 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 elephants 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 S&M 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. Yeah, that's right. 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 the 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 and 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 lack 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 gonna 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 liquored scales about how that makes them feel or doing asking random adults on the internet whether they're hopelessly helpless or helplessly 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 yell you know, really needs her Instagram to be blocked when her mood is getting low. Well, okay. All right, thank you. And John, you actually have three minutes to respond to that, so. Okay, wow, well, yeah. So, and 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 that we're lying on are flawed. You're absolutely right. The Google doc that Zach and I and Jean Tranke 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 the great majority of studies are. You've been a critic of the social sciences and the replication crisis we have and 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 what was the third? And purely negative. 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 the social sciences, many are bidirectional. And I hope that in my book, as in all my books, nobody would say, oh, he's reducing it to 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 the skeptics. You and there are about four or five others that are the main people who are writing. And actually, this is what academic life is supposed to be like. And it's actually fun when I, this is my first time meeting Aaron. When you actually meet someone and they're charming and they're able to 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, do you have a quick rebuttal? Well, I did. Or further comment. You don't need to. I think you're sliding off a little bit. So I think we agree that, yes, the book shows the complexity, the entanglement, the bi-directional, all that, but it seems to me that your policy recommendations require the simple, the unidirectional causal, that if you're gonna ban something, you gotta say, okay, there's a simple relationship. This causes us to, if we get rid of it, it's bad. Thank you. 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 gonna try and go on phone free. Like that's the way public policy works and I think it should work that way. We in social sciences, we're so slow. It takes us decades to resolve things. They can't wait for us. But you would also recognize that at an individual school, that's one thing to say, we're going to make that a national policy or a state policy. 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, go through the 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.