Jonathan Haidt Wants to Fix Anxiety

Hey, Upstream listeners. In this episode, we're revisiting my conversation with renowned social psychologist Jonathan Haidt to discuss his book, The Anxious Generation. We explore the troubling effects of social media on youth mental health and Jonathan's controversial recommendations for smartphone and social media use among teens. We also tackle the broader implications for democracy, the political divide, and how these issues intersect with the tech industry. Please enjoy.

Jon, welcome back to the podcast. It's great to chat again.

Thank you, Erik. Yeah, that's right. I guess I was here sometime before COVID I guess everything happened sometime before COVID Yes, exactly.

You're here with a new book, The Anxious Generation. Why don't you contextualize this book in light of some of your other books, right? The Righteous Mind, The Coddling of the American Mind. Why don't you trace that evolution for people who haven't followed your evolution as closely?

Sure. So my day job, my main area of work for my whole career has been moral psychology, then moving into political psychology. And that was sort of The Righteous Mind, The Left-Right Culture War. And then I had this side project with Greg Lukianoff because universities started melting down in 2015 in ways that actually were very revealing of moral psychology. a really fun book to write, Coddling the American Mind. And it was about Gen Z. We didn't know that there was a Gen Z in 2015. We thought that students were millennials. But by 2017, when we were writing, now there was the new name Gen Z or iGen. And they were really different. So I began collecting mental health data on them and just seeing how bad is it and trying to understand what caused it. And I was all set to write a book I got a contract actually to write a book on what social media is doing to democracy. That's my main interest and how it's creating environments in which I think a lot of the assumptions about liberal democracy no longer apply and we're going to have a really hard time adapting, I believe. So it's going to be this big, very depressing book on how technology is wonderful in many ways, but it might cause sociological collapse. And I was going to start the first chapter was going to be on this side project I have on teens and social media, because it looks like, you know, as soon as teens move their social lives, 2010 to 2015 is when their childhood changes. It becomes phone-based. As soon as they have smartphones and social media, their mental health plummets, especially for girls. So I thought, I'll do chapter 1 on that. And then I'll show, see, now let's look at democracy. Like what happens when we move our, our public and political life onto these platforms? We go crazy too. So I wrote the first chapter and I laid out the stats. And especially once I saw just how big and consistent the increases were, And then especially when I saw that they were international, it wasn't just us. I already knew that it was happening in Britain, but once working with Zach Rausch, once we discovered it's actually in a lot of countries, all the English-speaking countries, same thing, same time, same way. So then I realized, wow, this is possibly the biggest story I will ever work on in my life. If this is really happening to young people globally, or at least in the developed world, I should say, in the wealthy world, I can't justify writing anything else. I've got to figure this one out. That's how the book started. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The point is, I split the book in 2 and I said, let's just write one whole book on teen mental health, and then maybe a year or 2 from now, I'll start working on the book on democracy.

Let's get into— just to finish that point, into the book, that's your next book? The Social Media and Democracy?

Yeah. I mean, they gave me an advance on it. I've got the money, so I owe them the book eventually, but I don't think they're going to rush me because I think they're pretty happy with the way The Anxious Generation is going.

Yes.

Okay.

So let's, for people who haven't yet read the book, why don't you further flesh out the case for The Anxious Generation and why smartphones are the cause? Right.

So first of all, I'll just tell it as a story, and then we can get into what's the evidence about causality because that's where the the relevant debate is. So let's talk about that. So the story is best expressed as a tragedy in 2 acts. So The Coddling of the American Mind was about the overprotection of kids and how we developed this paranoid parenting in the 1990s. We thought if we ever let our kids out, they'll be abducted, they'll be sexually abused. We have to keep them inside. We have to always be supervising. You can't let a 12-year-old go to the next aisle in the supermarket, many people think, because someone might abduct them in the next aisle in the supermarket. I mean, we're completely insane. We're completely bonkers in this country about About our fears of each other. We don't trust the people around us. And that started really in the '90s, um, in Britain and Canada as well. Um, so we overprotect our kids. We don't let them out for what's called the play-based childhood. So act 1 of the tragedy is from the, you know, mid-'80s through 2010, the decline of the play-based childhood. Everybody listening to this podcast, if you're over 35, over 40, you remember going outside to play. That's what kids did from the time you're in 3rd grade, maybe 2nd grade. Um, right around age 7 or 8, the norm always was kids, they go out, you play with your friends, you pick up basketball game, you, you know, you light fires and, and break things, whatever it is you're doing, but you're on your own having adventures. We put a stop to that. So that's act 1. That weakens kids. But the amazing thing is their mental health. So in the 2000s, the teenagers are millennials. Their mental health is fine. It actually doesn't decline. So they're getting less life experience. But they don't, they're not depressed and anxious and suicidal. Actually, they're in better shape actually than Gen X, which was lead poisoned. They were the most lead poisoned generation in history. Um, so then Act 2 is the, is the really the heart of the tragedy. Um, so in 2010, kids still have a recognizably human childhood. They have technology. Everyone has a cell phone, but it's a flip phone mostly, or a brick phone. Uh, the iPhone had come out a couple of years before, but most teens didn't have one. It was like about, I think, 15%, 20% had a smartphone in 2010. So there's no front-facing camera, no Instagram, certainly not on, I mean, not at the beginning of the year. And no, very few people had high-speed internet. And then over the next couple years, everything changes very, very quickly. Teens are trading in their smartphone, their flip phones for smartphones very rapidly. Instagram is bought by Facebook in 2012. That's the big surge of young women, especially onto this social media platform. The front-facing camera came out in 2010. High-speed internet, unlimited texting. Now everything, you've got the entire internet in your pocket whenever you want, everything all the time for free. That wasn't possible in 2010. By 2015, that's normal human childhood. Kids are spending, well, now it's about 8 or 9 hours a day on their phones. I don't remember what it was back in 2015, but it was close. It was, you know, high. So the point is, recognizably human childhood in 2010, kids' mental health is fine. There's no sign of any problem all the way up through 2011. And then right around 2012, 2013, everything goes haywire, especially for the girls. It's very sharp for the girls, a little more diffuse for the boys. So that's the story. We've overprotected our kids in the real world. We've underprotected them online. Both were tragic mistakes. We have to undo both. It's not just about the phones. It's also about restoring a play-based childhood. So that's the tragedy. Any questions? Yes.

A lot of people will agree with you on the coddling or the kids need to play outside. I think your book, Coddling the American Mind, had unanimous agreement, at least from our world. But on this book, of course, because we've created these technologies or funded them, there's more pushback. So when you talk to the Marc Andreessens, Tyler Cowen had some pushback. He's tangentially affiliated with our world, of course. Um, not being a tech person, but, but a pro-tech economist.

No, we all love Tyler.

I know.

Yeah.

What is the smartest pushback that you've, you've gotten? Um, and, and how do you respond to it?

Oh, that's an interesting way to phrase it because let me think, because I do get pushback, but let me see if I can consider any of it really smart. That's an obnoxious thing to say, but, uh, cause, you know, cause some of it is, is, is just very simple and simple-minded. So first I'll start with the bad stuff. So the bad pushback is, oh, Haidt's offering a one-factor theory. He says everything is social media, but But life is complicated and everything has multi-causes, which is what we social scientists always say and do. And that's fine. And my book has multiple causes. My book isn't just about social media. It's about the complete transformation of childhood and an evolutionary analysis of childhood and what kids need to do and how neural development works and how cultural development works and how emotional development works and how when you shift onto a phone. So anyway, so nobody should ever accuse me of offering one-factor theories. I mean, look at The Coddling of the American Mind. It's a 6-factor. I mean, I don't do simple. I do, you know, let's, let's understand the textual, the complexity, the interaction. So, okay, that's— so that pushback I think we can ignore. Um, uh, the other— oh, the main pushback, which all your listeners will be, uh, familiar with, is the claim that I've mistaken correlation for causation. Yes, mental health collapsed at the same time in the same way in dozens of countries. Yes, but— and that happens to be the exact time that kids were trading. But, you know, maybe it was the financial crisis. Like, maybe that's why. Maybe in 2008, it was delayed effect. You know, bottom falls out in 2008, economy's recovering by 2010, 2011. But for some reason, teenage girls get super depressed in 2012 because of the financial crisis. Okay. That's the only one that's been offered as a global reason. And then people offer local reasons, school shootings. You know, we had the Newtown massacre in 2012, which is true. And so if this was just an American thing, I'd say, yeah, maybe it's school shootings. So my, my response to those who say that I've mistaken it is first, okay, you tell me any other theory that can explain why this happened in so many countries at the same time hitting girls hard. Like, give me some other explanation. That's the first. The second is, okay, you want to roll up your sleeves and get into the data? Let's do it. I've been accused of cherry picking, um, by my critics. And so people especially know there's a, there was a review of the book in Nature by Candace Hodgers, who's a professor in California. And she said, I have no evidence of causation, no evidence, which I think is not, it's not a correct thing to say. You know, in the book, I have a long section on correlation versus causation. I describe experiments throughout the book. I have about 4 data-heavy chapters. I describe experiments. I always attend to the issue of causality versus correlation. But the main way I would respond to that charge that I don't have evidence or I'm just cherry-picking a few studies. Um, is that, yeah, I am cherry picking, but guess what? I am the only person in this debate who picks all the cherries. I'm the only one. When I started this in 2019, actually working with Jean Twenge, so she's my partner in this, and Zach Rauch, so the 3 of us. In 2019, I was confused. You know, people, uh, people pushed back on— I suggested in The Coddling, maybe social media has something to do with this, we don't know. And people pushed back and said, no, no, there's no evidence. You know, it's, it's You know, social media is as bad as eating potatoes according to one study, which is like zero. No, it's not bad. Um, and I didn't know. And so I said, okay, look, everyone's citing different studies. There's so many. Let me put them all in a Google Doc. And so I just, I put them all in the Google Doc. And so it's, it's as though I picked every single cherry that's out there and I laid them all out on a blanket and I, and I categorized them. I said, here are the correlational studies. Here are the longitudinal studies. Here are the experimental studies. Here are the quasi-experimental studies. In every category, we divide them into which are the ones that indicate a problem, which are the ones that show no correlation or no causation. So I picked all the cherries. I've laid them out there since 2019. They're all there visible to see. I have multiple Substack posts where I go through it. So you don't even have to read these long Google Docs. You can just read the Substack posts on correlation versus causation. So the claim that I have mistaken it is just false. And it's, it's as though, you know, people who say that haven't read my work. They haven't read the book. They haven't read my Substack. Um, and let's see, and the claim that there's no evidence is also false. I mean, I don't know how much more I can say it. Look, here are 25 experiments plus 8 quasi-experiments. So don't say I have no evidence. You can say I'm not persuaded by your evidence. That's fine. That's fine. If my critics want to say, yeah, there's a correlation, but I don't think it's big enough. And yeah, he's got evidence of causation, but I don't believe it. Okay, fine. That's the academic debate right there. But to say that I don't have evidence and I don't know the difference, that's just not true.

Yeah.

So let's try to present better forms of pushback. I'm curious what you'd say to this argument as an example that, and you've heard it dozens of times, that it's temporary, that every time there's a new technology—

Oh, that. Oh yeah. Just another moral panic. This always happens. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. And that we're going to develop the antibodies to get used to it. And people are saying the same thing about novels or TV or Other, um, you're not sympathetic to that.

Um, not at all. Not at all. Why is that? Put it this way. Put it this way. It's a very reasonable starting hypothesis. And back in 2017, 2018, that was the prevailing view among psychologists. We've been through this with TV and video games and radio and novels and Aristotle, uh, Socrates was worried about writing, you know, so, so perfectly reasonable to start with that hypothesis. But, uh, and of course we have to be wary of moral panics because You know, a few scare stories, the media runs with it. But here's why this is so different. So different. So first, there's never been a new technology where as soon as, like, really within a year or two, as soon as kids moved on to it, you see huge mental health effects. That didn't happen with novels, as far as I know. Didn't happen with radio or TV. That's the first. The second is that a traditional moral panic is fueled by very rare stories that perhaps never happened. that are blown up by the media so that some kid, you know, he shot up his school and he watched video games. You know, he did, you know, so it's a rare thing. Um, or, you know, a kid smoked reefer and chopped off his parents' heads and, and then the media runs with the story. This is totally different. Wherever I go, no matter who interviews me, if they have kids, they usually say, you know, I've seen it in my own kids. Or, you know, a friend of mine's daughter committed suicide. I mean, this is not occasional scare stories. You know, this is— most people are seeing this in people they know. So this is gigantic. This is not like previous moral panics. And then another difference is that in previous moral panics over what the kids are doing, the kids are like, leave us alone. Like, we like this. Not now. Talk to members of Gen Z. If you survey them, if you ask the question in the right way, you know, because they don't want to be taken off it. But if you say, well, what if everyone's off it? Then they say, oh yeah, that would be great. So There was a study came out from University of Chicago, Leonardo Bursten. Bursten, Bernstein, Bursten. They they college students. They said, "How much would we have to pay you to get you to give up TikTok for a month or Instagram?" And they gave some number of dollars that have to be paid. But then they said, "Now we're trying to get everybody in your college to do it. If we could get everyone to do it, to go off for a month, now how much would we have to pay you?" And the scale included. that you pay us? And the answer is, if you say everyone's going to get off, people say, oh my God, I would pay, I would pay $100 for that. Like, that would be great if we can get everyone off. And my students say the same thing. They're on it because everyone else is. So we've never had— this is just not like a previous moral panic. The evidence of harm is gargantuan, and all the signals of a traditional moral panic, which is groundless, those signals are absent.

But what about the take that it's not that it's not big, but that it's temporary, that we're going to develop tools or, uh, yeah. Yeah. And maybe, okay.

All right. So let me, let me, let me try something. Let me try answering this in an unusual way. I once heard a joke, something like there was a very devout man and he lives in a house and there's a flood and the floodwaters are rising. And he, he, you know, a neighbor comes by and says, hey, you know, Bill, we better evacuate. And he says, you know, no, no, God, you know, God will save me. And then the floodwaters rise. And then another neighbor comes by in a boat and says, Bill, we better evacuate. You know, come get in the boat. He says, no, no, God will save me. And then the floodwaters continue to rise. He goes up on his roof. A helicopter comes by, you know, the rescue services, you know, come get aboard. And he says, no, no, God will save me. And then the waters keep rising and he is washed away and he drowns. He goes up to heaven and he says, God, why didn't you save me? And God says, "I sent you a neighbor. I sent you a boat. I sent you a helicopter. You didn't get on." Okay. So now the reason I told that joke is because, like in my conversation with Tyler, you know, I mean, I really like Tyler. We've you know we disagree especially on the role of government. That's his his that was our big disagreement. But you know Tyler was like, "Well, we're going to adapt." And I'm like, "Yeah, we're gonna adapt by keeping kids off until they're 14 on a phone and keeping them off until they're 16 on you know on social media. And we're going to adapt by having." phone-free schools. Like, this is how we adapt. So, you know, yeah, I mean, if the argument is, oh, it's okay to give our 2-year-olds to raise them on iPads because, you know, neurally somehow within 100 generations we'll adapt. So we don't need to walk anymore. We can just, you know, be on whatever the future of an iPad is, a chip in your brain. So yeah, we're not, I mean, Childhood is a product of evolution. We can't change our evolution. Kids need to run around unsupervised, take risks, play with each other, have conflicts. And none of that happens in a helpful way on social media. It happens in a weird way that doesn't seem to produce growth.

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I want to segue a little or introduce some of the main ideas or main recommendations, just like you made recommendations that you have for this book of your next book, because I think it gets into this social media discussion more broadly. So you just said, hey, at the end of this book, you say, hey, we're going to keep— I recommend no phones until 14, phone-free schools, no Instagram until 16. Why don't you briefly preview some of the same takeaways from your next book of, one, how social media breaks democracy, and then two, what recommendations you might have?

Oh boy. Well, I'll start with the bad news, which is I don't really have much in the way of recommendations. That's part of why I was willing to put that book off. The situation I think is extremely dire and I don't know what the solutions are. Um, whereas with the teen mental health crisis, I can say exactly what's happening and I can say exactly what we can do and we're going to do it because they're all easy if we do them together and we're going to actually change childhood in the next 2 years. So, so that, but on the democracy side, um, the basic idea is if you, especially if you go back to the founding fathers thinking about the Constitution and the, you know, we'd started this thing called the American experiment. And what that meant, if you've ever heard, if you've ever heard the phrase, the American experiment, people might hear it, but they don't know what it means. It's an experiment in self-governance. And the question that the world was asking in the late 18th century was, can free people govern themselves without a king? It had never been done. I mean, it had been done, but it usually blew up and it usually didn't last very long. Yeah, there were democracies in the past, but they, they burned up very quickly. And the founding fathers knew that. They read everything they could on ancient history, on democracy. They were amazing social psychologists. And so, especially if you read Federalist 10, Madison writes about— I forget the exact quote, it's a beautiful quote, but like our tendency to get upset over trivia, and if nothing is happening, we'll make something up and then we fight about it. He talked about how the passions of the people are such that they're inflamed by demagogues. And so you don't want a direct democracy.

Hmm.

What you want is an indirect democracy where the people can ultimately kick them out of power if they're not happy, but the people don't get to make the rules, 'cause you don't want like what California has where you do everything with these stupid, you know, what do you call them? Everybody votes on something. What are they called? Not a min— ballot measures, whatever, initiatives. Yeah, yeah, I remember what that is. Yeah, so, you know, the founding fathers, you don't want that. But they said, but you know what? Because we're such a huge country, we actually have an advantage over small republics, which is something might happen in Massachusetts, but by the time the, uh, you know, the news of it reaches Georgia, I mean, it's going to be a couple of weeks and by then things will have burned themselves out. And so because news traveled slowly, they kind of, in their world, they figured out ways so that passions won't overtake and, and, uh, you know, you won't have demagogues and the people whipped up and, you know, storming the Capitol and all that sort of stuff like that's not going to happen because of the way things are. Well, you know, now you say, okay, let's bring in not just like the telephone, which obviously sped things up and connected people in mostly very good ways, but you bring it now. How about instead of the telephone connecting people, we have this like funhouse mirror weird thing where representatives and, you know, congresspeople and senators, they give a speech, you know, Ted Cruz, you know, one example, you know, Ted Cruz was giving some sort of a speech and he sits down and the photographers behind him, they see, they catch He is looking at how his speech just played on Twitter, not even to his constituents. It's like, how am I doing on Twitter? And this is a complete disaster for the design of our republic. So that's just one piece of it. There's a lot of other stuff I could say, but the point is, um, liberal democracy evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries and 20th century too. It evolved in the Gutenberg era based on print, very stable. You know, the early Gutenberg era was full of war and chaos, but we kind of got it right. We got, you know, editors and fact-checkers and journalism. And so we have this very slow evolution that is consistent with American democracy. And then we have a sudden phase change around, I think around 2014. I mean, it's building in the, you know, um, early 2000s, but around 2014, I think is when we go from a world that was recognizably not completely insane to a world that is completely insane and always will be.

How much of it in your mind is the fact that it's algorithmically based or the fact that social media exists at all? Because I see a lot of people, or I see some people trying to conflate this idea of, hey, the algorithm optimizes for engagement versus just, hey, we don't have 3 TV channels anymore. And now that people can talk to each other and expose what's happening, and that led to Donald Trump getting elected or contributed or something like, my candidate didn't win. Um, so yeah, I'm curious for your thoughts on that.

That's a great question. Um, people see, you know, people who don't know a lot about it seem to focus on the algorithms. I, I don't talk about algorithms much. I do see the role that they play. Um, but Twitter, as far as I remember, Twitter didn't even use algorithms until 2017. You know, Twitter was just chronological feed. And if you follow people, you know, so things that go viral, it's sort of like, that's the number. Like it went viral. It didn't need help from an algorithm. And then of course, once you algorithmicize, now, now things are even more viral. So, um, my analysis— I have an article with Tobias Rose Stockwell in 2019 in The Atlantic— um, is that it's really the retweet button and the like button. Those both come out in 2009. Those 2 innovations really change the dynamics. And it's really, you know, it's— the metaphor we use there is, you know, it's really like, um, you know, if God suddenly changed the gravitational constant of the universe. Like one day he says, I'm sick of this, you know, whatever it is, you know, 2 times 10 to— I don't know what it is. 10 to the 32nd. I'm sick. Let's just multiply it by 10. Let's just see what happens. Like there'd be chaos throughout the universe and everything would change. So suddenly connecting people, uh, you know, early Facebook, I don't think was, was destructive. It was some performative, but you know, as you connect to your friends, it's once you get the newsfeed and then the newsfeed done by algorithm, because you have so much data from the like and retweet, and then the retweet is like exponential. You introduce a new exponential term into our political life. So that's why I think things began to go insane. You know, the early internet was amazing. Like we all loved it. Like we thought it was gonna be the best friend of democracy. And that's why we didn't notice this coming in the 2010s because we were still all very positive about the internet and the Arab Spring and it's gonna bring down dictators. But from 2009 to 2014 is the period when I think the Tower of Babel fell, when this like human civilization that we'd built up over so long really begins to crumble. I think it's December 23rd, 2013 is when you get Justine Sacco, which is the first global cancellation. The woman who made a bad joke on Twitter landed in South Africa and the world was laughing at her and she was fired. I mean, this is just crazy that this happens. And that was the first big one. That was December 2013. So that's sort of like the harbinger of insanity to come. And that's right when, you know, The Coddling of the American Mind, like Greg and I noticed, like 2014, that's when universities begin to melt down. So anyway, that's my story about how you know, the changing technology just inadvertently changed the basic fabric, the interconnections, the wiring of society in ways that may be incompatible with liberal democracy.

Yeah.

One thing you mention is, or you speak about, is how this has affected liberals more than conservatives. Going back to sort of the increase in depression and struggles there. And one reason is because you say conservatives have, at this point, more of a structure, whether it's family, whether it's religion, or some of the structures that particularly protect it against some of these negative causes. And I almost expected you post-Coddling of the American Mind, where you talk about, hey, sort of the far progressive left has internalized— you talk about sort of the reverse of CBT, right? These negative behaviors that lead to depression. I'm curious why there isn't— you didn't almost write a book analyzing how the left came to adopt those mindsets and not just the left, but all of our universities, or I guess in terms of the left takeover of a lot of our institutions. And I know you've been trying to push back against that, but do you think you have done that thorough investigation or—

Yeah, I wrote a whole book. I wrote a whole book on it. It's called The Coddling of the American Mind.

Yeah.

So, but okay, but what you're talking about, the specific thing you're talking about, Is the finding. This is, I think, mentioned in the book, but I have a bunch of Substack posts on it. One is Why Liberal Girls Fail First and Fastest, I think, something like that. So if you go to afterbabel.com, it's free. There's no paywall. afterbabel.com. This is where I've been putting out a lot of empirical research since finished the draft of the book in July, August of last year, and then have done a lot of additional work with Zach Rausch on the Substack. So the finding is that almost all the graphs in the book you'll see are hockey sticks. No problem. Everything is level. Nothing really changing a lot until about 2010, 2011. And all of a sudden, 2012, 2013, everything goes up. All the bad stuff goes up. And then in later work, or as we were finishing the book, we did it, but we broke it down further. Okay. This is, you could, we always break it down by gender. You have to always say, here's the line for boys. Here's the line for girls. You never want to mix them because they're often different. Um, but then we said, okay, let's break it down by politics and gender. And so here's the line for liberal boys, conservative boys, liberal girls, conservative girls. What you find is that everybody is up. So conservatives are, you know, they're more anxious and depressed than they were, but it's only a little. Whereas the liberals, especially the liberal girls, they go up first. So they're already going up by 2012. Conservatives, it takes another year or two before they start going up. And they go the highest to the point where, as what's his name, Zach Goldberg, I think was the first to notice in this Pew dataset that was published, it was collected in March, right? You know, like a month or two into COVID. Um, and the question was, um, a, um, a mental, uh, has a mental health professional ever told you that you have a psychological disorder? And when we look at, uh, at just, uh, white girl, white people on the left, wait, no, you just look at white people, you break them up by age and politics. And what you find is that, uh, you know, women have higher rates than men. That's been known for a long time. That's been true for a long time. Internalizing disorders, depression. Um, older people have lower rates than younger people. Um, older people are just much mentally healthier because they were from a tougher generation. Um, and let's see, what was the other, the other effect? In politics, you know, uh, liberals have more than conservatives. But when you look at the interactions, what you see is that when you look at the young liberal girls, their level is so much higher that it's over 50%. So at least in this survey, I think it was 57%. This was Pew data. 57% of young liberal girls, Gen Z liberal girls, said they had a psych— they were told they have a psychological disorder. Now, part of that is, you know, that subgroup is much more into therapy. They're much more open. So part of it, I think, is just differing. You know, it doesn't necessarily mean that those are the real rates of underlying disorder. But I think everything we're seeing suggests, no, actually, there is a real difference. And the way that Zach and I have interpreted this, because you add this together with the religion finding. Religion's the same thing. Um, high school seniors, uh, those who say on one question on the Monitoring the Future study, religion is important to me, you know, strongly agree, agree, don't— religion is important to me and my family, something like that. The ones who say yes, they only go up a little. It's as though they were protected, as though they were rooted. And this, this is the big word for us now— they were rooted. So kids who are rooted in a real community You have to go to church on Saturday. You do Shabbat on Friday if you're Jewish. You have no social, you know, no electronics on Saturday. You visit your grandmother at the table. We say prayers. You go to bed at a certain time. We use authoritative and sometimes authoritarian parenting on the right, whereas liberals use authoritative and sometimes permissive parenting, much looser. So even going back to The Righteous Mind, that's the big difference. Liberal moralities are liberating. Let's throw off all the chains. Conservative moralities are binding. Let's try to get people to do their duty. Let's try to restrain, you know, our innate urges of lust and desire. So, so what I'm saying is conservatives and religious people were sort of prepared for the, for the tsunami that hit teens in 2012, whereas especially secular liberals were not rooted and they got washed away. I mean, really devastated. And this has huge implications, I believe, for the Democratic Party and for progressive causes. Because there have been a number of articles. It was called The Elephant in the Zoom. If you just Google The Elephant in the Zoom, there are several articles about how a few years ago— this was like 2021, 2022— that progressive organizations like those that are for progressive advocacy, they're consumed with infighting over somebody said something. Everything is somebody said something, and now we all have to do something because somebody said something. So this is really causing problems for the left. And it's a gift to the right, frankly.

And this is where I want to wrap everything with a bow a little bit in terms of combining the ideas. Here's my perspective on your book. So I actually agree with the recommendations, or I don't find— I think they're eminently reasonable. If I had kids, I would adopt them. Hey, no phone till 14, no smartphone till 16. Phone-free schools, that sounds great. My kids would be happy with that.

Wait, the 4th is far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. You can't just take away the phones. You got to give them back a real childhood.

Yeah.

But continue about how much you agree with me.

I think all of that sounds reasonable. I think some people, some quibbles on the margins of— and you're not saying there's perfect correlation or causation in everything, but the Norwegian smartphone bans, I'm not sure had a massive impact, or suicide rates in Germany among women, I think, think are plummeting. Not that everything needs to be explained by this theory, but I think enough— anyone who's close to smartphones and has kids has a sense for what's happening. So I think that's pretty reasonable. But here's my worry with only focusing on smartphones. You're not only focusing, you also wrote The Coddling of the American Mind, but I worry that it's necessary but not sufficient in the sense that—

Oh, I agree.

Yeah. So I worry that it gives other things a pass. Like one—

Like what? Tell me one.

So one, that liberal ideas are making people miserable as well.

Okay. I see. Yeah.

Yeah. And so without a focus on that, sort of the things you just mentioned, does that need to be altered? Or is there a way for people to be more progressive in a way that doesn't adopt some of the bad ideas that you talked about or actually pushes back against some of those bad ideas? And then the second thing really quick is just that also schools, I think, make kids miserable too. Yeah. So yeah, that's my point.

But just briefly, schools make kids a lot more miserable now than they did before 2012. Jean Twenge and I have a paper analyzing PISA data from around the world. Guess what? Kids with their questions about how lonely you are, there's, there's like 6 items. Like, I feel lonely. I often feel lonely at school. I don't make friends. These are, you know, there's 6 items. We sum them together. They were pretty stable from like whatever, 2001 through 2012. And then after 2012, all over the world. Kids are more lonely in school because they're not talking to each other in between classes. If this, you know, if the school has been successful in, in making everybody hide their phone in their lap, that's what my kids do in New York City public schools. You're not allowed to use your phone in class. You have to hide it in your lap. Um, and so if the schools are successful in suppressing some use during class, as soon as class is over, they're on their phones. Hallways are much quieter than they used to be. So yeah, kids are unhappy in school in part because they're all on phones all the time. Or Chromebooks or tablets. That's something we should talk about. We're starting with the phones, but it's looking to me like giving kids distraction machines, you know, an iPad, you know, a Chromebook on their desk. It's like when I was growing up, if we were allowed to take our TV, our VCR, our Pong, you know, and everything put on our desk, like, that'd be crazy. We wouldn't do that. But that's what we do now. All right. So that's a side thing. Your question was— oh, yeah, about the—

Should we be encouraging people to be conservative, i.e., identify with a religion, adopt family values, adopt nationalist values, if that— like, yeah, how do we think about that?

Yeah, well, you know, I'm— so there's— I'm focused on the descriptive question, what's going on? I'm very gentle on the normative question, what should you do? Now I'm going to say, what should you do to protect your kids? But you're saying you should send your kids to church or synagogue more often. Well, I think that's actually true. You know, if you— so I'm a Jewish atheist. I'm a very secular person. But when I moved to New York City in 2011, my family, we joined a synagogue. I wanted my kids to have some, some Jewish culture and education. So I think the way I would say it is this. If you're religious or conservative, and especially religious conservative, you have built-in protection. Your kids are rooted and anchored. If you're a secular liberal, you have to be a lot more intentional. If you're raising kids and you're a secular liberal, you have to really think hard about how are you going to give your kids a stable community of people who will be there for decades. It's not enough to send them to different lessons and playgroups and this emotion discussion group and that, you know, meditations. You know, that's not real community. That's temporary. So secular liberals have to be much more intentional going forward. And also, religious conservatives have many more controls on phone use, whereas secular liberals are more like, you know, yeah, honey, do whatever you want. They're more permissive. So secular liberals really are going to have to work harder. than religious conservatives going forward. I would put it that way. It's, you know, I see the point of your question. It was, you know, I said all this stuff, you know, in the coddling that people who are anti-woke love. Why didn't I say all that stuff in the anxious generation? And the answer is, this is, I think, the biggest public health crisis we've ever had for young children. I mean, you know, bubonic plague was much worse, but there weren't that many people back then in terms of the total destruction of human capital. Now that we have whatever, 8 billion people and, you know, some large number of children, and we're just talking about the developed world now. Now that, you know, so what's happening is so, so massive, um, that I really want these norms to be effective. And so I did make a decision when I was writing the book, you know what, I'm not going to do any politics stuff. Let's just, you know, I, I can do that on the Substack if it's relevant. I can do it when I talk. But the book, you know, right now, as you see in Congress, Republican, you know, every bill, it's, they've got Republican sponsors, Democratic sponsors, like Congress, because they mostly have kids. I was just down there a couple of weeks ago. They're almost all parents and they all see it and they are working together on this. And so I just made a decision. You know what? Let's, let's just keep this apolitical. We've got, we've got to work together, you know, side by side. We've got to work together to change childhood back to a human and humane form.

Yeah. And I get the pragmatic nature of it. I think there's some percentage of parents. I don't know if that's 30% of parents or closer to 50 or more or less, who might say something like, hey, you know, we take this smartphone away in schools. That's great. But what that doesn't solve the problem that I worry about is that they're being taught ideas about race or gender or something else in school, in schools that are, that are making them miserable.

No, that's true. I see what you're saying. No, I do agree with that. I do agree that, and I have a Substack post on this and, you know, when you teach kids the oppressor-victim mindset and everything is oppressor-victim, You know, you're really, you're, you're hurting them. You're narrowing their thinking. You're making them simple-minded, moralistic, sort of the opposite. My first book was The Happiness Hypothesis: Ancient Wisdom for Living a Good Life. That's sort of the opposite. Uh, you know, be, let's be more judgmental and binary in our thinking. Um, so yeah, I, I, I see your point. I, I didn't try to do everything in this book. I really focused as a social psychologist on how we're in a set of collective action traps where If anyone tries to do the right thing, they get penalized. And interestingly, the tech companies, the social media companies are in the same trap because if Meta were to start kicking off 12-year-olds and 11-year-olds, if they were to make an effort, those kids would just go to other platforms. So, so the companies themselves are trapped. And that's why we need federal legislation to say there's a minimum age. You know, COPPA set it at 13 and said, oh, no enforcement. As long as you don't know, you're okay. You don't have to ever check. So I wrote the book assuming that this is going to be 4 norms. I wrote the book assuming Congress is dysfunctional. It will never help us. I wrote the book saying, what can parents and schools do on their own? And that's the 4 norms. But, you know, if Congress saw fit to help us with age verification, that would be really great. You know, Britain is doing it. Britain, they just actually issued guidance today. Ofcom issued guidance today pushing ahead their age-appropriate design code and their Online Safety Act. They are going to mandate various forms of age verification under certain circumstances. So there is progress being being made there. But you know what? I think wait, we have like fifteen more minutes. I think okay. What I would most like to do is ask you to give me more criticism because you know as I was saying before, what I've noticed is whenever I talk to parents, they see it. They agree with me. You know they you know we all see it. But when— but I hear from people in the tech world, they say, you know, you know, my friends are all like, they're all circulating stuff, says you're wrong. They don't believe it. So I want to first make the point, and I often make this when I'm speaking publicly, the tech, the tech industry is being demonized. And I often say, you know what, it's only 5 or 10 companies that are causing the problem. There are thousands of companies that are making our lives better. So I don't demonize the tech industry. I especially focus on Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, uh, you know, Twitter's not— I mean, Twitter has its lots of issues, but it's not so important for kids. You know, there's Discord, there are others, but, but the huge damage I believe is being done by Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat are the big 3, and also YouTube Shorts. Any— the short-form video is incredibly toxic for kids. Like, that you really want to keep your kids away from. That do not let them on TikTok, um, or, or YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels. So anyway, all right, so over to you. Yes, please. You know, I want to, I want to talk to the tech industry. I don't demonize you other than the 5 or 10 companies. What are they saying?

I, I, so part of it, a small part of it is, is, is what I alluded to of this idea that focusing only on the smartphone and then you're doing it for pragmatic reasons is kind of a cover for some of these other, um, more, more insidious, um, problems or, or also insidious problems. But I think the bigger part is, is and it connects to your next book, or what I expect you'll cover in your next book, is this idea that, hey, over the last 10 years, social media has been criticized by lots of people who had some bad arguments. It turns out people think Cambridge Analytica wasn't as big as people say. There's a few sort of things that—

Okay, fine. It's still really bad.

Yeah, that came out. They're basically like people who were mad that Trump got elected, blamed Facebook. Oh, I see.

Yeah.

When they weren't mad about the Arab Spring or they weren't mad about Obama. And what happened— and there's sort of this class of disinformation researchers, some of whom I bet are very good people, but it just feels like it's been very one-sided. It's rare that the people who are targeting disinformation identify misinformation on the left that hurts the left. Usually it's information that hurts the right. And maybe there is more misinformation on the right, or that's, you know, that helps the right, but it's probably not to the same degree that these researchers are identifying as such. And so they're pushing back against what they see as overreach on the— so anything that looks like criticizing of social media feels like it's enabling this sort of class of activists that— Got it.

Got it.

Made a living and been very effective, right, in criticizing tech and making social media the— like, did the New York Times face as much scrutiny for getting us into Iraq or something? I'm not saying they did that. I'm just saying, like, it feels like there's an asymmetry of how these platforms are treated.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So, okay. So, no, I'd like to address that. So I think the COVID response in this country was so disastrous. The scientific community really politicized things. And especially as, you know, everyone on the right is really— especially talks about how They were told, you can't go to church, we're going to arrest you if you go to church. Oh, but, you know, Black Lives Matter protests, well, that's for justice. So, yes, go ahead and do that. And so over and over again, it is clear. And look, one of the biggest problems I've been working on— let me put it this way. My mission is to help to use research in moral psychology to help important institutions work better, because without our institutions, we are headed for collapse. So I've been focused on universities as a key institution. And in 2011, I began to notice, you know what, wait, we're all on the same team here. Everyone's on the left. There are no Republicans in psychology. There's one. I found one. And I said, this is really bad. Like, you know, we just for the quality of our work and for the fact that Republicans aren't going to support us if so many of us are being activists and using our research to help the Democrats, like we got to stop this. So I've been very— and that's what led me to co-found Heterodox Academy, the idea that we need viewpoint diversity. And what we've seen happen in the 2010s, driven in part by social media, is that sort of the natural left-right asymmetries have gotten super amplified so that journalism always leaned left, but now it's like really far left. And museums always leaned left, and now they're crazy far left. And over and over again, we're seeing a purification. And when you get a purification politically, then you get sacred values, and the group acts like by any means necessary, we're going to You know, we're going to advance this agenda even if we have to betray our fiduciary duties, our professional responsibilities. So I hear those critiques about how, you know, anything that's about content moderation is going to favor the left. Like, yep, you know, you're right. That is going to happen. And that's why I almost never talk about content moderation. I am, especially because my good friend Greg Lukianoff has rubbed off on me, I am naturally very concerned about free speech and about censorship. And so a really important point here is that everyone focuses on the content, and the content isn't that important. And this was Marshall McLuhan's point about television when he said the medium is the message. So back in, you know, in the 1950s and '60s, it was all like, we have to— there's too much sex and violence on TV, we have to protect kids from seeing sex and violence. It's all about the content. And that's what Mark Zuckerberg wants is let's keep the focus on the content because, you know, Senator, we have world-leading, you know, as he said in his testimony, we spend a lot of money. We are the best in the business at getting this content off. And that's important to do. That's a good thing to do. But these platforms, especially I think Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, you know, they're complex ecosystems that were designed with no immune system. There's no immune system to catch, you know, now we've got Nigerian sextortion rings. You know, welcome to, you know, welcome to Instagram. Um, there's no, there's no immune system on these platforms and, you know, really bad stuff happens. This is not about content. This is about structure. This is about architecture. This is about design decisions. And so that's why, um, that's what I mostly focus on. And so one of the design decisions is how about if we have no age gating, we just make people say they're 13. And, and then, you know, like that's a terrible, terrible idea. Um, and so what I'm pushing for, these are all content neutral. You know, politically neutral. You know, I'm not saying let's keep, you know, let's keep liberal kids off, but let's let the, you know, conservative kids on so they get messed up. Like, I'm not saying that. I'm saying, you know, let's look at the big things that are changing the nature of childhood. Now, of course, you know, the beheading videos. I mean, I was just in the UK and there's a lot of talk about beheading videos, the sextortions, the suicides from sextortions. Well, that's not— and then I heard about— have you heard about the cat in the blender video? Do you know what that is?

No.

It's exactly what you think it is.

Oh my God.

Now, I have not watched it because I do not want to watch it, but apparently it was a real video. It was a guy in China, but a lot of kids have seen this. And so content does matter. I mean, the horrifying content, we can all agree, like kids should not be seeing beheadings and cats whipped up in a blender. Like, that's just not something we should be exposing them to. But the big change is going to come from the 4 norms that I talked about. I'll just list them again for your audience because repetition is good. No smartphones before high school. No social media, not just Instagram, no social media before 16, and this includes Snapchat. Um, no, uh, phone-free schools. Um, just, you know, you have to lock them up in the morning, you get them back in the afternoon in a phone locker or a Yonder pouch. And the 4th is more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. And I co-founded letgrow.org with Lenore Skenazy. If you have kids, under about the age of 12, please go to letgrow.org and support letgrow.org. We have some really simple, powerful ways that schools and families can give their kids back a play-based childhood. The—

and I think a lot of people listening will agree with that, but just because you asked for the critiques and this could help explain some of them. Are you familiar with the Baptist and bootlegger sort of analogy or parable?

No, no, what's that?

Marc Andreessen brought it up in his AI regulation piece where he fears that AI regulation is going the way of social media regulation, where there are people like yourself called the Baptists who are truly concerned about the issues and are making good recommendations, but then there are bootleggers who are just trying to achieve some sort of outcome. And in this case, one critique that the tech has is when people talk about saving democracy, what they really mean is letting the Democrats win, like saving the Democratic Party. Like, when— if Hillary Clinton were to win in 2016, it would— and, you know, it would be this great force of, you know, a Democratic win thanks to social media, just like Obama. And, you know, someone once called Steve Bannon— said to Steve Bannon, hey, our democracy is in danger. And Steve said, hey, we just had the most people vote in this election ever. It looks like it's actually pretty healthy. And they said, oh yeah, but look at the outcome. And so the Baptists are—

It's the same thing in Europe. Europe is doing the exact same thing about their populist movements.

Yes, exactly. So, yeah, populism bad, democracy good, right? When it leads to the right people winning. And so the Baptists, the idea is that the Baptists have some truth on the side and the right motives, but they end up empowering these people who just have more nefarious or narrow-minded— not nefarious, but narrow-minded aims. Um, i.e., they just want their tribe to win, right? Um, and, and so that is a concern that people especially have as you face in your, in your next book, but also here because it's a critique of social media and involves potentially some regulation.

Yeah.

Okay. But still, you're still, that's still focused on content. I mean, I don't, you know, if I'm recommending that we delay and keep kids off till 16, am I a Baptist? Maybe. But how is that enabling bootleggers? Like what you said makes sense when people think everything is content moderation. And I'm like, how about we talk about everything other than content moderation? Content moderation, it's impossible to do it well, and it's going to be political. We can't stop that, and it's going to produce backlash. So that's why I just don't talk about content moderation. Let's talk about everything else. That's where most of the action is.

It's, it's somewhat content moderation in the sense of they can't see the content on their, on their phones at school or maybe before 14 or 16.

That's not content moderation. I mean, that's like saying, you know, not letting them take heroin is like plant intake moderation or something.

I guess another version would be—

I like that analogy.

Other things, you know, cause people to feel like fashion magazines make people, women feel bad. Like there are other things that also make women feel insecure or depressed. And, and so should we regulate it? Like, should we regulate those or socially regulate those, those too?

Oh, well, you know, if the evidence was as clear that as soon as a girl looks at a fashion magazine, she falls off a cliff, Then yeah, I think we probably would. I mean, we've done that with hardcore porn for a long time, you know. I mean, when I was growing up, you know, I couldn't buy a Playboy magazine, and then I didn't even know that there was hardcore because that wouldn't even, you know, that wouldn't even be in the 7-Eleven. Like, that would not be anywhere in the 7-Eleven franchise. So, you know, I think we in the 20th century, we developed all kinds of ways by which adults and children could share the same world. And And adults could basically do what they wanted. But sometimes, like, you know, you have to show your ID to buy cigarettes and it's annoying. But, you know, like, we do these things or, you know, you have to have a fence around your swimming pool. I mean, there's all sorts of— there's some regulations that we can share the world with children. In the virtual world, there's nothing, absolutely nothing. Beheading videos, hardcore porn, anal sex, whatever it is, you know, sex trafficking. Welcome. You know, you're old enough to type. You're old enough to exchange nude photos with a stranger. Yeah.

Totally. And let me close on this because people have this critique of you too, which is they say you're staring the facts in the face and you still won't switch sides, so to speak. And they're like, what fact?

Wait, wait, wait. What fact is in my face that I'm not acknowledging?

Sort of the liberal-conservative bent on not only happiness, but you're talking about in the coddling, like all the bad ideas that are coming out of the left, basically.

Erik, I think I have done far more than my share of people in this country to analyze the bad ideas coming out of the left that are hurting the left as well as other people. So I resemble that remark or whatever the joke is. Yeah. You know, I, I reject that criticism. I chose to write a book with very little politics in it for strategic reasons. My goal is not for either side to win. My goal is to strengthen our institutions, our families, and our children.

And I think you've done a great job of that. My last question related to that is, What would need to be true for you? What would need to happen in the world for you to say, hey, I haven't left the left, the left left me, or some version of that, which is to say—

Oh, no, I would say that. I would say that right now.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, I have not. I have not said I was on the left for 10 years. When I was writing The Righteous Mind, I said, wait, you know, I'm now in the center. Like, I was always on the left. I started that project hoping to help the Democrats stop losing, you know, as they did to George W. Bush twice. But once I wrote chapter 8 of The Righteous Mind, and I really tried to lay out intuitions about proportionality, not just equality— the left loves equality, the right loves proportionality and liberty— I said to my wife, Jane, I don't think I can, I can keep calling myself being on the left. I think, you know, there's really good ideas on both sides. Now, I think the Republican Party has terrible dynamics. They've gotten rid of all their moderates. And so one argument I get from people on the left is, well, just, just look at the parties. Only one of them is completely insane. Only one of them is starting the Capitol, and I have to say, "Yeah, you know what? If we just look at the parties, you know, you're right. You're right." But then I talk to people on the right, and they say, "But look at every institution, what they're doing to our schools, our museums, our science, you know, the medical—I mean, medical schools, psychiatry—and you know, you know, because—and you know—that's all caused by the left, not the right. Yep, you're right." So there's this really, there's this real asymmetry where I've said for a long time that in Washington, I think the the Republican Party is the more. dysfunctional party. But in our cultural institutions, that really is on the left's ledger, not much more than the right. So once again, I don't know why you're pushing me to— it sounds like you're trying to pull me over the divide to say that I am on the right or something. But I know I'm very happy being a principled centrist, learning from everybody and pointing out the very serious problems on both sides.

Yeah, yeah. I was just responding to your— what are the critiques that—

Oh, good. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

I, and I think most people in tech, to the extent that they have critiques, they also acknowledge that a lot of how people learned about some of these issues in the first place is thanks to books like The Coddling of the American Mind, or even before that, The Righteous Mind. And I think you've done— I and we think you've done an amazing service. And I'll close by saying this. I think that most intellectually honest people listening to this, reading the book, have to find sympathy with your recommendations that social media is, the addiction to it and its addictive nature can break brains, especially younger people, but even older people.

Older girls especially.

Yes. And they're just concerned about how that argument might be used by other people who are trying to advance an agenda. And I think that's something we'll hopefully talk about after your next book, which I can't wait to read in the next years or whenever it's out. But I want to say thank you. Your books have greatly influenced my thinking, and I think you've done a really valuable service with them and this one especially. So thank you, Jon, for coming to the podcast. It was a great discussion.

Oh, thanks so much, Erik, for having me on. I really— I haven't had many chances to talk to the tech community, so I really appreciate this. And I hope everybody will go to afterbabel.com, which is the Substack, and anxiousgeneration.com, which is the website for the book. And if you click on the Take Action tab, we have all kinds of things that parents can do, that schools can do, that legislators can do, and that tech companies can do. So, you know, we have to solve this problem, you know? So, and if, you know, if we work together on this, we really can and we will. Thanks a lot.

Well, I know there are people who are listening to this who work at some of these companies who can help make a difference. So do reach out to either of us and the conversation will continue. Thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you, Erik.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Hey everyone, Erik here. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts to shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, investors, and influencers like Econ 102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week and we're looking for industry-leading sponsors. If you think that might be you and your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's erik@turpentine.co. And let's partner together.