Jonathan Haidt Reveals Why Smartphones and Social Media Are Destroying an Entire Generation of Kids

Are your kids depressed? Anxious? Maybe it’s because they’re addicted to these. If your kids went through puberty on a smartphone with social media, they came out different than human beings before that. Jonathan Haidt, author of this big bestseller, “The Anxious Generation,” says today’s kids are addicted to smartphones. They know that life could be better if they didn't spend five or six hours a day on social media. They know that, but they can't help it. But some researchers are not convinced. We're probably in the midst of another moral panic. Chris Ferguson says Haidt’s campaign against smartphones is like earlier campaigns against rock and roll, video games, even comic books. I think there ought to be a law against them. Look at kids today. They're less violent. They smoke less. They use drugs less. Yeah, that's all true. All this happened during the social media age. I’ve posted two short videos about Haidt’s smartphone criticism. One was positive, one was skeptical. But Haidt’s push to get schools to ban phones is winning. And he has many more interesting things to say. So here’s our full interview. Congratulations, you're changing America. I kind of came on the scene at a weird moment where all over the world, parents were fed up with what was going on. So my book came out in March of 2024, and all over the world, parents are rising up, acting on it, delaying smartphones. What do you mean all over the world? I know United States, but elsewhere? All over the developed world. The key is, if your kids went through puberty on a smartphone with social media, they came out different than human beings before that. And wherever this has happened, mental health is declining, attention spans are declining. Educational stats are going down. I shouldn't say literally every place else. I don't know every country and I don't know East Asia, but across the Western developed world, this is all happening at the same time, beginning in the early 2010s. I could ask the question selfishly. I'd say you and my son Max are changing the world. I would agree with that. Max, your son Max, is a great speaker. Social media companies make their money on advertising, which basically means the more of your time that we can take, the more money we make. He has an amazing background in this technology and he too finds a ready market in schools because, imagine being a school teacher or a principal. Imagine being a teacher and you look out at your class and they're all on their phones. Like when you and I were in school, imagine if they said, “You can take your TV into class. You can take your binoculars, your guitar, take everything you want, and you can use it during class time.” You couldn't possibly learn. Teachers are quitting in droves. They can't get through to students. And so the demand for someone to come in and say, “What the hell is happening and what do we do?” That's why my book has become a bestseller in so many countries instantly. And that's why your son Max has, I assume, an infinitely long list of schools. Your book is not just a bestseller. It's been a bestseller for more than a year. That's unheard of. It's still #4 on the list. It's been in the top three for half of those weeks. It is not like other books because no one else ever had the luxury of coming into a world that was so far out of whack that a single book attracted everybody. So the only other book on the bestseller list, there's the book Atomic Habits that has been very high up for many, many years. It's a great book. I use it in my flourishing course at NYU. But most books, there's some interest, they rise up and then they drop off. My book seems to be staying because there are a lot of people who have children and every year there are a lot more. And whenever there's a group of parents, an Instagram group or WhatsApp group, at some point they're talking about The Anxious Generation because everybody sees the problem and they want help knowing what to do about it. Sum it up. This argument resonated with parents? Yeah. What's it about? It's about what the hell happened to people born in 1996 and later around the Western world. The book is a tragedy in two acts. In Act One, we lose the play-based childhood. We stop letting kids run around outside. We're too afraid they'll get abducted. I'm sure you've had Lenore Skenazy on this show before. As we've given kids less freedom, as we've trusted them with less freedom in their lives, less independence, less joy, what a surprise. They're becoming anxious and depressed. So we get the gradual loss of play from the 90s through the early 2010s. That's Act One of the tragedy, that sets kids up to be weaker. Weaker because by not going outside and having real experiences they're less resilient? Exactly. Exactly. When you have a play-based childhood with no adult supervision, you have to learn to be self-supervising. And sometimes you get lost and you're scared, but you find your way back. And sometimes there are some mean kids who are threatening to beat you up, but you either talk your way out of it or you run away or you actually get punched. And it's those sorts of things that toughen you. And if all you do is sit inside on a computer, it's kind of like you're missing out on all of your childhood. And that brings us to the second act of the tragedy, which I call “The Great Rewiring of Childhood.” Between 2010 and 2015, everything changes. In 2010, the iPhone was out, it'd been out for three years, but very few teens had one. Everyone had flip phones or basic phones. You text, you call, and there was a game called Snake, which millennials seem to all remember. That's it. It was a communication device. So if you were born in 1995, you begin puberty at around, let's say 2007, you’re age 12, and you don't really get a smartphone until you're 14, 15. You're most of the way through puberty by the time you get your first smartphone. And so you come out without mental health problems on average. The Millennials are actually slightly healthier, mentally, than the generation before them, Gen X. But if you were born in the year 2000, you hit puberty around 2012. And 2012 is the key year in our story. The iPhone 4 has the first front-facing camera. That's 2010. Instagram comes out in 2010, but it doesn't get popular until 2012, which is the year that Facebook buys it. And that's when all the girls get on Instagram, is 2012. You get high speed internet coming in, unlimited texting, you get higher video speeds, you get on-demand porn, you get everything in this little box. And so by 2015, if you're going through puberty in 2015, you're going through puberty online, posting photos of yourself, not running around outside. If you're spending 5 to 10 hours on your device, there's a lot of things you're not doing. You're not spending much time sleeping and so we get an increase. The levels of sleep deprivation were steady in the early 2000s. They went up in the 90s that I don't know whether that was technology or something else. But the point is many, many things change between 2010 and 2015. Sleep goes down, time with friends goes down, exercise goes down, time with friends. This, in fact, in a way, this is the most direct illustration of "The Great Rewiring of Childhood.” What this graph shows is that in 2010, people in the youngest age group, 15 to 24, they were spending two hours a day with their friends because that's what you do when you're a kid. You hang out with your friends after school and on weekends. This is a time-use data for Americans. One of the questions is, “How much time a day do you spend with your friends outside of work and school?” So leaving aside work and school. What you see is everyone else is spending 40 to 50 minutes with their friends. They're married, they've got jobs, they're not hanging out with their friends like on the show “Friends.” But young people used to hang out with friends until they get a smartphone. Once they get a smartphone, as you see in the graph, time with friends plunges. Plunges more than 50% drop in time with friends. And that's one of the best things you can do as a kid is hang out with your friends, joke around, have adventures. So again, everything changes between 2010 and 2015, and the kids who made it through puberty before then are Millennials. They're okay. And the kids who got caught in it, went through puberty online. That is where we see the maximum damage, especially to girls. And you say it harms girls more because? Yeah. So let's be clear about the harms. Originally, I thought my book was going to be about how social media causes anxiety and depression, because that’s where the data is best. And that is especially girls. That link is much clearer, much stronger in the correlational studies, much stronger in the self-report studies. Boys are on social media and lots of bad things happen to them, but it doesn't seem to make them depressed and anxious nearly as much. But when we expand our focus on the harms and we say, “Well, what about kids who die because of drug overdoses?” Because now, you can get drugs instantly on Snapchat. Dealers are all over the place. You can connect with them, they'll deliver it to you. And a lot of them are laced with fentanyl. So a lot of the fentanyl crisis is because kids can get drugs so effortlessly and instantly. That, I'm not sure that that's more boys than girls, but I suspect that it is. Buying weapons online is much more boys than girls. So originally, I thought that girls were doing worse. But here's what I've come to realize since the book came out. If we check in on the kids at age 14, the girls are doing worse. They're more depressed and anxious, they're more messed up. The boys are having fun. They're spending all their free time on video games and porn and those are fun. But now let's look at the kids when they're 26, 28. What happened? The girls are much more likely to have gone to college, graduated from college, gotten a job and moved out of their parents' home. The boys are more likely to still be in the parents' basement playing video games. They never grew up. They didn't have toughening experience, they didn't develop social skills. They changed their dopamine systems so that they have to have lots of rewards. Real life is incredibly boring compared to a video game or porn. Real women are boring compared to porn and they're difficult, whereas porn is easy. So I think what we're seeing in the long run is actually the phone-based childhood, I believe now, is messing up boys. It's causing even more harm to boys than to girls. But you don't see that at 14. You see it in adulthood. I get hooked. I watch TikTok videos, I get caught up. It's just so interesting. Well, that's right. And it was designed to do that. And so a crucial distinction is between technology as a tool and technology as a master. So the original iPhone was an amazing piece of equipment. You zoom in or zoom out by pinching or unpinching with your fingers, it's spectacular. It was the ultimate digital Swiss Army knife. I got one in 2008. It had mapping software and music and a telephone and a web browser and the thing even had a flashlight. And if my Swiss Army knife when I was a kid had had a flashlight too, that would've been incredible. But Swiss Army knives were not designed to keep you using the Swiss Army knife all day long. That's just not what they were thinking when they put on the corkscrew or the magnifying glass. And the same is true for the original iPhone. The mapping program wasn't designed to keep you using maps all day long. So technology as a tool, it's fantastic. I love technology. I love the original iPhone. But then in, that's 2007, 2008, ‘09, you get the App Store and you get push notifications and you get the beginning of the engagement based, or advertising driven business model. Facebook originally didn't have a way to make money, and once they worked out like, “Oh no, we're going to show you ads and keep you on as long as possible to show you more ads,” that all becomes possible after push notifications in the App Store. Instagram is the first social media platform designed exclusively for the phone. You couldn't use it on a browser originally. And so everything moves on to the phone between 2010 and 2015. And now the phone is not a Swiss Army knife, now it's a slot machine. You've got a whole bunch of apps. A lot of them are Swiss Army knife apps still, but all of the social media apps and the video games, they're all designed to hook you, to keep you on. And so we adults are hooked too, but at least we made it through puberty. In puberty, the brain is rewiring itself from back to front. The whole thing is changing in the course of just a few years. It's an incredibly sensitive, delicate process. So you and I made it through. We have adult brains that work properly and we can still get addicted, but if we quit our addictions, we get our normal brain back. But if you went through puberty on this, it's possible, we don't know for sure, but it's possible that the changes are permanent or at least very hard to overcome. Max says Snap is the worst. Well see, they have different profiles. In terms of exposure to things that are really dangerous, Snap is the worst. In terms of destroying your ability to pay attention, TikTok is the worst. In terms of destroying a teenage girl's sense of confidence, self-esteem, body image, Instagram is the worst. So they each have their own profile of effects, and we have to be aware of that. A lot of the research is just, “How many hours a day do you spend on social media and how is your mental health?” And you look at the correlation, “Oh, it's small.” Of course it's small. Each one is causing different kinds of harm. And each one we don't really measure. We just have this one very rough measure. How many hours a day do you spend on all social media? All the things we love about social media, those are the reward in the slot machine. So, our experience using this stuff becomes, “Bored, bored, bored, ha ha that was funny. Bored, bored, bored. Whoa! Check that out.” We get that hit every once in a while— [coins clattering] Which is like the reward in the slot machine that's there to keep us scrolling for hours and hours at a time. And what Max is drawing on there, is the known fact that the people who made these programs, a lot of them took a course at Stanford called “Persuasive Design.” They studied behaviorism, they learned about variable ratio, reinforcement schedules, and they built them into their product. Just like a slot machine. Exactly. Mostly nothing, nothing, oh, I won! Exactly. That's right. What the behaviorists discovered back in the ‘20s and ‘30s, we're talking B.F. Skinner, Thorndyke, people like that, was if you give an animal a reward every time they do what you want, you can train their behavior and you can train them to do amazing things, complicated things. This is the way circus animals get trained. But if you give them intermittent conditioning, I remember that from college. That's right. So even more efficient than rewarding every behavior is rewarding maybe a 10th of them, but the animal never knows where it's going to be. So it's every 10th, but with variation. And that's exactly what slot machines do. And I forget who brought this out, that when you want to check like, “Oh, do I have any more messages?” And you pull down and then it kind of bounces up and then you get the more messages. They literally and consciously copied the slot machine for that. They studied what the casino industry does to hook people, to make them lose track of time, to extract as much money as possible from them. It’s all been arranged just for us to get your money. That’s the truth about Las Vegas. We’re the only winners. I have strong libertarian sympathies. I don't want to tell adults what to do. But if companies are hooking children intentionally and deliberately and fighting every effort around the world to regulate them, well, I think these companies are doing bad things and we need to rise up and say, “No, you have to stop doing this to children.” Levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm were pretty stable from the 1990s, late ‘90s through 2010, even 2011. There's no sign of a problem or a crisis or an increase. And then all of a sudden, in many countries at the same time, the rates go up, way up, especially for girls. And if it was just the US, you could say as some people, some of my critics have said, “Oh, correlation isn't causation. The mere fact that kids got on smartphones, then. It could have been, you know, 2012 was the Newtown massacre, like, you know. After that, kids had these lockdown drills. And that's why kids are so anxious because we made them anxious with lockdown drills.” Or maybe because their professors are telling them America is evil and white people are evil and we should be guilty. Fine. You can have that hypothesis too. But then you'd have to explain, first, why 2012, why they were not saying that in 2011, but by 2013 they all were? So you have to get both the timing and the international scope. So really? Professors in Scandinavia and Australia were all doing the same thing. They weren't doing it in 2011, but they were all doing it by 2013? So my point is that I don't think there's ever been such synchronized mental health collapse around the world, mostly hitting girls and especially younger teen girls. So no one has yet come up with another explanation. I keep waiting like, okay, you don't believe me, come up with another explanation. Statistical noise, things change. Suicides have gone up and down in the past. Yeah, the big spike in suicides and crime in the ‘80s, I think was plausibly related to leaded gas, which interfered with brain development. As soon as we banned leaded gas, well, 15 years later, crime rates and suicide rates dropped. So it's true that there was a rise in crime and suicide in the ‘70s and 80’s. That is true. But I don't believe that that was related to depression. In fact, the rates of depression, anxiety don't quite follow that. So I think there was some brain dysregulation in Gen X especially, which was the most leaded, they had the most leaded brains growing up in the ‘70s. There's some psychologists who say, “You don't have the data, really, to prove these things.” Great, let's go. So what they're saying is, it's just a correlation. And there are two different kinds of correlation. There's an historical correlation, which is, as soon as childhood moved on to these devices, that's when all the graphs go up. That is a historical correlation. Can I prove that one caused the other? No, it's very difficult to prove any historical correlation. But the critique would be a lot more compelling if they had another explanation for why this happens internationally at the same time. Okay, that's one set of data. Fine, I can't prove it, but my theory is the only plausible one out there. No one's even proposed one that will work across so many countries in 2012. Then there's correlations in these data sets. When you look at who's a heavy user, they're doing worse. And this is true across these devices. The people who are heavy users are often more likely to become problematic users, more addicted. The heavy users are always doing worse. Now, does that mean that spending six hours a day on video games does something? Maybe if you’re a depressed person-- Maybe it's just the depressed people— It causes you to— So that is a theoretical possibility and that's what the entire argument hangs on. This is Meta's main defense that the data is correlational and it's mostly reverse correlation. It's just that depressed kids are more likely to use our products, which is a kind of an interesting thing, but that does not explain, first, why it is that the number of depressed people doubled after 2012. Doubled? Most of these stats, if you look at, especially at girls, and especially younger teen girls, in general, the increases are 50% to 150%. We're not talking about 10% or 20% increases. We're talking 50% to 150%. And for younger teen girls, that's where you get the 150%, even 200% increases in self-hospitalizations for self-harm. So the critics say, “Oh, it's just correlations.” [sighs] There are so many different kinds of evidence, one of which is the experiments. When you ask people to get off of social media for more than a week, on average, their levels of depression, anxiety, get down. Those are experiments, not correlations. But more importantly, there are so many different kinds of evidence. One is confessions. If they say they're hurting people, if they have reports from their own research that they're hurting people, that's evidence. The only people who know what's going on are the companies. We, psychologists, all we get is this crappy data of, here's a giant dataset. How many hours a day do you spend? 1 to 5. That's a very weak variable to extract anything from. The companies are the only ones to know what's going on, and they find that they're hurting kids. So if you have a perpetrator who the victims identify, and in surveys young people say, what's the cause of the anxiety, depression? They say social media is the main cause. So if the victims identify the perpetrator, if the perpetrator confesses in writing, if there are lots of witnesses, teachers, police departments now. There was just a report in the UK, there's an increase in violent crime, knife crime, youth crime. The big surprise in the report was, almost everywhere we look, social media is involved. The fights start on social media. It's brought in the bathroom so that it can be filmed and put up on social media. And so if this was a legal case and we had positive ID by the victims, we had eyewitnesses, we have confessions, I think the case is pretty much closed. Yes, the correlations are not gigantic, but the variables we're correlating are only picking up a small piece of the puzzle. Do they really know? I mean, maybe something else is making children depressed. They know, and I know that they know because there are so many dead kids whose parents have sued these bastards. And in the process of the lawsuits, there's discovery and we're still at the early stages of that, but even just what's come out from the lawsuits, and here I'm drawing primarily from the state attorneys general. So I think almost all of the states have sued these companies because just the sheer cost of all the extra emergency services, the psychiatric care. I mean, we're talking, I assume, billions of dollars nationally. So most of the state attorneys general have sued Meta and Snap and TikTok and just by bringing out internal memos, just by bringing out some email conversations. There was a number of things from Snapchat in 2022. They were getting 10,000 reports of sextortion from their users. 10,000 reports, not a year, a month. Every month. And that's just what was reported. So it was a lot more than that probably. Sextortion, meaning someone artificially made a nude picture of someone and demanded money. No, sextortion generally is people in a foreign country who do this professionally and very efficiently. They pretend to be a young girl, because it’s mostly teen boys who fall for this. They pretend to be a young girl, sexy. She flirts with you. Maybe she meets you through a friend of a friend on Instagram and then you become friends. And as the relationship develops, she sends you a sexy picture and asks you to send a sexy picture. And once this sextortionist has a picture of a boy and his penis and his face, he is toast. And at that point they reveal, they're not this sexy girl, you have to send me $500 in the next hour, or I will send this to everyone in your contacts. I will send this. I know where you are. I know your school. And these boys panic and a number of them have killed themselves within 12 hours. I don't believe like, "Oh, if one person dies, we need to…” I don't believe that at all. But if we're talking about dozens or hundreds of deaths per year and literally millions of victims who are traumatized, I don't think this is an appropriate product for children. And the company knows it. And I even spoke with them about this and they had no, they didn't answer, they didn't respond. So it’s not, you know— Because I wanted to make sure, is this right? Am I missing something? So each of these products is harming literally millions of children every year. They say so, they know it. All three of these companies, Meta, TikTok, and Snap, those are the biggest ones. I mean, there are others, but those are the ones that basically own childhood right now. Now, some schools are saying, “Put your phone in a bag when you get here.” Mhm. Some parents are saying you can't have it until later. They're following your recommendation. Is there a difference? Yes. One reason my book did so well is that it didn't just say, “Oh my God, a generation is lost! Oh, here's why it's terrible.” It said once we understand what happened and how this was a set of collective action problems that everyone had to get a phone because everyone else did. Now the way out is clear. And in the book I propose four norms that will solve collective action problems and roll back the phone-based childhood. They're very simple. No smartphone before high school. We need a bright line. Parents need to know when to hold out until so: high school. But all my friends have one! For now, they do. But what if it was only most of your friends who have one? Then it's much easier. And in a couple of years, it's going to be only a few of my friends have one. So this is how you roll back a collective action problem, with collective action. Only a few because your movement will spread. That's right. It's spreading because most parents are fed up with this. And so yes, the kids who are in middle school now who already got phones, it's very hard to get them off. But the kids who are in elementary school now, who are about to get phones in fifth or sixth grade, I think it's going to be much easier for us to just delay that until high school. So that's the first norm. Second norm is no social media until 16. Social media is an inherently adult activity. You are talking to anonymous strangers around the world. You're sending people photos. Your parents have no idea what you're doing. By social media you mean Instagram? Facebook? Yeah, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok. Technically YouTube is social media. You can have a profile, you can have comments, all of that. YouTube is in a special category just because we use it as the world's video library. We're not going to say no YouTube. But YouTube Shorts is no different from TikTok. And the short videos, TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, those are the worst of the worst. Those are the things that really shatter attention spans. Those are the things that are making it hard for young people to read a book. It's very hard for them to read books nowadays. Because you can’t, you know, what if you get to a boring passage in the book? You can't just swipe and move on to something super interesting. But this is how I communicate with my friends. Couldn’t you communicate by calling them or texting them or emailing them? So the phone that just texts is okay. It is much, much better. What we're hearing now, now that parents are moving their kids from smartphones to basic phones, is that even still, there are a lot of group chats. Texting with one or two people is great. Texting with 10 or 20, becomes performative again. But it's much better than uploading photos of yourself in a bikini and watching to see who likes your photo of yourself in a bikini. This is the slot machine effect. Bing! “I got a like. Oh, good.” That's right. It's both the slot machine. So look— I’m loved. Okay, so the one conflict that I sometimes have is some libertarians say, “Oh, this should be entirely up to the parents. You shouldn't have, government should not play any role in these decisions.” And in general, I'm very sympathetic to that. And I think libertarians generally like me for the positions that I've taken. But in this particular case, parents are trying and we are unable, we’re unable to manage what's going on because unless you keep your children away from the entire internet, you can't stop them from opening multiple accounts at the age of seven. I mean, there is no age verification. Your children are signing terms of service, they're signing these legal agreements. You have no idea what they're giving away. So this is the one area where we need, actually, legislative help. So just to be clear, the four norms, I really intended them as norms, not laws. I don't think we should have a law that no kid should have a smartphone. That's up to, that is up to the parents. But we do have minimum ages for things that are addictive, that show extreme sexuality and violence. We don't let kids watch this. So we have laws to protect children from certain things that we think you should at least have an adult brain to make decisions. And most get ignored. And if there's a law that says you can't sign on to the service until you're 18, the kids will just buy fake IDs. So we have to figure out how we're going to do this. And right now, it's the honor system. And people seem to think that age verification requires you to give an ID, a fake ID or a driver's license to Meta, to open an Instagram account. That would be one way of doing it, not a very good way. And that way has all kinds of civil liberties issues and privacy issues. There are many industries already that do age verification to do business online. They have a variety of methods. Some of them require to show a driver's license. I use the company Clear when I go to airports. Clear knows who I am. They know my age, they know my identity. So Clear is an option. What's emerging and what Australia did. Australia is the first country in the world to say, "You know what, we're going to raise the age to 16 and guess who has to enforce it? Not the parents, the companies." And Australia wrote into the law that the companies cannot only offer a government ID as a way of doing this. You can offer that if you want. If you want to show your driver's license, you can. But there are so many other ways. There are so many other companies out there that do age verification. So what I'm imagining is, if you want to open an account on Instagram or TikTok, you already are giving them lots of information. They already are going to take all your contacts. They already are going to take almost everything you have. How old are you? You put in your age. And then they send you to a page which says, “Okay, to verify your age, here are five options. Pick one.” One could be show us your driver's license. One could be Clear. If you have Clear, just go there, boom, you're in. One could be, you go to, I think Yoti it's called. Does facial recognition in terms of, is your face structure that of a child? None of these are perfect, but right now there is nothing. Nothing at all. And as with alcohol laws, yeah, kids can still get an older brother to buy them beer, but does that mean we should get rid of minimum age laws and let every kid buy alcohol at every age? So this is the one area where we really need legislative help because this is an issue of companies making a hell of a lot of money from children by pushing products on them that were designed to be addictive and which they know are harming children at an industrial scale, by the millions. Do you know this guy Chris Ferguson? Oh yeah, please. I know him very well. He's saying this is a moral panic. And there have been so many in the past. We've seen a lot of moral panics, a lot of other different issues, and people might remember them about, like, you know, the radio of the 1940s and comic books in the 1950s and rock music in the 1980s and more recently, video games and particularly, violent video games. So the way that these moral panic charges in the past are usually dismissed is because they usually focused on violence. So video games, are they harmful? These games teach a child to enjoy inflicting torture. All of the research was, do they cause kids to be violent? And the answer is, we still don't know. It is still debated. And it seems as though there, I think— It's pretty clear that they don't. It is still being debated. But here's the point. If we just zoom in on this, we lose track of all the other harms. Boys who are addicted to video games, and that's anywhere from 1% to 4% are severely addicted. Their lives are basically ruined because they can't stop. 10% to 15% are problematic users. It doesn't mean they're violent, they're not. But this is a major harm. And so to say that we had a panic over video games, that was just over a violence in video games. Heavy use of video games is not okay. Light use is. Light use is fine. Television, the big panic was, is it making kids violent? And we still don't know, but is watching six hours a day of TV when you're four years old, good for you? No, it's really bad. And so my point is, to say this is a moral panic, like the others is in the first instance, doesn't mean we shouldn't worry. We should worry about kids spending a lot of time on this. Secondly, in previous moral panics, the kids themselves were not organizing, creating organizations to try to push back on the comic book makers saying, “Please, comic book makers, stop making such addictive comic books. We can't stand it.” But Gen Z is active, pushing back. Gen Z says, “This is hurting us and we want you to stop.” They are? Yeah. There are a whole bunch of organizations. If you go to AnxiousGeneration.com, it's the main website for the movement that we're coordinating. We have dozens of Gen Z groups that are pushing back on this. Also in a previous moral panic, the stories were spread by the media. There's a story about a kid who read a comic book and then axe murdered his mother. Now did that happen one time or zero times? I don't know. This is not like that. This is— The current concern is, because almost every parent has seen it, and if not in their own children, they've seen it in their nephews and nieces. They've seen it in their friend's kids. So for Chris to say, “This is just a moral panic,” is to deny what everybody sees. It's also to deny the experimental evidence, the confessions. So I know that Chris has taken that line. Chris and I have debated a lot in the academic literature, but I believe he's just flat out wrong on this one. If teens are having more sex, we'll complain about that. If they're having less sex, we complain about that too. And blame technology. That's fine. That’s true. Another bite. Look at kids today. They're less violent, they smoke less. They use drugs less. Yeah, that's all true. They drink less. All this happened during the social media age. Exactly, because kids have been shifted from discover mode into defend mode. Kids are anxious. They're not risk taking. I have a long section of the book on the decline of risk seeking, risk taking. Teenage boys used to be the most likely to break a bone. They were on their bicycles going over jump ramps. They were climbing trees. That all ended once they got smartphones and video games. Now, teenage boys are less likely to go to the hospital for broken bone than their fathers or grandfathers because teenage boys aren't doing anything that could possibly hurt their bodies. So sure, Chris can point to all kinds of benefits, but if the reason for this is that our kids are scared to go outside and they're not doing anything that takes risks, this is not a step forward socially. He says, you're cherry picking. I am not cherry picking. I'm the only one in this debate who has picked all of the cherries and laid them out on a blanket. From the beginning, in 2019 when I really dove into this, I've created these Google docs. If you go to Anxious Generation, you can find, AnxiousGeneration.com. You can find all these Google docs. We lay out all the studies on the pro side, on the con side, the correlational studies, the longitudinal studies, the experimental studies, the quasi-experimental studies, we lay them all out. Those who are criticizing me will cherry pick. They'll say, “Here's a study that shows you're wrong. Here's a study that shows you're wrong.” I say, yeah, I know about that study, but there are so many more on the other side. Suicide isn't up in Europe. They have smartphones. So suicide rates have been dropping overall since the early 2000s. This is true globally. Whenever you dig into the rates, what you see, Chris may be right that it's not rising overall in Europe, but wherever you dig into the rates, what you see is that if it's dropping overall, but you look at the teen girls especially, you'll see that it's not dropping as much or it's flat or it's even rising. So yes, there's a global pattern of dropping suicide around the world, but if you look at the subgroups, you see that the teen girls especially are doing worse than other people in their society. Furthermore, at our substack, after Babel, we've gone into great detail in the research on the Anglo countries, in all five of the main Anglo countries, suicide is now at the highest level ever for Gen Z, for both the boys, and I'm sorry, for the girls for sure and for the boys, it's the highest or sometimes equivalent to what it was in the 80s and 90s. The point is that it is up for teen girls relative to the rest of the population, just about everywhere we've looked in the Western world. So my son is not wasting his time? He is not. He's doing God's work. One thing I really hope you take away from my being here is with social media especially, what are you doing on purpose and what have you fallen into strange habits you would never actually choose for yourself? But what's difference can it make? Kids and parents have a lot of regret. They don't want to be growing up this way. They know that life would be better if they didn't spend five or six hours a day on social media. They know that, but they can't help it. Over and over again, we find kids are asking for help because they are trapped. If anyone says, “No, I'm getting off,” then they're isolated. They're alone. It has to be everyone together. And so people like Max who go around and speak at schools, he is catalyzing change in that school. It doesn't have to be everybody, but if you can get a quarter of the kids to adopt a better lifestyle, and then you can convince the parents, the teachers, to give them more independence. Let them have more recess. Let them walk home from school without a chaperone. Let them go get pizza at lunch. Let them live in the real world. Now life gets fun again and they're less lonely in school. Ferguson: A Florida district banned phones. Mental health referrals went up after the ban, bullying behaviors went up. More kids were suspended for having a phone and that's not good for them. When schools ban phones, the results are overwhelmingly positive. Almost every school reports decreases in discipline problems, increases in laughter in the hallway. There was one article in the New York Times, the only time I've ever seen it backfire was the one Chris is talking about. That's the only one I've ever even heard of where it went badly. And that's because they had poor enforcement. So if you have the rule, but yet you don't do a good job of actually making sure the kids are not having the phones, of taking the phones, then you can have conflicts. So that, again, Chris is cherry picking. He's pointing to the one story that I've ever seen where it backfired. Teachers and administrators all over the country are loving phone-free schools. They can teach again, discipline problems go down. So no, I mean, if Chris can show that this is generally the case, great. Let's have a debate. But he's cherry picking a single study, a single, not even a study, a single newspaper article. Schools are boring. 80% of high school students claim to be bored. All day, every day. Why did this suddenly change in 2013? Like, school suddenly got boring in 2013? An important fact here is that it's not just depression that went up. It's academic performance went down. And it didn't go down in COVID. It began dropping around 2014. One of the reasons I think that school is so boring after 2012, Jean Twenge and I have a paper showing that the sense of loneliness in school was flat in the early 2000s. And then at 2012, loneliness in school goes up around world. Why do you think that is? If you go into school and everyone's on their device and that's your school day? That's pretty lonely. And you're basically winning because more schools are doing this, more parents are delaying it. Yeah. There is so much winning. I'm really enjoying the winning. Now you've moved on to Let Grow. So to be clear, the four norms that I was talking about before, the first is no smartphone before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools. And the fourth norm is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. All around the western world, people are acting on the first three. Parents are fed up with the phones, the teachers are fed up with not being able to reach the kids. So those are happening really fast around the world. I don't have to do anything. It's just everyone wanted to do those. But convincing parents that they need to back off, send their kid out to play, not monitor them every moment is a much harder sell. That's not happening automatically. And so here I teamed up with Lenore Skenazy, a wonderful woman who wrote the book “Free Range Kids” about a decade, more than a decade ago. And she and I co-founded an organization called Let Grow, LetGrow.org, where we're advocating for giving kids back independence that will lead to them becoming competent, capable, happy young adults. What we're proposing, is that schools and families need to work together to give kids a lot more unsupervised time. Let them play freely? They’ll be hurt. The world is much safer now than it was when you and I were growing up. Drunk driving is way down. Crime is way down. Kids are much less likely to be harmed by someone else nowadays. You've been a college professor 30 years. How has education changed? There was a kind of sudden change around 2014. I started graduate school in 1987. I got my first faculty position at the University of Virginia in 1995 teaching the last of Gen X and then mostly the millennial generation. Those born between 1980 and ‘95. And there's some small differences between generations, but students, they wanted to have fun. They laughed at jokes about sex. I mean, I sort of felt I understood college students. But something weird began to happen around 2014, 2015. College students were different. And one of the first people to notice this was my friend Greg Lukianoff, our mutual friend Greg, who's the president of what is now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. And Greg noticed a surge in anxiety and anxious thinking students doing the same cognitive distortions that Greg had learned to stop doing when he was treated for suicidal depression. And he learned CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy. I'm looking on campus and I'm like, wow, it’s kind of like administrators are telling students to catastrophize, to do all these things that I was taught not to do. Administrators teach students that they're fragile and in constant danger and can be permanently harmed by words. This is not a kind or compassionate thing to teach people. And what Greg noticed was, many of your listeners will remember when these terms came in, students asking for safe spaces. Safe from what? You're on a college campus. Safe from ideas that would threaten things that I believe. Yeah, isn't that kind of the point of going to college? And trigger warnings. I thought it was. Yeah, we all did. That was part of the fun of it was being, having your mental constructs kicked and then you have to either defend them or reformulate them. So there was a new game going on that we didn't understand around 2015, and that's what led Greg and me to write our, first, it was an Atlantic article called “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It came out in August of 2015. And then, that was before things really blew up on campus. The campus blowups can really be traced to the Yale Halloween debacle with students screaming at Professor Nicholas Christakis. You should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space, it is not, do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here! You are not doing that. You should not sleep at night, you are disgusting. Who has enormous dignity in the face of the students screaming at him. Merely because his wife recommended they not worry about Halloween costumes. Exactly. That's right. His wife wrote a very caring email. She's a developmental psychologist who had a book about the importance of being little, about let kids be kids. And so she wrote a very gentle, kind of, loving email to the students in this residential college, Silliman College at Yale that she and Nicholas were the, sort of the house parents in a sense of, and it led to a whole firestorm and protests and marches on the president's house and demands for major changes. And then this spread and hit many of the universities. The kids are so angry. Like crazy angry. What can cause that? Let's bring a distinction here between two psychological states. You can either be in discover mode or defend mode and the human brain is organized so that we have all kinds of circuits, all kinds of evolutionary heritage for pursuing goals. And those circuits are a little bit more lateralized, a little bit more in the front left cortex. And when you see an animal engaged in the hunt or you see a kid pursuing some goal while playing a game, they're in discover mode, they're in approach orientation. And conversely, we all have, especially in the front right cortex, circuits specialized for withdrawal, fear. What do you do if there's a threat? And in the natural world, there are always threats. Things are always about to jump out at you and kill you. So you need a balance. In the safe world that we've created, yes, there's crime, but you should be in discover mode, maybe 98% of the time would probably be about ideal. And our stereotypes about college students were that they are generally in discover mode. They're up for fun, they want to go to parties. It's only in discover mode that you can learn anything. So what we saw, what Greg first picked up and what our later research has really confirmed, is that there is a big change in, I would say the brains of young people who were born after 1995 compared to those born before. They're much more in defend mode. A common sort of thing that happened on campus is, someone would come to campus, let's take one of the big ones that happened at Brown, John Tomasi, who now runs Heterodox Academy. He's a professor at Brown for a long time. And he did, he had this program that that would bring in speakers with opposing views about something. They'd have a debate. Isn't that a great thing to do on a college campus? And one of the events that they arranged in 2013 or 2014 was a debate over whether America is or is not a rape culture. And this is one of those, sort of, extreme political views that were coming out about, you know, America is intrinsically a rape culture or sexist. And there are some academics who say yes and some who say no. John Tomasi brought in two feminists, one of whom argues that it is, one of whom argues it isn't. Great! A good thing to do on a college campus. There were student protests, there were demands that the president shut it down. And the reason this was covered in the New York Times, this is one of the episodes that first brought it to national attention. The reasons given were, the woman who was denying that America's rape culture. North America is not a rape culture, and it is an insult to women who live in one, that women here, with so much freedom and so much opportunity are trying to share the same status with them. This could be very upsetting to students who have experienced some sort of abuse and whose personal knowledge is that America is a rape culture. And so to bring someone who will say, “You might be wrong,” this is dangerous, this is threatening, this could really harm them. And we're all like, “What are you talking about? Just don't go to the talk.” But we didn't understand, is that there was a combination of things that happened in the early 2010s. One was the change from Millennials to Gen Z, where Gen Z are much more anxious. They see things much more threatening, they're much more in defend mode. The other, separate from that, is what we call the “Great Awokening,” which is the sudden confluence of a set of political ideas that are so toxic and self-destructive that in many ways brought the left to ruin by embracing it. They've brought liberal girls especially, to mental health problems by embracing it. So there's a set of ideas in which everything is oppression. Everything is oppression versus, you know, oppressor versus oppressed. So that set of ideas also comes in in the early 2010s. You get the combination around 2014 of a set of new ideas, mostly in the academy about oppressor victim and a newly anxious undergrad population. And that, we think, is what led to this explosion of these new political ideas that took over campus in the mid 2010s. And you wrote the book, “The Coddling of the American Mind” and made a movie about that. Students said things like: I was full of self-confidence when I was 18, but while I was in college, that disintegrated. The great insight that led to this whole project was Greg's, that somehow we are teaching students to engage in these cognitive distortions. Over-generalization, black and white thinking, emotional reasoning. And so as we developed the original Atlantic article into a book, because things got so much worse after 2015, as the "Great Awokening" spread across campuses and all the campus antics, all the videos that you've seen of students shouting down speakers: Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charley Murray go away! All of that which cratered public support for universities, which set us up, I think for where we are now with universities with respect to the President. Greg's great insight was that we were teaching students to think in distorted ways. And so in the book we were able to sort of boil it down to three great untruths. Here are three ideas that are so bad, that if you accept all three, it's almost guaranteed you'll be unsuccessful in life. And so the first is, what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. So don't expose yourself to threats. Don't expose yourself to a person who might be very upsetting because that's going to harm you. So protect yourself, trigger warnings, safe spaces. The second is, always trust your feelings. Whatever you feel, that tells you about reality. And the third is, life is a battle between good people and evil people. Now, my first book was called, “The Happiness Hypothesis.” It grew out of my teaching Psych 101, I surveyed in my class, I would bring in writings from the ancients, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, philosophers. And so I wrote a whole book on ancient wisdom. And each of these three great untruths is the exact opposite of a chapter in “The Happiness Hypothesis.” So there's a whole chapter on growth through adversity, because of course, as Nietzsche said, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. We need to be challenged and even face threats and fear and overcome it. But this idea— I think I'm successful in TV because I'm a stutterer. There you go. The obstacle is the way. And that's a great story. There's a classic story from ancient Athens about an orator who became one of the great orators of Greece because he had a speech impediment. He practiced with pebbles in his mouth. So that's the issue of anti-fragility. And colleges should take students who are anti-fragile, give them challenges, and what comes out is someone who's really strong. But we stopped doing that. We accommodated to students' needs. We tried to remove any words that they wouldn't like. Let's give you an environment in which nothing will offend you. And that way when we send you out into the corporate world, you'll find life intolerable because everyone else is not going to do this for you. So that was the first great untruth. The second, always trust your feelings. This is again, the exact opposite of stoicism and of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is, we see the world through filters and we see something, like, we have an offense filter. Everyone is out to get me. Or a fear filter. That life is dangerous. Or an abundance filter. Oh, these are opportunities. There are many filters. And the stoics taught us to question those first reactions and look for evidence and try to see things as they really are. And that is good thinking. That is, good, that is critical thinking. And so don't just go with your feelings. Your feelings are often wrong. And then the third great untruth, this is the one that's more connected to my early work because I study moral psychology, life is a battle between good people and evil people. That's the easiest thing to believe in the world. That's tribalism. We evolved to believe that. And civilization requires us to overcome that. Civilization requires us to have institutions and norms so that we don't treat everybody as either friend or foe. We don't treat everybody based on their race or their religion. We treat people as individuals. We give them the benefit of the doubt. We have institutions to resolve conflicts. We don't duel or challenge people to a duel. So you put these three together and what you get are, if students believe them, you get students who are fragile, emotional, and primed to see the world in terms of good and evil. And that's what happened in the mid 2010s. At least that's the story we tell in “The Coddling the American Mind.” Thank you, Jonathan Haidt. Thank you, John. It was a pleasure to talk with you. [Swoosh] Here at Stossel TV, we won’t coddle your mind. We like talking to people who shake up the status quo. To get more interviews with people like that, make sure to like this video and subscribe.