Is Social Media Giving Kids Anxiety? | Jonathan Haidt

Even if we never get any help from our legislators, which is quite possible at the national level, you can actually give your kid a childhood in which technology is sort of put back in its place as a feature of life, not as the dominant factor in life. And you can do that with summer camp, schools, and oh, encourage your kids to play sports, team sports.

Well, John, welcome to the Dr. D's Pharmacy podcast. I've been following your work for a long time and been very moved by your efforts to change our thinking around the way in which we need to deal with our childhood in America and increasingly around the globe because it's driving increasing rates of anxiety, depression, and that there's real connections to social media that have been evident from your research. And also that this isn't just a correlation, that there may be causal factors that are identified and that the prevalence of anxiety and depression and suicide among adolescents and children is dramatically increasing, doubling, tripling often. And it's not just an artifact. So I'd love to have you share how you kind of got into this, why this is such an important conversation now. And then we'll dive deep into some other factors that I think are also driving increasing rates of anxiety and depression, including our ultra-processed diets, which I talked about a lot on the podcast.

Yes. Oh, great. Well, thanks, Mark. Thanks so much for having me on. I've been so caught up for the last year in debates with other researchers about the mental health effects Does heavy social media use cause declines in mental health, especially for girls? But there are so many other effects. First of all, it's not just social media. It's the whole phone-based childhood. And it's not just mental health. There's also their educational outcomes, their cognitive developmental outcomes, and their physical health outcomes. And I have not been part of any conversation about the physical health outcomes. So I'm especially looking forward to talking about that with you. As for how I got into this, so this began as a side project. I'm a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business and my main research is on moral psychology and how that helps us to understand our political life, left versus right, polarization, incivility, all the craziness that America's going through now. But along the way, something strange began happening to college students in 2014. It wasn't there in 2012. College students in 2012 were all millennials, and mental health stats had been pretty steady for about 10 or 15 years. And college students did what we think college students do. They wanted to go out drinking and have fun. But the students coming in in 2014-2015 were different. And it showed up with very high rates of fragility, fear, concerns about words and books and speakers, as though ideas were going to be we're going to hurt them, ideas would be violence. And so my friend Greg Lukianoff first diagnosed this problem. He runs the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. And together we wrote up an article in the Atlantic originally called the Coddling of the American Mind about how overprotection, we'd overprotected kids, we weren't exposing them to normal toughening experiences. And as a result, it's as though they have no skin. Some of them seem to be just so easily hurt. We're not helping them by protecting them. And in that article, we just noted in passing, well, you know, the timing kind of works out for Facebook, like, you know, social media, this generation, they're the first to kind of hit puberty in the social media era. But we left it at that because we didn't know in 2015. So then Greg and I wrote it up into a book because the problem kept getting worse and worse and worse. And now we're beginning to have more information. Gene Twenge had published a book called iGen, and she pointed out at least the correlations that Heavy social media use is associated with depression and anxiety, whereas any activity that puts you in a group, in a real world group, as she pointed out, sports and religion. Teens who were doing sports, team sports or religion were protected from this. But the ones who were spending a lot of time on their phones and not with other people, they're the ones who were getting most depressed. Now again, that's a correlation. and also she had these amazing graphs about the timing showing, you know, mental health is steady, steady, steady, and then all of a sudden, right around 2012, 2013, you get a hockey stick, you get numbers going up. Now, Jeanne in her book, she only had like two or three years of data showing these numbers going up, because it takes a couple of years before.

The data comes out.

So I thought, wow, this looks really scary, but you know, if these numbers go down next year, Jeanne's gonna look awfully silly. and they didn't go down. They went up, and the next year they went up, and the next year they went up, and they've just been going up. I mean, sometimes it'll level off for a year or two, but it's been going up and up since 2013. So we have a major, and it's not just America, it's all the English-speaking countries for sure. It seems to be most of the developed world. Across the developed world, we're seeing suddenly in the early 2010s, teens are getting more depressed and anxious. And so this was a side project for me. But as I began to dig into it and to realize that it's international, to realize that more and more studies are coming out showing not just a correlation, but we're beginning to get experiments, experiments where you randomly assign one group of college students to reduce their social media for a month, another group doesn't, you see what happens. So once you have correlational studies and experimental studies, and you have massive eyewitness testimony, from Gen Z. Go find me. I cannot find, find me an essay online. Find me an essay anywhere by a member of Gen Z who defends the phones, who says, oh no, it's been great for us. Oh no, the phone-based life has been great. Don't take it away from us. You can't find that. But you find thousands of essays about how it destroyed me, it destroyed my net generation, destroyed my childhood. And we have massive eyewitness testimony from the teachers. The teachers all hate the phones. I mean, I don't know about all, but 90% in surveys say this is a problem, 80, 90%. same thing for school principals. So we have all these different kinds of evidence converging on the fact that this really rapid movement of childhood from normal sort of play and social interaction onto the phones is not just a correlate of the collapse of mental health around the world, teen mental health, but a cause.

Yeah. Well, you know, I think there was a sort of an attempt to rebut this by Candace Hodges in Nature, and you on X basically replied to that, kind of rebutting a lot of what she said, which was that there was no causal evidence. And you've talked about a lot of the data that you cite, which is both experimental and observational data that kind of lay out the reality that this is not just some correlation.

Yeah, that's right. So a few pieces to the argument. The first, as I said, there is experimental evidence and A meta-analysis came out six or eight months ago showing, yeah, some experiments show a big effect or an effect, some experiments don't. It's kind of up in the air. But my research partner and I, Zach Rausch, we're reanalyzing all the experiments. And actually, when you remove the short-term experiments, this is the key. Some of the experiments ask people to get off social media for a day or two days. And if you're addicted to something, Do you think quitting heroin or cocaine is a good idea? Well, yeah, but if you quit it for a day or two, it's going to be pretty bad. You have to wait. It takes Anna Lembke says three or four weeks, but I think we're seeing effects by a week or two. You're getting over the roughest part. So the trick is when you remove the one-day studies and you just look at those that went longer than a week, overwhelmingly they find that there are mental health benefits to getting off social media. So, Odger has said that I have only correlational evidence, which is false. I keep saying, no, look, here's the experimental evidence. And the other thing that I think is very powerful is that this happened around the world at the same time. And, you know, most people say, oh, height is trying to make us bark up the wrong tree. We're going to be looking into phones and banning phones for little kids. When what we should be looking at is, you know, X, Y, and Z. And X, Y, and Z is usually inequality and climate change and racism. Donald Trump and things like that. There's something about America.

Probably all of it adds to the soup for sure.

Well, fine, but what changed in Obama's second term? Why was it that during Obama's first term with the financial crisis, things were fine for teenagers? Mental health didn't change in his first term. Then all of a sudden, in his second term, what suddenly like racism and.

Or.

School shootings, that's the other thing that people say, 2012 was the Newtown massacre. So that does fit the timing, 'cause after that, kids had lockdown drills. Fine, if it was just the US, if 2012 was the turning point in the US, but not anywhere else, then I'd say, yeah, you know what? You could be right about that. But the fact that teenage girls start checking into psychiatric emergency wards at much higher rates, not just in the US, but in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, that's just not compatible with any other theory. No one can come up with another explanation that fits internationally other than the great rewiring of childhood that happened between 2010 and 2015.

And that rewiring that you're talking about essentially is the advent of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram that then drove- Not.

Well, we have to be more specific 'cause Facebook comes out in 2004 and it's 2003.

That's when they put the like and the share buttons, right?

That's right. So we have, let's just trace it out. And actually, this is very, very important for people understanding why this time is different. So the internet comes out, the public gets access to it in the mid 1990s. I remember the first time I saw a web browser was Alta Vista. And I almost dropped to the floor in shock and awe. Like, you mean I can just ask for something and it comes to me instantly? I don't have to get in my car and go to the library. Like anything, like omniscience. That's crazy. It was totally crazy. It was magical. And in the 90s, the teenagers who were Gen Z, I mean, who were Millennials, they took to the internet. They were on AOL and AIM, and their mental health was fine. The early internet was decentralized. It was fun, it was exploratory, it was amazing. And so we all think, well, this is good. And our kids are spending time on it, and that's good, we think. And then you get into the 2000s. Now remember, everything's dial up. So there's no video, slow connection speeds. It's just like text. You didn't have photographs early on. Now you get into the 2000s, now you get fiber optic cable laid everywhere in the world and speeds are speeding up and you get social media. Now we're beginning to get a more centralized internet. Many young people won't know that the internet was not dominated by three or four companies for the first decade or so. It was a wide open space. Now, three or four companies basically control our kids' consciousness. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, a few others account for, I think, the majority of what they're doing with their day.

It's basically TikTok, Google, Meta, and... That's right.

That's right. And especially the short videos. That's right.

Yeah.

X is not so important for adolescents. It's there and it's important for democracy, but it's not, X does not seem to be playing a role in the mental health issues. It's the short videos and video content especially. Anyway. So 2003, you get Facebook, but it's only for college students at first, and it's not particularly toxic. In the late 2000s, you begin to get, so you get the iPhone in 2007, which is an amazing digital Swiss Army knife. It's not harmful. There are apps, but there's no App Store, no push notifications. So all the way up to 2008, 2009, the situation is not particularly toxic. It's getting interesting, it's getting more engaging, but it's not It's not like what we know now. And teen mental health is fine up until 2011. There's no sign of a problem before 2011. In 2009, you get the like and the retweet buttons. And now Facebook and Twitter are able to algorithmize everything because you get share buttons as well. So retweet, share. So now social media becomes much more about the newsfeed. Before then, they were called social networking systems. You just connect with people. You see their page. They see yours. Connecting people is generally a good thing. But now it's about the newsfeed, which is algorithmicized to fit you and keep you on. Facebook literally rewarded its engineers for increasing engagement time. That was the metric. If you can keep people on longer, you get paid. You get a bonus. You get a bonus. Yeah. And so, you know, very smart people, they did it. They found ways to keep young people, especially on longer. And that was the newsfeed and the algorithms. Much more emotionally engaging content is selected. So, At the beginning of 2010, very few teens have a smartphone. They mostly have flip phones. They're using Facebook on their dad's computer. They don't have high-speed internet. It's not dial-up at that point, but it's not very fast. They don't have Instagram. It doesn't exist on January 1, 2010. There's no front-facing camera on January 1, 2010. In 2010, you get the front-facing camera and Instagram. takes a couple of years before everyone has it. In 2012, Facebook buys Instagram. It doesn't change it at first, but that's when it gets huge publicity. That's when girls' social life, teen girls' social life, moves on to Instagram. It wasn't on it, it wasn't there before. The point is that by 2015, the great majority of teens in developed countries have a smartphone with a front-facing camera, and an Instagram account and high-speed internet with an unlimited data plan. In 2010, you could not spend 10 hours a day on your flip phone. I mean, that would just be hell. But in 2015, you can spend 10 hours a day on your smartphone. And now that's about the average. 8 to 10 hours a day is what teens now spend on their phones. That includes video games. But it's mostly phone and it's mostly consuming videos. So that's why I call it the great rewiring of childhood. In 2010, kids used flip phones to connect and see each other in person. In 2015, that's largely, well, it's not gone, but it reduces greatly. And life is now, you sit on your bed scrolling and then your mom calls you down for dinner. That's now, that's a lot of teen life now.

Yeah, it's pretty depressing just to talk about this because it's happening almost invisibly in a way that's sort of at a subtext in our culture. And the consequences haven't fully been realized in downstream effects on the physical and mental health of the kids who are now growing up in this generation and the consequences of that for their behavior. And I think the data is pretty striking. I mean, the data basically showed that this is JAMA Pediatrics from 2005 to 2017, the rate of adolescents reporting symptoms of major depression increased by 52%. Those 12 to 17 who experienced a major depression in that same period went from 8.7% to 15.7% from 2005 to 2019. And the heavy use of social media also has been correlated in Lancet papers and others and then to be really correlated or even potentially causal with this. And so the costs of this are staggering. I mean, just economically, the cost of depression and mental health is the major driver of the total cost of care to society, not actually hospitalization and medication, but just when you count disability and loss of quality of life years, it's the single biggest driver of cost to society. And it's just beginning. It feels like we're just at the beginning of this. And what's coming around the corner is even worse because we haven't fully realized the consequences of what's just happened over the last, I mean, 10 years, right? 10, 15 years. It's very quick. And your work really sort of underscores that this is an issue, but you also talk about what needs to be done to kind of solve it. And some of the things you talk.

About.

Seem easy, but they also seem ambitious. In other words, getting phones out of schools, no phones for teenagers until they're 16, no smartphones. you know, making sure kids get out and play. I mean, all the stuff that we did when we were kids, I mean, you and I are about the same age. And I mean, you know, I was like seven years old and had my bicycle and left after school and my parents didn't see me till dinner and run around the neighborhood. I mean, and, and yet, you know, they seem very simple in terms of these, these Solutions, but I, I can't imagine how you, how you imagine they're going to get implemented because of the resistance and the change in behavior.

No, no, it's actually amazingly easy. I'm shocked at how easy this is. I've been involved in a lot of efforts at social change. I ran a gun control group in college, a handgun control group in college, and that was completely hopeless. We made no progress. It's very difficult to persuade people of things. But here, the reason why we're going to be successful, why we're being successful, is that we don't have to persuade people. They already know. Almost everyone who's a parent sees this. Almost all the principals and teachers see it, the child psychology, everyone sees it. So I don't have to persuade anyone. What I had to do in my book is give a clear diagnosis. Here's exactly what happened, when it happened, and why. Here are the psychological mechanisms. Here are the developmental pathways that get blocked. Here's the way puberty works. Here's the way the brain changes during puberty. So people needed a kind of a more complete understanding of what's happening. They needed to understand the history. how the internet was amazing in the 90s, but the internet we have now is nothing like the internet we had in the 90s. And then people, the key thing that I think I did in the book that's really bringing about collective action is I analyzed this all in terms of collective action problems. Why is it that 10-year-olds now have phones, have their own smartphone? And the answer is because your 10-year-old comes home in fifth grade and says, Mom, everyone else has a phone. I need an iPhone. And you say, well, no, but I gave you a phone watch or I gave you a flip phone. You can call me if you need. No, no, no. Everyone has an iPhone. They're making fun of me. And then you give in and you give your kid an iPhone. Well, once 90% of the kids have an iPhone, then everyone has to have one or they will be left out. So we got into this so deeply because it's a collective action problem. And this is the key to why it's so painful for kids because social media is socially addictive. Now, it is biologically addictive to some heavy users. Dopamine circuits get rewired. For some, we can say it's biologically addictive. But for the great majority of teens, they're on it not because their brain says they must be on it to feel normal, but because everyone else is on it. They can't quit. I talk to my students at NYU. They waste huge amounts of time. They don't want to waste all this time. I say, why don't you just delete it? I can't because everyone else is on it. I have to know what's going on. So these things are socially addictive. And so what I did in the book is I said, once we understand the nature of collective action problems where if everyone is on it and you step off alone, you bear a cost and you don't make anything better for anyone else. But what if 10% of people get off? Well, now they have each other. Now they're not alone. They have each other. And then now it becomes possible to imagine not having a phone in fifth grade. And now some parents will say, no, you're not, you know, there's a pledge called the wait until eighth pledge, which is actually wait until after eighth, wait until ninth, really, because my argument has been we have to get kids through middle school. Middle school is early puberty, really important period of brain development, the worst possible period to hook kids up to TikTok and have weirdos around the world being their source of cultural information. We've got to keep this out of kids' lives, at least until high school. So the wait until eighth pledge is a way to solve the collective action problem. Parents sign up when their kid is in elementary school. They say, I'm not going to get my kid a phone until ninth grade. Smartphone, you can give them a phone watch, give them a flip phone. And then once 10 people, I think it's 50 people in each school sign up, something like that, then the pledge goes into effect. And so this is why we are being successful. And I used to say we're going to be successful, but that was back in March and April. Now it's clear we are being successful. And the reason- that's remarkable. Is because schools all over the country, everyone hated the phones. I mean, it's impossible to teach. When I mean, imagine when you and I were kids, if they said, you know, you can bring in your TV set, you can bring in your VCR, you can bring in your paint to your paint by numbers kit, you can bring the car, you bring in anything, everything. Have it right with you in your pocket on your desk while I'm trying to teach you. Go ahead. Like insanity.

Yeah.

So so phone free schools is happening very, very fast. Los Angeles school districts is are going phone free. New York City is going to announce in a couple of weeks the state of Virginia. I forget which other states have done truly phone free. Some states just say, oh, you can't use your phone in class, which is nonsense because then you have to use it between classes. So that's terrible. But some states are going truly phone free from bell to bell. You turn on your phone in the morning. This is happening at lightning pace. I have never seen social change happen this fast. So on the schools, we already are successful. Every day I'm getting notes from parents saying, thank you. Your book gave me the courage to let my seven-year-old ride his bicycle to his friend's house. or ride it up and down our street. And now other kids are riding their bicycles. So it's a collective action problem. And parents are ready for change, not all, but a lot are ready for change. And once they start and their kids are out having fun together, more parents are going to say, oh, it's kind of creepy for you to just be sitting here all day long scrolling. Why don't you go out and play? And I think that's going to happen over the next year or two.

That's incredible, John. I mean, I think It's hard to imagine something happening that fast, but it seems like there's a sort of global awareness that there's a problem and you point a path to a solution that people are jumping on. The interesting thing is what's going to happen between when they leave school and they go home and they go to bed. Because that doesn't stop the problem. They have a smartphone when they get home. So do you think that- no, but.

It kind of does. It kind of does. Because the the issue with the smartphone is that you have it with you always. And so, because anything you can do on a smartphone, you can do on a computer. If you have a laptop at home and, you know, most nowadays, you know, middle school kids, they need a computer, access to a computer. So if you have, you know, ideally, you know, if parents have like one desktop computer in the living room or the kitchen or someplace, I think that's great. That's very safe. The kid's not going to get into porn. They're not going to get seduced by extortionist rings. So having access to a computer is great, but that's just going to be for an hour or two a day at most. When you have the phone, you can get 16 hours a day. And that's what some of the kids are getting. 16 hours a day. How is that possible? Because when they're on the bus, they're doing this. When they're in class, they're doing this. When they're on the bathroom, they're doing this. One teenager told me, Now that iPhones are waterproof, kids are taking them into the shower so you can keep scrolling or doing things while you're taking a shower. Okay, so can't we just delay that till high school? Can't we just let kids get through early puberty without having that?

Yeah, it's quite striking. You know, I think you talk a lot about kids, but I would also sort of point out that there's been a significant increase in depression and anxiety among adults as well. It's not just kids.

And I wonder- Let's talk about that. Wait, wait, just tell me what you've seen because What Zach Rausch and I do is we have all these graphs of all the data sets we can find, all the longitudinal studies. Some of them allow us to break it up by age. And what we generally find is that when you track levels of, at least I've only done depression anxiety, I haven't done everything. When you look at depression anxiety, for people over 40 or 50, there's no change. They are, of course, we all feel frazzled. We feel there's too much stuff coming in. We're all hooked on our phones. But levels of depression anxiety are not really rising for older people. For Gen Z, it's a hockey stick. Gen Z is born 1996 and later, hockey stick, huge. For the millennials, it's in between. And I need to try to break it up by early millennial versus late millennial. It might just be that those born in millennial generation is usually 1981 through 1995. And it might just be that it's the millennials who were born in the early 90s, they had this stuff when they were late teenagers. It might just be them. But as far as I can see, for depression, anxiety, It's really a Gen Z and a little bit millennial thing. It's not a Gen X and older thing. But you tell me, do you know specific?

I mean, the WHO basically says between 2005 and 2015, there was about an 18% increase in depression. In kids, it was more, right? In youth, it was 52% between 2005 and 2017. So it's certainly more in kids. I agree.

And it's much more in girls. Wait. So you can say, if you look at a nation, you'll see an increase. But if you must always break this stuff up by gender, always, because sometimes the effect is entirely limited to girls, sometimes it's just bigger in girls. So the increase for younger females is gigantic. The increase for other groups is not nearly so large. Yeah.

And how do you sort of see this playing out in the future of our country and society? as kids sort of are hooked on social media, on the internet that's affecting them. And hopefully your efforts will actually lead to sort of a reduction of this because of the prohibitions in school. But where do you see this going? I mean, it just seems like we're heading kind of a slow motion disaster.

We were heading in a slow motion disaster. And by 2019, when I was really beginning to get into this, and Gene Twenge was writing about this, We were beginning to point out, like, wait, we just did this gigantic uncontrolled experiment. And now the results are in. Look, things are going really, really badly, 2019. And then COVID hits. And everybody, you know, in 2019, I was saying, what kids really, really need is a lot less time on screens and a lot more time outside playing. That's what we need to do. And COVID comes, what do we do? How about a lot more time on screens and no time outside playing? Because we thought you could get COVID outdoors and you can't touch people, you know, We got it all wrong with kids. We really made COVID so much worse for kids than it had to be.

But that confused us all.

And of course, the kids were on screens all day long. They had to be on Zoom, and it was really discouraging and dispiriting, but that's what they had to do. And so now that COVID has receded, now we can see the wreckage. We see the gigantic rates. And while some numbers come down a little bit from the peak in COVID, but in a sense, they're really just returning to the trend line that would have been if COVID never happened. So now it's becoming obvious. I don't think it's going to be a slow motion disaster from here on in. I think we're at a cultural turning point and we're now seeing this is not light playful stuff that lets kids be creative. This is not that. That's what Facebook and others have sold us on. Sure, they can do that. That is part of the experience. That is true. But a lot of it is talking with strange men who are trying to get photos of you in a bikini or who are trying to sextort you or trying to sell you things. It's complete insanity that we let, as I say in the book, we have overprotected our children in the real world. We have underprotected them online. Both were mistakes. We have to reverse both, and we're going to. So I think we're at a cultural turning point where we're seeing this is not this light, playful thing. This is not the early internet that I remember from my 20s. We need to think of this much more like alcohol or tobacco or automobiles or gambling or strip clubs or whatever. There are all sorts of things. that we let adults do, but we don't let children do. And in general, the reason why we put age gates on, the reason why we block children from doing things, is either sex, violence, addiction, or physical harm, or other kinds of illness. Those are five reasons. If something's dangerous for kids, or it's sex and violence, or addiction, we tend to say, no, 12-year-olds can't do this. Even 16-year-olds can't do this. You have to be 18 or 21 to do this. Social media hits all five. You get addiction, you get extraordinary, I mean, the amount of hardcore pornography that some kids are watching is unbelievable. So, you know, you get addiction, sex, violence, you know, beheading videos, these YouTube, there's one called the Gauntlet, are you tough enough to watch 20 videos that get increasingly horrific, people being dismembered while still alive? I mean, it's horrible, horrible stuff. Anyway, so I think we're at a cultural turning point where we're going to see this is just wildly inappropriate for 10-year-olds.

And Cenk speaks to a sort of a bigger disconnect in society. And I think the whole social cohesion that we had that felt like we were all Americans, that we have some differences of opinions, but they were all sort of rowing in the same direction has now been completely assembled. And it seems as though we're in this polarized, divisive society where people aren't able to have civil discourse, they're not able to have difference of opinion, you know, John Stuart Mill's basic thesis on liberty that we should basically be able to have dissent and different opinions and- GT: Right, it makes you sound- Controversy. Yeah, are gone out the window and we get canceled for saying something, we get ripped apart on social media, we get shamed and blamed and it's a little bit terrifying to navigate. I mean, I feel this myself when I'm thinking about it. Do I want to post my opinion on my social media platform about XY topic? I think twice about it because I don't want to make myself a target of attacks. I don't want to offend people. I also don't want to be able to sort of create conflict where it doesn't need to be. But I also feel like it's almost impossible to have a conversation and be curious.

That's right. Yeah, so let's understand, so we can approach this two ways. I'll start by looking at different kinds of connection and then we'll talk about historically what happened. So in general, in the course of human history, connecting people has been a good thing. So building roads, you know, generally has been a good thing. Trade has helped, brings up civilization. The postal service was a great innovation. You know, it can be abused, you know, there can be scams through the mail, but the postal service connecting people is really good. You know, telephones, telegraph, all these things, they had downsides. But in general, the world has gotten smarter and more prosperous when we've stepped up a level in connectivity. I think you could say the same about email. For all that it kind of dominates our lives now and there's too much of it, You know, this is like, I can connect to you for free and I can send you information for free. Like, this is all good. And from the point of a democratic theory, like so much in the social sciences about what does it take to have a good democracy and what are some of the processes? And so connecting people generally is good. But what if you connect them in this way? You can, whatever you say, When, as you say it, you're saying it from the center of the Roman Coliseum. And the fans, the stands are full of people who want to see blood. And so you say something, and then 50 people come out to fight you over it. And they're hacking away at you, and they're trying to stab you and throw nets over you and burn you. And, you know, and, you know, maybe you survive. But, and then next, and that lasts for 15 seconds. And then someone else says something, and people come a different set come out to try to kill him, and that lasts for 15 seconds. You know, and every day there's a few big ones that everyone is tuning into. Is this good for democracy or bad for democracy? Well, obviously this is nothing like the kind of connectivity we need to have the wisdom of crowds, to have the sort of the John Stuart Mill wisdom. He of course was an 18th century British philosopher who said, he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. That we have to hear our critics, we have to hear our opponents, in order to even know what we think, in order to know what's right, we have to be challenged. So all that goes out the window. So that is one of the reasons why I'm extremely alarmed about the future of American democracy in particular. And in fact, I was writing a book on that. That's what I set out to do, was write a book called Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share. And I got a contract to write that book in 2021. And I started working on it in 2022. And I thought, okay, let me start this off. I have all this data on what happened to teenagers when they moved their social life onto social media. Let me write chapter one, let's trace that, what happened to them? And so I wrote up this chapter and it was so shocking and with all these graphs and I found it wasn't just America, it was all over the world. It was many, many countries in the world. Then I said, okay, well, I can't just leave it at that. I can't just say, here's chapter one, gigantic youth mental health crisis all over the world. Now let's move on to democracy. what happened when we moved our so, you know, no, I need to explain, like, how does this change? How does it affect childhood? What did kids have to do in childhood? So I wrote chapter two. And then I said, I need a whole chapter for the girls story because girls are really suffering here and it's different from boys. So I need a chapter on the girls and I knew a lot about that, a lot of research on that. And I wrote that. And then I said, I can't, you know, I have to figure out the story for boys because they're also in big trouble, not quite in the same way. And we can come back to that. So once I had four chapters in this democracy book, I realized, wait, this is completely insane. I can't do a 500 page book that comes out in three years. I have to split the book in two. I have to write one book on what social media and the phone-based life is doing to young people. And then I'll- This is the anxiety center of the democracy book. yeah, exactly. So that became those four chapters, that became the core of the anxious generation. And I was going to return to writing the life after Babel this fall after the anxious generation came out. But things are going so well and change is happening so fast and so much research is needed to guide that change and to respond to the critics who say, oh, it's just correlation. Oh, you know, there's nothing to see here. Oh, the kids are all right. That I've decided to spend the next three years just doing this. I'm going to really focus on this. I think we can change childhood around the world in three years. Not completely, I just mean change our expectations. Three years from now, it'll be as absurd to give a 10-year-old Instagram and TikTok as it is to give them a cigar or a marijuana joint or a day in a casino. It's just obviously not a thing that you do.

Yeah, the executives of Coca-Cola don't feed their kids Coca-Cola.

Exactly. That's right. And the people in Silicon Valley don't let their kids use the products. And a lot of them send their kids to the Waldorf School, where there is zero technology in the classroom. It's all analog. They have a computer room so you can learn how to program. But yeah, the fact that drug dealers don't give the drugs to their kids.

Is, I think, pretty good evidence that the drugs are bad for kids.

Yeah, my kids went to Waldorf. We didn't have television at all. Oh, wow. So tell me about it. So is it really true that there.

Was no technology in the classroom? It was all analog? Well, my kids are older, so they're in their 30s. Yes, it's all, it still is. Yeah, still, it's totally analog. I mean, it's a little bit, I would say, not Luddite, but there's elements where it's a little bit slow. And I think they're focused too much on art and music and not enough on the intellectual development of the kids and reading and writing and math and so forth. But it depends on the kid. Some kids flourish in that. Other kids don't. you know, my daughter was kind of bored, so she would bring books. She wouldn't have her smartphone, but she would literally bring books and read them under the desk. So she was a word. But it. But I think the whole idea of not having technology, making kids play, making them be in nature, that was a huge value for me, for my children. And I think. Okay, you know, it was something that. That I think, you know, impacted them so that they're. They're not in that world. But I think, you know, what. What I'm kind of. really concerned about is, you know, the other piece of this that we really haven't touched on, which is, you know, what are potential other causes of this social sort of disruption we're seeing now and the fragmentation? And, you know, I spent a lot of my life work looking at food and the food system and its impact on our health and not just physical health but mental health. And then I think when you look at the data on this, it's quite striking that There is evidence that because about 67% of children's diet is ultra-processed food. Oh my God.

Is that you're talking calorie-wise or weight-wise?

Calorie-wise.

Calorie-wise. Wow.

62/3. 67% of adults. Yeah. It's 60% of adults. Incredible. And ultra-processed foods are relatively new in the last 50 years. They're basically deconstructed science projects that don't have the same ability to influence the body as real food and they actually cause dysregulation of neurochemistry, they create brain inflammation. they lead to massive nutritional deficiencies like omega-3s and B vitamins, which are essential for mood and cognitive function. They drive inflammation, which creates brain inflammation. And we now know that inflammation of the brain is actually what underlies a lot of anxiety and depression. It causes metabolic dysfunction and blood sugar, which affects the health of the gut microbiome is affected by it, all of which is linked to mental health issues. So it seems to me that there's these two forces, you know, our food system and the, and sort of advent of social media that have really kind of collided in this moment in time to drive massive disruption. And I don't think it's just anxiety, depression in kids. I think it's just the greater social disconnection we're seeing and the inability to have civil discourse, the inability to actually talk to people and neighbors, talk to neighbors. It's something that's deeply concerning to me. And I think, you know, I don't know how we deal with the, the part around the sort of divisiveness and the way that we have this sort of digital persuasion economy that engages people based on their worst based instincts and attacks our limbic system all day long. And I don't know, I mean, what you're doing seems to be like a first step around children, but it seems like a bigger problem in society and a bigger threat to democracy. So I'm wondering how you think about one, this sort of how food intersects with what you're talking about, and also how as a society we begin to think differently about what we need to do both on a policy level and an individual level to sort of combat this and start to create bridges and connections. Because for longevity, you know, I think we talked about a little bit before the podcast, you know, one of the key things for longevity and for health is your social relationships and connections. And that you're more likely to, for example, have a heart attack, be obese, have some serious illness or die if you're lonely, then almost anything else. It's worse than smoking cigarettes. Right. And our society just sort of fosters that level of disconnection. So maybe you could sort of chat a little bit about your thoughts.

Oh, no, I'd love to. My God, this is what I've been thinking about for 20 years now. So first, let me say, for all, you know, this is an incredibly exciting time to be a social scientist. Of course, it's exciting to be in.

Robotics or- Because society is in disaster.

-It'S going to hell. We have a complicated problems that intersect in the ways that you were just saying. This is not just a one-factor story. There are all these things going on. So let me just say a few things. One is, so Zach Rauch and I, we maintain a document. So we have all these Google documents that lay out all the studies we can find. And if listeners go to anxiousgeneration.com/reviews, we have all kinds of documents. One of them is the alternate hypotheses. document. Because for five years now, people have been saying, oh, no, it's not that. It's SSRIs. It's the fact that suddenly kids are getting SSRIs. That's what's causing this. Or they say, or it's electromagnetic radiation, or it's, there's all these ideas people have. And in that, there are two, I think, that really stand out in the two that you mentioned. One is the ultra-processed food. I'm hearing more and more about that. Sapien Labs just had, they put out a report, I think, last year. showing a huge, you know, huge, correlational study, but around the world. And you just laid out all these mechanisms, especially inflammation, so that we can see a clear causal pathway by which that could happen. The question there would be, was it a gradual increase in ultra-processed foods from the 50s all the way through today? Or were there any periods of inflection points when, like, suddenly the total calories, increased, like not linearly, or when some new substance came in, whether corn sugar or whatever. So first let's just start with that and then we'll move on to the social one. How has the American diet changed that might be compatible with this finding on mental health that things were really unchanged from the late 90s through 2011? No change really in adolescent mental health. And then boom, 2013, 2012, 2013, everything goes to hell, especially for the girls. how did our food system change over those 50 years? Well, I mean, I think, you know.

What happened is sort of in the 70s, we started, you know, we started back in the 50s with sort of processing of food and, you know, Betty Crocker being an imagination and spam.

And spam was back earlier.

Yeah. Fleischmann's margarine, you and I grew up.

In the era of Tang and Fleischmann's margarine. Oh, my God.

Those margarine people, I can't get, if you think it's butter, but it's not.

It's not. Right. Exactly. What is Fleischmann's? No, it's Chiffon. If you think of Chiffon, it's Chiffon. But yeah, they all have them where our heads are full of car salesmen and margarine commercials.

Yeah, exactly. And then in the 70s, the government started getting involved in food policy under McGovern and starting to set dietary guidelines. And there was just a lot of maneuvering by the food industry. And then we got the food pyramid in '92. and that food pyramid essentially said we should be eating a very low-fat diet with the base of our diet being refined starches and sugars and carbohydrates. So, carbs. Yeah, 6 to 11 servings of rice bread, serum pasta a day. And that led to this hockey stick rise in obesity and diabetes and some resistance. And so now we're seeing, you know, when I was a kid, there was that one chubby kid in the class, you know, now it's 20% of the kids are obese, not overweight, obese 40, plus almost 45% are overweight. Nearly half our kids in this country are overweight. and, and that, that's not just a, a physical sort of appearance problem. It's a, it's a physiological problem that drives inflammation throughout the body, including the brain, and it's been linked to, to sort of mood disorder. So I, I think it's all related. And, and, of course, you know, when kids are on their phones, they're not exercising, they're not moving, they're not playing, they're not running around on their bike like we were. And it just are all compounds of problems. So I, I, I think you know, there's also been interventional studies using diet. For example, in a book I wrote called food fix, I talk about how, for example, in juvenile detention centers, where there's a lot of violence, when they change the diet from a traditional processed diet, they're feeding these kids to a whole foods diet, then violence went down by 97% in 75, 97%. The restraints went down by 75. Suicide went down.

Just from changing the food, just from changing the food to whole foods. Amazing.

100% reduction in suicides, which is the third leading cause of death in that age group of adolescents and boys. So there's interventional data that's quite compelling around this. There's also a lot of population data around it. So I think that these two trends are key. I'm working in Washington on food policy to try to shift this, but it's a monstrous problem because you've got the Goliath of industry, both on the internet, right? Google, Meta, and X and all those sort of company, TikTok, that are driving this. And then you've got, on the other hand, all the giant food companies. So there's really only kind of probably a handful of CEOs that are driving so much of the problem. And they're not incented to do the right thing. They're incented to do the wrong thing. And so are you seeing that policy shift has to drive this as well? Because it seems like you're working more on a grassroots level with parents and schools and local communities and Yeah.

So, that's so interesting because we don't usually put food in the same categories like tobacco, alcohol, gambling.

It is. It's very right. By the way, 14% of kids and adults are by the definition of food addiction. This is the Yale food addiction scale developed by Kelly Brownell are addicted to food, biologically addicted to food and affects.

The same limbic center. I mean, we're all addicted in the sense, I mean, I love food.

I'm talking about the physiological responses that drive behavior that are defined in a very strict way that include withdrawal. Compulsive use. Compulsive use. There's a whole series of scientifically validated metrics that are looking at food addiction as not just people who like ice cream like I do, but people who just can't stop eating or who are truly biologically addicted, because it affects the nucleus accumbens in the brain, which is the addiction center. The reward centers. Yeah, the reward centers.

Just like the dopamine hits you get from social media, you're getting those from sugar and processed foods. I see, I see. Okay, so let's, so very close parallels. You've got giant companies driving this effect. It's a mass effect. It's a massive alteration of the ecosystem within which kids are growing up. It occurred more slowly, as you said, it kind of begins in the '50s, And I guess if you have one hostess cupcake a day, but your mom is cooking baked chicken at night, one hostess cupcake is fine. But at a certain point, it goes from 10% of your calories to 50, 70. You said 77 now.

67, yeah.

67, right. So, two-thirds. But do you have any data, or could we find any data on whether it was straight liner, whether did something happen in the 2010s or the late 2000s that increased kids consumption?

I think it was just increase in products, increase in marketing, increase in targeting kids, increase in very subversive social media advertising. I write about this in the book, but the social media companies allowed the food industry to embed within games and other things advertising for processed food. So the kids would see, you know, five billion impressions a year of crap for, it wasn't even on a regular TV commercial or it wasn't in traditional marketing. It was all this subversive marketing to social media that was done.

So that would be fascinating to look into because often researchers don't know how to break it down that way. Like maybe something did change in the early 20s because especially for boys, the boys story is a little bit different. I'll just say it briefly here. The girls, it's really clear social media is really harmful to them. they go on it, they can't get off because all the other girls are on them. Constant social comparison, it's much harder for them to give it up. Boys are on social media and a lot of bad things happen to them, but they're not as addicted to it as the girls are. For boys, the story is that the video games and the porn has gotten so good and so available, and you couldn't have that in the year 2000. There wasn't the high speed. You couldn't do that. But it's only in the early 2010s that.

Remember my dad used to have Playboy magazine.

I'd sneak.

To check it out.

Exactly, that's right. It left something to the imagination and it did show five guys putting their whatever into these orifices. So the boys' story is they're sort of gradually disengaging from the real world, beginning in the 70s and 80s. They're withdrawing from school. School gets increasingly feminized. It's for girls' virtues. Girls are just better at school. They get better grades. more likely to go to college, more likely to graduate from college. Richard Reeves has written about this. So boys are kind of gradually withdrawing. And then the video, once you get video over the internet, high speed, now the video games in the point is so good that the boys are really spending a lot of time there and they're having fun. They're enjoying it. But they're changing their dopamine systems. They're getting hooked. They're not doing much of anything else. They're not developing skills that would turn them into adults. So if we check in on kids when they're 14, we're going to find the girls are more miserable than the boys. But if we check in on them when they're 28, which is what the oldest Gen Z are, what we're going to find, I think what we do find, is that the girls are much more likely to have gone to college, much more likely to have graduated from college and gotten a job. The boys are substantially more likely to have not gone to college and to be living at home with their parents. So at 28, I don't know for sure, but it might be a reversal where The girls are doing better than the boys, even though they're going to be still more anxious than the boys. Well, not necessarily because now the boys are kind of losers. They've kind of stepped out of life. They know they're losers. And so that actually causes anxiety. So I don't actually know.

We need to be looking more at what's happening to kids and to young people in their 20s. Yeah, well, this has to get fixed because we're heading down a pretty bad direction. I wanted to sort of wrap up with the conversation around society and democracy as a whole because the consequences of what's happened to our children and even to our society as a whole is threatening our future, our democracy. And you write a lot about that. And in fact, you wrote an article in Atlantic that was quite compelling. And everybody should definitely check out, which was around this topic. And it was.

It was, the title was, why the Past 10 Years of American Life have Been Uniquely Stupid.

Yeah, right. That's right. And, and, and that's a very kind of, depressing title. But the thing I want to end on is why is that true? And then why is there hope? And is there are we just, or is there not hope?

Yeah, sure, sure. So this is a good way to look at this, and it's sort of harkening back to the beginning of our conversation about democracy. When I forget who was the first person to use the word the American experiment. I know George Washington. use the term that America is an experiment. And we talk about the American experiment. And what that means, the experiment is, can people govern themselves? And if you go back to Europe in the 18th century, the Europeans all had kings. And they thought, at least the nobles, they thought, you can't govern yourselves. The people are a rabble. The people will just vote themselves more money. You can't do that. You have to have A wise leader, you know, and our founding fathers said, no, we're going to try it. Now, we know that every previous democracy has gone up in smoke. We know the problems. You know, you get demagogues rousing the passion of the people, but we're going to design a complex system that will regulate that. And they wrote a lot about the virtues needed for democracy, for a republic, for a liberal democracy or republic. And the virtues include the ability to have civil dialogue and some degree of openness and moderation and some, you know, respect for the rules of the game. And so they knew, as Ben Franklin said when asked what kind of government the Constitutional Convention gave us, he said, A republic, if you can keep it. And so that's the question, can we keep it? And if you think about it as an experiment in self-government, governance. And now you look at childhood. When you and I were out on our bicycles with friends, and sometimes there'd be arguments or fights, sometimes there were even conflicts between one group of kids and another group of kids, we had to work that all out. And that's, those are the skills of democracy, being self-governing. So a free range childhood where kids are out without adult supervision, that's how you become self-governing. And until the 1990s, American children learned how to be self-governing before they turned 18. Now they can vote at 18, and they've learned how to be self-governing as individuals, and now they can function in larger groups in their town. They can vote national elections. But what began to happen in the 90s was we really cracked down on childhood freedom. We got afraid, partly because of the media ecosystem and 24-hour news cycles about, you know, kidnapped kids. and partly because we were losing trust in our neighbors. That's the big other piece to this. We stopped letting kids out in the 90s. And by the early 2000s, we got the phenomena of if you send your eight-year-old to the store, some neighbor might call the police because no one had seen an unaccompanied eight-year-old in 20 years. So we basically said, by the early 2000s, we said, how about if we don't give you any experience in being self-governing until you're 18? then we'll send you off to college where you'll pressure the college to be your parental unit and to protect you from everything, including books, words, speakers, and ideas. So how about now you don't really become self-governing until you're 21, and then you go off to industry where some of them will pressure the companies to take care of them in that way. In other words, if the American experiment of self-governance is to succeed, we must give children hundreds of thousands, millions of opportunities for each child Hundreds of thousands to practice self governance from the time they're six or seven all the way through young adulthood. And that's my fourth norm. So just to repeat the four norms that can break this cycle, and you said, Is there hope? Yes, there's hope. With four norms, we can break the cycle. We can make major improvements to youth mental health. We can have self-governing young people. And so the four norms are no smartphone before 14, No social media before 16, phone free schools, and far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. If we do those four things, we're going to find that our kids are going to be much more competent, comfortable, capable, happy, they'll be better democratic citizens. I don't mean to blame them for any of this mess. Gen Z bears no responsibility for the mess we're in. That was all done by older people and technologies and companies. But we have to stop doing what we're doing to childhood. We have to give kids a human childhood with a huge amount of face-to-face experience and very little of their time spent governed by a few major companies that control their attention all day long.

Yeah, I would say probably the biggest thing that influenced me as a child was going to camp.

Yes.

I had the privilege of going to camp.

I would go for two two months.

Starting at like seven years old. Okay. And that was tremendous because I got away from my parents. I got to navigate the world on my own. I got to be with other kids. I got to be in the concentrated play. It led to a sense of, you know, Independence and also, you know, self-agency where I became competent at many things and learn many things. And kids today don't have that. And, and I think What you're calling for is a re-engagement with childhood.

That's right, with the world. Childhood has to happen in the real world, not online. Let's put a few things together for parents.

Or as they say, IRL.

In real life.

IRL.

That's right. So let's put a couple of things together. That's a very important point about summer camps. It's something that Lenore Skenazy wrote the book Free Range Kids. She co-founded a group with me called Let Grow. I urge everyone to go to letgrow.org, you'll find all kinds of ideas to do at home, to do in schools. But yeah, Lenore and I wrote about summer camps in the book. Don't send your kids to a summer camp that lets them keep their phones on them. You get this chance to have them be phone free for a month and that breaks the addiction that detoxes even the most addicted kids. So let's put a few things together. Suppose you push for phone free schools in your town. and there are other parents who are doing this too. Suppose you get phone-free schools in your town and you send your kids away for at least a month every summer to a completely phone-free environment. And you have very clear rules about phones. You don't give a kid a smartphone until they're in high school to begin with. And even in high school, there's no phone use, no phones allowed at the table, no phones are allowed in the bedroom. They can do things on their computer sometimes, but they don't get to take their smartphone into the bedroom and sleep with it. So even if we never get any help from our legislators, which is quite possible at the national level, even if we don't get any legal changes, you can actually give your kid a childhood in which technology is sort of put back in its place as a feature of life, not as the dominant factor in life. And you can do that with summer camp, schools, and oh, encourage your kids to play sports, team sports. especially. So if they're doing team sports in the app, if there's no phones during school, and then there are team sports in the afternoon, and then there's no phones at dinner, now basically you've got the entire day covered up until seven o'clock. And, you know, okay, you know, maybe later in the day, they gotta do their homework. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Yeah.

So, Mark, there is a lot of hope. The democracy problems are very serious, and I don't really know the way out, but on the childhood problems and the teen mental health problems, I have never been more hopeful about any social change question than I am about this one.

That's exciting. Well, hopefully you can figure out the bigger problem of our soul disruption and how we get to be actually having civil discourse again and allow for dissent and allow for different opinions and allow for learning from others. I mean, to me, I don't want to just talk to people who think what I think because it's just an echo chamber that's not going to help me grow or learn. I actually learn the most when I talk to people who are quite different than I am and who think differently and have different opinions and different life experiences. And it helps me understand the context of their values and what matters to them. And it creates a bridge of humanity that I think has been lost. So I hope we can recreate that bridge to humanity that we lost.

I'm smiling from ear to ear because what you're saying is music to my ears. Yes, this is what I'm trying to do. So I can just put in, just mention a couple of of sites and things that I've created to work on this problem, 'cause that is the problem that's animated my research. So anybody who is a professor or administrator at a university, if you are associated with the university, please go to heterodoxacademy.org, it's a group I co-founded with other professors to encourage viewpoint diversity and just exactly what you just said about the need for civil discourse in order for us to get smarter, that's the John Stuart Mill point. As part of Heterodox Academy originally, but it branched off into its own thing, We created a program called Perspectives. And if you go to constructive dialogue.org, constructive dialogue, g-u-e at the end.

And we'll put this all in the show notes, so don't worry guys, we're.

Gonna put all this in the show notes. So, yeah, so constructive dialogue, the Perspectives program is a program, it's designed to be used when you're coming into, say, freshman year of college. Everyone does it, we're doing it at NYU this year, Harvard has adopted it, a lot of schools are adopting it. You teach incoming students about confirmation bias, about why we disagree, about why left and right disagree, and how to handle these disagreements that are part of being a citizen in America's liberal democracy. So I co-founded Heterodox Academy for universities, Constructive Dialogue Institute to help any sort of group get along. It can be high schools, it can be corporations, any group you can get along better with this. I co-founded Let Grow with Lenore Skenazy to give kids more free-range childhoods. And finally, for this book, I hope everyone will go to anxiousgeneration.com We have all kinds of resources there for parents, for teachers, for young people about how to address this, how to bring back an IRL childhood and how to improve mental health for young people.

Well, John, thank you so much for all the work you've done. And we'll put all this and all links to many other articles that we've talked about and your work in the show notes for the podcast. But I just want to say that you're one of those lightning rods in society that people have catalyzed around that is changing thinking, which is not easy to do with all the noise that we have today. And I'm just very honored that you've come on the podcast. I'm honored to have a chance to unpack some of these issues. And I think there's more work to be done for sure. I think looking at all some of the other variables like food and its impact on mental health and getting crap out of schools is important too, not just phones. But I think we're finally waking up to these issues. I think both parents, citizens, legislators are all coming to understand that this is sort of a critical issue for us to address as a society. So thanks for all the work you do and all you're doing and being such a vigorous advocate for the right thing.

Oh, well, thanks so much, Mark. And thanks for all the work you do. I'm going to be even more conscientious about my junk food consumption.

Yes, I love the taste and I have weaknesses.

No Hostess cupcakes.

Yeah.

What was that cream filling anyway?

Yeah, we grew up on that same thing. I went to that little corner store and got my little Hostess cupcake with the... All right, well, thanks so much and we'll hug you soon and hope you all enjoyed the podcast and check out what we're doing next week. But we're gonna put everything in the show notes for you to review everything we talked about, which I think is a lot. So thanks for listening.

Thanks so much, Mark.

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