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A much buzzed about book, the anxious.

Generation, is available now. Here's, of course, Jonathan Haidt.

Girls are extraordinarily anxious and depressed. Boys are extraordinarily undeveloped. We shouldn't have kids with a massive entertainment center in their pocket by which strangers can reach them. This is complete insanity.

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Jay Shetty, the one, the only Jay Shetty.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to on purpose, the place you tune into to become happier, healthier, and more healed. Thank you so much for investing in your growth and your journey by being here today. As I'm about to interview one of my favorite authors, a researcher, a professor that I'm so excited to talk to, I've been wanting to have this conversation with him about many of his books. And we're finally here for his latest installment. It's called the anxious generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Please welcome to on purpose Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan, thank you for being here. Thank you for making the time and spending this energy with us.

Oh, my pleasure, Jay. Thanks for having me.

This is a conversation that I feel, as I was saying to you offline, which is so critical and sensitive for our listeners. I know that everyone who's tuned in, whether it be right now on YouTube or listening to us on an audio platform, this is of the number one concern in their life, which is their personal mental wellbeing and then the mental wellbeing of their children and the people that they care about and love. And I think when I first saw the title the anxious generation, I was thinking about how there's this rhetoric that has become quite normal in society around how every generation has had their anxiety, whether it was the world wars, whether we talk about, oh, we have social media, but, you know, kids back in the day had black and white tvs and then color television, and then they had video games. And so I feel like there's been this rhetoric that social media is just the latest installment in a host of previous technologies that have made old people worried about young people. Why is this different?

So that is, the main counterargument I get is from people who say, oh, we've been through this before. When I was a kid, we watched too much television. But look, it didn't do anything to us. And it is true that ever since modernity began, so beginning in the 17th century, when the pace of change really begins to accelerate generation to generation, the next generation actually is a little different from the previous one. And generally, we think the next generation, they're kind of soft. They don't have our virtues, they have funny habits. So that's always been going on. And that's what, I'm a late baby. I was born in 1963. So that's what we thought about the millennial generation. Oh, they're always just focused on their coffee and their avocado toast. They're not serious, but actually. And you're a millennial, I believe, right?

Yes, that's correct.

So millennials, born 1981 through 1995, roughly. But the millennials, their mental health was actually pretty good. Better than Gen X, actually. And they're an amazingly successful generation. They were creative, they traveled the world, they start companies. So that's the normal intergenerational difference. This time is really, really different because all of a sudden, in 2012, 2013, it's like someone flicked on a light switch and all over the developed world, we don't have data from the. From the developing world, but all over the developed world, certainly the english speaking countries, Scandinavia, girls in particular, began to get depressed, anxious. They began to cut themselves. They began checking into psychiatric wards right around 2013 in the US, it's very sharp. Right around 2013. It sometimes is a little bit, but it's basically the early twenties, 2010s. This has never happened before. There has never been a global, synchronized collapse of mental health. This is far larger than anything we've ever seen in terms of its effects on kids. This is way, way larger than Covid. This is affecting most kids. So I'm engaged in debates with other scholars about, well, why did this happen? And what I marshal in the book is the evidence that it's not just a coincidence, it's not just a correlation.

That, oh, that's exactly when kids basically switch from flip phones to smartphones, was between 2010 and 2015, all over the world. But I'm showing that there's a lot of experimental evidence that shows causation. And another thing that makes this different, the kids themselves say it. So when I was a kid, we watched too much tv. But you didn't see kids organizing to keep kids off tv. You didn't see kids saying, oh, please, save us from tv. You know, we're stuck watching it. We don't want to be watching it. But that's what young people are saying about social media. I just saw a survey. The majority, the majority of people of all ages, including young people, say they would rather that TikTok was never invented. They're spending time on it because everyone else is, but they see that they're trapped. So this is so different from any previous moral panic.

That's so fascinating to hear, that it's the first time that people are actually saying, or kids are actually saying that this experience is something that we're feeling, yet we feel so trapped, addicted and.

Exactly. That's what my students say at NYU. That's what students say on surveys. When you ask them, why do you think mental health is so bad in your generation? The most common answer is social media. They see it happening. The parents see it happening to the kids, the teachers see it happening to the kids. So there's all kinds of eyewitness testimony. Like, people see this happening. It's not just like, hmm, I wonder if it's the phone. It's like, no, we see the evidence of it.

I'm fascinated. Why are people debating you?

Well, there are so, you know, I'm an academic, and we publish our articles in journals, and there are some people who've been studying media for a long time, and many of them are very technophilic. They like technology. Some of them, like video games, have been writing about the benefits of video games. And there are some. And so I think they come to this prepared to believe that this is just another moral panic. We've been through this with television and video games and before that, comic books. The 18th century was novels. People didn't want young women to read novels because it would stimulate their sexual appetites. So they sort of approach it with like, you know, this is just another one of those moral panics. And then I keep doing this work with Gene Twenge and Zach Rauch. We keep showing like no other explanation works. This time is different. This is not just some artifact of kids being more willing to talk about it. This is the same curves in self report. You see those same curves in hospital admissions and psychiatric emergency department visits. So this is not just some illusion, but there's about five or six researchers.

They're serious researchers, and they look at the same data I do, and they say, well, the correlations are too small to explain it. Or they say, you know, it's mostly correlational. There are not enough experiments. And I say, okay, look, I found 25 experiments, 16 of which do show a causal effect, you know, with random assignment, the kids who, the young people who are assigned to do less social media in the first few days, maybe their mental health is bad because they're addicted, but if you wait three or four weeks, on average, they feel better. So I say, look, here are all these experiments. And they say, well, the experiments aren't good enough. Here's a flaw in that one. Here's a flaw in that one. So this is a normal academic debate. I'm not going to change their minds ever. They're not going to change my mind ever. This is just the way these things go. But as we argue it out in public, the rest of the world can look and they can say, what are my arguments? What are their arguments?

And then they'll decide, yeah, absolutely. And from reading your book and your work, what I understand is you actually are not saying social media doesn't have benefits either. That's not really what you're saying. You're not saying that there is no validity to it.

Well, what I would say is, for adults, social media has many benefits. So obviously, many people start their businesses. Look, I use Twitter to get my research out. So for adults about this, these used to be called social networking sites because originally they were just ways to connect people. And as an adult, I have a need to network, and it's useful to me. And LinkedIn is useful, Twitter is useful, many Facebook groups are used. These are all useful for adults. But let's talk about middle school kids. So in America, middle school is roughly ages eleven to 13. Let's talk about kids just beginning puberty. How much need do they have to network? How much do they need to meet strangers, strange men who are approaching them? How much do they need that? How much do they need social media to connect with their friends? The telephone was an amazing invention. You pick it up, you press some numbers, and you can talk to your friend anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. So we already had that. How much more help did eleven and twelve year olds need to connect with their friends? And so I would argue then, when we look at middle school, this is my main focus, is early puberty.

Early puberty, the brain is extremely vulnerable because the frontal part of the brain is rewiring very rapidly. Growth is slow during childhood, but it's very rapid in puberty. And so I would say that for 11, 12, 13 year old kids, I'm willing to say there aren't really any benefits and the harms are extraordinary. So that's why I say we need to just raise. We need to raise the ages. We should have a norm that no one gets a smartphone before high school. Kids with a massive entertainment center in their pocket by which strangers can reach them, companies can reach them. And we should raise the age of social media opening account from 13, which is at present not enforced, to 16, and enforce it. If we do those two things, we'll really get at least a handle. We'll protect kids during early puberty.

Yeah. And I want to get onto all of those points. I think one thing before that, I think the word anxiety, in some cases, we've become so numb to it, it's become so normalized. It is the norm to hear someone you know as anxiety, someone you love as anxiety. Children have anxiety. And I feel that word has been so repeated over the last five to ten years, maybe, that it's become. We've become numb to it, and because of that, we don't really understand. And which you do spend a lot of time in the early parts of the book, not only defining what anxiety is an experience, but the extent to which anxiety affects our normal, everyday functioning. Could you give us a short summary on that, which I want people to dive into the book to read the deep research on, but could we at least explore? So what are the implications? What is anxiety, and what are the implications of anxiety in the long term, if not for some of these recommendations you're suggesting?

So the most important emotion for animals is fear. Fear is, across all the different species, vertebrates, invertebrates, there's a very huge, long evolution. A lot is known about fear because if you've ever been snorkeling or out in the woods, you know that life for animals is you're looking for. You're looking for food, and then you're dead because someone jumped on you. So all animals, including us, have a hair trigger alarm system. That's normal, that's healthy. So that's fear. Now, sometimes that's when you're attacked, you're threatened. Sometimes you're in an environment where you don't see a threat, per se, but you're very wary of it. And so let's say, you know, so humans are much more afraid in the darkest, because in the dark, you're much more likely to be killed by nocturnal hunting animals. So we have an innate fear of the dark. It doesn't mean we're necessarily afraid, but we're just a little more on edge. And so that's your brain saying, okay, we're going to shift the alarm system over. We're going to make you a little warrior. If anything happens, you're going to jump. Whereas if it was broad daylight, you would just look and say, what was that?

So our brains are these incredible survival machines that have very, very deep circuits for fear, which mobilizes us to fight or to flee or fight, and then for anxiety, which is more diffuse, just a general sense of threats. Now, when the fear system is triggered and then you take action and then it shuts off, that's normal, that's healthy. But as many of your listeners will know, chronic stress causes an increase in circulating cortisol. It keeps your stress system on. Stress is not bad. Kids need stress, but short term stress, when you have long term stress now, you have hormonal dysregulation. You have cortisol, which has many functions in the body, but high levels of cortisol expose you to all kinds of health problems, joint problems, immunity. I mean, I forget the whole list. Cortisol has so many effects. So what's happening is young people, there have always been anxious young people. Some people are set to anxious. Some people are set to more calm. That's always been the case. But there's a shift so that more and more kids are closer to the anxiety side. Now, part of this is they're told there's a lot of talk, actually, just this week or two, there's a lot of talk about how these programs that teach kids to label their emotions, and they talk about, you know, were you afraid?

Were you anxious? They seem like they're well intentioned. It seems, you know, social emotional learning, there is some basis to that decades ago, but it seems that it's moving in a direction of teaching kids to dwell on their own emotions, always be looking inward. How did that make you feel? How did that make. Were you anxious? You know, what? You know, where can you go for help? That this. There's actually not much evidence that this is helping. And there's some new studies suggesting that this stuff backfires. This is actually making kids more anxious. What I argue in the book is what kids really, really need to overcome anxiety is exposure. Go out and play, and sometimes you will be afraid, and sometimes you'll climb a tree and you'll go too high, and you're afraid. I remember those feelings from my childhood, but that's how you get over childhood anxieties where sitting inside in a classroom with the teacher, giving you an emotion circle and saying, which of these emotions are you feeling right now, Johnny? And sometimes they're asked, have you thought about suicide? Have you thought about harming yourself? And they ask this over and over again.

This suggests to kids that they are weak, that they have these emotions, and if they have these emotions, it's a problem. So I think we're the mental health community. I think we're just, we're not recognizing what's driving the epidemic, and we're not doing things that would effectively reverse it.

What is the root of that? Because I feel like the research oscillates. In some cases, or at least as humans, we like to oscillate. There's this idea of the past, and I assume it's the opposite of what you just said, where when you were young, you weren't allowed to feel. I think everyone's experienced that idea of, oh, don't worry, everything will be okay, or, oh, it doesn't matter that you feel pain, like, everything will be fine, let it go, or, you know, don't cry or things like that. And so that was one extreme, and then the other extreme is what you're saying now, where it's like, well, let's talk about every emotion and give it equal weighting and give it equal priority. What is the middle?

And, yeah, so I'm saying kids need adversity. They need to sometimes be excluded. So all of that is necessary. If you ask any parent, how many times would you like your child to be excluded? You just have a newborn child. Your child's going to turn 18 and 18 years. In those 18 years, how often do you want your child to be excluded and to feel excluded? And anybody who says, zero, they're speaking from their heart, but they're not speaking from their head. I would never hire someone who's never been excluded. This person is going to be having it very difficult to have normal human relationships. Sometimes they won't be included, and that's not a big deal. So we need adversity. Now. I think what you're saying is it used to be we were too insensitive, and that's true. And there were a couple of categories especially. So bullying. Bullying is really, really bad. But what we have to be clear about is bullying is not aggression. Bullying is aggression or humiliation directed at a kid day after day. It has to be over time, because aggression is a normal and necessary part of childhood. You have to let kids experience aggression, express aggression.

Express hostility. You have to allow that and let them work it out now. And then there will be a problem. There'll be one kid who is picking on another kid, and that kid doesn't want to go to school. And if that goes on for more than a day now, it's bullying, and now we need to be responsive. When I was a kid, we weren't. In the seventies. We weren't. And in some countries, I know at the time, you know, in Japan and Korea, there were horrible. I mean, the culture around bullying and english boarding schools, I've heard. So it's great progress that we're being more sensitive about bullying. Obviously, the shaming of LGBTQ kids, that was a. It was constant when I was a kid, but now it's much, much better. So, in many ways, we do need to be more sensitive. But I think the gist of your question is, have we overshot? Have we? And I would say, yes, we have really overshot, you know, if there's any. You know, recess in America is often very heavily monitored, and as soon as there's any kind of conflict, an adult comes in. When my kids went to New York City public schools, they go there still in high school.

And so that kind of attention to, let's make sure no one's upset. Let's make sure no one's excluded. My daughter and her friend, they formed a little club, but they were on the playground. They were told, no, you can't do that. You can't exclude anyone. That's crazy. Kids need to play with that. So, anyway, I think we've gone too far.

Yeah. Talking about recess, I believe it was in your book that you said that the average recess time or outdoor time is 37 minutes.

The numbers vary. It depends on. But in elementary school, I've heard numbers as low as 27 minutes as the average. Across.

The average.

Yeah, across the day. And sometimes that's combined with lunch. Some kids only get 25 minutes, including lunch. And so you go to. You know, you're in. You know, kids need to run around. They need recess. There's a lot of research on this play helps them learn, helps them attend later. But in America, at least, and in east asian countries, I would imagine we're so focused on test scores on that we think what five and six and seven year olds need is more math, and they don't. They don't need more math. What they need is more play time, and then they'll learn more in a shorter amount of math. In the United States, if you are in a federal maximum security penitentiary, you are guaranteed 2 hours a day of yard time. You can't keep. It's inhumane to keep them in their cells all day. They have 2 hours of yard time. But if you're an elementary school student in the United States, you have no guarantee. And it's very often as little as 27 minutes, including lunch, which means you have to stand in the lunch line. That takes ten minutes. You get your lunch, you have, you know, you wolf it down in five minutes, you have whatever.

Five minutes left to play. This is complete insanity. If we want to get a handle on the mental health crisis, I think we need to back off on the adults instructing kids about their emotions, do a lot less of that, and take all the money and all the time we're spending on that and give kids more play.

Hey, everyone, it's Jay here. My wife and I have had so much fun creating our own sparkling tea. Junie and I've got big news for you. It's at Target, and we'd love your support. If you can go out, grab a journey, you'll be adding adaptogens and nootropics into your life with mood boosting properties aimed at promoting a balanced and happy mind. Through our commitment to our wellness journey and striving to fuel our bodies with the healthiest ingredients, it's been our purpose to make healthy choices accessible for all, which is why Juni is now on shelves at Target. So head to our store, locator@drinkjuni.com and find Juni at a target near you. You talk about what we need as children. You're talking about the need for play. Is play truly just play, or is there certain parameters, certain ideas, certain thoughts that make play more effective?

Yes. Play is a mammalian universal. So mammals, you know, the first mammals, whenever it was that some females began to secrete milk from glands in their skin, it's kind of an amazing evolution, evolutionary adaptation for having a longer childhood. You know, other animals, they lay an egg, and that's it. Animals on their own. But mammals, we have this long, long childhood, and that allows us to have much larger brains and much more complex social behavior compared to, say, reptiles. And so we have this long childhood, and especially the social animals. So dogs more than cats, but, you know, dogs and humans and are incredibly playful creatures. We have a puppy at home. She's now a year and a half. She still looks like a puppy. She wants to play all the time, and she has to play. That's the thing, since all mammals play when they're young and they take risks. So evolution isn't stupid. Evolution didn't say, we're going to let these baby animals practice jumping out of trees and practice getting in fights for no good reason. No, there's a very good reason. That's what you have to do to train your brain to reach adulthood.

And that's why, for hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, you could say all human children played unless they were being seriously deprived of play and stuck in a factory. So in America, we had play all the way up through the 1990s. That's when we begin to lose it in the nineties. We freak out in America and Britain and Canada, and we say, it's too dangerous. You'll be abducted. You'll be sexually molested. No, you stay home or you stay under supervision. Oh, and there's this fabulous new Internet. So why don't you spend more time on that? That's what happened in the nineties and that's when childhood really departed from the human need for play and independent activity and became over supervised, helicopter parented, restrained, restricted. And you can play on a video game in a way, but it's not embodied. We're physical creatures. We need to run, jump, touch, wrestle, hug. I remember doing all those things with my friends when I was in second or third grade. We would sometimes hug each other or pick each other up or wrestle. Children are physical, like puppies. But now, you know, kids, they're on their screen all the time.

There can be a playful element, but there's no risk, there's no physicality. They don't learn the social skills that you do from face to face encounters.

When you were saying that, I was actually thinking back to a trip I took to Rwanda two years ago, and I was thinking about our guerrilla friends, who we share, I believe, over 96% of our DNA with, and watching the young gorillas play outdoors. And even you were talking about wrestling and you would see. That's right. Yeah. And it was such a check because we're primates.

Primates have arms and primates use their arms in play. And you see it with all, you know, with chimpanzees and bonobos and gorillas. Yeah. And it's so cute. Right? Like, we love watching it because we mammals, as adults, we are primed for cuteness because that triggers in us a protective instinct over the kids. So we have this protective instinct and unfortunately, it's kind of run rampant. You know, it used to be the kids are out of the house, you don't see them. But now we can monitor kids all the time and we're just. We're swooping in too quick.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think we all resonate with that, even as adults. There's this beautiful quote from George Bernard Shaw where he said that we don't stop playing because we get old, we get old because we stop playing beautiful.

Yes, that's right.

And I think that we can relate to that. I can relate to this idea that I misplay. I think the challenge is that, as you said in the 1990s, when things started to veer off course, now children, given the choice, generally are going to choose indoor video games, phone, iPad, and they're not going to choose play. So I think the challenge becomes, now that our taste buds have become technological, how do we rewire that taste bud when we've been so diverted?

That's right. So it's not clear whether it's that the taste buds have become technological or that the technology has adapted so profoundly that it now knows exactly what we most want. So I was born in 1963. I remember when the game pong came out. It was the first video game you could get on your home television. So it was very, very crucial. But it's amazing. You turn a knob and you can play tennis, and I'd sit there with my friend and we'd do that for 2030 minutes, then we'd go do something else. So these video games were not immersive, they were fun. And you played with a friend. But once you get, you get graphics cards, you get color monitors, you get high speed Internet, you get multiplayer video games. These games are incredible. I mean, my son plays Fortnite. I didn't let him on in 6th grade when he was eleven, but I did let him on at 13 around Covid time. These games are incredible. And as a boy, what's most exciting is war games. And so the games just get better and better. And this is actually something we need to talk about.

You know, so much of the talk is about social media and girls. With boys, it's a different problem. Boys, there are many that are harmed by social media, many are driven to suicide. I don't want to say it's okay for boys, but social media use is not so correlated with depression and anxiety. For boys, it is for girls. For boys, what's happening is the technology is so amazing and the real world is getting more and more inhospitable to them. I mean, we've been really trying to reduce prejudice against girls and open up girls and bring them into every. That's all great, but girls are just so much better in school. They just do better in school is made for more of a female child than a male child. You sit still, you learn, you please the teacher. And we've pushed out rough and tumble play, we've reduced recess, there's no more shop clubs. So boys aren't enjoying school as much as girls. Boys are enjoying the technology more and more. And it's not just the video games, it's also the pornography. So, you know, war games and sex, those are deeply appealing to boys and young men.

And as the technology gets better and better, now, you know, if you're a boy with budding sexual urges and you have two choices, one is the most incredible pornography you've ever seen. And then soon there'll be goggles, soon they'll be put into sex dolls and robots. I mean, you can have this amazing sex life that you can customize, you can customize the body size, you can customize the personality. You know, you can have virtual girlfriends and boyfriends now. So boys are finding video game play and pornography more and more satisfying. And it's just difficult to arrange a soccer game with your friends. That's just difficult. Let's just meet online. And it's difficult to flirt with a girl and develop a relationship and fall in love and have sex. That's really hard. So I think we're losing boys. It's not just because their taste buds are rewired. It's because the technology is amazing, good at learning. What do we most want? Let's deliver that. But it's not what we most need. It's what we most want.

And what's the cost of that? What's happening to boys brains and minds?

So the big picture is that boys are failing to have the kinds of experiences that will toughen them, teach them skills, teach them virtues, and turn them into men. Boys development is different from girls development all around the world. Traditionally, boys generally, initiation rights involve more toughening, toughness demonstrations. And we can say this is terrible and patriarchal, but I actually think it's important. So, you know, all kids start off in the female sphere. We all live. We're all raised by mothers and girls and aunts, traditionally, around the world. And so girls stay within the female world. And girls initiation rights are usually pegged to puberty, to menstruation. And then they're taught all the secrets of being a woman, all that boys have to make the transition from the girl, the women's world, into the men's world. And less so today. I'm not saying it needs to be this way. I'm just saying it generally is. To some extent, boys development is different from girls development. And boys, if you give them the easy way out all the time, many of them will take it. And then they don't grow, they don't toughen. And so I think what we're seeing now is a generation, Gen Z, born after 1996 and later, in which the girls are extraordinarily anxious and depressed, much more so than the boys.

But the boys are extraordinarily undeveloped. Many people say they have no social skills. They don't look you in the eye. They don't know how to behave in public. They certainly don't know how to talk to a girl. So I think we're seeing just a massive, massive blockage of development. And, you know, Gen Z, the oldest, are 28. We'll see. We'll see if they come out of it. But when the millennials were 28, they had already invented so many companies, they were inventing technologies. I mean, the millennials, by 28, they were like a meteor streaking across the sky. And Gen Z seems much more to be hunkered down, like talking about their anxiety. So I'm not blaming them at all. It's not their fault. We deprive them of play. We put touchscreens in their hands. Then they had the bad luck to basically come out of college, the eldest of them, right into Covid. So those in their twenties now, their work experience was truncated. What they need is mentoring in a real office or a real job, and they didn't get a. So again, I'm not blaming, but, man, we have to have a lot of sympathy, and we have to make sure this stops.

We have to stop this right now.

And I think that's the challenge, right? A lot of people will say, well, people are going to have virtual girlfriends, and we are going to live in the virtual world, and everyone's going to go home and put their headset on and, you know, disappear. Disappear into the abyss. And then we'll be wearing it all day, not just in the evenings. And so there's that belief system that actually we're just getting better at using the technology that would define our future success anyway, anyway, or future failure if we don't know it. But you're saying that there's just, what are the, I guess, the harsher implications of what does this look like in 20 years time?

Okay, so I'm very influenced by one of the puzzles that I first tried to deal with is why? What made Gen Z? Because when I started this work, when I started writing the Kylie in the american mind with Greg Lukianoff, we first wrote our article in 2015 in the Atlantic, and we thought college students were millennials. The millennial generation started in 1981, and it was expected to be. If you're born all the way up through 2000, you're a millennial. That's what we thought. But then Jean Twenge came out with her book Igen, and her research showing that kids born around 1996 and later are very different, much higher rates of mental illness. And so when you look at the millennial generation, their mental health is actually pretty good. You know, the youngest millennials are a little bit more like Gen Z, but for the most part, the millennial's mental health is fine. They made it through puberty before they got their first smartphone and social media account. So if you didn't get so, you know, millennials, like a lot of them, got Facebook when they were in college. In fact, originally, Facebook was only for college students.

You had to be in college to get Facebook. So what we see in the data is that if you didn't get a smartphone and social media until you were 18 or older, your mental health is fine. I now, you know, let's say you're a 35 year old right now. You might feel overwhelmed. You might feel that this thing is stressing you out, but you had normal brain development. You used technology when you were a kid. You had a flip phone. You used it to connect with other kids. You used it, you know, you'd have to text, and it was hard to text, and you had to use your thumbs and press number keys. But you use the technology as a tool to help you meet up with your friends. Or maybe you called them on the phone. That was it. That's all your phone could do. But if you got a smartphone in social media at the start of puberty, which is what almost all kids do now, that means you're going through puberty on social media and with a massive entertainment, with a supercomputer and an entertainment system in your pocket with you all the time.

So my point is this, if we can protect childhood and let kids get through puberty, and then we give them the goggles and the virtual girlfriends and everything else, their lives are still going to be kind of messed up by this stuff. But at least their brains matured and they're probably not going to be depressed and anxious for life. If we. If we keep giving it, you know, it used to be at, you know, 1011 is when kids get their first smartphone. Now it's more. It's going down to five or six. If we keep giving little children a touchscreen device, including an iPad, and using it as a babysitter, and saying, oh, yeah, yeah, you just, you know, here. Here's your device. I'm busy. I'm doing email. I'm cooking. Here's your device. If we keep doing that, we're not. Our brains are not going to adapt to that. Children's brains are not going to somehow evolve so that that becomes okay. It's not going to be okay.

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Yeah, and it's such a harsh reality. But it's true that people have less time. We have less. We are doing so much more. It seems we are living further away from family reasons why the iPad is becoming the babysitter, that feels validated because we're not living in bigger family spaces. We don't have the support of our neighbors. We don't have the resources or the funds to have a paid babysitter or whatever it may be. So there's so many almost valid reasons for why we even say, take the iPad.

No, that's right again. In my book, I have almost really no criticism for parents. And some people say it's the parents responsibility. It's their fault. Why aren't you blaming the parents? To which my answer is, you know, I'm a parent. I know a lot of parents, a lot of us are really trying, and it's really hard. I mean, the technological environment now is such that, you know, if you don't give your kid a smartphone, she's left out. And she, you know, says, dad, I'm the only one. I'm left out. So parents are trying. And as a social psychologist who studies morality, I know that if one person does something that seems evil, well, maybe they're, maybe they're evil. But if an entire society and if an entire planet changes at the same time, in the same way, it's not individuals fault. And so if parenting changed, certainly across the english speaking world, we can't blame the parents for that. There must be some reason why we all freaked out and began overprotecting. So, yeah, I don't blame the parents. I say we're stuck in systemic problems, and I'm proposing norms by which we can escape.

And I think anyone, when I've been mentioning you were coming on the show, I was talking to people about your work, and I was talking about your recommendations of no social media before 16, no phones before 14, and I don't think there's any adult that I spoke to that had any debate with either of those. I think everyone looked at me, you know, and I'm talking to everyone 25 and up. But anyone that I talked to 25 and up went, that makes perfect sense. I think that's a great idea. And what a brilliant recommendation. Like, when do we get started?

That's right. That's right. People are ready to get started because everyone sees it.

Yeah. And obviously in the book you hold, you say, here's what governments can do. Here's what technology companies can do, here's what schools can do. I think my question is, and I know you've talked about what they can do in so many other places, which is fantastic, my question is, how do we actually get that to be a reality. Like, what does it actually take to change norms? Because I was trying to think, and I'd love your take on this, like, when was the last time we tried to do that in any sphere of life?

Oh, sure.

And how did it go? Oh, and where did it work and where did it fail?

So we have a lot of experience with norms changes. So one of the clearest is smoking. It took 20 or 30 years. When I was in high school, in the seventies, a bunch of kids smoked. Most of us didn't, but a bunch of high school kids smoked age 15, 1617. And beginning in the eighties or nineties, there was an anti tobacco campaign, and it took a few decades, but the rates of smoking are very, very low. Now. There's vaping. Kids moved on to vaping, which is bad, but not as bad as smoking. Smoking norms around LGBTQ and shaming and bullying and using racial slurs. These norms have changed radically in the last 20 or 30 years. So norm change normally happens over the space of a few decades. And we have many, many examples. We've been studied. So some things get more moralized. Like, smoking is now seen as evil, whereas homosexuality, which used to be seen as evil, is now seen as perfectly. Okay. Change over the course of decades. What's happening now is very different. What's happening now, the digital world has put us into an environment in which things can spread within minutes.

I mean, this has never happened in human history. Norms can spread around the world in days. Not norms, but ideas or memes can spread around the world in days. And what that means is that norms can change very quickly, too. And so all over the world, all over the developed world, in 2010, kids had flip phones, no social media on their phones. In 2015, we have now the phone based childhood. All over the world, kids are behaving the same way. So that changed very quickly, and that put pressure on everyone else to do the same thing. Okay, so we're stuck in this collective action problem that emerged very, very quickly, but by the same token, we can escape very, very quickly, because wherever I go, the main counter argument I get is parents who say, oh, you know, it's just. It's too late, the train's left the station. What are we going to do? Way of the future. So resignation is really the only obstacle I'm facing. But most parents, so many parents are upset by this that they're ready to act if only some way can be found to coordinate them. So, in the UK, I just got back from London a few days ago.

In the UK, the parents revolution started in February. A couple of mothers, Daisy Greenwell and Claire Reynolds, they just put up on an Instagram post. They put up that they'd started a WhatsApp group for parents who wanted a smartphone free childhood. They were going to delay giving their kids smartphones. And like overnight, tens of thousands of british parents signed up. There's a limit on WhatsApp groups. They had to form hundreds of WhatsApp groups. It spread like wildfire. And what I'm finding, I've been involved in a lot of efforts to change ideas and norms. It's very hard. Takes decades. On this one. I don't have to convince anyone on this one. It's like everyone's ready to act. They just need to know what to do. And so I'm proposing these four simple norms, as you said. The two that I would add, that I add that we haven't mentioned are phone free schools. We must keep the phones out of school. Just lock them up as soon as you come in.

That should be doable.

That is doable. This can be done by September. And the fourth is give far more free play and independence in the real world. That's the hardest one, actually, but that's incredibly. That'll be important. So let me actually just take advantage. I'm actually very excited you have this gigantic global audience.

Well, I was about to ask. My next question would be, how can we help?

Great.

What can we do? Because I want to be a part of the mission.

Great. Great. So here's what I can say. First, let me just give a little background, which is, is this just happened in the United States? No. So all over the world. Please go to afterbabble.com, comma, after B A B E L. That's my substack. It's free. Nothing's behind a paywall. That's where we're putting our research out. And you'll find articles there. We have one post on how the mental health epidemic is hitting all the anglosphere countries. And so Zack Roush, this was his first international post. We've gathered all the mental health data we can from around the world. Most countries don't have any, but the developed countries often do. So we can show that the same thing is happening at the same time in all the anglo countries. And then he moved on to Scandinavia. Scandinavia, same thing's happening at the same time in the scandinavian countries. Now that's very interesting because I just had an interview with a finnish journalist this morning and she said, in Finland, we let our kids out like our kids at seven, eight, they're out playing. But even still, she says, they go outside to play and they sit down and they're on their phone because they all have phones from the age of six or seven.

So this is happening all over the developed world. In Europe. Zach has a post on the rest of Europe. It's especially northern Europe. It's a little less so in eastern Europe and Europe. So first, there is variation around the world in mental health. That is definitely important. But what I'm finding is parents everywhere are seeing their kids not playing. They're seeing them sit on their phones at recess. In countries where the kids can have a phone in their pocket at recess, the kids are often sitting down on their phones. They're not running around and yelling and laughing. So wherever you are in the world, figure out whether you have this problem. You probably do that. Your kids, even if they're not depressed, suppressed, they're missing most of childhood. They're missing adventure. They probably have fewer hobbies. They probably don't read books. They probably don't spend much time with other people. So this is going to influence them in a bad way around the world. And then start talking to other parents. The simplest thing, most of us are on a text thread with the parents of our kids friends because you had to arrange for this birthday party.

Okay, I'll pick them up and, you know, so we're all in contact with the parents of our kids friends. Just start with that. Say, do you see this problem? Are you concerned? And especially if you have younger kids, you can delay when. You can delay when you give your kid a smartphone. If your kid's friends are in the same boat, then it's not hard. That's the point of this getting out of the collective action problem. I would also urge anyone around the world, bring up the subject of phone free schools. If your child is a number of countries, France, Australia, a few countries, and Britain just have guidance that schools must go phone free. They must either lock them up or lock up the phones in a locker, special locker, or in a yonder pouch, a lockable pouch. But if your country doesn't do that, start advocating for it. If you go to anxiousgeneration.com, that's the website for the book, we have a whole research page. Look at that. Send that to people. I have all kinds of talks I've given on YouTube. You can find my YouTube channel channel, lectures about why we need to go phone free.

So that's right. That's the thing we can do this year. We can do it in 2024 is make all our schools phone free, and that will allow our children to learn more. Because when they're sitting in class, they don't have the world's greatest entertainment center in their hand, and they're not texting, and they're not bullying each other, and they're not doing TikTok challenges. They're actually listening to the teacher or passing notes with other kids, which is fine. They're interacting with other kids. That's actually okay with me.

Why haven't schools done it already? I feel like it's a no because.

A few parents complain. In the United States, the only problem, the only reason they don't do it, is that american parents are so overprotective. Many not all so overprotective. And they've gotten so used to being able to text their kids throughout the day. So it could be, you know, hey, Johnny, how did your, how did your math test go? And they might even text that during the math test. And the kid checks his phone during the math test, you know, or, oh, I'm going to be late for pick, like, okay, did the kid need to know that during english class? Like, why not just, you know, let, when he gets his phone back, he can see, okay, you'll be late for pickup. And in America, we have the problem that because we do have school shooting now, they're extremely rare, but they're happening more. So some parents think, oh, if there's a school shooting, I want to be able to talk to my child. And this is a huge mistake, because if there actually was a shooter on a school campus, what you want is the kids to follow directions and do what they were trained to do.

You don't want every kid pulling out their phone and crying to mom and daddy. So I've spoken to many principals or heads of school, and I asked them, why don't you ban the phones? And they always say the same thing. There'd be a riot among the parents. Well, only among some parents. And so if you're listening to this podcast and you have kids in school, talk to the head of school and say, no, I want my kid to be in a phone free school. I want my kid to listen to the teacher and to interact with other kids. So that's something we can all do right away.

And do you have resources on how to have that conversation effectively? Okay, brilliant.

I do so@anxiousgeneration.com. comma, we do have some. You go to resources, take action, and then there's a tab for parents. There are also two organizations. In the United States, there's smartphonefreeschools.org and smartphonefreeschoolsmovement.org dot. So we have two different organizations that are, they show you. Here's a sample letter that you can send. Here's what you can do. In the UK, there's smartfront prechildhood dot co dot UK dot. So within a number of countries, there are already movements. But you know what, you can just use the resources from the american or the british one. And you know what, this global audience, start your own. Come to anxiousgeneration.com. we have a list of aligned organizations, mostly in the US and the UK. But there are a couple in Canada. There's, I think one in Germany. There's one somewhere in Latin America. So people are starting. These parents are rising up all around the world. Let's join them.

Let's talk about, before we dive into spirituality, because I was curious to see you had a chapter dedicated to that inside the book. Talk to me about the difference in girls and their use of social media versus boys, because like you said, and I'm glad we talked about young boys because often they can get forgotten in a conversation. But let's talk a bit about young girls and how social media is having a far more adverse effect on their mental health.

First, the evidence of a link is just very clear for girls. With girls, their mental health was very stable until 2012. And then in 2013, it starts rising. It really is a light switch. For boys, it's not so sharp, it's more gradual. Secondly, the correlations for girls are much higher. The correlation between time spent on social media and mental health problems. So for girls, the evidence is much clearer. Now. Why? Why the connection? In the book, I go into the psychology of motivation, and there are two categories of motivation. They're very important to understand, agency and communion. So agency is the desire to be an agent, to make things happen. You know, when I was a kid, it was so exciting to take a bb gun and shoot it tin cans, because I pull a trigger and the thing falls over. It's an incredible thrill. So that's agency, making things happen. Communion is connection. Being with friends, bonding, sharing stories, sharing emotions. I really enjoyed that, too. Everyone has both motives, on average. On average, boys and men have a little bit more on the agency side. It matters more to them when you let them choose what to do.

They're going to go out, they're going to build a tower and then knock it over. My friends and I, we used to build model airplanes like World War Two fighter jetse. Then we'd put, like, rubbing alcohol in them, and then we'd light them on fire. Like, that was really fun to do. So that's agency making things happen. Communion is connection. Girls, if you let kids play, the girls are much more likely to sit and talk. They want to connect. And what are they talking about? Other girls? They're talking about relationships. They're developing their mental map of space. So girls are a little more sophisticated about social relationships. They think more about them. They share emotions more, and that's a strength. That's. That's something. That's why women excel certain professions and men excel in other professions. But the differences aren't so much how good they are. They're what they enjoy doing. And so when the companies come along and they say, hey, do you want to see what everyone's doing? Do you want to see what everyone's saying? Do you want to see what they're saying about you? This is like catnip for girls. This is.

This is. They really target this at girls insecurities, and they get girls to come on, and then there's drama, which brings more girls on. Now, boys are affected by this, too, but it's just not as alluring. And if you give. So when everyone gets multiple screens, you know, by 2010, 2011, the iPad comes out. Multiplayer video games, everyone is tempted by screens. The boys go rushing into multiplayer video games and porn. They do a lot more of that. The girls go rushing for Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, especially the visual platform forms. Okay, so now why is this so bad for girls? And I go through, I think, five reasons in the book. So one is just the social comparison. Girls are always judged more on their looks. I just came across a quote from Epictetus. I read stoic writings in the mornings. Epictetus commented in ancient Rome about how when they turn 14, girls are judged as sexual partners, and they're made to focus too much on their looks. And this is a sad thing, that these girls are just becoming focused on their looks. What's happening now? Because girls, it's constant social comparison with other girls who get praised for being not just beautiful, but sexy.

So whether they know it or not, they're copying porn star type poses, porn star type looks, they're being hyper sexualized, massive social comparison. And on average, they don't measure up, because if everyone on Instagram is actually appears much more beautiful than in real life, well, then everyone else is below average. So the social comparison hurts girls more than boys. The nature of aggression is such that boys aggression is more physical, and it's ultimately about who can dominate who, who can beat up who. If it came to that girl's aggression, girls are just as aggressive, but it's different. Girls aggression historically and across cultures and even across species, is more relational. Girls will damage another girl's reputation or relationships. And, boy, does social media allow them to do that anonymously and on the weekends? It used to be that girls were safe from bullying on the weekends because they're out of school, but now they're not. And then there's the sexual predation. There are sexual predators that are going for boys, but if you're a boy on the Internet, you're not being constantly sexually propositioned by older men. I mean, it happens, but it's not that common if you're a girl on the Internet.

We just published an article from Antonio Behar, who was a Facebook whistleblower, and his research within Facebook, within Instagram, actually was that 13% of teenagers, 13 to 15 year old teenagers, had gotten some sort of a sexual proposition or someone coming onto them, a stranger coming onto them in the past week. In the past week, 13%. So if you're a girl online, it's just. You're just living among predators. You're like, you know, the animals we talked about before, in the woods, after dark, you're more frightened. So for all these reasons, when kids shifted from a play based child to a phone based childhood, it was more devastating for the girls.

Something that makes me crazy is when people say, well, I had this career before, but it was a waste. And that's where the perspective shift comes, that it's not a waste, that everything you've done has built you to where you are now. This is she pivots, the podcast where we explore the inspiring pivots women have made and dig deeper into the personal reasons behind them. Join me, Emily Tisch Sussman every Wednesday on she pivots. As I sit down with inspiring women like Misty Copeland, Brooke Shields, Vanessa Hudgens, and so many more, we dive into how these women made their pivot and their mindset shifts that happened as a result. It's a podcast about women, their stories, and how their pivot became their success. Listen to she pivots on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On his new podcast, six degrees with Kevin Bacon. Join Kevin for inspiring conversations with celebrities who are working to make a difference in the world, like musical artist jewel and what an equal opportunist misery is. It doesn't care if you're black or white or rich or poor or famous or homeless. If you were raised in misery systems, it's perpetual.

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Vinaya and I were talking about this yesterday. What's your take on? He was suggesting this idea of everyone on social media being verified.

Oh, yeah.

Having to be verified. What would be your take on that?

Oh, my God. Of course that has to happen. So think about it. In America, we're afraid to let our kids out, in part because we think they'll be abducted. There'll be a stranger hanging out by the playground, luring them into a car. And that has happened in America. It's very, very rare. There's only about 100, 150 cases of true kidnapping by a stranger in this country every year. So it's extremely rare. Does happen. We're very afraid of strangers approaching our children. But guess what? The strangers are not at the playground anymore. They've moved to instagram. Okay, so the idea that we're going to put our kids on platforms where strange men can reach them, flirt with them, say that they're a twelve year old boy or 15 year old boy, exchange fake photos, including a photo of your daughter in a bathing suit, or less. This is complete. And, Sadeena, I don't think we should be having children interacting with complete strangers. The sextortion rings. Now, it used to be just ten or 20,000 a year reported in the United States. It's way more now. There's a nigerian gang, the Yahoo boys, I think it's called.

They've industrialized it. So we don't know. But hundreds of thousands, millions of boys are getting extorted now, and dozens are known to have committed suicide. It's probably hundreds who have committed suicide, but most we don't know about because they're flirting with what they think is a girl. And then this criminal gang tricks them into sending a nude photo. And at that point, then they say, I have what I need to ruin your life. Send us. Send me $500 right now, or I will send this to all of your contacts. This is complete insanity that we let our boys and our girls interact with criminals day and night. So what I would like to see is first, we just have to raise the age. So below 16, they just shouldn't be on it at all. They need to be in contact with each other over 16. Okay. You know, this is the nature of the world. People are going to be interacting with strangers. There are some benefits to that. There's networking issues. But if you were on a platform like LinkedIn, LinkedIn, people use their real names. You don't hear problems about LinkedIn. The problems are especially on Instagram, Snapchat, any platform that has anonymous strangers interacting.

So if we had. If we had both, age verification, which is essential, we have to get age verification eventually and then also identity verification. Now here, I'm nothing saying that the government needs to mandate identity verification on all platforms. The world would be a much better place if we did that. There would be many fewer threats to democracy if we did that. Russian agents and chinese agents couldn't just drop crazy rumors and make us hate each other in America the way they do. So I would prefer that we live in a world where every platform has mandatory identity verification. You could still post with a fake name, but in order to open an account, you have to show I'm a real person in this country and I'm old enough, but I would be content even if it's not mandated. I would be content if platforms just made this the default. What if meta, or let's say not meta, they're not going to do it. But what if there was an alternative to Instagram in which people had to be verified, and then they had all kinds of other safety features if they have an immune system built in now, how would I feel about letting my 16 year old daughter on that?

Much better than on a platform where she's interacting with criminals from around the world.

Have you spoken to Meta?

Yes, I've spoken.

Why would they not do it?

Well, they say they're working on it. They say they're working on age verification, but I've seen nothing from them. I shouldn't say they haven't done nothing. They've done a few things. One thing is they, at least, I think they set the privacy defaults to high for under 16. I think it is. Whereas it used to be you're a nine year old, you lie, you say you're 13, and what you say is public. That's completely insane. So they have taken a few steps, but not much. And again, Antonio Behar's testimony to the Senate last year was, I showed them what's happening, the sexual solicitation of teens. I told them a simple way to have this reported. They didn't do anything. So I think meta in particular has shown itself resistant to changes suggested by people within. That's why we have a couple of Facebook whistleblowers. So I'm hoping that market competition will help. I'm hoping that Congress will repeal the mistakes it made in the United States. We created this problem for the world. Our companies created this stuff. Our congress said that we're not allowed to sue them for what they do to our kids.

They can show our kids whatever they want and we can't sue them. It's a special law that says we can't sue them, but in other countries they can. And so I'm really hopeful that all around the world, people initiate lawsuits when their kids have committed suicide because of things that happen on social media. I hope that people will initiate proceedings if they can, if it's clear that it was caused by online. Online activity. And then Congress, the US Congress, created this very ridiculous law that the age at which you can sign a contract with a company and give away your data without your parents knowledge, without your parents consent, is 13, which is insanely low that I think needs to be 16 or 18. But it was set to 13 in 1998 with no enforcement. In fact, the way the law is written, as long as. As Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat, as long as they don't know you're underage, they're fine. But if they ask and then they find out that you're under 13, well, then now they're responsible. So it's very important for them that they not know how old their users are.

And we have to change that. We have to get to the point where they have to know, of course, they do know how old their users are. They know everything about their users, but they don't kick them off. So we have to get to the point where the companies are held responsible for underage use in the physical world. It's like, it's so absurd. You know, people say, tell me. Well, it's the parents job to keep them off. Okay, imagine a world in which we generally think kids should not be exposed to hardcore sex, to drugs, to violence and to addiction. So we have age limits on bars, strip clubs, brothels. There are, you know, the brothels in Nevada and in Europe and casinos, we have age limits on those. What if someone said, you know, it's the parents job to keep the kids out of that. If they don't want their 13 year olds in a brothel, they should stop them from going to brothels? Like, no, that's not the way it works. Like, no, this is a business. This business is hurting kids. This business is responsible for checking ids, for keeping out children.

Yet in the online world, we say, well, you know, what are you going to do? You know, nine year olds are going to be watching beheading videos, they're going to be watching anal sex. They're going to be watching the cat in a blender video. Have you heard of this one? Cat in a blender?

I didn't know that one.

It's exactly what it sounds like. And this is something that kids are.

Exposed to, like a little.

It's an actual cat put in a blender and killed. Yeah. I have not watched the video because I don't ever want to see it, because I'll never unsee it. But I did enough research to know this is not just an Internet rumor. This actually happened. It was in China. So, you know, this is the world that our kids are now inhabiting. And I'm saying, no, no, wait. At least till you're 16, get partway through puberty before you're immersed in this garbage. And that is a great transition to our spirituality discussion.

Well, it's an ironic situation where we were glorifying the millennials to have been much more productive and effective. But a lot of the millennials who created amazing companies are the companies that now creating this challenge.

That's right. That is an irony.

Yeah. But I read something around over ten years ago, and it talked about how humans defined what was most important to a community, a city or a town based on the tallest buildings building that was built. And so previously, it was the church or the place of worship. A few years later, that transformed. A few decades later, that transformed to the government building, and then decades later, that transformed to the corporate offices, and now the tech companies or the financial institutions. And so we saw how society has shifted its north star. I was curious to see why you brought a chapter on spiritual elevation and degradation into this conversation, and how is it connected?

Yeah. Was called the happiness hypothesis. Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. What I did in that book, it grew out of my teaching, psych 101, introductory psychology at the University of Virginia. I noticed when I was trying to explain psychology to 300 students, I would quote Shakespeare, there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Well, that insight is actually also Marcus Aurelius and Buddha. Buddha says, we are what we think with our minds. We make the world. And so I realized, wow. Across the millennia, across the continents, people have come to these deep insights about psychology, about happiness, about love, about consciousness. So I collected. I read a lot of ancient wisdom all over the world, and I took out every psychological claim, and I organized them, and I made it into ten chapters. And so some of them are like, be slower to judge, quicker to free forgive. Jesus says, judge not, lest ye be judged. And I have a whole chapter on how our moral psychology is such that we jump to judgments. We care about our tribe. We don't care about the truth. So that was my background. I wrote that book on ancient wisdom, and then I wrote the coddling the american mind with Greg Lukianoff, and we talked about these three great untruths, the ways that students are being taught that they're fragile.

Ancient wisdom is what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. There's quotes from all over the world about that, but kids are being taught, no, you're fragile. Like, if someone says a word or a name, that can be violence against you. So we're making mistakes here. So that's sort of my background is thinking about ancient wisdom in psychology. All right. So then I end up writing this book, the anxious generation. And it's July of last year, and I'm way behind deadline, and I'm already really stressed about, like, you know, I'm so far past the deadline in order for us to get the book out. But I felt like, you know what? I just wrote this whole book about kids. I haven't said anything about adults, but we're all feeling it. Most of us, at least, are feeling it. Something is wrong. You know, the. You know, when I got my first iPhone, it was so amazing. I loved it. But these technologies have become our master. They're changing our lives. And I decide, you know what? I'm going to write a chapter for adults. I'm just going to stick in a chapter. What is it that's happening to all of us?

And I just started making a list. You know, it keeps us indoors, it keeps us distracted. And I suddenly realized, wow, almost all the ancient insights into how to live the phone based life is the opposite. And once I saw that, I said, oh, my God, that's the structure for this chapter. So I opened it with my earlier work on moral elevation. I study moral emotions. I used to have writings on moral elevation, which everyone will recognize. When you see a story about, you read a story you see on the news, or anything about heroism, about loyalty, about devotion. A dog that was so devoted to its master, and it keeps coming to the train station to greet him. We're easily moved, and we feel it. We feel it in our chest. It's the vagus nerve gets activated. Our heart rhythms change, their hormonal effects. There's oxytocin is released, women lactate. I showed that experimentally in a study with Jennifer Silvers. So I did all this research on moral elevation, and the key to it is the psychology of UP and Down. Some things make us feel closer to God. Some things make us feel further from God.

That's the way cultures talk about it. And it's always a vertical metaphor. God is up, the devil is down. So this is my view. I'm a jewish atheist Myself. I'm not a believer, but I've had some religious experiences. I've had a number of spiritual experiences. So I know these are an important part of human psychology. And once I put it in that framework, that ancient traditions are trying to move us up. They're saying, meditate. HIndu traditions, buddhist traditions, everything out of India is much more. Get control of your attention, get control of your consciousness. Otherwise it just gets drowned in trivia. But no, Meditate. Live purely. Do your work with MAstery. Come out like the moon. Come out from behind, the clouds. Shine. That's a Loose translation from the DHammapada. But what does a phone based life do? Constant notifications, constant interruptions. My students at NYU, you know, they get two or 300 notifications a day on average on their phones. Many of them never go ten minutes without an interruption. So I just made a list, and it was things like spiritual practices involve making something sacred. And we all agree this thing is sacred.

Sacred, and we worship it. We have sacred days. So in the jewish religion, we have the Shabbat Sabbath. You're not supposed to use electronics if you're orthodox. Things are sacred. And it's the sharing. The sacredness binds us together. That's what every religious community does. But a life online, nothing is sacred. There's no sacred time. The Internet never closes. It's global. There are no holidays. There are no holy days. And the constant demand for you to post about your brand, what you're doing. Look at the amazing life I have. So we have a posted after Babbel. We're just taking on this really wonderful british writer, a young woman named Freya, India Gen Z, a writer. And she has a post which starts with, you see a photo of a young woman posing for a sexy selfie on the train tracks in front of Auschwitz. Auschwitz. Here she is. She's on some tour of Auschwitz, the concentration camp. But it's a nice day in Poland. And so she poses in a sexy way in front of the gates of hell. And so if everyone's a brand manager all the time, nothing is sacred. Oh, and it's all about you.

Whereas one of the keys to spirituality is it's not all about you. You actually are not that important. It's only when you can transcend yourself, transcend yourself, self interest, that you can open your heart to God, to our higher motives, to love to other people. So, you know, you just go through the list. Whatever the ancients urged us to do to achieve spiritual progress, a life lived online, even for us adults, pulls us in the opposite direction.

I couldn't agree with you more. And I think what's really interesting when I'm hearing that, and that's primarily why I started this show. The goal and the intention behind this show was, how can we avoid gossip. How can we avoid the juiciest scoop? How can we avoid the lowest hanging fruit and still get as many or more views than everyone else on the Internet?

Beautiful.

Because my belief system was that if you were able to make wisdom go viral, then you could actually raise consciousness. And if we keep feeding people junk food and junk content, it's actually not that hard to get clicks and views. But if you actually, just as if you've retrained your habits, when you put a healthy meal in front of someone, it can taste like the tastiest meal in the world because you've retrained. And we've seen that. Like, I know that the audience that listens and watches us, which is all across the world, every age bracket and every demographic, is choosing to do something healthier with their time. But I wonder, when I'm listening to you, Jonathan, I'm hearing the challenge again, goes back to the ironic point I made, which is, if creators are not informed and trained in sacred creation, you end up creating things that have the flaws of the creator.

And so beautifully put.

Right? When I look at what the flaws of the creator.

That's beautiful.

Yeah. Like, I've always thought when everyone's like, oh, do you think AI will be manipulative of us? I'm like, of course, because we're manipulative. Like, it's, it can't not be anything that we've seen. So AI is going to take over the world. It's like, yes, because humans did. Like, it's not, it's not that surprising. And so when I think of the challenges that I see in even tv content and streaming content and how dark it's got, and whenever anyone says to me in my coaching practice that I have anxiety, the first thing I ask them is, what did you watch last night? And it's, there's such a direct correlation between these cliffhanger chemicals that are released in everyone's brain in order to keep them addicted. And so I go, where does this education come in? Because we can take away, and I agree with you, by the way. I'm fully with you. We take away what is currently causing an amplification of insecurity, envy, ego, and the acceleration of it. But the challenge is that the seed of that still remains and then gets exercised in adulthood. What do we do?

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Well, so the first thing is, we need to understand what's happening to us. And this is all so new. And my argument is that the world changed. Life changed between 2010 and 2015. And my book was about how it changed for kids, but it changed for all of us. And we're confused. We don't understand it. These things are powerful tools. We adults, we benefit from them in many ways, but we don't understand what's happening to us. And so my hope is that with my book, with your show, with a lot of people who are writing about this, I think people are coming to realize we were confused in the 2010s. It was so new, and I think we were beginning to get there to see this as a problem. And then Covid hit, and we all got super confused by Covid, and we needed our online devices all the time in Covid. But I think the reason why things are changing so fast now is because now that we're coming out of COVID now, everyone sees the wreckage. They see it in the new patterns in their children. They see it in the new patterns in themselves.

They're sick of being on Zoom calls all the time. They want crave human contact. So let's just see how far we can get just by raising awareness of this, as you're doing on your show, as many people are doing. So, two things I would urge people to think about are you need to control your own attention. Your attention is the most precious, among the most precious resources you have. So once you see your attention as a precious resource, you can stop letting companies just steal it from you. This is perhaps the most effective thing I do with my students in New York university. They're mostly 19 years old, plus or minus, and I show them how important attention is. They're business students. They want to have an effect on the world. They want to create something. And I show them. If you've given away all your attention to notifications to TikTok, you have no attention left. So you're not going to be able to do anything in this life. Do you want that? No, they don't. Well, okay, how about if we turn off almost all your notifications? How about if we take social media off of your phone?

So I'm hoping that some of them will quit entirely. But let's just start by just don't have it on your phone. You can use your laptop at home, whatever. If you need to check, you need to keep up with things. Just by making a few changes, they regain their attention. Now suddenly they have the mental capacity to think, to think big, to do things. So we need a global awareness, global recognition that our attention is being drained away as if there was a giant mosquito, like a giant drill stuck into our brain, sucking out our attention. We got to say stop. We've got to pull the needle out. That's the first thing. Another is to recognize that we need to be rooted in real communities with real relationships and face to face and touch. And so we need to resist taking the easy way. It's so much easier to set up a Zoom meeting than it is to get in your car and go to visit someone. And there's many times when you need to do that. But we need to rehumanize our lives, and that means more time with real people, not feeling so rushed and being able to be open to people and sharing experiences.

So that's another. There's so many I could list. I'll just list one more area where I want to really raise awareness, which is time in nature. So the modern world, we're further and further away from nature. And as we get busier and busier, we have no time. And so after 2012, when everyone's on social media all the time, everyone's on their phones, people are spending less time. People in America. Church attendance has plummeted since 2011 or so 2012 because no one has time. Everyone's so busy with their notifications, and they're in their posts. So exposing ourselves to beauty, to nature, going out for all walks. Go out for a walk. I have my students go out for a walk in a park with no phone and no headphones. They can't listen to music. They have to go, just walk slowly. And the effects are amazing because many of them, they've never noticed. They've never noticed how beautiful the world is. So we can take steps to rehumanize.

Our lives and how do we respiritualize them. How do we. Going back to that chapter, I feel like it's also a spiritualizing of intention, right? If someone's creating something, and I'm assuming when you do your research and the books you've written and even the one happiness hypothesis that you started with and the journey that you've gone on, it seems like your intention has been to uplift people through your work.

Certainly my early work, I used to study positive psychology, and the goal there was very explicit the whole movement started by Martin Seligman in the 1990s. The whole movement was, psychology is pretty good at taking people from negative six up to zero. We have some ways to bring you up to zero, but most people are actually above zero. Most people are actually doing reasonably well, and they want to go from plus two to plus seven, and psychology had nothing to say to them. So, yes, a lot of my early work was about how do we get to plus seven? But especially with the coddling american mind and now the anxious generation, and I'm now talking about how do we get from negative ten up to zero? I mean, that's the first step. Just help the next generation get out of defend mode, out of performance mode, and into a more human, real childhood.

It's almost like your students and the people that will go on to become entrepreneurs and business leaders. It's almost like the challenge still becomes that even if people think big and think successfully and think scaled and are open minded, it's almost like without the inherent belief that I should create something to help others, without that, no matter what you create, will in some way harm or cause difficulty to others, because it wasn't there. In not saying that you can do something perfectly and not saying you could build something without any flaws completely, that's no one can do that. But this idea that at least, if that's my intention, if that's at least my North Star, if that's my compass, and I'm wondering where people are getting that from, if at all.

Yeah, I'll take what you said, and I'll just make it a little bit more business friendly, please. What you said seemed to be something like, if you intend to make something that's good for people or if you have a positive intention, this is going to help people. And so many people think like, oh, I should go into a nonprofit work, I should go into charity work. A lot of young people are headed towards nonprofit work, and a lot of the nonprofits don't do very much, and they're wasting their talents there. Since I moved to a business school in 2011. I used to teach in the psychology department at the University of Virginia, but I've been at the NYU Stern School of Business since 2011. What I've come to see is that almost all businesses make the world better because they're creating something that people need. And I once heard a philosopher say, in an ideal capitalist society, the only way to get rich is by making other people better off. And so you don't have to be all prosocial. You can just say, look, there's a need for this kind of wrench. I invented this wrench.

The world's better off. People need it. And then I make money. That's great. I tell my students, if all you do is create goods and services that increase the general welfare of humankind because it's a useful product, that's great. You're part of progress. But now, when we look at it that way, now we get a new view of social media, because social media is not a normal consumer product. A normal consumer product, if it hurts the customers, they'll stop buying it, unless they're addicted. But with social media, and especially the advertising driven business model that Facebook developed originally, now many of them have copied. The customer is the advertiser. That's who pays the money. The consumer is the product. They're the victim, in a sense, of this. And that explains why for. Especially for TikTok and Instagram. I've seen a couple of surveys now, and I did with my own class. You say, do you use TikTok? So let's do it this way. I ask my students, how many of you use Netflix? How many of you watch Netflix at least once a week? Almost all hands go up. How many of you wish Netflix was never invented?

Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Netflix is stories, full length stories. We enjoy it. Maybe we watch too much, but we don't feel it's ruining our lives. Okay, how many of you use TikTok once a week? Most hands go up. How many of you wish TikTok was never invented? Most hands go up. Same thing for Instagram. So we have this bizarre situation where a couple of big platforms, especially TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, a few others, they're sucking up most humanity attention. Billions and billions of people are spending hours a day. Most human attention is being drained away for a product that most people wish never existed. So this is, I think, the greatest destruction of human value in human history. These products should not exist, or at least they should not exist in their present form, unregulated, not responsible for the harm they cause, causing massive harm. The people who use them don't overall wish they didn't exist. Something is deeply, deeply wrong with our society and the nature of these companies, which are now some of the biggest, richest companies on earth.

Yeah, and you could argue that fast food companies and junk food companies have done the same for years and got away with it, too.

Well, that's true. That's true. But at least there, people are making a decision now. Part of it is addiction, but at least there. I really enjoy Fritos. I just love Fritos. It's just something an m and M. Is there a few consumer products that I love? And I, you know, I know they're bad for me, but I make a decision about it, and I don't think, and they are, of course, they are adding to obesity, but I think social media is so much more pernicious because if I eat Fritos, that doesn't make anyone else eat fritos. But if I get on social media that, you know, the more of us are on, the more pressure there is to be on, and that's especially hitting our kids. We've got to break that up.

Absolutely. Jonathan, it's been such a joy talking to you and so insightful. I'm so glad you gave our audience so many great call to actions. And we'll make sure we put them in the caption and the comment section so people can find them easily. We end every episode of on purpose with a fast five or a final five. These have to be answered in one word to one sentence. So you have some. Something to play with.

Drink of water? Let me compose myself. This can be difficult.

Jonathan Knight, these are your final five. The first question is, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?

Well, what comes to mind? I don't know if it's the best, but what comes right away to mind is what my father said when he dropped me off at college. And he said, john, the most important things you learn, you're not going to learn in the classroom. And it was just, you know, it was just advice to go have experience. And that's actually something I tell my students now, is just take risks, have experiences.

Beautiful. Question number two. What is the worst advice you ever had to receive?

The worst advice I ever received? Hard to say. But I think generally a piece of bad advice that young people receive is just follow your passions. That's important. But I think many young people now think that they need to be engaged in work, which is not just rewarding, but socially valuable, as though my first job after college has to have all these features. And what I try to tell them is, no, no, you want to end up there. You want, you know, in a decade or two. You want to have work that you love. That doesn't mean you have to love every moment of it. You know, think long term. Think about the skills you need. Think about the toughening you need. Think about the experiences you need. And it might even be unpleasant for a while, but think long term.

Great. Question number three, an experience that you'd never thought you'd ever try, but you're glad you did.

I'm really pro experience. I'm very high in openness to experience, and I always kind of wanted to try out everything. So whether it was psychedelic drugs or travel all over the world, so I actually can't think of anything.

So you've done them all.

Well, I mean, I've done a lot of different things in my life.

I can't think of psychedelics.

Yeah. Which I've talked about on some podcasts. Now that Michael Pollan has written a book on it. Now that people can talk about psychedelic experience, that is, I mentioned before, I've had a number of spiritual experiences, and some of the most intense ones were on psychedelics.

Question number four, an experience that you're excited to try this year.

Experience. I'm excited to try this year. Well, this. Well, actually going to Wimbledon, my son.

Have you ever been before?

No.

I know it's going to be amazing.

My son is graduating from high school, and I wanted to give him something special. I said, what's something that's an experience you want to have? And he said, wimbledon. He loves tennis. We go to the US Open in New York. But he's never been to Wimbledon.

Oh, you're going to have the best time.

Yeah. So I was able to scrounge up a few tickets and we'll go a couple of days.

Fantastic. That'd be great. Okay, fifth and final question. We asked this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law that everyone had to follow, what would it be?

I mean, I'm thinking kind of practically here, you know? Yeah, please. One would be that businesses that impose costs on others that are not party to the exchange should have to bear the cost. So basically get rid of externalities. And social media imposes so many externalities. But if I have just like one dart to throw one thing to ask right now, I'm just going to say, let's get effective mandatory age verification on the Internet so that some sites are actually, like, porn sites are actually not open to children. I think a law like that would be, that's going to be the big hard one. That would be a real game changer. So again, not very, you know, hoping, you know, it would be great if I could come up with, you know, some version of Kant's categorical imperative here. But no, I'll just go with. Those are the ones I've been thinking about.

Fantastic. Everyone. Thank you so much for listening. The book is called the anxious generation. How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Jonathan Haidt, thank you so much for joining us on, on purpose. I really am encouraging everyone who's been listening and watching to go ahead to the sites that Jonathan recommended, see if we can be a part of the mission, support the work that Jonathan and his team are doing, because I couldn't agree with you more. I think this will, this is what I love about what you've done, is often I find a lot of thinkers and thought leaders create fear based arguments and without any concrete solutions. And I feel that only adds to the fear and anxiety in the world. And so I'm very grateful that we have very tangible, specific things that we're fighting for here. And I really, really hope that you'll lean on us to help you and help be a part of this with you.

Oh, thank you, Jay. I am wildly optimistic that this is a problem we can solve in a year or two.

Absolutely.

At least get most of the way towards solving your help in getting the word out. I'm so excited to reach a global audience because this is, this is a pan human. This is a global problem. So thank you, Jay.

Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you. If you enjoyed this podcast, you're going to love my conversation with Michelle Obama, where she opens up on how to stay with your partner when they're changing and the four check ins you should be doing in your relationship. We also talk about how to deal with relationships when they're under stress. If you're going through something right now with your partner or someone you're seeing, this is the episode for you.

No wonder our kids are struggling. We have a new technology and we've just taken it in hook, line and sinker. And we have to be mindful for our kids. They'll just be thumbing through this stuff. You know, their mind's never sleeping.

Something that makes me crazy is when people say, well, I had this career before, but it was waste. And that's where the perspective shift comes that it's not a waste, that everything you've done has built you to where you are now. This is she pivots, the podcast where we explore the inspiring pivots women have made and dig deeper into the personal reasons behind them. Join me, Emily Tisch Sussman, every Wednesday on she pivots. Listen to she pivots on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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You know, I found myself moving upstate.

In the middle of this fracking fight.

You know, and I'm trying to raise.

Kids there, and my neighbor's willing to poison my water.

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