The Anxious Generation with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt | A Bit of Optimism Podcast

Jonathan, huge fan of your work, going back to all of your TED Talks.

I would like to start there if I can. Your work on morality I find infinitely fascinating. One of the things I find so interesting, especially in this modern day, is the conflict of morality. In other words, two sides believing that they are on the side of the moral right.

Yeah.

And, you know, and that seems to be where we are these days, where. Where. It's not like you have an interesting point of view that I disagree with, but rather I am right and you are wrong, and both sides believe that they are fighting for the moral good of the nation. You know, we used to read the news and then call up our friends and vent our anger or feel our emotions and cry or whatever it was to our friends, and then we would be able to have a rational conversation about it later. And now we read the news and we log on to our social media of choice, and we vent our anger or feel our emotions, and then we respond to the responses. We respond to the reactions.

That's right. So it's very helpful to always ask, what game are you playing? And what game is my partner playing? What game is the other person playing? Yeah. So, yeah, you know, in the old days, you know, when. Well, I'm older than you, but you know, when. When we read newspapers and didn't have social media, you might call.

You're kind.

I'm old enough.

Sorry.

Thank you. You look. You look a lot younger than me. You don't have any gray hair. So I'm gonna count you as a. I guess you're Janet, You're Gen X. You're not a millennial.

But I am Gen X.

Yes. Yeah.

But, you know, so what game are you playing? You might really have been upset about that thing, and so you actually do want to vent, and so you're playing the I'm expressing my feelings game. And there's a place for that. Yeah. Or maybe, you know, maybe your friend disagrees with you and then you're playing the game of, oh, I want to convince him. Or maybe it's just the game of I'm right. I need to prove that I'm right. So there are a lot of different games, and that's just if it's two of you. Now, suppose that instead of a private phone call, you said, let's meet down in the Roman Coliseum, in the center of the Coliseum, and let's fill the stands with people who paid to get in to see blood. That's what they're there for. They want to see fighting and now let's talk about gun control or abortion or whatever. You read the newspaper, let's talk about it. Well, what game would we be playing? We're entirely playing the game of savaging the other in order to appeal to the audience. Now that's not what always happens on Twitter. I mean, Twitter, often interactions can be nice, but the incentives on, the incentives in social media are not to play the find the truth game or not to, you know, to play the even, even the persuade the other person game. It really is playing to an audience. And this is one of the reasons I am so alarmed about the future of, of the United States, because our country already was polarizing before social media and cable TV has a lot to do with this. I was already concerned about polarization. My first TED talk in 2008 was about left, right, why they can't understand each other, moral foundations. I was already concerned about polarization in 2008, back when social media wasn't terribly polarizing. And then in 2009, you get the like button, the retweet and share button. You now get. Algorithms become much more common because now you've got all this information coming in from like and share buttons. The newsfeed came in a couple years before, so social media really reconfigured around between 2009 and 2012 to become much, much better at throwing gasoline on every possible spark. So, yeah, that's where we are now, playing that game.

The frustration is, and this goes to some of the work that I've done and a lot of the work that you've done, where we speak about younger generations.

And the insidiousness of social media and cell phones as it relates to, you know, feelings of self worth and sociability. You know, but the, the.

There'S no going back. The, the, the, the genie's out of the bottle. Like, and you know, the stuff that we're talking about now, you know, the concept of dopamine and dopamine hits an addictive quality. Like, this is now, this is now known. Like, this isn't. Like, this is no longer news, yet we all know it. We all know that we're divided. We all know that we react to social media the way we do. We all know about virtue signaling on both sides of the political equation. We know these things. And yet for some reason, we still can't control ourselves. We still can't find, get, get out of it. You know, Jonathan, how fix America?

Okay, let's, I can do half of it. Let's break the problem into the Kids and the democracy. Okay, the kids, which is the subject of my book, the Anxious Generation, that we can actually solve that in the next year or two. And I'll start there. The democracy, my God, that is a much harder problem for a lot of reasons, which I hope we'll get into. But what you were just laying out was how each of us might individually want to change, but yet we're not able to. Now, sometimes that's because of addiction. And as you, as you said, I mean, you know, these things are all about little dopamine hits, and that's what makes us crave more. And so smokers, when they want to quit, have trouble quitting. And so part of that is what's going on for adults. But the biggest thing, you know, I teach courses here at nyu and I have graduate MBA students and I have undergrads. And we go through what. What the life on social media is doing to them, to their productivity, to their focus, to their happiness. And, you know, some of them try to quit, but I say, well, why don't you, why don't you all just quit? And the answer is always the same because everyone else is on it. I can't quit because everyone else is on it, and they would miss out on too much. And there are sometimes career elements for the MBA students, but for the undergrads, it's all social. And so the way to understand what's happened to us is that these tech companies have put us into what social scientists call the collective action problem.

Where we face a problem. We don't like how things are. We could change it individually, but each of us looking at the change says, oh, wow, if I do that, I'll actually be worse off. And so most of us who, you know, our kids come to us in sixth grade, typically fifth or sixth grade, and say, you know, daddy, I. I need a smartphone. Everyone's. Everyone's got a smartphone. I'm the only one. And that's very painful to hear that your kid is being excluded. Well, the only reason that the other parents gave their kids a smartphone so early is because they also said everyone has a smartphone. And so each of us might want to delay smartphones and social media, but if our kid is the only one who's kept out, well, then our kid is worse off. But if we all do it together, or if even a quarter of us do it together, then our kids can't say they're the only ones. So if we can do this with the parents of our kids friends, then we give them a normal Child, we say, instead of spending all afternoon on your phone, how about you guys get together and go out someplace with no supervision, ride your bicycles, go buy ice cream, do something together not supervised by adults. They would have a much better childhood. They'd come out mentally healthy.

Though.

I agree, the challenge is kind of like education reform. Every. The more I learn about education reform, the more I'm learning that it's not the school districts, it's not the teachers, but it's largely the parents, which is everybody wants education reform. We just don't want you to experiment on my child. You know, please experiment at a different school and find out what happens.

And I've heard the same when it comes to phones, which is some schools have attempted to ban phones, and it's the parents who make an uproar. You know, I have to be able to text my kid anytime. What happens if there's an emergency? We'll call the office. They know where your kid is. They'll go, get your kid out of class and say, your grandmother died. You know, like, they know where your kids are at all moments. But for some reason, it's the parents and the anxiety the parents have. And I've even read research that, like in the car, you know, kids who are on the phone when they're driving, it's largely the parents texting them, and the parents will get mad at them.

Oh, no. Oh, no. So.

So the intention. The intensity of, like, I have to respond immediately, even when I'm driving. The pressures are not coming, actually, from. I'm sure. Look, there's plenty of peer pressure from the kids, obviously, but.

But.

But huge amounts of pressure from the parents. So I hear you, but how many of the parents will collectively say, we agree not to give our kids when they have the anxiety of not being able to get hold of their kids every moment?

Okay, right. So this is the. This is the big thing that a lot of people don't seem to understand is that there are other kinds of phones other than smartphones. Yeah, yeah. So I totally understand. Look, you know, half of what I'm saying isn't about the phones. Half of it is we have to let kids out on their own by the age of 8 or so. There are circumstances where maybe it's later, but, you know, in general, all older people, we were all out by age 7, plus or minus. That's when you went out to play with other kids. Yeah. That's incredibly healthy. You. You get into trouble, you get into arguments, but you resolve them. So that has to happen. And I understand. Look, I live in New York City. I started sending, let my kids walk to school in fourth grade when very few other nobody else was doing that. I wasn't going to let my kids walk around New York City without being able to track them and find them and contact them. But I didn't think to give my son a flip phone. I just said, well, he needs a phone. So I gave him my old iPhone. Yeah, but what I'm advocating for is that, is that we solve this collective action problem by saying, no smartphones until high school. You can give your kid a flip phone. You can reach your kid now. You're right that even with a flip phone there's like too much, there's too much contact. That's definitely true. So we still have to work on norms, but at least with a flip phone. What's a flip phone good for? All it's good for is making phone calls and receiving texts. Not even good for sending text because you have to press the seven key three times to make whatever letter. So if we gave our kids flip phones, they wouldn't be on it all the time, like pouring out their emotions. They'd say like, you know, see you at three. And then they're more likely to use it to meet up and to communicate with one person, not to broadcast out to social media. Yeah. So that, that's an important technological thing. As for schools, you're absolutely right. When, when I talk to principals, they all hate the phones. It's making their lives miserable. The teachers all hate the phones. It's making their lives miserable. The students aren't paying attention in class. They're literally watching porn and YouTube and gamble. I mean, they're. It's insane that we let kids have the greatest distraction device ever invented. They can just keep it in their pocket. Completely insane. And I say to the principals, why don't you just use phone lockers or yonder pouches? It's always the same thing. Which is just what you said. Some of the parents will freak out. They need to reach their kids. Yes, that's true. Some of the parents will freak out. But you know what? Almost all. Most parents now are so fed up with what the phones are doing to their kids that most parents would support a phone free school as long as they know that everyone else is supporting it, everyone else is doing it. And I can reach my kid in case of an emergency. Some will still freak out, but the great majority want to do something. So I think this, again, it's a collective action problem. If we Start this together. It's going to overwhelm the principals, and they'll have to say, you know what? Far more parents want their kid to pay attention in class than the, you know, the seven who are always ruining my life by yelling and screaming at me. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Let's go to democracy.

Wait, before we do that, do you. Do you have kids?

I don't. I have a niece and a nephew.

Okay, how old are they?

My nephew just turned 13 and my niece is 14.

And they both have smartphones. I assume.

They do. They do.

Where are they growing up?

In Los Angeles.

And do you know if they're on Instagram?

They are not.

Okay, what about Tick Tock?

They are my net. My niece is. My niece is not. My nephew. My nephew's. His demise is YouTube. A teenage boy on YouTube. I mean, he'll get up and go get a drink, and I'll walk into the kitchen and he'll be on his phone looking at YouTube. I'm like, I thought you were just getting a drink, you know, which is insane. My niece. My niece.

It's.

What I find fascinating about my niece is. And I actually really like this.

Yes.

She's talking on the phone the whole time to her friends, but she's on FaceTime. Like, they're actually. They're actually. I find that great.

I find that FaceTime is fine.

I think that's super healthy.

Yeah. Yep. That's right. Yeah. So they. So what the research shows is that boys and girls are equally. They're spending roughly the same amount of time on their phones, about five hours a day just on social media. Now, that includes. Now the trick is, though, that includes TikTok and YouTube because the kids are watching huge amounts of videos. What. What really began in the early 2010s is that when they all got phones, they all spent the whole day on the phone. But the girls went for social media, especially visual platforms. They went for Instagram and Pinterest and Tumblr. And the boys went for video games and YouTube. That. They tend to be more addicted to those two. And so the girls instantly got depressed. The depression epidemic, it begins in 2012, 2013. As soon as, you know, in 2010, very few kids had a smartphone. It was just coming in. You know, the App Store had just been released recently. So in 2010, the iPhone is not a big part of teen Life. By 2015, it's the center of teen life. So what I'm arguing in the anxious generation is that between 2010 and 2015 was the great rewiring of childhood where kids were no longer looking at each other or spending time with each other because they had this incredible distraction device, this, and this phone, which was their portal to lots of companies that wanted to get their attention. So we basically, it's like, you know, a lot. Most parents would not want their, their, their child, their daughter to have an open window out onto the street where anyone can just reach in and, you know, and see them and take them. But that's kind of what we did in the early 2010s. We said, here, have a phone, go on Instagram, talk with strangers. You know, they'll try to proposition you, they'll try to sell you things, but you know, what are you going to do? It's the digital age. That's where we are.

So, so, but, so is, but parents are struggling as well. Like I think, I mean all parents, I think most, most parents are well intentioned. Most parents, absolutely. The vast majority of parents want, want what's best for their kids.

There is, it's okay to be tempted by the, the magic of the phone, you know, because it's a great babysitter, you know, giving the kids a divide. I went out for brunch and there's a whole table of the parents and then there's a whole table of the kids and all the parents are chatting and all the kids were on their own device.

Yeah, that's right.

And it was tragic. Like, I have friends who, they've got two, two younger kids and the kids don't have phones. But every, and I've gone out for dinner with them and their family. They bring paper and, and colored pencils.

Right.

And so the kids, like as soon as you get to the dinner table, the kids just start drawing. That's great. And I find that. And like, so, so you're still allowing the kids to be distracted to do something else. Except it's, it's analog. And I kind of like, whatever happened to the mom bag filled with games and toys and you know, pens and pencils and paper?

Yeah, no, that, that's, that's exactly right. Part of, you know, as I'm, as I've been reconstructing the history of how did we get here? Like, yeah, how is it that entire generation is now sucked into this terrible, terrible way to grow up? How did this happen? And what I realized is you have to put yourself back in the year, let's say 2011, 2012, which is when the big transition is happening. And you know, for those, you know, I mean, I'm I just turned 60.

Boy, do I remember the fall of the BERLIN Wall, the 1990s, the beginning of the Internet. I mean the 90s were incredible. And it was like so hopeful and it was, you know, democracy is going to rule and the Internet is going to, you know, be the greatest friend of democracy and it's going to take down tyrants. And then the millennial generation, which grew up with the early Internet, they mastered it and they were able to use it in all kinds of ways. We'll talk. I think you and I might disagree about the millennials versus Gen Z, or maybe we do, we'll find out. But the millennials mental health actually wasn't much worse. It actually was a little better than Gen X. Gen X have the worst mental health of any generation. That might have to do with lead poisoning. That's another topic we can come back to. But, but the millennials, their mental health didn't, didn't plunge.

And so we thought like, well, you know, the Internet's amazing. We all love it. These kids are digital natives. They're going to, this is the way of the future. And the Internet is amazing for democracy. So is social media. And look at the Arab Spring, look at Occupy Wall Street. So, so in 2011, 2012, when you're at your parents, say you're a 35 year old parent and you're at dinner and you know, you think, should I give my kid an iPhone? I mean iPhones are amazing, the Internet's amazing. The kid's gonna master it anyway. You know, we thought it was okay. Yeah, we thought maybe we're even helping them, like let that, let them get a head start. You know, they're going to be living with these things. Why not let them play with it? At age 3, I got my first iPhone when my son was 2 and he figured, you know, is incredible. He got the touch and swipe technology. And the fact that I didn't sell everything and buy Apple stock is one of my greatest regrets. I mean, what a product. This was 2008, so you have to go back to that time and realize we didn't know what we were doing. We thought that this wasn't going to harm the kids. And it's really only in 2016, I'd say after the Trump election, that's when a lot of people, especially in the blue parts of the country, really began to turn on the Internet and social media and see this is causing all kinds of problems. And then so, so our, our discovery that, that a life online is really, really bad for Kids, we didn't actually know that in 2011.

How would you define the social differences between the millennial generation and the Gen Z generation? Like, what are the big markers that make them so, so different?

Yeah, so the big marker, the biggest marker of all is, is that millennials grew up with flip phones and Gen Z grew up with iPhones. And the reason why this matters so much is that for millennials. So we'd already ruined childhood by the time the millennials came along for a lot of reasons that you've talked about. The over, you know, the, the coddling, the everyone gets a medal. So that was already going on. That began in the 80s. And so you're right to point out that this, you know, changed the millennials and it wasn't their fault. You know, it's, it's, none of this is the kids fault, obviously. It's, it's structures and parents.

Yeah, yeah.

But.

So the millennials grew up with. Without toughening, we began to crack down on going outside. So the older millennials, if you're born in 1981, 82, you know, you, you probably did still play outside, but if you're born in 1990, 91, 92, you probably didn't. You probably were not allowed to go out without an adult watching you. That's. It's really the 90s that we really stopped letting kids out. And of course, that's just when the crime wave ended. You and I grew up during a huge crime wave in the United States, but it sort of mysteriously ends in the 90s. Again. I think that's lead poisoning. We'll come back to that. So the millennials actually don't have as much freedom in childhood. They have a lot of overprotection, but they're still really heavily interacting with each other directly, one on one or in small groups. They have flip phones, but with a flip phone, again, you're not going to like, pour out your heart on a flip phone texting. You use it to talk to one person or text one person. It wasn't all about group calls. So that's the millennials. And their mental health is actually, as I said, a little better than Gen X. All right, so then we get to 2009, 2010, 11. This, this is when social media now becomes much nastier. So the millennials got Facebook in college. You had to have a college account in order to get it for the first few years. So the millennials had flip phones and no social media. When they were going through puberty, they don't get that stuff. Until they're in college or later. Gen Z. I would define Gen Z as it's the first people who got a smartphone and social media at the beginning of puberty. If you go through puberty not playing with your friends, not talking to others, but with, you know, this, you know, this thing in front of your face, I mean, you walk around, you know, in like, New York City. Are you in la? Where do you live?

I live in la.

Okay. Yeah. So, you know, well, maybe nobody walks in la.

There's no walking la. People drive with their phones in front of their faces.

There you go. There you go. So. So that, I think, is the big difference, that Gen Z went through puberty especially. It's especially clear with the girls, but it's true for the boys as well. They went through puberty with a thing that blocked their interactions with others. They don't spend much time with others. And we have a lot of data on this. Kids used to spend a lot of time with their friends. And as soon as you get to 2012, that plummets. It plummets to the point where by 2019, kids were only spending a little bit more time with their friends than their parents were, which is insane. And when they were with their friends, it was a lot like what you just said. They might be physically with their friends, but they're all on their devices. So, you know, as a human being, we're an incredibly social species. You can't grow up without a lot of social interaction. But that's what we did to Gen Z.

You talk about the irony of democracy, you know, which is we thought the Internet would be the greatest thing, you know, for democracy, and it's ended up being sort of. It's the possibly the worst thing, possibly the worst thing for democracy. And you look at the way that more.

Dictatorial or tyrannical regimes operate.

They.

They've cracked down on all of it, and not always for propaganda purposes. Like we know in China, for example, there's. There are. They too are concerned about their children spending too much time on the phone. And so, you know, it's just not possible. Like, the phones physically don't work for more than a fixed amount of period of time per day, you know, and like, they can do that. And you start to think, you know.

You know, is democracy might be a great form of government for. For choice, but is it the best form of government for. For the flourishing of society?

Right, that's. And that's the question. That question goes back to Aristotle and Plato. That's the fundamental Question of political theory, what form of government is best? And the lesson of the twenties, I think.

But I would have def. I still believe in democracy, of course, but, but, but this is a. The Internet and social media have profoundly changed many, many things in our lives. You know, it changes the way innovation works. Innovation used to be a hardware model. Now it's largely a software model. Iterate, iterate, iterate. You know, it's changed the way entrepreneurship worked, which is only big companies competed, could compete against big companies. Now small companies can compete against big companies because of computers and the Internet and social media. And it's a huge boon for entrepreneurs. I mean, so it's had profound and permanent and many positive impacts, but we have to look at the liabilities as well. And again, I go back to the original question where we started, which is the genie's out of the bottle. And I think everybody has their point of view, which is we have to pass legislation to crack down on the social media companies because of their algorithms, and we, we have to censor this and we have to stop that and we have to control this and control that in our children. But the reality is we're doing nothing.

That's right. We're doing nothing at all. That's right.

We're whining and complaining and everybody thinks they have the solution, which none of those, none of those are silver bullets. And so you spend a lot of time looking at this data and you spend a lot of time. And you've written and spoken extensively about the damages and the collective action that you are talking about, which I agree with. Social animals can only cure social problems socially.

Right.

But we're left back at, at point one, which is how do I even organize people to do that?

Yeah.

When the very, the very thing that I need to organize them, which is the Internet is being used.

Yeah.

To organize disorganization.

Okay, so we've got, we got so many threads here.

I'll tell you what, are you free.

For the next four hours? Well, I'm, I'm kind. I plan to work on this basically until I die. So. Yeah.

How about let's trace out the democracy threads and then I really want to talk about the effect it's having in the workplace and on entrepreneurship. Yeah. I mean, here I am teaching in a business school and I haven't really been keeping up with trends in, in, in work culture over the last couple years, whereas you have. Yeah. So let's do the democracy thing and then we'll go to entrepreneurship and business. The. My friend Tristan Harris of the center for Human Technology has long made the argument that digital technology is helping authoritarian countries be better. Authoritarian countries. If you're China, you know, in Mao, in the era of Mao or Stalin, like, they had to have secret police forces that were brutal, but they couldn't be everywhere. Now they can be everywhere. Yeah. So, so the digital technology is, Is a tremendous boon to China, and that includes all the, you know, the cameras and the AI for face recognition. So you take all of it. China is in much better shape because of the technological revolution. Democracy, on the other hand, has all these really well known weaknesses, known since the time of Plato, who said that democracy is the second worst form of government because it inevitably decays into tyranny. And he was talking about direct democracy because people are passionate, they're easily led astray. They respond to demagogues. And so the American Founding Fathers knew all this. They read Plato and Aristotle, they. They knew political theory and history. And James Madison said, well, how do we design it so that the people don't get to make the laws and rules? The people choose the representatives, and then the representatives are somewhat insulated from the people's passions so that they can actually think together and, and debate and come up with policies, and the people get to throw them out if they're not happy. And that was the system they gave us. And boy, did that work in the Gutenberg era, the era that was based on print. Now in the network era, the problems Madison was trying to fix are overwhelmed. I mean, Those problems are 10x100x for the reasons we've been talking about. If the citizens aren't just like voting on election day for who they want, they're rather opining at every moment. So that Congress people, I mean, you see this, you know, Ted Cruz, he once I was. I was testifying remotely at a Senate hearing on, on social media regulation. And Ted Cruz gives us. Oh, actually, I'm sorry. Previously, Ted Cruz had given this bombastic speech on the Senate floor, and then he sat down. He was caught on camera instantly checking his Twitter feed to see how his Senate speech played. So if our politicians are being held captive, Twitter to this instant feedback from whatever random stranger. Boy, does that pervert democracy? And then the funny thing that I got confused is then like a few months later, I was testifying just by zoom to on a hearing about regulation. And I gave the example of a senator who was caught checking. You know, I was asked whether this would affect Congress, said yes. And I gave the example. I didn't mention names of A senator know who was caught doing this. And then it turns out Ted Cruz was in the room and he then asked his question of me, which was actually not really a question even. It was just, he just went on and on and on about his number of Twitter followers. Like that was what he wanted to talk about was how he thought Twitter was discriminated against him. Anyway, all I'm saying is, man, is this messing up democracy as we had it in America?

Well, I, and there. Oh, I could go to some. That's right.

Rabbit holes. Lots of directions.

There's rabbit hole. So, so it goes back to your, the arena analogy, which is we've now put our politicians in the center of the arena and we want blood and we want a performance and we know that they grandstand and perform for the cameras. Like, this is not news. But, but, but it's not just CNN and the nightly news now. It's the, as you said, it's the instant gratification. And I've been told by some of the old timer content Congressman that there was a time where they would grandstand 20% for the cameras and then 80% of the date debate was behind closed doors.

Right? Yeah. And.

And now it's 100% for the cameras. And even when the new speaker of the House was elected, like the number of people said, I don't even know.

Him, like, oh my God, I didn't know. Wow.

Oh, the number of, of congressmen who said, I I don't even know the guy.

That's incredible.

And so we, I mean, there's not that many of them. There's a few hundred of them.

And they don't socialize anymore.

They don't socialize anymore. And there was a time when you moved your whole family to Washington.

Yep.

You know, and, and your kids integrated into the school systems and then.

Exactly.

You went to the baseball games and you went to the PTA meetings and you went to school plays and you saw people of the opposite party sitting in the stands with you and you socialized and they didn't.

Absolutely.

They may or may not have been friends, but they were social and they were civil and they saw each other as human. They saw each other as parents. And now they spend most of their time back in their home states, they say, doing the work of their people. But let's be honest, it's fundraising.

Fundraising.

And, and they spend very little time in Washington. They and rarely move their families to Washington anymore. So they don't even see each other as human anymore. And they don't Know each other. And so how can, how can a governing class govern and be expected to.

Find common ground with people who they only view as the enemy or an abst. Or worse, an abstract enemy, which is the worst kind. Inhuman.

Right. And unhuman.

So what we're really talking about in all of these things is the restoration of humanity. Whether it's teenagers spending time with teenagers and they all put their phones in a bucket when they come in the house.

You know, it's like, I mean, like.

I mean, that's a good connection, you know, which is.

It's the same thing, right? It's the same thing, which is if. Invite all the kids over for a play date and call the parents and say, if you need your kid, call me. Here's my phone number because I've taken all the kids phones away.

Yes. Oh, that's great. Oh, I'm gonna write this down because that's, that's a piece of advice I'm gonna give to parents, right?

Like, yeah, like, here's my phone number. Your kid's coming over to my house. I'm taking your kid's phone away while they're playing. Call me if they need any. If you need anything. And, and, and, and it's, it is, it is, it's. They. I know somebody who did this, which is. They, they, they were really stressed out about their kids being addicted to their phones. They decided to go on a family vacation and they forced their kids to leave the phones at home. So that was fight number one, of course. But turns out the parents prevailed because the kids are, you know, 13, you know, and they brought one phone because you got to have a phone, right? And apparently the first two or three days of the vacation were absolutely awful. Fighting and yelling and I want my phone and I miss my friends. And then after about two or three days, apparently they all forgot and they had the most incredible time and they bonded as a family. Nobody missed their phones, and it was magical. The point is, like any addiction, there's going to be some, some, Some side effects. You're going to have.

Exactly. Withdrawal symptoms.

You're going to have withdrawal symptoms and you have to allow. And the problem is we take these phones away from the kids and they act out and then we immediately give it back. And like any drug addict, you just. It sucks and it's awful. But you got to allow the withdrawal symptoms to go through.

Absolutely. That's right. And that's why summer camp is so important in American society right now. It's very hard to get your Kid off for long enough for the withdrawal symptoms to subside, for the dopamine neurons to reset to the normal baseline level. But summer camps, sending your kid away for three or four weeks minimum, where most, most summer camps do ban the phones. I gave a talk to a group of summer camp administrators. Most of them do confiscate the phones. Thank God. Nobody should send their kid to a camp that doesn't confiscate the phones. And I hear the same story very often. The kid comes back from camp. It's the sweet, you know, it's the sweet 11, you know, 11 year old that I used to know. You know, I have a 12 or 13 year old girl, let's say, and she became all, you know, cranky and negative. You send her to camp and you get your child back for a couple of weeks and then they go back on their phones and the ugly personality returns.

Isn't it ironic that parents are comfortable that their kids phones are taken away at summer camp? We where they will legitimately like fall off horses and break their arm, you know, but we don't want to take their phones away when they're just at school and we have to figure out what time to pick them up. Like there's a great irony in that.

Well, you know, in part it's the logistics. I mean the logistics is a piece of it, the idea that your kids are being cared for by someone else so you can step back. But what I'm learning, you know, since I sent my kids to my daughter, especially to summer camp, it's now the norm that you get photos every day. Yeah. Somebody goes around, takes thousands of photos. Yeah. And AI, there's whatever this camp, my, I don't remember what it's called, but there's this company, they use AI to find the pictures of your child and send you a customized set of reports. What this means is that your kids at summer camp away from you for three or four weeks, but every day the kid has to perform for the camera because mom and dad might be watching. It's insane. So I would urge, I would urge summer camps to stop doing that. Send a few group photos every weekend, not during the week. And I would urge parents to ask that, ask that of the camp, say please, you know, would you consider not sending photos every day? It's bad for everyone.

So. So going back to the previous, to the previous line of thought, which is this resocialization, so forcing kids to play amongst themselves with the parents intervening and taking phones away is not dissimilar to Forcing congressmen to get to know each other. I think they should move their families to Washington. You know, if you want to represent the nation, you should move your family to Washington and live there. And, and, and that started, I think, in the 90s. It was, it was the, it came with Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich was the one who said, go back home. Right? Exactly.

Well, correct, because he changed the schedule. He said, we will only do business Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Right. So you don't have to be. You just fly in on Monday night or Tuesday morning. You can fly out Thursday evening. And, and then you don't even rent an apartment. You just share. You, you know, you share a place with a few other congress people in your party. So, yeah, we drained the. Your point about humanity is great because it, I didn't see that, but it is. It's the same thing with the kids. Kids need to be interacting with each other.

Yeah.

And we've drained that out. And politicians need to be interacting with each other, and we've drained that out. And so we're surprised that the system doesn't work.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you, are you hopeful? Hopeful for democracy?

I'm hopeful for the kids. I really think we can solve this. I'm not hopeful for democracy. I think as long as the Internet, not the Internet, the problem's not the Internet per se. The Internet per se is amazing. We all love it. Nobody's considering either. You know, that's inconceivable to, to not have the Internet. Social media is not the Internet. As long as social media stays the way it is. Yeah. And the U.S. congress stays the way it is. I am not hopeful at all for our country. Now, on the kids side, it's totally bipartisan. This is why I think we're going to win there. But on the democracy side, because the right believes that the left is censoring them online. And there's probably some truth to that. And my God, the new, the new Google AI. What a disaster for Google to put out an AI to that is, you know, radical left, identitarian, woke lecturing, obnoxious. You know, I mean, why should the right ever trust Google now? And Google's basically shown we're not here to find the truth. We're here to make you endorse these, you know, these progressive values. So this is part of why I'm, I'm very concerned and I don't see a way out, frankly.

Oh, can you tell me something that you've been engaged in or done in your career? Anything Commercially successful or not, doesn't matter. Academically. Academically successful or not, it doesn't matter. But something you've been engaged in, something you've done, a project you've worked on that you absolutely loved, and you wish everything you ever do could be like, this one thing for the rest of your life.

Oh, wow. Well, I would actually say this one. This one. The. The Changing Childhood project.

In college, I ran a gun control group in the state of Connecticut, and that was totally hopeless and we got nothing done. I've been involved in various progressive movements and causes where we tried to persuade people of things and, you know, very hard to do, and got nothing done. I helped on some messaging campaigns. How do we change people's minds? Very hard to do. Didn't get much done. And now I'm working on this problem, this gigantic problem, the biggest one I've ever worked on. Um, and I don't have to persuade people. Like, everyone is fed up with the phones. Most parents are fed up. They're upset about what's happening. They just don't know what to do. So all I have to do is. So first of all, I got to spend the last four years thinking about this in really deeply and doing a lot of research. And that's what is my greatest pleasure, is really trying to figure something out using the tools of various social sciences. So that was a joy. And then I come up with these recommendations and they're very easy to do and there's no opposition. And so here they are. Here are the four norms. If we do these four things we can. We can not solve, but we'll really improve teen children's mental health. One, no smartphone before high school. Two, no social media before 16. Three, phone free schools. And four, more.

Independence, free play, and responsibility. In the real world, the free range kids, those four things, they cost essentially nothing. Maybe some phone lockers you'd have to buy. So they're easy, They're. They cost nothing. They're totally bipartisan. There's no cultural war issue here at all. And most parents want to do it. So I'm incredibly excited that I get to be part of and a contributor to what I think is going to be one of the most successful social movements and the fastest ever. That is, I think, within. By the end of 2025, I think we're going to have different norms about childhood because the ones we got now, they only started, you know, 10, 15 years ago. They're very new and they're terrible, and we have to get rid of them.

Tell Me an early, specific, happy childhood memory.

Oh, gosh. One of the most exciting things was my best friend and I. Krister was his name. We. We would sometimes cut through this church parking lot where there was a school, and the kids there got mad at us for cutting through. And before we knew, we were having a rock fight with them. But it was looking back on it like, we. We made rules, like, you can't aim for the face. You know, if someone gets hurt, you have to pause and. And let them, you know, so it was just so exciting to have play war. Now, I. I didn't realize it at the time, but, you know, boys really seek out play war. And that was one of the few times that we actually got it. You really could get hurt. And something I've learned in writing this book is that thrills and the. And the real risk of physical injury is actually the best kind of play. It does something to your nervous system to help you learn to deal with risk. Whereas boys who are on playing Fortnite, let's say they're jumping out of planes, they're stabbing each other, but there's no fear, there's no risk. So. So, yeah, any sort of memory where, you know, there. There was a team versus team situation. How's that? Can you work with that?

I mean, so of all the fun things you did as a kid, what is it about the throwing of the rocks? Because you're thinking one particular time where there was this rock war, right?

Yeah, that's right.

What do you think is the reason that that stands out?

Excitement was incredibly exciting. Yeah. And I don't even remember if we won or not. Like, I think we finally called it off. I don't remember. But it's things like that where you're taking chances, you're doing something new, and it, you know, I think a lot about evolution. Oh. Like the first time I played paintball with my buddies when we were 30, that was ecstatic, because, again, it was play war that we didn't even know that we loved so much. We'd never done paintball, but there's something about a small group of guys hunting another group of guys and taking aim at them and shooting them and trying to win is incredibly thrilling.

Yeah. I have done it. And if you don't get hit, it's really fun.

That's right. And it's important. I've played laser tag, too, and that's pathetic. Laser tag, there's no pain, whereas paintball, it does. It hurts to get hit, and that's crucial. That's Crucial because then you really care.

This is so interesting. So what I, what I find so interesting about the project you're working on now is, is, you know, all the other things you did. It was about convincing, convincing, convincing, convincing. And this one stands out because there's no convincing required. It's simply action. Right?

It's. It's. That's right. Well, it's even simpler. People are ready to act. They just don't know what to do.

They just don't know.

All, all I have to do is show them what to do. So, so I just, I, I just, I think in metaphors and I just. Earlier today I was thinking, you know, yeah, things could really change fast. Like, like with the fall of the east block. Yeah. And I was thinking, you know, I think things are going to change as fast as they did with the fall of communism. And the reason is because I traveled through the East Block. 1987, everyone hated it. There were no, there were no real communists. Everyone hated it. But they only went along out of fear. Sure. Because if you raise your voice, you'll be jailed and tortured and killed or whatever. Well, it's the same thing now. Gen Z hates this childhood. I have not found a. Literally, not a single defense. Like, nobody in Gen Z is saying, no, don't take away social media. No, don't take away our phones. We love our. No, nobody is saying that. Gen Z realizes. They recognize they're messed up by this. This is ruining their generations, is ruining their mental health. Why are you on it? Fear of missing out. Fear of being the only one out. So if you have a situation where most of the kids don't like it, most of the parents don't like it, all of the teachers don't like it. No one's happy with this, but we just don't know what to do to get rid of it. And I think that in my book, I basically have been able to say, you know, here's where we are, here's how we got here. Four norms will get us most of the way out.

There's a company. There's something here about relieving tension.

Right.

Which is, you know, these kids hated you when you walk through the, through their school to cut, you know, to cut home. And the tension was relieved by giving them an outlet. Right?

Yeah.

Where, which is to start throwing rocks at each other, to start playing.

And, and the, the same is true for what you're doing with the, the, the work you're doing now, which is you're giving an outlet. You're Relieving attention. Everybody knows it's built up. And in all the other cases of convincing, you try to create attention.

Right.

That's what convincing is about.

That's right.

And. And I think where.

Where. Oh, yeah, you're right. You're right. That's good. I hadn't thought of it that way.

Right. And so I think where you are your most fulfilled, but also where your work seems to be the most passionate is. And it's an ironic thing for an academic book, you know, but.

Which is.

It's about the relieving of tension, giving people an outlet, which is. I hate this. I hate this.

I hate this.

Well, you know, you could just do these three things. You could just start a.

A war here. You could just start throwing rocks, you know, because there's a tension. We hate you. Stop walking through our thing. It's like. Well, we hate the cell phones. Like, we hate each other. It's like when you talk about moralities, that you talk about people hating each other. But. But I think where your work shines is when you give us.

When.

When. When you're not convincing us, but you're pointing out the thing that we already know, which is the tension.

Yeah.

And then you offer us.

I'm illuminating. You're in.

Illuminating the thing that we already know rather than trying to convince us or show something and then offer us just one or two ways to relieve the tension. And we rush towards them.

Yeah, that's right. Thank you. That is a perfect that. I love that. And that is what happened in the UK over the last month. The UK is ready to tip. The parents are fed up. And, you know, some. Some. Some mothers put up a site about delay smartphones, and, you know, and parents are rushing to it. So I think we're. We're there in America, but thank you for that. Thinking about, like, relieving tension rather than trying to change people's minds. Hey, Before. I don't know how much time we have, but let's be sure to talk about the workplace, because here's where I want to ask you.

Yes, let's talk about that. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Right. So you have this great. This great clip where you go, you explain what's happened to millennials, and, you know how. You know, because of the phones and the overprotection, all those things, they haven't learned to do things that are hard. They're not patient. And I forget what year you. You gave that. That was. It was before COVID It was.

I think. I think it went That, I mean, I was giving that answer for quite a while, but I think that clip went viral, I think in like 2017 or 2018.

Okay, so you were talking about millennials. Almost entirely. Millennials are those born between about 1981 and 1995 or six. Pew says 1996. Anyway, you're talking about people born in the 80s and early 90s. And all the things that you say in that are true, except the mental health piece, that is their levels of, their levels of depression, anxiety, were actually not higher than the previous generation. Everything you say about mental health is true about Gen Z, that is, and that might have been what you're referring to because you talked about how the suicide rate is up, and that is true. Wasn't up for millennials, was down for millennials. Gen X had very high rates of suicide. Millennials had much lower rates. And then it only starts going up around 2009. It only starts going up as Gen Z is, is coming in. So, so a lot of what you said, almost all what you said is true about, about the millennials. And in a sense, it's what every generation has said to some extent, what every generation has said about the younger one. Although some. I'm sorry, actually some of the instant gratification ones are unique to, to our time. Anyway, so all I wanted to say is you take all the things you said about the difficulties that managers are having working with millennials, they're far more true for Gen Z. Yeah, yeah. Gen Z is much more messed up in those ways than the millennials were.

So we'll probably cut this out. Was this a little inside baseball. But the, the. One of the things that frustrates me as somebody who studied cultural anthropology, which is a generation used to mean 20 years.

Right.

So, like, it was really easy to calculate, even though it's rough around the edges. So the, we start with the baby boomers because they're the, there's the easiest. You know, their parents came back from war, started having fun. 1945, 1946, they had a bunch of kids and 20 years late. So that's, that's your boomer. Plus 20 takes you to 1964, 1965, 1966, and then that's Gen X. And that's Gen X till about 1984, 85, 86. So some were younger, some are older. Like it's spanned a generation. And then, so Gen Y millennials is about 84ish to about 2004ish. And then, and then you keep adding 20 years. And for some reason I don't understand the why. Maybe it's just because it's pop culture. We never used to talk about, quote unquote, the generations, but we've never bifurcated or trifurcated, you know, Gen X into anything less than 20 years or the boomers into anything less than twice. But these modern generations were slicing them into five and ten year, you know.

That's right. No, well, that's right because. So Gene Twenge has an important book here called Generations and she makes the argument that many people assume that a generation is defined by something that happened in the world. So World War II happened. Boy, does that create a new generation. But what she shows is that perhaps a bigger influence, especially in the post war world, is the technology that we have as kids. And so since the technology is changing faster and faster, so are the generations.

So, so it's, it's. The way I've defined it is just shared experience as, as you're growing up. Like, you know, if you.

That's. Yeah, but it's, it's, it's. So I think I would actually say it as, as the Marshall McLuhan quote, the medium is the message.

Yeah.

So if you grew up on radio, that was one thing. But if you grew up on television, now you're more passive. McLuhan said you're more passive. And Neil Postman also, you, everything's entertainment. You sit there, you stare at the screen. That's what you do. And that changes a generation. And then you get, you know, then you get the early Internet. And that is going to change, you know, what people are doing, that's going to change them. And then you get social media becoming nasty. I mean, early social media wasn't so bad. It becomes nasty to, you know, 20, 10, 11, 12. So, so that's why generations are now much shorter than 20 years.

So anyway, so, but, you know, so even that's true. These things are poorly defined as to what the years are. But nonetheless, so, so, so I, but I, but, but broad strokes, I completely agree with you. You know, the, the thing that I find fascinating about this young generation at work is.

Very uncomfortable with discomfort.

Yep, absolutely.

Getting in trouble, being told you didn't do good work. You know, create, you know, the, how comfortable they are quitting without another job, which is entirely new to your, you and me. Like you and I couldn't imagine quitting a job without another job lined up. Yeah, you know, that's right. You have a series of dental appointments that you keep going to, although you're wearing A suit for those dental appointments, you know, and then eventually you quit. You know.

But that happens.

The other thing is the, for the generation which is rightfully so demanding that you will. You like having boundaries and telling people about your own boundaries, but seemingly having no respect for other people's boundaries. Yeah, there's that great irony. Respect my boundaries, but I'm allowed to not respect yours. Yeah. And this just. And I, and I think if you go through the patterns of all of these things, I think what it reveals is, is, is loose footedness, unsure, a great unsureness, you know, not 100% knowing who I am, where I stand, what the future is. And I think, I think uncertainty is one of the worst things you can give to someone. You know, this is how dictators rule. It's not, they're not always evil. They, they generate tremendous uncertainty. It was said of Saddam Hussein that when you got called to his palace, you didn't know if you're going to be executed or given a Mercedes.

Right? Oh my God. Yeah.

And so, and this is how con artists work, right? This is how con artists work, which is. Or master manipulators. Master manipulators. They're, they're nice one day and horrible the next and screaming at you and then showering you with love and, and it's the uncertainty in keeping you off balance that makes you so susceptible to control. Because if you're just mean, I just either hate you or leave you, you know?

Right, right.

And so I think that they're living in a, in a society where they're so battered around and there's such a lack of sure footedness that I think it has, I think it has these ripples that what we are complaining about, but they're really symptoms of something else. And I think it all boils down to self confidence. And if, if any parent, and we going right back to your work about social media and cell phones, if any parent cares about the, the self confidence of their children, please, I beg of you, reduce the app, the access to cell phones and social media.

That's right. Yeah, absolutely. But if you're going to take those things away, you must give them something to do that builds something to do. That's right. That's right. And that something to do should be hang out with other kids, do things with other kids. That's what they really need.

Yes, exactly. And I think the thing that we think builds people self confidence, just telling them they're great, that's not what does it, you know, letting them solve problems with, with Each other, letting them figure things out together, letting them fight, letting them resolve. You know, being a kid is difficult. It sucks. And it's especially being an adolescent. I mean, it's really hard. And we, we as parents want to coddle as much as we can. But there is. And you, you definitely know this. There is such thing as over coddling.

Well, that's right. I mean, kids are antifragile. And.

Let'S see. Oh, what was I gonna say about it?

They're built tough. You know, when your kid, like I always get a kick. The analogy is when a little kid falls over before they cry, they look at their parents.

Yeah.

And if the parent goes, oh, my God, the kid starts crying. And if the parent goes, you're fine, they just get up and keep playing. And it's amazing how they learn to react to the pressure and the stress.

That's right. That's right. And so when we became overprotective in the 80s and 90s. Yeah. We weakened their development. I just want to make. That's right. I want to make one point about self esteem, which is, it was a big word in the 70s and 80s, but psychologists, research psychologists are pretty wary of it because while self esteem is a real thing, you don't want to build up a child's self esteem. That's a really bad thing to do.

What you want to do is build up a child's capabilities. So the child then does things. And if the child achieves things, then they will have a good opinion of themselves. But you can't, you can't artificially say, you're great. I want to build up your self esteem. That's bad for your kids. So. And that is, you know, that is one of the things that's commonly said about, about the millennials, because in the 80s is we really, you know, as a culture, we really got into that. And a lot of progressive education still believes that. And I think it's. It's making things worse.

On that note, Jonathan, thank you so, so much. I could talk to you for hours. I just. There are so many loose ends that we haven't. That we haven't finished. And so many rabbits hole. I want to. Rabbit holes. I want to continue to go. Is it like surgeons general? Is it rabbit's hole?

You know.

Rabbit'S hole. That's good.

There's so many more rabbit holes. I want to go down with you. Truly, truly. Thanks for taking the time.

My pleasure, Simon. It was great fun.

If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts, subscribe. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, SimonSinek.com for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself. Take care of each other.