 This is The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Today's guest is Jonathan Height, whose new book is The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. The New York University psychologist and Heterodox Academy co-founder argues that what he calls a play-based childhood has been replaced with a phone-based one, leading to skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide among younger Americans. He says parents, schools, and society must keep young kids away from smartphones and social media if we want them to thrive. Here is The Reason Interview with Jonathan Height, which was taped in front of a live audience in New York City. This is The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Thanks for coming out. Our guest tonight is Jonathan Height, a NYU psychology professor whose new book is The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Jonathan Height, thanks for talking to me. My pleasure, Nick. So this book is currently at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, is that correct? Okay, so this is like, give it up. This is the, I mean, you're coming up after 2018's The Coddling of the American Mind. So you're like Fleetwood Mack or Elton John at their peak, right? I mean, you are, you debut at number one now. Let's start by talking about, what's the elevator pitch for? Actually, before I do that, I want to just make a very brief opening statement, which is when I walked in or we were all milling around before, and Matt Welch said, welcome to the lion's den, because there's an interesting thing going on with this issue, which is that there's not really a left-right divide. Left and right are actually pretty much together. It's actually the main critics, the main debate is actually between left and right and libertarians. And here's the great thing about libertarians. When they disagree with you, if they hate what you're doing, you know what they do? They make arguments and they give evidence and they have fun doing it. And there's humor and there's excitement, things like this. So, and as Matt acknowledged, like, it was a joke, like, you know, you guys are very nice lions. You're not all libertarians, but you're all, you know, nice lions. Well, we'll see about that. I guess we will. And then the other thing I just wanted to say is, when my wife, Jan, and I, when we moved to New York in 2011, we were welcomed by Jerry Orstrom and you and Matt and many others. And so the sort of the extended reason network in New York City has been really the most exciting intellectual community, you know. So anyway, thank you for all of that. Now, elevator pitch for the book. Something really, really changed for Americans born in 1996 and later. They were very different from those who were born just a few years before. And we first saw this with the coddling. Greg and I, Greg was the first to spot it. The students coming in 2014 were just very different from those who'd come in even as late as 2012. We didn't know it then, but it was the Gen Z millennial Divide. So their mental health is much, much worse. And it turns out that's happening in all the English speaking countries and in Northern Europe as well. It's very widespread. So we have this giant global mystery. Why did mental health collapse in so many countries at the same time, in the same way, hitting girls harder than boys? And in the coddling, Greg and I addressed a major cause, which was coddling, like overprotection. That's what we focused on. We didn't know that. We speculated, well, maybe, you know, social media could be something. The timing is right, but we don't know. We wrote that in 2017. Since then, a lot new has come in. A lot of new evidence. People have seen it with their own eyes. Something is just going wrong when kids are raised on a screen rather than playing. So the book is about how the play-based childhood got replaced by the screen-based childhood. And that disrupts almost everything about human development. And so the book explores much more than you can do in an article. It explores 15 different causal pathways and many interactions. And so that's what the book is about. And then it goes into solutions, which are some norms that I think will change this. Okay. And we'll get to those in a second. In the book, you talk about how there are two main contributing factors to the current mental illness problems with Gen Z and I guess younger people. First, before we get into that, can you just quickly sketch what is the, what are the problems that we're seeing now that are so different? So the ones for which we have the most evidence are the mental health studies because that's tracked very carefully. America and Britain have very good longitudinal surveys. And so what you see, and you can see this in all the graphs, my lead researcher and research partner, Zach Roush is here somewhere. Zach, where are you? Stand up. Okay. Back there. So if you follow, I hope, I hope everyone here will follow after babble.com. That's our sub-stack. Zach is the editor and we put, you know, he puts, we put all our work up there. And what you see over and over and over again are hockey sticks. The mental health was pretty stable. The millennials were actually a little healthier than Gen Z, than Gen X before them. And then all of a sudden right around 2012 plus or minus a year or two, the numbers go way, way up for anxiety, depression, self-harm, and well, suicide starts a bit earlier, but that also goes way up. And it's not just us. It's the same in many countries. That's, that's the obvious thing. And that's where the debate has been. Like all the, almost all the scientific argument is like, is social media causing mental illness? There does not seem to be a debate about whether or not these indicators have changed. Actually, there is, there is. And, you know, we'll hear from Aaron, my colleague at NYU. Some, there are some people who are, who think maybe there's not even any real rise. It's just changes in diagnostic criteria. So that's a separate argument is, is there a mental health crisis? But I think most people now in almost all health authorities internationally are saying something's going wrong for young people. So in the book, you talk about, you know, there are two major contributing factors. And it's kind of like different types of insulin, a fast acting and a slow acting one. One is the disappearance of what you call a play-based childhood. And this really starts decades ago. Can you talk about what is, what is a, what was a play-based childhood and what happened to it? So the play-based childhood is mother nature's plan for mammals. So when mammals evolve, they quickly develop larger brains, especially the social mammals like dogs and cats and primates. Dolphins. Dolphins, yeah. That's right. They play. That's right. If you, right, if you are a social, if you're an intensely social species, you have a big brain for the sociality. And how do you wire it up? Because the genes don't tell the neurons where to grow. They just start the ball rolling. You wire it up in play. That's the most important thing. And that was the case from about 200 million BC till about 1980 something. And all kids went out and played. And, you know, it didn't matter if it was raining. It was heevis and butthead, right? That ended play-based childhood or something. They did. Yeah. I guess that was kind of the fall of the civilization. But, but, you know, play is just, you know, it's just absolutely essential for human development. And the most nutritious play is a group mixed age outdoors. We evolved outdoors. We're attracted to outdoor things. We want to run. That's the healthiest kind of play with no adult supervision. And here I'm drawing on Lenore Scanesi, who wrote the book Free Range Kids and helped me to write this book. She had a huge contribution to the sections at the end on what parents can do. Lenore, if you can just stand up. Just Lenore Scanesi also writes it also writes it Reason. So the play-based childhood is what we evolved to do to wire up our brains. And we develop our social skills, empathy, ability to read faces, turn taking, all the skills of democratic engagement, all the skills that Alexis de Tocqueville praised about Americans, that if there's a problem, they get together and they figured out a way to solve it. You know, whereas in France, we wait for the king to do it. All those skills, kids were developing until the 1980s. And then we started freaking out about child deduction. We stopped trusting each other with our kids. We also had fewer kids. So for a variety of reasons, the play-based childhood faded out. And those are not- Is it also, I mean, is it partly because women started going, entering the workforce on equal terms as men? So what do you do with kids, right? Because we're both the same age. We're 60. You know, we grow up in a period at, I mean, my, both of my parents- Mothers were home, but most mothers- Yeah, in the neighborhood, you grow up if you were in the baby boom or Gen X, to some degree. There were always parents in the neighborhood, mothers in the neighborhood. That kind of disappeared. That was part of- You put the kids in institutional settings. That's correct. That's a big part of it. So there is, you know, what, there was what was called eyes on the street. So Jane Jacobs wrote about, you know, the sidewalk ballet. And kids were out playing, you know, they were playing, even if the weather was bad, even if there was a crime wave, whatever, the kids were out playing. And in part because there were adults around that you could trust. But as women begin to work and for related and other and unrelated reasons, family size begins to shrink. So there just aren't a lot of kids around. Gen X, they were known as the latchkey kids because part of the solution to mothers working was, well, sweetheart, here's the key, you come home alone, let yourself in after school, you know, when you're seven or eight, which you can do, kids can do. And so there was a brief period, but then we kind of said like, no, let's stop doing that. Let's make sure there's always an adult supervising. And if that means I have to put them in adult supervised activities every day, and so be it. But in the process, kids lost- And part of it is we professionalized childhood, right? I mean, and it's boomer parents who, you know, wanted, you know, they created communes or went wandering, but they wanted their kids to have, you know, ballet lessons, music lessons, be good at sports. We became richer, fewer kids, we focused more attention. One of the things that you talk about in a great 2017 article, for a reason that you co-wrote with Lenore Scanesi, where you kind of helped or used, it was at the beginning of Let Grow, the nonprofit that you helped co-found. You wrote that as a result of the kind of immersion in, you know, in kind of institutional settings, children have been taught to seek authority figures to solve their problems and shield them from discomfort, a condition sociologists call moral dependency. That's a big part of the coddling. Can you talk a little bit about how the end of play gave rise to what you wrote about with Greg Lukianoff and the coddling of the American mind? So there's a really, so, you know, as I was founding Heterodox Academy, and John Tomassi is here somewhere, the president of Heterodox Academy. John, can you stand up? Where are you? All right. This is like a Dean Martin celebrity roast. I mean, it's just like everybody's here tonight. No, it's like the intellectual royalty of New York City. That's right. It's good. So moral dependency is this really great term that I learned from to sociologists who wrote the first major paper on microaggressions, Manning and Campbell, were their last names. And they pointed out that, you know, all this stuff of microaggressions, it was coming up not in the places where you'd expect there to be the most prejudice or the most reason for it, but in the places that were the most equal, in the places that were most egalitarian, in places where there aren't big distinctions, but there is also an authority that you can call in if you need help. And they point out how in a culture of honor, a man cannot stand, a microaggression, a man cannot stand to stand upon his honor. And he must take vengeance himself. He can't like call the police like he has to do it himself. So there's a culture of honor. And then that change to a culture of dignity where sticks and stones will break my bones. We let the law take care of it. And what they observed was there was emerging on college, elite college campuses among young people. And this is the beginning of Gen Z. They wrote this around, I forget when, 2015, 2014, something like that. On college campuses was emerging a culture, which is kind of like an honor culture, in that if any little thing is said, it must be dealt with by the authorities. And so young people became expert at how do I make my case to the authority? I'm not going to argue with you. I'm going to convince him to punish you. And this is what really just really ruined things in universities, because we have to be able to challenge each other. We have to be able to study all sorts of things. We need open inquiry. But if someone is offended and they can call in a drone strike on you, it really kind of chills people. And this is the difference between, I don't know how much this is kind of mythic or not. But some of us, at least boys, although I think this was true of girls too, you would get into a fight, come home, and complain to your parents and they would say, go out and figure it out. Like we're not stepping in. That is over. And now it's, you come back to your parent. They call the other parent or sometimes report them or whatever. Yeah, that's right. So that's that's moral dependency where you don't handle disputes yourself. Everyone needs to handle, learn to handle disputes themselves and know when to escalate. There are times, but it shouldn't be every day. So what that gives way, the play-based childhood has given way to the phone-based childhood. Talk about that. So the play-based childhood is declining from the 80s, all the way down to 2010. Kids are spending less time alone, less time outside. So it's gradual. But mental health isn't actually declining. As I said, the millennials, actually they're a little healthier than Gen X. But that's because Gen X is just a garbage generation. No, it's, no, it, no, that is, that is terrible. It's because of leaded gas. They have brain damage from leaded gas. Now onto, yeah, and I'm actually mostly serious about that. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. So, but, oh yes. So, so that's the puzzle is that this is very important, but it seems to sort of weak, you know, weaken them, but it doesn't make them anxious and depressed. The millennials, they still have this amazing spirit. You know, when I hear my wife has lots of millennial friends and, you know, you talk to them like, yeah, you know, so I decided to go surfing in, you know, in this place. And then I, you know, I sold my car and I went here like, wow, like you really have a spirit of exploration. And that seems to be almost entirely missing in Gen Z. I'm just so much more anxious. And Gen Z, what's, what's the age range in Gen Z? So I say 1996 and later, Gene Twanky said 95 originally, Pew now says 97, whatever. But so I say 96 is about when the birth year it begins. So what, what happens? So it's important to understand the chronology. So in, in 2010, there's no sign of a problem. You know, the mental health stats are, you know, they're bouncing along. There's no, no trend up. 2010, very few young people have an iPhone. The iPhone comes out 2007. Very few, very few young people have one as expensive, less than 20%. Most don't have high speed internet. No one has a front facing camera. No one has Instagram. So that's the situation for teens in 2010. They use their flip phones to text each other to meet up. Like, let's, you know, meet you at the mall or let's go to get, you know, someplace after school. So mental health is fine. Five years later, everything is different about their daily life because now 75 or 80% have a smartphone. These smartphones got front facing cameras in 2010. Instagram was founded in 2010, but only becomes a real thing in 2012 when Facebook buys it. So they've got high speed data on the unlimited texting, but it's, it becomes possible to be online all the time. And half of Gen Z now says how often are, how much of your data is spent online? 45% in a Pew survey a couple of years ago said pretty much all the time. So even if they're in school, they're actually tracking what's going on in their virtual world, they just hold the phone in their desk. Even if they're talking to you at the dinner table, they're actually thinking about it and they're checking whenever they can, they have the phone out. So it's a complete transformation of consciousness, behavior. I mean, imagine, imagine take childhood in 2010. Let's drain out most, let's take away a lot of outdoor time, a lot of sleep, read fewer books, no hobbies, no time for hobbies. You don't see friends very much. You basically go home, if you're a boy, you have to go home in order to play with your friends because you have to go to have your control or your headset. So you can't go over to friends house to play video games anymore because now everything's multiplayer. So for all these reasons, the technological, these technological changes, they came in very, very fast. And that's why I say 2010 to 2015 is the great rewiring of childhood. And just to finish up from a point before that I forgot to put the second half on the mental health stats is where we're fighting about. But there's like 20 other outcomes. And this is what I hear from employers. You know, I was asking how's working in business school, I talked to a lot of business people, how's it going with your young employees? I never hear, oh great, they're so creative, they're amazing. It's always, they're so anxious and they need encouragement about everything. And they often won't do things because they say, you know, they have an anxiety reason, they've been accommodated so much. So there's just problems making the transition. None of this is their fault. We never let them have the independence. Where do we see that in terms of, you know, depression? How many kids are disabled by depression in 2010, you know, 2015, 2020, right? So in general, based on the self report studies, the numbers go up, it depends on what study you're looking at, generally between 50 and 150%. So these are not small increases. Whenever you zoom in on, so girls, the percentage increase is usually larger, they're not always. Young girls, 10 to 14, that is always the largest and it's often gigantic. So the increase, the increase there in, I forget the exact numbers for depression and anxiety, but there you often get numbers 150 to 200%. Self harm is up, I think 190%. That's hospital visits for self harm. So what are, do we know the absolute numbers though, because this is, if it's, you know, from zero to one, that's a massive increase, but it's not like, okay, this is the new normal that kids are killing themselves. Kids are disabled by depression. So obviously it's not the new normal that kids are killing themselves, but it is the new normal that if you're a girl in a, in an English speaking country, you're, you know, a little less than half, I mean, one in three, let's say, has an anxiety or depression at a relative level of severity. And this is on the order of 50 to 100% more than what it was in 2010. So these are big increases. And because we see the same degree of increase in self harm and suicide. So some critics have said, Oh, this is just changes in self report criteria or diagnostic criteria by psychiatrists. It's not a real thing. The kids are okay. But because, again, we see the same thing. If you look at the number of kids who were taken for psychiatric emergency visits in Australia or New Zealand, we see the same patterns. And around the same magnitude. So I don't think this is just Gen Z is comfortable reporting. So one of the things you point out in the anxious generation is that Gen Z was the first generation to go through puberty with smartphones. Why does that matter? Because the, so puberty is an incredibly important time neurologically looking forward to the future. So the human brain grows very quickly. It reaches almost full size by the age of six. And then the rest of development is not about getting bigger. It's about actually pulling stuff out and leaving just what matters. And then you myelinate those. You put a fatty sheath along them to make the circuits better. So this is happening during childhood, but it really speeds up at puberty. It's not just a body growth spurt. It also is the signal, okay, now we convert over from the caterpillar to the butterfly. Now we convert over from the child form of the brain to adult form of the brain. And that process is guided by experience, not guided by the genes. The genes don't tell the neurons where to grow. It's guided by incoming experience. And so in most cultures traditionally, as soon as they're the first signs of puberty, that's when the adults say, okay, now we will separate you from your childhood life and you will have a guide and it won't be your parents. It's never the parents. It's always other adults of your sex will help you and guide you into how you become an adult in our culture. And what we've done instead is we've said, you know what, we're too busy for that. Forget that here, here you go. Here's an iPhone. Now you can basically do this all during puberty and that will guide your neural development. And you'll be basically socialized and encultured by random weirdes on the internet who are selected by an algorithm. And this, you know, this, I think has lasting effects, possibly permanent, although it can be undone to some extent. But that's why early puberty is so, so important. And this, I believe is why the millennials are okay in their mental health because they didn't get their first smartphone or Instagram account until they were at least 15 or 16. They were well into high school or college. And so yeah, it's doing a number on all of us. We all feel fragmented and frazzled. And, you know, I get very anxious if I'm on social media. But our brains like we made it through puberty. So our brains aren't being changed as much. Do you see, you know, is there a decline in participation of, you know, say after school sports or things like that? I mean, that would also show that Gen Z or younger kids are withdrawn from social life. I mean, you there's a lot of studies that's that show the younger people are the fewer close friends they report having and things like that. But, you know, in our kids doing fewer sports, are they doing fewer music lessons? Are they doing things with that? Yeah. So adult organized activities, I don't know that those are dropping. I don't see any reason why adults are suddenly going to say, oh, rather than having, you know, piano and, you know, math and all these other after school activities, we're going to reduce that because you need more time on TikTok. Rather, they have, you know, as far as I know, they have roughly the same number of activities. It's just that now that they're spending a couple hours a day on TikTok and a couple hours and other platforms, and it all adds up to the average is about nine hours a day that they're spending on their devices. That's not including school or homework. So it's most of the time is is now doing this. And what that means is that they just don't have much time for they have less time for homework. So they're not getting more homework, but they're more pressured because they don't have time for it anymore. They don't have time to see friends. They don't go to religious services, don't read books. So, you know, imagine giving up nine hours a day every day. Like, there's not a lot of time left. So yeah, everything else is getting squeezed out. Is there a reason to believe that we won't adjust to this or that we're not already adjusting, you know, to a new technology? This happened. I remember when my parents were born in the 20s, when they got their first TV sometime in the early 50s, it was like, there's a Honeymooners episode for those of you who remember the Honeymooners where Ralph Cramden and his wife get a TV and they stay up 24 hours watching and they were like, that's exactly what they did. And then after a couple weeks, they were like, okay, we got to reel this in. I'm looking at 16 to 19 year old labor force participation rates. In 2002, it was 47%. It dropped to 34% in 2012. It was back up to 37% in 2022, suggesting that teenagers are actually going back into the workforce a little bit. There are other indicators like that where, according to Pew Research, between 2022 and 2023, the amount that 13 to 17 year olds said they used YouTube decline, TikTok declined, Snapchat actually went and Instagram declined. Are we starting to, why wouldn't we kind of adjust after this shock of a new powerful technology that we really did? So I think adults are trying to learn how to live with this. We're trying to adapt to it. And from what I hear, we're not doing a very good job. It's hard. We rely on these things for work. We get hooked on them for pleasure. And I have very little interest in limiting what adults can do, but children is a very, very different story. And I don't think that in 100 years, children will have adapted to nine hours of TikTok a day so that it no longer harms their brains. And you don't think that they won't be on nine hours of TikTok or social media? No, I think the way we adapt to it is precisely by saying, you know what, this is really messing up our kids. How about we say no smartphone till 14, no social media till 16, phone free schools and more independence and free play. That's what my book is about. So yeah, I think we will adapt. I think we're going to roll back the phone-based childhood because it's just incredibly toxic for developing kids. Let's run through some of the critiques of the book, and I'll give you a chance to respond. And then when we start the question and answer period, actually, John mentioned that Aaron Brown is here. He's a statistician and an academic. He's also written and done videos for reason, including a critique of John. So we're going to do a mini debate about Aaron's critique of John, which has to do with some of the social science work that John relies on. And I do want to say, before we go into that, the subsequent after Babel or Babel is fantastic. And you have really put all of your work out there, your thinking process. I mean, this is exemplary kind of, you know, enlightenment science, where you're putting, this is my source material. This is how I arrive at this. Here's my data. So that's phenomenal. And I'm very happy to engage in a little bit of that here. As with that as a prologue, Eric Levitz at Fox wrote a piece critiquing your book. And he points out that Stetson University psychologist Christopher Ferguson notes that the recent increase in suicide rates in America is not simply for younger people. It's across across age ranges. And actually higher age ranges have higher rates that suggests that whatever is driving up suicide rates, which is a hard number, it's a harder number than diagnoses of mental illness. It's something different than cell phones, right? Well, hold on a sec. So, so suicide has many causes. It's not that I don't know the percentage of people who kill themselves who are depressed. But one thing and Zach has just been digging into this data recently, because the other critique that I'm sure you get to Candace Rogers is about she suggests that it's the global financial crisis is the cause of the because, you know, that was that actually is why I want to kill other people. So Zach has been looking into the Gene Twenge and Zach and I have all looked into this. And what we find is when the economy tanks, there is one group that really is more likely to kill themselves. And it's adult men. When men suddenly go bankrupt, they're supporting their family. They do sometimes turn to suicide here in New York as all the South Asian family, you know, men who bought taxi licenses as those license, those medallions dropped to very low value. A lot of them killed themselves. They couldn't make a living. There's not a hint, a shred, anything suggesting that economic factors affect teenagers. I mean, the suicide rate is not affected by this. Depression rates are not affected by this. So are you suggesting then that the suicide rate for older people might be going up for one reason and then for younger people for different reasons? That's right. And so suicide, you know, Chris is right that suicide is the hardest metric. The stats are very accurate from many countries. Yes, it's a good thing to look at. But it is not a direct readout of depression and anxiety. There are many causes. Emile Durkheim wrote an incredible book on suicide and all the different factors of social integration that go into suicide. But what we've done it after Babel, Zach has traced out the he's developed an interesting way of graphing out the suicide rate of each generation at each age. And then he stacks them so you can see how suicidal was Gen X compared to other generations when they were all 18 years old or whatever. And what he finds is that Gen X was the most suicidal generation for the boys overwhelmingly. Those Gen X boys had the highest suicide rates ever. But when we look at girls, it's not Gen X. It's Gen Z. Gen Z girls in all five Anglo countries, he's done it. It's the exact same pattern. It's the highest ever. It all goes up in the early 2010s. So there is a signal here. This is not random noise. And suicide, it's not, you know, there are many reasons for adults committing suicide. I don't think adults are committing suicide because they have TikTok and Instagram. But I think teenage girls often are because when they get a mob against them, when you are canceled, you know, in the ancient world, you know, either we're going to kill you if you commit crimes, we're going to kill you or banish you. You're socially dead either way. And for teenagers, social death is a living hell, whereas death is over quickly. So I think that I think the part of the big increase in preteen girls' suicide is because a small number of them get massively shamed in ways that could not have happened before 2010. What, how many preteen girls commit suicide though? Is that, you know, it's a tragedy, but is that indicative of a larger problem or is that just, you know, an outlying statistic? Well, no, I mean, so, you know, Chris Ferguson and others are right to say, you know, if we really want to save lives, we'd be looking especially at older people. The suicide rate is much higher in older people. And it's lowest in the preteen boys and girls, especially the girls. But what, what Zach and I are trying to figure out is a detective story. What happened? Why did this change so quickly in so many countries at the same time? We don't see that for the adult data. You don't see that suddenly middle-aged men are killing themselves more at a certain point other than the global financial crisis. You don't see, so, so if you're trying to solve a mystery, then you're interested more in percentage change than in absolute levels. Can you talk about why this stuff hits girls, particularly young girls, harder than any other subset of the population? Sure. So come back to the boys in a moment, because it's not that the boys are okay. The boys have a different set of problems. But it's, but the evidence connecting social media to girls is much more consistent and much strong with the correlations are larger, the experimental effects are larger. So there is a special relationship between social media and girls. And as we say in the book, you know, the reason seems to be, you know, when boys get together, if you just let them get together with no adult supervision, they're likely to organize themselves into groups to compete. It's just something that boys really enjoy doing more than girls. And so when everyone goes on devices and the internet is everywhere, boys are going to go to multiplayer video games. They're amazing. They're fun. Girls are girls are much more interested in talking about relationships, who is on the outs with whom, you know, who's dating who. So girls are just much more they have a more developmental map of the social space boys are a little more clueless and literally on the spectrum, according to Simon Baron Cohen, that is the male female differences that boys are shifted over towards autism a little bit. And so because girls are just more interested in social relationships, and also their aggression is different boys aggression is ultimately backed up by the threat of physical domination and punching or pain. Girls isn't like that girls aggression is is equal in magnitude, but it's aimed at relationships and reputation it's called relational aggression. So video games, if anything, prevent boys from getting in fights because you can't have a fight on a video game, there's no nothing to argue over the platform does all the settles all the everything. But but girls relational aggression is amplified. And the worst year of bullying is seventh grade. And this is I'm really focused on middle school. There's no argument middle school. There's a popular series middle school the worst years of my life. That's right. It is. And so it used to be junior high, which was awful. And then what middle school just they just changed the name. But and they drop it down a year. Okay, but if you know, but if you if you think about all the things that were terrible about middle school, and then you give everybody Instagram, and you get things like, you know, we have an example in the book of a story, you know, they organized an Instagram group, everyone but Mary, like, we're all going to get to talk about her. I mean, how painful is that when you're a 12 year old girl. So so for so many reasons, social media really targets girls insecurities and social needs. It doesn't satisfy them. So as soon as girls go on social media, it's not like they're like now super connected and happy, they get much lonelier. Is it, you know, in in some parts of the book, and in some interviews I've seen you do, you kind of wave away the benefits of social media. You know, and it's true, okay, Mary is is ostracized within a certain setting. But a lot of people talk about how, you know, social media and before that just the rise of the internet allowed people who are already isolated to connect to other people. How does that kind of balance factor into this? So the key is what you just said. And before at the internet. So I think there are a couple of mistakes that people make when they talk about the benefits of social media. Obviously, for adults, we use it for many purposes, businesses needed. It's a functional tool. I'm not saying that. But let's focus on middle school, let's focus on, you know, seventh, eighth graders, you know, they're 11, 12, 13 years old, let's focus on them. It said, Oh, you know, they can help some find people and especially for my marginalized community or LGBTQ. Well, you know, the internet did that before Instagram, like you don't need, you don't need a news feed and algorithm amplification, which pushes everyone to go for a route, you don't need that. So if you have the whole internet and blogs and videos, you have all this stuff, you're not isolating more. So that's the first thing is don't confuse social media with the internet. I'm not talking about keeping kids off of the internet. What counts of social media and what doesn't? Yeah, so it's prototypically defined. That is, the prototype would be would be Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. It's where users have accounts, they post stuff on their accounts, they connect to other people's accounts, and it's all about user generated content. So those are the prototypes. Now, technically, YouTube is social media, because you can have an account you can post. But for the most part, YouTube is used as the world's video library. YouTube, if we're gonna do a cost benefit analysis, you know, YouTube is incredibly valuable. A lot of bad stuff happens, a lot of radicalization, but I think it's also by far the most popular. I've been pretty much across all age groups, too. Yeah, I don't remember whether it's I think it is more even more than TikTok now, I think so. But and TikTok is bad. TikTok is really, really bad. Yeah, why is TikTok really, really bad? Okay, so I didn't write about this much in the book, but I'm coming to see short form video is really, really horrible, especially for young people, for children. And so the reason is this. I'll do an experiment with you right now. How many of you, I don't know if this will work on radio or whatever, we'll give it, we'll say, how many of you in this audience raise your hand, if you watch Netflix, at least once a week, raise your hand high. Okay, about half. Okay, now just those who raised their hand, how many of you wish that Netflix was never invented? The world would be better if Netflix wasn't here. Raise your hand if you, okay, one or two. So Netflix is stories. Stories are human. Humans love stories. We've always told stories. We've always lived in stories. We've always raised our kid in stories. And when you and I were young, we were immersed in stories that were really, really stupid, like I dream of Jeannie and Gilligan's Island, but they were stories. Okay, so the stories are better now on Netflix and things like that. All right, next question. How many of you spend at least an hour or two a week on TikTok? Raise your hand high. Okay, not enough to do the demonstration. So I'll have to tell you it's only about five hands. Okay, of the five of you, how many of you wish that, think the world would be better if TikTok was never invented? Raise your hands. All of you. Okay, even more than the five who raised their hand before. Yeah, right. So powerful. So I do this with my students at NYU and the results are same on Instagram, but on TikTok, almost everybody raises their hand that they use it. How many of you wish it was never invented? Almost everyone raises their hand. Why did they do that? Because it's a collective action trap. I say why, and you know, some of the students are spending five hours a day on TikTok, five hours a day, just on TikTok. And then there are other platforms. And part of that is addiction. It's the most addictive form. So, you know, Netflix isn't rewarding you like BF Skinner with a little treat every hour when you press the repeat button. In fact, you don't even have to press it. They have autoplay, which is bad. Whereas TikTok is, you know, it's stimulus response, stimulus response. So TikTok has a power of behaviorist conditioning that more than any other platform. And it's not stories. It's little bits of garbage. It's people doing degrading things. It's people getting hit by cars. It's all kinds of horrible things. That does not really comport with the content analysis of TikTok. And I don't think most people, you know, I'm just saying. Look at teenage boys. Look at teenage boys. Obviously, it's lovely for many people because of course it gets to know you. But for a lot of teenage boys, what they're being fed, what they're choosing ends up being really horrible stuff. So I think when we look at the social benefit brought by a platform, economists have this thing they do where they say, willingness to pay. How much would you pay to avoid oranges being eliminated from the world? Like, I don't want a world without oranges. I'll put in a thousand dollars to save oranges. Okay. But and when you say, when they ask them about social media and people say, oh, you'd have to pay me a certain amount of money to get off of Instagram, the economists say, oh, see, multiply this out by, you know, three billion people. That's a lot of value created. But actually, it's a trap because people are on it because everyone else is. And the young people say, I would get I would be off TikTok if everyone else was. But since everyone's on it, they're talking about I have to know what are the what are the TikTok trends? Abigail Schreyer, who has a book out that's also somewhere on the New York Times bestseller list called Bad Therapy. She argues that social media, she's not she's not a big fan of it, but she says that the bigger problem is the context in which it emerges, which is a therapeutic culture that has infused every aspect of childhood in particular. And she has written that, you know, all of the bad trends showed up before social media kicked in, we have social media, which is bad. And then we have all these other things like a constant valorization of being emotionally traumatized, teaching you that you need to check in with an adult or a mental health expert before you take any risks whatsoever. Is she right? Or is she wrong to devalue the contribution of social media to the lassitude and mental problems of gender? So she's right. I think I haven't read the book yet, but I've heard interviews and I get the basic story. Her basic story is right that therapy, while therapy for adults overall is positive, therapy for teenagers and children is not nearly as positive as many more risks, many more backfire effects. She's right about that. She's right that we're doing too much therapy, we're valorizing. So her basic argument is right, but for her to say, so it's not social media, it's bad therapy, I would say, now wait a second, since the 70s, we've been becoming a therapeutic culture, you know, the triumph of the therapeutic. This is a very long running trend. Everything gets psychologized. And so if you wanted to say that some long running decline was because of our long running increase in psychologization, I would say, okay, that's a sensible argument. But I would ask her, I hope I will imagine I'll get a chance. Okay, why does suddenly everything go haywire in 2013? Is that because suddenly everyone was getting therapy? Or is that because suddenly the girls were on Instagram sharing emotions, they were on TikTok and what not TikTok, they're in YouTube groups for various mental illnesses with no psychiatrist anywhere near just young people competing for likes by being more and more extreme. So I would say her argument of bad therapy isn't contradicting my story about social media, it actually is an illustration of it. We'll get into this a little bit later. But you know, what do you do with studies that show, and there's a 2022 Stanford Medicine or study done by some people at Stanford Medicine Medical School that was led by Ziren's son that found a study of 250 tweens over about a five-year period that found that the presence or lack of presence of phones or high-speed internet just was not a predictor of whether or not these people did well. Is that just too small a study or is that? Yeah, I mean, 250 people is not, I mean, I don't know that study. So I mean, if we're looking at correlational studies, there's a lot of them. And even my critics, even some of the skeptics that I'm debating with, so Amy Orbin for one at Cambridge, you know, she did a review of what's the size of the correlation between social media and mental health problems. And she concluded that the correlation is in the domain of 0.1 to 0.15. It's not 0.03, which is, you know, the size of eating potatoes in our arcane debate. So even she finds that it is, it is not zero, it is more substantial. And that's for all kids, it's actually larger for girls. And even she finds that the evidence of harm is greatest for 11 to 13 year old girls. That's where the correlation is even bigger. Should we be more focused on them rather than all kids? Oh, you mean just on middle school girls? Yeah, if they're the largest, you know, kind of victims of this technology or the shift, you know, because are the things that will help them necessarily, the things that will help other people? So if we, so imagine a complicated space with 12 different things that, part of the technological environment. And over here, you've got 15 different bad outcomes. And one of them is watching social, spending a lot of time on social media, and then depression anxiety. That link is definitely strongest for the girls. And so if that was all it was, if it was just everyone's fine, except that more girls are depressed, and it seems to be social media, maybe we can let the boys on social media, but the girls, let's keep the other, you know, not that we would do that. But if that's all it was, I would say, well, you know, maybe, maybe, but that's not all it is. So the boys aren't watching, you know, checking social media and getting depressed and having eating disorders, that's not them. But they are getting drawn into these insane challenges where they risk their lives and some of them die, and they commit vandalism, and they get sex distorted, and they buy drugs with fentanyl. So there's so many different harms. So I would not say, oh, let's just, let's just keep the, you know, the 11 to 13 year old girls off of social media, let them on when they're 14, 15. Is I, I don't mean to be a dick about it, but I guess I'm going to be like, are you, are you catastrophizing to use a word that you use in kind of like, how many kids actually die from Tik Tok challenges, from milk crate challenges? I mean, these are vanishingly small numbers that are similar to the number of kids who go missing, you know, because they're kidnapped or something like that. Oh, no, I think it's larger than that. Okay, but I mean, like word, word, word, but we're, I mean, we're talking very, I mean, how many kids died from milk crate challenges or eating cinnamon challenges or whatever the social media thing. Yeah, I don't, I don't know the number. And I, you know, I don't think it's tens of thousands, but it's also, you know, look, if it was, if it was 10 or 20 a year, I would say, you know, that's just, that's life. But imagine that, you know, I don't quite remember what the Furby was, but there was a toy craze called the Furby. Yeah. Okay. Now, so imagine if the Furby, you've triggered me actually, but thank you. So imagine, imagine if the Furby caused, you know, every year it caused a few hundred boys to die doing stupid things and it caused a few hundred girls to commit suicide. Now as a percentage of the public, that's like 0.00. I mean, come on. Like that's not a big deal. But, you know, that thing would be gone an instant. This is the growth of these companies. These are the most important companies in the world by many metrics. They're certainly the most important companies in our children's lives. They largely govern our children's lives. They may have more influence over our children than we do. They are completely unregulated. Congress, not only did Congress say, how about you don't have to agegate? How about you don't have to check ages? You're not responsible unless you know that they're under 13. So Congress passed a law saying, you don't have to agegate. Kappa, it says, you know, as long as people say they're 13, that's enough. And then Congress says, oh, and also you can't be sued. How about you can't be sued? Now imagine if the maker of the Furby had was killing, you know, just a few hundred a year, only a few hundred kids a year, and they can't be sued. Like that's where we are. I'd buy Furby stock because that's how you make money, right? By killing your customers. They're not the customers. They're not the customers. But it's a good pivot into policy prescriptions. And to go back to what you were saying before about the adjustment period, I think your, you know, your book is certainly part of the adjustment. It's calling attention to, you know, the impacts of this technology. What are your, what are your main policy proposals? And, you know, this is, if not in the room, you know, going out on a reason channel, it's largely a libertarian audience. And you're very thoughtful about wanting to stress what are the different types of policies that you're calling for here. Yeah. Thank you for that. So, so I'm a social psychologist. And at the center of the analysis in the book is that, is that social media has social effects that are unlike anything else, unlike cigarettes or heroin or gambling or anything else, you know, with cigarettes at the peak of smoking, only a third of high school kids were smoking, two thirds were not smoking. But if we look at eighth graders, ninth graders, you know, it's the great majority are on, they have to be because everyone else is so it's a trap. And so what I'm after at the end of the book is how do we liberate ourselves in the trap? And the first movers, if you're the only parent of a sixth grader who says, you're not getting a smartphone, I don't care that you're the only one. I don't care that you'll be cut off. You're not getting a smartphone. You are going to stick with the Furby. You get a Furby. Yeah. It's like you're just taking the Furby to college. So, so that's that you're now costing your kid a lot. It's, and you're going to have a lot of struggle. So if you're the only one, it's very costly. And most parents look at and decide, you know what, this is, you know, this is the way things are, I'm just going to give my kid a phone. And that's so you get caught in a collective action trap. So what I did in the book was I wanted to find norms that were realistic, that we could actually do and coalesce around. And so, so, and I wrote the book assuming that we will never get any help from our legislators. Congress created the problem in the 90s with two bills. And I'm assuming that we will never get help from Congress. Now, I think I actually think- And by that, you mean because the age, the minimum age federally where, where a website can't collect data without parental consent of a minor, it's set at 13. 13, unless you say you're 13, in which case you can be two. Yeah. So- But if you're two and you're faking 13, you're probably going to- You're probably going to be. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I, I wrote the book assuming that we're not going to get any help from legislation. Now in Britain they are, Britain they have a functioning legislature, we don't, but they have a functioning legislature which has mandated phone free schools. Now, that's obviously state level here in the US. So- Well, let's, let's, let's go with- Phone free phone, getting, taking phones out of schools is one of the- That's right. So, so let's go through them. So the first one is no smartphone before high school. Just give a flip phone or a phone watch. This is a parent, this is a thing that people can do if they coordinate with other parents at their kid's school. As long as you and the families of your kid's friends do it, it is actually not just painless, it actually is fun if you also give those kids fun things to do together. And this is where let grow comes in. Go to letgrow.org, you'll find all kinds of ideas. I was, I was going to say tie this in to let grow and you- There it is. That's right. Your work in the territory. What does that mean though? Like what, what would you do if you say, okay, we're creating a, you know, and I realize I'm running into trouble here, but like a kid version of a polycule and we're saying like we're not, we're no smartphones. Okay, we're just using flip phones. What are some of the other things that the kids would do to fill the time? Okay, so first, okay, so let me just jump temporarily to the third rule, the third norm, which is phone free schools. Now some schools are going phone free. I've learned that religious schools that those that are orthodox Jewish or, or various Christian denominations, they think about the whole community and orthodox Jewish schools say not only can you not have a smartphone in school, you can't come to this school if you have a smartphone. Parents have to agree. I don't know if this is all schools, but some orthodox parents have to agree that they will not give their kid a smartphone. There's what's called a kosher phone that has very few functions. So religious communities, so religious communities have already organized to do not just phone free schools, but to delay smartphones till 18. Okay, so let's look at secular schools. What's happening now, which is so exciting, is now, and in part because from, you know, from reading my book and other things that we've done a lot of, and I had a big article in the Atlantic a year ago on phone free schools. So a lot of schools are going phone free, which means you lock up the phone in the morning, you know, you need the phone to get to school, perhaps, but you put in a phone locker or a yonder pouch and get it out at the end of the day. So schools are doing that, but they're not just doing it. They're now actually communicating with the parents. This is not public schools, but some private schools are doing this. They communicate with their parents to explain their concern. So I just gave a talk at JPMorgan. There were 15 heads of schools of schools in New York City. They all see the problem. They hate the phones generally. They're now beginning to communicate to the parents. Look, we all have to do this together. So once you have everyone agreeing, not just phone free schools, but let's at least keep it out of middle school. No smartphones in middle school. Oh, and if we're taking away so much screen time, we have to actually give them the independence, the freedom, the responsibility to do things in the real world. So now it's not just deprivation. It's how about kids? How about you have a fun childhood the way all of us did? So this is kind of blending, you know, free range. In the book you talk about we over-regulated the real world and under-regulated the virtual world. You're kind of flipping that script. Well, that's right. I would say it's not, it's, it's, it's, that's right. I'm flipping the script, but they're really two halves of the same coin because if you send your kids out to play and they have a smartphone and they're eight, nine, 10 years old, they're going to sit and be on the phone. You know, they might, maybe they'll be doing it together, but often they're just sitting next to each other on separate things. So you can't really give the independence if they're just going to be hooked on the phone all the time. That seems like a, you know, I don't know anybody who would be particularly upset by that. I'm saying, you know, parents obviously have a large amount of dominion over their children and you decide what the technology is and you're giving them a kind of scheme where you can get more people to get along with that. And with schools in America, I mean, there are at the national level and at the state level, you know, there are certain requirements, but generally speaking, it's a pretty dispersed and decentralized system. Yeah. And within, with some states, we are getting laws like Florida and Utah that are mandating schools, go phone free, a bunch of states are doing that. In other states, they're living up to the district. So in all of this, I don't think we have any conflict with liberty. Like my views are not going to conflict with libertarians on the, yeah, we'll get to that in a second. I mean, one of the things that's fascinating though, is that at the state level, one places like Florida have said, okay, we're going to ban certain types of social media practices. That does, you know, get in the way of a libertarian idea. It's like my kids and I should be able to raise them the way that I want. One of the big proposals that you have is age gating is changing the age, the minimum age, raising it at, you know, under which kids can't have access to social media. Talk about that and how does that, you know, is that just okay, this is a difference with libertarian ideas? This is the one place where I think I do have conflict with libertarians. And I want to talk about it because, you know, I'm best friends with Greg Lukianoff. I have, you know, a lot of... Yeah, and if we... I mean, you're the co-author of With Greg of the Coddling of the American Mind, who on his sub-stack wrote a critique or his concern, his first amendment concerns with some of your policy proposals, and he writes to paraphrase an old adage, it is unfair to deny a man a steak because a baby can't chew it. Let's see, it's unfair to deny a man a steak because a baby can't chew it. And he's saying that a one-size-fits-all government bands are one-size-fits-all, he writes. That means those kids who benefit from social media and there are plenty of them would be out of luck. Parents know their kids better than anyone, let them, not the government, make the decisions about what media they consider. How do you respond to that? Right. So let's talk about age-gating. So first, I would ask you or him or anyone else. So let's start with pornography, strip clubs, and casinos. So let's talk about things that either involve sex or addiction. Let's also bring in alcohol, nicotine. So all these things, when there is especially sex, let's focus on sex or addiction. In the real world, we've largely said, you know what, adults want to do these things. They're really harmful for kids who are not ready to make these decisions and their brains are developing. So in the real world, we've worked out all kinds of ways where adults can do what they want, and sometimes there's a little inconvenience. So when I was in high school, we could buy cigarettes from vending machines, but then they realized, you know what, we have to stop that. And now people want to smoke. They have to actually pull out their driver's license and show it, and then they get their cigarettes. That's an inconvenience, I understand that. But in the real world, we've found ways to do that. We're only 10 or 25 years in, however you want to count it, into the internet age. I really consider it really, the early 2010s is when the current internet age really began. So this is all very new for us. And so far, we've done nothing. There's no protections of any kind. Well, there is parental... Where? I mean, parents either know or they don't know what their kids are doing, right? Because there are controls on all of the social media platforms and all of the devices. Parents either say they can't use them or they don't use them, which is similar to in the 90s when cable TV was being attacked. And we created TVs with v-chips and ways of banning certain channels and parents didn't use them. That was okay. Well, that's fine. So even when it was simple on one device, parents often didn't use them. And then there would also be differences of education and marriage. There are going to be all kinds of couples that are going to be trying to do it. There are all kinds of... So I would put it to you like this. I certainly want parents to have control, but here's the thing. Most parents feel they don't have control. Most parents don't want their kids on these things early, but they feel like they can't stop it. If you value parental control and consent, you should be very upset with the way things are now, and you should ask for a change that would allow you to have the kind of policies that you want, because right now very few parents are able to do that. So think about it this way. Suppose 100 years ago when they began to regulate passing laws on alcohol and drugs and all sorts of things, suppose they said for alcohol, okay, the age is 18, but we can't expect bars and casinos to enforce that. It's up to the parents. Parents, if you don't want your kids being in bars and casinos and strip clubs and other things, you keep them out. Well, that would mean you have to lock your kid up. You cannot let your kid out. Otherwise, you can't stop them. But it's also... If I want to go to a bar, I mean, because the age-getting laws means that everybody has to enter confidential information on a website in order to... Well, how else do you do it? And it's not if I want to go to a bar, I don't have to share my credentials that then get put into a database, which is going to be hacked, et cetera. That's right. Thank you for that. Yeah. So I think many people think, first of all, there's a misconception that height wants the government to control everything and wants the government to tell you how to raise your kids. Again, I wrote the book assuming that nothing is going to happen on the government level, that we can do this all ourselves with collective action. The one place where it'd be really, really helpful would be if Congress would raise the age from 13 to 16 and require the platforms to actually share in the policing of it. Now, people assume then that I'm saying you have to show your driver's license, your government ID in order to open an account, because we're not talking about logging onto your account. It's only to open an account. That's all. What I'm suggesting is that Congress undo the mistake it made when it said companies don't have to check age... The age is 13 at which you can give away your data and sign a contract with a company, but the companies don't have to check anything. I want Congress to fix that and not say, as a couple of state bills do, that they have to require a driver's license. I don't want that. I want them to say, and the platforms shall offer a menu or a range of options for doing age verification. There are many, many range things already there. So clear, the company clear. Many of us have clear to go to airports. You can use that to buy a beer at a stadium. You don't need to show an ID. I don't know whether in that case it's biometrics, but clear is one way. If you have a clear account and my kids have clear accounts, so clear already is doing it. What's the liability that you would hold companies responsible for if parents sue Instagram and say, my daughter killed herself and she shouldn't have been able to have an account? What happens? Under current practice, I think that the parents should be able to sue and the companies have done everything they can, especially Metta. They've done everything they can to get the youngest kids they can. They want to do Instagram for kids. They talked about how do we get five and six year olds involved. So Metta, I think, should be held responsible for what it is done to kids. Now, what I'm suggesting is, especially for the underage, what I'm suggesting is what if Congress were to actually undo the mistake, make it 16, require age verification, but not 100%. We don't expect like, oh, this kid got on, therefore you can sue Metta. But if Metta is doing a reasonably good job of putting in an obstacle, making it harder, then they wouldn't be sued for that. What do you do to the parent who lets their kid on at 13 rather than 16? Do the kids get taken away? What's their liability? Well, I mean, because if your kid was having sex below the age of consent, child protective services would come in and be like, what the fuck's going on here? No, no, no. What we're talking, so what I'm really focused on here is not banning an experience. It's what are the laws around signing a contract at which you can give away your family's information and data without your parents knowing or consenting? What did you think that should be? I mean, do you think that any seven, eight-year-olds should be able to just sign a contract with a company and tell them all about what you have in your house without you knowing? How can this be the reality that we live in? So I'm not focused on banning an experience. I'm saying, at what age do we treat children as adults? And what Senator Markey did when he was in the house and introduced Kappa, he said 16. We've got teenagers dealing with all these new tech companies in the 90s. 16 should be the age, but various libraries, they pushed it down to 13. They gutted enforcement. So now it's essentially nothing. That was a mistake. Let me ask you, what age do you think your kids should have been able to make contracts with companies without you knowing? I have a Gen Z child as well as a millennial and they got social media or they got unfettered access to the internet. My younger son was probably 10 or 11 and we monitored it though as much as we could. But unless you keep them away from browsers, if he's at someone else's house and they have a browser, he can open accounts on everything. But I'm asking you personally, at what age? The way that we dealt with it was, it was not seven or eight, but you talk about it and you check things and you check them with other parents. I'm not disputing. I think you're absolutely right. And this is one of the real insights of Abigail Schreyer's book, which is that, and we forget this, kids are different than adults and they should be treated differently and things that are fine for adults to do are not good for kids to do and all of that. But once you start getting into the nitty gritty of saying, how do you police this and how do you regulate it? It comes back to this question more of social norms and of kind of individual familial or parental kind of enforcement mechanisms more than I think overarching legal ones. But that's not the way we dealt with drinking and gambling. But it is kind of and like I lived in Ohio. No, no, but what I'm saying is that, and that's also up to businesses to do what they want. But if you are with your kids in Ohio, if you're with your family, if you're with your parent or guardian, you can drink at the age of like 15 in a restaurant. So there's a sliding scale and things like that. And to give away discretion away from families to a government, that's like that is a big deal. And I'm not saying one is right and wrong, but it is a real difference. Okay. So I appreciate that as a libertarian, you're willing to say that kids are different from adults. And while we both have very libertarian ideas for adults, but we recognize that kids are different. We recognize, I assume you think it's legitimate. Do you think actually do you think it's legitimate for states or for states to say there's a minimum age to gamble, like in a casino? Or do you think that should be entirely up to the parents? No, I think it's mostly up to the parents. But yeah, I don't lose a lot of sleep over that. And I don't lose sleep over age of consent laws and things like that. Although there are always exceptions, right? Okay, good. So here's, so the two exceptions we've already talked about are sex and addiction. So we agree with it. And things that involve sex or addiction, there might be a role for a government to set a minimum age. I want to add a third category, which is those that by your very action as an individual, put pressure on everyone else. That's what we're dealing with. Social media is unlike anything else we've ever dealt with. I'm not convinced of that or to say that having access to Instagram at 14 would lead to a social, a collective action problem, or a particular outcome for a kid that I would say, no, nobody can consider that. Now, why did you say 14? I'm just saying, well, it could be 13. Okay, no, it could be 12 has to be 14. I don't know. So, okay, so I'm just saying it's below 16, because that's what you want to make. So let's talk about the Florida bill, because I think that's actually a very good one. So my, my, my second norm is no social media before 16. I think that should just be the norm. It should be supported by age verification. So that's what I'm proposing. Now the Florida bill that DeSantis just signed a couple of weeks ago says originally it was that it was that you can't in Florida, you can't open an account. It's not banning experience and saying you can't have this commercial relationship with the company until you're 16. And then there was pushed back. And so they added on and now if you're 14 or 15 and you have your parents consent, then you can do it. So it's like a Romeo and Juliet law for age of consent. Okay, yeah. Okay, that's fine. That's fine. So, so actually I'm okay with that. Yeah. And the reason why I'm actually, you know, I, the reason why I'm okay with it is because that would force the companies to do something they could easily have done long ago, but they really don't want to do, which is establish a way to get parental consent. Right now you have no, you really can't stop your kid from doing things unless you lock them away and they can't get to the internet. But if they could develop ways by which, you know, if you have an Instagram account or you will do something and you can verify that you're the parent, you know, then you can give permission to your 14 year old, not your 13 year old, because we have to get it out of middle school. It's a collective action problem. We have to get middle schools free of social need entirely. I don't necessarily, let me put it this way. And we might agree on this, we need to get rid of middle school. And I don't say that lightly. I mean, or junior high, because it used to be seven, eight, nine, now it's six, seven, eight. Middle school is a terrible institution. Nobody comes out of middle school. Well, what do you propose? What do you propose we do? I, you know, maybe it's, maybe it's one through eight, maybe it's one through eight, or you put them in a coma of medically induced coma for a couple years. That's basically what TikTok is restructuring. Yeah, that's very good. But, you know, restructuring the educational experience so that you're not hitting puberty in a kind of Lord of the Flies scenario. And we, we need to be thinking more creatively about that. Let's go to audience Q&A. And again, I want to stress that John has been remarkably open and transparent in the way that he comes up with his ideas and whatnot. We're going to have a quick mini debate with his critic, Aaron Brown. Aaron, could you stand up and what are the time constraints we each get? Yeah, Aaron is going to get two minutes to do a Pat Benatar and hit you with his best shot. Okay. And you get two minutes rebuttal and you'll each get one more attempt to kind of do. So Aaron, in two minutes or less, you, you have a video that's up at Reason. It'll be in the show notes for this video and podcast. What is your biggest issue with the anxious generation? Thank you. According to the Kinsey report, every average man you know much prefers his lovey-dovey to court when the temperature is low. You probably recognize that's the Elephant's Gerald version of a Cole Porter lyric from the show Kiss Me Kate. Alfred Kinsey, the pioneering, pioneering researcher of human sexuality, interviewed prostitutes, went to prison to talk to sex offenders, went to gay bars and SNM clubs. He did real experiments. He brought subjects back to his lab, to the attic in his house. He filmed them doing sex sacks, which he encouraged his staff. Are you suggesting John should be conducting sexual experiments in his attic? We're getting to that. We're getting to that. And filming them on TikTok. And also he did longitudinal studies, real ones. He followed individuals over many years to trace their life paths. One of my mentors was a great statistician, John Tukey. And Tukey famously said he would prefer a random sample of three to five people to Kinsey's 18,000 in-depth interviews. And the antiseptic mathematical rigor of Tukey is welcomed in polite society, whereas Kinsey has acquired a taint because he literally got his hands and other body parts dirty. Now, I highly recommend this book. It's a masterwork of sociology. It's gracefully written. It has lots of great insights. But I couldn't find much psychology in here. And I certainly couldn't find none of the spirit of Kinsey. I accept I was convinced by the claim that social media has revolutionized the social life of teenagers and that at roughly the same time, we've seen a worrying decline in teen mental health. But the stronger claim that there's a causal, unidirectional, purely negative link between social media and teen mental health, especially teenage girl depression, rests on some studies. The book, to me, reading it actually shows the opposite. It shows an entanglement of a lot of social forces bi-directional that's net positive for some individuals and net negative for others. The studies supporting it, both a list on a sub-stack online and the ones cited in the book. There are overlapping groups. I found appalling numbers of junk studies that both Tukey and Kinsey would reject. Of course, there were plenty of good studies, but most of them lacked data either for the time period or the variables mentioned. And the handful of relevant good studies didn't provide unambiguous support for the unidirectional, purely negative causal link. If social media is a plague on our children, we're only going to prove it by talking to the victims. You have to go to mental hospitals to hospital suicide, watch wards to prisons, homeless shelters, drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers. You have to talk to real people. I don't think you can prove this problem by asking your sophomore psychology class to turn off their smartphones and circle a few licorice scales about how that makes them feel or doing asking random adults on the internet whether they're hopelessly helpless or hopelessly hopeful or whatever like that. I think if a second edition of this book could get a little help from modern Kinsey, we could add a new lyric to the song, we could say, according to the anxious gen, every teenage gal you know really needs her Instagram to be blocked when her mood is getting low. All right, thank you. And John, you actually have three minutes to respond to that. So if that was your best shot as a critique, I'm actually very happy with it because it was a very constructive description of a book that you praised for a number of reasons. And then you said that some of the studies in relying on are flawed. You're absolutely right. The Google doc that Zach and I and Jean Tranque created was not, it's not a meta-analysis. We were trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Everyone's citing studies, this study, that study, no one can keep track of it. Let's just put them all together in one document. And so that's what we did in 2019. And you're right, a lot of the studies are very low quality as you know, the great majority of studies are. You've been a critic of the social sciences and the replication crisis we have and you know, guilty as charged. We really have to get our act together and we are doing that, especially in social psychology where we kind of led the charge against that. So if your skepticism is just that we have not conclusively proven the causal link, I think that's a reasonable position to hold today. Now you suggested that what I'm saying is causal, unidirectional and purely negative. Right. So no, first of all, I would never say that it was unidirectional. There are some studies that show that depressed kids do then use social media more. So most things in social science is many are bi-directional. And I hope that in my book, as in all my books, nobody would say, oh, he's reducing it to, you know, this and this, like it's always a multi-layered story. I go into developmental psychology. I go into cultural history. I go into the technology. So this was a really fascinating book to write because so many things come together. So I'll just say that I appreciate actually the work of all of all the skeptics. You and there are about four or five others that are the main people who are writing. And actually, you know, this is what academic life is supposed to be like. And it's actually fun when I, this is my first time meeting Aaron. You know, when I, when you actually meet someone, you know, and they're charming and they, you know, they're able to, you know, give you funny cultural references. You then remember, like, oh yeah, we're part of a guild. Like this guild goes back to Plato and Aristotle. And it's in an event like this that we enjoy putting out ideas and challenging each other's ideas. So if that's your best shot, I love it. And I thank you. All right. Let's, uh, do you have a quick rebuttal or further comment? You don't need to. I think you're, you're sliding off a little bit. So, so I think we agree that yes, the book shows the complexity, the entanglement, the bidirectional, all that. But it seems to me that your policy recommendations require the simple, the unidirectional causal that, you know, if you're going to ban something, uh, you got to say, okay, there's a simple relationship. This causes, if we get rid of it, it's bad. Thank you. Uh, John, final comment on that? Yeah. I would just say that there are many, when we're talking about public policy decisions, it's very different than when we're talking about admitting a study to a journal. So it's proper to have a very high level of skepticism before you say, we'll take this in science or nature. But if you're the head of a school and you have a raging mental health crisis and your kids are cutting themselves in the bathroom and you say, look, we all think it's the phones. Maybe we're wrong, but we think it's the phones and there is no other explanation on the table. So we're going to try going phone-free. Like that's the way public policy works. And I think it should work that way. But we also, we're so slow. It takes us decades to resolve things. They can't wait for us. But you would also recognize that, you know, at an individual school, that's one thing to say, we're going to make that a national policy or a state policy. You know, there should be a little bit more humility. No, I totally agree. I totally agree on that. So what I've been advocating is that some state take, you go through the department of its department of education, take a school district or the whole state, take all the middle schools in the state, find out which ones are willing to try this experiment of more play, more free play and no phones, and then randomly assign half of them to do it. Because what we need to test are the group level emergent effects. And there are no studies of that. Everything's on individual level. And it would be fascinating to see more play and more phones assuming that they're not mutually exclusive. Let's open the audio, you know, Q&A for the audience. Come up to the microphone, please. And I want to privilege younger people in the spirit of Aaron's query. If any of you are young and mentally ill, you get to go, you get a quick pass, you can answer. Okay, sir. Sorry, Nick, not young nor mentally ill. Okay, we'll be the judge of that. Let's hear the question and make it a question. I did love your baby boomer references to Gilligan's Island and Pat Benatar and the honeymooners. Can't believe we got through this entire discussion without somebody mentioning AI. And my background is in digital media to some extent. And I can't imagine that there's not a technological fix where AI is going to be able to determine at some point who is watching based off of information gleaned and connections made from all over where they go on their internet searches and their browsers and the apps they have in their phones. Have you looked into that? Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So we can mention AI in two ways. You're mentioning that as a part of a solution. And yes, if there is a company that uses AI to establish people's ages, that can be one of the seven methods that a company would offer. I'll just add that I thought a lot about AI in the last year or two. All the things I'm concerned about what the technological environment is doing to kids is going to get a lot worse once content is generated by AI, once companies are able to use AI to optimize how much they can hook kids with a feed. As kids move to having AI boyfriends and girlfriends that are put in sex dolls, I mean, that's going to really put a damper on future dating, sex, and marriage. So yeah, I think that AI is going to really make things a lot worse. So I'm looking forward to the AI Furby. I think it's somewhere in my closet. I can dig it up. Next question, please. As a 25-year-old Jewish man, I can assure you that myself and all my friends are very highly anxious and we're Gen Z and Jewish, so that's to help a lot of anxiety. What year is this? That could be 1965, right? Woody Allen or what? He has other reasons to be anxious. Yeah. But my question is, when me and my friends are obviously all on SSRIs, you know, you don't ask people do you take SSRI? You say, which SSRI are you on, right? When we discuss our parents, it seems like many of our parents also had a lot of depression and anxiety, but they never got diagnosed for it. They never went to therapy, et cetera, et cetera. Is it possible that because of social media and smartphones, many more of us are learning about mental health and therefore seeking out help and therefore getting a diagnosis and that's the explanation for the rise in cases of anxiety and depression? Well, so one possibility is that there isn't a real rise. It's just that people are knowing more about it. But, you know, but the fact that we see the behavioral things going up as well, I don't think I don't think it's an artifact. Now, we're all supposed to say, isn't it wonderful that stigma is reduced? Isn't it wonderful that people can get information? Isn't that great? But I think, and I haven't read Abigail Schreiber's book, but I think part of the point is, yeah, we don't want stigma for depression and anxiety for anything. We don't want valorization. We don't want to put our kids into sub-communities where the more extreme your symptoms are, the higher your status is because we know where that's going to lead. And I think, again, social media has done that. So I don't think there's anything good to be gotten from young, depressed, anxious people gathering together on any kind of a platform. Thank you. Next question. Thank you both for your conversation tonight. I've definitely really enjoyed it a lot. I'm curious, towards the end, you were speaking about what we can do for like, you know, current children and upcoming children with, say, rolling back phone usage in schools or age gate. I'm curious if you have any thoughts about what we can do for kids who have lived through this, like, rewired childhood. So for instance, like, I'm a 2002 baby and I'm definitely grateful, like, my parents gave me a phone later than a lot of my classmates, but I can also relate to a lot of what you spoke to tonight. Okay. How much time a day would you say you spend on your phone? Do you feel it's a problem or is your phone just a tool that you use when you need it? I think right now, I think right now it's like a tool and it's not too much of a problem, but I think at times like during high school, there were times where it was a problem or it was getting in the way of like productivity or there's just a large opportunity cost. Okay. So what I can tell you, since I teach a course at NYU, I've long told a course for MBA students on positive psychology, how to have more, you know, how to have a more satisfying career. But two years ago, a year and a half ago, I converted over to an undergrad version, which is much longer. It's a full semester, we go into much more detail. And these are mostly sophomores at NYU Stern. And they vary, some of them have severe tech addictions, video game addictions, some of them have no problem. Most of them are, you know, as you were, they find themselves wasting a lot of time, they can see they're not productive, they know it makes them anxious. And what we find is what we work together on is step one is get control of your attention. Recognize just how little attention you have to give. You know, your business students, do you want to be successful in life? Do you want to do something? You have to reclaim your attention. You can't give it all away to companies that interrupt you every day. So one of the most important things we do is we take out their phones, which are not used other times and look at notifications. And most people are having three, four or 500 notifications a day. And so turn off all the alerts, like you don't need alerts from, you know, from newspapers and magazines about somebody getting a divorce, like you, you know, just check that once a day, don't be let them interrupt you. So there's a lot of things you can do to, to get control of your attention. Another powerful thing is either quit social media entirely, or if you need it for some reason, just get it off of your phone. Everyone should get it off of your phone. Just you can check in now and then on a computer. So there's all sorts of things that students can do to reclaim their attention. And once they do that, they find they're able to think more deeply, they're able to be more productive. So there's a lot that you can do. I should put a link. So at anxiousgeneration.com, we don't have this yet. But I find myself sending the syllabus of the flourishing course to a lot of people who email a lot of young people who email me like, what can I do? I'm 25. And I, you know, I spend every day on video games for 10 years, what can I do? And so I will put that, I'll find a way to put that up there, anxiousgeneration.com. And I need to write like a chapter, a whole chapter on that. I wish I had a chapter in the book on advice to older Gen Z. I don't. But Zach and I are actually going to work on that. The paperback. Right. That's the second. Thank you. Next question, please. Some, but not all the studies you mentioned, you specified English speaking countries. And so I was curious, do you see a trend globally that's consistent? Are there exceptions to that rule? And to the extent that is worse in English speaking countries, is that a correlation with wealth or some other element? Or is there actually something in Anglo culture? Or maybe it's the English language. Well, I was going to say until TikTok, I did think of that most of them are, most social media platforms are US native, but I guess TikTok kind of kills that hypothesis. Yeah. No, so no, that's a great question. And that is still an open question, but I can tell you what our thinking is. So Zach has been in charge of tracking it down internationally. We started with the Anglo countries. It's all the same. It's big in all of them. He then went on to the Scandinavian countries, then five Nordic countries. And it's happening there too, not on every single measure, but it's clearly happening there. Then he has a post on Europe. And so here's where we think the answer lies. When you look at Europe, there's only one area where mental health is actually getting a little better. The numbers are going down. That's actually Eastern Europe. And that's also the only place that's getting more religious. When you look at America, there wasn't a big difference in mental health between religious and secular kids before 2012. Religious kids are a little bit better off. But after 2012, the secular kids go way up and the religious kids only go up a little bit. So you put all this stuff together about religion, about conservatism, about married parents, all sorts of things. So what I think is going on is the more you're embedded in real communities that put restraints on you, constraints, you have obligations, you have to go to church on Sunday, you have to see your grandmother, the more you do that, the more it's like you're doing this a lot, but you don't get washed out to see. Whereas if you are a kid with permissive parents and you can do this all day long, you get washed out to see. So I've always been Durkheimian. I love Emil Durkheim. And by the end of this book, I sort of found my Durkheimian groove again. Thank you. Can we have a woman ask a question? I mean, nothing against other people like me who present as male, but let's... Hi. I just wanted to question your confidence and questioning a lot of the content that come out on TikTok that we get around is, you know, a lot of trash content. And trash content is definitely rewarded on TikTok. But I do think, especially for marginalized kids that grew up in an environment that might not fulfill a lot of their social intellectual needs, it is very positive. I personally have seen much benefit of being the only person, the first person in my family to go to college in the U.S. to learn about what FAFSA was, what a letter of recommendation was, how do you articulate, how do you strategize a lot of those things. To me, it came from TikTok. I got exposed to a lot of health content from a very young age. It might be a little too personal, but I lost 200 pounds learning how to lose weight from TikTok. I used to be very big. Those tied pods just take the pounds off. What's the question that you mentioned? Yes, the question is, I am unpersuaded by the fact that a lot of those kids that are watching a lot of those content on TikTok would not be watching a lot of the trash content from TV or any other media. Do you think that, in fact, is there's something about TikTok that makes that content more accessible to children? And are you persuaded that TikTok has a problem and not just the lack of physical opportunities that kids have? Thank you. Yes. So TikTok has the unique national security problem that TikTok is bound by Chinese law to do what the Communist Party asks it to do. So that's a unique issue about TikTok. But I'm coming to see much more than this. What does that mean? If a Chinese corporation must, I forget where it is in Chinese law. So TikTok, they try to say, oh, we store the data somewhere else. It's not in China. So I'm very supportive of what Mike Gallagher is pushing for. Not that TikTok should be banned, but that it's against the law for foreign powers to own newspapers and TV stations, but they can own the most powerful influencer on our kids. So I think that's a separate issue. But to your question, I think there is something uniquely bad about TikTok. And one way to look at it is look at the dopamine profile. Anything that requires some effort and then you get a reward is probably pretty good. Anything like a TV show is enjoyable and it's a story and it's stretched out. It might be enjoyable, but it's not giving you these little pulses of dopamine that reward certain kinds of behavior. That's what seems to get kids into this narcotic loop. And they use the word narcotic. And they'll say, I was on for three or four hours. And then my friend asked me, what did you see? And I said, I don't know. So there is something uniquely powerful from a behaviorist point of view about the short form videos, you know, YouTube shorts and Instagram reels, you know, maybe the same, I haven't looked at them, but the short form video I think is particularly pernicious. And I would recommend not as a law, but I would recommend to parents that they really limit or not let their kids on, certainly not in middle school. Okay, let's make this the final question. So make it a good one. Where's your control group or barring that? What's the best natural experiment? Because otherwise this seems like a thesis with a lot of confirmation bias. Okay, well, first of all, there are many kinds of evidence going on here, one of which is, is eyewitness testimony, one of which is, you know, if, if the young people themselves say that this is what's harming them, then I don't think it's my confirmation bias. I think it's this is what people are seeing. But more to your question, the existing research is almost all used in a dose response model where you look at how much is a person consuming. So if we take this person off, then do they get worse off? What we need to do is group level experiments. What we need to do is have some middle schools go off and some not. So that's what I've been advocating for. I've got it in the Google doc. I asked the attorney, the surgeon general to put out a call for this. This is the kind of research we need whole schools doing something. Then we'll really find out. John, just two quick final questions for you. One, you've talked about religious people or people in more kind of thickly embedded communities doing better. Has that changed your life? Like reading this, you have kids, like, are you becoming more religious or more embedded? Well, I guess so. I'm a Jewish atheist, like many secular, many reform Jews. But we joined a synagogue when we moved to New York, when my son turned eight, because I wanted to have some Jewish culture and Jewish identity. But so I definitely see the value of, I've seen the value of religion for a long time from the righteous, from writing the righteous minds. It was a purely intellectual and that's why I got in debates with the new atheists. And I was sort of like, I'm like the atheist that religious people like because I say that religion isn't this terrible, stupid, evil thing. It's certainly not always, right? That shouldn't be complicated at all. I mean, I've just been, I guess I'd have to say, no, it hasn't changed my life only because I've been so completely overwhelmed and busy that I haven't had time to make any life adjustments while I've been writing this book. You should try TikTok. It's very refreshing. It's like a junior mint. I would much rather have alcohol. My other final question is like, do you have a guilty pleasure? If you pulled at your phone right now, is there, is there an app? Is there candy crush on your phone or something that puts you into a narcotic loop? No, not really, because I'm kind of a workaholic on this. Like, you know, so I do have problems with focus, but it's not so much on my phone. It really is more like, whenever, you know, when I'm trying to write, I'm doing something hard on my computer, and it's like, when the thinking gets hard, I find myself clicking on a link, clicking on a different tab. I'll check the weather. I'll, you know, I'll check like, how am I going to get to this thing? I'll do anything but the hard thinking. And so, but no, I don't, I'm so efficiency focused, like I don't spend hours and hours like doing, I don't have a guilty pleasure like that. Just a quick follow up, because I mean, you remember a time before computers, when you were as an undergrad or even a grad student, whatnot. I mean, how did anything get done when we, you were first writing things out on Longhand and then typing it up and things like that. Well, right. So in high school, we had typewriters and my freshman year of college, I think I had a typewriter. That's when we got the first IBM PC. And so yeah, it is, it is amazing how productive we can be with these tools. But here's the thing, as I forget who pointed this out. You know, those of us who remember, you have to get an envelope and a stamp and you have to write something, you have to put it in. That's a real pain. And boy, is it a great time saver to have email. Okay, how about if you have 500 emails a day? Is it still a time saver? So, you know, it's like, yes, we can get more. And so Cal Newport is really the person to follow here. I love his book, Deep Work. He talks about the something hive mind, the, I forget what it's called. But, you know, we're all involved in these text threads. And even grown-ups are using texting now instead of email, which I think is a big mistake. Because we're basically saying, oh, you know what? Here's all these people who can interrupt me. Each one is fun. I've got a couple of my buddies here. We're on a text thread. And I love what they say. But when you add it all up, all the different ones, it ends up, we just don't have much time to think. Okay, we're going to leave it there. The new book is The Anxious Generation. How they're great. We are rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. The author is Jonathan Haidt. Thank you so much for talking tonight. And thank you. And there are sandwiches to be eaten and beer and wine and soft drinks to be drank and books to sign and buy. Thanks so much for coming.