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Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Haidt Expose How Smartphones and Social Media Destroyed Childhood for Gen Z
Jordan Peterson sits down with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt to dissect the catastrophic impact of smartphones and social media on children's development. Haidt presents compelling data showing a sharp spike in depression, anxiety, and self-harm among young people beginning around 2012-2014, coinciding with the mass adoption of smartphones and platforms like Instagram. The conversation explores how technology has replaced essential childhood experiences like physical play, face-to-face interaction, and risk-taking with addictive dopamine loops that fragment attention and undermine development. Peterson and Haidt examine the differential effects on boys versus girls, the role of parental expectations, and what can be done to reclaim childhood from the grip of machines designed to exploit our most primitive instincts.
The Data Behind the Mental Health Crisis
Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, presents a disturbing pattern in mental health data that emerged around 2012-2014. Rates of internalizing disorders, particularly anxiety and depression, remained relatively stable from the late 1990s through 2011. Then something changed dramatically. Beginning around 2012-2013, there was a sharp elbow in the data, with rates climbing steeply for girls and curving upward for boys. The pattern wasn't limited to the United States. Canada, the UK, Australia, and Northern Europe all showed identical trends.
The increases aren't subtle. Between 2011 and 2015, rates of depression and anxiety among young people increased by 50-100%. For pre-teen girls aged 10-14, some measures showed increases exceeding 200%. Self-harm, which was extremely rare among 10-14 year old girls before 2012, exploded during this period. Hospital visits for self-harm in this demographic increased by over 200%.
Critics suggested the self-report data might be unreliable, that young people might exaggerate symptoms for attention. But the behavioral data told the same story. Self-harm represents a direct behavioral measure that can't be faked or exaggerated away. Something fundamental had shifted in the lives of children across the developed world.
The Great Rewiring of Childhood
The period from 2010 to 2015 represents what Haidt calls the great rewiring of childhood. In 2010, most teenagers had flip phones or basic phones. The iPhone existed but wasn't ubiquitous. The front-facing camera arrived on the iPhone 4 in 2010. Instagram became massively popular in 2012. Within just a few years, teen social life transformed from using phones to coordinate in-person meetings to spending entire days swiping, scrolling, commenting, and posting.
The correlation in timing is striking. The introduction of smartphones with social media platforms coincides precisely with the spike in mental health problems. But correlation doesn't prove causation. What makes the case compelling is that the pattern repeated across multiple countries with different cultures and policies. No alternative explanation accounts for simultaneous changes across all these nations that would plausibly affect pre-teen girls so dramatically.
Time-use studies strengthen the case. Heavy users of social media consistently show worse outcomes across almost every study. Experimental research adds another layer of evidence. When people are removed from social media for more than a week, the vast majority report feeling less anxious and happier. Shorter deprivation periods don't work because withdrawal from an addictive substance doesn't produce happiness. But sustained breaks consistently improve wellbeing.
Why Girls Were Hit Hardest
The mental health crisis affected both sexes, but girls experienced sharper, more severe declines. Understanding why requires examining fundamental differences in how boys and girls relate to the world. Drawing from the work of Simon Baron-Cohen on autism, Haidt explains that female brains tend toward empathizing while male brains tend toward systemizing. The biggest gender difference in interests is things versus people. Girls and women are more interested in people, more attuned to social dynamics, more invested in knowing who said what about whom.
This social orientation creates vulnerabilities in a hyperconnected world. Girls have historically been more susceptible to social contagions, a pattern documented for over 300 years. There are two types of social contagions: those involving motor behavior like tics or dancing fevers, and those involving anxiety, fainting, and related symptoms. Girls are more prone to both types.
When all girls suddenly connected via Instagram around 2012-2013, it created unprecedented opportunities for social contagion. These platforms function as discussion groups where girls share anxiety and suffering. The more extreme your suffering, the more support you receive, creating perverse incentives to amplify distress. Self-harm, once extremely rare among pre-teens, became a behavior that spread through these networks.
Physical appearance plays a heightened role in female social competition. Women are judged more harshly on appearance, particularly by other women. Social media intensifies this dynamic. It's one thing to compete with a small peer group. It's another to compete with algorithmically selected images representing peak attractiveness from across the entire world. The internet never forgets, creating permanent records of teenage awkwardness and mistakes. Girls hit puberty earlier than boys, facing these pressures at younger ages with less experience and fewer coping mechanisms.
The Loss of Essential Childhood Experiences
Technology doesn't just introduce harmful content and dynamics. It displaces activities essential for healthy development. All mammals play during childhood. Play involves engaging with the physical and social world repeatedly in low-stakes environments. A child practices running from a predator in a game of tag. If caught, everyone laughs and tries again. This process, repeated tens of thousands of times, allows the brain to wire itself properly.
By age six, the brain reaches 90% of its full size. Subsequent development involves pruning unused neural connections and strengthening circuits that get used through a process called myelination. This requires extensive physical play, social interaction, exposure to nature, adequate sleep, and loving relationships. Phone-based childhood blocks nearly all of this.
Half of young people now spend over eight hours daily on entertainment screens, not counting school. Half report being online almost constantly. Consider what this eliminates. Take 50% less exposure to sunshine. Remove two-thirds of in-person laughter with friends. Eliminate moving in synchrony with others through games, jumping rope, or sports. These activities have sociologically magical powers. Moving together, laughing together, and eating together create bonds that shallow online connections cannot replicate.
Reading declines dramatically. Hobbies nearly disappear. There's simply no time when you must respond to constant incoming stimulation. Sleep suffers. Time in nature vanishes. Even critics who claim there's no evidence of harm must contend with the fact that this technology demonstrably reduces sleep, time with people, time in nature, and ability to sustain attention on books. Of course it has harmful effects.
The Mechanics of Addiction
Critics sometimes dismiss concerns about smartphones and social media as moral panic, comparing it to fears about television. But the mechanisms are fundamentally different. Television presents stories, even if many are stupid. A show like Gilligan's Island ran for 20 minutes with a single narrative. Everyone watched the same content. You often watched with siblings or friends, making it social. There was no behaviorist training involved. You didn't perform actions that received variable reinforcement.
Smartphones introduced radical changes. First, you watch alone on a small screen you control. Content becomes shorter and shorter. TikTok discovered that brief videos train users most effectively. After eight or nine seconds of a video, you become expert at thinking it might not be the most interesting option. You swipe to try again, just like pulling a slot machine lever. Sometimes the next video is better, sometimes not. This variable ratio reinforcement schedule is the foundation of addiction.
The pull-down refresh feature was literally modeled on slot machines. As long as small dopamine hits follow behavioral actions, you engage the psychology of addiction. Television could create habits but didn't cause addiction the same way. Social media, video games, and short-form video all depend on delivering quick dopamine. If a platform doesn't provide it, users migrate to competitors. This creates a race to the bottom of the brain stem.
Artificial intelligence makes everything worse. AI systems monitor attentional focus and optimize for grip through reinforcement learning. Machines now use reinforcement technology to perfect reinforcement technology. It's worse than slot machines because the system learns separately for each person, identifying and exploiting individual vulnerabilities. Generative AI will soon create custom content, whatever video or image most engages you, generating it on demand. It's the ultimate narcissistic mirror, the beginning of The Matrix where everyone exists in isolated pods, hooked to machines.
The Destruction of Attention and Executive Function
While the mental health crisis primarily affects girls more severely, a potentially larger destruction affects both sexes: the demolition of attention and executive function. Executive function means setting a goal and executing the steps to achieve it. If you get stuck at step A because it's endlessly interesting and hooks your attention, you never reach steps B, C, D, or the ultimate goal X. You don't develop into a competent, employable adult, someone others would want to marry or hire.
Haidt distinguishes between fast dopamine and slow dopamine. Fast dopamine comes from immediate rewards: do something, get a reward, repeat. That's video games and scrolling. Slow dopamine involves pursuing goals over weeks or months, feeling great as you make progress. Working up courage to talk to a romantic interest, having that first conversation go well, pursuing a relationship over time—that's slow dopamine. It requires long-term planning with various steps. That's what adult competence demands.
Developing this capacity requires overcoming real fear, not just resisting distraction. Real games provide essential training. Half the time you lose. The advantage is developing resilience in the face of loss. You must accept defeat gracefully, learn from it, and persist. Loss is critically important because in life, you lose more games than you win. Success doesn't require winning most games, just some, but definitely requires persevering through losses.
Real games also involve rule administration and litigation. Jean Piaget, the great developmental psychologist, would play marbles with children in Geneva, deliberately doing something wrong to observe how they enforced and explained rules. In real games, disputes are the most nutritious part. "That was out of bounds." "No it wasn't." "Yes it was." Everyone wants to keep playing, so there's pressure to work it out rather than storm off. Video games eliminate this entirely. Everything is administered by the program. Players never adjudicate anything, never negotiate rules, never develop the meta-skills that create moral development.
The Boy Story: Checking Out
The boy story differs from the girl story. At age 14, girls show worse outcomes on measures of anxiety, depression, and self-harm. Boys' suicide rates are higher, though the percentage increase in suicide is often larger for girls. Boys at 14 seem to be doing better because they spend huge amounts of time on video games and pornography, which they enjoy. But they're lonely, lacking the gangs of friends that characterized childhood for previous generations.
Video games aren't as harmful to boys as social media is to girls. Correlational data and experiments sometimes show certain benefits. Video games have one significant advantage: they're synchronous. Boys play together, laughing with friends. That's vastly better than isolated social media scrolling. The problem is addiction. About 10% of boys develop problematic use, compulsive behavior that interferes with other life aspects. For 1-3%, it looks like full addiction. Losing even 1-3% of boys represents enormous societal damage.
The larger issue is attention fragmentation and loss of ability to engage in activities that don't provide quick dopamine hits. Boys face open season from companies competing for every moment of attention. Video game companies, pornography, vaping and nicotine, marijuana and THC, sports gambling, investing apps, cryptocurrency—all gamified to especially attract boys. Boys are more interested in doing things and seeing immediate results, making them vulnerable to these variable reinforcement schedules.
At age 28, the oldest Gen Z cohort reveals the full damage. Girls are more likely to have finished high school and college, more likely to have jobs, less likely to live with parents. Boys are more likely to have accomplished nothing. Perhaps 10-20% become what Haidt calls drones, unable to set long-term goals and execute them. Losing a substantial portion of young men represents tremendous societal loss.
The War on Male Development
Jordan Peterson identifies additional factors harming boys beyond technology. There's been an increased war on male play and interest preferences, manifesting through hyperfeminization of school systems. Young boys are increasingly medicated for ADHD. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, who established the existence of the play circuit in the brain, discovered that the primary effect of Ritalin is play suppression.
Initially, psychiatrists thought boys with fragmented attention had a paradoxical response to stimulants, that it increased their focus. But that's not paradoxical at all. Stimulants do that to everyone. They increase the probability you'll focus on whatever you're focusing on. Panksepp showed that if you deprive young juvenile rats of rough-and-tumble play, their prefrontal cortexes don't mature. Let them play and they do so frenetically, like boys after being forced to sit still in school. Ritalin suppresses that play. When rats engage in catch-up play after deprivation, their prefrontal development proceeds normally. Play is essential for maturation.
Beyond medication, there's been communicated insistence that male ambition is toxic, that competitive games are bad, that patriarchal institutions are corrupt, that demand for victory represents psychopathology. This demoralizes boys and provides excuses for irresponsibility. As Nietzsche said, you're often punished for your virtues. If you're going to be punished for being ambitious and goal-directed, that provides powerful incentive to bow out and avoid responsibility.
The Default of Trivial Hedonism
The default state for males is uselessness. The Arab world, broadly speaking, produces about as much economically as Spain, partly because many men don't work. What's surprising isn't that some men don't work but that any men work at all, since work requires difficulty and sacrifice. The anthropological question of initiation asks: how do you socialize and civilize men when the default is trivial hedonism?
The answer involves telling a story of heroic responsibility and connecting responsibility with adventure. Peterson's work with young men centers on this connection. Look for maximum burden and note that in service to that burden, you find meaning. Thousands of young men have reported that deciding to take responsibility for themselves and tell the truth changed everything in their lives.
This represents the opposite of soft bigotry of low expectations. The family dynamic stereotype illustrates the principle. The mother says, "You're lovely the way you are." The father says, "I kind of like you, but you could be a lot more." Together, these messages are powerful. When the child explores away from maternal acceptance, masculine encouragement says go further. When exhausted, the child returns to maternal acceptance. This is the standard pattern of security-seeking and exploration.
Telling young men they could be more than they are functions as an insult, implying they're not good enough now. But it prioritizes the optimized future self, which is hugely advantageous. The problem with both young men and young women is not asking, requiring, or demanding nearly enough. They default to trivial hedonism because nothing challenges them toward something greater.
The Role of Thrilling Play and Fear
Norwegian psychologist Ellen Sandseter identified six kinds of thrills in play that serve as powerful anti-anxiety agents. Kids choose activities where they might get hurt. They climb trees to the point of fear, then go a little higher, then maybe stop, then climb higher the next day. Once you learn to bicycle, you jump ramps and stairs. Kids actively seek thrills.
The categories include high places, fast speeds, dangerous tools, hiding and disappearing, and rough-and-tumble play or fighting. That feeling of thrill, the combination of fear and laughter, represents the most exciting and developmentally important play. This is what fathers specialize in. Fathers pretending to be monsters chasing children, who run away scared but laughing—that's thrilling play.
Mothers are driving efforts to remove phones from schools and address the crisis, but fathers have a particular role in providing thrill and fear. Not fear of the father himself, but play involving exposure to fear and risk. This can be as simple as amusement parks, where there's no real physical danger but roller coasters are genuinely scary. Boys may need more rough-and-tumble play specifically, though the data on differential need for thrills and fear remains unclear. What's certain is that boys suffer from lack of adventure, challenge, and responsibility. They need a world with possibilities to do something big, risky, great, and thrilling.
The Abrahamic Pattern of Development
Peterson draws on the Abrahamic covenant to illustrate the pattern that maximizes reproductive success across time. Abraham, characterized as the father of nations, is wealthy and privileged at 70 when the divine voice calls him to adventure. The voice says: leave your zone of comfort, leave your tribe and family, leave everything comfortable, do it voluntarily, make necessary sacrifices, and pursue your adventure.
Abraham agrees, and God offers five gifts representing alignment of developmental adventure with the divine. The covenant specifies that if you hearken to the voice of adventure and make appropriate sacrifices, you will be a blessing to yourself, your reputation will grow validly among compatriots, your enemies will not withstand you, you will establish something of enduring permanence, and you will do it in a way that brings benefit to everyone.
This developmental impetus to move into the world produces meaning through expansion and development. It aligns the psychological and the social, which must align because we are social creatures. Our developmental impetus cannot contradict our social utility, or we'd be in competition with the social world rather than aligned with it. The call to adventure is the Abrahamic call and the antithesis of the selfish gene.
If you embody that adventurous spirit properly as a father, you establish the pattern of adaptation that maximizes your children's reproductive fitness. A boy raised as a cringing coward will not find a successful mate or raise thriving children. We're asking far too little of young men, and the same dynamic affects young women through different mechanisms.
What Can Be Done
Haidt's overall message is clear: once you understand what's happening in online worlds, especially social media, they're simply not for children. These are adult activities. Talking with unverified strangers in anonymous formats might be acceptable for adults who choose it, but under no circumstances should 12, 13, or 14-year-olds be doing this. So many girls have been destroyed, damaged, and harmed by it.
The landscape features too much supervision in the real world and no supervision at all in the online world. The online world is a bad proxy for the real world because bad actors have much more free rein. The online world may be an unplayable game that doesn't generalize to reality. Virtualization produces psychopathization by enabling psychopathic types.
The solution requires understanding that children need discovery mode and risky play. We are mammals with large brains who engage in extended childhood characterized by play. Play involves risky things, learning physical skills, predator-prey games, engaging with physical and social worlds tens of thousands of times in low-stakes environments. The brain wires itself through use, pruning unused neurons and strengthening circuits that get used.
This requires time, which phone-based childhood eliminates. It requires physical presence, social interaction, movement, laughter, eating together, sleep, love, and proper nutrition. Half of kids spending over eight hours daily on entertainment screens, half being online almost constantly, cannot develop properly. They experience 50% less sunshine, two-thirds fewer in-person laughs with friends, elimination of synchronous movement, massive reductions in reading and hobbies.
Parents, especially fathers, must reclaim childhood from machines designed to exploit primitive instincts. This means providing adventure, challenge, burden, thrilling play, exposure to manageable fear, and most importantly, high expectations. Tell young people they could be much more than they are. Demand responsibility. Connect responsibility with adventure and meaning. Ask more, require more, demand more. The alternative is a generation lost to trivial hedonism, isolated in pods hooked to machines optimized to exploit every weakness.
Video Transcript
Half of our kids say they're online almost constantly. Once you give your kid a smartphone and Instagram or Tik Tok or Snapchat, that's sort of the end of what we might have thought of as normal childhood. We've actually created machines that use reinforcement technology to optimize the grip of reinforcement technology. Tik Tok or YouTube shorts, it's just such degrading trash. There's a race to the bottom online that's probably a consequence of something like algorithmic competition for grip of short-term attention. And that's completely tantamount to addiction. Under no circumstances should 12, 13, 14y old kids be doing this. But then there's also the problem of what children aren't doing while they're absorbed in their screens. My overall message um is once you understand what's going on in these online worlds, especially social media, they're just not for children. Too much supervision in the real world and no supervision at all in the online world. You know, if our minds are like an LLM, what are you putting in? Are you putting in movies and books and good television, or are you putting in little 10-second clips of people getting kicked in the balls? This is a tremendous loss to any society. [Music] So what's the issue that we're discussing today? Um what is technology, communications technology, hyperconnectivity, social media doing to our children and what can you do about it? Who am I speaking to about that topic? Social psychologist Jonathan Height, who is one of the most um precise and deep psychologists working today. He's the author of a number of books, The Coddling of the American Mind, The Righteous Mind, The Happiness Hypothesis, and most recently, The Anxious Generation, which is the focus of our discussion today. What's the issue at hand? The capture of our children's attention by machines. The interference with their development, especially in relationship to play, the pathology of the content, and the marketked rise, particularly in depression and anxiety, associated demoralization among young women in particular, but also young men. and a discussion about what practically can can and is being done about that. So join us for uh discussion of crucial importance particularly if you're a parent. So Dr. Height, we've met and spoken a number of times and this new book of yours, The Anxious Generation, was I suppose it was it of particular interest to me? Maybe because it delves even further into the clinical realm even that more than your last books. You're a social psychologist. I'm a clinical psychologist. But uh you're working at an interesting intersection which is the intersection between the social and the psychopathological. And in this book you're focusing on the the effects of the fragmenting really the fragmenting and demoralizing effects of technology. And so I thought we'd walk through your book and I suppose we might as well start if it's all right with you with the data that you aggregate as a social psychologist really on the u on the rise in negative emotion and the decrease in positive emotion. both of those things because those are separate things that that you see as characteristic of really the last 15 years something like that maybe with a real acceleration around 2014. You know, you mentioned in your book that you really had a sense for example that something went sideways on the campuses around 2014 which is certainly in commensurate my experience. So let's talk about the surge of suffering. That's your first chapter. Yes. So um you know I'm a social psychologist who studies morality. Um my my dissertation in 1992 was actually on adolescent moral development. So I have been studying development of psychology and adolescence. Uh but my focus has been on moral and political psychology. Um but something weird happened in 2014. Um uh Greg Luciano, my my friend who runs the foundation for individual rights and expression um he noticed it too. came to talk to me. Um, something had changed among the students. There was a new kind of a new morality driven by anxiety and fragility. And so we wrote an Atlantic article called the coddling of the American mind. We turned that into a book in 2017. We went much deeper. And in that book and in my early work, I thought we, you know, we thought we had good evidence about the role of overp protection. So coddling means overp protection. and writing that book in 2017 um we have a page where we say you know the timing is right for social media like social media comes in just at the right time to maybe contribute but we don't really have evidence so that's it that's all we said that was 2017 by 2019 um uh 2019 I'm collecting evidence um because now it's clear it's not just America what what we're seeing in first we saw in all of the Anglophere countries is that when you look at levels of internalizing disorders, so this is very important. It's not all mental illnesses, it's not schizophrenia, it's internalizing disorders, which is preeminently anxiety and depression related disorders. They're pretty stable from the late '9s all the way through 2010, 2011. There's really no trend in the United States or in the other English English speaking countries. And then all of a sudden there's an elbow like around 2012 2013 there's an elbow and the rates go up very sharply for girls with more of a curve for boys and that's a clue the different shape is an important clue but for girls 2011 2012 no sign of a problem 2014 2015 it's off to the races with depression anxiety we see the same thing in self harm and it was when I realized that it wasn't just America when I saw the same graphs in Canada the UK Australia and more recently We've seen we've looked all over Europe. We find it strongly in Northern Europe. That's when it became clear something big is happening to human children at least in the west. I we don't have good data from East Asia or the developing world but all across the west something terrible began happening around 2012 2013. Uh so that's that was the empirical puzzle that came to us as college professors and that came to us in the national data and that's what that's what launched me on this book. Yeah. Well, it's an important kod that you mentioned there that it wasn't only rates of self-reported depression and anxiety, right? Because I know there was a criticism directed at your work by a psychiatrist who pointed out or claimed that the self-report data might be unreliable. There, for example, people can exaggerate their symptomatology. They can be trained to do that. They can do that to attract attention to themselves. There can be competition for psychopathology. That's part of the structure of uh a contagious psychological epidemic. But you pointed out quite rightly I thought that you saw the same data in um e episodes of self harm particularly among young women which is a much more direct behavioral measure of that proclivity for negative emotion. And I should point out clinically just for those who are watching and listening that anxiety is a response to the the threat of uh destruction psychological or physical. Depression is more of a pain response and it's got two aspects. It's heightening of negative emotion, withdrawal in particular, that causes sessation of activity, but also decrease in positive emotion, which is more associated with demoralization and and lack of uh motivational impetus to move forward and and those are you describe those as the internalizing disorders. That's not the same as the fragmentation that goes along with psychosis, which which which or manic depressive disorder for that matter. um these are this is quite a particularized let's say epidemic and so okay so you you you laid out the data that this is occurring and you noted that it was happening cross-culturally so it wasn't something specific let's say to the United States what what drove you to the conclusion or even to investigate the possibility that this had something to do with technology generally and with social media more particularly. Mhm. Yes. So, uh, Gene Twangi was really the first person to call attention to this. Uh, Gene Twangi has been studying generations for 20 years and she had an article in the Atlantic in 2017 where The Atlantic chose the title, "Have smartphones destroyed a generation?" And so, Gene laid out the evidence. It was all correlational, uh, which doesn't prove it, but the patterns are so consistent. Um there's a correlation in time which is um uh when this new technology is introduced um around 2012 is basically so to back up in 2010 teenagers almost all have a flip phone or a basic phone. The iPhone exists but it's not very common. Um the front-facing camera comes out on the iPhone 4 in 2010. Instagram becomes super popular in 2012. So that's the period where teen social life is changing radically from using a phone to call your friend saying hey let's get together this afternoon to spending all day swiping and scrolling and commenting and posting 2010 to 2015 is the great rewiring of childhood. Um and the reason why we think that that is the the major cause um is because first when we look at the historical pattern it's a correlation. Lots of things happened in 2012. We can't prove that oh they get on social media and instantly the girls get depressed that could be a coincidence. But because it happened the same way in so many countries, no one else has come up with an alternate theory. No one else has said, "Yeah, but here's something else that happened in all these countries that would plausibly make girls and especially pre-teen girls, this is important." Um, the the increases we're talking about are are generally between 50 and 100% increases in in these measures of of psychopathology. For pre-teen girls, you sometimes get 200% increases. And for self harm, uh, 10 to 14 year old girls did not used to cut themselves. It was very very rare before 2012. uh for there you get over 200% increase in hospitaliz in hospital visits for for self harm. So the historical correlation there's it doesn't prove it but there's no other alternative and then you have the correlation in time use that is the people who are heavy users of social media in almost every study are doing much worse. Um, and then you have experiments where when you get people off of social media for a couple of weeks, only if it's more than a week. This is important. Some studies make someone get off social media for a day or two, and if you're addicted to something and you're deprived of it for a day or two, you're not happier. You have withdrawal. But when it goes uh longer than a week, the vast majority of those studies find that people actually feel less anxious, they feel better. So, a variety of kinds of evidence were coming in by the late 2010s and this is all before co uh coming in that it sure looks like it's the move onto smartphones with social media. Okay. So, let me ask you some clinically relevant questions if you don't mind, especially about the pre-teen issue and the issue with girls. So, when you say pre-teen, what age exactly are you speaking of? So the um the CDC happens to break up data uh 10 to 14 and then 15 to I think 19. So we have um that I mean we could probably dig into it and go find a resolution but that's what they provide. So I'm here I'm specifically giving you numbers for the 10 to 14 year olds. Um I would consider pre-teen generally 10 to 13 let's say. Um you know at 13 is when you're supposed to be able to start using these things at least according to the law. Now nobody pays attention to that. The age of first social media goes down and down and down. For Tik Tok it's now around age 8. Uh Instagram I think is around n Instagram's around 9 or 10. So it is normal. It is widespread. It is probably a majority of 12year-olds who are already on at least one social media platform. Greer and Catherine, their 4-year-old son was diagnosed with a degenerative illness. That initiated a discussion about resilience in children. Resilience in general. It's a challenge for any parent to figure out when to nurture, when to push, when to comfort, how that works. It sounds like your son is social and he's verbal and he's smart and he's imaginative. Certainly, your task is going to be to help him find his way. He's going to have to be the person who figures out how much he's going to be willing to fall on his face. I want to be an oak tree, but also a source of of light. My daughter was very ill for several decades. She was doomed with her illness and she figured it out and she's like firing on all cylinders. So, who knows what you what you can manage if you maintain your upward orientation. You don't have to have all the answers. You just have to have answers to the questions he's asking. [Music] Okay. So you're talking about really early adolescence on the female side. Okay. So let me lay out some propositions and tell me if they're in accord with what you're observing. So it's been known for 300 years, 400 years that young women are more prone to social contagions. There's a great book called um the history of the unconscious by Henri Alberge and he traces the history of psychoanalytic thought way back before memer and documents the hysteria so to speak which was the Freudian version of social contagion literally back it's 300 years so it's very well documented it's a great book by the way very useful for the sort of thing that you're that you're investigating and then the question might be why. So, I'm going to lay out some hypothesis and you tell me what you think. So, the first is girls tilt more heavily towards negative emotion in general and they're more agreeable by temperament, which means that it may mean that consensus is more important to them, like social consensus, but also that they experience a given unit of threat or pain with more emotional intensity. that really seems to kick in about the same time puberty kicks in. Now, there there's various reasons for that. Women are more uh susceptible, you might say, particularly at puberty, sexually and physically. And then you could also make a case that their nervous systems are wired for the protection of infants rather than for their own optimal social functioning. Um, I think that's a reasonable hypothesis. In any case, it's well documented across the world that differences in negative emotion and agreeableness seem to emerge in early at at puberty and then they're permanent. Okay. So then the next quest the next issue might be um when women experience negative emotions particularly of the self-conscious kind and self-consciousness as you point out in your book is associated with suffering that tends to take the form of bodily preoccupation. And the hypothetical reason for that is that women are judged more harshly in consequence of their physical appearance by men arguably but even more intensely by other women. And then the final kicker might be that the forms of social interaction that women appear to prefer girls online are short form and heavy heavily image related. And so, you know, you talked about the front-facing camera. God only knows what that technological innovation alone. And then you could imagine one final thing, which is, you know, it's one thing to compete for social priority on the basis of your appearance, all things considered, with a small close group of peers. It's another thing to compete with the whole bloody world in terms of maximal attractiveness. And so, and then there's the final issue we might say is that the internet never forgets and that's a big problem, too. So, I'm wondering what you think of those potential contributing factors. Well, and also finally, girls hit puberty earlier than boys. So, they have to contend with the complexity of the introduction of the sexual, let's say, at an age where they have less experience than than boys do when they encounter puberty. So, anyways, those are some of the potential contributors as far as I'm concerned to the differential sus susceptibility. I think every one that you mentioned is plausible. um the way I approach in the book and again I'm coming from from social psychology I think we'll end up in the same place and especially I want to I want to especially flag the social contagion that's really powerful really important uh the way that I approach it is drawing from say Simon Baron Cohen's work on autism uh and so uh you know we all start off as girls in uterero and if there's a Y chromosome you get a little testosterone it changes the body over to the male pattern changes the brain over to the male pattern on average and it be the male brain becomes a little less about empathizing, a little less socially connected and a little more about systemizing. And this is the the the biggest difference in the biggest gender difference in interest is things versus people. Uh girls and women are just more interested in people. They want to know. They have a more elaborate mental map. Um they are interested in who said what about whom and how did she know that he thought that. Whereas guys are just much more clueless about that. guys are shifted over a little bit toward on the spectrum towards autism and that is going to help us explain the boy story because that's going to be more about video games and all sorts of other things. It's not as much about social media but the girl story focuses very much on social media. Now why is the curve so sharp for girls? Um you almost never get such sharp curves in mental illness data. Um, and I think this is because, um, as you said, girls are have long been more prone, teenage girls are have long been more prone to social contagion. And I review a study from the '90s, historical study, but there are two different kinds of social contagions. There are those that involve motor behavior like like ticks or and also dancing fevers where people in the middle ages would dance for days and sometimes die of exhaustion. So there are there are some that are motor um and there are some that are more anxiety related and and maybe fainting and um so so girls are more subject to both of those kinds of social contagion. So I think the reason why it's so sharp for girls and especially self harm is that that is a very particular behavior that very few people would think of doing on their own. But when you superconnect all the girls in 2012 because they all get on Instagram or not all you know most get on Instagram right around 2012 2013 suddenly you have these pools these these discussion groups these um you know places where girls are sharing their anxiety and the more extreme you're suffering the more extreme your anxiety the more support you get so they're incentivizing each other to be more and more extreme. Um, and some girls are self harming and while it's not has not been so rare for older teens, it used to be extremely rare for 10, 11, 12 year old girls. They didn't used to cope themselves. So, I think many of the things you said, the greater susceptibility to negative emotion, which especially uh comes out at puberty, hormonal changes change change so much about boys and girls. Um, the greater social connectedness so that girls are just much more affected by what they see. um the uh the desire to uh for approval in the eyes of others and all of the things you said about being judged by social appearance. There's even a quote I think it's in Marcus Aurelius about what a shame it is that girls are just judged for their you know just judged for their beauty their sexual potent something like that um you know right at puberty um girls are you know girl girls become objects in that way and we haven't even mentioned porn so many uh I mean the the the premature sexualization of kids um so for all these reasons I think it's been tougher on girls now to be clear and we'll get to the boy story soon I hope Um to be clear, if we if we check in on kids at 14, the girls are doing worse. There's no doubt about that. There are measures of anxiety and depression, self harm are worse. Now, boys suicide rates are much higher. That's a different story. Boys suicide rates are much higher, but the increase, the percentage increase in suicide is often a little bigger in girls than boys. So, they're both going up. Um the boys um seem to be doing better at 14 because they're spending huge amounts of time on video games and porn and that's really fun. They're enjoying that. Now they're lonely cuz they don't have friends the way you know when you and I were kids we had a gang of friends. Um but they but they don't seem to be doing as bad at 14. Now at 28 I think they're actually doing worse. But we'll come back to the boy story later. Okay. I guess there's a couple other factors that we might consider too. um one is more abstract, the other more concrete. The abstract one has to do with fertility suppression among females. And so that's a pronounced tendency in primate communities, by the way, that the females um aggregate, conspire, you might say, to suppress the fertility of other females. That's the motif in Snow White, by the way, with the evil queen. And the other issue with regards to social media that's extremely relevant as far as I'm concerned is that social media, the online landscape, I think facilitates female psychopathy very specifically because women when they're savaging one another, men do the same thing to each other, by the way, and men can play the same game women do. But this is still the female pattern of antisocial behavior is reputa anonymized reputation savaging, right? And exclusion. Cancel culture, for example, looks like a manifestation of female type antisocial behavior. and and it's really amplified by social media because you can denounce anonymously with with not only with no cost but likely in the consequence of it is that you'll attract attention and even positive attention. And so I'm quite afraid that the online world um what would you say it decreases our ability to inhibit psychopathy by a lot and that's a big problem. And so the proclivity of women to attack one another, such as it is, is likely amplified on social media and the consequences of it decreased. So those are additional potential contributing factors. Absolutely. The um male aggression has always been always been backed up ultimately by the threat that if you don't back down, I could beat the hell out of you. And and so when everything moves online, you know, you're not going to beat people up online. So, life doesn't get that much worse for boys when they get on social media. But for girls, as you say, it's reputational destruction and rel and damaging their relationships. It's Yeah. relationships and reputation. You can savage them both. And the fact that you can now do it anonymously and especially these I mean the most savage thing that kids were exposed to or these various apps like Yik Yak uh there was a YOLO I think it was called where or or tea like spill the tea where you can anonymously gossip about anyone. This is horrible. Um it's always been hard to be the hardest part of life I would think I think is being a teen a pre-teen girl. Middle School for Girls has always been really really hard and to have to suddenly put this in where anyone can say anything about anyone in a forum where everyone will see it with no consequences. No consequences. So the savagery unleashed uh on girls and often by girls but often by boys too. They're be quite cruel here too. So, you know, my overall message um is once you understand what's going on in these online worlds, especially social media, they're just not for children. These are adult activities. Talking with unverified strangers in anonymous formats, okay, if adults want to choose to do that, but under no circumstances should 12, 13, 14y old kids be doing this. Uh and the the girls in particular are so many of them have been destroyed by it or damaged, harmed, I should say. Well, and you you make a you make a very interesting what juxtaposition in your book about um too much supervision in the real world and no supervision at all in the online world and the online world is a bad proxy for the real world because the bad actors have much more free reign. So, you know, it could easily be that the online world in a sense is an unplayable game. It doesn't generalize to the real world. So the virtualization produces a psychop psychopathization or awkward terminology especially by enabling the psychopathic types. So that's a huge danger. So let's let's move to if you if if we can let's move to what children need in childhood. You talk there also this is chapter 2 and three discovery mode and risky play. And so now there's a there's a distinction that needs to be made here. One is the effect of the technology per se in the fragmentation of attention. The second is the the content of the online world, pornography perhaps, and this this online reputation savaging being foremost among them. But then there's also the problem of what children aren't doing while they're absorbed in their screens. So, walk us through that. Sure. Um so we are mammals and mammals have uh large brains comparatively especially social mammals like dogs and dolphins and chimpanzees and humans and all mammals play when they're young. Mamalianism is a long childhood. We we literally drink milk from the skin of our mother's chest. Um for so we have a long childhood and uh what has to happen is the child starts off fully attached to the mother for sustenance and as they get better motive behavior they move further and further away from the mother to play and play involves risky things involves learning to jump to climb trees if that's what your species does. Um many or most mammals play chasing games predator prey uh tag sharks and minnows. So we have to do this. We have to engage with the physical and social world over and over again, tens of thousands of times in a low stakes environment where I practice running away from a shark and if the shark gets me, we just laugh and then we do it again. Um, and in doing so, the the the the brain wires itself up. Uh, the brain is actually 90% of its full size by the time you're 6 years old. So, it's not about growth beyond that. It's about actually pruning out the neurons that don't get used and emphasizing and ult ultimately myelinating or sort of insulating the circuits that do get used. So play has to occur over a long period of time, physical, social, um um uh and then we need all sorts of other conditions. We need sleep, we need love, we need food. So what I want listeners to imagine um think back for older people. If you're over 35, let's say, uh, think back on your childhood. Think of all the fun things you did. Think of the best parts of childhood. Now, imagine, uh, let's take some stuff out. Um, because you probably spent 3 or four hours a day on television, uh, but you had a lot of other time on on weekends, but imagine that, you know, half of our kids are spending more than eight hours a day on on entertainment screens, not counting school. Um, half of our kids say they're online almost constantly. So, let's just take that half. For the half of young humans that are online almost constantly, what's their childhood like? So, I'd like you to think, did you ever see sunshine? Of course you did. Take 50% of that out. Imagine that you had 50% less sunshine in your life. Um, did you ever laugh with a friend? Of course you did. Probably millions of times. Take twothirds of that out because you're not with other people very much. You're alone. You're sharing memes. You might laugh. They might laugh, but you're not laughing together. That's jointly. That's right. There's a couple of things. I mean, this is again, as a social psychologist, we are an ultrasocial species. We have this incredible ability to be like bees. Bees are so powerful because they're sort of one for all, all for one. Humans, we have the ability to get into that state temporarily. Um, moving together in synchrony does it. That puts us in that state. Laughing together and eating together. These are three things that have really kind of like sociologically magical powers over us to link us to others. So imagine that you never move in synchrony with anyone. You know like girls do patty cake games and things like that. Imagine that. Imagine girls that jump rope singing. Take all that out from childhood. Imagine you don't eat with your friends very much anymore cuz you're getting together online. Um you don't laugh very much with them. So you take all that stuff out. Now what's happens? You're lonely. Sure. You're connected to 200 people, but it's very shallow. You're not laughing with anyone. Um, and they're all replaceable. That's right. That's right. They're cheap. That's right. Um, did you ever read a book when you were a kid? Take 50 or 70% of those out. Did you ever have a hobby? Take almost all of those out. There's no time. There's no time for books. There's no time for hobbies. The amount of stuff coming in that you have to respond to and know is beyond what anyone can do in a day. So once you give your kid a smartphone and Instagram or Tik Tok or Snapchat, that's that's sort of the end of what we might have thought of as normal childhood. Now it's going to be this phone based childhood. And the phone based childhood blocks out almost everything else. Not entirely. I mean, kids will still laugh with someone else, but it it's going to cut down almost everything that's help Oh, including sleep. And so, you know, I have some critics who say, "Oh, there's no evidence that this is harmful. It's just a correlation." I mean, imagine a a technology that comes in. It reduces your sleep, reduces your time with people, reduces your time in nature. 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We have no that's particularly relevant it seems to me for kids between about the age of four and 10 you know to play tag to jump rope to do those synchronous games to play soccer to play baseball right those are all and those are all activities that are analogous to healthy adult activities because they require principal governed behavior and social coop cooperation towards a goal. So all of that's supplanted, but even more pernitiously, the supplement the sub the the the the replacement is increasingly shortterm. You know, one of the distressing things I've seen, YouTube, for example, has degenerated staggeringly in the last 3 years because YouTube has started to attempt to compete with Tik Tok. Yes. Yes. And so there's this race to the bottom. It's sort of like we saw this in magazines, Jonathan. You know, the the logical degenerative endpoint for all magazines was People magazine, right? These short-term, brief, gossipy, contentless, shallow representations of celebrity, let's say, that required no thought. Time magazine eventually turned into People magazine. And there's a race to the bottom online that's probably a consequence of something like algorithmic competition for grip of short-term attention. And and and that's completely tantamount to addiction, right? There's no difference between grip of short-term attention and and addiction. They're the same thing. Well, let let's run it through Okay, let's let's run it through the sort of the stimulus response dopamine loop because this is important for people to understand. You know, my critics say, "Oh, this is just like television. This is just a moral panic like television." You know, adults said that it was rotting kids' brains, but we turned out fine. So, television is an effective way to present stories. Stories are good things. You and I watched tens of thousands of stories. Now, a lot of them were stupid like Gilligans Island, but they went on for 20 minutes. It was one story for 20 minutes. Um, but the there was and everyone watched it. Everyone watched it. You could talk about them. That's right. you watched it with your sister or with a friend. So it was more social. Um so and there was no behaviorist training that is you didn't do anything that you were reinforced for. Um what happens when it moves onto a smartphone? First it's a small screen that you control. Now you're watching alone. You're not with your sister or brother. You're not with your friends. You're alone. And uh the content is shorter and shorter. As you say, it's Tik Tok discovered that the fastest way to train people is these short videos. And what are they training to do? So, a video comes up, you're watching it, and you've been watching it for eight or nine seconds, and you become an expert in saying, "This is not the most interesting. Let me let me try again." Like a slot machine. I I'll do a behavior. I'll swipe and then I get a reward. But it's a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. Some sometimes I swipe and it's not better, but sometimes I swipe and it is better. And so that feeling of slot machine. Exactly. It's in fact it's modeled after the slot machine. The the pull down the, you know, it was literally modeled, you know, you pull down and then it kind of bounces that was literally modeled on on the slot machine. And so as long as it involves little bits of dopamine uh in response to doing a behavior, now you're engaging the psychology of addiction. And this is Anna LMK's wonderful book, Dopamine Nation, was television, but you could have a habit, but it wasn't it didn't cause addiction in the same way. So, social media, video games, and short videos are all based on giving kids quick dopamine. And if you don't give them quick dopamine, they're going to go to one of your competitors. And that's why you said race to the bottom. Tristan Harris calls it a race to the bottom of the brain stem. If you don't go to the bottom of the brain stem and just get them, get them, get them, then Tik Tok's going to get them. Yeah. Well, and then it's worse. It's worse than you say even because the AI systems are monitoring that attentional focus and they're optimizing for grip of short-term attention. And they're learning with reinforcement learning to do that, which makes them even better at that than any behavioral trainer who's human could possibly be. So, we've actually we've created machines that use reinforcement technology to optimize the grip of reinforcement technology. It's worse than slot machines. That is a really good point. You're right. It's terrible. It's terrible. Right. So, of course, then an LLM is like a brain in the sense of just having lots of of like neurons or system that are learning by reinforcement learning. And what you're saying is by reinforcement learning based on your behavior, it's learning how to reinforce you for the behavior that the company wants. I think that's exactly right. Well, it's it's worse, Jonathan, because it's doing that separately for each person. Yes. Yes. And that that's right. But it's going to get even worse in the next year or two because uh the first encounter with AI was algorithms that are choosing content, but that content was almost was all made by people. And so the algorithm is has for for the last uh you know I guess the algorithms come in around 2009 10 11 in that range they become very common. So we've had algorithms for 15 16 years uh guiding the content uh and they get better and better at feeding you from all the available content in the world. It'll pick the stuff that gets you. But now with generative AI, what we're going to be seeing, I think we're already beginning to see it, is this algorithm is going to be able to generate whatever short video, whatever pornography, whatever image of a person being punched or stabbed or beaten, whatever image will most engage you, it can generate it for you. So, it's the ultimate solopcyistic empty. It's, you know, it's like the beginning of the Matrix where everybody's just in their pod um hooked up to a machine. That is, if we don't get a handle on this now, that's where we're going. It's the ultimate in narcissist mirror, right? Because really what you're doing is you're gazing into a pool. That's your fatal short-term weakness, right? Wherever you can be hooked, you're going to be hooked. And and the problem is the it's optimization for short-term grip of attention at the expense of everything else, right? And so it's the it's it's it's the it's bread and circuses. See, you remember in in the Pinocchio movie that the delinquents end up on Pleasure Island, right? You remember this is so interesting because one of the motifs in horror common motif is the vicious criminal psychopath satist who lurks on the fringes in the amusement park, right? The evil clown, the the carney who's gone wrong, the Yeah. And it it's it's exactly pointing to the danger of that brain stem hedonism. And the danger there is the sacrifice of the future and the social community for the immediate present. So it's a reverse sacrifice instead of maturity is the sacrifice of the present for the future and for others. Immaturity is the sacrifice of the other and the community for the immediate for the present. And these bloody machines are going to optimize for that. That is what's happening. Great. So, so this is the perfect transition to the boy story because um you know as I said well so I wrote the book focused on the mental illness focused on depression anxiety self harm suicide and that is mostly worse in the girls uh but what I've come to see since the book came out a year ago is that I think the bigger destruction is the destruction of the ability to pay attention and it's for the reason that you just said we have to develop executive function we have to develop the ability to set ourselves a goal I want to do X and therefore I have to do steps A, B, C, and D. But if we just get stuck at A all the time because A is so interesting and it and it it just hooks us, we never get to B, C, D or X, um then we don't develop into an adult. We don't develop into a competent adult, an employable adult, an adult that someone want would want to marry or hire. And um as I understand it, um you know, I some in the book I make the distinction between slow dopamine and fast dopamine. Fast dopamine is you do something, you get a reward. You do something, you get a reward. And that's video games, that's scrolling. Uh, but slow dopamine is you pursue a goal over weeks or months and as you make progress on on it, it feels great, you know, like you know, like what you know, when I you know, like with my first girlfriend, like I I sort of had had my eye on her and then I got up the courage to talk to her and when that first conversation went well, like wow, that felt great. Um, so it was a long-term plan with various steps and that's what you need to do to become an adult. You need to it's also overcoming real fear there a that's another thing is that it's it's not only the sacrifice of distraction in the pursuit of a goal over the long run. But in the example you used, it's you're moving towards a goal, but you're also moving towards a goal in the face of your own fear. And that that isn't realized in the virtual world because there's no practice for resilience. Like part of the utility of games, which we didn't go into, is that half the time when you play a real game, you lose. And the advantage to that is that you develop resilience in the face of loss. You have to accept it gracefully. You have to learn from it. And you have to persist. Right? And so the loss is unbelievably important, especially because in life, you probably lose more games than you win, right? Partly because you don't have to win that many games to be successful. You have to win some, but you definitely have to persevere through loss. Yes. Yes. And I would add on another feature of games which is very important um which is rule um rule administration and uh litigation. And so the great the great Swiss uh developmental psychologist Jean PG he in the moral development of the child which is like the classic text of moral development he would he would get down on his hands and knees and he would play marbles with kids in Geneva and he would deliberately do something stupid or wrong and he'd wait to see what they did, how they enforced the rule and how they explained it. Um, and in a real game, this is perhaps the most nutritious part of all is the rule. You know, like that was out of bounds. No, it wasn't. Yes, it was. And you know, you argue about it. But everyone wants to keep the fun going. So, it's very rare that someone's going to storm out and take their marble. I'm not going to play. Like, you've got there's a lot of and you'll be a crybaby and a loser. So, there's a lot of pressure to you have to work it out somehow. Now, what happens in a video game? Is anything ever called out of bounds? Does the player ever have to adjudicate anything? Everything is done by the program. So a video game is really like the junk food of games in that it doesn't have the nutritious part which is the disagreements, the arguments, right? So there's no there's no meta negotiation about the rules themselves. So you know one of the things PJ pointed out in terms of his development of a moral hierarchy was there was the first the ability to act out the rules. Then there was the ability to describe the rules that are being acted out accurately. Then there was the ability to negotiate the rules. Then there was the ability to come up with new rules. Right? So that's a like that's a and and that's also why PG wasn't a moral relativist. He thought there was a hierarchy of morality and that's also why he thought Thomas was wrong. Right? Because arguably it it's complicated and PJ knew Coon's work. and and PJ also pointed out you know that when there was a stage transition in development that the new stage did everything the previous stage did plus something additional. Right? So that was his criteria for improvement. And that movement up that moral hierarchy. It's like once you can act out the rules you can play a game. Once you can describe the rules, you can play a game and discuss it. Once you can negotiate the rules, you can do those first two things and the negotiation and then you can establish your own games, right? Clear progression in terms of expansion of skill. It also makes a mockery of the idea that games are competitive. You know, games where there's a victory. It's like they're not sure you try to win, but the cooperative element subsumes the competitive element because as you said, everyone wants to keep the game going and play, right? So, you have to do that by principle. So, okay. And so, in video, let's talk about video games because boys at least do aggregate together and cooperate in relationship to a goal. So, there is that real world element to them. and the the video games and I I just I don't know that much about the video game world. Like that was one thing I missed completely being as old as I am or almost completely. Um, do you see how clear do you think the evidence is that disappearing into the video game rabbit hole is a breeding place for isolated like pathologies of isolation compared to let's say texting instead of meeting and pornography instead of relationships. Yeah. So median is more complicated. When I started the book, uh, I knew what the girl story was. The story social media, girls, anxiety, depression was very clear, and I thought maybe it'd be the same for boys with video games, and it's not quite the same. Uh, the correlational data, the the experiments. Uh, video games are not as harmful as so to boys as social media is to girls. Sometimes there are even signs of certain benefits from them. Um, so with video games, what I'm coming to see, and just to point out, they have one really good feature, which is they are synchronous. And so um uh when my son I didn't let him on uh Fortnite in sixth grade uh but by just just before co came in we let him get an Xbox he started playing Fortnite. It's a very good thing that we did because that was all they had during co and they would be laughing he'd be laughing his head off with his friends. So that's much better than what girls were doing on social media. The problem as I'm seeing it with video games um is two things. One um um one is the addiction that is about 10% of boys develop what's called problematic use which is compulsive use. It interferes with other aspects of life. It it often looks like addiction. Um and when we talk about I mean I've meet I met so many parents whose boys are completely lost to video games. Um it it it's you know that's all they can do. They're very upset when they don't have it. They don't do anything else. Um and that that's you know 1 to 3% which is still a lot. I mean losing 1 to 3% of boys is a lot. Um 10% having problematic youth is a lot. So the first thing I can say is that um some boys are going to basically become like addicts and miss out on much else in childhood. The great majority are not that's not going to happen too. But what I'm coming to see is that the the attention fragmentation, the loss of the ability to do things that aren't full of dopamine, quick dopamine, um is crippling. And this ultimately, I think, is the boy story. Um boys, um it's not just video games. Boys are basically it's open season on boys by companies. Um and so it's the video game companies are competing for their every moment. It it's well porn. I don't fully understand how they monetize it, but uh you know, a lot of boys get addicted to porn. Um vaping. I can't believe that people, especially young men, are vaping. They're consuming nicotine. Also, dopamine addictive. Uh marijuana is, you know, at least a motivational syndrome. So, uh THC, um sports gambling when they're a little older. You don't have to be 18. There are ways to gamble even before you're 18 or 21. Um investing when you're a little older. crypto, Robin Hood, all these things are gamified, which especially attracts boys. Girls are more interested in the social information. Boys are more interested in I do this and something happens. I do this and something happens. And so I think what we're seeing is when we check in on the kids at the age of 28, which is the oldest gen Z, if we check look at them in mid20s, what we see is that the girls are more likely to have finished high school, more likely to have finished college, more likely to have a job, more likely to not be living with their parents. boys are more likely to have done nothing. Um, and so to lose I can't say what percent but so you know 10 20% of boys become kind of drones because they can't really as we were saying they can't set long-term goals and it executes on them. Um, this is a tremendous loss to any society to lose a substantial portion of your young men in that way. Again, I can't put an exact number on it, but it's, you know, 10% is the problematic use number, and so the percent that are damaged in some way is certainly higher than that. There's been some concerning research about the true safety of the abortion pill that's worth discussing. A recent report suggests that serious adverse effects from the abortion pill may be more common than previously understood, potentially affecting around 11% of patients, according to their findings. Given that the abortion pill now accounts for about 60% of all abortions in the US with roughly a million procedures annually, this could impact tens of thousands of women each year. 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All contributions are taxdeductible. how much I mean one of the things I've seen because I've spent a lot of time talking to young men watching them let's say is that and I'm wondering how you separate this out because I would also say that there are elements of the social media world the hyperconnected world that are also particularly toxic to boys and I don't know and and a lot of this to me seem to emerge around the same period of time that you're describing so I don't know what percentage of boys are now on ADHD medication but it's in it's always on the rise and Jacqu Pankep who the affective neuroscientist who who established the existence of the play circuit pointed out that the primary effect of rolin is play suppression that's what it does oh absolutely so there was this idea Jonathan initially that boys with fragmented attention had a paradoxical response to stimulants in that it increased their attentional focus. But that's not paradoxical at all. It does that to everyone. But what it does is it it increases the probability that you'll focus on whatever you're focusing on. Now, what Pankep showed very clearly, if you deprived young juvenile rats of rough and tumble play, their prefrontal cortexes didn't mature. And then if you let them play, they would play frenetically like boys do in after they've been forced to sit down forever in school. But that you could suppress that with rolin. Wow. I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. The Pank's work on that is it's brilliant. The play work plus the rolin work. It's just well especially because he also showed degener or like failure to mature at a prefrontal level that and that if you let the rats the juveniles play frenetically and exhaust themselves say over some reasonable period of time their prefrontal cortexes would develop. So it's catchup behavior. So, so I saw I saw hypothetically an increased war on male play and interest preferences that made itself manifest, I would say, with the hyper feminization of the school system. And then as well the there there was the communicated insistence that male ambition was toxic, that competitive games were bad and that you know to the degree that the patriarchy is a corrupt institution that any sign of that demand for victory let's say a competitive m v victory on the male front was actually a sign of psychopathology. So I think part of the reason that the boys have been demoralized or h no are are failing to participate is because they've been demoralized and that that's provided them also with an excuse to be irresponsible. Look nature said you're best punished for your virtues. So the conclusion is is if you're going to be punished for being ambitious and goal directed then that's going to be very effective as a punishment but it also gives you every reason to you know to bow out and to be irresponsible. So I don't know what you think about that in in combination with the things that you're seeing on the you know the more specifically technological front. Yeah. Well, so the boy's story is different from the girl story and it's a story of checking out of the real world and I draw from this in part on Richard Reeves who's a wonderful book of boys and men. He points out that you know boys and men used to dominate the economy and society in many ways. Um but beginning in the 70s we get the transition away from physical work and long shoremen and strength and to a service economy. Um, and we get uh as uh and girls are rising, which is great. Um, but as girls are rising, boys are not rising too. In some ways, they're falling. And, uh, by 1980, I think it is, most half of college students were female. Now, it's 60% are female. Um, so boys have been kind of checking out of school, checking out of the workplace. The electronic world, the online world's gotten better and better, more and more attractive for boys. They're spending more time on video games. So, it is a story of male achievement, male motives being kind of hijacked or turned towards trivial, pointless pursuits that don't add up to anything. Um, and so I would agree with you um about the discouragement of of male ego, ambition, desire to be great, uh the subversion of that into just wanting to do, you know, higher up on a on a video game leaderboard, I suppose. But, you know, I'd love to ask you. Yeah. You know, because I've been I I've only really I I only really began turning to the boy story about three three years three or four years ago when I began working on the book. You've been talking to young men for a long time now. What do what do you see when you look at the Moles among young men? I mean, part of what you just said about but but just what's your diagnosis about um about what's what's happening to young men? Is it depression, anxiety? Is it hopelessness? What what do you see happening? Well, a huge part of it fractured demoralization. Like one of the things I've really noticed this, it's quite the stunning and horrifying thing to see. You know, I think the biggest impact what I've said on young men has been my drawing of a relationship between meaning, adventure, and responsibility. It's like, well, and you know, you touch on this in your book, like one of the things you point out. So, let let me take a bit of a sideways route here. When the big five theorists were laying out the uh semantic webs associated with negative emotion, neuroticism, McCrae um in particular with uh with the Neo big five noticed that self-consciousness and neuroticism were so tightly associated semantically that they were indistinguishable. So, here's the rule. This is the rule. And you allude to this. If you think about yourself, you are going to be anxious and miserable. Those are the same thing. And you know that when you're possessed by a bout of self-consciousness, it's not pleasant. Okay. So then you might say, well, what do you do about that? And one answer would be, well, don't focus on yourself. But you can't not focus on yourself. You have to focus on something else. Okay. So what do you focus on if you're male? Well, you focus on responsible service to the future and others. Well, why? Well, because that gives you what you described as that slow dopamine kick. It's like that's where and that's not happiness. It's meaning. Those are very different things. Happiness is that like hedonistic kick that can be hijacked by the AI machines. meaning is s more s less intense but more sustaining. Okay. So where do you find that? And that's simple. You find that in the adoption of maximal responsibility. That that's burden. That's challenge. That's play if you do it right. That's also the sacrifice that civilization is founded on. And one of the things that we might know Jonathan is that the default man is useless. Right. So I So for example, I'm going to get myself in trouble here, but I don't really care. So in the in the Arab world, broadly speaking, the Arab world produces about as much as Spain. Okay. Well, why? Well, it's part of the reason is the men don't work. Now, that's not surprising. What's surprising is that any man ever work because work is difficult and it requires sacrifice. And so the question is and this is the anthropological question the the question of initiation. How do you socialize and civilize men? Cuz the default is going to be trivial hedenism. Of course it is cuz it's easier. Of course it's going to be the default. The default's always what's simpler and more fragmented. Well, you tell them a story of heroic responsibility and you draw even more importantly, you draw a connection between responsibility and adventure, you know, and so it's so interesting because so many men have reflected this back to me and I literally mean thousands because I've I've said, you know, what you do is you look for the maximum burden and you note that in service to that you find meaning. And so you can do that with truth. You can do it with responsibility. And the young men will come up to me and they do this daily I would say and say, you know, 5 years ago I decided I was going to start taking responsibility for myself and tell the truth. And like everything's changed in consequence. Everything. And so what what we're do we're doing this bigotry of soft expectations with men. And one of the things I got right right off at the beginning was see the mas the male attitude towards younger men isn't the feminine ethos of acceptance. So the you could imagine the dynamic in a family is that this is a stereotype but I'm going to go with it anyways. The mother says to the child, "You're lovely the way you are." And the father says, "You I kind of like you, but you could be a lot more." And those are good. Those are really good together, you know, because when the child goes out from the mother, he's encouraged, let's say, by the masculine go out. And then when he's exhausted or she's exhausted for that matter, she can come back to the mother and be accepted. And that's the standard pattern of, you know, security seeking and then exploration. Now, what I've been doing with young men is saying to them, you could be a lot more than you are. And that's it's an insult in a way because means you're not good enough now. But it it prioritizes the optimized future self. And that's actually hugely advantageous, you know. And so I think what we're doing that's wrong with young men, well, and I think we're doing it to young women, too, in a more subtle manner is not asking, not requiring or even demanding nearly enough. So they default to trivial hedenism obviously. Yeah, that's right. Let's keep going on this theme about adventure, challenge, burden. Um, one of the most interesting findings that I came across when writing the book, um, in the chapter on play, uh, I cover work by a Norwegian psychologist named Ellen Sansedar who has an article from 10 years ago, 15 years ago where she goes through the six kinds of thrills. She says, uh, thrilling play is the most powerful anti-anxiety um, agent. that is kids kids will choose to do things where they can get hurt. They will choose to climb a tree to the point where they're scared and then they'll go a little a little higher and then maybe they'll stop and then the next day they're they can go higher. Um you know once you learn to bicycle you learn to bicycle over jump ramps and stairs. So kids are seeking thrills and she says there's high places, fast speeds, dangerous tools, hiding, disappearing. Um there's a couple others I forget what rough and tumble play I suppose or fighting is one. Uh and and she points out that it's it's that feeling of thrill that's like you know cuz you know play there's all kinds of imaginative games. Those are very nice and imagination has all kinds of benefits but but the most it's like the most exciting play is where there's some danger you might get hurt and you're maybe laughing and also afraid. And that kind of play is actually what dads specialize in. I remember when I was a kid, you know, on the beach like my father, you know, my father would pretend to be a monster cha, you know, giant monster chasing us and we would my sister, you know, we'd run and we were kind of scared but also laughing our heads off. So that's thrilling. And um this is where where I'm coming to see, you know, the my book has really caught fire with mothers in particular. Mothers are were more concerned about this. they felt it more. Um, and they're driving the efforts to get phones out of schools in general. Men are involved too, of course. Um, but what I'm thinking nowadays is that men, dads in particular, really have a role to play in giving their kids more thrill and fear. And fear, I don't mean fear of them. I mean play that involves exposure to fear. Exposure to Thank you. Yes. Exposure to fear and risk. And that can even be just at an amusement park. just taking your kids to an amusement park where there's not really any physical danger, but man, it is scary when you go on a high roller coaster. Um, so yeah, so kids need that. Um, it might be that boys need it more. At least boys need more rough and tumble play. That that I'm confident they need more rough and tumble. I don't know about thrills and fear. I just don't know. But um, our boys, I think, are suffering from a lack of adventure, challenge, responsibility. You you said the soft like the soft bigotry of low expectations. Um, and yeah, we need to give them back a world in which there are such possibilities to do something big, risky, great, thrilling. I'm going to tell you a little story very quickly, I hope, very quickly. I spent a lot of time recently assessing the Abrahamic covenant. And so Abraham is characterized as the father of nations, right? So you could imagine that he's emblematic of the pattern that maximizes reproductive success across time. That's a way of thinking about it biologically. The divine comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure, right? Because Abraham is wealthy and privileged and he doesn't have to lift a finger, you see. And so he's 70 when the voice comes to him and it says to him, you have to leave your zone of comfort and have your adventure in the world. You have to leave your tribe. You have to leave your family. You have to leave everything you're comfortable with. You have to do that voluntarily. And you have to make the sacrifices that are necessary in its pursuit. And Abraham agrees. And God offers him five gifts in consequence. And this is the alignment of the spirit of developmental adventure with the divine. And so here's the the the the offer. This is the covenants very specific. So the deal is that if you hearken to the voice of adventure and make the appropriate sacrifices, then you'll be a blessing to yourself. Your reputation will grow validly among your compatriots. No, your enemies will not be able to withstand you. You will establish something of enduring permanence and you'll do that in a way that brings benefit to everyone. And so imagine what that means, Jonathan, is that that developmental impetus to move out into the world produces that meaning because it's it's emblematic of expansion and development and it aligns the psychological and the social which is nothing but an expression of the fact that we are social creatures. Like how could it be that our impetus to develop would be in contradiction to our social utility? It can't be that because we wouldn't be social, right? We'd be essentially in competition with the social world. We wouldn't be aligned. So the call to adventure is it's the Abrahamic call as far as I'm concerned and I think it's also the antithesis of the selfish gene because the idea in it is that if you imagine this is that you embodied that adventurous spirit properly as a father. Well then you establish the pattern of adaptation that maximizes the reproductive fitness of your children. And obviously like what? You're going to raise a boy who's a cringing coward and what? He's going to find a successful mate and his children are going to thrive. I don't think so. I don't think that's how it works. So, we're asking far too little of young men and what we're doing with young women. And I think this is part of fertility suppression. You know, the the evil queen in Snow White turns attempts to turn Snow White into a narcissist. She gives her a bo
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