#2121 - Jonathan Haidt

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Hello, Jonathan. Good to see you, sir.

Good to see you again, Joe.

The same problems that you talked about when you were here last, that I've referenced many times since on the podcast, have only exacerbated, unfortunately. And that's why you wrote this, The Anxious Generation. And it could not be more true, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. I don't think anybody can dispute that.

Yeah, when I was on last time, there was a dispute.

There were some psychologists who said,

oh, this is just a moral panic. They said this about video games and comic books. And, you know, no, this is not a real thing, they said.

Now they don't.

Yeah, I think it was pretty obvious. I think it was only their preconceived notions that were keeping them from admitting it before, or at least looking at it before. Or maybe they don't have children. You know, could be that. I think a lot of older people, particularly boomers, they're a little bit disconnected from it, because they're not, unless they're addicted to Twitter, you know, they're not engaging in this stuff.

Yeah, and they're often thinking, you know, when I was a kid, we watched too much TV and we turned out okay. Yeah. But part of the message of the book is that social media and the things kids are doing on screens are not really like TV.

They're much, much worse for development.

Yeah, and even watching too much TV, I don't agree that they turned out okay. I think it had a pervasive effect. It did, but nothing like this.

Yeah, well, that's right. Because, you know, look, when we were watching TV, I'm a little older than you. I was born in 1963.. So I grew up watching a lot of TV. You know, maybe, you know, an hour or two a day, weekdays, and then two or three hours on the weekends.

You're arguing about things. You're eating.

So it's actually pretty social. Right.

But now kids are spending, the latest survey, Gallup.

finds that it's about, what, five hours a day just on social media, just social media, including TikTok and Instagram. And when you add in all the other screen-based stuff,

it's like nine hours a day.

And that's not social.

It's private on your little screen. You're not communicating with others.

So, you know, in all these ways, the new way that kids are digital is really not like what we had when we were watching TV.

It's also an extraordinary amount of wasted resources. I'm always embarrassed when I look at my phone. When I see my screen time, like, four hours. Like, that's four hours. I could have done so many different things with.

That's right.

And so that's the concept of opportunity cost,

is this great term that economists have, which is the cost of, you know, if you buy something, you know, if you invest, you know, an hour of your time and $100 to do something, how much does it cost? Well, you know, $100, but you could use that $100 and that hour for something else. So what are the things you gave up? And when screen time goes up to, now, it's about nine hours a day in the United States, nine hours a day, not counting school.

Average, average. Is that for a certain age group?

Which are teenagers, yeah, not little kids.

But, you know, 13 to 15, 17,. that range, that's when it's heaviest. It's around nine hours a day.

And so the opportunity cost is everything else. Like, imagine if somebody said to you,

Joe, you know, you've got a full life. Here, you have to do this thing, this additional thing, for nine hours. Like, that's insane. That would push out everything else, including sleep.

When you are now talking to people that agree that this is an issue, what changed?

So, you mean, what changed? Like, why is there now more agreement?

Yeah.

So, in 2019, when I was last here with you, my book, The Coddling of the American Mind, had just come out. And back then, people were beginning to sense that, you know, this internet, the phones, the social media that we are all so amazed by, you know, there was a very positive feeling about all this stuff in the early part, you know, like in the 2000s. It was beginning, sentiment was beginning to turn.

But there was a big academic debate,

because when you look at studies that look at how, you know, do kids who spend a lot of time on screens, do they come out more depressed? The answer is yes, but the correlation is not very big. So there was a big argument among researchers. And that's when I got into this around 2019, really getting into that debate. And I think that Gene Twenge and I really had good data.

showing, you know, there is an issue here. And then COVID came. And that confused everything.

Because, you know, basically when I was on with you the last time, 2019, I was saying,

you know, what kids most need is less time on their devices and more time outside. playing unsupervised. Let them be out unsupervised.

That's what we needed, 2019.

COVID comes in, boom, exactly the opposite. What do kids get?

No more time unsupervised. You can't even go out. I mean, in New York City, they locked up the playgrounds.

They locked up the tennis courts. It was insane.

No time outside with your friends.

Oh, spend your whole day on screens. So that made everything worse.

But people thought, oh, yeah, the kids are really messed up now from COVID. But they were wrong. COVID was terrible for a lot of kids. When you look at the mental health trends over the last 20 years, COVID was a blip. Actually, you know what?

Did you send the data to Jamie so he could pull it up?

I haven't sent it yet, but I'll – oh, right. Do you want to stop and do that?

Yeah, let's pause real quick so you can give out – Jamie will give you the email address. Okay, we're back.

All right.

What are those things?

Oh, so, these are stickers for your kids.

So, as part of the book, I'm trying to launch a movement called Free, the Anxious Generation. Here you go. You have two younger kids.

And so I've teamed up with the artist who did the book cover,

Dave Cicirelli, who's created these incredible artworks. There's going to be billboards. He's putting together a 12-foot-tall milk carton, which is going to be traveling around different cities with this.

Missing childhood. Do they do that anymore, the milk carton thing?

No, I don't think so.

Okay, so here's the graph.

Okay.

So this is the graph that I showed last time I was on. What it shows, because I know most of your listeners have probably just listened to the audio, it shows that from 2005 to 2010,, the rates of depression in girls was about 12% of American girls had a major depressive episode in the last year, and for boys it was about 4% to 5%.

And it's flat. There's no change.

Then, all of a sudden, around 2011,, 2012,, 2013,, the numbers start rising, especially for girls, and it goes all the way up to 20% for girls. So that was a huge rise, and that's what I showed you last time.

What is the difference between boys and girls?

So girls suffer from more internalizing disorders.

That is, when girls have difficulties, they turn it inwards.

They make themselves miserable. So girls suffer from higher rates of anxiety and depression. That's always been the case, especially once they hit puberty.

Boys, when they have psychological problems,

they tend to turn it outwards.

They engage in more violent behavior, deviant behavior, substance use.

So boys, it's called externalizing disorders. But you can see, both boys and girls are getting more depressed. It's just that the effect is bigger for girls.

So boys have gone up to about 7%, and girls are way up to 20%.

That's right, and that was 2019.

So one out of five girls.

That's what it was. That's right.

Was.

Was. That's right. And then COVID comes in. So if we can have the next slide.

And if you look at the 2021 data point, you can see that little peak at the very top there. That's because of COVID. That is, COVID did increase things. It did make kids more depressed.

But as you can see, it's a blip.

COVID was just a tiny effect compared to this gigantic increase. And so on the last slide, it was 20% of girls. Now it's almost 30..

Almost 30% of girls who had a major depressive episode in the last year.

And for boys, it's up to 12%, which is still quite a lot.

It's more than a doubling, although much less than for the girls.

It's still, even if you look at boys, or, excuse me, if you look at girls from 2018 pre-COVID, that ramp is very steep. The upward ramp.

That's right.

And that might be TikTok.

So what happens is a lot of things change around 2011, 2012.

So my argument in the book is that we had a complete rewiring of childhood between 2010 and 2015.

They didn't have Instagram. They didn't have high-speed data. So they would use their flip phones to get together with each other. They'd communicate with each other. By 2015,.

And this really messes up the girls.

So that's what I think happened between 2010 and 2015.

We don't have good data on just TikTok. But I suspect that that sort of extra acceleration might be due to TikTok.

What specifically about TikTok?

So this is something I'm just really beginning to learn. I don't even have much on it in the book.

There are myths.

We see plays. We see television shows. And so I asked my undergrads at NYU. I said, how many of you use Netflix? Almost everybody says yes.

How many of you wish Netflix was never invented? Nobody. Nobody.

Watching stories is not a bad thing. TikTok is not stories. It's little, tiny, tiny bits of something. And they're short. They don't add up to anything.

They're often disturbing and disgusting.

People are being hit by cars.

People are being punched in the face. And it's much more addictive and with no nutritive value.

They're not really stories. And so it seems to be much more addictive. Kids really get hooked on it, much more so than Netflix or anything else. And it depends on what you're watching. But I suspect that so many of them are consuming stuff about mental illness.

Now, I know that there's some push right now, currently to ban TikTok.

Well, it's a national security issue. So, yeah, right. So thank you. Let's separate the national security issue from the mental health issue.

I have a lot of libertarian friends. I have a lot of libertarian sympathies. I would be uncomfortable about the government banning a company or a product because it's harmful to children. I personally think we should just have age verification. We should not have kids on certain things.

But if it was just a question of, you know, this is really bad for children, let's ban it. Like, no, I don't think I would support that. But TikTok is different because it is a Chinese-owned company. And, as many of your listeners will know, China, it says in whatever, it doesn't have a constitution, I don't think. But by law, every Chinese company must do what the Chinese Communist Party tells it to do.

They might have similar effects to TikTok. But the Chinese government can literally tell ByteDance to change what kids are seeing. And they do that in China.

They tell them in China, you have to have this kind of content and not that kind of content. There was an incredible episode of, you had Tristan Harris on.

Tristan Harris has this amazing podcast episode where they go into the national security risks. And they show that the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, TikTok and Russia changed radically.

Like, the government was on, like, you know, TikTok was on it. Like, yep, we're going to do what, you know, what Putin wants us to do. So the idea that the most influential, the most influential platform on American children,

the idea that that must do what the Communist Party tells it to do, at a time when we have mounting tension with China and the possibility of a war. I mean, as Tristan says, imagine if, in the 1960s, the Soviet Union owned and controlled, you know, PBS, ABC, NBC, and all the kids programs, you know, we would never have allowed that.

So I hope, listeners, I really strongly support this bill. I think Rep. Mike Gallagher, I think, was one of the ones proposing it.

Or at least certainly advocating for this issue. I hope people will not see it as a TikTok ban, but they'll see it as an urgent national security move to force ByteDance to sell to a non-Chinese owner.

And specifically, what are they pointing to when they say national security risk? What specifically have they seen?

So a lot of it seems to have to do with the data question.

Like all the, you know, Facebook pioneered this model, in which the person using the product is not really the customer. They don't pay the money. They're, you know, they're the product. The user is the product, not the customer.

And they give them data.

And the data can be used for all sorts of purposes, especially marketing and advertising. And so TikTok has enormous amounts of data. And they can get all psychological on it, because they know exactly how long you hesitate or how much you like certain kinds of videos. You know, many people have written articles on how TikTok seems to have known they were gay before they did that sort of thing. So TikTok has extraordinary amounts of data on most American, most Americans, certainly most young Americans.

Like it's in a server over here in Singapore.

I don't know where, but it's, you know, it's not in China.

Oh, come on. Come on.

You know, there's no way. it could possibly be the case that the data is really separated and not available to the Chinese Communist Party.

And what are they pointing to in terms of the danger of this data that makes them want to have it sold to an American company?

I don't know whether the motivation behind the bill. I don't know whether it's that the Chinese would have some access to data on American citizens or whether what most of what most alarm me when I, when I heard the Tristan Harris podcast, was the ease of influencing American kids to to be pro this or pro that on any political issue.

You're seeing that with Palestine and Gaza.

Yeah, I think so.

You're definitely seeing that now. It's, it's very, it's very obvious. Well, it's, it's very obvious that many things with tick, tock, trans stuff and there's a, there's a lot of different things that they're encouraging. And, you know, people that are opposed to that are being banned, which is also very odd.

Anyone has the ability to really harm anyone else. There's an extraordinary amount of intimidation available via social media. And so this has led the leaders of all kinds of organizations to run scared. Greg and I, Greg Lukianoff, and I saw this in universities.

Why don't the university president stand up to the protesters who are shouting down visiting speakers?

Why don't? isn't there a grown up in the room?

And then we saw it in journalism of newspapers and editors who wouldn't stand up for journalistic principles. And so I think what has happened here is that social media allows whoever is angriest and can mobilize most force to threaten, to harass, to surround, to mob anyone. And when people are afraid to say something, that's when you get the crazy distortions that we saw on campus, or that or that Riley Gaines was seeing, to just that. people are afraid to speak up. And in a democracy, in a large, secular, diverse democracy, we have to be able to talk about things.

And so that's part of why we're in such a mess now is. I've argued that it's when social media became super viral after 2009,, 2010,. you get the like button, the retweet button.

Social media wasn't really bad or harmful before.

That wasn't terribly harmful before then. But by 2012, 2013,, it had really become as though everyone had a dart gun. Everybody could shoot everyone. And that's when we began sort of like teaching on eggshells in universities, because our students could really do a lot of damage if we said one word they didn't like.

And it's not just the students, which is really disturbing. We've talked about this before. There was an FBI security specialist who estimated that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of the Twitter accounts were bots.

Yeah.

Which is very strange, because that means that they're mobilizing specifically to try to push different narratives.

Yeah, that's right. So if you think of, you know, people say, well, now Twitter is the public square or things like that.

You know, it's not a public square. It's more like the Roman Coliseum. It's more, like, you know, a place where people say things and the fans are in the stands are hoping to see blood. To move our discussions onto platforms like that, that can be manipulated, that anyone doesn't have to be a foreign intelligence service. It could be anybody who wants to influence anything in this country or anywhere in the world.

They can, you know, for very little money, they can hire someone to create thousands, millions of bots.

And so we're living in this sort of funhouse world where everything is weird mirrors and it's very hard to figure out what the hell is going on.

Have you ever sat down and tried to figure out a solution to this other than trying to encourage people not to use? Jimmy, did something happen to the volume just dropped lower? OK, so what was I just saying? We're talking about solutions other than asking kids to not use it, which is very hard to do.

Yeah, that's right. So when we're talking about the democracy problems and the manipulation of politics or anything else, those are really, really hard. I have a few ideas of what would help. And we're not going to do them, because, you know, all of them are like the left legs and the right doesn't, or vice versa.

What are those ideas?

Oh, things like, you know, like identity authentication. If, if large platforms had something like know your customer laws, that is, you know, if you want to open an account on Facebook or on X, you have to at least prove that you're a person. And I think you should be able to have to prove that you're a person in a particular country. I think you should, over a certain age, you prove those to the to the platform, not directly.

You go through a third party.

So, even if it's hacked, they wouldn't know anything about about you. Just you establish that you're a real person and then you're cleared.

Go ahead. You open your account.

You can post without you. don't use your real name. If we did that, that would eliminate most of the bots.

That would make it much harder to influence. That would make us have much better platform for democracy.

Is that possible to do internationally?

Well, the platforms can certainly require whatever they want for membership.

Right now, they are legally required to ask you if you're over 13.

You're in. So those those rules could be changed and they could be required to to do more. And, you know, they're based in the United, most in the United States, but their users are all around the world. So, yeah, that could be done.

So one of the things that people are nervous about when it comes to authentication, authentication, is that if you could do that, then you could target individuals. They wouldn't be allowed to be anonymous. So you eliminate the possibility of whistleblowers.

No, no, no. That's no. The point is that the point is that you just have to establish that you are a person. It doesn't mean that you have to post under your real name. And, you know, even if you want ultra high security, you could just have dissidents in repressive countries.

So I understand the concern and there are values to having anonymity.

But I think what we're seeing now is that the craziness, the way it's affecting, it's, you know,

it's making it harder for democracies to be good, vibrant democracies.

And it's making it easier for authoritarian countries like China to be powerful and effective authoritarian countries. So I think we have to start weighing the pluses and minuses, the costs and benefits here.

Right. But how would you ramp that up? Like, how would you implement that internationally? Like, say, if you're talking about people in Poland, just pick a country.

Yeah. Well, the platforms can do whatever they want. But then, yes, how would if a company starts in Poland, then the U.S. Congress would have no influence on that.

Right. Like China, could pretend and they could falsify the data that shows that these are individuals.

Oh, I see.

They wanted to empower a troll farm.

Oh, I see. You're saying, even if American companies did this, the Chinese could still get around it. Yeah, that's true. You're never going to have a perfect system. But right now, it's just so easy and cheap and free to have massive influence on anything you want.

But, yes, there are implementation problems. There's all kinds of political questions.

So my basic point is, man, those problems, I don't know that we can solve, but we can do better. Oh, and I should point out, a lot of these have to do with the basic architecture of the Web.

When we move from Web 1,, which was put up information, it's amazing. You can see things from everywhere to Web 2,, which was directly interactive.

Now you can buy things, you can post stuff. And it's the Web 2 that gave us these business models that have led to the exploitation of children and everyone else. And I'm part of a group, Project Liberty, if you go to projectliberty.io, that's trying to have a better Web 3,.

where people will own their own data more clearly.

As the architecture changes, it opens us up to new possibilities and risks.

So there are some hopes for a better Internet coming down the pike.

Actually, I just wanted to put all this stuff out there about democracy. to say this is really hard,

but when we talk about kids and mental health, this is actually amazingly doable. We could do this in a year or two. And the trick, the key to solving this whole problem with kids, is to understand what's called a collective action problem.

So there are certain things where, like if you have a bunch of fishermen and they realize, oh, we're overfishing the lake, let's reduce our catch.

And if one person does that and no one else does, well, then he just loses money.

But if everyone does it, well, then actually you can solve the problem and everyone can do fine. With social media, what we see over and over again is kids are on it because everyone else is. And parents are giving their kids a phone in sixth grade because the kid says everyone else has one and I'm left out. And over and over again, you see this. When you ask kids, you know, how would you feel if I took your Instagram or TikTok away?

I did it as a test with my students at NYU and a review of the book of The Anxious Generation in the UK Times. The woman ended by asking her 16-year-old, would you have liked there to be a social media ban until you were 16??

I think the daughter was like 18 at the time. This was last month. And the daughter says, would everyone else be off it too? And she says yes. And then the daughter says, yeah, I would have rather liked that.

How would you do that, though? How would you, would you get all the parents to do it? Would you get the social media companies to do it? Like, how would you do that?

I'm not counting on the social media companies or Congress.

I'm assuming we'll never get help from either one.

Now, I hope I'm wrong about Congress. But as a social psychologist, I'm trying to point out, you know, we can actually solve this ourselves. And so that's where the simplest one is. So I propose four norms.

If we can enact these four norms ourselves as parents and working with schools, we can largely solve the problem.

We can reduce, we can certainly reduce rates of mental illness a lot.

The first norm is the simplest. No smartphone before high school.

Now, people say, oh, my God, but my kid needs a phone.

Sure, give him a flip phone. Millennials had flip phones and they were fine. Flip phones did not harm millennials' mental health. They're good for communication. You text, you call, that's it.

So the first rule is no smartphones before high school.

And as long as a third of the parents do this, well, then the rest of the parents are free to say when their kid says,

Mom, you know, I need a smartphone. You know, some other kids have one.

Then you can say, well, no, you'll, here's a flip phone. You'll be with the kids who don't have one. Oh, and by the way, you're also going to get a lot more freedom to hang out with the other kids.

So we don't need everybody. But we need to break the feeling that everyone has to have one because everyone else has one.

Yeah. That sounds great on paper. But just I can't imagine that most parents would agree to it, because most, there's just so many parents that don't pay attention.

That's true.

Especially two families where two people are working. Yeah.

No, you're right.

Just when we look right now, it's kids with married. parents are trying harder to keep the kids off.

These things are good babysitting devices in the sense that the kids are off doing their thing. You don't think about them.

So it is true that this would not be adopted universally at first. But I think we could still develop a norm that it's just not appropriate for children to have a smartphone. They should have flip phones. And I think that any community that wants to do this, because what I find over and over again is that most parents are really concerned about this.

And this is across social classes.

Most parents are seeing the problems.

And so I don't have to convince parents to change their minds about something.

What I'm trying to do with the book is show them. here are four norms that are pretty easy to do if others are doing them. And these are going to make your kids happier, less mentally ill.

Yeah, like I said, it sounds like a good suggestion. I just don't imagine that with the momentum that social media has today and the ubiquitous use that kids are going to give it up. They're not going to want to give it up. I think there's a lot of kids that have had problems that if you talk to them alone and you say, wouldn't it be better if social media didn't exist? They've been bullied or what have you.

Well, you know, you may be right, but I'm encouraged because whenever I speak to Gen Z audiences, and I've spoken to middle schools, high schools, college audiences, I always ask, do you think I got this wrong or do you think this is the correct description of what's happening? They agree. They're not in denial. They see the phones are messing them up. They see that social media is messing up the girls, especially.

Second is no social media till 16.

But, you know, the big platforms like Instagram, the place where you're posting and the whole world is seeing and strangers are contacting you.

You know, I think the age is currently 13.

But even if they don't, parents, as long as many other parents are doing it, me, I, as a parent, you know, my, my, my kids are 14 and 17.

Yeah. If you again, if you could get them to say it. And I think the kids would push back so hard because so many other kids are on it. And that's how they interact with each other.

You're just reiterating the social, the collective action problem. You're just saying they react because all the other kids are on it. Yes. So it does require a big push.

But I think we're ready. I don't think we're ready in 2019.. It wasn't as clear. But now that we're through COVID, now that the numbers are through the roof, I think I think we're ready.

And if it starts in some places, not others, that's OK with me. That's the way it's going to be. And then we'll see whether it spreads.

And then we'll see the data.

Yeah. Because look at smoking. You know, smoking is highly addictive. It was very common up through the 1990s. And now it's very rare in high school.

And what was the third?

The third is phone-free schools.

And this one is happening. This is already happening. So I've published articles in The Atlantic and on my, on my sub stack, the AfterBabble.com.

Bringing together the research, when kids have a phone in their pocket in school, they're going to be texting.

Because if anyone is texting during the day, during the school day, they all have to check, because they don't want to be out of the loop. They don't want to be the one who doesn't know. So when kids started bringing smartphones into school instead of flip phones, academic achievement actually went down. Kids are stupider today than they were 15 years ago. I mean, stupider meaning measuring their academic progress.

And you hear laughter.

Whereas right now, in a lot of schools, it's just zombies looking at their phones in between, as they're walking from class to class.

Yeah. So the assumption is that from 2012,, kids are just much more distracted.

Oh, my God. I mean, look, Joe, I think I heard you say in one of – yeah, it was a conversation you had a few weeks ago with a comedian friend of yours. And I think this was a direct quote from you.

My fucking phone runs my goddamn life.

Does that sound like you?

Yeah, it sounds like me.

Okay. So,

Our brains developed.

We have the ability to stay on task. And, man, it is hard with notifications coming in. There's always so many interesting things you could do instead of what you need to do. So it's hard enough for us as adults. Imagine if you didn't have a normal childhood where you developed executive function, where you developed that ability as a teenager.

Because puberty is when the prefrontal cortex, the front part of the brain, that's when it rewires into the adult configuration. So the fact that we're scrambling kids' attention at the time when they're supposed to be learning how to pay attention, I think, is terrible.

Where do you think this is going? This is my concern, is that this is just the beginning of this integration that we have with devices. Yeah. And that the social media model – and it's been immensely profitable.

Yes. Oh, my God, yes.

It's been incredibly addictive. Yep. And there's a massive, massive amount of capital that's invested in keeping us locked into these things. Where do you think this goes from here? Have you paid attention to the technology?

Like AI?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. So let me just draw a very, very sharp, bright line between adults and children.

I'm very reluctant to tell adults what to do.

If adults want to spend their time on an addictive substance or device or gambling, I'm reluctant to tell them that they can't. So when we're talking about adults, I think where this is going is – well, where it's gone so far is everything that you might want becomes available instantly and for free, with no effort. And so in some ways, that's a life of convenience. But in other ways, it's messing us up and it's making us weaker. So you want sexual satisfaction?

Free porn.

And it gets better and better and more and more intense.

You want a girlfriend or boyfriend who you can customize?

You have that already. Advances in robotics are such that it's just a matter of time before AI girlfriends are put into these incredible female bodies that you can customize. So I think the adult world, for young adults especially, is going to get really, really messed up.

And again, I'm not saying we need to ban it now. But what I'm saying is, for God's sakes, don't let this be 11-year-old children's lives.

Let's at least keep children separate from all this craziness until their brains develop. And then they can jump into the whirlpool and the tornado.

But the fact that our 11-year-old girls are now shopping at Sephora for anti-wrinkle cream or all sorts of expensive skin treatments, this is complete insanity. So let's at least protect the kids until they're through puberty.

Well, that would be nice. That would be nice.

Kind of essential, I think.

It's just the way I see adults being so hooked on these things. There's so many adults that I know that are engrossed in this world of other people's opinions, of everything they think and say. And it just doesn't give you enough time to develop your own thoughts and opinions on things. That's right. So many people are dependent upon other people's approval.

Yeah, that's right. One way to think about this is let's look at junk food, which became very popular after the Second World War. The manufacturing of food became very good. There were science labs.

At Frito-Lay, they studied the exact degree of tensile strength that a chip should have before it snaps.

And, you know, how do you make this?

What's the perfect crunch? So they designed the foods to be as addictive as possible. And in the 70s and 80s, Americans switched over to a lot of junk food and we became obese, like a huge increase in obesity.

And that kept going on for a few decades.

As I understand it, obesity has finally turned around a little bit.

And many people are still eating huge amounts of junk food. But at least some people are beginning to say, you know what, I'm going to resist that. Deep evolutionary programming for fat and sugar. The companies played to that. They hijacked those desires and they got us hooked on junk food.

What's the root of that progress?

I don't actually know the numbers. I just know. a few years ago, I saw something that, for the first time, obesity actually went down in the United States. I don't know that. that's still true today, but this was like three or four years ago, before COVID.

Do we know what caused it to go down?

I don't. I'm just assuming that this is an issue that we dealt with as a society. And we didn't know what we were doing at first. And we got hooked. And the efforts to, you know, efforts to educate people and to develop healthier alternatives.

I'm sure Jamie can find something.

Okay. Yeah. Look it up online.

I'm surprised.

Is obesity still rising in the United States, or is it actually lower than it was 10 years ago? That's the question.

I mean, I quickly found this study here, but I haven't even got a chance to look at it yet.

Ah!

This is the second time I've done this. Something about this is giving me anxiety. I'm spilling it.

Update on the obesity epidemic. The Anxious Podcaster.

After the sudden rise, is the upward trajectory beginning to flatten?

Okay. So, it's a question. And what year was this?

So, do you think it's people recognizing that they're developing health issues and they're taking steps to discipline themselves and mitigate some of these issues? Or is there some sort of information push that's leading in that direction?

That I don't know, because it's not my field. But I would say that that is probably a necessary precondition, like understanding the problem and developing in people a desire to change it.

And then it's hard to change.

You know, I love chips.

I love chocolate. I love ice cream.

It's hard to change.

But over time, a society adapts. And now the question is, will we adapt to social media? Because the desire for sugar and fat and salt is very deep. The desire for others to think well of us, to hold us in esteem, I would say, is just as deep and much more pervasive.

It's much stronger, I would say. And so, because, you know, as adults, we're very concerned. You know, when I put out a tweet, you know, I know all this stuff.

I know how terrible this is for me to check.

I'm busy. I've got things to do. But I'll go back and I'll check how the tweet is doing. 30 seconds later. Like, I'll go, you know, and then I'll check again five minutes later.

But what I can say with not confidence, but what I think is the case, is, as long as our kids are going through puberty on social media and video games, and they're not developing executive control, I do not think they will be able to keep a handle on this as adults.

I do not either. Again, as you're saying, we are adults. We grew up without the Internet. And it's hard. We grew up without all these problems.

Okay. I don't read anything. I just post things. Yes.

I post things. I don't read comments.

That's really smart.

It's made me immensely more happy.

Yeah.

It's a massive difference. I very rarely use Twitter. The only reason why, or X, whatever, the only reason why I use it is to see information, to see things. I don't read anything about myself. And I certainly don't.

Because those are areas where various actors are, various parties, and actors and countries are trying to manipulate us.

Yes. And they're doing it.

They're doing a great job of it.

They're very focused. It's really incredible. It's incredible to see the impact that it has when you see 50 posts, 50 comments, and 35 of those seem to be not real people.

That's right. I think your strategy is very wise. And for this reason, when social media began, you would put something up and then people could comment on it.

Okay.

That goes until about 2013, 2014.

So you get basically everyone fighting with each other in the comment thread.

Yes. And what social media is good for is putting out information quickly. You know, I'm a professor. I'm a researcher. I am engaged in various academic disputes and debates.

And Twitter is amazing for finding current articles, for finding what people are talking about.

Yeah. So the function of putting information out is great.

But the function of putting something out and then watching everyone fight in the comments,

that's why I use the analogy of the Roman Colosseum, like with the gladiators.

That's just sick. There's nothing good comes from that.

Right.

My concern is that we are paddling upriver. Yeah. And that there's a raging waterfall that's powering this whole thing that you cannot fight against. And that we are moving in a direction, as a society, with the implementation of new, more sophisticated technology, that's going to make it even more difficult, unless you completely opt out. And some people are going to opt out, but it's going to be like my 600-pound life.

It's so sad. Yeah.

They're addicts. Yeah.

I share that fear.

Humanity has faced many crises before.

That doesn't mean, you know, as they say, you know, past performance is no guarantee of future success. So we've faced many crises, and we've always come out stronger.

I've never faced anything like this.

That's right. This is a rewiring. That's right. Exactly. That's right.

So we face many external threats. We face diseases. We face wars.

Those have come and gone.

But this is a rewiring of the basic communication network of society in ways that link up with so many of our deepest motivations. This is a challenge unlike any we've ever faced.

And, you know, so I think, you know, what we really need, I'm speaking as a university professor, is we really need great social sciences.

We need great sociologists.

We need people really studying this.

That too. Yeah. Well, we're trying to paddle, but that's the direction that we're moving in. Yeah.

That's right. That might be the case that, you know, so, yeah, we live at a very interesting time in history, when the, you know, in the 90s, the future looked so bright. And, yeah, now it doesn't.

My fear is that we are no longer going to become human. That we will no longer be human. We'll be a different thing. And I think the implementation of technology is what's going to facilitate that. I think we're, you know, how many years away from Neuralink and something similar to it.

Competitive advantage.

Yeah, that's the real fear of something like Neuralink or whatever. If they can figure out a Neuralink that doesn't require surgery. If they can figure out something that does that without surgery, the advantage of having that in a competitive sense in terms of, like, business and technology and industry. It's going to be massive and it's going to be so difficult to get people to not do that. That it's going to be like phones.

Oh, wow. One of the big ones that went to a satellite?

It was actually connected to my car in 1989. And it was very advantageous. My friend, Bill Bluenright, who owns the, he owned the Comedy Connection. He owns the Wilbur Theater now in Boston. And I got a lot of gigs from him because he could call me.

Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Yes, we are certainly headed in that way.

And I think the word human is a very good word to put on the table here. Some things seem human or inhuman.

And when you simply connect people, you know, Mark Zuckerberg sometimes says, how could it be wrong to give more people, more voice? If you're simply connecting people, making it easier for them to contact each other,

you know, I think that's mostly going to have good effects. And that happened with the telephone.

You know, we all got telephones and we could do all sorts of things.

We could coordinate with our friends. Telephones are great.

But when it became not technology, making it easier for this guy to reach you.

or me to communicate with you,

but rather it's a way to put things out, to try to gain prestige for me.

in front of thousands or maybe millions of people.

Now it changes all of our incentives. It changes the game we're playing.

You know, what games are we playing as we go about our day?

And the more people are playing the game of. I'm struggling to get influence in an influence economy where everyone else is on these seven platforms.

So I have to be too, or they have an advantage over me. That is the way that things have been rewired already. Already we're there. Yeah. Now you're raising the possibility that the next step is more hardware based,

that it's going into our bodies.

And I think that is likely to happen. And so I hope what we'll do now, and I hope my book, The Next Generation, will sort of promote a pause. Let's think where we are. Let's think what we've done. Let's look at what has happened.

Like. they can connect. They can form communities. It's going to be great. And now it's clear, no, it's been horrible.

It's been really, really terrible.

As soon as they got on, their mental health suffered.

You know, they might feel like they have a community, but it's much worse than what it replaces.

So I think what we're seeing is the sort of the techno optimist, the sort of the futurists who say, oh, it's going to be amazing. You know, we'll have Neuralink. We'll have all this technology.

We'll be able to do everything. Like here's, where we have to heed, I think, the warnings of the ancients, of religious authorities, of those who warn us that we are leaving our humanity.

and we're stepping into an unknown zone where, so far, the initial verdict is horrible.

So if we keep going without putting on some brakes,

yeah, I think we're going to a horrible place.

Yeah. My fear is that it won't be horrible.

Oh, it'll feel good.

Yeah, that it'll be amazing. So my fear, my genuine fear, is the rewiring of the mind in a way that can enhance dopamine, enhance serotonin, and do things that can genuinely make you feel better. Yeah. In the short run. Yes, and that we will decide.

Yeah, and having less sex, I read recently. Yes. The SSRIs are suppressing sex drive in many people.

Yes. So there's that. There's a lot of issues that come along with those, and yet there's immense profit in making sure that people take those and stay on those. My fear is that if you can do something that allows people to have their mind function, have their brain, their endocrine system, have all these things function at a higher level, then everyone is going to do it. You would not want to just be natural and depressed if you could just put on this little headset and feel fantastic, and maybe it could be a solution to so many of our society issues.

Right now, it certainly feels that way.

And people say, oh, that ship has sailed.

Oh, the train's left the station. But if a ship has sailed and we know that it's going to sink, we can actually call it back. I've been on airplanes where it leaves the jetway, and then they call it back because they discover a safety issue. So we are headed that way, I agree. But I think we humans are an amazingly adaptable species.

These technologies could, in theory, give us the best democracy ever, where people really do have the right kind of voice. It's not just the extremes who are super empowered, as it is now.

And are we able to get there? Is there a path? Or is it like there's no path from A to B?

So I don't know, but I think we sure as hell have to try. And the first thing we have to do is not be resigned and just say,

oh, well, the world's going to hell. What are you going to do about it? It's too big. So let's start, I have a proposal, let's start with the one area that we can all agree on, which is our kids. It's the most amazing thing.

Let's test that proposition.

And let's test it in the place where we're most likely to succeed,

which is rolling back the phone-based childhood.

and replacing it with a more play-based childhood. Oh, so, actually, I said there are four norms, we talked about three. So if you don't mind, I'll put in the fourth norm now. So the first three are about phones. No smartphone before high school, no social media until 16, phone-free schools.

Okay, but if you take away the phones, and you don't give kids back each other and playtime and independence,

what are they going to do? You're going to keep them at home all day long, without screens?

So the fourth norm is more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.

And this is a thing that you and I talked about last time, I think we actually had a small disagreement,

Parents, please go to letgrow.

So this fourth norm, this is the harder one. This is the one that we have to really overcome our fears of letting our kids out. So actually, let me ask you, I think our disagreement last time was, I talked about this, and I said, like, letting kids go for sleepovers.

and spend more time with other kids and unsupervised.

And then you said, I think you said something like, no, I'm not letting my kid go to sleepovers because I don't trust the other families. Does that sound familiar to you?

I don't believe that's what I said. I think our concern was with people wandering around, with kids being free to walk home in cities.

Yes, you had that also.

We did talk about sleepovers. My kids have sleepovers.

Okay. They've always had sleepovers. If you know the parents and you trust the parents, it's a great way to give the kids independence and have them interact with other people.

Do you remember when you let them out like they could go out the door, get on a bicycle, walk seven blocks to a friend's house without any adult with them?

Do you remember what age or grade?

No, I don't. I mean, it's fine if you live in a good neighborhood. The problem is if you're, you know, childhood predators are real.

Not really. Not anymore. What I mean is, What do you mean?

Well, when you and I were growing up,

there were childhood predators out there in the physical world, approaching children.

And I think you said there, you told the story about one who approached you when you were doing magic tricks.

So there were child predators out there.

That's true.

They're all on Instagram now.

The kids aren't out. And Instagram, and especially Instagram, makes it super easy for them to get in touch with children. So this is my point.

I can summarize the whole book with a single sentence. We have overprotected our kids in the real world and underprotected them online.

I would agree to that.

So, you know, yes, child predators are terrible. But guess what? We actually locked up most of them. You know, when you and I were growing up, they weren't all locked up.

They were just eccentrics who were exposing themselves. Remember flashing? Flashers?

You know, that doesn't happen anymore. Because if you do that now, you're going to jail for a long, long time. So we actually locked up most of the predators. And they know, don't approach kids on a playground. Approach them on social media.

I don't know if we are doing that. And there's this new push.

Oh, yeah. Once you're identified as a sex offender, you are gone for a long time and then they're a sex offender.

We've really done a lot since the 90s to make the real world safer.

But there is push against that. You're aware of this term, minor attracted persons. that's being pushed?

Disgusting.

Disgusting and freaky. It's such a bizarre term that I got to imagine is only being done by people who don't have children. And they're pushing this thing, that it's an identity. And that it's not the fault of the person who has this issue. Yeah.

Yes. Not that specific issue. But I can, you know, so look, I study moral psychology.

That's my academic discipline.

And I study the roots of it evolutionarily, historically, and child development. What is our moral sense?

And there are different moralities.

And in some ways that's good. And, you know, left and right push against each other.

So I'm very open to different moralities. But when a group makes something sacred, and they say this is the most important thing, and nothing else matters other than this, then they can kind of go insane. And they kind of lose touch with reality.

And I think, you know, again, I don't know the history of this particular movement, that horrible term. But there is a certain kind of morality which is all about, you know, oppression and victimhood. And once you, you know, someone, I guess somewhere, said, Oh, you know, men who are attracted to boys, or, you know, little girls are being, you know, are victims. I don't know what. Some, in some little eddy of weird morality, someone put that forward as a new victim class.

Once someone puts that up as a new victim class, and you have to do that, you have to change the terms. This is very Orwellian. You change the terms.

And then some others who share this morality, which is focused on not making anyone feel marginalized, you know, not allowing any labels that will slander someone or make them look bad. I think, you know, I think people who approach children for sexual goals, I am very happy to have them slandered and labeled and separated. But, you know, I suspect that some people, once they lock this in as a group that's being marginalized, they say, Well, we have to, we have to defend them. And we don't think about what the hell we're actually saying.

It seems purely an academic thing. It seems that this is something that with people that only exist in sort of an academic space, where it's almost like an intellectual exercise in understanding oppression. It's not, you can't apply it in the real world. It's just, it's too fucked up. The consequences of it are horrific.

Yeah, that's right.

Normalizing, victimizing children. That's right.

Now, the one thing, so before we go any further with this particular topic, I would want to point out one of the problems that our social media world has given us, which is somewhere in all of the academy and all the universities, some philosopher, let's say, proposed that term or raised an idea. So this has been going on for thousands of years. Someone in a conversation proposes a provocative idea. What if we think about this as a minor, attracted person? They put that idea out, and then other people say, No, that's really stupid.

So maybe can you look up minor attracted person. Is this just like a thing that was from one academic talk, or is this an actual movement?

Well, I've seen politicians discuss it.

No way. Wait, wait, wait. It's like decriminalizing or destigmatizing?

Destigmatizing, yeah. Oh, God. There was a recent politician that went viral for this discussion.

Oh, no. All right.

There may be more.

More than one. There was two specific women that were doing that, and I didn't investigate whether these women had families or what it was, but this push to try to alleviate bullying or alleviate shame or alleviate the stigma that's attached to what they're calling an identity.

Yeah, that's right. So actually, that brings us to the issue of identitarianism,

which I think is a useful term for us these days.

So I think a lot of what's happened on campus is the move to focus on identity as the primary analytical lens in a number of disciplines, not in most disciplines, but in a lot of the humanities, the studies departments. So putting identity first and then ranking identities and saying some identities are good,

some are bad, this really activates our ancient tribalism, and I think that the liberal tradition going back hundreds of years is really an attempt to push back against that and to create an environment in which we can all get along. And so, you know, as I see it from inside the academy, we've always been interested in identity. It's an important topic.