they're looking at their kid. They're like, I've ruined this kid. The boy's never going to get a job and the girl's going to have an eating disorder. What can they do? Like, what are the protective measures?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Thank you for pulling me back from the doom and gloom because I can go on forever.

[Christina]

Oh, no, I like doom and gloom. But you know.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay, so let's hope that nobody tuned out before this point of the conversation. So here's what I can say with some confidence. The brain is still pretty plastic until the early 20s in puberty. So the brain is changing very rapidly in the first couple years and it's growing very rapidly. But then it reaches full size, almost full size, by about age 6. And after that, the game is not growth. The game is like, which neurons are going to wire up to which, which neurons are going to disappear. And so they're tuning up with cultural input and especially speeds up in early puberty. I want everybody to really focus on early puberty. Try to protect your kids during that period. But suppose your kid is 15, she or he has already been on the video games, the social media. One possibility is that the changes could be long lasting. It is possible that if you went through puberty this way, it could change things in ways that are lasting. We don't know. But here's what I can say for sure. When kids take steps to regain control of their tension, they get miraculous results. And I know this because I teach a class at New York University. I'm a professor in the business school there, and I teach one of my classes called flourishing. And it's 35 undergraduates, they're mostly sophomores around 19 years old. They all spend too much time on their phones. And the project is you have to, over the course of the semester, you have to change yourself in a way that will improve your happiness and flourishing by the end of the semester. So a lot of them work on their phone habits. And I say if you're spending three hours a day or more on social media, you have to work on this one because there's no point doing anything else. And the ones who are doing A lot of social media and some are like five or six hours just on TikTok. When they move it off their phone and onto their computer, they get a lot of relief. It goes way down. And then if they take it off the computer and just stop, especially for TikTok, they tell these miraculous stories like I can do my homework now. It's not just that I have enough time, it's that I can actually focus on it and I have more time with my friends and we're doing fun things and I'm sleeping better. And so what I can say for sure to parents whose kids are late teens is it's not too late, but they have to regain control of their attention. They have to largely get off of social media. I'm not going to say that boys shouldn't play video games at all, but just keep an eye on their dopamine circuits. Anything they're doing every day for an hour or two, there's a risk that it's changing them in ways that make everything else more boring. So do not give up hope. It's hard to do it yourself. So just say to your 17 year old daughter, you need to get off social media even though all your friends are still on it, that's a social death sentence. It can be very hard to persuade your girl to do that. So the trick is do it in a group. And that's why the class is so successful, because they're all supporting each other, they're all doing it and then sometimes they go out together.

[Christina]

So is that like connecting with other parents and being like, hey, whether it's at your school, at their gymnastics club, being like hey, I'm doing this experiment, will you join me?

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right, especially when your kids are younger. You know, we all know the parents of our kids friends cause we arrange pickups and birthday parties and all that. So if you get a group of friends, the parents all agree to do this, we're going to follow the four norms that I lay out in the book. Then it's actually much easier and it's a lot more fun.

[Christina]

Yeah, can you say the four norms? Because we haven't got into that.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So the four norms to roll back the phone based childhood are pretty simple. They are first, no smartphone before high school or age 14. You want to communicate with your kid, give them a flip phone, give them a basic phone, give them a gab phone, a pinwheel phone. There's all kinds of options that don't have a browser, don't have social media and I think the way to think about it is this. Across the western world, we all have our previous iPhone in a drawer someplace and we all give that to our 2 year old. I just saw an incredible study. It found that 40% of American 2 year olds have their own iPad. And so we're just giving this advanced technology to 2 year olds. Don't give.

[Christina]

Do you know why that is? Because if they use your iPad, it gets grubby. They crack the screen. Guys, there's a reason for it. It's terrible, okay?

[Jonathan Haidt]

But we do it. I think a large part of it is because we all discovered. Just give them the iPad.

[Trevor Noah]

It's a digital pacifier.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Pacifier. It's like giving them a little bit of opium. It calms them down.

[Christina]

IPad, babysitter.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. So it's very effective, but I think it's also very damaging. So my point is, don't start with that stuff. I mean, they're going to have that eventually. You know, give them, you know, if they're in third, fourth grade, you want to send them out into the world, give them a phone watch, not an Apple watch that has too much stuff on it, but just a phone watch. I gave my daughter, I think it was called the Gizmo Gadget, she could call three phone numbers. That was it. And that was great for sending around the world. So start real simple now in high school, then many will want to wait later. But I'm just trying to propose a norm. What if there's a norm that we all adopt as a minimum that would have so much benefit for all of us? So again, the first norm, no smartphone before high school. Second norm, no social media till 16. And here's where what we really need is a law of implementing a minimum age. And Australia has done that for us. It'll take effect November and let's hope it works smoothly and then a lot of countries will follow. But anyway, try to keep your kids off from opening a social media account, especially TikTok and Instagram and Snapchat, until they're 16. The third norm is phone free schools. If you can text your child during the day, during class, that's a problem. That means that all the kids are texting each other and everyone has to check because nobody wants to be the one kid at lunch who didn't know about the thing that happened in third period. So schools must take the phone in the morning, put it in a locker or a locked pouch, a yonder pouch, or just a manila envelope in the front of homeroom by the Teacher's desk, but take the phones away in the morning and phone watches and AirPods, everything, give it back when they leave, and that way they pay attention to the teacher and the other kids. That's what we want. The fourth norm is the hardest, and we've already been talking about it. The fourth norm is far more free play, independence, and responsibility in the real world. Because the point here isn't just, you know, let's take away the screens. The point is let's give them back an amazing childhood. They need fun. They need interaction. They need to wrestle, put their arms around each other, laugh together, eat together. So we've got to give them back more time together, together. And that's hard because we don't trust our neighbors anymore. It's hard to just say, go out.

[Christina]

And play, and we don't have third spaces. I, I, you know, we don't have third spaces. We don't. A lot of cities don't have public transportation, I think, like, but can I.

[Trevor Noah]

Tell you a secret, though? And I agree with you on this, because I, like, really, like, try and figure out how we can solve this issue, especially after we talk to Robert Putnam on the podcast. I think the truth is that we think we don't have the third spaces, but we, it's, it's just because we've made every space a private space. Like, I was just thinking this, walking around, like, parts of Brooklyn the other day. I've noticed a dip in how many block parties there are.

[Christina]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Just. That was a simple event where you closed the streets.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

You agreed. Neighbor at the end. Neighbor at the end. We all agree on Saturdays, we are going to close our block, and everyone's gonna just open their door and, like, walk out, and the kids can kick a ball and can hit a ball. And I've seen a few parts of New York where they do it now. Like, this is, like, in Manhattan, by the way. Like, Chelsea somewhere there. I remember driving one day and I was irritated because I was in the car trying to get to an airport and the road was closed. But I loved the fact that, like, I saw, like, someone hitting a ball, a baseball, and then people running. The whole street was just closed. And I was like, oh, we've been tricked into thinking the thing that's right outside our door is not a third space.

[Christina]

No, but that's not a third space.

[Trevor Noah]

Why is it home?

[Christina]

Third spaces are, like, actual. I'm talking about parks, libraries. They have decimated them.

[Trevor Noah]

I'm with you, and I'm telling you that when I grew up. They didn't exist. Black kids couldn't go to a library. There was no park. There was no. During apartheid. None of this exists. But I have the full childhood that you're talking about because the third space was the street.

[Christina]

Okay, I get what you mean.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Your grandmother told you, travel around, sometimes you don't see girls, but you always see boys playing in the street.

[Christina]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

The third space is the street.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right.

[Trevor Noah]

So you go, you tell the kids.

[Christina]

We need to get rid of these SUVs. I would let my son play in the street if Americans didn't have these huge cars. Like, if he runs in front of the car.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes, but that's what I mean by close the street. Yeah, yeah. So I go. I would love to live in a society where we go, like, we used to do this on. I wish I could, like, take you to the picture in my brain. We, as the kids, ran the streets as if we were adults.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So we would close the street with brick responsibility.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. We would take bricks and we would put them at the beginning of each road and close each road. And then when a car would need to turn into the street, because this is like a road, you know, it's not a public. I'm not talking about, like, main roads.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So if you're listening to this, an informal thing.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes. I'm not talking about a highway. I'm not talking about a main road. I'm talking about, like, in your neighborhood. Yeah, your neighborhood. It was a township, but it was still a neighborhood. We'd put bricks there. A car would need to turn. There would be kids stationed at every corner, and you'd shout, you know, car. And then you'd run there together. You'd move the bricks. Everyone would clear the road. The car would drive either through where it needs to go to, or it would, like, stop at the house that it's stopping at, and then we put the bricks back on the road, and then we'd continue playing. And because I agree with you, I'm not saying, like, go play in the street, but I'm saying sometimes we look at problems in life and they. They seem insurmountable because we're looking at them the wrong way. Okay, no phones and no this and no. And where now are we going to build third space? How much is a third space? Where do you get it? How do we build a park? Do we get permits? Guys, everyone, if you are lucky enough to have a house, if you're lucky enough to be renting a space, you literally have the Third space right outside your door. You just have to claim it back. Yeah, you literally just have to claim it back.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Collectively, I think that's really good. And because what you're saying is we have to be much more deliberate about this. My parents grew up in New York City. It was very similar. They'd play stickball in the street and if the car's coming, you step back.

[Trevor Noah]

Exactly.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So we can't just say to our kids, you're nine years old, get out of here. Don't come back till the street lights come on. Don't come back till dinner. In some parts of America, you can do that. There are rural parts or places where people trust their neighbors. But especially for those of us in cities, we're going to have to be a lot more deliberate. And what you're saying is an example of, of a community or a couple of leaders taking a step to make something happen right here in Chelsea. So that's great. I want to bring in here an organization that I co founded called Let Grow. If you have young kids, go to letgrow.org it's run by a wonderful woman named Lenore Skenazy, who wrote a book called Free Range Kids. It's all about how do we help Americans actually let go and let their kids grow with these sorts of experiences. And so we have two really simple programs. The simplest of all is called Play Club. And what it is is a school. It's based around schools and school playgrounds. In a lot of places, parents don't trust anything, but they do trust the school playground. That's the one place that they will let their kids hang out after school. And so it's so simple. A school just says, okay, one after school activity that you can choose is Play Club. And so let's say your eldest son, you sign him up for Fridays, let's say. So he's part of Play Club on Friday, along with 10 or 20 other kids who are always there on Friday. And there's an adult nearby. There is an adult around if someone gets hurt, but there's nobody blowing a whistle. There's nobody supervising, there's nobody directing. And so you were talking about your kid, your one year old being overscheduled.

[Christina]

Luna's a diva. She's got a lot going on.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay. But when she starts school, especially say kindergarten, first grade, they love running around in the playground. So Play Club is so simple, it doesn't cost anything. Okay. You need to have like one staff person stay after. But the results are so amazing. Teachers often volunteer to do It. Because it's so wonderful to watch. So just using the local school playground. Now, some schools in New York City, I talked with a principal up in the Bronx. He said there is no outdoor space. So there are. It's not that.

[Trevor Noah]

Well, that's a lot of New York City in general. Even the fancy schools, by the way.

[Jonathan Haidt]

They usually have a little fence.

[Christina]

Yeah, they'll have some.

[Trevor Noah]

But I'm saying, like, a lot of them, you'll be shocked at how there's. It's just like. It's the city. It's the curse of a city.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah, but. But we. So we have to be intentional and clever. We've got to find spaces for our kids to play without adults directing them. And it's going to be tricky, but we can do it. And there's a. There. You know, this is an enormous need. I teach in a business school, and I've really come to see, you know, entrepreneurs are not saying, how can I get rich, rich, rich? They're saying, where. Where's something that needs doing? Where's there a market for something? Where's there a desire? One of the biggest desires in the world is parents who want to give their kids a better childhood, but they don't know where to do it. There's no third space. So in Britain, there's a company, I think it's called the Den, and they have these. I suppose it's for. I don't know if it's for profit or nonprofit. I should look that up. But it's a place that routines can hang out, and there are games and there's food, and they're adults around.

[Christina]

We used to call that a youth club. Do you remember? Like, but those have been cut back on.

[Jonathan Haidt]

So I think we have to really double down on that. Community's not going to happen naturally the way it used to, and we have to be more deliberate.

[Christina]

Some of the things. Ideas you had made me, like, vibrate a little.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Vibrate? Which ideas made you vibrate?

[Christina]

I'm realizing that a lot of the things I, like, critique other parents for, like, I have myself, it's just projection. And I really need to surrender and be less fearful and anxious about my children in the world. Like, fear of them having an accident or something happening to them. Like, because, you know, when you're talking about that unsupervised play, I'm like, oh, my God, this kid is going to swing off something. And then.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right. That's what we all think as parents.

[Christina]

And then I'm like, well, okay, he does swing off something and they do break their arm. And like you always. Because I think a lot of parents are catastrophic, catastrophizing. Yes, because we are in this world of. My father and his brothers survived a civil war, the Biafra war. They had far more danger and risk than I can ever imagine. And I'm afraid to let my 5 year old play with his Legos alone because I'm worried, no, I'm worried the 19 month old is going to swallow it. You know, I'm like. And so I think that because my world is so. Our worlds are really so safe and sanitized.

[Jonathan Haidt]

They really are.

[Christina]

We don't have that sense of proportion. And then because of that, I'm afraid of like a thing that's really basic. And I, I've got a therapy for you, okay?

[Jonathan Haidt]

I've got. So this is our second program at Let Grow Again. It's so simple. It's called the Let Grow Experience. Okay, here's all it is. It's made for schools, but you can do it by yourself at home. So imagine you got an elementary school and imagine that you say all the third graders are going to do the Let Grow experience. You give them a piece of paper with instructions, they take it home. It says, work with your parents to pick something that you think you can do by yourself that you've never done before. You're gonna do it with your parents permission, but without your parents. Let me give them some examples. Like maybe you think that you have a dog and you've never walked it by yourself. You know, you're eight years old, you've never been like around the block with the dog. But mom, I think I can do that.

[Christina]

It's so funny, you said that thing about the dog and I was like, right, great, I'll let you do it, but I'll put an airtag in your shoe.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Okay, you know what? Look, if it takes that to let you do it, do it. Start that way or make breakfast for the family. Because one of the things that happened around 2011 is teenagers began much more likely to agree with the statement, my life feels useless. Our kids are. They feel useless. All they do is consume content. They don't do anything. And so the lecrow experience is do something new, useful. And two amazing things happen. The first is, you know, let's say you send your kid out, there's a store three blocks away. Your eight or nine year old can go get a quart of milk and come back. The first thing is they are jumping up and down when they return, they are so excited, you know, they did something. And the key is that it's a little scary at first because they've never done it before. But that's how we get over our fears. You get over your fears by experiencing a stimulus. Nothing bad happens. And then the next time you have less fear. So the kids are changed and the kids have a sense of competence and capability. But the unexpected effect, or maybe actually this was planned by Lenore and others who invented it, is the parents fear goes down because. And you know, because like the first time we had, my wife and I, the first time we let our son walk to school. I tell this story in the book. We only let our son walk to school in fourth grade when he was nine because we were friends with Lenore Skenazi. No kids were walking to school at 9, even at 10, even fifth grade in New York City it starts more at sixth grade, but we were a little early on it. But the first time we did it was terrifying. And we tracked him. We gave him my old iPhone because we didn't know any better. And we tracked him and we were like, oh my God, is he gonna make it? And we're watching, wait, he must. He's at 7th Avenue, but that's really complicated intersection. Is he gonna make it? Is he gonna make it? We were really nervous. And even though I know all this stuff, but I'm a parent, this is what we feel. And so then the second day we were just a little nervous, and the third day, not at all. And that was it. We never tracked them again. So the let grow experience. So if you do it in a school, imagine all the third graders in a town are doing this. So beginning of September, you see a whole bunch of 8 year olds walking to the store. And maybe they're together and lasting, or maybe they're alone. And once you see a lot of it, you realize like, oh, okay, I guess 8 year olds walk to stores. Now, nobody's seen that since 1992, you know, but if you do it as a community, suddenly you change their arms in the community.

[Christina]

I love that you're saying that because I was thinking about how can I do it with my friends, like the people who are in my community, but it's like a collaboration between not just the parents, but schools. It's the shopkeeper. It's saying, by the way, there's gonna be some 8 year olds coming in. They may steal, but they're gonna buy some stuff. No, but, no, I think, I think shoplifting is a good experience. To have and to be.

[Trevor Noah]

I think being caught.

[Christina]

Yeah, I think being caught and then you learn, like, yeah, it's punitive. And then you don't, you don't eventually steal a car one day.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Christina]

But like, whatever it is, you just, you say, you tell the shopkeeper, there's going to be some kids coming in. Like, it just requires you to speak to. That's different stakeholders.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That's right. We have to be more deliberate. And so that's a good point. I was emphasizing, like, you can do it yourself as one family. It's better if you do it with a few families. It's best if you do it by the whole school, however you do it. I had thought before, and I sometimes say, you might even go talk to the chief of police and say, what do you think about this? We want to do this. Do you think this is okay? Because if you warn the police ahead of time and they're probably going to be supportive, if you talk to them ahead of time, then there's not much risk if some nosy neighbor calls the police, they're going to say, it's okay, we know about this. But I hadn't thought of talking to the shopkeepers. So that's a great idea. If there's a store that your kid can walk to, talk to them and say, is it okay if I send my kid in here? Oh, they're going to love it.

[Trevor Noah]

This is amazing. This has really been. And I mean, there's so many more we could speak about. But luckily that's why there's a book. And I, I really encourage everyone to read it because I think if you don't have kids, I think it still applies to you as somebody who does have a phone, who might struggle with community, who might have anxiety, who might not even realize how much these latent effects have affected them.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I could just say, just first, if you don't have kids, there's a whole chapter in the book on spiritual degradation. All of us are feeling it. It's affecting us all. So the book, I hope, does speak to all ages. So there is a movement brewing around the world.

[Christina]

I love it.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Parents are sick and tired of this. They are revolting. Gen Z is sick and tired of it. They see what's happening, they are revolting. So even though this problem seemed insurmountable a year ago, what we're finding is the will to solve it is so widespread that people are coordinating, people are acting together. So if we act together, I think we can beat this. I think we can restore a fun, exciting, play based childhood in time for your kids.

[Christina]

Oh, amazing. And the husbands.

[Trevor Noah]

Jonathan Haidt, thank you so much.

[Christina]

Thank you, Jonathan.

[Jonathan Haidt]

It's a pleasure. Great to see you both.

[Trevor Noah]

What now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin and Jodi Avigand. Our senior producer is Jess Hackle. Claire Slaughter is our producer. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannis Brown. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next Thursday for another episode of what Now.

[Christina]

Sam.