Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview

I'm going all in. All right, besties, I think that was another epic discussion.

People love the interviews.

I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely. We crushed your questions. Admit it.

We are giving people ground truth data.

To underwrite your own opinion.

What did you guys say? That was fun.

That was great. All right, everybody, welcome back to the All In podcast. We're trying something new today. You all love when we do interviews. You love the great content that came out of the All In Summit, but you also want to not miss an episode of the four of us talking about the news of the week. So today we are doing our first episode of what we're calling the All In Interview. What is the All In Interview? Well, it's two of us interviewing one guest, as opposed to four v one, which is quite unfair sometimes and a little bit unruly. And so we're planning on doing these as an experiment, maybe 10 times a year, since we know you love interviews. And today we are really excited because we have Jonathan Haidt with us. He is a fearless author of some really amazing books. Freeberg, you have read all four of them. I have read two of them. So why don't you give us your take on these four books, Dave, and then we'll kick it off to John.

It's great to have you, John, thanks for joining us. I know you've done a lot of media lately and a lot of it has focused on the anxious generation, which has obviously got some really important topical conversations embedded within it and that people are now having because of it. I first read the happiness hypothesis years ago. In fact, in one of our first episodes on of the All In Pod back in 2020, I referenced it and I referenced some material from the happiness hypothesis. My general take on the themes of your work is Evolutionary biology meets modernity. Does that sound like a reasonable take that the nature of the human being in a modern age causes these really interesting kind of points of tension and conflict and behavioral shifts that maybe are undesirable or that are different than what we've had as a species in the past? And so much of like how we're wired, how our brains work in the context of modern technology, modern society, is causing some behavioral system changes that maybe are a bit scary.

Yeah.

Does that sound like a fair way to describe the arc?

If you can just do two terms, I'd say, yeah, evolutionary biology meets the problems of modernity. But if we can add in evolutionary psychology meets anthropology and cultural psychology with a little smattering of sociology in the head of a guy who is just really bothered when he sees systems and institutions screwing up, messing up, and he thinks to himself, wait, if we just did this, it would work better. And so I get deeply involved in what's going wrong with our democracy, and that's the righteous mind. What's going wrong with our universities? That's the coddling the American mind and my project at Heterodox Academy. And now what's going wrong with family life and children and people born after 1995. So I would just put a few more terms in there, but yeah, so.

From an institutional perspective, Fair enough. Yeah. I thought about this deeply, like outside of the context of your book that, you know, humans in the last kind of century and a half have had this kind of industrial production thrust upon us, then digital media thrust upon us, and then open markets and globalization thrust upon us, all of which give us kind of instant access to knowledge about the state of the world in a way that we've never had. Historically, humans maybe saw A family, maybe their village. You know, it wasn't like mass communication, but with digital media, I can see the good life of someone on a private jet a thousand miles away and I can live stream their private jet experience. I can theoretically order a Louis Vuitton bag and have it arrive in a couple of hours. If only I had the means that creates this kind of like tension. I can have any experience I want to because of the system of markets that have kind of put in place. and I think, like, historically, it took Generations for things like the Bible or the Quran or monarchical systems to kind of permeate and, and, you know, kind of make Society believe a certain system. But now you can kind of pump the right message to someone and shift their, their brain, and things change quite considerably.

That's right. I mean, things change at different speeds. And, of course, Evolution works extremely slowly unless you are a plant biologist who has a company that is making it happen very quickly. But until, you until very recently, our psychological evolution or the evolution of our minds happened at the level of tens of millennia, and then culture changes more slowly. And really, the origin of sociology is really in the huge changes in the 19th century wrought by the Industrial Revolution.

The first Industrial Revolution, yeah.

I guess, sure. For you guys, it's the first industrial. That's right, yeah.

A lot of people discard it. They don't pay as much attention to it.

It's not that big compared to what's happening now. And, you know, because often we can see that we can see changes on the surface, like, oh, people will now have more access to information. That's great. But a lot of the early sociologists, like, you know, Weber and Durkheim and Tonnies and all these, you know, German European guys, they could see that something very deep about the way we live together is changing in ways that we don't really understand. One of my concerns, again, we'll talk a lot about this, I hope. I love technology, I love my phone, I love all the convenience. I'm not anti-tech, but one thing that I'm thinking a lot about is how you guys, whatever, the tech industry out in the West Coast, you do employ a bunch of social psychologists, like especially Meda, a few other companies, not necessarily for good, I think sometimes for manipulation, but you do employ some social psychologists. I've never heard of any company that employs a sociologist. And what I mean by that is the changes that are coming to us because of tech are so earth shattering and so fast that they are changing the basic conditions of America's liberal democracy in ways that I think it may not survive. That is, all the assumptions made by the founding fathers about how we live together, how news travels, why passions affect the legislature, all those assumptions. might now be rendered moot in ways that we do not understand and no one is studying. And so anyway, that's just one of my causes for concern.

And to bring this from a graduate school class and, you know, the 40,000-foot view you guys are talking about and bring it down to the reality of today, maybe 20 years ago, 25 years ago, a lot of folks were building mobile social applications and they figured out, hey, games. Gamification levels, being in martial arts, going from white belt to yellow belt, scoring, becoming in Dungeons and Dragons, a 19th level wizard or whatever, this becomes highly addicting and they built it into these products. And then once they built it into the products, we then passed another Rubicon, which was, hey, let's just hand this to machine learning or AI and have them do the gamification without it being explicit. , and that's really TikTok. So you had the gamification of Twitter and Facebook, which was likes, retweets, follower count, Instagram, and then now it's transitioned into something even more pernicious, which is some black box on, in TikTok knows this is gonna maximize the dopamine hit. So this is kind of gone. This is an experiment that's gone awry.

I think so. And just to build on that, there was a lot of research on television. Television came in relatively slowly compared to what's happening now. And television was kind of hypnotic and some kids could watch for hours. I did sometimes. But just as the move from heroin to fentanyl kills lots and lots of people, 'cause fentanyl is so incredibly concentrated, the move from television to algorithm-driven social media where it's not just like mass marketed, we think this show, Nielsen ratings say this show is popular. It's we have AI targeting this at you, targeting feed at you. So what happens when you have a society in which kids are consuming media, they're playing sports, they're reading books, they're doing all sorts of things. What happens if the media consumption suddenly gets 100 times more attractive or addictive or short term dopamine focused? and I think there are huge broad societal implications that we don't understand, and I'm very concerned by them.

And what you're speaking to is the velocity here, I think, as well, huh?

Freeberg and the targeting.

And the velocity and the targeting. I think your TV analogy is really interesting because we're both, I think we're all three of us Gen Xers here.

I'm baby boomer by two years.

I'm the end of the baby boom, '63. Got it. And I think Freeberg, you're the tail end of Gen X. We would certainly take in the Gen X draft. When you look at this, the TV analogy is so good because we did have a moment in time where TV got faster and was gamified. It was called MTV. And they were like, Hey, let's make this a lot faster.

You're right.

And now you're just gonna watch three minutes. It's called a music video. So we're taking your 30 minutes down to three. And then in that video, the directors of music videos became the directors of movies and TV shows later. That's where they cut their teeth on little $50,000 videos. Mm-. But because they had to do so many cuts in those projects to tell the story in three minutes or four minutes of a Michael Jackson video, that made its way into things like the Sopranos, which had a much greater density of characters or Game of Thrones today. And then that's given way now to whatever the hell is going on on TikTok to our brains. So I'm curious what you think that final jump, the TikTok jump, is doing to kids brains.

Yeah. I think this is the right way to look at things. to look at how the changes in technology, even if they seem to be gradual, they can have just really outsize effects. When I wrote, I turned in the manuscript for the book in last August of 2023, and I'd only taught this undergrad class on flourishing once. I taught it as a grad class for a long time, but I teach at NYU Stern. And in the fall, I taught it again after I turned in the book. And one thing I really learned from my students is that TikTok and then YouTube Shorts are the ones copying it, you know, Instagram reels. They're uniquely horrible. And the reason, there are many reasons why they're horrible. And let's start with the contrast. So as a little experiment, I said to my class, how many of you watch Netflix every week? At least once a week, almost every hand goes up. How many of you wish that Netflix was never invented? Nobody, no hands go up. because stories are wonderful. Humans live in stories. We tell stories. We've always told stories. The stories on TV are so much better today than where, when I was a kid, I'm older than you guys, but I remember like, I Dream of Jeannie and, you know, the Brady Bunch.

There were stupid shows. Very flat. Yeah, very flat.

Yeah. Yeah. So stories are great. There's no problem with stories, no problem with Netflix. And then I say, how many of you use TikTok or one of those programs at least once a week? The great, not everybody, but the great majority of hands go up. How many of you wish that it was never invented? The great majority of hands go up. And what's happening to the, and these are 19 year old, they're smart kids, they're, you know, they're mostly sophomores at New York University Stern School of Business. But these things aren't stories. A story is entertaining, but it doesn't give you a huge hit of dopamine. If it's really well told, it can be an aesthetic experience. You lose yourself, but it's not about the quick dopamine reward system. Whereas TikTok and those that short form, it's really, you know, it's able to optimize for whatever gives you that little bit of dopamine in your reinforcement pathways. And because there's a behavior response loop, which you didn't have with television, with television, you could raise the volume, lower the volume, or change the channel. That's it. Those were your options. There was not like a feedback loop where the television is rewarding you for certain actions. whereas what Tick Tock pioneered is we don't care who you know. We only care what makes you pause, what makes you click, what makes you react. So Tick Tock is basically if B.F. Skinner could come back to life, one of the founders of behaviorism, and observe Tick Tock, he'd say, this is brilliant. This is so brilliant.

Yeah, variable rewards.

Yeah, exactly. Variable rewards.

Can you just hit on why, from an evolutionary biology perspective, we are wired this way? What caused what is the wiring that's being tapped into here?

So we have to go back before humans because the brains change very slowly and whatever was built in by the time you get to mammals and primates is the basic architecture of our minds. So we have a reinforcement system which has worked really, really well for other animals. And it is when certain things happen, when there are signals that this is advancing your evolutionary project, which is survive eat, have sex, leave offspring. So if something happens, you're making progress towards, say, finding a mate, you get a reward and it feels good. And that doesn't make you say, oh, I got my reward, I'm done. The way dopamine works is the neurons, I think it's in the nucleus accumbens is one of the main reward areas, those circuits that use dopamine, the dopamine says, Ooh, that was good. Keep going, get more. And that's why potato chips are the way they are, because you don't eat when you say, oh, that was good. You eat when you say, now I want one more than I wanted the first one. So this worked really well for other animals. And by the time you get to humans, that's what we're stuck with, is this, it's very much based on a few kind of, a few sort of imperatives. But another thing which is a little more uniquely human is the need for reputation. And so chimpanzees do have a whole lot going on about status. I mean, so these systems go back before humans. And status is life or death. It certainly is among males, especially, it's who gets to mate. So maintaining high status is extremely important. And we certainly see this in adolescents. Adolescents are, they would gladly do something that knocked a few years off of their life at the end of their life if they could be more popular today. again, it's the short term. We've got to do the thing that seems so imperative to us now. And that's reputation. So we have all. So, you know, I guess Dave, you started off that I'm something about evolutionary biology. Yeah, I love Evolution. It is. It's like. It's like, what is the. What is the design manual for humans? And then it's customizable. But what is the design manual? And so once you start looking at things like, you know, reward, reputation, you know, we like Outdoor spaces that look like. savannas and golf courses. I mean, there's all kinds of stuff you can learn from evolution. And then you can understand what some of these guys hacked. And we have actually, Chamath, I think, is one of the ones who talked. There's a great quote. I think I might even, you know what? I think I even quote him in the book. There's all, you know, a lot of the guys who were in there early, they could see exactly what was being done to hack into young people's concerns for their reputation.

And the prolonged dopamine release This is not good for your brain. It's one thing to find a ripe pair or a mate and have sex and like have this dopamine release. It's like, okay, yeah, let's find some more ripe pairs, eat a couple more till we're full. There's kind of a, a system that gets shut off naturally in nature. And with sex, like, okay, yeah, we, we've had this orgasmic release. We don't need to do it again for some period of time. And let's get too graphic here about pairs and right pairs, but you know, when you're doing Tick Tock, there is an addiction here that to Skinner, to your Skinner point, variable interval and it's variable reward. Something could be the hocktua girl, and everybody in the world is like, oh, my God, sex. And, you know, she's spicy, whatever. But then there's another person on the other side of that and a society. So you have the dopamine. you know, very primal thing happening. But then you also have this next layer you're talking about socially, which is now what happens to that girl? What happens to her family? Is she going to kill herself? Is she going to become a reality TV star? I don't know. I mean, we're in uncharted territory. No human, evolution did not anticipate a billion people, a million people, understanding one person's or digesting one person's most candid, worst, embarrassing or thrilling moment, did it?

No, that's right. We evolved for small group interactions with a lot of gossip. And when you, you know, so when kids are talking in small groups and someone says something stupid, others make fun of them, people laugh and then you move on. But when you put kids on a stage where potentially millions of people could be laughing at them, and they could be the internet topic of the day and it might last for the whole week. A lot of those kids are considering suicide because when you are being shamed and it seems like you're out, a lot of kids will think of killing themselves because that's a way to relieve the pain. So however, and the thing is, look, almost all of us as adults, we see this stuff. We, you know, if you post stuff on social media and then you read the comments and then, you know, you can be upset by the comments, Imagine if you were 12 or 13.

Your brain is not developed. You don't have any foundation. Yeah, and then some permanent solution for a temporary problem seems like a fine idea.

That's right. And so I just, you know, I really want to emphasize puberty as that's, puberty is one of the key ideas in my book. So in the Anxious Generation, I really focused on, well, the subtitle is How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. So while it's childhood that got rewired from 2010 to 2015, it is unrecognizable. The change that happened in those five years is beyond what anyone could have ever imagined. And the millennials are fine because they were already done with puberty by 2010, largely. And so they had flip phones when they were going through puberty, let's say ages 11 to 12, it begins typically a little earlier for girls to 1516 is sort of the peak. That's like the major, it goes on until your early 20s. but it's especially early puberty, the early teens, the mid teens. That is the period where your brain is literally rewiring. It is literally from back to front, changing over from the child form to the adult form, which is much more competent but much less flexible. We don't respond to brain damage as flexibly as we did when we were children, because everything's locked in. And so the difference between the millennials and Gen Z is that the millennials went through puberty on flip phones. And they actually, and they used those phones to meet up with each other and they saw each other and they got together in person, they made eye contact, they laughed together, they had a recognizably human childhood. By 2015, that's not happening anymore. I mean, things have changed. And so if Gen Z, suppose you're born in 1990, let's say born in 2000. So you're seven when the iPhone comes out, but that's not so important because the iPhone doesn't change things for the first few years. you're nine when social media goes super viral, when you get the retweet button, the share button, the like button.

The gamification.

Yes, exactly. That's right. Social media changes radically beginning in 2009.

The status aspect.

Well, that's right. 'Cause then it's not about me connecting with your page, it's now about the.

Newsfeed and the likes and what goes on. I wanna accumulate likes and views, and I think that, and I wanna come back to this point about status that you made earlier, because, and I wanna kind of relate it to, human history as well, because it's really important to understand where that comes from, where does status as a desire come from?

Yeah, absolutely. Let me just finish up the narration of Gen Z and we'll go right to that. So Gen Z had the bad luck that they went through all of puberty. So if you're born in 2000, you are, and let's say you're a girl, 2011-2012 is when everyone is changing in their flip phones for smartphones. 2010, you get the first front-facing camera on the iPhone, and then Samsung copies that right away. So 2010, you get the front-facing camera. 2009, we got super viral social media. 2012, Facebook buys Instagram, and that's when it really becomes popular. In this period is when everyone's getting high-speed internet. In 2010, most people didn't have it. So the point is the millennials in 2010 on their flip phones could not spend all day on their flip phones. What are you going to do? Texting like that difficult texting on the number pad all day long? Nobody did that. But by 2015, Gen Z, you can be on your phone all day long, and half of them say, literally half of American teenagers say, that they are online almost constantly. So if they seem to be talking to you, they're thinking about what's going on on their phone. If they're on the bus, next to other kids, they're on their phone. If they're in class and the teacher's talking, they're on their phone.

Which, let's be candid, watching the funniest thing that happened on planet Earth in the last hour is by definition going to be funnier or more entertaining than the three of us having a burger? Oh, wow.

That is a great way to put it. I'm going to take that line and try to remember to credit you for it. Watching the funniest thing. Okay, watching the funniest thing.

That's great. Yeah. Yeah. And so can you blame them, right?

It was kind of, this is my point about like instant access. I've always had this belief that the Zen Buddhists got it right. Like they always had it right. There are two key aspects of human nature. that if you can address those, you solve all the world's problems, which is desire and dualism, dualistic thinking.

Tell me more. What do you mean? If you solve those two things, so desire, yes, but it's all about cutting off desire.

And the aspect of desire that plays out in this context is I, at any given moment now, have access or can see, can create a desire for something that I would, if I was sitting in a village without a phone, I wouldn't have a desire to be on a private jet. But now I'm sitting on this phone, I'm seeing this funniest moment or this most beautiful person or this incredible experience that I am not a part of. I am not in. I don't get instant desire creation for me. So the dopamine aspect, I also question as anticipatory because I think, I don't know if it was your book or some other research I've read about dopamine being released in anticipation, not necessarily in the satisfaction of acquisition, that the acquisition of something Always feels a little bit, okay, I got it. Whereas the moment right before you get it is when you get the best opening. It's like that anticipation is really- It.

Is the experience of taking a scoop of ice cream. And John, just to, as a fellow East Coaster, I grew up in Brooklyn and went to Fordham and spent my first 30 years in Manhattan and Brooklyn. What you're experiencing here is also the two most important things to Silicon Valley people, private aviation and then the next greatest height, owning a sports team. So this is our version of sex and ripe fruit. Private aviation and then owning the Knicks. The two things I'm working towards, we could talk about the dopamine release of this, but it is true that there is an end state to all of this private aviation and owning a team.

But I do think this point about, Is status a point of desire?

Right?

So I don't know that I want something until I see someone else with it. Like that becomes the notion of desire for me.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And that plays into like, I see someone with a million likes on their photo. I don't have a million likes on my photo. So I suddenly want that. Like that creates a new, a new emptiness in my spirit that didn't exist before or in my brain that didn't exist before, that then I'm on this constant circuit looking for how do I do something that creates a million likes? Because that's something that others have that I don't have.

Yeah, that's right. There's a great thinker who I know was talked about in Silicon Valley, Rene Girard, Frenchman who taught at Stanford. I read some of the chapters of one of his books and I read some summaries of his work. I think it's brilliant. And the key thing is this, we kind of naively assume that young people copy what they see other people doing. but that's not true. If my kid sees me doing something, they're not going to copy me. I mean, when they're two, they do, but not older. If they see some other kid doing something, they're not necessarily going to copy that just because the kid is doing it. Girard's point is what we copy is what they want. So if someone, we don't know what to want. I mean, yes, for hot we want cool, but beyond that, we don't know what we want. and so we're incredibly attuned to what everyone else in our reference group is wanting. And that's always been the case. And of course, advertisers in the 19th century began to pick up on that. How do you make it seem like everybody wants this product? So advertising has always been about appealing, about trying to hack, trying to really activate this Rene Girard mechanism that we're copying each other's wants. And that's where I think influencer culture represents. the, what, not reduct, like take it to its extreme conclusion where I speak to young people, they come to ask me for advice on how to be successful. And some of them have not even thought about what they can do that would be of worth to anyone. All they're focused on is how to get more followers.

Right.

So, you know, like everybody wants likes and followers. So I want likes and followers. Well, you know, in the world before this, you had to do something to get prestige.

You had to have a skill. You had to play a skill. You had to be a rock singer, et cetera. And I think kids have actually, I give kids a lot of credit. I think they've put it together pretty wisely. They watched Kim Kardashian during this period of time we're talking about, release a sex tape, or, you know, whatever, participate in the releasing of a sex tape. I'm not sure exactly what the details of it are. get a bunch of likes, get a bunch of followers, get a private jet, get a TV show. And to their point, this does actually make sense. It is a sequence of events that other people have now done. They're not wrong. There is a clear path.

That's right. And that's a trap. That's a trap that leads to unhappiness. That's right.

But there's, there's always been this notion of celebrity and kind of, you know, like this, there, there, the celebrity the monarchy, replace the church, whatever. But nowadays with the influencer culture, the celebrity is accessible, meaning I have access to being in that state. So it creates this deep, dark hole for me, at least this is my read on it, that I can't, I'm not in that state, but I should be, I could be. Therefore, I have this deep like emptiness because I theoretically I could be that person. It's not like, There's a caste system. It's not like there's a monarchy where your blood determines whether or not you get to be a king or the church where the Lord determines whether you get to be in charge. In this case, someone got there, but I'm not there. So I get to see, and not only that, but my reference library historically was like four to six sitcoms a week. Now my reference library is four to six TikTok videos a minute. And, you know, I'm just like suddenly there's all these different things that I don't have in status statuses that I don't, that I haven't accumulated.

Should we talk about thoughtful proposals in your book in the latest book, the anxious generation? I, I, I, two things struck me as absolute no-brainers and you are currently in a war with people trying to, I think, maybe who got to these topics before you and maybe feel some ownership of them. And they, you've basically become, I don't know, the lightning rod for all of this discussion now, and people are coming to you as the expert. I get to send some of these sociologists a little upset that you've taken their, their, their shine putting it aside, because you do reference them and you give them a lot of credit in the book. The pouches at school for, and the phone lockers, maybe you could touch on that. And then what's the proper age for kids to get a phone? Those two things to me seem like the most pragmatic proposals in the book.

Okay. So let me just set this up by sort of jumping ahead to the notion of collective action problems and the four norms that I suggest in the book to break out of collective action problems. So the clearest collective action problem is any kid who doesn't get a phone is left out. And so the kid says, Mom, I'm the only one without a phone. I'm in fifth grade, everyone else has a phone. They're making fun of me, and this hurts us as parents. So we say, okay, I'll give you, I have an old phone here, we'll reactivate it for you. And so you can end up in a situation where everyone has a bad outcome, which is you get to the point where now, in third and fourth grade, kids are all getting phones, and you sort of get there because everyone else is doing it. Gen Z feels trapped on social media. I talk to my students, why are you spending so much time on TikTok and Instagram and five other platforms every day? You have no time to do anything of any use to anyone. And they say, well, I have to because I need to know what people are talking about. I don't want to be left out. So this whole thing is a set of collective action traps. That's how we got so deep into this. And so the solution is collective action. So in my book, I kind of assume that we might never get any real help from the federal government, that there is a chance that COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, will pass. That is the one thing that really could pass. But I really wrote the book assuming there's not going to be a legislative solution to this. We have to do this ourselves by changing norms. And so in the book I propose, I have like 50 suggestions, 50 ideas for parents and teachers and schools. But I realized, wait, four of these are just really foundational things that we can do together, and they're really powerful. So in order, they are no smartphone before high school. We have to clear this all out of middle school. Middle schoolers should not be having the internet in their pocket. Give them a flip phone, give them a phone watch, give them something else, but not a smartphone. No social media till 16. Social media is wildly inappropriate for minors. It's full of extreme sex, violence, you know, men from all over the world reaching out to you because they want sex. I mean, it's insane that we have children talking with men all over the world. So no social media till 16. The third norm is phone preschools, lock up the phones in a yonder pouch or in a phone locker in the morning, they get it back at the end of the day. And the fourth norm is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. Because until the 1990s, kids had a childhood. They were outside a lot. They had adventures. They learned to be self-governing, self-supervising. We took that away from them beginning in the '90s. totally gone by 2015. So our kids never get any fun or adventure. So all they have is their screens. So if we do those four things, we break out of these collective action problems, we restore childhood, we delay the full social media immersion until age 16 when they're, you know, halfway or more than halfway through puberty. That's my basic proposal. So those are the four — what's.

The reaction been to this proposal? Amazing. It's not like Matt is going to wake up someday and Zuckerberg is going to have this epiphany that, he's done more damage to children than the tobacco companies.

I've got to imagine that the reaction has been amazing to anyone that's not gone through this problem as children, right? Have you talked to the Gen Z about the problem?

Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness.

And I think that's, yeah, yeah.

That's what's so exciting about this is that, so I proposed these four norms, I have this analysis of what happened to Gen Z. I paint Gen Z as a generation that's been damaged, that's going to be less than they would have been. They're less ambitious, they're less successful, they're less happy, they're less competent. And I've given versions of this talk in middle schools, in high schools, in universities. And I always ask at the end of it, what do you think? Did I get your generation wrong? And I usually try, if I remember, I usually say, okay, question time. If you think I got something wrong, please raise your hand now. or please be the first up to the microphone. And maybe one time someone said, I think you got this wrong. The other, thousands and thousands and thousands of times, they say, yep, that's basically right. Now, maybe some of them are too shy to speak up, but my point is young kids like 9, 10, they desperately want phone, TikTok, everything. But by the time they're in late high school or certainly college, the overwhelming view I find among Gen Z is, wow, did this mess us up? Not that I'm going to quit because I don't want to be alone, but man, did this mess us up. And that's why when you ask them, do you wish social media was never invented? Most of them say, yes, I wish it was never invented. So Gen Z, Gen Z is incredibly supportive. If you go to the website for the book, anxiousgeneration.com, we have all kinds of activities for, you know, parents and teachers and Gen Z. We have writing on my substack, afterbabel.com by Gen Z. That's why this is so different from any previous tech panic, is that the kids themselves see the problem.

What is the connection between themes in coddling of the American mind and the anxious generation and what we see on college campuses recently? So can you comment on the protests, the recent activities on campus and maybe help us kind of understand, is there a difference or is this a continuation ContiguatIon.

Yeah, it's definitely contiguatIon. Yeah. So my previous book, the Coddling of.

The American Mind began when my friend- by the way, I gave a copy to everyone at our summit last year.

So we gave away 18 copies if you remember. Oh, great. It was my pick, yeah. Yeah. So it began when Greg Lukianoff, who is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, noticed that all of a sudden around 2013-2014, it was actually the students who were demanding protections from speech, from books, from speakers. Shut this down, ban this, stop this person from speaking. and he came to me and said, something's wrong, something's really different about students today. It wasn't like this in 2012. Something's changed and they are more fragile. They want more protection from words, books, speakers. They think speech is violence. And at the time, we thought that these were millennials because that was the name for the young generation, millennials. And so we wrote an article on this in the Atlantic, laying out what we think is happening. Something is teaching these students to think in these distorted ways that are like cognitive distortions. And then in 2015, so the article comes out August 2015, in October 2015 or November 2015, everything blows up beginning at Yale, the Halloween costume protest, all sorts of things. Universities undergo a kind of a cultural revolution, really some very similar, a lot of similarities to the Chinese cultural revolution of pulling down everything high, pulling down everything old, a kind of a revolutionary young people's movement shaming professors, spitting on professors, all that sort of stuff. Now, so what's the continuity today? One of the worst things that the leaders did back then, the university presidents, is they did nothing. Students would shout down speakers. No one was ever, ever punished for shouting down speakers, even when they used intimidation. I should, Claremont McKenna, there was one, Claremont McKenna did punish some students in 2018, but hundreds and hundreds of shout downs, no one ever punished. The message was, oh, as long as you're protesting for social justice, you can break the rules. You can use intimidation. You can shout people down. You can bang on glass and make people afraid for their lives. You can do those things because it's for a good cause. And besides, we're actually kind of afraid of you, too. So that was the precedent that was set. And that, I believe, was the beginning of one of the greatest brand destructions in American history. Higher Ed used to have one of the greatest brands in the world. Elite Higher Ed was the envy of the world. Now it's a laughing stock. Harvard is a punchline and jokes around the world, certainly in America. And so it was because there was fear, there was lack of leadership, and we permitted intimidation rather than persuasion. Universities must be about persuasion. You can never win an argument by saying, if you don't agree with me, I'm going to hurt you, I'm going to destroy you socially. We can't allow that. But we did. And so now along come the protests. So of course, the October 7th, the massacre was horrific. the Israeli response has produced horrific suffering and death. Yes, it's normal and expectable that there would be debates on a college campus. And nobody that I know of is saying people shouldn't be protesting in favor of the Palestinians. But the question is really about the encampments and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of the university to pressure the university to make a statement pro-Palestine or anti-Israel. or to divest from Israel. So this is the use of intimidation and disruption, which they allowed for nine years before. They said since 2015, as long as you're protesting for social justice, you can do whatever the hell you want. We're not going to punish you for anything. So now, this sort of the intersectional social justice protests that are pro-Palestine and often anti-Israel and often shading into antisemitism, the presidents don't know what to say. And that was the spectacle we observed on December 5th in that House hearing room, of the three presidents who could not explain why it was against their policies for people to call for death to the Jews. They had been so tied in a knot with their hypocrisy, they couldn't even explain it. So yeah, there's a very direct continuity.

And in fairness, if the protesters were simply doing a sit-in, they've got a long history of people sitting in, in the '60s and '70s, protesting different things. It's virtuous. It's this sort of tipping over into intimidation when five or six people surround a student and or chase them into a library or bang on the doors. I mean, if you were to just, I always use my friend Sam Harris's, you know, technique, which is just replace, you know, go through each, you know, person on the victim Olympics and the identity politics bingo card.

Yeah.

And just replace it. Okay, now white students are chasing black students. Black students are chasing Hispanic students, Hispanic students are chasing Japanese students, Japanese students, lesbians are chasing hetero people, whatever it is. Pick your from the bingo card and then just see if this stands up. And if it had been black students being surrounded by white students, people would be like, what?

That's right, exactly.

This is my point about like dualistic thinking, like the whole core of like the Zen Buddhist approach is to get rid of the, sides in a system. But can you talk a little bit about this oppressor-oppressed concept and how critical it is to social behavior and now social evolution? I've thought a lot about this over the last year, and I feel like so much of human societal development, politics, purchasing behavior is all driven by this concept of oppressor and oppressed, which can be approximated as the haves and the have nots. And at any given moment, I can feel like a have not to some other have. And theoretically, I'm a have to someone else who's a have not. My have not identity drives me to purchasing, to getting likes on Facebook, to changing who's in office, to deciding which company I should spend money on and which company I should not spend money on. and that this notion extends its way into feeling oppressed, meaning there's a system in place that's keeping me from having something that someone else has. And maybe you can talk a little bit about has this changed, has this always been in human psychology? Is this changing because of modernity and why? Would be great.

No, good. That's right. That's another point of continuity from the coddling. So the central idea of the coddling was that there are three great untruths, ideas that are so bad that if any young person believes all three, they're almost certain to be depressed, anxious, not amount to much in life. And those three are, what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. So avoid stressful experiences, avoid speakers who are going to say things that you hate, don't expose yourself. Always trust your feelings. Your feelings are right if you feel offended by something that someone has offended you, and someone has to do something about this, someone has to punish that person. and the third, to your point about duality, is life is a battle between good people and evil people. And this is the distortion that's caused the most human misery. I mean, this is a normal thing people do. This is part of being a tribal species. We're very, very good at coming together to say, our side has been hurt or cheated or defiled by their side. They're the evil ones. We're, you know, they're perfectly bad. We're perfectly good. So it's that third distortion is really the most pernicious from a societal level. Now, what you just said before about the haves and the have-nots, that's what the left used to be about from the time of Marx or the French Revolution even, until the 1950s or '60s. It was about the haves versus the have-nots. And the left was the one that stood up for the have-nots, and the left stood up for the poor and the people. But we go through a period in the '60s and '70s of the conversion away from away from a sort of a Marxist idea based on economics to something, is it a little bit Marx? Is it Michel Foucault? There's different intellectual heritages here where now it's all about power. It's not haves or have nots, it's power. And power is such that whatever you look at in society, you will see that some people have power and privilege and they use that to oppress the opposite. And this is what intersectionality is about. It starts with a perfectly legitimate point that there are multiple dimensions of identity. And to be a black woman is not just the sum of being black or being a woman. There are unique indignities that hit black women that you don't notice unless you are tuned into this. So intersectionality begins, Kimberly Crenshaw, with a very good insight, which I think is absolutely right. But the way it plays out on campus, what Greg and I argued in our book, is 18-year-olds coming onto campus, they're easily lured into this incredibly simplistic and exciting way of looking at the world, which is, I don't have to know anything about you. I can just look at you and I can say, oh, you're a man. Oh, you're a white man. Oh, that means that you're an oppressor. And I can feel virtuous to the extent that I am not that. and this puts a lot of pressure, especially on white kids, to try to develop some identity as a victim, which is incredibly disempowering and just not good for their development. And what we end up with is a movement that thinks in these binary terms, and this is what brings us to today, is, of course, Jews, I'm Jewish, we always thought that we were among history's victims and certainly You can't understand the creation of the state of Israel without understanding what happened in the Holocaust. But because of the way intersectionality played out, because whiteness is so quintessentially evil, whiteness is the thing that is ruining everything. Whiteness is the, so everything that's not whiteness unites together to fight whiteness. Now, most Jews, as I understand it, most Jews in Israel are actually Sephardic. They're not from Europe. But in America, Jews are coded as white, and therefore, if there's a conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians, then obviously one is the oppressor, one is the oppressed. Now, obviously, economically, Israel is wealthy, Israel is powerful. So it's not that there's no legitimacy to that view. Obviously, there's a huge power differential in Israel versus Gaza. But the mindset that says everything is about power is so narrowing, incorrect, boring, and offensive. I spent so many years trying to help the left using moral psychology so they would stop losing elections. And I finally decided they're beyond hope. The right's beyond hope too. But the left is losing Asians, it's losing black men, it's losing Hispanics in the time of Donald Trump. Why is this happening? A big piece of it seems to be this oppressor-victim mindset pushes policies that are so offensive to most people of every race that they're like, I've had it with the left. I don't like this. So sorry, that was a rant. That was more of a rant than an answer to your question, but I hope it was entertaining.

No, it seems accurate.

Do you think the pendulum is shifting? What do you see broadly socially right now? Are we still in this loop where we are creating oppressor oppressed kind of construct perpetuating policy or are folks in the left saying it's gone too far, it's time to make a change. Now folks are feeling, because I've seen a lot of folks that have traditionally been, I'm not a politics guy and I'm not in a political party or anything, but I've seen like a lot of folks who I know who are traditionally democratic voters, Democrat voters who are now Republican voters after what's happened over the last couple of years. Surprisingly, shockingly, would have never sworn that would have been the case 10 years ago. Are things changing now? Is that sort of shift going to be what pulls things policy-wise the other way?

Yeah, I think things are changing. So at least on, you have to look institution by institution. And so at least on campus, things got insane in 2015. I mean, it was, again, it was like the cultural revolution began in 2015. It wasn't like this in 2012. And I started a group called Heterodox Academy. If there are any professors listening to this, please join Heterodox Academy. We advocate for viewpoint diversity among professors. We think that we shouldn't all think the same. We shouldn't all be on the left and progressive. And every year since 2015, things got worse and worse and worse. And especially 2020 with COVID then especially George Floyd, a lot of progressive ideas got supercharged. Ibram X. Kendi became the patron saint. Everything was about anti-racism. So that's when things really became completely bonkers, not just on campus, but in journalism, in museums, you know, firing all the white guides and, you know, all just crazy stuff was happening 2021-22. Business went, many businesses went that way, but businesses have to actually make money. And so by 2022, a lot of businesses were rolling it back. They're saying, well, this stuff is terrible. This is not making life better for, for, for members of minorities. This is actually just turning everyone against everyone. We all hate this. So business has begun definitely moving away from all this stuff. Universities were not really moving away until December 5th. I think December 5th, that hearing was so humiliating for higher ed. I think a lot of us feel much freer now. We feel like, you know what? The intersectional, the sort of the people who will destroy your reputation if you question them, they're on the defensive now. We don't hear much from Ibn Khaldun anymore. we don't hear him referred to very much anymore. So I think that at least even on campus, the pendulum is swinging. I was afraid it wasn't a pendulum. I was afraid it was more like a tower that just falls faster and faster. But I do think, because the great majority of professors and presidents are true liberals. They're on the left, but they believe in free speech. They're not illiberal. What I think has happened on the far left and the far right, we have illiberalism. So that the far left is not liberal, the far right is not conservative. And most of us, the 70% in the middle, are actually pretty reasonable people who could live together, but we're all afraid of the extremes. But we're less afraid of the extremes now than we were a year ago.

Because cancel culture has ended essentially, and like the left took it too far and the right took it too far.

Is that what's- you- have to look institution by institution. And so in institutions that are governed, that are dominated by the left, and that is all the knowledge creating institutions. So it's journalism, the arts, media. universities, most of the scientific establishment, other than the hard sciences, in all those areas, yes, I think the left took it too far. We went into a point where everything like chemistry has to be about anti-racism and everything has to be about race. And that was just kind of nuts. And so I think there is a kind of a move to a more common sense being.

You've got to be very racist elements.

Yeah, right.

Very racist elements.

Yeah.

Just subtly racist.

Can you talk a little bit about what traditional liberalism and conservatism should look, looks like? Because a lot of people in our public audience, a lot of people I talk to, they're confused now about the terms because so much of traditional liberalism feels illiberal because of your point about far left behavior. Traditional conservatism feels illiberal because of far right behavior. What is the difference between the two and kind of help us bring balance to the force?

So I'll answer your question as a psychologist, which is One of the amazing discoveries in psychology since the '80s is that almost everything about our personality is partly heritable. And if you have an identical twin separated at birth, you never met. But if you're very much on the left, your twin probably is too. Something about our brains make us predisposed to the right or the left. And it goes back to openness to experience and conscientiousness, a few personality traits. But basically, There's a liberal or progressive sentiment that says, it's captured by this Robert F. Kennedy quote, Some men see things as they are and say, why? I dream things that never were and say, why not? So progressives historically are the people who look at existing institutions and say, you know, why don't we change this? Like, why don't we have some other thing which might be more just? So progressives are always pushing for progress, for change. But then the wisdom of the right is to say, you know what? We may not understand our institutions, but if we just go changing them willy-nilly, it's going to be a disaster because we don't understand what we're doing. In fact, I opened our conversation with that. That's actually a conservative, something I learned from reading the conservative intellectuals, going back to Edmund Burke. You can't just go messing with institutions and expect it to work out well. So a good liberal democracy is one in which you have some people pushing for change, you've got other people saying, slow down, like, not so fast, like, let's be careful about this. And that's William F. Buckley's famous quote about national review is going to stand athwart history yelling, stop, or at least slow down. So that's great. Like, you have a car with a gas pedal and a brake, like, you need that. And what happens when there are no conservatives? What happens when there's no one to say, slow down? You know, progressive revolutions have an almost perfect record of disaster. I mean, it always descends into chaos and economic chaos and cruelty. And what happens when there are no progressives, when it's all conservative? You tend to get much more repressive, certainly LGBTQ rights. I mean, you get very predictable pathologies on either side. And part of my analysis, what I think has gone wrong in our country, I'm very focused on what social media has done to society as well as to Gen Z, is there always was a distribution where most people on the left are reasonable left, progressives, I mean, so they're true liberals. They believe in a John Stuart Mill vision of a society in which people are maximally free to construct lives that they want to live. That, I think, is the heart of the liberal vision and liberal society. And on the right, you have conservatives who generally believe in tradition, family, group loyalty, religion, the things that bind us together and limit bad behavior. This is Thomas Sowell talking about the the constrained vision of humanity. So that's all healthy. And then you always have some far left radicals who they become Maoist in one generation, they become Robespierre in other gen, you know, they chop off heads prone to violence on the far left. You got a group prone to violence on the far right that are reactionary, that are authoritarian. And let's say there was some distribution. Now then along comes Twitter, along comes Facebook, along comes social media. What happens? Mark Zuckerberg used to say, how could it be wrong to give more people more voice? That sounds great. But what if you're not giving the disempowered more voice? What if you're not giving everyone voice? What if you're bringing everyone into the Roman Coliseum and saying, okay, let's fight it out for the entertainment of the people in the stands. And the great majority of people don't want to fight with swords. They just go quiet. And some people pick up the swords like, yes, let's go. And so the far left becomes super empowered, the far right becomes super empowered, and the center left and the center right goes silent. And that's what I think is, you know, that's, I think, a real disaster for our country.

I think that was like such an excellent, like, commentary for people to hear. I want to ask one follow on, which is, why has liberalism and conservatism in some aspects switched? So, One of the things I think a lot of folks observe is that modern liberalism is a lot of redistribution, equality for the oppressed, bring everyone up to the same outcome, the same level on an outcome basis, which limits the freedom and flexibility of others. It limits free markets, for example. More taxes, more regulations is one way to characterize that, that conservatives will say. More taxes and more regulation is not John Stuart Mill. It's not more free market enablement. And then on the flip side, this idea of conservatives want to have less government, less regulation, less taxes, which can drive more inequality of outcome, et cetera, can drive, in fact, fundamentally, and I believe this very deeply, free markets drive progress, technological progress and social progress. And as a result, by getting technology out, the most disempowered benefit the most by new technology. They can progress more than the wealthy can progress. And so why has that flipped? Why is conservatism and liberalism in some aspects flipped? And when did that happen? Yeah. So don't think of it as though.

Liberalism and conservatism have flipped. Think of it as though the left and the right have really changed. One thing I learned from studying conservatism from the intellectual historian Jerry Mueller is that conservatism in every era is a reaction to the excesses of the left.

I see.

So if the left was the revolutionaries in the French Revolution, the right were monarchists. They wanted the restoration of the king.

Right.

If the left in America is about, you know, pulling down the founding fathers because they were slave owners, the right is going to be, no, we're going to get extra patriotic. We're going to wear funny hats like the, you know, 18th century Americans. So you always have to understand the right as a reaction to what they perceive to be the excesses of the left. Now, a lot of what's happened is, as I said, the left is a political coalition that votes similarly in elections, same with the right. It's made of a mixture of different kinds of people. There's a wonderful study from More in Common that talked about the seven tribes of seven groups of Americans. the progressive activists, which is the group on the furthest left, they were never liberal. In fact, they're really illiberal. They're not even about bringing up the bottom. They're much more focused on pulling down the top. That's the ugly side of egalitarianism. So they're very focused on restraining rich people, pulling down privilege. They don't seem as concerned about bringing up poor people. So that's the far left. They're not liberal. But now, but for a while, they were really dominant. Not in the Democratic Party. This is an important point. The Democratic Party has two wings. Which one usually wins? The liberal, the moderate wing, not the squad, not the... So if you just look at the parties, the Democrats are a functioning center-left party with an outspoken progressive wing. That's great. That's viewpoint diversity. I love that. The right is different. If you just look at the party, You used to have all kinds of true conservatives, George H. W. Bush through Mitt Romney. They were true conservatives, very decent men. They believed in decency, family value. I mean, they have a lot of respect for traditional conservatives. But now it's the party of Donald Trump, and the Republican Party has gotten rid of nearly all its moderates. The Democrats pulled some dirty tricks that actually wiped out a few of those moderates, which I think they really have a lot to answer for. But my point is, if you just look at the parties, the Republican Party has been gutted of its moderates. Now they do crazy, insane things like, let's work really hard to solve the immigration problem. Oh, Donald Trump says, let's not do it. Okay, let's throw it out the window. I mean, insane stuff that is really hurting the country. So I just wanna make it clear, I talk a lot about universities where the villain is the left. There really is no right to speak of on university campuses. But in Washington, I think the Republican Party is the party that's really gone farther off the reservation or if one can still say that today, whatever, you know, that's gone.

Can we do some quick lightning round questions on parenting? So my kids are, I got three daughters under seven. There's a conversation amongst the parents. When do you let the kids get phones? When do you let them get on social media? And some of the parents don't listen. So then the kid, you got a couple kids in the class that are on social media, they're on iPhones. fifth grade, fourth grade, whatever. And the kids that aren't are the have nots. They're left out. They're, they're not able to be on the text stream with the kids that are. So they're not cool. They're socially disengaged. They're angry at their parents. They're sad. How do you address that as a parent where you've got some of the kids in the class that are doing.

This, given the framing you provided earlier on the best rules?

Yeah.

So the answer is collective action. So for each, each kid feels left out, but What if you, so I assume you're in contact with the parents of your kids' friends, right? Because you got to drop them off, pick them up, you do all sorts of things. So what if you were to talk with the parents of a few of the friends who don't have, haven't given phones yet? And you say, hey, we don't want our kids to have a phone-based childhood. Do you agree with me on that? If we work together, you know, John Hite says, if we work together, we can actually give our kids a fun childhood. Are you in on that? And what that means is we're gonna follow the four norms. We are not giving our child a smartphone until high school. Let's just commit to that. Now, we should be sending our kids out, in which case, like I bought my daughter a phone watch, a gizmo, it could call three numbers. That was it. And that was enough for two or three years. That was all she needed. She could go out and do errands. She could go get bagels. She could go bring food to my office across the park. So it's okay to give kids a way to contact you, but you just all agree, no smartphone. And you all agree, no social media until 16. And that even includes Snapchat, which is what the kids are using to communicate, but just lots of bad stuff happens on Snapchat.

And it just takes them. But then if some of the parents don't agree, and then you've got this class system that forms amongst the social, you know, groups of the kids.

You got some kids that are, that have this- you- just hold the line.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. well, yes, it's hard to hold the line on your own. It's much easier if you have three of you holding the line, but it's even better if it's not holding a line, it's offering a more positive vision of childhood. So you and the kid, so your kid and the other kids who were your parents all agree, you make extra efforts to give your kids an exciting, fun childhood where they do exciting things together. The other kids can be home on their bed swiping all day long. Let them do that. They're gonna end up basically anxious and never having really done anything to grow up. Whereas your kids are getting together for four-way sleepovers where you're taking them bowling and you just, you know, you just, well, to the extent that you're allowed to, you step back. Like you let them be self-governing. You know, you give them money or give them an allowance, I suggest in the book. Be really clear about chores, allowance, and encourage them. Go ride your bicycles down and go get ice cream, you know, go, Get ice cream just before dinner for all I care. Be a little rebellious. So if you, you know, we've really taken almost all the fun out of childhood.

There's very little adventure left in childhood. I've leaned into that. My kids love the fact that I told them my dad would kick us out of the house in the morning.

In the summer and we could come back on when the street lights came on. That's the common rule.

That's right. So tell me how you do it. 'Cause there's a lot of questions around it. How do you do it today? And then I just had them leave the house and I told them I'm locking the doors for three hours. Go have fun outside. And then sometimes when we're in town, I'll have them walk around town. I'll give them the 20 bucks. I'll say, you,'re going to meet me at the Apple Store at this time. If you need to know the time, you can go ask them. But we're going to meet at the Apple Store in two hours. Have fun. Anything goes wrong, just go into any.

Store and talk to an adult. Boom. Fantastic. And I'm just giving them those kind of like free range things.

Yes, that's beautiful. And do they see this as punishment or are they excited?

No, they enjoy it.

They love it. Of course they love it. Of course they love it.

They ran around the house.

Found one of the doors open and said, you forgot to lock this one. Lock it. Great. And they said, what if we have to go to the bathroom or we need a drink of water? I said, there's the hose and there's a tree.

Yeah. Excellent.

That's how we did it in Brooklyn.

Yeah. Get the hose.

And that's my team's reason for doing it. They think it's hilarious and they love it. And then the other thing I do as a tip is I, you know, if they want to do screen time, I tell them, great, come up with a creative project. and one hour of creative project, you can do one hour of TV or one hour of iPad or something. So I just do one for one with them. They have to earn it by doing something creative. And they're like, we don't know what to do. And I'm like, figure it out. And then boredom, I explained to them equals creativity. You have to be bored, your mind.

Clears, and then you come up with.

A great creative idea. Now they're writing beautiful movies, they're writing stories, they're making books, they're writing songs. Like they literally will complain. It's like you mentioned Skinner, When you extinguish a behavior, like an addiction to devices, the bad behavior spikes. They scream, they cry, and then boom.

It drops down to zero.

Exactly. And you're fine.

You just have to weather that brief storm. It's the withdrawal. That's right. Because when you've had hyperstimulation of quick, easy dopamine, those systems downregulate, they react, they try to restore homeostasis, and now it takes more stimulation to get them to the normal level. Now you take away the video games, you take away the phones. And for Anna Lembke says it's two or three weeks to overcome withdrawal symptoms, especially for more serious drugs. But in my experience, it's more like, it's like a few days. The first three or four days are really bad, but by a week actually they're mostly over it. That's what you find. Like summer camp. So send your kids to summer camp and never send your child to a camp that allows kids to keep phones on them. Never do that.

That's a wasted opportunity for detox. this is what kids want, by the way. Kids want to have a childhood. They don't. You, you asked them, you, you polled the students, and they, they told you, we don't want to be addicted to the stuff. That's like, if you were to ask Philip Seymour Hoffman, you want to be addicted to heroin? Did you wish heroin was never existed? He'd be like, yeah, I'm dead.

Of course I wish heroin didn't exist.

Yeah, that's right. This thing's ruined my life. Like, that was a, they know they're on heroin. What'd you say? That was a poll. Like, whatever. I just, I'm thinking about New York and just I mean, I used to work out in the same gym as in Chelsea Piers. And I'm, every time I see Philip Seymour Hoffman in like the Master or Long Kane Polly, I just think, this is what we're doing to our kids.

They get addicted to these things and.

Then fentanyl and like- Talented Mr. Ripley, wasn't he? Just so many great artists gone. And I think that's what's happening to these kids' brains. I think their brains are being melted in all their creativity, their ability to.

Learn an instrument, to interact with each other, were stealing their childhoods and replacing them with Zuckerberg's payday. For the heavy users especially, I mean, I try to avoid saying brain melted. I try to be a little more precise. For the heavy users, and this is the thing, about five, depending on how you measure it, about 5 to 12% of the boys do become problematic users of video games. So for most boys, video games are okay. They're a lot of fun. And I wouldn't say video games are melting most boys' brains. But 5 to 12% is a lot of boys to lose. And these are boys who are spending, you know, 3, 4, 5 hours a day on video games for years and years and years. They don't develop social skills, they don't develop dating skills. These boys I think are- that's right. Exactly.

Exactly. It's just, I mean, it is, you may not like to say you're an NYU professor, it makes these kids really weird. I watch these kids who are addicted to TikTok and addicted to video games, they get really socially weird. They can't make eye contact, they can't have a conversation. and then they become young adults. They don't know how to go on a date. They don't know how to talk to adults. I mean, they don't know how to work.

Yeah. Tell me more about what you're seeing in Silicon Valley in the tech industry. Are you talking only about boys? Are you saying girls are this way? Girls aren't making eye contact?

No, I think it's the boys mainly. The girls seem to be a different set of behaviors, which is like maybe more social pressure. and more depression, more eating disorders, self-harm, all that collection where maybe it's directed, you know, in some way of harming.

Yourself, which is really internalizing disorders. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So, and, and tell me how Gen Z employees are working out in general in your sample.

They're terrible.

And that's, that's what I hear very widely.

Yeah. You just hire people in Canada or the Philippines.

Well, Canada is almost as bad as America. Canada has problems too. They're almost like us. But I agree, immigrants have different experiences. They have a better work ethic. And I'm gonna, you know, what I'm hoping that we'll get to is because this problem is so, like, this is what I, you know, I work in a business school. I talk to a lot of people in business. I always ask them that question. I always hear the same thing. I've never heard anyone say, oh yeah, young people are so wonderful. People are having problems integrating Gen Z employees into their companies.

They're fragile. They're- the top 20% are fantastic. the majority do not have the wherewithal, the resiliency, the confidence, the communication skills to operate in a business environment.

Period from stop. So what do you think about this? What about instead of like, don't hire American kids, saying, look for signs that this person can be a team player and work with other people. So especially go for anybody who's ex-military, anybody who was major team sports.

Yeah, no, people do hire based on that. They always did in sales, like the sales department, you wanted military people, you wanted discipline because it's a numbers game, you have to just grind it out. But I do think like even for what people don't realize is when everybody went home for COVID, managers learned how to manage remote workers. Once they figured out I can manage a remote worker, dealing with somebody who has too much anxiety to come to work today or be in a meeting and told they did a job and like you need to buck up and do a better job. Like people will quit on the spot. People will start crying. People will drop off the zoom because there's too much anxiety to be told you did a bad job. Now you tell that to somebody who's working in India or South America or Portugal or Manila. Hey, this is not the standard at which we operate. They're like, can you tell me how to do better? Let me go look online. I'll go find some way to do my job better. Thank you for letting me know that I could do better at my job. This generation can't handle even the modest amount of, I shouldn't say all of them, but a large percentage of them have so much anxiety they cannot operate in the workplace.

Okay, so that is similar to what I hear a lot from people who are hiring young people. But let me suggest one slight variation that you might try. because a really good thing about Gen Z is that they're not in denial. All the things you say about them agree with what I say in the book. I think that's basically true. But what I'm finding in my teaching, what I find in general, is that if you approach them in the right way, and you, first of all, they have to understand the concept of antifragility. Very easy to explain. Chapter one of the Coddling the American Mind. If you go to thecoddling.com, I have chapter one. We put it up there so that everybody can use it. Send it around to all your employees. It's what doesn't kill you actually makes you stronger. And you grow through adversity, and it's stoic wisdom, and it's wisdom around the world. So if you have that concept, you're talking about it, and then you say to your new Gen Z employees, okay, now we can do this in two ways. One is, since I really want you to be successful in this job, so I'm going to tell you everything I think you're doing wrong, and I'm going to try to make you better. That's option one. Option two is I can be really sensitive about your feelings and really try to make everything gentle and try never to upset you. Which one do you want? And I guarantee you, the great majority are going to pick option one because they do want to grow. They're not in denial. They're not defensive. They're not like, no, I'm not like that. So I especially would not, I'm not giving up on Gen Z, especially those who are still in the early 20s. 'cause that's what I'm teaching at NYU and they show incredible growth. Now, it's exciting 'cause they're doing it together. I have a class of 35 students, we're doing it together. But if you have a cohort, if you're selective in your hiring and you try to avoid the ones who are most showing the signs of the extreme activism and the extreme emotionality, if you have a group and you're explicit that you want them to get stronger, you want them to succeed, and that's why I'm going to give you some harsh feedback. I think actually they generally love it.

I do think some number will rise to the occasion. I think it's really good advice. The other advice, you know, I'll just tell you what people do practically in the real world.

Please.

Hire three people. Expect that one's going to be fired in the first six weeks because they present well in an interview, but they're going to have a panic attack or they're just going to be, don't have the work ethic to be successful in an intense field like venture capital or a venture-backed startup. So, and then one will leave because they're got rich parents and they don't need to have the stress of the job or whatever. And then whoever's left, that's the winner. And so that's how people are approaching this now, is hiring people on project basis. Let's see them do the work. Let's see if they can maintain the intensity. And that's really is like, if you weren't allowed, if you were monitored and helicopter parented and you didn't go to the store on your own and you didn't get lost and you didn't have somebody steal your money or, you know, you didn't get in a fight in the schoolyard or you didn't play tag and, you know, didn't get picked for dodgeball, you got smashed in dodgeball and they bullied you. If you didn't have all those experiences that are formative, yeah, you're not going to survive in the corporate world. There's no time. There's time to teach you how to, you know, get smashed in the face, you know, with a, with a dodgeball, you know, that should have happened in 12, 12 years old. It's, it's going to be tough for them. I, I think you're doing God's work trying to get them back on track.

Well, let's, you know, let's hope that, that parents and schools realize, you know, the, the truth of what you're saying. And we get to the point where, you know, college admissions and hiring is not just going to go for the high GPA. and the full resume of extracurricular activities, they're going to go for signs of being a free range kid. They're going to go for signs that you traveled alone, you traveled on your own for three months someplace, you know, when you were 18 or 19. They're going to go for signs that.

That you actually can handle adversity. Yeah, I'd like to see your project work. You know, I see an NYU or Florida, I see a, any Ivy League school degree or something like that. You're going to think, oh my God, this person's going to come here and start a union, a movement. Yeah. you know, they're going to distract everybody. This is why coinbase and other folks are just saying, we're here for this purpose. If you're here, you're here for this mission and this purpose.

Anything else you want to do on your own time, they should a business. But that's. Major, major kudos to coinbase. They were the first one. Armstrong, he was the first one to.

Really put that out there.

And a lot of companies follow.

Yeah, that's. Yeah, that's right. Now it's the standard. Okay, you're here. You. The random group, there's like a random channel on slack. that is like one of the default channels. That's where chaos occurs. The first thing you got to do is delete the random channel. There's no random here. We're here to work.

Yeah.

There's no, you know, side hustle, random, you know, your politics, whatever indigenous group, you know, whatever group that you care most about. Yeah, that's called the weekend. We had a word for that in Gen X. That's your weekend. At five o'clock on Friday, you could start thinking about that. the rest of the week, you're focused.

Anyway, I'm old school.

Gen X, I'm old school now. It's so great to have you on here. The books, Coddling of the American Mind, Anxious Generation, and the first two, buy all four, everybody. That's the message you should get here. Stop what you're doing, get the audiobook. Books are the greatest deal in the world. 10, 15 bucks, you get a ton of knowledge. And hopefully this podcast inspires you. Whether you're a parent, educator, or a young person to just understand what's going on here. John, you're a great guest.

Thanks so much, guys. I just wanna put in just a quick note to learn more, go to anxiousgeneration.com is the website for the book. AfterBabel.com is my substack. We put a lot of research, a lot of writing. And letgrow.org is an incredible organization that we created with I can name a few, with Dr. Luis Sanchez to give parents like you more help, more ideas.

On how to give your kids a free range childhood.

I have been all over that website. Lots of great ideas there. Yeah. So I hope if there's any philanthropists in the audience who are willing to, we were, it's a tiny little organization. We could do so much more if we had some money and could hire some, hire more staff. So let grow.

Make a donation now. Letgrow.org.

Fantastic.

Let your kids grow.

Exactly. Exactly.

And let us know what you think of the all in interview, everybody who's a fan. John, you are amazing. Great guests.

Thank you so much, guys.