The Anxiety Doctor: Social Media Is Causing A Mental Health COLLAPSE (& It's Only Getting WORSE!)

Jonathan Haidt 0:00 There has never been a global synchronized collapse of mental health. This is far larger than anything we've ever seen. In terms of its effects on kids, this is way, way larger than COVID. A much buzzed-about book.

Speaker 0:11 The Anxious Generation is available now. He is, of course, Jonathan Haidt.

Jonathan Haidt 0:15 Girls are extraordinarily anxious and depressed. Boys are extraordinarily undeveloped. We shouldn't have kids with a massive entertainment center in their pocket by which strangers can reach them. This is complete insanity.

Jay Shetty 0:30 Hey, everyone. I've got some huge news to share with you. In the last ninety days, seventy-nine point four percent of our audience came from viewers and listeners that are not subscribed to this channel. There's research that shows that if you want to create a habit, make it easy to access. By hitting the Subscribe button, you're creating a habit of learning how to be happier, healthier, and more healed. This would also mean the absolute world to me and help us make better, bigger, brighter content for you and the world. Subscribe right now. The number one health and wellness podcast.

Speaker 1:07 Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. The one, the only Jay Shetty.

Jay Shetty 1:13 Hey, everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose, the place you tune into to become happier, healthier, and more healed. Thank you so much for investing in your growth and your journey by being here today, as I'm about to interview one of my favorite authors, a researcher, a professor that I'm so excited to talk to. I've been wanting to have this conversation with him about many of his books, and we're finally here for his latest installment. It's called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Please welcome to On Purpose, Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan, thank you for being here. Thank you for making the time and spending this energy with us.

Jonathan Haidt 1:52 Oh, my pleasure, Jay. Thanks for having me.

Jay Shetty 1:55 This is a conversation that I feel, as I was saying to you offline, which is so critical and central for our listeners. I know that everyone who's tuned in, whether it be right now on YouTube or listening to us on an audio platform, this is of the number one concern in their life, which is their personal mental well-being and then the mental well-being of their children and the people that they care about and love. And I think when I first saw the title, The Anxious Generation, I was thinking about how there's this rhetoric that has become quite normal in society around how every generation has had their anxiety, whether it was the World Wars, whether we talk about, "Oh, we have social media," but, you know, kids back in the day had black and white TVs and then color television, and then, then they had video games. And so I feel like there's been this rhetoric that social media is just the latest installment in a host of previous technologies that have made old people worried about young people. Why is this different?

Jonathan Haidt 3:00 Uh, so that is the main counterargument I get is from people who say, "Oh, we've been through this before. When I was a kid, we watched too much television, but look, it didn't do anything to us." Um, and it is true that ever since modernity began, so beginning in the seventeenth century, when the pace of change really begins to accelerate generation to generation, the next generation actually is a little different from the previous one. And the-- And generally, we think the next generation, they're kind of soft. You know, they don't have our virtues. Um, they have funny habits. So that's always been going on. And that's what, I'm a late baby boomer. I was born in nineteen sixty-three. So that's what we thought about, you know, I, I, you know, the millennial generation. You know, oh, they're always just, you know, focused on their coffee and their, and their avocado toast. They're not serious.

Jay Shetty 3:39 [chuckles]

Jonathan Haidt 3:39 But actually, uh, and you're a millennial, I believe, right? You-

Jay Shetty 3:41 Yes.

Jonathan Haidt 3:41 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 3:42 That's correct.

Jonathan Haidt 3:42 So millennials are born nineteen eighty-one through nineteen ninety-five, roughly. Um, but the millennials, their mental health was actually pretty good. Um, better than Gen X, actually. And they're an amazingly successful generation. They were creative. They traveled the world. They start companies. So that's the normal intergenerational difference. This time is really, really different because all of a sudden, in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, it's like someone flicked on a light switch. And all over the developed world, we don't have data from the, from the developing world, but all over the developed world, certainly the English-speaking countries, Scandinavia, girls in particular began to get depressed, anxious. They began to cut themselves. They began checking into psychiatric wards in, right around twenty thirteen. In the US, it's very sharp, right around twenty thirteen. It sometimes is a little bit, but it's basically the early twenty tens. This has never happened before. There has never been a global synchronized collapse of mental health. This is far larger than anything we've ever seen. In terms of its effects on kids, this is way, way larger than COVID. Um, this is affecting most kids. So I'm in de-- en-engaged in debates with other scholars about, well, why did this happen? And what I marshal in the book is the evidence that it's not just a coincidence. It's not just a correlation that, oh, that's exactly when kids basically switched from flip phones to smartphones. It was between twenty ten and twenty fifteen all over the world. Um, but I'm showing that there, there's a lot of, uh, of experimental evidence that shows causation. And another thing that makes this different, the kids themselves say it. So when I was a kid, we watched too much TV, but you didn't see kids organizing to keep kids off TV. You didn't see kids saying, "Oh, please save us from TV. You know, we're stuck watching it. We don't want to be watching it." But that's what young people are saying about social media. I just saw a survey. Uh, the majority, the majority of people of, of all ages, including young people, say they would rather that TikTok was never invented. They're spending time on it because everyone else is, but they see that they're trapped. So this is so different from any previous moral panic.

Jay Shetty 5:44 Hmm. That's so fascinating to hear that it's the first time that people are actually saying or kids are actually say- saying that this experience is something that we're feeling, yet we feel so trapped, addicted in-

Jonathan Haidt 5:55 Exactly

Jay Shetty 5:56 ... in digital life.

Jonathan Haidt 5:56 That's what my students say at NYU. That's what students say on surveys. When you ask them, "Why do you think mental health is so bad in your generation?" The most common answer is social media. They see it happening. The parents see it happening to the kids. The teachers see it happening to the kids. So there's all kinds of eyewitness testimony, like people see this happening. It's not just like, "Hmm, I wonder if it's the phone." It's like, "No, we see the evidence of it."

Jay Shetty 6:19 Hmm. What-- I'm fascinated. Why are people debating you?

Jonathan Haidt 6:22 Well, there are, uh... So, you know, I'm an academic, and we publish, um, our articles in journals, and there are some people who've been studying media for a long time, and many of them are, um, very technophilic. There's-- They, they, you know, they like technology. They l-- Some of them like video games, have been writing about the benefits of video games, and there are some. And so I think they come to this prepared to believe that this is just another moral panic.

Jay Shetty 6:44 Hmm.

Jonathan Haidt 6:44 We've been through this with television and video games and before that, comic books. The 18th century, it was novels. People didn't want young women to read novels 'cause it would stimulate their sexual appetites. So they sort of approach it with a, like, you know, "This is just another one of those moral panics." And then I keep, uh, doing this work with Jean Twenge and, and Zach Rauch. We keep showing, like, no other explanation works. This time is different. This is not just some artifact of kids being more willing to talk about it. This is y- the same curves in self-report. You see those same curves in hospital admissions, uh, so, and, and psychiatric emergency department visits, so this is not just some illusion. Uh, but you know, there's about four or five, uh, five or six researchers. Um, you know, they're serious researchers, and they look at the same data I do, and they, uh, they say, "Well, the correlations are too small to explain it," or they say, you know, "It's mostly correlational. There are not enough experiments." And I say, "Okay, look, I found 25 experiments, 16 of which do show a causal effect, you know, with random assignment. The kids who, or the young people who are assigned to do less social media, um, in the first few days, maybe their mental health is bad 'cause they're addicted. But if you wait three or four weeks, on average, they feel better." So I say, "Look, here are all these experiments." And they say, "Well, the experiments aren't good enough. Here's a flaw in that one. Here's a flaw in that one." So this is a normal academic debate. I'm not gonna change their minds ever. They're not gonna change my mind ever. Um, this is just the way these things go. But as we argue it out in public, the rest of the world can look, and they can say, "What are my arguments? What are their arguments?" And then they'll decide.

Jay Shetty 8:11 Yeah, absolutely.

Jay Shetty 8:12 And from reading your book and your work, what I understand is you actually are not saying social media doesn't have benefits either. That's not really what you're saying. You're not saying that there is no validity to it whatsoever.

Jonathan Haidt 8:23 Well, what I... Well, what I would say is for adults, social media has many benefits. So, you know, obviously, many people start their businesses. Look, I use Twitter to get my research out. So for adults, so think about this. These are, these were wr- These used to be called social networking sites 'cause originally, they were just ways to connect people. And as an adult, I have a need to network, and it's useful to me, and LinkedIn is useful. Twitter is useful. Many, you know, Facebook groups are use-- These are all useful for adults. But let's talk about middle school kids. So in America, middle school is roughly ages 11 to 13. Let's talk about kids just beginning puberty. How much need do they have to network? How much do they need to meet strangers, strange men who are approaching them? How much do they need that? Um, how much do they need social media to connect with their friends? The telephone was an amazing invention. You pick it up, you press some numbers, and you can talk to your friend anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. So we already had that. How much more help did 11 and 12-year-olds need to connect with their friends? And so I would argue that when we look at middle school, this is my main focus, is early puberty. Early puberty, the brain is extremely vulnerable because the fr- for the, the frontal part of the brain is rewiring very rapidly. Um, growth is slow during childhood, but it's very rapid in puberty. And so I would say that for 11, 12, 13-year-old kids, I'm willing to say there aren't really any benefits, and the harms are extraordinary.

Jay Shetty 9:51 Hmm.

Jonathan Haidt 9:51 So that's why I say we need to just raise, we need to raise the ages. We should have a norm that no one gets a smartphone before high school. We shouldn't have kids with a, a massive entertainment center in their pocket by which strangers can reach them, companies can reach them, and we should raise the age of social media opening account from 13, which is at present not enforced, to 16 and enforce it. If we do those two things, we'll really get at least a handle. We'll protect kids during early puberty.

Jay Shetty 10:18 Yeah, and I wanna get onto all of those points.

Jay Shetty 10:20 I think one thing before that, I think the word anxiety, in some cases, we've become so numb to it.

Jonathan Haidt 10:26 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 10:27 It's become so normalized. It is the norm to hear someone you know has anxiety, someone you love has anxiety, children have anxiety, and I feel that word has been so repeated over the last five to 10 years maybe that it's become... we've become numb to it.

Jonathan Haidt 10:42 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 10:42 And because of that, we don't really understand and, which you do spend a lot of time in the early parts of the book, not only defining what anxiety is in experience, but the extent to which anxiety affects our normal everyday functioning. Could you give us a short summary on that, which I want people to dive into the book to read the deep research on. But could we at least explore what are the implications? What is anxiety, and what are the implications of anxiety in the long term, if not for some of these recommendations you're suggesting?

Jonathan Haidt 11:14 So the most important emotion for animals is fear. Fear is, across all the different species, vertebrates, invertebrates, there's a very, you know, huge long evolution. A lot is known about fear. Because if you've ever been snorkeling or out in the woods, you know that life for animals is you're looking for food, you're looking for food, and then you're dead because someone jumped on you. So all animals, including us, have a hair trigger alarm system. That's normal. That's healthy. Uh, so that's fear. Now, sometimes, um, that's when you're attacked, you're threatened. Now, sometimes you're in an environment where you don't see a threat per se, but it's-- you're very wary of it. And so let's say, you know, so humans are much more afraid in the dark because in the dark you're much more likely to be killed by nocturnal hunting animals. So we have an innate fear of the dark. It doesn't mean we're necessarily afraid, but we're just a little more on edge. And so that's your brain saying, "Okay, we're gonna shift the alarm system over. We're gonna make you a little warier. If anything happens, you're gonna jump." Whereas if it was broad daylight, you would just look and say, "What was that?" Um, so our brains are these incredible survival machines that have very, very deep circuits for fear, which mobilizes us to fight or to, to flee or fight, um, and then for anxiety, which is more diffuse, just a general sense of threats. Now, when the fear system i-is triggered and then you take action and then it shuts off, that's normal, that's healthy. But as many of your listeners will know, chronic stress causes an increase in circulating cortisol. It keeps your stress system on. Stress is not bad. Kids need stress, but short-term stress. But when you have long-term stress, now you have hormonal dysregulation. You have cortisol, which has many functions in the body. But high levels of cortisol expose you to all kinds of health problems, joint problems, immunity-- I mean, I forget the whole list. Uh, cortisol has so many effects. Um, so what's happening is, um, young people, there have always been anxious young people. Some people are set to anxious, some people are set to more calm. That's always been the case. But there's a shift so that more and more kids are, are closer to the anxiety side. Now, um, part of this is they're told, there's a lot of talk, actually just this week or two, there's a lot of talk about how these programs that teach kids to label their emotions, and they talk about, you know, were you afraid? Were you anxious? They seem like they're well-intentioned. It seems, you know, social-emotional learning, there is some basis to that decades ago. But it seems though it's moving in a direction of teaching kids to dwell on their own emotions, always be looking inward. How did that make you feel? How did that make-- Were you anxious? Um, you know, what, you know, where can you go for help? Um, that this, there's actually not much evidence that this is helping, and there are some new studies suggesting that this stuff backfires. This is actually making kids more anxious. What kids, what I argue in the book is what kids really, really need to overcome anxiety is exposure. Go out and play, and sometimes you will be afraid, and sometimes you'll climb a tree, and you'll be, go too high, and you're afraid. I remember those feelings from my childhood. But that's how you get over childhood anxieties. Where sitting inside in a classroom with a teacher giving you an emotion circle and saying, "Which of these emotions are you feeling right now, Johnny?" You know, and, and sometimes they're asked, "Have you thought about suicide? Have you thought about harming yourself?" And they ask this over and over again. So this suggests to kids that they are weak, that they have these emotions, and if they have these emotions, it's a problem. So I think we're, you know, the mental health community, [lips smack] um, you know, I think we're just, we're not, we're not recognizing what's driving the epidemic, and we're not doing things that would effectively

Jonathan Haidt 14:51 reverse it.

Jay Shetty 14:51 What is the root of that? Because I feel like the research oscillates in some cases, or at least as humans we like to oscillate. There's this idea of the past, and I assume it's the opposite of what you just said, where when you were young, you weren't allowed to feel. I think everyone's experienced that idea of, "Oh, don't worry, everything will be okay," or, "Oh, it do- it doesn't matter that you feel pain, like everything will be fine. Let, let it go," or, you know, "Don't cry," or things like that. And so that was one extreme, and then the other extreme is what you're saying now where it's like, "Well, let's talk about every emotion and give it equal weighting and give it equal priority." What, what is the middle? And-

Jonathan Haidt 15:26 Yeah. So, um, so I'm saying kids need adversity. They need to sometimes be excluded. So all of that is necessary. You know, if you, if you ask any parent, how many times would you like your child to be excluded? You, you just have a newborn child. Your child's gonna turn eighteen in eighteen years. In those eighteen years, how often do you want your child to be excluded and to feel excluded? And anybody who says zero, they're speaking from their heart, but they're not speaking from their head. I would never hire someone who's never been excluded. This person is gonna be, have find it very difficult to have normal human relationships. Sometimes they won't be included, and that's not a big deal. Uh, so we need adversity. Now, I think what you're saying is it used to be we were too insensitive, and that's true. Uh, and there were a couple of categories especially. So bullying. Bullying is really, really bad, but what we have to be clear about is bullying is not aggression. Bullying is aggression or humiliation directed at a kid day after day. It has to be over time because aggression is a normal and necessary part of childhood. You have to let kids experience aggression, express aggression, express hostility. You have to allow that and let them work it out. Now, now and then there will be a problem. There'll be one kid who is picking on another kid, and that kid doesn't want to go to school. And if that goes on for more than a day, now it's bullying, and now we need to be responsive. When I was a kid, we weren't. In the seventies, we weren't, um... And in some countries, I know at the time, you know, in Japan and Korea, they were horrible. I mean, the culture around bullying in English boarding schools, I've heard. So it's great progress that we're being more sensitive about bullying. Um, obviously, the shaming of LGBTQ kids, that was a, you know, it was constant when I was a kid. Um, but now i-it's m-much, much better. So, so in, in many ways, we do need to be more sensitive. But I think the gist of your question is have we overshot? Have we-- And I would say yes, we have really overshot. Um, you know, if, if there's any, you know, uh, recess in America is often very heavily monitored. And as soon as there's any kind of conflict, an adult comes in. When my kids, my kids went to New York City public schools, they go there still, they're in high school. Um, and so that kind of attention to, "Let's make sure no one's upset. Let's make sure no one's excluded." You know, my daughter and her friend, they formed a little club, but they were t-- you know, on the playground. They were told, "No, you can't do that. You can't exclude anyone." That's crazy. Kids need to play with that. So anyway, that's The, I, I, I think we've gone too far

Jay Shetty 17:44 Yeah. Talking about recess,

Jay Shetty 17:45 I believe it was in your book that you said that the average recess time or outdoor time is 37 minutes. Is that accurate?

Jonathan Haidt 17:50 There, it, the numbers vary.

Jay Shetty 17:51 Yeah

Jonathan Haidt 17:51 It depends on the ... But in elementary school, I've heard numbers as low as 27 minutes as the average.

Jay Shetty 17:55 Across the day

Jonathan Haidt 17:56 The average. Yeah, across the day. And sometimes that's combined with lunch. Some kids only get 25 minutes, including lunch. And so you go to, you know, you're in, you know, kids need to run around. They need recess. There's a lot of research on this. Play helps them learn. It helps them attend later. But in America at least, and in East Asian countries, I would imagine, um, we're so focused on, on, on test scores, on, that we think what five and six and seven-year-olds is more, need is more math, and they don't. They don't need more math. What they need is more playtime, and then they'll learn more in a shorter amount of math. Um, in the United States, if you are in a federal maximum security penitentiary, you are guaranteed two hours a day of yard time. You can't keep ... It's in- inhumane to keep them in, in their cells all day. They get two hours of yard time. But if you're an elementary school student in the United States, you have no guarantee, and it's c- it's, it's very often as little as 27 minutes, including lunch, which means you have to stand in the lunch line. That takes 10 minutes. You get your lunch. You have, you know, you, you wolf it down in five minutes, and you have, whatever, five minutes left to play. This is complete insanity. If we want to get a handle on the mental health crisis, I think we need to back off on the adults instructing kids about their emotions. Do a lot less of that, and take all the money and all the time we're spending on that and give kids more play.

Jay Shetty 19:11 Mm.

Jay Shetty 19:12 And what do, what do we need? You talk about what we need as children. You're talking about the need for play. Is play truly just play, or is there certain parameters, certain ideas, certain thoughts that make play more effective?

Jonathan Haidt 19:24 Yes. Play is a mammalian universal. So mammals, you know, the first mammals, whenever it was that some females began to secrete milk from glands in their skin, it's kind of an amazing evolutionary, uh, adaptation for having a longer childhood. You know, other animals, they lay an egg, and that's it. Animal's on their own. But mammals, we have this long, long childhood, and that allows us to have much larger brains and much more complex social behavior compared to, say, reptiles. And so we have this long childhood, um, and especially the social animals, so dogs more than cats, but, you know, dogs and humans and, uh, are incredibly playful s- creatures. We have a puppy at home. She's now a year and a half. Well, a year and a half, she still looks like a puppy. She wants to play all the time, and she has to play. That's the thing. Pl- Since all mammals play when they're young, and they take risks. So evolution isn't stupid. Evolution didn't say, "We're gonna let these, these baby animals practice jumping out of trees and practice getting in fights for no good reason." No, there's a very good reason. That's what you have to do to train your brain to reach adulthood. And that's why for hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, you could say, all human children played unless they were being seriously deprived of play and stuck in a factory. So we, a- and in America, we had play all the way up through the 1990s. That's when we begin to lose it. In the '90s, we freak out in America and Britain and Canada, uh, and we say, "It's too dangerous. You'll be abducted. You'll be sexually molested. No, you stay home, or you stay under supervision. Oh, and there's this fabulous new internet, so why don't you spend more time on that?" That's what happened in the '90s.

Jay Shetty 21:00 Mm.

Jonathan Haidt 21:00 And that's when childhood really departed from the human need for play and independent activity and became s- over-supervised, helicopter parented, uh, restrained, restricted. And s- You can play on a video game in a way, but it's not embodied, whereas we're physical creatures. We need to run, jump, touch, wrestle, hug. Uh, you know, I remember doing all those things with my, with my friends when I was in second or third grade. We would sometimes hug each other or pick each other up or wrestle. You know, it's, children are physical like puppies. But, but now, you know, kids, they're on their screen all the time. There can be a playful element, but there's no risk. There's no physicality. Um, they don't learn the social skills that you do from face-to-face encounters.

Jay Shetty 21:43 When you were saying that, I was actually thinking back to a trip I took to Rwanda two years ago, and I was thinking about h- our, our gorilla friends who we share, I believe, over 96% of our DNA with, and watching the young gorillas play outdoors. And even you were talking about wrestling and, and we would see them tumble and-

Jonathan Haidt 22:01 It's so recognizable. That's right.

Jay Shetty 22:03 Yeah, and it was such a like-

Jonathan Haidt 22:04 That's right, 'cause we're primates.

Jay Shetty 22:05 Yeah.

Jonathan Haidt 22:05 Primates have arms, and primates use their arms in play, and you see it with all, you know, with chimpanzees and bonobos-

Jay Shetty 22:12 Yeah

Jonathan Haidt 22:12 ... and gorillas, yeah.

Jay Shetty 22:13 Yeah.

Jonathan Haidt 22:13 And it's so cute, right?

Jay Shetty 22:14 It is. Yeah, it's adorable.

Jonathan Haidt 22:14 Like, we love watching it because we mammals, as adults, we are primed for cuteness because that triggers in us a protective instinct over the kids. So we have this protective instinct, and unfortunately, it's kind of run rampant. You know, it used to be the kids are, are out of the house. You don't see them. But now we can monitor our kids all the time, and we're just, we're swooping in too quick.

Jay Shetty 22:39 Yeah. No, I, I mean, I think we all resonate with that, even as adults. There's this beautiful quote from George Bernard Shaw where he said that we don't stop playing because we get old. We get old-

Jonathan Haidt 22:50 Oh

Jay Shetty 22:50 ... because we stop playing.

Jonathan Haidt 22:51 Beautiful. Yes, that's right.

Jay Shetty 22:52 And-

Jonathan Haidt 22:52 That's right

Jay Shetty 22:52 ... and I, and I think that we can-

Jonathan Haidt 22:54 Yeah

Jay Shetty 22:54 ... relate to that. I can relate to the as- this idea that I miss play. I think the

Jay Shetty 22:59 challenge is that, as you said, in the 1990s when things started to veer off course, now children given the choice generally are going to choose indoor video games, phone time-

Jonathan Haidt 23:10 Absolutely

Jay Shetty 23:10 ... iPad.

Jonathan Haidt 23:11 That's right.

Jay Shetty 23:11 And they're not going to choose play. So I think the challenge becomes now that our taste buds have become technological, how do we rewire that taste bud when we've been so diverted?

Jonathan Haidt 23:25 That's right. So it's not clear whether it's that the taste buds have become technological or that the technology has adapted so profoundly that it now knows exactly what we most want. So, uh, I was born in 1963. I remember when the game Pong came out. It was the first video game you could get on your home television, so it was very, very crude, but it's amazing. You turn a knob, and you can play tennis, and I'd sit there with my friend, and we'd do that for, you know, 20, 30 minutes, then we'd go do something else. Um, so these video games were not immersive. They were fun. And, and you, and you played with a friend. Um, but once you get, you know, you get graphics cards, you get color monitors, you get high-speed internet, you get multiplayer video games. These games are incredible. I mean, my son plays Fortnite. I didn't let him on in sixth grade when he was 11, but I did let him on at 13, around COVID time. Um, these games are incredible. And as a boy, what's most exciting is war games. And so the games just get better and better. And, and this is actually something we, we need to talk about. You know, so much of the talk is about social media and girls. With boys, it's a different problem. Boys, there are many that are harmed by social media. Many are driven to suicide. I'm not-- I don't want to say it's okay for boys. But social media use is not so correlated with depression and anxiety for boys. It is for girls. For boys, what's happening is the technology is so amazing, and the real world is getting more and more inhospitable to them. I mean, we've been really trying to reduce prejudice against girls and open up girls and bring them into every pro-- That's all great. But girls are just so much better in school. They just do better in school. They-- School is made for more, more of a, a female child than a male child. It's for you, you sit still, you learn, you please the teacher. Um, and we've, we've pushed out rough and tumble play. We've reduced recess. There's no more shop class. So boys aren't enjoying school as much as girls. Um, boys, um, are enjoying the technology more and more. And it's not just the video games, it's also the pornography. Um, so, you know, war games and sex, those are deeply appealing to boys and young men. And as the technology gets better and better, now, you know, if you're a boy with ur-- budding sexual urges, and you have two choices. One is the most incredible pornography you've ever seen, and then soon there'll be goggles, soon it'll be put into, into sex dolls and robots. I mean, you can have this amazing sex life that you can customize. You can customize the body size. You can customize the personality. You know, you can have virtual girlfriends and boyfriends now. So boys are, are finding, uh, uh, video game play and pornography more and more satisfying, and it's just difficult to arrange a soccer game with your friends. That's just difficult. Let's just meet online. And it's difficult to flirt with a girl and develop a relationship and fall in love and have sex. That's really hard. Um, so I think we're losing boys. Um, and it's not just because their taste buds are rewired. It's because the technology is amazingly good at learning what do we most want, let's deliver that. But it's not what we most need. It's what we most want.

Jay Shetty 26:25 And what's the cost of that? What's happening to boys' brains and minds?

Jonathan Haidt 26:29 So the big picture is that boys are failing to have the kinds of experiences that will toughen them, teach them skills, teach them virtues, and turn them into men. Um, boys' development is different from girls' development all around the world traditionally. Um, boys, generally initiation rites involve more toughening, toughness demonstrations. And we can say this is terrible and patriarchal, but I actually think it's important. Um, so, you know, all kids start off in the female sphere. We all live-- You know, we're all raised by mothers and girls and aunts, uh, traditionally around the world. Um, and so girls stay within the female world, and girls' initiation rites are usually pegged to puberty, to menstruation, and then they're taught all the secrets of, of being a woman, all that. Boys have to make the transition from the girl-- the women's world into the men's world. And less so today. I'm not saying it needs to be this way. I'm just saying it generally is to some extent. Boys' development is different from girls' development. And boys, um, if you give them the easy way out all the time, the-- many of them will take it, and then they don't, they don't grow. They don't toughen. And so I think what we're seeing now is, is a generation, Gen Z, born after 1996 and later, in which the girls are extraordinarily anxious and depressed, much more so than the boys. Um, but the boys are extraordinarily undeveloped. Many people say they have no social skills. They don't look you in the eye. Um, they don't know how to behave in public. They certainly don't know how to talk to a girl. So I think we're seeing just a massive, massive blockage of development. And, you know, Gen Z, the oldest are twenty-eight. We'll see, um, you know, we'll see if they come out of it. But when the millennials were twenty-eight, they had already invented so many companies. They were inventing technologies. I mean, the millennials, by twenty-eight, they were like, you know, a meteor streaking across the sky. And Gen Z seems much more to be hunkered down, like, you know, talking about their anxiety.

Jay Shetty 28:26 Mm.

Jonathan Haidt 28:26 So I'm not blaming them at all. Um, it's not their fault. We deprive them of play. We put touchscreens in their hands. Then they had the bad luck to, you know, basically come out of college, the eldest of them, right into COVID. So those in their twenties now, their work experience was truncated. What they need is mentoring in a real office or a real job, and they didn't get it.

Jay Shetty 28:47 Mm.

Jonathan Haidt 28:48 So again, I'm not blaming, but man, we have to have a lot of sympathy, and we have to make sure this stops. We have to stop this right now.

Jay Shetty 28:56 And I think that's the challenge, right? A lot of people say, "Well, people are gonna have virtual girlfriends, and we are going to live in the, the virtual world, and everyone's gonna go home and put their headset on and," you know-

Jonathan Haidt 29:07 Disappear

Jay Shetty 29:07 ... disappear into the abyss. And then we'll be wearing it all day, not just in the evenings. And so there's that belief system that actually we're just getting better at using the technology that will define our future success anyway, or future failure if we don't know it. But you're saying that there's just-- What are,

Jay Shetty 29:24 what are the, I guess, the harsher implications of what does this look like in twenty years' time?

Jonathan Haidt 29:28 Okay. So I'm very influenced by, uh, by one of the puzzles that I first tried to deal with is why-- you know, what made Gen Z? Why? 'Cause when I started this work, when I started writing "The Coddling of the American Mind" with Greg Lukianoff, we first wrote our article in 2015 in The Atlantic, and we thought college students were millennials. The, you know, the millennial generation started in 1981, and, you know, it was expected to be if you're born all the way up through 2000, you're a millennial. That's what we thought. Um, but then Jean Twenge came out with her book, iGen, and her research showing that kids born around 1996 and later are very different. Much higher rates of mental illness. Um And so when you look at the millennial generation, their mental health is actually pretty good. You know, the youngest millennials are a little bit more like Gen Z, but for the most part, the millennials' mental health is fine. They made it through puberty before they got their first smartphone and social media account. So if you didn't get a sm-- So, you know, millennials, like a lot of them got, you know, Facebook when they were in college. In fact, originally, Facebook was only for college students. You had to be in college to get Facebook. So what we see in the data is that if you didn't get a smartphone and social media until you were 18 or older, your mental health is fine. Now, you know, let's say you're a 35-year-old right now, you might feel overwhelmed, you might feel that this thing is stressing you out, but you had normal brain development. You ha- You, you used technology when you were a kid. You had a flip phone. You used it to connect with other kids. You used it to, you know, you'd have to text, and it was hard to text, and you had to use your thumbs and press number keys. But you used the technology as a tool to help you meet up with your friends, or maybe you called them on the phone. That was it. That's all your phone could do. But if you got a smartphone and social media at the start of puberty, which is what almost all kids do now, um, that means you're going through puberty on social media and with a, with a massive entertain-- with a supercomputer and a entertainment system in your pocket with you all the time. So my point is this. If we can protect childhood and let kids get through puberty, and then we give them the goggles and the virtual girlfriends and everything else, their lives are still gonna be kind of messed up by this stuff. But at least their brain's matured, and they're probably not gonna be depressed and anxious for life. If we, if we keep giving it, uh, you know, it used to be at, you know, ten, 11 is when kids get their first smartphone. Now it's more-- it's going down to five or six. Um, if we keep giving little children a touchscreen device, including an iPad, and, and using it as a babysitter and saying, "Oh, yeah, yeah, you just, you know, here. Here's, here's your device. I'm busy. I'm doing email. I'm cooking. Here's your device." If we keep doing that, um, we're not-- Our brains are not gonna adapt to that. Children's brains are not gonna somehow evolve so that that becomes okay. It's not gonna be okay.

Jay Shetty 32:07 Yeah, and

Jay Shetty 32:08 it's, it's, it's such a harsh reality, but it's true that people have less time. We have less-- We are doing so much more, it seems. We are living further away from family. There's so many reasons why the iPad is becoming the babysitter that feels validated because we're not living in bigger family spaces. We don't have the support of our neighbors. We don't have, we don't have the resources or the funds to have a, a paid babysitter or whatever it may be. So there's so many almost valid reasons for why we even say, "Take the iPad."

Jonathan Haidt 32:39 No, that's right. Again, uh, you know, in my book-

Jay Shetty 32:41 Yeah

Jonathan Haidt 32:41 ... I have almost no cr-- really no criticism for parents.

Jay Shetty 32:43 Yeah.

Jonathan Haidt 32:44 And some people say, you know, "Why don't-- It's the parents' responsibility. It's their fault. Why aren't you blaming the parents?" To which my answer is, "You know, I'm a parent. I know a lot of parents. A lot of us are really trying, and it's really hard." I mean, the technological environment now is such that, you know, if you don't give your kid a smartphone, she's left out, and she, you know, says, "Dad, I'm the only one. I'm left out." So parents are trying. And as a social psychologist who studies morality, I know that if one person does something that seems evil, well, maybe they're, maybe they're evil. But if an entire society and if an entire planet changes at the same time in the same way, it's not individual's fault.

Jay Shetty 33:22 Yeah.

Jonathan Haidt 33:22 And so if parenting changed, certainly across the English-speaking world, um, we can't blame the parents for that. There must be some reason why we all freaked out-

Jay Shetty 33:30 Mm

Jonathan Haidt 33:30 ... and began overprotecting. Um, so yeah, I don't, I don't blame, uh, I don't blame the parents. I say we're stuck in systemic problems, and I'm proposing norms by which we can escape.

Jay Shetty 33:41 And I think anyone-- When I've been mentioning you were coming on the, on the show, I was talking to people about your work, and I was talking about your recommendations of no social media before 16, no phones before 14, and I don't think there's any adult that I spoke to that had any debate with either of those. I think everyone looked at me, you know, and I'm, I'm talking to everyone 25 and up. But anyone that I talked to 25 and up went, "That makes perfect sense. I think that's a great idea, and what a brilliant recommendation." Like, "When, when do we get started?" Like-

Jonathan Haidt 34:09 Yeah. That's right.

Jay Shetty 34:09 Right?

Jonathan Haidt 34:10 That's right. People are ready to get started because-

Jay Shetty 34:11 Yeah

Jonathan Haidt 34:11 ... everyone sees it. Everyone's sick of it.

Jay Shetty 34:13 Yeah. And, and obviously in the book, you hold-- You say, "Here's what governments can do. Here's what technology companies can do. Here's what schools can do." I think my question is, and I know you've talked about what they can do in so many other places, which is fantastic.

Jay Shetty 34:27 My question is, how do we actually get that to be a reality? Like, what does it actually take to change norms? Because I was trying to think, and, and I'd love your take on this. Like, when was the last time we tried to do that in any sphere of life?

Jonathan Haidt 34:39 Oh, sure.

Jay Shetty 34:40 And how did it go?

Jonathan Haidt 34:41 Oh. So-

Jay Shetty 34:41 And, and where did it work, and where did it fail?

Jonathan Haidt 34:43 Yeah. So we have a lot of experience with norm changes. So one of the clearest is smoking. It took 20 or 30 years. Uh, when I was in high school in the '70s, um, you know, a bunch of kids smoked. Most of us didn't, but a bunch of, of high school kids smoked, you know, aged, you know, 15, 16, 17. And beginning in the, the '80s or '90s, there was an anti-tobacco campaign, and it took a few decades. Um, but the rates of smoking are very, very low now. Uh, now there's vaping. Kids have moved on to vaping, which is bad, but not as bad as smoking. Um, norms around LGBTQ and shaming and bullying and using racial slurs, these norms have changed radically in the last 20 or 30 years. So norm change normally happens over the space of a few decades, and we have many, many examples. There's been-- We've been studying-- So some things get more moralized, like smoking is now seen as evil, whereas homosexuality, which used to be seen as evil, is now seen as perfectly okay. So norms change over the course of decades. What's happening now is very different. What's happening now, the digital world has put us into an environment in which things can spread within minutes. I mean, this has never happened in human history. Um, norms can spread around the world in days. Not norms, but ideas or memes can spread around the world in, in days. And what that means is that norms can change very quickly, too. And so all over the world, all over the developed world, uh, in 2010, kids had flip phones, no social, no, no social media on their phones. In 2015, we have now the phone-based childhood. All over the world, kids are behaving the same way. So that ha- that changed very quickly. And that put pressure on everyone else to do the same thing. Okay, so we're stuck in this collective action problem that emerged very, very quickly. But by the same token, we can escape very, very quickly because wherever I go, the main counterargument I get is parents who say, "Ugh, you know, it's just, it's too late. The train's left the station."

Jay Shetty 36:35 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Jonathan Haidt 36:35 "What are we gonna do? This is the way of the future." So resignation is really the only obstacle I'm facing. But most parents, so many parents are upset by this that they're ready to act if only some way can be found to coordinate them. So in the UK, I just got back from London a few days ago. In the UK, the parents' revolution started in February. Um, a, a couple of, of mothers, uh, Daisy, uh, Greenwell and Claire Reynolds, they just put up, um, on a Instagram post, they put up that they had started a WhatsApp group for parents who wanted a smartphone-free childhood. They were gonna delay giving their kids smartphones. And like overnight, tens of thousands of, of British parents s-signed up. There's a limit on WhatsApp groups. They had to form local-- They had to form hundreds of WhatsApp groups. It spread like wildfire. And what I'm finding, I've been involved in a lot of efforts to change ideas and norms. It's very hard, takes decades. On this one, I don't have to convince anyone. On this one, it's like everyone's ready to act. They just need to know what to do.

Jay Shetty 37:33 Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Haidt 37:34 Um, and so, you know, I'm proposing these four simple norms. As you said, the, the two that I would add, that I add, uh, uh, that we haven't mentioned are phone-free schools. We must keep the phones out of school. Just lock them up as soon as you come in.

Jay Shetty 37:44 That should be doable.

Jonathan Haidt 37:45 That is doable.

Jay Shetty 37:46 Yeah, that feels very easy.

Jonathan Haidt 37:46 This can be done by September.

Jay Shetty 37:47 Yeah.

Jonathan Haidt 37:48 Yeah. And the fourth is give far more free play and independence in the real world. That's the hardest one, actually, but that's incredibly important. So let me actually just take advantage. I'm actually very excited that you have this gigantic global audience, you know?

Jay Shetty 37:57 Well, I was about to ask.

Jonathan Haidt 37:59 I've been-

Jay Shetty 37:59 My next question would be-

Jonathan Haidt 37:59 Okay

Jay Shetty 38:00 ... how can we help?

Jonathan Haidt 38:00 Great. Okay, good.

Jay Shetty 38:01 Like, what can we do? Because I've, I wanna be a part of the mission.

Jonathan Haidt 38:03 Great. Great. So, so here's what I can say. Uh, first, let me just give a little background, which is, is this just happening in the United States? No. Um, uh, if, if listeners, if you-- So all over the world, please go to afterbabel.com. After, B-A-B-E-L. That's my substack. It's free. Nothing's behind a paywall. Uh, that's where we're putting our research out. Um, and you'll find articles there. Uh, we have one post on how the, the mental health epidemic is hitting all the Anglosphere countries. And so this, so Zach Rausch, this was his first international post. We've gathered all the mental health data we can from around the world. Most countries don't have any, but the developed countries often do. Um, so we can show that the same thing is happening at the same time in all the Anglo countries. And then he moved on to Scandinavia. Same thing's happening at the same time in the Scandinavian countries. Now, that's very interesting because I just had a, an interview with a Finnish journalist this morning, and she said, "You know, in Finland, we let our kids out. Like, our kids at seven, eight, they're out playing." But even still, she says, "They go outside to play, and they sit down, and they're on their phone."

Jay Shetty 39:06 Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Haidt 39:06 Because they all have phones from the age of, you know, six or seven. So, so this is happening all over the developed world. Um, I, in Europe, Zach has a post on the rest of Europe. It's especially Northern Europe. It's a little less so in Eastern Europe and Southern Europe. [lips smack] Um, so first, there is variation around the world in mental health. That, that is definitely important. But what I'm finding is parents everywhere are seeing their kids not playing. They're seeing them sit on their phones. At recess, in, in countries where the kids can have a phone in their pocket, at recess, the kids are often sitting down on their phones. They're not running around and yelling and laughing. So wherever you are in the world, figure out, you, you know, figure out whether you have this problem. You probably do. That your kids, even if they're not depressed, they're missing most of childhood. They're missing adventure. They're probably have fewer hobbies. They probably don't read books. They probably don't spend much time with other people. So this is gonna in-influence them in a bad way, uh, around the world. Um, and then start talking to other parents. Um, the simplest thing, most of us are on a text thread with the parents of our kids' friends because you had to arrange for the, "Oh, this birthday party. Okay, I'll pick them up," and, you know, so we're all in contact with the parents of our kids' friends. Just start with that. Say, uh, "Do, you know, do you see this problem? Are you concerned?" And especially if you have younger kids, you can delay when, you know, y-you can delay when you give your kid a smartphone if y-your kid's friends are in the same boat. Then it's not hard. That's the point of this collective, of get- getting out of the collective action problem. Um, I would also urge, um, anyone around the world, bring up the subject of phone-free schools. If your child-- So a number of countries, France, um, Australia, um, a, a few countries have, uh, and Britain, um, just g- uh, have guidance that schools must go phone-free. They must either, you know, lock them up or lock up the phones in a locker, special locker or in a Yondr pouch, a lockable pouch. Um, but if your country doesn't do that, start advocating for it.

Jay Shetty 41:02 Mm.

Jonathan Haidt 41:02 If you go to anxiousgeneration.com, that's the website for the book, we have a whole research page. Look at that. Send that to people. I have all kinds of talks I've given on YouTube. You can find my YouTube channel, lectures about why we need to go phone-free. So that's, right, that's the thing we can do this year. We can do it in 2024, is make all our schools phone-free, and that will allow our children to learn more, because when they're sitting in class, they don't have the world's greatest entertainment center in their hand.

Jay Shetty 41:31 Yeah, it's ridiculous.

Jonathan Haidt 41:32 Um, and they're not texting, and they're not bullying each other, and they're not doing TikTok challenge. They're actually listening to the teacher or passing notes with other kids, which is fine. They're interacting with other kids. Uh, that's actually okay with me. So-

Jay Shetty 41:43 Why haven't schools done it already? I, I feel like it's a no-brainer.

Jonathan Haidt 41:45 Because a few parents complain. In the United States, the only problem, the only reason they don't do it is that American parents are so overprotective, many, not all, so overprotective, and they've gotten so used to being able to text their kids throughout the day. So it could be, you know, "H-hey, Johnny, how did your, how did your math test go?" And they might even te-text that during the math test, and the kid checks his phone during the math test. Um, you know, or, "Oh, I'm gonna be late for pickup." Like, okay, did the kid need to know that during English class? Like, why not just, you know, let, when, when he gets his phone back, he can see, okay, you'll be late for pickup. Um, and in America, we have the problem that because we do have school shootings, now they're extremely rare, but they're happening more. So some parents think, "Oh, if there's a school shooting, I want to be able to talk to my child." And this is a huge mistake because if there actually was a shooter on a school campus, what you want is the kids to follow directions and do what they were trained to do.

Jay Shetty 42:39 Mm.

Jonathan Haidt 42:39 You don't want every kid pulling out their phone and crying to mom and dad. So I've spoken to many principals or, or heads of school, and I ask them, "Why don't you ba- you know, ban the phones?" And they always say the same thing. "There'd be, it'd be a riot among the parents." Well, only among some parents. And so if you're listening to this podcast and you have kids in school, talk to the head of school and say, "No, I want my kid to be in a phone-free school. I want my kid to listen to the teacher and to interact with other kids." So that's something we can all do right away.

Jay Shetty 43:07 Mm. And do you have resources on how to have that conversation effectively?

Jonathan Haidt 43:10 Yes.

Jay Shetty 43:10 Okay, brilliant.

Jonathan Haidt 43:10 I do. So at anxiousgeneration.com, we do have some. You go to Resources, or you Take Action, and then there's a tab for Parents. There are also two organizations in the United States. There's smartphonefreeschools.org and smartphonefreeschoolsmovement.org. So we have two different organizations that are-- They show you, "Here's a sample letter that you can send."

Jay Shetty 43:31 Oh, amazing.

Jonathan Haidt 43:32 "Here's what you can do." Um, in the UK, there's smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk. So within a number of countries, there are already movements. But you know what? You can just use the resources from the American or the British one. Um, and you know what? This global audience, start your own. Um, come to anxiousgeneration.com. We have a list of aligned organizations, mostly in the US and the UK, but there are a couple in Canada. There's, I think, one in Germany. There's one in somewhere in Latin America. So people are starting these. Parents are rising up all around the world. Let's join them.

Jay Shetty 44:03 Let's talk about, before we dive into spirituality, because I was curious to see you had a chapter dedicated to that inside the book. Talk to me about the difference in girls and their use of social media versus boys, because like you said, and I'm glad we talked about young boys because often they can get forgotten-

Jonathan Haidt 44:18 They get left out

Jay Shetty 44:19 ... in the conversation.

Jonathan Haidt 44:20 Yeah, yeah.

Jay Shetty 44:20 But

Jay Shetty 44:21 let's talk a bit about young girls and how social media is having a far more adverse effect on their mental health.

Jonathan Haidt 44:26 First, the evidence of a link is just very clear for girls. Um, with girls, their mental health was very stable until 2012, and then in 2013, it starts rising. It really is a light switch. For boys, it's not so sharp. It's more gradual. Um, secondly, um, the correlations for girls are much higher, the correlation between time spent on social media and mental health problems. So for girls, the evidence is much clearer. Now, why? Why the connection? Um, in the book, I go into the psychology of, of motivation, and there are two categories of motivation. They're very important to understand, agency and communion. So agency is the desire to be an agent, to make things happen. You know, when I was a kid, it was so exciting to take a BB gun and shoot at tin cans 'cause I pull a trigger-

Jay Shetty 45:09 Yeah

Jonathan Haidt 45:09 ... and the thing falls over.

Jay Shetty 45:10 I remember.

Jonathan Haidt 45:10 It's an, it's an incredible thrill. So that's agency, making things happen. Um, communion is connection, being with friends, bonding, sharing stories, sharing emotions. I really enjoyed that too. Everyone has both motives. On average, on average, boys and men are-- have a little bit more on the agency side. It matters more to them. When you let them choose what to do, they're gonna go out, they're gonna build a tower, and then knock it over. My friends and I, we used to build model airplanes, like World War II fighter jets, and then we'd, we'd put, like, rubbing alcohol [lips smack] in them, and then we'd light them on fire. Like, that was really fun to do. So that's agency, making things happen. Communion is connection. Girls, if you let kids play, the girls are much more likely to sit and talk. They want to connect. And what are they talking about? Other girls. They're talking about relationships. They're developing their mental map of space. So girls are a little more sophisticated about social relationships. They think more about them. They share emotions more. And that's a strength. That's, that's something that, that's why w- women excel in certain professions, uh, and men excel in other professions. Um, but the differences aren't so much how good they are. They're what they enjoy doing. And so when the companies come along and they say, "Hey, do you wanna see what everyone's doing? Do you wanna see what everyone's saying? Do you wanna see what they're saying about you?" This is like catnip for girls. This is, this is-- They really target this, uh, girls' insecurities, and they get girls to come on, and then there's drama, which brings more girls on. Um, now, boys are affected by this too, but it's, it's not, it's just not as alluring. And if you give-- So when everyone gets multiple screens, you know, by 2010, 2011, the iPad comes out, multiplayer video games, everyone is tempted by screens. The boys go rushing into multiplayer video games and porn. They do a lot more of that. The girls go rushing for Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, especially the, the visual platforms. Okay, so now why is this so bad for girls? [lips smack] And I go through, I think, five reasons in the book.

Jay Shetty 47:09 Yeah.

Jonathan Haidt 47:09 Uh, so one is just the social comparison. Girls are always judged more on their looks. I just came across a quote from Epictetus. I read Stoic writings in the mornings. Epictetus commented in ancient Rome about how when they turn 14, girls are, are, are judged as sexual partners, and they focus, they're made to focus too much on their looks. And, you know, this is a sad thing that these girls are, are, are just becoming focused on their looks. What's happening now? Because girls, it's constant social comparison with other girls who get praised for being not just beautiful, but sexy. So whether they know it or not, they're copying porn star-type poses, porn star-type looks. They're being hypersexualized. Massive social comparison. [lips smack] And on average, they don't measure up because if, if everyone on Instagram is actually-- appears much more beautiful than in real life, well, then everyone else is below average. So the social comparison hurts girls more than boys. Uh, the nature of aggression is such that boys' aggression is more physical, and it's ultimately about who can dominate who, who can beat up who, if it came to that. Girls' aggression-- girls are just as aggressive, but it's different. Girls' aggression historically and across cultures and even across species, um, is more relational. Girls will damage another girl's reputation or relationships, and boy does social media allow them to do that anonymously and on the weekends too. It used to be that girls were safe from bullying on the weekends, but-- because they're out of school, but now they're not. So, and then there's the sexual predation. You know, there are sexual predators that are going for boys, but if you're a boy on the internet, you're not being constantly sexually propositioned by older men. I mean, it happens, but it's not that common. If you're a girl on the internet, [lips smack] we just published an article from Antonio Bejar, who was a Facebook whistleblower, and his research within Facebook, within Instagram actually, was that thirteen percent of teenagers, thirteen to fifteen-year-old teenagers, had gotten some sort of a sexual proposition or someone coming on to them, a stranger coming on to them in the past week. In the past week, thirteen percent. So if you're a girl online, it's just-- you're just living among predators. You're like, you know, the animals we talked about before in the woods after dark. You're more frightened.

Jay Shetty 49:17 Mm.

Jonathan Haidt 49:17 So for all these reasons, when kids shifted from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood, it was more devastating for the girls.

Jay Shetty 49:26 Mm. Vinay and I were talking about this yesterday. What's your take on... Uh, he was, he was suggesting this idea of everyone on social media being verified.

Jonathan Haidt 49:34 Oh, yeah.

Jay Shetty 49:35 Having to be verified.

Jonathan Haidt 49:36 Oh, my God.

Jay Shetty 49:36 What would be your take on that? What's your-

Jonathan Haidt 49:37 Oh, my God. Of course, that has to happen. So think about it. You know, we're-- in America, we're afraid to let our kids out, in part because we think they'll be abducted, there'll be a stranger hanging out by the playground, luring them into a car, and that has happened in America. It's very, very rare. There's only about a hundred, a hundred and fifty cases of true kidnapping by a stranger in this country every year, so it's extremely rare, but it does happen. We're very afraid of strangers approaching our children. Um, but guess what? The strangers are not at the playground anymore. They've moved to Instagram. Okay, so the idea that we're gonna put our kids on platforms where strange men can reach them, flirt with them, say that they're a twelve-year-old boy or a fifteen-year-old boy, exchange fake photos, including a photo of your daughter in a bathing suit or less, this is complete insanity. Um, I don't think we should be having children interacting with complete strangers. Um, the sextortion rings now, it used to be just ten or twenty thousand a year reported, um, in the, in the United States. It's way more now. There's a Nigerian gang, the Yahoo Boys, I think it's called. [lips smack] They've industrialized it. So we don't know, but, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of boys are getting sextorted now, and dozens are known to have committed suicide. It's probably hundreds, uh, who have committed suicide, but most we don't know about, um, because, you know, they're flirting with who they think is a girl, and then this criminal gang tricks them into sending a nude photo, and at that point, then they say, "I have what I need to ruin your life. Send us-- Send me five hundred dollars right now, or I will send this to all of your contacts." This is complete insanity that we let our boys and our girls interact with criminals day and night. So what I would like to see, um, is first, we just have to raise the age. So, you know, below sixteen, they just shouldn't be on it at all. They, they need to be in contact with each other. Over sixteen, okay, you know, this is the nature of the world. People are gonna be interacting with strangers. There are some benefits to that. There's networking issues. But if you are on a platform like LinkedIn, LinkedIn, people use their real names. You don't hear problems about LinkedIn. The problems are especially on Instagram, Snapchat, um, any platform that has anonymous strangers interacting. Um, so if we had, if we had both age verification, which is essential, we, we have to get age verification eventually, and then also identity verification. Now here, I'm not saying that the government needs to mandate identity verification on all platforms. The world would be a much better place if we did that. Um, there would be many fewer threats to democracy if we did that. Russian agents and Chinese agents couldn't, like, just drop crazy rumors and make us hate each other in America the way they do. So I would prefer that we live in a world where every platform has mandatory identity verification. You could still post with a fake name, but in order to open an account, you have to show, "I'm a real person in this country, and I'm old enough." But I would be content, even if it's not mandated, I would be content if platforms just made this the default. What if Meta, or let's say not Meta, they're not gonna do it, but what if there was an alternative to, uh, Instagram in which people had to be verified, uh, and then they had all kinds of other safety features? If they have an immune system built in, now how would I feel about letting my sixteen-year-old daughter on that? Much better than on a platform where she's interacting with criminals from around the world.

Jay Shetty 52:58 Have you spoken to Meta?

Jonathan Haidt 53:00 Yes, I've spoken to-

Jay Shetty 53:01 Why would they not do it?

Jonathan Haidt 53:02 Well, they say they're working on it. They say they're working on age verification, but they-- I've seen nothing from them. They ha-- I shouldn't say they, they haven't done nothing. They did-- They've done a few things. One thing is they at least, I think they set the privacy defaults to high for under sixteen, I think it is, whereas it used to be, you know, you, you know, you're, you're a nine-year-old, you lie, you say you're thirteen, and what you say is public. That's completely insane. So they have taken a few steps, but not much. And again, Antonio Bejar's testimony to the Senate last year was, "I showed them what's happening, the sexual solicitation of teens. I, I told them a simple way to have this reported. They didn't do anything." So I think, um, Meta in particular has shown itself resistant to changes suggested by people within. That's why we have a couple of Facebook whistleblowers. Um, [lips smack] so I'm hoping that market competition will help. Um, I'm hoping that Congress will repeal the mistakes it made. In the United States, we created th-this problem for the world. Um, we, you know, our companies created this stuff. Our Congress said that we're not allowed to sue them for what they do to our kids. They can show our kids whatever they want, and we can't sue them. It's a special law that says we can't sue them. Uh, but in other countries, they can, and so I'm really hopeful that all around the world, people initiate lawsuits when their kids have committed suicide because of things that happened on social media. Um, I hope that people will initiate proceedings if they can, um, if it's clear that it was caused by, by on- online activity. Uh, and then Congress, uh, the US Congress created this really, this very s- ridiculous law that the age at which you can sign a contract with a company and give away your data without your parents' knowledge, without your parents' consent, is 13, which is insanely low.

Jay Shetty 54:39 Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Haidt 54:40 Um, it should-- That, that I think needs to be 16 or 18, but it was set to 13 in 1998 with no enforcement. In fact, the way the law is written, as long as Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat, as long as they don't know you're underage, th-they're fine.

Jay Shetty 54:56 Mm.

Jonathan Haidt 54:56 But if they ask, and then they find out that you're under 13, well, then, then now they're responsible.

Jay Shetty 55:02 Right.

Jonathan Haidt 55:02 So it's very important for them that they not know how old their users are, and we have to change that. We have to get to the point where they have to know. Of course, they do know how old their users are. They know everything about their users, but they don't kick them off. So we have to get to the point where the companies are held responsible for underage use. In the physical world, it's like, I mean, it's so absurd. You know, people say, tell me, "Well, it's the parents' job to keep them off." Okay, imagine a world in which we generally think kids should not be exposed to hardcore sex, to drugs, to violence, and to addiction. So we have age limits on bars, strip clubs, brothels. There are s- you know, the brothels in Nevada and, and in Europe, um, and casinos. We have age limits on those. What if someone said, "You know, it's the parents' job to keep the kids out of that. If they don't want their 13-year-olds in a brothel, they should stop them from going to brothels." Like, no, that's not the way it works. Like, no, th-this is a business. This business is hurting kids. This business is responsible for checking IDs, for keeping out children. Yet in the online world, we say, "Well, you know, what are you gonna do? You know, nine-year-olds are gonna be watching beheading videos. They're gonna be watching anal sex. They're gonna be watching the cat in a blender video." Have you heard of this one? Cat in a blender?

Jay Shetty 56:10 No, I didn't know that one.

Jonathan Haidt 56:11 It's exactly what it sounds like. And this is something that kids are exposed to.

Jay Shetty 56:15 Like a lit- Uh-

Jonathan Haidt 56:16 It's an actual cat put in a blender and killed. Yeah.

Jay Shetty 56:19 Wow.

Jonathan Haidt 56:19 I have not watched the video-

Jay Shetty 56:20 I have not seen the video

Jonathan Haidt 56:20 ... because I don't ever want to see it because I'll never unsee it.

Jay Shetty 56:23 Yeah.

Jonathan Haidt 56:23 But I did enough research to know this is not just an internet rumor. This actually happened in Ch-- It was in China. Um, so, you know, this is the world that our kids are now inhabiting, and I'm saying, "No. No. Wait at least till you're 16. Get partway through puberty before you're immersed in this garbage." And that is a great transition to our spirituality discussion.

Jay Shetty 56:42 [laughs] Well, it's an, it's an ironic situation where we were glorifying the millennials to have been much more productive and effective, but a lot of the millennials who created-

Jonathan Haidt 56:51 Yeah

Jay Shetty 56:51 ... amazing companies are the companies that are-

Jonathan Haidt 56:53 Exactly. That's right

Jay Shetty 56:54 ... now creating this challenge.

Jonathan Haidt 56:55 That's right.

Jay Shetty 56:56 Um-

Jonathan Haidt 56:56 That is an irony.

Jay Shetty 56:57 Yeah. But

Jay Shetty 56:58 I read something around over 10 years ago, and it talked about how humans defined what was most important to a community, a city, or a town based on the tallest building that was built. And so previously, it was the church or the place of worship. Few years later, that transformed, or a few decades later, that transformed to the government building.

Jonathan Haidt 57:19 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 57:20 And then decades later, that transformed to the corporate offices and, and now the tech companies or the financial institutions. And so we saw how society has shifted its North Star. I was curious to see why you brought a chapter on spiritual ele-elevation and degradation into this conversation, and how is it connected?

Jonathan Haidt 57:39 Yeah. So my first book was called "The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom." What I did in that book, it grew out of my teaching Psych 101, Introductory Psychology, at the University of Virginia. I noticed when I was trying to explain psychology to 300, you know, students, I would quote Shakespeare. You know, "There's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Well, that insight is actually also Marcus Aurelius and, and Buddha. Buddha says, "We are what we think. With our minds, we make the world." Um, and so I realized, like, wow, you know, across the millennia, across the continents, people have come to these deep insights about psychology, about happiness, about love, about consciousness. So I collected, I read a lot of ancient wisdom all over the world, and I took out every psychological claim, and I organized them, and I made it into t-10 chapters. And, you know, so some of them are, you know, like, uh, you know, be slower to judge, quicker to forgive. You know, Jesus says, "Judge not, lest ye be judged." You know, and I have a whole chapter on how our moral psychology is such that we jump to judgments. We care about our tribe. We don't care about the tru-- you know, so, so that was my background. I, I wrote that book on ancient wisdom. And then I wrote "The Coddling of the American Mind" with Greg Lukianoff, and we talked about these three great untruths, the ways that students are being taught, you know, that they're fra-- you know, they're fragile. Ancient wisdom is, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. There's quotes from all over the world about that. Um, but kids are being taught, no, you're fragile. Like, uh, y-you know, if someone says a, a word or a name, that can be violence against you. So w-we're making mistakes here. Um, so that's sort of my background is thinking about ancient wisdom and psychology. All right, so then I end up writing this book, "The Anxious Generation," and I'm-- It's July of last year, and I'm way behind deadline, and I'm already really stressed about, like, you know, I'm so far past the, the deadline in order for us to get the book out. But I felt like, you know what? I just wrote this whole book about kids. I haven't said anything about adults. But we're all feeling it. Most of us at least are feeling it. We're-- Something is wrong. You know, the, the-- You know, I-- When I got my first iPhone, it was so amazing. I loved it. Um, but th-these technologies have become our master. They're changing our lives. And I decided, you know what? I, I, I'm gonna write a chapter for adults. I'm just gonna stick in a chapter. What is it that's happening to all of us? And I just started making a list. You know, it keeps us indoors. It keeps us distracted. And I suddenly realized, wow, almost all the ancient insights into how to live, the phone-based life is the opposite. And once I saw that, I said, "Oh my God, that's the structure for this chapter." So I opened it with my earlier work on moral elevation. I, I, I studied moral emotions. I, I used to have writings on moral elevation, which everyone will recognize. When you, you see a story about-- you read a story, you see a, a, a, you know, on the news or anything about heroism, about loyalty, um, about devotion. You know, a dog that, um, you know, was so devoted to its master, and it keeps coming to the train station to greet him. I mean, you know, we're easily moved, and we feel it. We feel it in our chest, and it-it's the vagus nerve Um, gets activated. Our heart rhythms change. Um, there are hormonal effects. Uh, there's, um, um, oxytocin is released. Women lactate. I, I showed that experimentally in a study with Jennifer Silvers. So I did all this research on moral elevation, and the key to it is the psychology of up and down. Some things make us feel closer to God. Uh, some things make us feel further from God. That's the way cultures talk about it. Um, and it's always a vertical metaphor. God is up, the devil is down. So this is my view. I'm a Jewish atheist myself. I don't-- I'm not a believer, but I've had some religious experiences. I've had a number of spiritual experiences. So I know these are an important part of human psychology. And once I put in that framework that ancient traditions are trying to move us up, they're saying, you know, "Meditate." You know, Hindu traditions, Buddhist traditions, the, you know, the thing-- everything out of India is much more, "Get control of your attention, get control of your consciousness." Otherwise, it just gets drowned in trivia. But no, you know, meditate, live purely, do your work with mastery, come out like the moon, come out from behind the clouds and shine. That's a loose translation of, uh, from the Dhammapada. But what does a phone-based life do? Constant notifications, constant interruptions. My students at NYU, you know, they get two or three hundred notifications a day on average on their phones. Many of them never go ten minutes without an interruption. Um, so, so I just made a list, and it was things like spiritual practices involve making something sacred, and we all agree this thing is sacred, and we worship it. We have sacred days. So, you know, in the Jewish religion, we have the Shabbat, you know, Sabbath. You know, you're not supposed to use electronics if you're Orthodox. Um, things are sacred, and it's the sharing the sacredness binds us together. That's what every religious community does. But a life online, nothing is sacred. There's no, there's no sacred time. There's-- The, the internet never closes. It's global. Um, there's no ho- there are no holidays. There are no holy days. Um, and the constant demand for you to post about your brand, what you're doing, look at the amazing life I have. So we have a post at After Babel. We, we, we're just taking on this really wonderful British writer, a young woman named, uh, Freya India, Gen Z, a writer. And she has a post wh- which starts with you see a photo of, of a young woman posing for a sexy selfie on the train tracks in front of Auschwitz. Here she is. She's on some tour of Auschwitz, the concentration camp. But it's a nice day in Poland, and so she poses in a sexy way in front of the gates of hell. And so, you know, if everyone's a brand manager all the time, nothing is sacred. Oh, and it's all about you. Whereas one of the keys to spirituality is it's not all about you. You actually are not that important. It's only when you can transcend yourself, transcend your self-interest, that you can open your heart to God, to, to our higher motives, to love, to other people. So, you know, you just go through the list. Whatever the ancients urge us to do to achieve spiritual progress, a life lived online, even for us adults, pulls us in the opposite direction.

Jay Shetty 1:03:54 I couldn't agree with you more, and

Jay Shetty 1:03:56 I think what's really interesting when I'm hearing that, and that's primarily why I started this show. The goal and the intention behind this show was how can we avoid gossip?

Jonathan Haidt 1:04:07 Hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:04:08 How can we avoid the juiciest scoop? How can we avoid the lowest hanging fruit and still get as many or more views than everyone else on the internet?

Jonathan Haidt 1:04:17 Beautiful.

Jay Shetty 1:04:18 Because my belief system was that if you were able to make wisdom go viral, then you could actually raise consciousness. And if we keep feeding people junk food and junk content, it's actually not that hard to get clicks and views. But if you actually, just as if you've retrained your habits, when you put a healthy meal in front of someone, it can taste like the tastiest meal in the world because you've retrained it. And we've seen that. Like, I know that the audience that listens and watches us, which is all across the world, every age bracket and every demographic, is choosing to do something healthier with their time. But I wonder, when I'm listening to you, Jonathan, I'm, I'm hearing the challenge again goes back to the iron- ironic point I made, which is if creators are not informed and trained in sacred creation, you end up creating things that have the flaws of the creator.

Jonathan Haidt 1:05:16 Yeah, that's right.

Jay Shetty 1:05:16 And so when I-

Jonathan Haidt 1:05:17 Yeah. Oh, beautifully put.

Jay Shetty 1:05:18 Right?

Jonathan Haidt 1:05:19 Wow.

Jay Shetty 1:05:19 When I look at what-

Jonathan Haidt 1:05:20 The flaws of the creator. That's beautiful.

Jay Shetty 1:05:22 Yeah. Like I've, I've always thought when everyone's like, "Oh, do you think AI will be manipulative of us?" I'm like, "Of course it will-

Jonathan Haidt 1:05:27 Of course it will

Jay Shetty 1:05:27 ... because we're manipulative."

Jonathan Haidt 1:05:28 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:05:28 Like it's, it can't not be anything that we've seen. So we're like, "AI is gonna take over the world." And it's like, yes, because humans did. Like it's not, it's not that surprising. And so when I think of the challenges that I see in even TV content and streaming content and how dark it's got, and whenever anyone says to me in my coaching practice that I have anxiety, the first thing I ask them is, "What did you watch last night?"

Jonathan Haidt 1:05:52 Hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:05:52 And it's-- There's such a direct correlation between-

Jonathan Haidt 1:05:55 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:05:56 ... these cliffhanger chemicals that are released in everyone's brain in order to keep them addicted. And so I go, "Where does this education come in?" Because we can take away-- And I agree with you, by the way. I'm fully with you. We take away what is currently causing an amplification of insecurity, envy, ego-

Jonathan Haidt 1:06:18 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 1:06:18 ... and the acceleration of it.

Jonathan Haidt 1:06:19 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:06:20 But the challenge is that the seed of that still remains and then gets exercised in adulthood. Where, how, where, how, what do we do?

Jonathan Haidt 1:06:29 Well, so the first thing is we need to understand what's happening to us. And this is all so new. And, um, my argument is that the world changed, life changed between 2010 and 2015. And my book is about how it changed for kids, but it changed for all of us. And we're confused. We don't understand it. Um, these things are powerful tools. You know, we, we adults, we benefit from them in many ways. Um, but we don't understand what's happening to us. And so my hope is that, you know, with my book, with your show, with a lot of people who are writing about this, I think people are coming to realize. You know, we were, we were confused in the 2010s. It was so new. And the-- I think we were beginning to get there to see this as a problem, and then COVID hit, and we all got super confused by COVID, and we needed our online devices all the time in COVID. But I think the reason why things are changing so fast now is because now that we're coming out of COVID, now everyone sees the wreckage. They see it in the new patterns in their children. They see it in the new patterns in themselves. They're sick of being on Zoom calls all the time. They want, crave human contact. So, so let's just see how far we can get just by raising awareness of this, as you're doing on, on your show, as many people are doing. So two things I would urge people-

Jay Shetty 1:07:38 Yes

Jonathan Haidt 1:07:38 ... to think about are you need to control your own attention. Your attention is the most precious-- among the most precious resources you have. So once you see your attention as a precious resource, you can stop letting companies just steal it from you.

Jay Shetty 1:07:51 Mm.

Jonathan Haidt 1:07:51 This is perhaps the most effective thing I do with my students at, in New York University, and they're mostly 19 years old, plus or minus. And I te- I, I show them how important attention is. They're business students. They wanna have an effect on the world. They wanna create something. And I show them, if you've given away all your attention to notifications, to TikTok, you have no attention left, so you're not gonna be able to do anything in this life. Do you want that? No, they don't. Well, okay, how about if we turn off almost all your notifications? How about if we take social media off of your phone? So I'm hoping that some of them will quit entirely, but let's just start by just don't have it on your phone. You can use your laptop at home, whatever, if you need to chat, you need to keep up with things. Just by making a few changes, they regain their attention. Now, suddenly, they have the mental capacity to think, to, to, to think big, to, to do things. So we, we need a global aware-- a global recognition that our attention is being drained away as if there was like a, like a giant mosquito, you know, like a giant drill stuck into our brain, sucking out our attention. We gotta say stop. We've gotta pull the needle out. That's the first thing. Um, uh, another is to recognize that we need to be rooted in real communities with real relationships and face-to-face and touch. And so we need to resist taking the easy way. It's so much easier to set up a Zoom meeting than it is to get in your car and go to visit someone. Uh, and there's many times when you need to do that. But, but we need to rehumanize our lives, and that means more time with real people, not feeling so rushed, um, and being able to be open to people and sharing experiences. So that's another. I-- There's so many I could list. I'll just list one more area where I wanna really raise awareness, which is time in nature. So the modern world, we're, we're further and further away from nature. Um, and as we get busier and busier, we have no time.

Jay Shetty 1:09:37 Mm.

Jonathan Haidt 1:09:37 And so after 2012, when everyone's on social media all the time, everyone's on their phones, um, people are spending less time-- People-- In America, uh, church attendance has plummeted since 2011 or so, 2012, because no one has time. Everyone's so busy with their notifications and their, and their posts. Um, so exposing ourselves to beauty, to nature, going out for all walks. Uh, go out for a walk. I have my students go out for a walk in a park with no phone and no headphones. They can't listen to music. They have to go just walk slowly. And the effects are amazing because many of them, they've never noticed. They've never noticed how beautiful the world is.

Jay Shetty 1:10:13 Yeah.

Jonathan Haidt 1:10:13 So we can, we can take steps to rehumanize our lives.

Jay Shetty 1:10:17 Mm. And how do we respiritualize them? Like, how do we-- Going back to that chapter of-- I feel like it's also a spiritualizing of intention, right? If someone's creating something, and I'm assuming when you do your research and the books you've written and even the, the, the one, Hi- Happiness Hypothesis that you started with and, and the journey that you've gone on, it seems like your intention has been to uplift people through your work.

Jonathan Haidt 1:10:42 Certainly my early work, I used to study-

Jay Shetty 1:10:43 Mm

Jonathan Haidt 1:10:43 ... positive psychology, and the goal there was very explicit. The whole movement started by Martin Seligman in the 1990s. The whole movement was psychology is pretty good at taking people from negative six up to zero. We, we, we're, you know, we're, we have some ways to bring you up to zero. But most people are actually above zero. Most people are actually doing reasonably well, and they wanna go from plus two to plus seven.

Jay Shetty 1:11:05 Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Haidt 1:11:05 And psychology had nothing to say to them. So yes, a lot of my early work was about how do we get to plus seven. Um, but especially with The Coddling of the American Mind and now The Anxious Generation, I'm n- I'm now talking about how do we get from negative 10 up to, up to zero. I mean, that's the first step. Um, just help kids, help the next generation get out of defend mode, out of performance mode, a- and into a more human, real childhood.

Jay Shetty 1:11:30 Mm.

Jay Shetty 1:11:31 It's almost like your students and the, you know, the, the people that will go on to become entrepreneurs and business leaders. It's almost like the challenge still becomes that even if people think big and think successfully and think scaled and are open-minded, it's almost like without the inherent belief that I should create something to help others-

Jonathan Haidt 1:11:52 Mm. Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 1:11:52 ... without that, no matter what you create, will in some way harm or, or cause difficulty to others because it wasn't there in-- Not saying that you can do something perfectly, and not saying you can build something without any flaws completely. That's n- No one can do that. But this idea that at least if that's my intention, if that's at least my North Star, if that's my compass, and I'm wondering where, where people are getting that from, if at all.

Jonathan Haidt 1:12:19 Yeah. I'll take what you said, and I'll just make it a little bit more business-friendly.

Jay Shetty 1:12:23 Please.

Jonathan Haidt 1:12:24 Um, uh, what you said seemed to be something like i- if you intend to make something that's good for people or, you know, if, if you have a positive intention, this is gonna help people. And so, you know, many people think like, "Oh, you know, I should go into a nonprofit work. I should go into-

Jay Shetty 1:12:37 Oh, yeah

Jonathan Haidt 1:12:37 ... charity work." You know, a lot of young people are headed to- towards nonprofit work, and a lot of the nonprofits don't do very much, and they're, they're wasting their talents there. Since I moved to a business school in 2011, I used to teach in the psychology department at the University of Virginia, but I've been at the NYU Stern School of Business since 2011. What I've come to see is that, is that almost all businesses make the world better because they're creating something that people need. And I once heard a philosopher say, "In an ideal capitalist society-" The only way to get rich is by making other people better off.

Jay Shetty 1:13:10 Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Haidt 1:13:11 And so you don't have to be all pro-social. You can just say, "Look, there's a need for this kind of wrench. I invented this wrench. The world's better off. People need it, and, and then I make money." That's great. You know, if-- I tell my students, "If all you do is, is create goods and services that increase the s- the, the general welfare of humankind because it's a useful product, that's great. You're part, you're part of progress." Um, but now when we look at it that way, now we get a new view of social media because social media is not a normal consumer product. A normal consumer product, if it hurts the customers, they'll stop buying it, unless they're addicted. But with social media and, and especially the, um, the, the advertising-driven business model that Facebook developed originally, now that many of them have copied, the customer is the advertiser. That's who pays the money. The consumer is the product. They're the victim, in a sense, of this. And that explains why for, especially for TikTok and Instagram, I've seen a couple of surveys now, and I did it with my own class. You say, "Do you use TikTok?" You know, so let's do it this way. I ask my students, "How many of you use, um, Netflix? How many of you watch Netflix at least once a week?" Almost all hands go up. "How many of you wish Netflix was never invented?" Nobody. Nobody. Netflix is stories, full-length stories. We enjoy it. Maybe we watch too much, but we don't feel it's ruining our lives. Okay? "How many of you use TikTok once a week?" Most hands go up. "How many of you wish TikTok was never invented?" Most hands go up. Same thing for Instagram. So we have this bizarre situation where a couple of big platforms, especially TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, a few others, they're sucking up most human attention. Billions and billions of people are spending hours a day. Most human attention is being drained away for a product that most people wish never existed. So this is, I think, the greatest destruction of human value in human history. These products should not exist, or at least they should not exist in their present form, unregulated, not responsible for the harm they cause, causing massive harm. The people who use them don't, overall, wish they didn't exist. Something is deeply, deeply wrong-

Jay Shetty 1:15:21 Mm.

Jonathan Haidt 1:15:22 ... um, with, with our society and the, and the, the, the nature of these companies, which are now some of the biggest, richest companies on Earth.

Jay Shetty 1:15:30 Yeah. And you could argue that fast food companies and junk food companies have done the same for years and got away with it too.

Jonathan Haidt 1:15:35 Well, that's true. That's true. But at least there, people are making a decision. Now, there are-- it's, it's part of it is addiction. But at least there, you know, like I really enjoy Fritos. I just love Fritos. It's just, you know, it's something I-- and M&M's. There are a few [smacks lips] consumer products that I love. And I, you know, I know they're bad for me, but I make a decision about it. Um, and I don't think-- and, and they are, of course, they are adding to obesity. But I think social media is so much more pernicious, because if I eat Fritos, that doesn't make anyone else eat Fritos. But if I get on social media, that, you know, the more of us are on, the more pressure there is to be on, and that's especially hitting our kids. We've gotta break that up.

Jay Shetty 1:16:11 Absolutely. Jonathan, it's been such a joy talking to you, and, uh, so insightful. I'm so glad you gave our audience so many great call to actions, and we'll make sure we put them in the caption and the comment section so people can find them easily.

Jay Shetty 1:16:23 Uh, we end every episode of On Purpose with a Fast Five or a Final Five.

Jonathan Haidt 1:16:27 Okay. All right. Let's, let's-

Jay Shetty 1:16:27 These have to be answered in one word to one sentence-

Jonathan Haidt 1:16:30 Oh my goodness. All right

Jay Shetty 1:16:30 ... maximum, so you have some, something to play with. So Jonathan Haidt-

Jonathan Haidt 1:16:32 Okay. Let me have a drink of water.

Jay Shetty 1:16:33 Yes.

Jonathan Haidt 1:16:34 Let me compose myself.

Jay Shetty 1:16:35 Please.

Jonathan Haidt 1:16:35 This could be difficult.

Jay Shetty 1:16:36 Uh, Jonathan Haidt, these are your Final Five. The first question is, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?

Jonathan Haidt 1:16:42 Well, what comes to mind, I don't know if it's the best, but what comes right away to mind is what my father said when he dropped me off at college. And he said, uh, "Jon, the most important things you learn, uh, you're not gonna learn in the classroom." And it was just, you know, it was just advice to go have experience. And, and that's actually something I tell my students now is just, you know, take risks, have experiences.

Jay Shetty 1:17:02 Beautiful. Uh, question number two, what is the worst advice you ever had to receive?

Jonathan Haidt 1:17:05 [laughs] Um, the worst advice I ever received, um, hard to say, but I think, um, generally a piece of bad advice that young people receive, um, is, you know, just follow your passions.

Jay Shetty 1:17:20 Mm.

Jonathan Haidt 1:17:21 Um, that's important, but I think many young people now think that they need to be engaged in work which is not just rewarding, but socially valuable, like as though my first job after college has to be, have all these features. And what I try to tell them is, "No. No. You wanna end up there. You want at th-- you know, in a decade or two, you want to have work that you love. That doesn't mean you have to love every moment of it."

Jay Shetty 1:17:47 Yeah.

Jonathan Haidt 1:17:47 You know, think long term, think about the skills you need, think about the toughening you need, think about the experiences you need, and it might even be unpleasant for a while, but think long term.

Jay Shetty 1:17:56 Mm-hmm. Great. Uh, question number three, an experience that you'd never thought you'd, you'd ever try, but you're glad you did.

Jonathan Haidt 1:18:02 Um, I'm really pro-experience. I'm very high on openness to experience, and I always kinda wanted to try everything. So, you know, whether it was psychedelic drugs or, um, you know, tr- travel all over the world. So I actually can't think of anything.

Jay Shetty 1:18:18 So you've done them all?

Jonathan Haidt 1:18:18 No. Well, I, I've done a-

Jay Shetty 1:18:19 Both of those

Jonathan Haidt 1:18:19 ... I mean, I've done a lot of different things in my life.

Jay Shetty 1:18:22 Including psychedelics.

Jonathan Haidt 1:18:23 I can't think of something... Yeah. Yeah. Which I've talked about on some podcasts. Now that, now that Michael Pollan has written a book on it, now that people can talk about psychedelic experience, that is, you know, I mentioned before, I've had a number of spiritual experiences, and some of the most intense ones were on psychedelics.

Jay Shetty 1:18:34 Mm. Question number four, an experience that you're excited to try this year.

Jonathan Haidt 1:18:38 An experience I'm excited to try this year. Uh, well, this, uh, well, actually, going to Wimbledon. My, my son-

Jay Shetty 1:18:43 Have you ever been before?

Jonathan Haidt 1:18:44 No, and I never have.

Jay Shetty 1:18:44 Oh, it's gonna be amazing.

Jonathan Haidt 1:18:45 My, my son, uh, is graduating from high school, and I wanted to give him something special. And I said, "What's something that, that, you know, what's a, an experience you wanna have?" And he said, "Wimbledon." He loves tennis. We go to the US Open in New York, but he's never been to Wimbledon.

Jay Shetty 1:18:58 Oh, you're gonna have the best time.

Jonathan Haidt 1:18:59 So, yeah. So I, I was able to scrounge up a few tickets, and we're, we'll go a couple of days.

Jay Shetty 1:19:03 Fantastic. That'll be great. Okay, fifth and final question. We ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law- ... that everyone had to follow, what would it be?

Jonathan Haidt 1:19:11 Hmm. I mean, I'm thinking kind of practically here, you know?

Jay Shetty 1:19:14 Yeah, please.

Jonathan Haidt 1:19:14 Um, you know, one would be that businesses that impose costs on others, um, that are not party to the exchange should have to bear the cost. So basically, get rid of externalities, and social media imposes so many externalities. Um, but if I, if I have just, like, one dart to throw, one thing to ask, right now I'm just gonna say let's get, uh, effective mandatory age verification on the internet-

Jay Shetty 1:19:38 Mm-hmm

Jonathan Haidt 1:19:38 ... so that some sites, um, are actually, like porn sites, are actually not open to children.

Jay Shetty 1:19:44 Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Haidt 1:19:45 Um, I think a law like that would be... That's, that's gonna be the big hard one. That would be a real game changer. So again, not very... I, you know, hoping... You know, it'd be great if I could come up with, you know, some version of Kant's categorical imperative here.

Jay Shetty 1:19:57 [laughs]

Jonathan Haidt 1:19:57 Um, but, uh, no, I'll just go with... Those are the ones I've been thinking about.

Jay Shetty 1:20:01 Fantastic. Everyone, thank you so much for listening. The book is called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Jonathan Haidt, thank you so much for joining us on On Purpose. I really am encouraging everyone who's been listening and watching to go ahead to the sites that Jonathan recommended, see if we can be a part of the mission, support the work that Jonathan and his team are doing because I couldn't agree with you more. I think this will... This is... What I, what I love about what you've done is often I find a lot of thinkers and thought leaders create fear-based arguments and without any concrete solutions, and I feel that only adds to the fear and anxiety in the world. And so I'm very grateful that we have very tangible, specific things that we're fighting for here, and I really, really hope that you'll lean on us to help you and, and help be a part of this with you, so.

Jonathan Haidt 1:20:49 Well, thank you, Jay. I am wildly optimistic that this is a problem we can solve in a year or two.

Jay Shetty 1:20:53 Absolutely.

Jonathan Haidt 1:20:53 At least get most of the way towards solving. And I really appreciate your help in getting the word out. I'm so excited to reach a global audience because this is, this is a pan-human, this is a global problem.

Jay Shetty 1:21:03 Absolutely.

Jonathan Haidt 1:21:03 So thank you, Jay.

Jay Shetty 1:21:04 Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you. If you enjoyed this podcast, you're going to love my conversation with Michelle Obama, where she opens up on how to stay with your partner when they're changing and the four check-ins you should be doing in your relationship. We also talk about how to deal with relationships when they're under stress. If you're going through something right now with your partner or someone you're seeing, this is the episode for you.

Speaker 1:21:30 No wonder our kids are struggling. We have a new technology, and we've just taken it in hook, line, and sinker. And we have to be mindful for our kids. They'll just be thumbing through this stuff, you know. Their, their mind's never sleeping