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The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt | What Now? with Trevor Noah Podcast

Jonathan Haidt, noted social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, sits down with us to discuss how smartphones and social media are harming Gen Z – and really all of us.

Trevor NoahhostJonathan Haidtguest

May 15, 20251h 21mWatch on YouTube

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Transcript

95 min read · 19,374 words

0:00 – 1:05
Cold Opening Intro
1. TNTrevor Noah
  We've created a world where the barrier to entry-
2. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm
3. TNTrevor Noah
  ... for some of the things that we've agreed on-
4. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm
5. TNTrevor Noah
  ... as some of the most harmful to younger kids-
6. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yeah
7. TNTrevor Noah
  ... the barrier to entry is zero.
8. JHJonathan Haidt
  That's right.
9. TNTrevor Noah
  It's literally you click a button that says, "I am 18 or older."
10. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yeah.
11. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
12. TNTrevor Noah
  And I remember the first time I saw that button when I wasn't 18.
13. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm.
14. TNTrevor Noah
  It was on a computer game called Leisure Suit Larry. I don't know if you've ever heard of this game.
15. SPSpeaker
  No, I haven't heard of that.
16. TNTrevor Noah
  So it was a story of this man, Leisure Suit Larry, who, whose only goal was to have sex. That's all he was trying to do.
17. SPSpeaker
  What a premise.
18. JHJonathan Haidt
  And you get points for the number of times you-
19. TNTrevor Noah
  And you, you played this game. I remember the first one, you were just at a, like, a bar, and you would type on the computer, like, "Open door, knock on door," and the bouncer would be like, "What's the code?" And you're like, "What is the code?" But, like, when, when I think about, like, this world-
20. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yeah
21. TNTrevor Noah
  ... I think about the, the option is, like, in the game, it would say to you at the beginning, "Are you 18 or older?"
22. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm.
23. TNTrevor Noah
  And I said, I said, "No." I was honest. I was like, "No."
24. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yeah.
25. TNTrevor Noah
  And the game was like, "You're not old enough to play." I remember being like, "Oh."
26. SPSpeaker
  [laughs]
27. JHJonathan Haidt
  And you went away?
28. TNTrevor Noah
  And then I, and then I booted it again.
29. JHJonathan Haidt
  But you just ... Oh, yeah, okay.
30. TNTrevor Noah
  I booted it up again.
1:05 – 4:42
Introduction to the youth mental health crisis
1. TNTrevor Noah
  Anxiety, depression, and loneliness are on the rise, and it looks like it's not just a phase. Parents are overwhelmed, young people feel lost, and no one's quite sure what or who is to blame. But today's guest has spent years trying to answer just that question. Jonathan Haidt is a leading social psychologist, a professor at NYU, and the author of The Anxious Generation, a book that's sparking urgent conversations around the world today. In this episode, we unpack what's going wrong and what we might still be able to do to get it right. This is What Now? With Trevor Noah. So when you wrote Anxious Generation, did you think you were tapping into the, uh, I mean, arguably, like, one of the, the most, what would you call it, the most pertinent moments of, of this generation? Did ... Because, I mean, you, you've written a few books.
2. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yeah.
3. TNTrevor Noah
  And every author who's writing about something, especially someone as learned as you, is thinking about the world.
4. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm.
5. TNTrevor Noah
  But this feels like it tapped into every single parent and everyone who's in the zeitgeist. It completely ... I mean, it, it's still, uh, you know, the last I checked, it's still on The New York Times-
6. SPSpeaker
  Yeah
7. TNTrevor Noah
  ... bestsellers list.
8. SPSpeaker
  Still up there.
9. TNTrevor Noah
  It's ... It, it just stays there as robust as ever.
10. SPSpeaker
  The mom groups are still talking about it.
11. TNTrevor Noah
  Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
12. SPSpeaker
  The mom groups are still talking about it.
13. TNTrevor Noah
  What, what do you, what do you think it is about the topic that connected with people as much as it has?
14. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yeah. Well, what, you know, what I discovered once I, once the book came out, and even before it came out, was that there is a desperation among mothers in particular that all over the world family life has turned into a fight over screen time. Everyone hates it. We didn't ask for it. Wasn't like this in 2010. I mean, of course, there were always arguments over TV. But once kids got touchscreen devices, which are much more addictive, they, they ... You have a stimulus response loop, it- which is much more addictive than watching a story on a screen. And so family life changed, and people couldn't, like, "What's, what's, what hell is going on?" And my sense is that mothers felt their kids being s- pulled away much more than-
15. TNTrevor Noah
  Mm
16. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... fathers did. Fathers were often like, "Oh, you know, cool video game. Hey, let's play."
17. TNTrevor Noah
  [laughs]
18. SPSpeaker
  [laughs]
19. JHJonathan Haidt
  But mothers really felt it, and so that's what's driven the success of the book, is it- it's mothers around the world, and all the political changes, all the laws that are being introduced. Oftentimes it's either a female governor-
20. SPSpeaker
  Mm
21. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... uh, like, uh, Sarah Huckabee Sanders in, um, in Arkansas, or it's the, the governor or prime minister's wife who reads the book-
22. TNTrevor Noah
  Hmm
23. SPSpeaker
  Interesting
24. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... and says ... You know, and this is what happened in Australia. The wife of one of the, of the premier of Sou- South Australia read the book, and she said to ... She was reading it in bed, and she turns to him and says, "Peter, you've got to read this book, and then you've got to fucking do something about it."
25. TNTrevor Noah
  Wow.
26. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
27. JHJonathan Haidt
  So he did, and that's what started the process in Australia.
28. SPSpeaker
  Do you know what? There's probably some people listening now who haven't read the book.
29. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm.
30. SPSpeaker
  And I've read the book, so has Trevor, and one thing that you do in the book, you make the distinguishment between a play-based childhood-
4:42 – 16:14
The shift from play-based to phone-based childhood
1. JHJonathan Haidt
  by saying that we've overprotected our children in the real world, and we've underprotected them online. Another way to say it is the book is a tragedy in two acts. Act one, we lose the play-based childhood, and this really kicks in in the 1990s. So older millennials, people who grew up in the '70s and '80s, there, there was a huge crime wave at that time, in America at least. But all kids played outside. It was just-
2. SPSpeaker
  Mm
3. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... you just go outside and play.
4. TNTrevor Noah
  Mm-hmm.
5. JHJonathan Haidt
  And then it's the '90s, which is actually when crime is dropping and life is getting safer and drunk driving is going down, we freak out in the '90s, um, and we start saying, "Well, it's too dangerous out there. It's too dangerous. You know, stay home. You have to always be supervised, or you'll be abducted." We freaked out about child abduction. Uh, so that's act one of the tragedies. We pull the kids indoors. We don't let them have play, and free play is crucial for development. And then act two is very, very sudden. It's between 2010 and 2015. In 2010, kids are going through puberty with a flip phone, and a flip phone or basic phone, you can text your friends, you can call your friends, and there was a game called Snake, I think. And that's it.
6. SPSpeaker
  Yeah, I love Snake. [laughs]
7. JHJonathan Haidt
  Okay. But, but that's about it.
8. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
9. JHJonathan Haidt
  You weren't talking to groups of 50 strangers. You weren't talking to-
10. SPSpeaker
  No
11. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... strange men who wanted sex from you. I mean, it was like the ... You know, it was a f- communication device. So if you're born in 1995, that's the last year of the millennials, suppose you're a girl born in 1995. In 2010, you're 15. You're through early puberty. But you did it on a flip phone without Instagram. But suppose you were born in the year 2000, so now you turn 15 in 2015, which means that your first phone was probably a smartphone with a front-facing camera, 'cause that comes out in 2010, with Instagram, 'cause that becomes popular in 2012, with high-speed internet. So you went through early puberty constantly on your phone, taking photographs of yourself, people talking about you, communicating with strangers. The phone moves to the center of your life. So anyway, in all these ways, we had this five-year period where childhood is transformed into a screen-based or phone-based childhood that I believe, and I argue in the book, is just not conducive to human development.
12. SPSpeaker
  And I, I, what I do love that you do in the book is that you really, you kind of preempt any arguments, 'cause there's some people who say, "Well, the world was always bad."
13. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm.
14. SPSpeaker
  They had, we had TVs.
15. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm.
16. SPSpeaker
  And you actually pin it down, and you say the depression and the anxiety and the loneliness we're seeing, I believe, is due to the smartphones.
17. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm. Yes.
18. SPSpeaker
  Could you talk more about that?
19. JHJonathan Haidt
  Sure.
20. SPSpeaker
  'Cause that, I was, I'm one of these per-
21. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm
22. SPSpeaker
  ... people, I say to Trevor all the time.
23. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm.
24. SPSpeaker
  Hitler didn't have screen time, and he, like-
25. JHJonathan Haidt
  [laughs]
26. SPSpeaker
  ... turned out to be a pretty horrible person.
27. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yeah. Mm-hmm.
28. SPSpeaker
  So, like-
29. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yeah
30. SPSpeaker
  ... I think there's been some moral panic around-
16:14 – 30:01
Gaming addiction and its impact on boys
1. JHJonathan Haidt
  get into some trouble, they get out of trouble. Um, and so there used to be that class difference. Um, but what has been found in more recent research is that now even middle class and working class-
2. SPSpeaker
  Yeah
3. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... we're all doing the concerted cultivation.
4. SPSpeaker
  And, and it's across race group-
5. JHJonathan Haidt
  And it's... That's right. Yes
6. SPSpeaker
  ... racial groups as well.
7. JHJonathan Haidt
  That's right.
8. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
9. JHJonathan Haidt
  There's not any big race difference that they've found.
10. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
11. JHJonathan Haidt
  That's right. Yeah. So we're basically denying children the main training they need in childhood, and that's actually how I first got into this, was noticing that the students who arrived on campus in 2014, 2015, um, were different than anything we'd ever seen.
12. TNTrevor Noah
  Huh. Okay.
13. SPSpeaker
  Well, and, and what was, what were you notice- like what was the difference for you?
14. JHJonathan Haidt
  Very high rates of anxiety and depression. They filled up the mental health centers. Um, they would sometimes be, uh, uh, uh, very anxious or, or even f- um, get upset if there was a speaker coming to campus that they didn't like. They thought this could be dangerous. And we're like, "What do you mean dangerous?" Like, "What do you mean you need a safe space?"
15. TNTrevor Noah
  But this was, so this was a distinct shift that you noticed-
16. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yeah
17. TNTrevor Noah
  ... in 2014. It wasn't, it wasn't like a gradual thing.
18. JHJonathan Haidt
  No.
19. TNTrevor Noah
  It was like all of a sudden, bam.
20. JHJonathan Haidt
  That's right. That's right. Because we thought at the time that the students coming were millennials. We thought the millennial generation starts in 1981, we'll go maybe to 2000, we thought. But it turns out that if you're born in 1996, you just, on average, of course there's huge difference with every-
21. TNTrevor Noah
  Yeah, yeah. Right
22. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... on average, um, you're more anxious. And so you come to school, and now you see, like, someone has a very different opinion, and you're like, "You know, this is dangerous. This is terrible. I don't, I don't want to engage with this person." And so that's how I first noticed it. And so this is, it's, you know, just the things you guys are talking about. It's like if you block the kids from having these interpersonal skills, you put them into a space where they see th- more things as threatening, they're not gonna thrive in college. In college, you need to be in, in discover mode. I have a whole chapter on discover mode versus defend mode.
23. SPSpeaker
  Mm-hmm.
24. JHJonathan Haidt
  And it was a very sudden switch. Kids born in 1996 and later were more likely to be in defend mode.
25. TNTrevor Noah
  It's interesting that you, you bring that up because I've often wondered how much we devalue exposing children to, you know, for lack of a better term, adverse events in life.
26. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm.
27. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
28. TNTrevor Noah
  You know? And I, I think to myself, like, when, when we're at the playground, when we're kids and like- There were, there were kids I didn't wanna see. There were people-
29. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yeah
30. TNTrevor Noah
  ... you didn't, you were like, "Oh, God forbid that kid is there on the swing."
30:01 – 51:55
Digital dangers and pornography accessibility
1. TNTrevor Noah
  could not find it anywhere. This was the-
2. JHJonathan Haidt
  Because you didn't have an older brother or anything?
3. TNTrevor Noah
  Oh, no, I was the older brother.
4. JHJonathan Haidt
  [laughs]
5. TNTrevor Noah
  I was the pioneer. You couldn't find... Let me tell you something. I try and explain this to my younger brothers now.
6. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm.
7. TNTrevor Noah
  And I often say to them, I go, "I am not against porn." I think the porn industry is terrible in many ways.
8. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm.
9. TNTrevor Noah
  I'm not against porn itself. I think it's as old as time. However, I think we have too much porn now.
10. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm.
11. TNTrevor Noah
  And I think we have too much access to porn, right?
12. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
13. TNTrevor Noah
  So for me, porn was still, like, this magical thing you would bump into.
14. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm.
15. TNTrevor Noah
  It was this unattainable, there would be a magazine in a random store-
16. JHJonathan Haidt
  Mm-hmm
17. TNTrevor Noah
  ... somewhere-
18. SPSpeaker
  Yeah
19. TNTrevor Noah
  ... that had it on a shelf wrapped in plastic.
20. JHJonathan Haidt
  Uh-huh. Yeah. [laughs]
21. TNTrevor Noah
  So you couldn't even see what was happening. That, that was porn. So yes, to your point, video games, yes, porn, no.
22. JHJonathan Haidt
  Okay. Right. But let's trace it on now for people younger than you. Suppose you're born in the late '90s. Well, the multiplayer video games Only come in after we get high-speed internet. So it's only the late 2000s, 2008, 2009, that you're really beginning to get these incredible multiplayer games where you're in your house-
23. SPSpeaker
  Mm-hmm
24. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... with your headset, and this avatar on the screen. I mean, they're amazing, and they go through many product iteration cycles to figure out, what can we do, what's the point structure to keep boys on the longest? Because if we keep them on, they don't go to another platform. So, uh, I, you know, the dose makes the poison, so when you get-
25. SPSpeaker
  Yes
26. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... these incredibly-
27. SPSpeaker
  Yes
28. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... immersive games that are designed to keep you on.
29. SPSpeaker
  Yeah. Mm.
30. JHJonathan Haidt
  And for boys, if you, you know, after school if you want to play with your friends, you can't go over to their house.
51:55 – 1:01:00
Social media's devastating impact on girls' mental health
1. JHJonathan Haidt
  reason we don't let our kids out in the '90s is not because the world's getting more dangerous. It's actually getting safer. It's because we're losing trust in our neighbors. We're losing the sense of community.
2. TNTrevor Noah
  Mm.
3. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
4. JHJonathan Haidt
  And once we lose the sense of community, the sense that all of us are at least a little bit responsible for other people's kids, now it's like, a- as we just, as we joked about, like y- you know, you say, "I, I walked by a playground." "Oh, no, you, you're a man. You can't go near a playground. You're gonna molest a child."
5. TNTrevor Noah
  Yes.
6. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
7. TNTrevor Noah
  Yeah.
8. JHJonathan Haidt
  Um, so as we all freaked out about that, and it, it's not that there was nothing to freak out about, but boy, did we overdo it by saying, like, "Let's just not get involved in anyone else's child." Now it falls all on the mother.
9. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
10. JHJonathan Haidt
  Now the responsibility-
11. SPSpeaker
  It's true
12. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... falls especially on the mother. And if a kid is seen playing outside without supervision, all the blame goes to the mother. How dare you? How ... He could be abducted.
13. SPSpeaker
  There was a recent case where a woman sent her child to get milk or something.
14. TNTrevor Noah
  Yes. Yeah.
15. SPSpeaker
  And I think someone called the-
16. JHJonathan Haidt
  She was arrested
17. SPSpeaker
  ... they arrested her.
18. TNTrevor Noah
  Yeah, she was arrested.
19. JHJonathan Haidt
  She was put in jail.
20. TNTrevor Noah
  Yeah.
21. SPSpeaker
  Which is insane to me.
22. JHJonathan Haidt
  The boy was 10.
23. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
24. JHJonathan Haidt
  And she didn't even send him. The boy was 10, and he decided to walk, you know, a little bit-
25. SPSpeaker
  Yeah
26. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... to a store. And someone s-
27. SPSpeaker
  Which is a credit to her, by the way.
28. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yes, exactly.
29. SPSpeaker
  That a 10-year-old's like, "Oh, I'm gonna go to the store."
30. TNTrevor Noah
  Yeah.
1:01:00 – 1:11:02
School-based solutions and phone-free initiatives
1. SPSpeaker
  The mums and dads listening to this at home, they're panicking now.
2. JHJonathan Haidt
  [laughs]
3. SPSpeaker
  They're looking at their kid. They're like, "I've ruined this kid. The boy's never gonna get a job, and the girl's gonna have an eating disorder."
4. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yeah.
5. SPSpeaker
  What can they do? Like-
6. JHJonathan Haidt
  Okay, good
7. SPSpeaker
  ... what, what are the protective measures?
8. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yes. Thank you for pulling me back from the doom and gloom-
9. SPSpeaker
  [laughs]
10. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... 'cause I can go on forever about what I-
11. SPSpeaker
  Oh, no, I like doom and gloom
12. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... what I'm finding
13. SPSpeaker
  But, you know.
14. JHJonathan Haidt
  Okay. So let's hope that nobody tuned out, uh, before this point-
15. SPSpeaker
  [laughs]
16. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... of the conversation. So here's, here's what I can say with some confidence. Um, the brain is still pretty plastic until the early 20s.
17. SPSpeaker
  Okay.
18. JHJonathan Haidt
  Um, the f- the, in puberty, so the, the brain is changing very rapidly in the first couple years, and it's growing very rapidly, but then it reaches full size, almost full size, by about age six. And after that, the game is not growth. The game is, like, which neurons are gonna wire up to which, which neurons are gonna disappear. Um, and so y- they're tuning up, uh, uh, with cultural input. And so, um, and especially speeds up in early puberty. I want everybody to really focus on early puberty. Uh, try to protect your kids during that period. But suppose your kid is 15. She or he has already been on the video games, the, the, the social media. You know, one possibility is that the changes could be long-lasting. It is possible that if you went through puberty this way, it could change things in ways that are lasting. We don't, we don't know. But here's what I can say for sure. When kids take steps to regain control of their attention, they get miraculous results, and I know this because I teach a class at New York University. Um, uh, I'm a professor in the business school there, and I teach, one of my classes is called Flourishing, and it's 35 undergraduates. They're mostly sophomores, about 19 years old. They all spend too much time on their phones. Well, and, and the project is, you have to, over the course of the semester, you have to change yourself in a way that will improve your happiness and flourishing by the end of the semester. So a lot of them work on their phone habits. And I say, "If you're spending three hours a day or more on social media, you have to work on this one."
19. SPSpeaker
  Mm-hmm.
20. JHJonathan Haidt
  "Because there's no point doing anything else." And the ones who are doing a lot of social media, and some are like five or six hours just on TikTok, um, when they move it off their phone and onto their computer, they get a lot of relief. It goes way down.
21. SPSpeaker
  Oh, wow.
22. JHJonathan Haidt
  And then, if they take it off the computer and just stop, especially for TikTok, they get, they tell these miraculous stories like, "I can do my homework now. I have... It's not just that I have enough time, it's that I can actually focus on it, and I have more time with my friends, and we're doing fun things, and I'm sleeping better." And so what I can say for sure to parents whose kids are, are late teens is it's not too late, but they have to regain control of their attention. Um, they have to largely get off of social media. I'm not gonna say that boys shouldn't play video games at all, but any, any, just keep an eye on their dopamine cir- circuits.
23. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
24. JHJonathan Haidt
  Anything they're doing every day for an hour or two, there's a risk that it's changing them in ways that make everything else more boring. So do not give up hope. It's hard to do it yourself. So y- y- y- you know, to say to your 17-year-old daughter, "You need to get off social media, even though all your friends are still on it," that's a social death sentence. It's gonna be very hard to persuade-
25. SPSpeaker
  Yeah
26. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... y- your girl to do that. And so the trick is, do it in a group, and that's why the class is so successful, 'cause they're all supporting each other.
27. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
28. JHJonathan Haidt
  They're all doing it. And then they, sometimes they go out together.
29. SPSpeaker
  So is that like connecting with other parents and being like-
30. JHJonathan Haidt
  Exactly
1:11:02 – 1:21:49
Rebuilding community spaces and trust
1. TNTrevor Noah
  ... you literally have the third space right outside your door.
2. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yeah, that's right.
3. TNTrevor Noah
  You just have to claim it back.
4. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yeah. That's right.
5. TNTrevor Noah
  You literally just have to claim it back collectively.
6. JHJonathan Haidt
  Yeah. I think, I think that's, that's really good because what you're saying is we have to be much more deliberate about this. My parents grew up in New York City. It was very similar. They'd play stickball in the street, and-
7. TNTrevor Noah
  Yes
8. JHJonathan Haidt
  ... if a car's coming, you step back.
9. TNTrevor Noah
  Exactly.
10. JHJonathan Haidt
  So we can't just say to our kids, "You know, you're, you're nine years old. Get out of here. Don't come back till the streetlights come on. Don't come back till dinner."
11. TNTrevor Noah
  Mm.
12. JHJonathan Haidt
  In some parts of America, you can, you can do that. There are rural parts or places where people trust their neighbors. But especially for those of us in cities, we're gonna have to be a lot more deliberate. And what you're saying is an example of, of a community or of a couple of leaders taking a step to make something happen, right, right here in Chelsea, so that's great. I wanna bring in here an organization that I co-founded called Let Grow. If, if you have young kids, um, go to letgrow.org.
13. TNTrevor Noah
  Mm.
14. JHJonathan Haidt
  Uh, it's, it's run by a wonderful woman named Lenore Skenazy, who wrote a book called Free-Range Kids. It's all about how do we help Americans actually let go and let their kids grow with these sorts of experiences.
15. TNTrevor Noah
  Oh, that's amazing.
16. JHJonathan Haidt
  And so we have two s- really simple programs. The simplest of all is called Play Club, and what it is is a school ... It's based around schools and school playgrounds. In a lot of places, parents don't trust anything, but they do trust the school playground. That's the one place that they will let their kids hang out after school. And so it's so simple. A school just says, "Okay, one after-school activity that you can choose is Play Club." And so let's say your eldest son, you sign him up for Fridays, let's say.
17. TNTrevor Noah
  Mm-hmm.
18. JHJonathan Haidt
  So he's part of Play Club on Friday, along with 10 or 20 other kids who are always there on Friday. And there's an adult nearby. There is an adult around if someone gets hurt, but there's nobody blowing a whistle. There's nobody supervising. There's nobody directing. And so you were talking about your kid, your one-year, [laughs] your one-year-old being overscheduled.
19. SPSpeaker
  Yeah, Luna has, Luna's a diva.
20. JHJonathan Haidt
  [laughs]
21. SPSpeaker
  She's got a lot going on. [laughs]
22. JHJonathan Haidt
  Okay, okay. But when she starts, when she starts school, especially, say, kindergarten, first grade, they love running around in the playground.
23. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
24. JHJonathan Haidt
  So, so play club is so simple. It doesn't cost anything. Okay, you d- you need to have, like, one staff person stay after.
25. SPSpeaker
  Yeah.
26. TNTrevor Noah
  Yeah, yeah.
27. JHJonathan Haidt
  But the results are so amazing, teachers often volunteer to do it 'cause it's so wonderful to watch.
28. TNTrevor Noah
  That's cool.
29. JHJonathan Haidt
  So just using the local school playground. Now, some schools in New York City, I talked with a, a principal, uh, up in the Bronx. Uh, uh, he said there is no outdoor space.
30. SPSpeaker
  There isn't.