Latest / INSPIRE STORY / The Anxiety Doctor_ Social Media Is Causing A Mental Health COLLAPSE (_ It_s Only Getting WORSE_)

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The Anxiety Doctor_ Social Media Is Causing A Mental Health COLLAPSE (_ It_s Only Getting WORSE_) · INSPIRE STORY

0:00
Speaker 1: There has never been a global synchronized collapse of mental health.
0:04
This is far larger than anything you've ever seen in
0:06
terms of its effects on kids. This is way way
0:08
larger than COVID are.
0:09
Speaker 2: Much buzzed about book The Anxious Generation is available now.
0:13
Speaker 1: Is of course Jonathan Hite Sir, alls are extraordinarily anxious
0:17
and depressed. Boys are extraordinarily undeveloped. We shouldn't have kids
0:20
with a massive entertainment center in their pocket by which
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strangers can reach them. This is complete insanity.
0:30
Speaker 3: Hey everyone, I've got some huge news to share with you.
0:33
In the last ninety days, seventy nine point four percent
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of our audience came from viewers and listeners that are
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1:05
Speaker 1: The number one health and wellness podcast, Jay set Jay
1:08
Sheidy Y.
1:10
Speaker 3: Holyou hey everyone, Welcome back to On Purpose to place
1:16
you tune into to become happier, healthier, and more healed.
1:20
Thank you so much for investing in your growth and
1:22
your journey by being here today as I'm about to
1:25
interview one of my favorite authors, a researcher, a professor
1:28
that I'm so excited to talk to. I've been wanting
1:31
to have this conversation with him about many of his books,
1:33
and we're finally here for his latest installment. It's called
1:37
The Anxious Generation, How the great rewiring of childhood is
1:42
causing an epidemic of mental illness. Please welcome to On Purpose,
1:46
Jonathan Heit. Jonathan, thank you for being here. Thank you
1:49
for making the time and spending this energy with us.
1:52
Speaker 1: Oh my pleasure, Jay, Thanks for having me.
1:55
Speaker 3: This is a conversation that I feel, as I was
1:57
saying to you offline, which is so critical and central
2:00
for our listeners. I know that everyone who's tuned in,
2:03
whether it be right now on YouTube or listening to
2:06
us on an audio platform, this is of the number
2:10
one concern in their life, which is their personal mental wellbeing,
2:14
and then the mental wellbeing of their children and the
2:16
people that they care about and love. And I think
2:19
when I first saw the title the Anxious Generation. I
2:23
was thinking about how there's this rhetoric that has become
2:28
quite normal in society around how every generation has had
2:32
their anxiety, whether it was the World Wars, whether we
2:36
talk about, oh, we have social media, but you know,
2:39
kids back in the day had black and white TVs
2:41
and then color television, and then they had video games,
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and so I feel like there's been this rhetoric that
2:47
social media is just the latest installment in a host
2:52
of previous technologies that have made old people worried about
2:57
young people.
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Speaker 1: Why is this different? So that is the main counter
3:02
argument I get is from people say, oh, we've been
3:04
through this before. When I was a kid, we watched
3:06
too much television, but look, it didn't do anything to us.
3:09
And it is true that ever since modernity began, so
3:12
beginning in the seventeenth century, when the pace of change
3:15
really begins to accelerate, generation and generation, the next generation
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actually is a little different from the previous one. And
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generally we think the next generation they're kind of soft,
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you know, they don't have our virtues, they have funny habits.
3:27
So that's always been going on, and that's what I'm
3:29
a late baby Borner I was born nineteen sixty three.
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So that's what we thought about, you know, you know,
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the millennial generation. You know, oh there are always just
3:36
you know, folks on their coffee and their avocado toast.
3:38
They're not serious. But actually, and you're a millennial, I believe, right, yes, yeah.
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Speaker 3: That's correct.
3:42
Speaker 1: Some millennials are born in nineteen eighty one through nineteen
3:45
ninety five roughly. But the millennials, their mental health was
3:48
actually pretty good, better than Gen X actually, and they're
3:52
an amazingly successful generation. They were creative, they travel the world,
3:56
they start companies. So that's the normal intergenerational difference. This
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time is really really different because all of a sudden,
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in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, it's like someone flicked on
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a light switch, and all over the developed world. We
4:13
don't have data from the developing world, but all over
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the developed world, certainly the English speaking countries Scandinavia, girls
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in particular, began to get depressed, anxious, they began to
4:22
cut themselves, they began checking into psychiatric words right around
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twenty thirteen. In the US, it's very sharp, right around
4:28
twenty thirteen. It sometimes is a little bit, but it's
4:30
basically the early twenty tens. This has never happened before.
4:33
There has never been a global synchronized collapse of mental health.
4:38
This is far larger than anything we've ever seen in
4:40
terms of its effects on kids. This is way way
4:42
larger than COVID. This is affecting most kids. So I'm
4:47
engaged in debates with other scholars about well, why did
4:51
this happen? And what I'm marshall in the book is
4:54
the evidence that it's not just a coincidence. It's not
4:57
just a correlation that, oh, that's exactly when kids basically
5:01
switch from flip phones to smartphones. Was between twenty ten
5:03
and twenty fifteen all over the world. But I'm showing
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that there's a lot of experimental evidence that shows causation.
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And another film makes us different. The kids themselves say it.
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So when I was a kid, we watched too much TV.
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But you didn't see kids organizing to keep kids off TV.
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You didn't see kids saying, oh, please save us from TV.
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You know we're stuck watching it. We don't want to
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be watching it. But that's what young people are saying
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about social media. I just saw a survey the majority,
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the majority of people of all ages, including young people,
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say they would rather that TikTok was never invented. They're
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spending time on it because everyone else is, but they
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see that they're trapped. So this is so different from
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any previous moral panic.
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Speaker 3: That's so fascinating to hear that. It's the first time
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that people are actually saying, well, kids are actually saying
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that this experience is something that we're feeling, yet we
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feel so trapped, addicted in exactly.
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Speaker 1: And that's what my students say at NYU. That's what
5:58
students say on surveys when you ask them, why do
6:01
you think mental health is so bad in your generation?
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The most common answer is social media. They see it happening,
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The parents see it happening to the kids, the teachers
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see it happening to the kids. So there's all kinds
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of eyewitness testimony, like people see this happening. It's not
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just like hmm, I wonder if it's the phone. It's like, no,
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we see the evidence of it.
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Speaker 3: I'm fascinated. Why are people debating.
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Speaker 1: You, Well, there are so you know, I'm an academic
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and we publish our articles and journals, and there are
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some people who have been studying media for a long time,
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and many of them are very technophilic. They like technology.
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Some of them like video games. Have been writing about
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the benefits of video games, and there are some And
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so I think they come to this prepared to believe
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that this is just another moral panic. We've been through
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this with television and video games and before that comic books.
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The eighteenth century was novels. People didn't want young women
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to read novels because stimulate their sexual appetites. So they
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sort of approach it with like, you know, this is
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just another one of those moral panics. And then I
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keep this work with Gene Twangian and Zach Rausch, we
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keep showing like no other explanation works, this time is different.
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This is not just some artifact of kids being more
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willing to talk about it. This is the same curves
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and self report you see those same curves and hospital
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admissions so and psychiatric emergency department business. So this is
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not just some illusion. But you know, there's about four
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or five, five or six researchers, you know, they're serious researchers,
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and they look at the same data I do, and
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they they say, well, the correlations are too small. To
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explain it, or they say, you know, it's mostly correlational,
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they're not enough experiments, And I say, okay, look, I
7:36
found twenty five experiments, sixteen of which do show a
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causal effect. You know, with random assignment, the kids who
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are the young people who are assigned to do less
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social media. In the first few days, maybe the mental
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health is bad because they're addicted. But if you wait
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three or four weeks on average, they feel better. So
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I say, look, here are all these experiments. And they say, well,
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the experiments aren't good enough. Here's a flaw on that one.
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Here's a flaw on that one. So this is a
7:57
normal academic debate. I'm not going to change their minds ever.
8:01
They're not going to change my mind ever. This is
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just the way these things go. But as we argue
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it out in public, the rest of the world can
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look and they can say, what are my arguments? What
8:09
are their arguments, and then they'll.
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Speaker 3: Decide yeah, absolutely. And from reading your book and your work,
8:14
what I understand is you actually, I'm not saying social
8:16
media doesn't have benefits either. That's not really what you're saying.
8:20
You're not saying that there is no validity to it.
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Speaker 1: Well, well, what I would say is for adults, social
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media has many benefits. So you know, obviously many people
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start their businesses. Look, I use Twitter to get my
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research out. So for adults, so think about this. These
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are these these used to be called social networking sites
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because originally they were just ways to connect people. And
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as an adult, I have a need to network and
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it's useful to me. And LinkedIn is useful, Twitter is useful,
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many you know, Facebook groups are used. These are all
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useful for adults. But let's talk about middle school kids.
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So in America, middle school is roughly ages eleven to thirteen.
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Let's talk about kids just beginning puberty. How much need
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do they have to network? How much do they need
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to meet strangers, strange men who are approaching them? How
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much do they need that? How much do they need
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social media to connect with their friends? The telephone was
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an amazing invention. You pick it up, you press some numbers,
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and you can talk to your friend anywhere in the country,
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anywhere in the world. So we already had that. How
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much more help did eleven and twelve year old need
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to connect with their friends? And so I would argue,
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then when we look at middle school. This is my
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main focus is early puberty. Early puberty, the brain is
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extremely vulnerable because the frontal part of the brain is
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rewiring very rapidly. Growth is slow during childhood, but it's
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very rapid in puberty. And so I would say that
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for eleven, twelve, thirteen year old kids, I'm willing to
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say there aren't really any benefits and the harms are extraordinary.
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So that's why I say we need to just raise.
9:55
We need to raise the ages. We should have a
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norm that no one gets a smartphone before high school.
10:00
We shouldn't have kids with a massive entertainment center in
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their pocket by which strangers can reach them, companies can
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reach them. And we should raise the age of social
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media opening account from thirteen, which is at present not enforced,
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to sixteen, and enforce it. If we do those two things,
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we'll really get a Lisa handle. We'll protect kids during
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early puberty.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, and I want to get on to all of
10:19
those points. I think one thing before that, I think
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the word anxiety. In some cases, we've become so numb
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to it. Yeah, it's become so normalized. It is the
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normal to hear someone you know as anxiety, someone you
10:32
love as anxiety, children have anxiety, and I feel that
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word has been so repeated over the last five to
10:37
ten years, maybe that we've become numb to it and
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because of that, we don't really understand and which you
10:45
do spend a lot of time in the early parts
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of the book not only defining what anxiety is an experience,
10:50
but the extent to which anxiety affects our normal, everyday functioning.
10:55
Could you give us a short summary on that, which
10:58
I want people to dive into the book to read
10:59
the deep research on, but could we at least explore
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what are the implications what is anxiety and what are
11:07
the implications of anxiety in the long term if not
11:11
for some of these recommendations you're suggesting.
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Speaker 1: So, the most important emotion for animals is fear. Fear
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is across all the different species vertebrates and vertebrates. There's
11:22
a very you know, huge lung evolution. A lot is
11:25
known about fear because if you've ever been snorkeling or
11:29
out in the woods, you know that life for animals
11:32
is you're looking food, you're looking for food and then
11:34
you're dead because someone jumped on you. So all of animals,
11:37
including us, have a hair trigger alarm system. That's normal,
11:42
that's healthy. So that's fear. Now, sometimes that's when you're attacked,
11:47
you're threatened. Now, sometimes you're in an environment where you
11:51
don't see a threat per se, but it's you're very
11:54
wary of it. And so let's say, you know, so
11:56
humans are much more afraid in the dark because in
11:58
the dark you're much more likely be killed by nocturnal
12:01
hunting animals. So we have an innate fear of the dark.
12:03
It doesn't mean we're necessarily for it, but we're just
12:06
a little more on edge. And so that's your brain saying, okay,
12:10
we're gonna shift the alarm system over. We're gonna make
12:13
you a little warier. If anything happens, you're gonna jump,
12:16
whereas if it was broad daylight, you would just look
12:18
and say what was that. So our brains are these
12:21
incredible survival machines that have very very deep circuits for fear,
12:27
which mobilizes us to fight or to flee or fight,
12:31
and then for anxiety, which is more diffuse, just a
12:33
general sense of threats. Now, when the fear system is
12:37
triggered and then you take action, and then it shuts off.
12:39
That's normal, that's healthy. But as many of your listeners
12:42
will know, chronic stress causes an increase in circulating cortisol.
12:48
It keeps your stress system on. Stress is not bad.
12:51
Kids need stress, but short term stress. But we have
12:54
long term stress. Now you have hormonal dysregulation, you have cortisol,
12:58
which has many functions in the body, but high levels
13:00
of court is all expose you to all kinds of
13:03
health problems, joint problems, immunity, I mean, I forget the
13:07
whole list. Of course, has so many effects. So what's
13:10
happening is young people. They've always been anxious young people.
13:15
Some people are set to anxious, some people are set
13:17
to more calm. That's always been the case, but there's
13:19
a shift so that more and more kids are closer
13:21
to the anxiety side. Now part of this is they're
13:26
told there's a lot of talk actually just this week
13:28
or two, there's a lot of talk about how these
13:30
programs that teach kids to label their emotions, and they
13:34
talk about, you know, were you afraid, were you anxious?
13:38
They seem like they're well intentioned, it seems, you know,
13:40
social emotional learning, there is some basis to that decades ago,
13:44
but it seems that it's moving in a direction of
13:46
teaching kids to dwell on their own emotions, always be
13:49
looking in word, how did that make you feel? How
13:51
do that make? Were you anxious? You know? What? You know?
13:53
Where can you go for help? That there's actually not
13:57
much evidence that this is helping, and there are some
13:59
new studies suggesting that this stuff backfires, this is actually
14:02
making kids more anxious. What kids, What I argue in
14:05
the book is what kids really really need to overcome
14:07
anxiety is exposure. Go out and play and sometimes you
14:10
will be afraid, and sometimes you'll climb a tree and
14:12
you'll go too high and you're afraid. I remember those
14:15
feelings from my childhood. But that's how you get over
14:18
childhood anxieties. We're sitting inside in a classroom with a
14:21
teacher giving you an emotion circle and saying, which of
14:23
these emotions are you feeling right now? Johnny? You know?
14:26
And sometimes they're asked, have you thought about suicide? Have
14:29
you thought about harming yourself? And they ask this over
14:31
and over again. So this suggests to kids that they
14:35
are weak, that they have these emotions, and if they
14:38
have these emotions, it's a problem. So I think we're
14:41
you know, the mental health community, you know, I think
14:44
we're just we're not we're not recognizing what's driving the epidemic,
14:49
and we're not doing things that would effectively reverse it.
14:51
Speaker 3: What is the root of that? Because I feel like
14:53
the research oscillates in some cases, or at least as humans,
14:56
we like to oscillate. There's this idea of the past,
14:59
and I as you, it's the opposite of what you
15:01
just said, where when you were young, you weren't allowed
15:04
to feel. I think everyone's experienced that idea of oh,
15:06
don't worry, everything will be okay, or oh it doesn't
15:10
matter that you feel pain, like everything will be fine,
15:12
let it go, or you know, don't cry, or things
15:15
like that. And so that was one extreme, and then
15:17
the other extreme is what you're saying now, where it's like, well,
15:19
let's talk about every emotion and give it equal waiting
15:22
and give it equal priority. What is the middle?
15:26
Speaker 1: And yeah, so I'm saying kids need adversity, they need
15:30
to sometimes be excluded. So all of that is necessary.
15:33
If you ask any parent, how many times would you
15:36
like your child to be excluded? You just have a
15:38
newborn child. Your child's going to turn eighteen and eighteen years.
15:40
In those eighteen years, how often do you want your
15:42
child to be excluded and to feel excluded? And anybody
15:45
who says zero, they're speaking from their heart, but they're
15:48
not speaking from their head. I would never hire someone
15:51
who's never been excluded. This person is going to be
15:53
very difficult to have normal human relationships. Sometimes they won't
15:56
be included, and that's not a big deal. So we
15:59
need adversity now. I think what you're saying is it
16:02
used to be we were too insensitive, and that's true.
16:05
And there are a couple of categories, especially so bullying.
16:08
Bullying is really really bad. But what we have to
16:12
be clear about is bullying is not aggression. Bullying is
16:17
aggression or humiliation directed at a kid day after day.
16:21
It has to be over time, because aggression is a
16:24
normal and necessary part of childhood. You have to let
16:27
kids experience aggression, express aggression, express hostility. You have to
16:31
allow that and let them work it out now now,
16:33
and then there will be a problem. There will be
16:35
a one kid who is picking on another kid, and
16:37
that kid doesn't want to go to school, and if
16:39
that goes on for more than a day. Now it's bullying,
16:41
and now we need to be responsive. When I was
16:43
a kid, we weren't. In the seventies that we weren't
16:46
and in some countries I know at the time, you know,
16:48
in Japan and Korea there were horrible I mean, the
16:50
culture around bullying and English boarding schools I've heard. So
16:53
it's great progress that we're being more SENSI about bullying. Obviously,
16:57
the shaming of LGBTQ kids, that was you know, it
17:00
was constant when I was a kid, but now it's
17:04
much much better. So in many ways we do need
17:07
to be more sensitive. But I think the gist of
17:08
your question is have we overshot? Have we? And I
17:11
would say yes, we have really overshot. You know, if
17:15
there's any you know, recess in America is often very
17:19
heavily monitored, and as soon as there's any kind of conflict,
17:21
an adult comes in. When my kids, my kids went
17:24
to New York City public schools, they go, they're still
17:25
there in high school, and so that kind of attention
17:28
to let's make sure no one's upset, let's make sure
17:31
no one's excluded. You know, my daughter and her friend
17:33
they formed a little club, but they were, you know,
17:35
on the playground. They were like, no, you can't do that.
17:37
You can't exclude anyone that's crazy. Kids need to play
17:40
with that. So anyway, that's I think we've gone too far.
17:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, talking about recess, I believe is in your book
17:46
that you said that the average recess time will outdoor
17:48
time is thirty seven minutes.
17:50
Speaker 1: The numbers vary, it depends on but in elementary school,
17:53
I've heard numbers as low as twenty seven minutes as
17:55
the average a bridge, Yeah, across the day, and sometimes
17:58
that's combined with lunch. Some kids it's only yet twenty
18:01
five minutes including lunch, and so you go to you know,
18:03
you kids need to run around, they need recess. There's
18:06
a lot of research on this play helps them learn,
18:08
helps them attend later. But in America at least and
18:12
in East Asian countries, I imagine we're so focused on
18:16
test scores on that we think what five and six
18:19
and seven year olds is more math, and they don't.
18:21
They don't need more math. What they need is more
18:23
play time and then they'll learn more in a shorter
18:26
amount of math. In the United States, if you are
18:29
in a federal maximum security penitentiary, you are guaranteed two
18:34
hours a day of yard time. You can't keep Its
18:36
inhumane to keep them in their cells all day two
18:40
hours of yard time. But if in an elementary schools
18:42
dudent the United States, you have no guarantee, and it's
18:46
it's very often as little as twenty seven minutes, including lunch,
18:49
which means you have to stand in the lunch line
18:51
that takes ten minutes. You get your lunch, you have
18:53
you know you will fit down in five minutes. You
18:55
have whatever five minutes left to play. This is complete insanity.
18:59
If we want to get a handle on the mental
19:00
health crisis, I think we need to back off on
19:03
the adults instructing kids about their emotions. Do a lot
19:06
less of that, and take all the money and all
19:08
the time we're spending on that, and give kids more play.
19:12
Speaker 3: And what do we need? You talk about what we
19:14
need as children? You're talking about the need for play?
19:17
Is play truly just play? Or is there certain parameters,
19:21
certain ideas, certain thoughts that make play more effective?
19:24
Speaker 1: Yes, play is a mammalian universal. So mammals, you know,
19:30
the first mammals. Whenever it was that some females began
19:34
to secrete milk from glands in their skin. It's kind
19:36
of an amazing evolutionary adaptation for having a longer childhood.
19:42
You know, other animals they lay an egg and that's it,
19:44
animals on their own. But mammals, we have this long,
19:47
long childhood and that allows us to have much larger
19:50
brains and much more complex social behavior compared to say, reptiles,
19:54
and so we have this long childhood, and especially the
19:57
social animals. So dogs more than cats, but you know,
20:00
dogs and humans and are incredibly playful creatures. We have
20:05
a puppy at home. She's now and a year and
20:07
a half. She still looks like a puppy. She wants
20:09
to play all the time, and she has to play.
20:12
That's the thing, since all mammals play when they're young,
20:16
and they take risks. So evolution isn't stupid. Evolution didn't
20:20
say we're going to let these these baby animals practice
20:23
jumping out of trees and practice getting in fights for
20:26
no good reason. No, there's a very good reason. That's
20:28
what you have to do to train your brain to
20:30
reach adulthood. And that's why, for hundreds of thousands of years,
20:33
millions of years, you could say, all human children played
20:36
unless they were being seriously deprived of play and stuck
20:39
in a factory. So we and in America we had
20:42
play all the way up through the nineteen nineties. That's
20:43
when we begin to lose it. In the nineties, we
20:45
freak out in America and Britain in Canada and we
20:48
say it's too dangerous. You'll be abducted, you'll be sexually molested. No,
20:52
you stay home, or you stay under supervision. Oh, and
20:55
there's this fabulous new internet, so why don't you spend
20:57
more time on that. That's what happened in the nineties,
21:00
and that's when childhood really departed from the human need
21:04
for play and independent activity and became oversupervised, helicopter parented, restrained, restricted.
21:13
And you can play on a video game in a way,
21:17
but it's not embodied, whereas we're physical creatures. We need
21:20
to run, jump, touch, wrestle, hug. You know, I remember
21:23
doing all those things with my friends when I was
21:25
in second or third grade. We would sometimes hug each
21:27
other or pick each other up, or wrestle. You know.
21:29
It's children are physical like puppies. But but now you
21:33
know kids, they're on their screen all the time. There
21:36
can be a playful element, but there's no risk, there's
21:38
no physicality. They don't learn the social skills that you
21:41
do from face to face encounters.
21:43
Speaker 3: When you were saying that, I was actually thinking back
21:44
to a trip I took to Rwanda two years ago,
21:48
and I was thinking about our gorilla friends who we
21:51
share I believe over ninety six percent of our DNA with,
21:55
and watching the young gorilla's play outdoors and you can
22:00
you to my wrestling and.
22:02
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, And it was such a because we're primates.
22:05
Primates have arms, and primates use their arms in play,
22:09
and you see it with all you know, with chimpanzees
22:11
and bonobos and gorillas. Yeah, and it's so cute, right,
22:15
We love watching it because we mammals as adults, we
22:20
are primed for cuteness because that triggers in us a
22:23
protective instinct over the kids. So we have this protective
22:27
instinct and unfortunately it's kind of run rampant. You know.
22:31
It used to be the kids are out of the house,
22:34
you don't see them, but now we can monitor kids
22:36
all the time, and we're just we're swooping in too quick.
22:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I mean I think we all resonate with that,
22:41
even as adults. There's this beautiful quote from George Bernard
22:44
Shaw where he said that we don't stop playing because
22:49
we get old. We get old because we stop playing beautiful. Yes,
22:52
that's right, and I think that we can relate to that.
22:55
I can relate to the as this idea that I misplay.
22:58
I think the challenge is that, as you said in
23:00
the nineteen nineties, when things started to veer off course,
23:04
now children given the choice generally are going to choose
23:08
indoor video games, FOS time iPad, and they're not going
23:12
to choose play. So I think the challenge becomes, now
23:15
that our taste buds have become technological, how do we
23:21
rewire that taste bud when we've been so diverted.
23:25
Speaker 1: It's so it's not clear whether it's that the taste
23:27
buds have become technological or that the technology has adapted
23:32
so profoundly that it now knows exactly what we most want.
23:38
So I was born in nineteen sixty three. I remember
23:40
when the game Pong came out. It was the first
23:43
video game you could get on your home television, so
23:44
it was very, very crude. But it's amazing. You turn
23:47
a knob and you can play tennis, and I'd sit
23:49
there with my friend and we do that for you know,
23:51
twenty thirty minutes, then we go do something else. So
23:54
these video games were not immersive. They were fun and
23:57
you played with a friend. But once you get you know,
24:01
you get graphics cards, you get color monitors, you get
24:04
high speed internet, you get multiplayer video games. These games
24:08
are incredible. I mean, my son plays Fortnite. I didn't
24:10
let him on in sixth grade when he was eleven,
24:12
but I did let him on thirteen around COVID time.
24:15
These games are incredible. And as a boy, what's most
24:18
exciting is wargames, and so the games just get better
24:22
and better. And this is actually something we need to
24:26
talk about. You know. So much of the talk is
24:28
about social media and girls. With boys, it's a different
24:31
problem boys. There are many that are harmed by social media.
24:34
Many are driven to suicide. I don't want to say
24:36
it's okay for boys, but social media's is not so
24:39
correlated with depression and anxiety for boys. It is for girls.
24:42
For boys, what's happening is the technology is so amazing
24:47
and the real world is getting more and more inhospitable
24:49
to them. I mean, we've been really trying to reduce
24:52
prejudice against girls and open up girls and bring them
24:55
into every prop that's all great, but girls are just
24:59
so much better in school. They just do better in school.
25:01
They school is made for more of a female child
25:05
than a male child. You sit still, you learn, you
25:08
please the teacher. And we've pushed out rough and tumble play.
25:11
We've reduced recess. There's no more shop class. So boys
25:15
aren't enjoying school as much as girls. Boys are enjoying
25:20
the technology more and more. And it's not just the
25:21
videogainst also of the pornography. So you know, war games
25:25
and sex those are deeply appealing to boys and young men.
25:29
And as the technology gets better and better. Now, you know,
25:32
if you're a boy with budding sexual urges and you
25:35
have two choices, one is the most incredible pornography you've
25:38
ever seen. And then soon there'll be goggles. Soon they'll
25:41
be put into sex dolls and robots. I mean, you
25:44
can have this amazing sex life that you can customize.
25:47
You can customize the body size, you can customize the personality.
25:50
You know, you can have virtual girlfriends. And boyfriends now,
25:52
so boys are finding a video game, play in pornography
25:56
more and more satisfying. And it's just difficult to arrange
26:00
a soccer game with your friends. That's just difficult. Let's
26:02
just meet online. And it's difficult to flirt with a
26:05
girl and develop a relationship and fall in love and
26:08
have sex. That's really hard. So I think we're losing boys.
26:13
It's not just because their taste buds are rewired. Is
26:15
because the technology is amazingly good at learning what do
26:20
we most want, Let's deliver that. But it's not what
26:23
we most need, it's what we most want.
26:25
Speaker 3: And what's the cost of that? What's happening to boys
26:28
brains and minds?
26:29
Speaker 1: So the big picture is that boys are failing to
26:33
have the kinds of experiences that will toughen them, teach
26:37
them skills, teach them virtues, and turn them into men.
26:41
Boys development is different from girls development. All around the world. Traditionally,
26:45
boys generally initiation rights involve more toughening toughness demonstrations. And
26:50
we can say this is terrible and patriarchal, but I
26:52
actually think it's important. So, you know, all kids start
26:56
off in the female sphere we all live, we're all
26:58
raised by mothers and girls and aunts traditionally around the world,
27:03
and so girls stay within the female world, and girls'
27:07
initiation rights are usually pegged to puberty, to menstruation, and
27:11
then they're taught all the secrets of being a woman
27:13
all that. Boys have to make the transition from the
27:17
women's world into the men's world and less. So today,
27:20
I'm not saying it needs to be this way, So
27:21
I'm just saying it generally is. To some extent, boys
27:24
development is different from girls development. And boys, if you
27:29
give them the easy way out all the time, many
27:32
of them will take it, and then they don't grow,
27:34
they don't toughen. And so I think what we're seeing
27:37
now is a generation gen Z born after nineteen ninety
27:40
six and later, in which the girls are extraordinarily anxious
27:44
and depressed, much more so than the boys. But the
27:47
boys are extraordinarily undeveloped. Many people say they have no
27:51
social skills, they don't look you in the eye, they
27:54
don't know how to behave in public, They certainly don't
27:57
know how to talk to a girl. I think we're
28:00
seeing just a massive, massive blockage of development. And you know,
28:05
Gen Z the oldest star twenty eight. We'll see, we'll
28:09
see if they come out of it. But when the
28:11
millennials were twenty eight, they had already invented so many companies,
28:14
they were in minting technologies. I mean, the millennials by
28:17
twenty eight, they were like, you know, a meteor streaking
28:19
across the sky, and gen Z seems much more to
28:22
be hunkered down, like you know, talking about their anxiety.
28:26
So I'm not blaming them at all. It's not their fault.
28:31
We deprive them of play, we put touch screens in
28:34
their hands. Then they had the bad luck to you know,
28:36
basically come out of college, the eldest of them, right
28:38
into COVID. So those in their twenties now, their work
28:41
experience was truncated. What they need is mentoring in a
28:44
real office or a real job, and they didn't get it.
28:47
So again I'm not blaming, but man, we have to
28:50
have a lot of sympathy and we have to make
28:53
sure this stops. We have to stop this right now.
28:56
Speaker 3: And I think that's the challenge. Right A lot of
28:57
people say, well, people all got to have at your
29:00
girlfriends and we are going to live in the virtual
29:02
world and everyone's going to go home and put their
29:05
headset on and you know, disappear, disappear into the abyss,
29:09
and then we'll be wearing it all day, not just
29:11
in the evenings. And so there's that belief system that actually,
29:14
we're just getting better at using the technology that will
29:16
define our future success anyway, or future failure if we
29:20
don't know it. But you're saying that there's just what
29:24
are the I guess the harsher implications of what does
29:27
this look like in twenty years time?
29:28
Speaker 1: Okay, So I'm very influenced by by One of the
29:31
puzzles that I first tried to deal with is why,
29:36
you know what made gen z Why? Because when I
29:38
started this work, when I started writing The Carlin in
29:40
the American Mind with Greg Lukiana, we first wrote an
29:42
article in twenty fifteen in the Atlantic, and we thought
29:45
college students were millennials. You know, the millennial generation started
29:49
in nineteen eighty one, and it was expected to be
29:52
if you're born all the way up through two thousand,
29:53
you're a millennial. That's we thought. But then Gene Twangi
29:56
came up with her book Eye Jen and her research
29:59
showing that it's born around nineteen ninety six and later
30:02
are very different, much higher rates of mental illness. And
30:06
so when you look at the millennial generation, their mental
30:08
health is actually pretty good. You know, the youngest millennials
30:10
are a little bit more like Gen Z. But for
30:12
the most part, the millennials mental health is fine. They
30:16
made it through puberty before they got their first smartphone
30:21
and social media account. So if you didn't get a
30:23
so you know, millennials, like a lot of them, got
30:26
you know, Facebook when they were in college. In fact,
30:28
originally Facebook was only for college students. You had to
30:30
be in college to get Facebook. So what we see
30:34
in the data is that if you didn't get a
30:36
smartphone in social media until you were eighteen or older,
30:39
your mental health is fine. Now. You know, let's say
30:41
you're a thirty five year old. Right now, you might
30:43
feel overwhelmed, you might feel that this thing is stressing
30:45
you out, but you had normal brain development. You you
30:49
used technology when you were a kid. You had a
30:51
flip phone. You used it to connect with other kids.
30:53
You used it. You know, you'd have to text, and
30:55
it was hard to text, and you had to use
30:56
your thumbs and press number keys. But you use the
30:59
technologies tool to help you meet up with your friends
31:02
where maybe you call them on the phone. That was it.
31:03
That's all your phone could do. But if you got
31:06
a smartphone in social media at the start of puberty,
31:09
which is what almost all kids do now, that means
31:11
you're going through puberty on social media and with a
31:14
massive entertainment, with a supercomputer and an entertainment system in
31:17
your pocket with you all the time. So my point
31:20
is this, if we can protect childhood and let kids
31:24
get through puberty and then we give them the goggles
31:26
and the virtual girlfriends and everything else, their lives are
31:29
still going to be kind of messed up by this stuff,
31:31
but at least their brain's matured and they're probably not
31:34
going to be depressed and anxious for life if we
31:37
keep giving it. You know, it used to be at
31:39
you know, ten eleven is when kids get their first smartphone.
31:41
Now it's going down to five or six. If we
31:45
keep giving little children a touchscreen device, including an iPad,
31:49
and using it as a babysitter and saying, oh, yeah, yeah,
31:52
you just you know, here, here's your device. I'm busy,
31:55
I'm doing email, i'm cooking. Here's your device. If we
31:58
keep doing that. We're not Our brains are not going
32:01
to adapt to that. Children's brains are not going to
32:03
somehow evolve so that that becomes okay. It's not going
32:06
to be okay.
32:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's it's such a harsh reality, but it's
32:11
true that people have less time. We have less, we
32:14
are doing so much more. It seems we are living
32:16
further away from family. There's so many reasons why the
32:20
iPad is becoming the babysitter that feels validated because we're
32:24
not living in bigger family spaces. We don't have the
32:26
support of our neighbors. We don't have we don't have
32:29
the resources or the funds to have a paid babysitter
32:33
or whatever it may be. So there's so many almost
32:36
valid reasons for why we even say take the iPad.
32:39
Speaker 1: No, that's right. Again. You know, in my book, I
32:41
have almost no really no criticism for parents. And some
32:44
people say, you know why, it's the parent's responsibility. It's therefore,
32:47
why don't you blaming the parents, to which my answer is,
32:50
you know, I'm a parent, I know a lot of parents,
32:52
a lot of us are really trying and it's really hard.
32:56
I mean, the technological environment now is such that you know,
32:58
if you don't give your kid smartphone, she's left out,
33:01
and she, you know, says dad, I'm the only one.
33:03
I'm left out. So parents are trying. And as a
33:06
social psychologist who studies morality, I know that if one
33:10
person does something that seems evil, well maybe they're maybe
33:14
they're evil. But if an entire society and if an
33:17
entire planet changes at the same time in the same way,
33:20
it's not individual's fault. And so if parenting changed, certainly
33:24
across the English speaking world, we can't blame the parents
33:28
for that. There must be some reason why we all
33:30
freaked out and began overprotecting. So yeah, I don't I
33:34
don't blame I don't blame the parents. I say we're
33:37
stuck in systemic problems and I'm proposing norms by which
33:40
we can escape.
33:41
Speaker 3: And I think anyone when I've been mentioning you are
33:43
coming on the on the show, I was talking to
33:45
people about your work, and I was talking about your
33:47
recommendations of no social media before sixteen, no phones before fourteen.
33:51
And I don't think there's any adult that I spoke
33:54
to that had any debate with either of those. I
33:57
think everyone looked to me. You know, I'm talking to
33:59
everyone trying to five and up, but anyone that I
34:01
talked to twenty five and up when that makes perfect sense.
34:03
I think that's a great idea, and what a brilliant recommendation,
34:07
Like when when do we get started?
34:09
Speaker 1: That's right?
34:09
Speaker 3: Right's right?
34:10
Speaker 1: People are ready to get started because everyone sees it,
34:12
everyone's sick of it.
34:13
Speaker 3: Yeah. And obviously in the book you hold, you say,
34:16
here's what governments can do, here's what technology companies can do,
34:19
here's what schools can do. I think my question is,
34:23
and I know you've talked about what they can do
34:24
in so many other places, which is fantastic. My question is,
34:27
how do we actually get that to be a reality?
34:29
Like what does it actually take to change norms? Because
34:32
I was trying to think, and I'd love your take
34:35
on this, like when was the last time we tried
34:37
to do that in any sphere of life?
34:39
Speaker 1: Oh?
34:40
Speaker 3: Sure? And how did it go?
34:41
Speaker 1: Oh?
34:41
Speaker 3: And where did it work? And where did it fact?
34:43
Speaker 1: So we have a lot of experience with norm changes.
34:45
So one of the clearest is smoking it took twenty
34:48
or thirty years when I was in high school in
34:50
the seventies. You know, a bunch of kids smoked. Most
34:53
of us didn't. Put a bunch of high school kids smoked.
34:55
You know age, you know, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and beginning
34:59
and it eighties or nineties, there was an anti tobacco
35:01
campaign and it took a few decades. But the rates
35:05
of smoking are very very low. Now now there's vaping.
35:08
Kids moved on to vaping, which is bad, but not
35:10
as bad as smoking. Norms around LGBTQ and shaming and
35:15
bullying and using racial slurs, these norms have changed radically
35:19
in the last twenty or thirty years. So norm change
35:22
normally happens over the space of a few decades, and
35:25
we have many, many examples we've been studied. So some
35:28
things get more moralized, like smoking is now seen as evil,
35:31
whereas homosexuality, which used to be seen as evil, is
35:34
now seen as perfectly okay. So norms change over the
35:37
course of decades. What's happening now is very different. What's
35:40
happening now. The digital world has put us into an
35:44
environment in which things can spread within minutes. I mean,
35:48
this has never happened in human history. Norms can spread
35:52
around the world in days, and not norms, but ideas
35:54
or means can spread around the world in days. And
35:57
what that means is that norms can change very quickly too,
36:00
And so all over the world, all over the developed world,
36:04
in twenty ten, kids had flip phones, no social media
36:08
on their phones. In twenty fifteen we have now the
36:10
phone based childhood. All over the world. Kids are behaving
36:13
the same way. So that changed very quickly, and that
36:16
put pressure on everyone else to do the same thing. Okay,
36:19
so we're stuck in this collective action problem that emerged
36:22
very very quickly. But by the same token, we can
36:25
escape very very quickly, because wherever I go, the main
36:30
counter argument I get is parents who say, oh, you know,
36:33
it's just it's too late. The trains left the station.
36:35
What are we going to do? This is the way
36:36
of the future. So resignation is really the only obstacle
36:39
I'm facing. But most parents, so many parents are upset
36:43
by this that they're ready to act if only some
36:45
way can be found to coordinate them. So in the UK,
36:48
I just got back from London a few days ago.
36:51
In the UK, the parents Revolution started in February. A
36:55
couple of mothers, Daisy Greenwell and Claire Reynolds. They just
37:00
put up on an Instagram post. They put up that
37:03
they'd started a WhatsApp group for parents who wanted a
37:06
smartphone free childhood. They were going to delay give me
37:07
their kids smartphones, and like overnight, tens of thousands of
37:13
British parents signed up. There's a limit on WhatsApp groups
37:16
that had a form local. They had to farm hundreds
37:17
of WhatsApp groups. It spread like wildfire. And what I'm
37:21
finding I've been involved in a lot of efforts to
37:23
change ideas and norms. It's very hard, takes decades on
37:27
this one. I don't have to convince anyone on this one.
37:30
It's like everyone's ready to act, they just need to
37:33
know what to do. And so you know, I'm proposing
37:36
these four simple norms as you said. The two that
37:38
I would add that I add that we haven't mentioned
37:40
our phone free schools. We must keep the phones out
37:42
of school, just lock them up as soon as you
37:44
come in. That is doable. This can be done by September. Yeah.
37:48
And the fourth is give far more free play and
37:50
independence in the real world. That's the hardest one actually,
37:52
but that's incredibly important. So let me actually just take advantage.
37:55
I'm actually very excited that you have this gigantic global audience.
37:58
Speaker 3: Boss, How can we help?
38:00
Speaker 1: Great?
38:01
Speaker 3: What can we do? Because I want to be a
38:03
part of the mission.
38:03
Speaker 1: Great Great, So here's what I can say. First, let
38:07
me just give a little background, which is is this
38:09
just happened in the United States. No if listeners, if
38:13
you so all over the world, please go to after
38:16
Babbel dot com. After bab e l that's my sub stack.
38:19
It's free, nothing's behind a paywall. That's where we're putting
38:22
our research out and you'll find articles there. We have
38:26
one post on how the mental health epidemic is hitting
38:31
all the Anglosphere countries and so zach Rouse this was
38:34
his first international post. We've gathered all the mental health
38:37
data we can from around the world. Most countries don't
38:39
have any, but the developed countries often do, so we
38:43
can show that the same thing is happening at the
38:45
same time in all the Anglo countries. And then he
38:47
moved on to Scandinavia. Same things happening at the same
38:49
time in the Scandinavian countries. Now that's very interesting because
38:53
I just had an interview with a Finnish journalist this morning,
38:56
and she said, you know, in Finland we let our
38:58
kids out, like our kids at seven eight they're out.
39:00
But even still, she says, they go outside to play
39:04
and they sit down and they're on their phone, because
39:06
they all have phones from the age of you know,
39:08
six or seven. So this is happening all over the
39:11
developed world. In Europe. Zach has a post on the
39:16
rest of Europe. It's especially in northern Europe. It's a
39:17
little less so in Eastern Europe and southern Europe. So first,
39:21
there is variation around the world in mental health that
39:24
is definitely important. But what I'm finding is parents everywhere
39:29
are seeing their kids not playing. They're seeing them sit
39:32
on their phones at recess. In countries where the kids
39:35
can have a phone in their pocket at recess, the
39:37
kids are often sitting down on their phones. They're not
39:39
running around and yelling and laughing. So, wherever you are
39:42
in the world, figure out, you know, figure out whether
39:45
you have this problem. You probably do that. Your kids,
39:47
even if they're not depressed, they're missing most of childhood.
39:50
They're missing adventure. There probably have fewer hobbies, they probably
39:53
don't read books, they probably don't spend much time with
39:55
other people, so this is going to influence them in
39:58
a bad way around the world. World and then start
40:02
talking to other parents. The simplest thing. Most of us
40:06
are on a text thread with the parents of our
40:10
kids friends because you had to arrange for this birthday party. Okay,
40:14
I'll pick them up and you know, so we're all
40:15
in contact with the parents of our kids friends. Just
40:18
start with that, say do you know do you see
40:20
this problem? Are you concerned? And especially if you have
40:23
younger kids, you can delay when you know, you can
40:26
delay when you give your kid a smartphone. If your
40:29
kids friends are in the same boat, then it's not hard.
40:32
That's the point of this collective getting out of the
40:34
collective action problem. I would also urge anyone around the
40:38
world bring up the subject of phone free schools if
40:41
your child so. A number of countries, France, Australia, a
40:47
few countries have in Britain just have guidance that schools
40:52
must go phone free. They must either lock them up
40:55
or lock up the phones in a locker, special locker
40:57
or in a yonder pouch lockable pouch. But if your
41:00
country doesn't do that, start advocating for it. If you
41:02
go to Anxious Generation dot com. That's the website for
41:05
the book. We have a whole research page. Look at that.
41:08
Send that to people. I have all kinds of talks
41:10
I've given on YouTube. You can find my YouTube channel
41:13
lectures about why we need to go phone free. So
41:16
that's right. That's the thing we can do this year.
41:18
We can do it in twenty twenty four is make
41:20
all our schools phone free, and that will allow our
41:24
children to learn more because when they're sitting in class,
41:27
they don't have the world's greatest entertainment center in their hand,
41:32
and they're not texting, and they're not bullying each other,
41:34
and they're not doing TikTok challenge. They're actually listening to
41:37
the teacher or passing notes with other kids, which is fine.
41:40
They're interacting with other kids. That's actually okay with me.
41:43
Speaker 3: Why school's done it already, I feel like it's.
41:45
Speaker 1: Because a few parents complain. In the United States, the
41:48
only problem, the only reason they don't do it is
41:51
that American parents are so overprotective, many not all so overprotective,
41:56
and they've gotten so used to being able to text
41:58
their kids throughout the day. Could be you know, hey, Johnny,
42:02
how did your math test? Go? And they might even
42:05
text that during the math test, and the kid checks
42:06
his phone during the math test, you know, or oh,
42:10
I'm going to be late for pickup, like okay, did
42:12
the kid need to know that during English class? Like
42:14
why not? Just you know, let when he gets his
42:17
phone back he can say, okay, you'll be late for pickup.
42:20
And in America we have the problem that because we
42:22
do have school shooting now they're extremely rare, but they're
42:25
happening more so some parents think, oh, if there's a
42:28
school shooting, I want to be able to talk to
42:30
my child. And this is a huge mistake because if
42:32
there actually was a shooter on a school campus, what
42:36
you want is the kids to follow directions and do
42:38
what they were trained to do. You don't want every
42:40
kid pulling out their phone and crying to mom and dad.
42:43
So I've spoken to many principles or heads of school
42:47
and I asked them, why don't you ban the phones?
42:50
And they always say the same thing. They'd be riot
42:52
among the parents, well only among some parents. And so
42:55
if you're listening to this podcast and you have kids
42:57
in school, talk to the head of school and say no,
42:59
I want my kid to be in a phone free school.
43:02
I want my kid to listen to the teacher and
43:03
to interact with other kids. So that's something we can
43:06
all do right away.
43:07
Speaker 3: And do you have resources on how to have that
43:08
conversation effect?
43:09
Speaker 1: Yes, okay, I do so. At Anxious Generation dot com
43:12
we do have some you go to resources, you take action,
43:14
and then there's a tab for parents. There are also
43:17
two organizations in the United States. There's Smartphone Free Schools
43:21
dot org and Smartphone Free Schools Movement dot orgs. We
43:27
have two different organizations that they show you here's a
43:30
sample letter that you can say, here's what you can do.
43:33
In the UK there's Smartphone Free Childhood dot co dot UK.
43:37
So within a number of countries there are already movements.
43:40
But you know what, you can just use the resources
43:42
from the American or the British one and you know what,
43:45
this global audience start your own. Come to Anxious Generation
43:49
dot com. We have a list of aligned organizations, mostly
43:52
in the US and the UK, but there are a
43:54
couple in Canada, There's I think one in Germany, there's
43:57
one in somewhere in Latin America. So people are starting,
44:00
these parents are rising up all around the world. Let's
44:02
join them.
44:03
Speaker 3: Let's talk about before we dive into spirituality, because I
44:06
was curious to see you at a chapter dedicate it
44:07
to that. Inside the book, talk to me about the
44:11
differencing girls in the use of social media versus boys, because,
44:14
like you said, and I'm glad we talked about young
44:17
boys because often they can get forgot and left the conversation.
44:20
But let's talk a bit about young girls and how
44:23
social media is having a far more adverse effect on
44:25
their mental health.
44:26
Speaker 1: First, the evidence of a link is just very clear
44:29
for girls. With girls, their mental health was very stable
44:32
until twenty twelve, and then in twenty thirteen it starts rising.
44:35
It really is a light switch. For boys, it's not
44:37
so sharp, it's more gradual. Secondly, the correlations for girls
44:43
are much higher. The correlation three time spent on social
44:45
media and mental health problems. So for girls the evidence
44:48
is much clear. Now why why the connection? In the book,
44:52
I go into the psychology of motivation, and there are
44:55
two categories of motivation. They're very important to understand. Agency
44:59
and commune union. So agency is the desire to be
45:02
an agent to make things happen. You know, when I
45:05
was a kid. It was so exciting to take a
45:07
BB gun and shoot at tin cans because I pull
45:09
a trigger and the thing falls over. It's an incredible thrill.
45:12
So that's agency making things happen. Communion is connection being
45:17
with friends, bonding, sharing stories, sharing emotions. I really enjoyed
45:20
that too. Everyone has both motives on average. On average,
45:25
boys and men have a little bit more on the
45:28
agency side. It matters more to them when you let
45:30
them choose what to do. They're going to go out.
45:32
They're going to build a tower and then knock it over.
45:34
My friends and I used to build model airplants like
45:36
World War two fighter jets, and then we'd put like
45:39
rubbing alcohol in them and then we'd light them on fire.
45:42
Like that was really fun to do. So that's agency
45:44
making things happen. Communion is connection girls. If you let
45:49
kids play, the girls are much more likely to sit
45:51
and talk. They want to connect. And what are they
45:53
talking about other girls? They're talking about relationships. They're developing
45:57
their mental map of space, so are a little more
46:00
sophisticated about social relationships. They think more about them, They
46:04
share emotions more, and that's the strength. That's something that's
46:08
why women excel in certain professions and men excel in
46:12
other professions. But the differences aren't so much how good
46:16
they are. They're what they enjoy doing. And so when
46:19
the companies come along and they say, hey, do you
46:22
want to see what everyone's doing? Do you want to
46:24
see what everyone's saying? Do you want to see what
46:26
they're saying about you? This is like catnep for girls.
46:30
This is this is they really target this girls in
46:33
securities and they get girls to come on, and then
46:36
there's drama which brings more girls on. Now boys are
46:41
affected by this too, but it's just not as alluring.
46:45
And if you give so when everyone gets multiple screens,
46:48
you know, by twenty ten to twenty eleven, the iPad
46:50
comes out multiplayer video games. Everyone is tempted by screens.
46:54
The boys go rushing into multiplayer video games and porn,
46:56
they do a lot more of that. The girls go
46:58
rushing for Instagram, Pinterest, Tumbler, especially the visual platforms. Okay, so,
47:04
now why is this so bad for girls? And I
47:06
go through I think five reasons in the book. So
47:09
one is just the social comparison. Girls are always judged
47:12
more on their looks. I just came across a quote
47:14
from Epictetus. I read Stoic writings in the Mornings. Epictetus
47:18
commented in Ancient Rome about how when they turn fourteen,
47:21
girls are are judged as sexual partners and they focus,
47:25
They're made to focus too much on their looks. And
47:27
you know, this is a sad thing, that these girls
47:28
are just becoming focused on their looks. What's happening now?
47:32
Because girls, it's constant social comparison with other girls who
47:35
get praised for being not just beautiful but sexy. So,
47:39
whether they know it or not, they're copying porn star
47:41
type poses, porn star type looks. They're being hyper sexualized,
47:46
massive social comparison, and on average they don't measure up
47:49
because if everyone on Instagram is actually appears much more
47:54
beautiful than in real life, well then everyone else is
47:57
below average. So the social harrison hurts girls more than boys.
48:02
The nature of aggression is such that boy's aggression is
48:06
more physical, and it's ultimately about who can dominate, who,
48:09
who can beat up who. If it came to that,
48:11
girls aggression, of course, are just as aggressive, but it's
48:14
different girls aggression historically and across cultures and even across
48:17
species is more relational. Girls will damage another girl's reputation
48:22
or relationships, and boy does social media allowed them to
48:25
do that anonymously. And on the weekends too. It used
48:29
to be that girls were safe from bullying on the weekends,
48:31
but because they're out of school, but now they're not so.
48:34
And then there's the sexual predation. You know, there're sexual
48:37
predators that are going for boys, but if you're a
48:40
boy on the internet, you're not being constantly sexually propositioned
48:43
by older men. I mean, it happens, but it's not
48:45
that common if you're a girl on the internet. We
48:48
just published an article from Antonio Bihar, who was a
48:50
Facebook whistleblower, and his research within Facebook, within Instagram actually
48:55
was that thirteen percent of teenagers thirteen to fifteen year
48:58
old teenagers had gotten some sort of a sexual proposition
49:03
or someone coming on to them, a stranger coming on
49:04
to them in the past week. In the past week
49:08
thirteen percent. So if you're a girl online, it's just
49:12
you're just living among predators. You're like, you know, the
49:14
animals we talked about before in the woods after dark,
49:16
you're more frightened. So for all these reasons, when kids
49:20
shifted from a play based childhood to a phone based childhood.
49:24
It was more devastating for the girls.
49:26
Speaker 3: Vidan, we were talking about this yesterday. What's your take
49:29
on He was suggesting this idea of everyone on social
49:33
media being verified. Oh yeah, having to be verified.
49:36
Speaker 1: Oh oh my god. Of course that has to happen.
49:39
So think about it. You know, we're in America. We're
49:42
afraid to let our kids out, in part because we
49:44
think they'll be abducted. There'll be a stranger hanging out
49:47
by the playground luring them into a car, and that
49:50
has happened in America. It's very very rare. If there's
49:53
only about one hundred, one hundred and fifty cases of
49:55
true kidnapping by a stranger in this country every year,
49:57
so it's extremely rare, but it does happen. We're very
50:00
afraid of strangers approaching our children. But guess what, the
50:04
strangers are not at the playground anymore. They've moved to Instagram. Okay,
50:10
So the idea that we're going to put our kids
50:12
on platforms where strange men can reach them, flirt with them,
50:16
say that they're a twelve year old boy or fifteen
50:18
year old boy, exchange fake photos, including a photo of
50:21
your daughter in a bathing suit or less. This is
50:24
complete insanity. I don't think we should be having children
50:28
interacting with complete strangers. The sextortion rings now it used
50:31
to be just ten or twenty thousand a year reported
50:35
in the United States. It's way more Now. There's a
50:37
Nigerian gang, the Yahoo Boys, I think it's called. They've
50:40
industrialized it, so we don't know, but hundreds of thousands,
50:43
millions of boys are getting sixtorted now and dozens are
50:46
known to have committed suicide. It's probably hundreds who've committed suicide.
50:49
Most we don't know about because you know, they're flirting
50:53
with what they think is a girl and then this
50:55
criminal gang tricks them into sending a nude photo and
50:58
at that point then they say, I have what I
51:00
need to ruin your life. Send us send me five
51:03
hundred dollars right now, or I will send this to
51:05
all of your contacts. This is complete insanity that we
51:08
let our boys and our girls interact with criminals day
51:12
and night. So what I would like to see is,
51:16
first we just have to raise the age, so you know,
51:18
below sixteen, they just shouldn't be on it at all.
51:21
They need to be in contact with each other over sixteen. Okay,
51:26
you know this is the nature of the world. People
51:27
are going to be interacting with strangers. There are some
51:29
benefits to that. There's networking issues. But if you were
51:33
on a platform like LinkedIn, LinkedIn people use their real names.
51:37
You don't hear problems about LinkedIn. The problems are especially
51:41
on Instagram, Snapchat, any platform that has anonymous strangers interacting.
51:47
So if we had if we had both age verification,
51:50
which is essential. We have to get age verification eventually,
51:54
and then also identity verification now here. I'm not saying
51:57
that the government needs to mandate identity verification on all platforms.
52:01
The world would be a much better place if we
52:03
did that. There'd be many fewer threats to democracy. If
52:06
we did that, Russian agents and Chinese agents couldn't just
52:10
drop crazy rumors and make us hate each other in
52:12
America the way they do. So I would prefer that
52:15
we live in a world where every platform has mandatory
52:18
identity verification. You could still post with a fake name,
52:21
but in order to open an account, you have to
52:23
show I'm a real person in this country and I'm
52:26
old enough but I would be content even if it's
52:30
not mandated. I would be content if platforms just made
52:33
this the default. What if Meta or let's say not Meta.
52:37
They're not going to do it, But what if there
52:38
was an alternative to Instagram in which people had to
52:42
be verified and then they had all kinds of other
52:46
safety features. If they have an immune system built in? Now,
52:51
how wold I feel about letting my sixteen year old
52:53
daughter on that much better than on a platform where
52:56
she's interacting with criminals from around the world.
52:58
Speaker 3: Have you spoken to Meta?
53:00
Speaker 1: Yes, I've spoken. Well, they say they're working on it.
53:03
They say they're working on age verification, but they I've
53:06
seen nothing from them. They have I shouldn't say that
53:09
they haven't done nothing. They've done a few things. One
53:12
thing is they at least I think they set the
53:13
privacy defaults to high for under sixteen. I think it
53:17
is whereas it used to be. You know, you know
53:19
you're you're a nine year old. You lie, you say
53:21
you're thirteen, and what you say is public. That's completely insane.
53:24
So they have taken a few steps, but not much.
53:27
And again, Antonio Dehar's testimony to the Senate last year was.
53:32
I showed them what's happening, the sexual solicitation of teens.
53:34
I told them a simple way to have this reported.
53:37
They didn't do anything. So I think Meta in particular
53:41
has shown itself resistant to changes suggested by people within.
53:45
That's why we have a couple of Facebook whistleblowers. So
53:49
I'm hoping that market competition will help. I'm hoping that
53:53
Congress will repeal the mistakes it made. In the United States.
53:56
We created this problem for the world. We you know,
53:59
there's our company created this stuff. Our Congress said that
54:03
we're not allowed to sue them for what they do
54:04
to our kids. They can show our kids whatever they
54:06
want and we can't sue them. It's a special law
54:08
that says we can't sue them. But in other countries
54:10
they can. And so I'm really hopeful that all around
54:13
the world people initiate lawsuits when their kids committed suicide
54:16
because of things that happened on social media. I hope
54:18
that people will initiate proceedings if they can, if it's
54:21
clear that it was caused by online activity. And then Congress,
54:26
the US Congress created this very ridiculous law that the
54:31
age at which you can sign a contract with a
54:33
company and give away your data without your parents' knowledge,
54:35
without your parents consent is thirteen, which is insanely low.
54:40
It should that, I think needs to be sixteen or eighteen,
54:42
but it was set to thirteen in nineteen ninety eight
54:45
with no enforcement. In fact, the way the law is written,
54:48
as long as Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat, as long
54:52
as they don't know you're underage, they're fine. But if
54:57
they ask and then they find out that you're under thirteen,
55:00
well then now they're responsible. So it's very important for
55:03
them that they not know how old their users are,
55:06
and we have to change them. We have to get
55:07
to the point where they have to know. Of course,
55:09
they do know how old their users are. They know
55:11
everything about their users, but they don't kick them off.
55:13
So we have to get to the point where the
55:15
companies are held responsible for underage use in the physical world.
55:19
It's like, it's so absurd, you know, people say, tell me, well,
55:22
it's the parent's job to keep them off. Okay. Imagine
55:26
a world in which we generally think kids should not
55:29
be exposed to hardcore sex, to drugs, to violence, and
55:33
to addiction, So we have age limits on bars, strip clubs, brothels.
55:38
There are you know, the brothels in Nevada and in
55:40
Europe and casinos. We have age limits on those. What
55:44
if someone said, you know, it's the parent's job to
55:46
keep the kids out of that. If they don't want
55:47
their thirteen year olds in a brothel, they should stop
55:49
them from going into brothels. Like no, that's not the
55:51
way it works. Like no, this is a business. This
55:54
business is hurting kids. This business is responsible for checking IDs,
55:58
for keeping out children.
56:01
Speaker 3: Yeah.
56:01
Speaker 1: In the online world, we say, well, you know, what
56:02
are you gonna do? You know, nine year olds are
56:04
going to be watching beheading videos, They're gonna be watching
56:07
anal sex, They're gonna be watching the cat in a
56:08
blender video? Have you heard of this? One cat a
56:10
blender on? That's exactly what it sounds like. And this
56:13
is something that kids are exposed to. It's an actual
56:17
cat put in a blender and killed. Yeah. I have
56:19
not watched the video because I don't ever want to
56:21
see it because I'll never unsee it. But I did
56:24
enough research to know this is not just an internet rumor.
56:26
This actually happened and it was in China, So you
56:30
know this is the world that our kids are now inhabiting.
56:32
And I'm saying, no, no, wait, at least till you're sixteen,
56:36
get part way through puberty before you're immersed in this garbage,
56:39
and that is a great transition to our spiritualities discussion.
56:42
Speaker 3: Well, it's an ironic situation where we were glorifying the
56:47
millennials to have been much more productive and effective, but
56:50
a lot of the millennials who create amazing companies that
56:52
the company is exactly now creating this challenge.
56:55
Speaker 1: That's right. That is an irony.
56:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, But I read something around over ten years ago,
57:00
and it talked about how humans defined what was most
57:03
important to a community, a city, or a town based
57:07
on the tallest building that was built. And so previously
57:12
it was the church or the place of worship. A
57:15
few years later that transformed, a few decades later that
57:17
transformed to the government building, and then decades later that
57:21
transformed to the corporate offices, and now the tech companies
57:24
or the financial institutions. And so we saw how society
57:29
has shifted its north star. I was curious to see
57:32
why you brought a chapter on spiritual elevation and degradation
57:36
into this conversation. And how is it connected.
57:39
Speaker 1: Yeah. So my first book was called The Happiness Hypothesis,
57:42
Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. What I did in
57:45
that book it grew out of my teaching psych one
57:47
oh one introductory Psychology at the University of Virginia. I
57:50
noticed when I was trying to explain psychology to three
57:53
hundred students, I would quote Shakespeare, you know, there's nothing
57:57
good or bad, but thinking makes it so well that
58:00
insight is actually also Marcus Aurelius and Buddha. Buddha says
58:04
we are what we think with our minds, we make
58:06
the world. And so I realized that, wow, you know,
58:09
across the millennia, across the continents, people have come to
58:14
these deep insights about psychology, about happiness, about love, about consciousness.
58:19
So I collected, I read a lot of ancient wisdom
58:22
all over the world, and I took out every psychological
58:25
claim and I organized them and I made it into
58:28
ten chapters. And you know, so some of them are
58:31
you know, like, you know, be slower to judge, quicker
58:33
to forgive, you know, Jesus says, judge not les ye
58:36
be judged, you know. And I have a whole chapter
58:38
on how our moral psychology is such that we jump
58:40
to judgments. We care about our tribe, we don't care
58:42
about the truth, you know. So so that was my background.
58:45
I wrote that book on ancient Wisdom, and then I
58:48
wrote The Coddling the American Mind with Greg Lukianov, and
58:51
we've talked about these three great untruths, the ways that
58:54
students are being taught. You know that they're fract Ancient
58:57
wisdom is, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
58:59
There's quotes from all the world about that. But kids
59:02
are being taught no, you're fragile, like you know, if
59:04
someone says a word or a name, that can be
59:07
violence against you. So we're making mistakes here. So that's
59:12
sort of my background. It's thinking about ancient wisdom and psychology,
59:15
all right. So then I end up writing this book,
59:17
The Anxious Generation, and I'm it's July of last year,
59:22
and I'm way behind deadline, and I'm already really stressed
59:25
about like, you know, I'm so far past the deadline
59:28
in order for us to get the book out. But
59:30
I felt like, you know what, I just wrote this
59:32
whole book about kids. I haven't said anything about adults,
59:35
but we're all feeling it. Most of us at least
59:37
are feeling something is wrong. You know, the you know,
59:40
when I got my first ife, when it was so amazing,
59:41
I loved it. But these technologies have become our master.
59:46
They're changing our lives. And I decide, you know what,
59:49
I'm going to write a chapter for adults. I'm just
59:51
going to stick in a chapter what is it that's
59:53
happening to all of us? And I just started making
59:56
a list. You know, it keeps us indoors, it keeps
59:58
us distracted. And I suddenly realized, Wow, almost all the
1:00:03
ancient insights into how to live the phone based life
1:00:07
is the opposite. And once I saw that, I said,
1:00:11
oh my god, that's the structure for this chapter. So
1:00:13
I opened it with my earlier work on moral elevation.
1:00:16
I studied moral emotions. I used to have writings on
1:00:19
moral elevation, which everyone will recognize when you see a
1:00:23
story about you read a story you see you know
1:00:26
on the news, or anything about heroism, about loyalty, about devotion.
1:00:32
You know a dog that you know was so devoted
1:00:35
to its master and it keeps coming to the train
1:00:37
station to greet him. I mean, you know, we're easily
1:00:40
moved and we feel it. We feel it in our
1:00:41
chest and it's the vegus nerve gets activated. Our heart
1:00:46
rhythms change. There are hormonal effects. There's oxytocin is released
1:00:51
women lactate. I showed that experimentally in the study with
1:00:54
Jennifer Silvers. So I did all this research on moral elevation,
1:00:58
and the key to it is the psychology of up
1:01:00
and down. Some things make us feel closer to God,
1:01:04
some things make us feel further from God. That's the
1:01:07
way cultures talk about it. And it's always a vertical
1:01:10
metaphor God is up, the devil is down. So this
1:01:14
is my view. I'm a Jewish atheist myself. I don't
1:01:17
I'm not a believer, but I've had some religious experience.
1:01:20
They've had a number of spiritual experiences, so I know
1:01:22
these are an important part of human psychology. And once
1:01:26
I put in that framework that ancient traditions are trying
1:01:29
to move us up. They're saying, you know, meditate, you
1:01:33
know Hindu traditions, Buddhist traditions, you know, everything out of
1:01:36
India is much more. Get control of your attention, get
1:01:39
control of your consciousness. Otherwise it just gets drowned in trivia.
1:01:43
But no, you know, meditate, live purely, do your work
1:01:46
with mastery. Come out like the moon, come out from
1:01:48
behind the clouds and shine. That's a loose translation from
1:01:51
the Damapata. But what does a phone based life do?
1:01:54
Constant notifications, constant interruptions. My students at NYU, you know,
1:01:59
they get two or three notifications a day on average
1:02:01
on their phones. Many of them never go ten minutes
1:02:03
without an interruption. So so I just made a list,
1:02:07
and it was things like spiritual practices involve making something sacred,
1:02:13
and we all agree this thing is sacred and we
1:02:16
worship it. We have sacred days. So you know, in
1:02:19
the Jewish religion we have the Shabbat, you know, Sabbath.
1:02:21
You're not supposed to use electronics. If you're Orthodox. Things
1:02:25
are sacred and it's sharing. The sacredness binds us together.
1:02:28
That's what every religious community does. But a life online
1:02:32
nothing is sacred. There's no there's no sacred time, there's
1:02:36
the internet never closes. It's global, there are no holidays,
1:02:41
there are no holy days, and the constant demand for
1:02:46
you to post about your brand, what you're doing. Look
1:02:49
at the amazing life I have. So we have a
1:02:52
post it after Babbel. We were just taking on this
1:02:54
really wonderful British writer, young woman named Freya India gen Z,
1:02:59
a writer, and she has a post which starts with
1:03:03
you see a photo of a young woman posing for
1:03:05
a sexy selfie on the train tracks in front of Auschwitz.
1:03:10
Here she is, she's on some tour of Auschwitz, the
1:03:13
concentration camp, but it's a nice day in Poland, and
1:03:16
so she poses in a sexy way in front of
1:03:19
the gates of Hell. And so you know, if everyone's
1:03:22
a brand manager all the time, nothing is sacred. Oh,
1:03:25
and it's all about you, whereas one of the keys
1:03:28
to spirituality is it's not all about you. You actually
1:03:31
are not that important. It's only when you can transcend yourself,
1:03:35
transcend yourself interest, that you can open your heart to God,
1:03:38
to our higher motives, to love to other people. So
1:03:44
you know, you just go through the list. Whatever the
1:03:46
ancients urge us to do to achieve spiritual progress, a
1:03:50
life lived online, even for us adults, pulls us in
1:03:53
the opposite direction.
1:03:54
Speaker 3: I couldn't agree with you more. And I think, what's
1:03:57
really interesting when I'm hearing that, and that's primarily I
1:04:00
started this show. The goal and the intention behind this
1:04:03
show was how can we avoid gossip? How can we
1:04:09
avoid the juiciest scoop? How can we avoid the lowest
1:04:13
hanging fruit and still get as many or more views
1:04:16
than everyone else on the internet. Because my belief system
1:04:21
was that if you were able to make wisdom go viral,
1:04:25
then you could actually raise consciousness. And if we keep
1:04:29
feeding people junk food and junk content, it's actually not
1:04:33
that hard to get clicks and views. But if you
1:04:37
actually just as if you've retrained your habits, when you
1:04:40
put a healthy meal in front of someone, it can
1:04:42
taste like the tastiest meal in the world because you've retrained.
1:04:44
And we've seen that. I know that the audience that
1:04:48
listens and watches us, which is all across the world,
1:04:51
every age bracket and every demographic, is choosing to do
1:04:56
something healthier with their time. But I wonder, when I'm
1:04:59
listening to Jonathan, I'm hearing the challenge again goes back
1:05:02
to the iron ironic point I made, which is, if
1:05:06
creators are not informed and trained in sacred creation, you
1:05:13
end up creating things that have the flaws of the creator.
1:05:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so yeah, beautifully right when I look at
1:05:20
what the flaws of the creator's beautiful.
1:05:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like I've I've always thought when everyone's like, oh,
1:05:24
do you think AI will be manipulative of off, I'm like,
1:05:27
of course, because manipulative, like it's it can't not be
1:05:30
anything that we've seen so well, like AI is going
1:05:32
to take over the world, And it's like, yes, because
1:05:34
humans did, Like, it's not it's not that surprising. And
1:05:38
so when I think of the challenges that I see
1:05:41
in even TV content and streaming content and how dark
1:05:45
it's got. And whenever anyone says to me in my
1:05:47
coaching practice that I have anxiety, the first thing I
1:05:50
asked them is what did you watch last night? And
1:05:53
it's there's such a direct correlation between these cliffhanger chemicals
1:05:57
that are released in everyone's brain in order to keep
1:06:00
them addicted. And so I go, where does this education
1:06:04
come in? Because we can take away and I agree
1:06:09
with you, by the way, I'm fully with you. We
1:06:11
take away what is currently causing an amplification of insecurity, envy,
1:06:17
ego and the acceleration of it. But the challenge is
1:06:21
that the seed of that still remains and then gets
1:06:25
exercised in adulthood.
1:06:28
Speaker 1: What do we do well? So the first thing is
1:06:31
we need to understand what's happening to us. And this
1:06:34
is all so new. And my argument is that the
1:06:39
world changed, life change between twenty ten and twenty fifteen,
1:06:42
and my book is about how it changed for kids,
1:06:44
but it changed for all of us, and we're confused.
1:06:47
We don't understand it. These things are powerful tools we adults,
1:06:52
we benefit from them in many ways, but we don't
1:06:55
understand what's happening to us. And so my hope is
1:06:58
that with my book, with your show, with a lot
1:07:01
of people who are writing about this, I think people
1:07:03
are coming to realize. You know, we were confused in
1:07:05
the twenty tens. It was so new, and I think
1:07:07
we were beginning to get there to see this is
1:07:09
a problem. And then COVID hit and we all got
1:07:11
super confused by COVID and we needed our online devices
1:07:14
all the time in COVID. But I think the reason
1:07:17
why things are changing so fast now is because now
1:07:19
that we're coming out of COVID, now everyone sees the wreckage.
1:07:22
They see it in the new patterns and their children,
1:07:24
they see it in the new patterns and themselves. They're
1:07:25
sick of being on zoom calls all the time. They
1:07:28
want crave human contact. So let's just see how far
1:07:31
we can get just by raising awareness of this, as
1:07:34
you're doing on your show, as many people are doing.
1:07:37
So two things I would urge people to think about
1:07:39
are you need to control your own attention. Your tension
1:07:42
is the most precious among the most precious resources you have.
1:07:45
So once you see your attention as a precious resource,
1:07:48
you can stop letting companies just steal it from you.
1:07:51
This is perhaps the most effective thing I do with
1:07:53
my students that at in New York University, and they're
1:07:55
mostly nineteen years old plus or minis, and I show
1:07:59
them how important attention is their business students. They want
1:08:01
to have an effect on the world, they want to
1:08:03
create something, And I show them if you've given away
1:08:06
all your attention to notifications, to TikTok, you have no
1:08:09
attention left. So you're not going to be able to
1:08:11
do anything in this life. Do you want that?
1:08:14
Speaker 3: No?
1:08:14
Speaker 1: They don't. Well, okay, how about if we turn off
1:08:17
almost all your notifications? How about if we take social
1:08:20
media off of your phone? So I'm hoping that some
1:08:22
of them will quit entirely. But let's just start by
1:08:25
just don't have it on your phone. You can use
1:08:26
your laptop at home, whatever, if you need to check,
1:08:29
you need to keep up with things. Just by making
1:08:31
a few changes, they regain their attention. Now suddenly they
1:08:34
have the mental capacity to think, to think big, to
1:08:39
do things. So we need a global aware and a
1:08:43
global recognition that our attention is being drained away. As
1:08:46
if there was like a giant mosquito, a giant drill
1:08:49
stuck into our brain, sucking out our attention. We got
1:08:52
to say stop, We've got to pull the needle out.
1:08:54
That's the first thing. Another is to recognize that we
1:08:59
need to be rooted in real communities with real relationships
1:09:02
and face to face and touch, and so we need
1:09:05
to resist taking the easy way. It's so much easier
1:09:07
to set up a zoom meeting than it is to
1:09:09
get in your car and go to visit someone, and
1:09:12
there's many times we need to do that. But we
1:09:14
need to rehumanize our lives and that means more time
1:09:17
with real people, not feeling so rushed, and being able
1:09:21
to be open to people and sharing experiences. So that's another.
1:09:24
There's so many I could list. I'll just list one
1:09:26
more area where I want to really raise awareness, which
1:09:29
is time in nature. So the modern world, we're further
1:09:33
and further away from nature, and as we get busier
1:09:36
and busier, we have no time. And so after twenty twelve,
1:09:39
when everyone's on social media all the time, everyone's on
1:09:41
their phones, people are spending less time. In America, church
1:09:45
attendance has plummeted since twenty eleven or so twenty twelve
1:09:49
because no one has time. Everyone's so busy with their
1:09:51
notifications and they're in their posts. So exposing ourselves to beauty,
1:09:56
to nature, going out for all walks, go out for
1:09:59
a walk. I have my students out for a walk
1:10:01
in a park with no phone and no headphones. They
1:10:04
can't listen to music, they have to go just walk slowly,
1:10:06
and the effects are amazing because many of them they've
1:10:09
never noticed, they've never noticed how beautiful the world is. Yeah,
1:10:13
so we can we can take steps to rehumanize our lives.
1:10:17
Speaker 3: And how do we respiritualize them, Like, how do we
1:10:20
going back to that chapter, I feel like it's also
1:10:24
spiritualizing of intention, right if someone's creating something and I'm
1:10:28
assuming when you do your research and the books you've written,
1:10:31
and even the one happiness hypothesis that you started with
1:10:36
and the journey that you've gone on, it seems like
1:10:38
your intention has been to uplift people through your work.
1:10:42
Speaker 1: Certainly my early work I used to study positive psychology,
1:10:45
and the goal there was very explicit. The whole movement
1:10:47
started by Martin Seligman in the nineteen nineties. The whole
1:10:50
movement was psychology is pretty good taking people from negative
1:10:53
six up to zero. We have some ways to bring
1:10:57
you up to zero, but most people are actually aboves.
1:11:00
Most people are actually doing reasonably well, and they want
1:11:02
to go from plus two to plus seven, and psychology
1:11:06
had nothing to say to them. So yes, a lot
1:11:08
of my early work was about how do we get
1:11:09
to plus seven? But especially with the Kylie, the American mind,
1:11:13
and now the anxious generation, I'm now talking about how
1:11:17
do we get from negative ten up to zero? I
1:11:20
mean that's the first step. Just help kids, help the
1:11:23
next generation get out of defend mode, out of performance mode,
1:11:28
and into a more human, real childhood.
1:11:31
Speaker 3: It's almost like your students and the you know, the
1:11:33
people that will go on to become entrepreneurs and business leaders.
1:11:37
It's almost like the challenge still becomes that even if
1:11:40
people think big and think successfully and think scaled and
1:11:45
are open minded, it's almost like without the inherent belief
1:11:50
that I should create something to help others, Without that,
1:11:54
no matter what you create will in some way harm
1:11:58
or cause difficult to others because it wasn't therein not
1:12:03
saying that you can do something perfectly and not saying
1:12:05
you could build something without any flaws completely, that's no
1:12:08
one can do that. But this idea that at least
1:12:11
if that's my intention, if that's at least my north star,
1:12:14
if that's my compass, and I'm wondering where people are
1:12:18
getting that from it a tool.
1:12:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll take what you said and I'll just make
1:12:22
it a little bit more business friends, please, what you
1:12:25
said seem to be something like if you intend to
1:12:28
make something that's good for people, or you know, if
1:12:30
you have a positive intention, this is going to help people.
1:12:32
And so you know, many people think like, oh, you know,
1:12:34
I should go into a nonprofit work, I should go
1:12:37
into charity work. You know a lot of young people
1:12:40
are headed towards nonprofit work, and a lot of the
1:12:42
nonprofits don't do very much, and they're wasting their talents there.
1:12:46
Since I moved to a business school in twenty eleven,
1:12:48
I used to teach in the psychology department at University
1:12:50
of Virginia, but I've been at the Nyustern School of
1:12:52
Business since twenty eleven. What I've come to see is
1:12:55
that is that almost all businesses make the world better
1:12:59
because they're creating something that people need. And I once
1:13:02
heard a philosopher say, in an ideal capitalist society, the
1:13:07
only way to get rich is by making other people
1:13:10
better off. And so you don't have to be all
1:13:13
pro social. You can just say, look, there's a need
1:13:15
for this kind of wrench. I invented this wrench. The
1:13:17
world's better off, people need it, and then I make money.
1:13:20
That's great. You know, if I tell my stents of
1:13:22
all you do is create goods and services that increase
1:13:27
the general welfare of humankind because it's a useful product.
1:13:30
That's great. You're you're part of progress. But now when
1:13:34
we look at it that way, now we get a
1:13:36
new view of social media, because social media is not
1:13:40
a normal consumer product. A normal consumer product, if it
1:13:44
hurts the customers, they'll stop buying it unless they're addicted.
1:13:48
But with social media, and especially the advertising driven business
1:13:53
model at Facebook developed originally, now many of them are copied.
1:13:57
The customer is the advertiser, that's who pays the money.
1:14:00
The consumer is the product. They're the victim in a
1:14:03
sense of this, and that explains why, especially for TikTok
1:14:08
and Instagram. I've seen a couple of surveys now and
1:14:10
I did with my own class. You say, do you
1:14:13
use TikTok? So let's do it this way. I asked
1:14:15
my students, how many of you use Netflix? How many've
1:14:19
watched Netflix least once a week? Almost all hands go up.
1:14:21
How many of you wish Netflix was never invented? Nobody? Nobody?
1:14:26
Netflix is stories, full length stories. We enjoy it. Maybe
1:14:29
we watch too much, but we don't feel's ruining our lives. Okay,
1:14:33
how many of you use TikTok once a week? Most
1:14:36
hands go up? How many of you wish TikTok was
1:14:38
never invented? Most hands go up? Same thing for Instagram.
1:14:42
So we have this bizarre situation where a couple of
1:14:45
big platforms, especially TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, a few others,
1:14:49
they're sucking up most human attention. Billions and billions of
1:14:53
people are spending hours a day most human attention is
1:14:57
being drained away for a product that most people wish
1:15:00
never existed. So this is I think the greatest destruction
1:15:04
of human value in human history. These products should not exist,
1:15:09
or at least they should not exist in their present form, unregulated,
1:15:12
not responsible for the harm they cause, causing massive harm.
1:15:16
The people who use them don't overall whish they didn't exist.
1:15:19
Something is deeply, deeply wrong with our society and the
1:15:26
nature of these companies, which are now some of the
1:15:28
biggest richest companies on Earth.
1:15:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you could argue that fast food companies and
1:15:32
young food companies have done the same for years and
1:15:34
got away with it too.
1:15:35
Speaker 1: Well, that's true, that's true. But at least there people
1:15:38
are making a decision. Now, it's a part of it
1:15:41
is addiction, but at least they're you know, like, I
1:15:43
really enjoy freedoms. I just love freedoms. It's just, you know,
1:15:46
it's something I a eminem is there are a few
1:15:48
consumer products that I love, and you know, I know
1:15:50
they're bad for me to make a decision about it,
1:15:52
and I don't think and now they are. Of course
1:15:54
they were adding to obesity, but I think social media
1:15:57
is so much more pernicious because if I eat FreeDOS,
1:16:01
that doesn't make anyone else eat FreeDOS. But if I
1:16:03
get on social media that you know, the more of
1:16:06
us are on, the more pressure there is to be on,
1:16:08
and that's especially hitting our kids. We've got to break
1:16:10
that up absolutely.
1:16:11
Speaker 3: Jonathan. It's been such a joy talking to you and
1:16:14
so insightful. I'm so glad you gave our audience so
1:16:17
many great call to actions, and we'll make sure we
1:16:19
put them in the caption and the comment sections so
1:16:21
people can find them easily. We end every episode of
1:16:25
On Purpose with a fast five or a final five.
1:16:27
At least I have to be in one word to
1:16:29
one sentence, so you have something to play.
1:16:32
Speaker 1: Okay, have a drink of water. Let me compose myself.
1:16:35
This could be difficult, Jonathan and I.
1:16:36
Speaker 3: These are your final five. The first question is what
1:16:39
is the best advice you've ever heard or received?
1:16:42
Speaker 1: Well, what comes to mind. I don't know if it's
1:16:43
the best board. It comes right away to mind is
1:16:45
what my father said when he dropped me off at college,
1:16:48
and he said John, the most important things you learn
1:16:52
you're not going to learn in the classroom. And it
1:16:54
was just, you know, it's just advice to go have experience,
1:16:57
and and that's actually something I tell my students now.
1:17:00
I was just you take risks, have experiences.
1:17:02
Speaker 3: Beautiful. Question number two, what is the worst advice you're
1:17:05
to receive?
1:17:07
Speaker 1: The worst advice I ever received? Hard to say, but
1:17:12
I think generally a piece of bad advice that young
1:17:16
people receive is, you know, just follow your passions. That's important.
1:17:23
But I think many young people now think that they
1:17:28
need to be engaged in work which is not just
1:17:31
rewarding but socially valuable, like as though my first job
1:17:35
after college has to have all these features. And what
1:17:38
I try to tell them is no, no, you want
1:17:40
to end up there. You want, you know, in a
1:17:42
decade or two, you want to have work that you love.
1:17:45
That doesn't mean you have to love every moment of it,
1:17:47
you know, think long term. Think about the skills you need,
1:17:50
think about the toughening you need, think about the experiences
1:17:52
you need. And it might even be unpleasant for a while,
1:17:54
but think long term.
1:17:56
Speaker 3: Great Question number three. An experience that you never thought
1:17:59
you'd ever try, but you're glad you did.
1:18:03
Speaker 1: I'm really pro experience. I'm very high in openness to
1:18:06
experience and I always kind of wanted to try everything, so,
1:18:10
you know, whether it was psychedelic drugs or you know,
1:18:15
travel all over the world. So I actually can't think
1:18:17
of anything. You've done them all, well, I've done. I mean,
1:18:20
I've done a lot of different things in my life.
1:18:22
I can't think I saw yeah, yeah, which I've talked
1:18:25
about on some podcasts. Now that now that Michael Polland
1:18:27
has written a book on it, now that people can
1:18:28
talk about psychedelic experience, that is you know I mentioned
1:18:31
before I've had a number of spiritual experience and some
1:18:33
of the most intense ones were on psychedelics.
1:18:35
Speaker 3: Question before an experience that you're excited to try this.
1:18:38
Speaker 1: Year experience, I'm excited to try this year? Well this well,
1:18:41
actually going to Wimbledon my son. My son is graduated
1:18:47
from high school and I wanted to give him something special,
1:18:50
and I said, what's something that that you know, what's
1:18:52
the experience you want to have? And he said Wimbledon.
1:18:54
He loves tennis. We go to the US Open in
1:18:57
New York, but he's never been to Wimbledon the best.
1:19:00
So I was able to scrounge up a few tickets
1:19:01
and we'll go a couple of days.
1:19:03
Speaker 3: Fantastic, That would be great. Okay, fifth and final question
1:19:05
we asked this every guest has ever been on the show.
1:19:08
If you could create one law that everyone had to follow,
1:19:10
what would it be?
1:19:12
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm thinking kind of practically here, you know, yeah, please,
1:19:15
you know. One would be that businesses that impose costs
1:19:18
on others that are not party to the exchange should
1:19:22
have to bear the cost. So basically get rid of externalities.
1:19:25
And social medium poses so many externalities. But if I
1:19:29
if I have just like one dart to throw one
1:19:31
thing to ask right now, I'm just going to say,
1:19:33
let's get effective mandatory age verification on the Internet so
1:19:39
that some sites are actually like porn sites are actually
1:19:42
not open to children. I think a law like that
1:19:47
would be that's going to be the big hard one,
1:19:49
that would be a real game changer. So again, not
1:19:52
very you know, hoping, you know, great, if I could
1:19:54
come up with, you know, some version of Kant's categorical
1:19:56
imperative here, but I'll just go with those the ones
1:20:00
I've been thinking about fantastic everyone.
1:20:02
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for listening. The book is called
1:20:04
The Anxious Generation, How the Great rewiring of childhood is
1:20:07
causing an epidemic of mental illness. Jonathan, thank you so
1:20:11
much for joining us on purpose. I really am encouraging
1:20:15
everyone who's been listening and watching to go ahead to
1:20:17
the sites that Jonathan recommended see if we can be
1:20:19
a part of the mission support the work that Jonathan
1:20:22
and his team are doing, because I couldn't agree with
1:20:24
you more. I think this will. This is what I
1:20:27
love about what you've done is often I find a
1:20:29
lot of thinkers and thought leaders create fear based arguments
1:20:34
and without any concrete solutions, and I feel that only
1:20:37
adds to the fear and anxiety in the world. And
1:20:39
so I'm very grateful that we have very tangible, specific
1:20:42
things that we're fighting for here, and I really really
1:20:44
hope that you'll lean on us to help you and
1:20:47
help be a part of this with you so well.
1:20:49
Speaker 1: Thank you, Jay. I am wildly optimistic that this is
1:20:51
a problem we can solve in a year. Absolutely at
1:20:53
least get most of the way towards solving, and I
1:20:55
really appreciate your help in getting the word out. I'm
1:20:57
so excited to reach a global audience because this is
1:21:00
this is a pan human this is a global problem.
1:21:03
I'm so thank you, Jay, thank you, thank you.
1:21:05
Speaker 3: If you enjoyed this podcast, you're going to love my
1:21:08
conversation with Michelle Obama where she opens up on how
1:21:12
to stay with your partner when they're changing, and the
1:21:16
four check ins you should be doing in your relationship.
1:21:20
We also talk about how to deal with relationships when
1:21:22
they're under stressed. If you're going through something right now
1:21:26
with your partner or someone you're seeing, this is the
1:21:29
episode for you.
1:21:30
Speaker 2: No wonder our kids are struggling. We have a new
1:21:33
technology and we've just taken it in hookline and Sinker,
1:21:37
and we have to be mindful for our kids. They'll
1:21:40
just be thumbing through this stuff. You know, their mind's
1:21:44
never sleeping.