00:00:51.060What do you know about the anxious generation?
00:00:53.360All I know is that if you're here to tell me that TikTok hasn't ruined Zoomers' brains, we're going to be in a fight.
00:01:13.520So the full title of this book is The Anxious Generation, colon,0.90
00:01:17.920How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
00:01:23.360OK. This has been on the bestseller list for weeks. It was at one point the number one New York Times bestselling book in the country. It's extremely popular. It started a huge amount of discourse about what are the teens doing on their phones. And I think that this is a good distillation of the argument that the phones are ruining the teens.
00:01:41.920Well, also, though, like boomers also fucked due to their phones.0.99
00:02:24.640So I'm going to start with a series of totally contradictory statements, all of which are true.
00:02:30.240I think it is important to acknowledge that, like, the internet and smartphones are a transformative technology that is changing society in all kinds of, like, genuinely very profound ways.
00:02:41.240And it would be really fucking weird to act like that has no downsides.
00:02:46.100It's also true that every previous technological advancement has resulted in a moral panic about teenagers.0.83
00:02:53.760For our disco demolition episode, I looked into, like, the moral panic around jukeboxes.0.56
00:02:58.340There was this idea that like kids were going to be dancing too much and some of that will be interracial dancing and the parents freaked out.
00:03:11.640Then of course we got video games and it just nonstop, whenever something new comes out, it's like, oh, what's it going to do to teens and adults lose their minds?
00:03:19.020It is also true that some of these technologies were bad.
00:03:25.680I read a really interesting article about these constant tech and teens moral panics that said it's actually quite rare to sort of circle back to the previous technology and understand what effect it had.
00:03:36.720So, you know, we had this decade long panic about kids watching too much TV and TV was going to rot their brains.
00:03:41.960And then we sort of moved into like the video games are going to rot their brains.
00:04:52.580That should be one of the most important qualifiers.0.99
00:04:55.960And then the last contradictory thing is that it really feels true that social media is fucking up our kids' brains.
00:05:04.500However, a lot of the actual evidence for this is anecdotal.
00:05:08.800One of the articles that I read is by a researcher who's been looking into this for decades.
00:05:12.260And she said this guy came up to her after a talk and was like, you know, how dare you say that the field and the evidence is nuanced on this?
00:05:31.560This is the thing is like at the same time that it's very plausible to me that this is ruining teens brains.
00:05:37.940That period of life between like 11 and 15 is a time when teens pull away from their parents.
00:05:42.820Like this happens to every single teenager and parents oftentimes want something to blame.
00:05:47.020For this episode, I talked to six teenagers across a wide range of ages, and every single one of them said that, like, my parents blame my phone for everything.
00:05:56.720It's like, you didn't clean your room because you're always on your phone.
00:05:58.920You didn't do your homework because you're always on your phone.
00:06:01.080And they're like, well, sometimes that's true, but sometimes I'm just a teenager who doesn't want to clean his room.
00:06:06.880People are coming to this with, like, either our experience, which is like, oh, my God, thank God I didn't have a phone in high school, which is absolutely what I believe.
00:06:13.120But also, I didn't have a phone in high school, so I don't really know what it would have been like to have a phone in high school.
00:06:17.920But also if someone if an adult watched me in 1999, they would have been like, thank God I didn't have Age of Empires 2 in high school, because obviously this will ruin a human being.
00:06:26.720Exactly. You're like TV or like first person shooters or like whatever the thing was when we were in high school.
00:06:31.540Right. That we spent way too much time doing when we should have been outside.
00:06:35.240A lot of this conversation is playing out based on anecdotes or things like my daughter got her phone and now she's sad.
00:06:41.340Something that is like you can't really prove that's because of the phone.
00:06:44.700When you're talking about like what's happening to teenagers, the inputs are so vast and complicated that even though it feels very intuitive that like TikTok cannot be doing any good.
00:06:57.500It's really hard to parse out exactly what it's doing.
00:07:00.100And so that doesn't mean phones are great for kids, but it also it doesn't mean that phones are bad for kids.
00:07:04.240I think if we're going to have a conversation about this as a society, we need to get the evidence in front of us and actually like talk to experts and talk to teens and teachers and psychologists and like really understand what we're looking at.
00:07:15.020My purpose with this was like to try to genuinely understand not just this book, but like for myself, like what do I think about the effect of the phones on the kids?
00:07:28.180I'm glad that you know your role so well.
00:07:29.600And my role is to ignore you and continue speaking.
00:07:32.060So as we always do on the show, I want to start with the first few paragraphs of the book.
00:07:38.120We're going to dive in and we're going to hear John Haidt's argument for why the kids are in danger from their telephones.
00:07:46.740Suppose that when your first child turned 10, a visionary billionaire whom you've never met chose her to join the first permanent human settlement on Mars.
00:07:54.600Unbeknownst to you, she had signed herself up for the mission because she loves outer space.
00:07:58.580And besides, all of her friends have signed up.
00:08:00.880she begs you to let her go. She's going to Mars. Before saying no, you agree to learn more. You
00:08:06.520learn that the reason they're recruiting children is that they adapt better to the unusual conditions
00:08:10.380of Mars than adults, particularly the low gravity. If children go through puberty and its associated
00:08:15.300growth spurt on Mars, their bodies will be permanently tailored to it, unlike settlers0.90
00:08:19.720who come over as adults. At least that's the theory. It's unknown whether Mars-adapted children0.91
00:08:25.040would be able to return to Earth. Did the planners take this into account? Did they do any research
00:08:30.320on child safety at all? As far as you can tell, no. So would you let her go? Of course not.
00:08:37.020Couldn't agree more. I would not let my 10 year old child go to Mars. And I'll say it on a podcast.
00:08:43.540This is by far like the best argument in the book. He's basically saying that like,
00:08:47.180we're doing this society wide experiment where we're just giving teenagers this like brand new
00:08:53.100technology. And we're just all kind of assuming, oh, yeah, they'll probably be okay. But like,
00:08:57.520There was no like FDA process to say, wait a minute, is this harmful before we give it to every single teenager in the country at an extremely vulnerable time in their life?
00:09:07.220The FDA comparison is apt because what social media really needs is more aggressive regulation.
00:12:06.500A third of teens say that they use social media, quote, almost constantly.
00:12:12.060I mean, there's various surveys of like how many kids have a smartphone.
00:12:15.240By the time they're 11, it's about 50-50.
00:12:17.640But then by the time they're 14, it's essentially every kid has one.
00:12:20.400Of the kids that have smartphones, the vast majority also have various social media accounts.
00:12:24.780It has taken a while to sort of get here, but we really are at like almost universal
00:12:29.620penetration of smartphones for both adults and children.
00:12:32.560I'd probably use a phrase other than universal penetration, but I hear you.
00:12:36.300I know. As I said it, I was like, OK, fuck, this is Peter Bate.1.00
00:12:39.720So that's like the timeline of all the tech innovations that brought us to this place.0.98
00:12:43.420What he's most concerned about is essentially kids who hit puberty right around this like 2008 to 2012 period when the tech companies were getting more sophisticated.
00:12:53.700That's why you see rising rates of depression and anxiety among Generation Z, but you don't see them in millennials and other and other age groups.
00:13:09.240So here is where he draws the distinction between adult use of social media and teen use of social media.
00:13:17.080Social media companies are making products that are useful for adults, helping them to find information, jobs, friends, love and sex, making shopping and political organizing more efficient and making life easier in a thousand ways.
00:13:29.420Most of us would be happy to live in a world with no tobacco,
00:13:32.180but social media is far more valuable, helpful, and even beloved by many adults.
00:13:36.680So he does acknowledge that there are also drawbacks for adults, right?
00:13:40.280He says that everything we talk about with teenagers is also happening with adults.
00:13:43.620However, adults do derive real benefits from social media.
00:13:48.940Here is the section where he talks about the difference for kids.
00:18:22.300So something happened that especially, well, when girls got super connected and began sharing,
00:18:29.740the idea of self-harming and the idea of anxiety became just much more widespread.
00:18:34.320Not a funny, not a funny or dunkable clip, but he's laying out the statistics.
00:18:39.360This is actually kind of compelling because hospitalizations for self-harm are a useful metric in the same way that like murder is a useful metric for crime because it's always reported as opposed to something that's like self-reported and might be the result of people just having greater awareness of mental illness or anxiety or whatever.
00:19:01.220Peter, this transitions. I feel like you're doing this on purpose. This transitions extremely well into the thing that I want to say. I mean, we're not going to go through the entire chapter of his book, but I do want to complicate the picture that he's painting of youth mental health.
00:19:13.200So he points out that rates of various markers of teen mental health are flat and then all of a sudden they explode in 2010.
00:19:21.620And this is essentially the heart of the book, that there's a strong correlation between adoption of smartphones in roughly 2010 and this huge spike in suicidality, self-harm, all of these markers also in 2010.
00:19:33.940That's the core of the book is just these like two lines going up at the same time.
00:19:37.480But the adoption of smartphones was not the only thing that happened around 2010.
00:19:43.200The other big thing is the implementation of Obamacare.
00:19:46.440So the percentage of kids in America who didn't have access to health insurance had actually been steadily dropping from the 1990s.
00:19:53.680But the implementation of the Affordable Care Act extended Medicaid coverage to a huge number of children and also increased access to private insurance plans.
00:20:04.460So what you find is that in 1997, around 14% of kids were uninsured.
00:20:12.400So around the same time, for both adults and kids, you start to see much more Medicaid coverage of mental health admissions to the hospital.
00:20:24.060The just kind of overall access to mental health care treatment really did significantly expand as part of the implementation of Obamacare.
00:20:32.300Another thing that happened was there was guidance from the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force that recommended screening adolescent girls for depression starting in 2011.
00:20:43.340It also made it mandatory for insurance companies to cover it.0.96
00:20:47.080There was also guidance around the same time that instructed doctors to add suicidal ideation as a cause of harm to medical records.
00:20:56.400I mean, this is another thing that he kind of glosses over that the numbers were actually rising of teen mental health problems before smartphones.
00:21:03.780So he's a little bit off on the timeline and he's a little bit off on the age groups because 10 to 14 year olds didn't actually have cell phones at that time.
00:21:13.340So they don't actually match up perfectly.
00:21:15.940And people in the medical system were already very concerned about these steady rises in suicidality and self-harm, especially for adolescent girls.
00:21:23.320And so there's a really interesting study of medical records in New Jersey that notes throughout the entire state what looks like a huge increase in suicide attempts and hospitalizations for self-harm.
00:21:36.540There's no actual difference in the numbers.
00:21:39.060It's just they're writing down suicidal ideation as like a sub cause of the injury.
00:21:45.640In 2008, there's something called the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equality Act, which improves access to mental health care for teens.
00:21:53.360There's also the update of the DSM in 2013, which loosens a lot of diagnostic criteria.
00:22:00.360This was just a period totally independent of smartphones where teens were just getting more access to the health care system in general.
00:22:07.860And there was a lot more focus on getting teens the mental health help that they needed.
00:22:13.040So I don't want to say that like this whole thing is fake. Like the fact that kids are feeling worse does appear to be real. And there's lots of statistics on this that do not depend on things like hospitalizations or, you know, diagnoses of depression. If you look at qualitative surveys of teens, they're much more likely now to say I'm depressed or I'm anxious or I don't have a lot of friends.
00:22:36.100Yeah. Although I that's the stuff that I'm less persuaded by.
00:22:41.840Yeah. Simply because self-reports might be the result of a generation that's just much more aware of depression.
00:22:49.740Yeah. When I when I was a teenager, people didn't talk about being depressed so expressly.
00:22:54.640You know, people didn't talk about anxiety.
00:22:56.640The idea that like this stuff is now in the mainstream vernacular and so you see teenagers self-diagnosing, that's sort of what seems noisier to me than something like hospitalizations, even if hospitalizations aren't a totally clean metric.
00:23:14.660Yeah. Well, the thing is, there's also surveys that don't ask teens like, are you depressed? But they'll say like, you know, how many times a week do you feel lonely? Or there's one, what was it? There's one where they ask kids a bunch of questions. And if you answer five out of nine of them, then they say you've experienced a major depressive episode. And it's things like, how often have you lost interest and become bored with most of the things you usually enjoy?
00:23:38.720I don't think that's the kind of thing that would necessarily depend on, like, the sort of expanding, you know, reducing stigma of depression, anxiety, and, like, the discourse around it.
00:23:47.760So there are also surveys that find, like, how often are you anxious?
00:23:51.460But there's also things that ask about, like, the component parts of depression, anxiety, which also show rising numbers.
00:23:57.940One of the really interesting things that they mentioned numerous times in this analysis of the suicidality data from New Jersey, all of these hospital records, is they say, look, this doesn't mean that the kids aren't depressed.
00:24:08.080what it actually means is that they were underdiagnosed for things like suicidal ideation
00:24:13.080before. So what we might be looking at is teens are very depressed and we're now better at catching
00:24:18.720it. It could also reflect an increase. Another thing that he doesn't mention is that kids are
00:24:24.500significantly less likely to kill themselves now than they were in 1988. If you look at teen
00:24:29.420suicide rates, like every other form of like violent crime that we've talked about, you know,
00:24:33.600murders and rapes and child abuse. It's like rises steadily in the 60s and 70s, plateaus in
00:24:38.820the 80s, drops really quickly in the 90s, and then gradually starts rising again. That doesn't
00:24:45.140mean that it's not smartphones. That doesn't mean that it's not the internet, right? You could say,
00:24:48.240well, when people started to get broadband internet in the 2000s, we started to have higher
00:24:51.920rates of teen suicides. Like this actually is congruent with his theory, right? And maybe
00:24:55.780something else was causing it in the 60s and 70s and cell phones are causing it now. Again,
00:25:00.500it's not really debunking his theory, but it does show that there are there are many factors that
00:25:05.640affect teen suicide. So anyway, I'm afraid that people are going to think like, oh, like Mike
00:25:10.100thinks that teen suicides don't matter or something or like Mike thinks that teen mental health is
00:25:14.400like not a problem in America. That's not remotely what I'm saying. What I'm saying is it's it's more
00:25:19.740tricky to measure these things than it seems. I think you've been clear and any haters are just
00:25:25.860anti-Hobbs. Thank you. That's their bias. This is, this is the hateration and holleration that
00:25:30.580Mary J. Blige was talking about. So, okay. So that's just like a factual overview.
00:25:36.380Michael, the references you drop in any given episode are so preposterous.
00:25:41.600It's because my brain stopped developing in like 1999. And so I just look at my phone now and I
00:25:47.760watch R.E.P. Vine videos. This is the most contemporary reference I have. It's all Harambe
00:25:52.920of jokes. That's when my brain stopped. He then turns to the causes of why teens are sad. He says
00:26:00.040that a lot of the other proposed explanations for the teen mental health crisis don't really make
00:26:06.560sense. And I kind of agree with this. I feel like there's the sort of counter narrative to like the0.81
00:26:13.060phones are making kids sad. People will often say like climate change is making kids sad or like
00:26:17.360school shootings are making kids sad. Honestly, that's always felt kind of like as one dimensional
00:26:22.020to me as the smartphone's explanation. So the first thing he talks about is the financial crisis
00:26:27.540that like, well, maybe kids started getting sad in 2010 because like their dads were unemployed,
00:26:32.120right? Or their moms. But that doesn't really make sense timeline-wise because you have this
00:26:36.460massive increase in unemployment and then it steadily goes downward. Like the country has
00:26:40.400been getting better on like economic indicators ever since. And yet teens start getting sad in
00:26:45.5202010 and they keep getting sadder. So if this was meaningfully related to economic conditions,
00:26:50.520that teens would be doing better now than they were in 2010. And they're not. There's been other
00:26:55.860economic crashes, right? In 2001, we had this huge economic crash and like we didn't see teen
00:27:00.540suicide spike. The relationship between economic conditions and like teen mental health is just
00:27:05.820not an easy one-to-one thing. He also mentions climate change. This is another thing that you
00:27:11.540hear that, you know, kids are bummed out because the world is heating up around them, which it
00:27:15.340absolutely is, but there isn't actually any evidence for this explanation. There's a lot
00:27:20.840of evidence that kids who experience hurricanes or wildfires have higher rates of PTSD and anxiety,
00:27:28.220depression, suicide. All that stuff is true. Those disasters are increasing due to climate change,0.95
00:27:33.000but it's kind of not enough to explain an entire generation that is showing these higher rates
00:27:38.960of depression, anxiety. It also can't explain why girls seem to be suffering so much more than boys
00:27:45.300It can't really explain why we see these big spikes in 10 to 12 year old kids who are just like less aware of news events in general.
00:27:53.860And it's always seemed a little one dimensional to me just because like we've had climate change as like a really major political issue for like 20 to 30 years now.
00:28:05.020And we haven't seen any spike in mental illness among teens until recently, until 2010.
00:28:11.520I wonder whether maybe not climate change specifically, but one of my sort of like general layperson guessing at what might be driving this sort of things is that like social media bombards you with things to be concerned about.
00:28:27.920If you're 11 or 12, you might not process that on an analytical level very well, but you do get this, like, impression that things are bad, right?
00:28:41.900This is also one of the weird things is that people oftentimes bring this up as a counterpoint or, like, a debunking of the social media as making kids sad narrative.
00:28:50.760But then it's like, OK, well, why are 12-year-olds sad about climate change?
00:28:54.060Oh, they're watching videos on TikTok about climate change all the time, which then kind of brings you back to social media is making kids sad.
00:29:00.440I want to just throw another theory in the mix.
00:30:02.600What a shitty country we have that we're making Australians sad, you know?0.99
00:30:07.520But then, so after he goes over all of these things that don't explain teen mental health,0.99
00:30:13.820right the financial crisis climate change etc he then basically says well it has to be social media
00:30:18.760because nothing else explains it as like a methodology i don't think that like you've
00:30:23.740discarded two other explanations therefore your explanation is true is like a very robust way to
00:30:29.980do it like you could easily say like well it's not the financial crisis it's not climate change
00:30:34.040so it must be vaccines right like you have to actually offer evidence for your view you can't
00:30:39.060just debunk other views one of the problems that i'm starting to see with his argument is that he's
00:30:42.960sort of reliant on your prior intuition that this is true when yeah he hasn't quite done the work
00:30:50.020but but again i still sort of agree because i do think this makes intuitive sense but then what's
00:30:56.200so weird about this book is you know the first chapter is this very detailed overview of the
00:31:01.360teen mental health crisis and a little bit about the causes like things that don't really explain
00:31:05.080it i was expecting then like okay we've established the teens are sad what is the evidence that the
00:31:11.040cell phones are making kids sad right he doesn't really do that oh he then moves on to this kind
00:31:16.720of sub argument in the book that kids are too protected in general right this is the thing0.95
00:31:22.160that he mentioned the coddling of the american mind he's fucking sneaking in the coddling of0.52
00:31:26.380the american mind argument this is three chapters but i'm going to kind of merge them it's part two0.97
00:31:30.820of the book is the decline of the play-based childhood god damn it and he says we've moved
00:31:35.300from a play-based to a phone-based childhood i was just going to complain about like generalists
00:31:41.020and the dangers of stepping out of your lane as an expert.
00:31:44.580And as quickly as I was about to say it, he just sort of turns back into his lane.0.99
00:31:48.720He's like, all right, here's this here's this thing I already wrote a stupid book about.0.98
00:31:52.700And large sections of this are true, right?0.97
00:31:54.660Like, it's a huge bummer that American kids don't walk and bike to school anymore.
00:31:58.480You know, people live in the suburbs where they're way too spread out.1.00
00:32:01.100It's like he's kind of correct about this.
00:32:03.360but then you also start to see his weird penchant for kind of overstating harm
00:32:09.980and speaking about all of these trends in this kind of weird black and white way.
00:32:14.840So here is a little section from chapter four.
00:32:19.920Smartphones and other digital devices bring so many interesting experiences to children and
00:32:24.400adolescents that they cause a serious problem.
00:32:26.960They reduce interest in all non-screen based forms of experience.
00:32:30.900The child will spend many hours each day sitting enthralled and motionless, except for one finger, while ignoring everything beyond the screen.
00:32:38.840And then this is from a little bit later.
00:32:40.580Are screen-based experiences less valuable than real-life flesh-and-blood experiences?
00:32:45.220When we're talking about children whose brains evolved to expect certain kinds of experiences at certain ages, yes.
00:40:49.480It's the same vulnerabilities that we see in offline exploitation, right?
00:40:53.180And it's kids who oftentimes the kids know that this guy's 40 years old.
00:40:56.860They know that they're meeting for sex, but they think it's a relationship because the0.99
00:40:59.780guy's fucking lying to them being like, oh, I really love you, blah, blah, blah.0.99
00:41:02.340That's the deception that's going on.0.99
00:41:04.000And so when when you find this kind of exploitation in the real world, it is almost always along the fault lines of existing vulnerabilities. And the way to solve it is to address those vulnerabilities.
00:41:15.020Right. God, I sorry. My brain got very scrambled by listening to those two.
00:41:21.120I know. I don't think I've ever like sat down and listened to or watched a full episode of Joe Reagan, but I've seen clips or whatever. And the idea that like young people are listening to shit like this being like this is intellectual.
00:41:34.000i know that's my moral panic the other reason i wanted to watch this is because listening to0.96
00:41:40.180john height it it does just sound like a guy who's like saying stuff that this book is not
00:41:45.540remotely rigorous it's actually really shocking to me that it's it's it's had such an impact i
00:41:49.960think mostly because it's telling people something that they want to believe yeah and already believe
00:41:54.100i interviewed more teenagers for this i interviewed more experts for this and i interviewed more
00:41:59.760teachers and researchers for this episode than he interviewed for his book as far as i can tell in
00:42:05.540the text of the book he interviewed one actual teenager about what they do on their phone
00:42:08.820he does not appear to have engaged with any researchers other than the one that he's already
00:42:12.900collaborated with he hasn't spoken to any teachers about what it's like in their classrooms he didn't
00:42:17.620speak to any psychologists it's so annoying that i'm i'm doing a an approximately as rigorous
00:42:24.460episode about eric adams every evening i have two drinks and then i watch eric adams clips
00:42:31.560and start outlining a books could kill bonus episode again i do think that there needs to
00:42:35.920be a societal conversation about this but i do not think this is the person to be leading this
00:42:39.680conversation this is the kind of thing where i feel like the book got popular because it's just
00:42:43.980giving intellectual heft or the appearance of intellectual heft to this intuition that we all
00:42:51.140have yeah so that you can say hey phones are fucking our kids up and then everyone's like
00:42:57.200yeah definitely and you get to be like there's a book about it and yeah that's how i know this0.52
00:43:03.500is real and serious yeah i agree that the decline of of outdoor play is bad it's just that he's
00:43:10.420super reductive about what exactly is good and what exactly is bad and what we should be doing
00:43:17.540Right. It's just lazy, honestly. It's just like, yeah, yeah, I don't mean to be fucking snooty, but it's just it's just someone who's not intellectually curious. It's someone who's just like pushing a really simple narrative and isn't that interested in identifying a supporting set of evidence.
00:43:32.420Do you want to get snooty and talk about the evidence?
00:44:18.640So when I went into this episode, I thought it was just going to be really obvious that like if you look at the data, kids who use smartphones more are more depressed.
00:44:28.240and kids who use smartphones less are less depressed and it would be really clear and
00:44:32.540then me and you would have this this like detailed conversation of like correlation versus causation
00:44:36.620and like yeah what does this mean right like that that's what i was expecting to get into in this
00:44:40.660episode but it turns out that's not even true so this is from a 2020 summary of like what have we
00:44:50.020learned about teens and internet social media everything in the last 10 years and i think it's
00:44:55.560a good summary. It's in kind of academic ease, so I had to condense it a little bit, but this is a
00:45:00.580good overview. Small associations still exist, as adolescents who report more depressive symptoms
00:45:05.560also tend to report spending more time online. However, a review of meta-analyses, recent large
00:45:11.100scale pre-registered studies, and daily assessments of digital technology usage
00:45:14.920show that associations between time online and internalizing symptoms are often A, mixed between
00:45:20.280positive, negative, and null findings, B, when present, likely too small to translate
00:45:25.360into meaningful effects, and C, typically not distinguishable in terms of likely cause
00:49:05.900one of the main things that I learned from talking to researchers over the last month is that this1.00
00:49:09.640whole concept of screen time is just such fucking garbage. Screen time includes like reading,0.99
00:49:15.540you know, going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. And it also includes like watching pornography.
00:49:19.240Like it just is not useful to talk about screen time as being harmful. But most of the data that
00:49:24.140we have about kids is just how much are you on your screens? I guess Wikipedia versus porn is
00:49:29.380the strongest dichotomy you can make. But like, but if you're trying to figure out what's rotting
00:49:34.660the kid's brains. You would need to separate out every app, every different use of every different
00:49:40.180app, et cetera. It becomes, there's just so much going on. There are so many different variables
00:49:45.260that to call it screen time is just sort of clearly not great.
00:49:51.000There's also something very funny. I felt really old when I was speaking to the teens for this,
00:49:54.540that all of them said that messages, like the text message app that we use is like what they
00:49:59.740use to communicate with old people and actual kids always communicate on Snapchat or Instagram.
00:50:04.660through dms whatever get a job get a job kids but this is the thing so even if you're measuring
00:50:10.640how many hours a day are you on instagram a lot of that's just like texting with their friends
00:50:14.780that's not actually you know looking at images of for example like women that are potentially
00:50:19.000going to give you an eating disorder like the kinds of things that we associate with social
00:50:21.920media harm even if you're measuring how much time they're on instagram that doesn't necessarily
00:50:26.240account for that right so that's kind of the first problem with these big quantitative data
00:50:32.280dump studies. The second problem is something that I've become so fucking radicalized on.0.96
00:50:37.040It's very easy to design these studies to get the result that you want. You can pick0.88
00:50:41.820different statistical controls. I saw so many fucking weird statistical controls in these0.96
00:50:46.880things. You can determine like what you're measuring. So one thing is a lot of studies0.98
00:50:51.900use these broad umbrella terms of like well-being. How much does being on your phone affect your
00:50:57.240well-being. And they'll pick sort of 10 or 15 questions from these big data sets. And they'll
00:51:02.820say like, oh, this is well-being. Or sometimes they call it like life satisfaction. But it's
00:51:06.360like totally arbitrary what you put in those things. And with the kinds of statistical software
00:51:10.700that people use now, it's really easy to be like, okay, if I control for income, what does it say
00:51:16.540about cell phones? Oh, it says cell phones are fine. What if I control for income and education?
00:51:20.420Oh, it says cell phones are bad. Okay, I'll control for those two things. And all of these
00:51:24.060statistical decisions kind of look defensible in a vacuum but when people publish papers on this
00:51:29.560they don't publish okay here's all of the other models that we ran here's all of the other
00:51:34.300statistical techniques that we used for all we know they're trying a thousand things and they're
00:51:38.640picking the one that gives the result that they want so big picture the data sucks and when you
00:51:45.320look at what we do have there's no clear answer there's no clear answer and even i like i think0.97
00:51:50.680this whole like exercise of combing through fucking data sets and looking for associations0.99
00:51:55.100is such bullshit. The, the one that John Height really like stakes his reputation on, he works1.00
00:52:00.000with this researcher named Jean Twenge, who I reached out to, tried to have a phone call with,
00:52:05.680she didn't want to do that, but we did email back and forth about some methodology stuff.
00:52:09.000John Height is working with her and they get into this big fight with these other two researchers
00:52:13.180named Amy Orbin and Andrew Shabilsky, both of whom I also interviewed. And they have this big,
00:52:17.780long kind of methodology, years long methodology fight about how to measure these things. And it
00:52:22.880sort of culminates in Orban and Chbilsky running this like huge meta analysis where they basically
00:52:28.320ran a bunch of different scenarios. Like if you control for this, if you didn't control for this,
00:52:32.920they run something like 3 million different permutations. And they find that in essentially
00:52:38.360all of them, except for a few, you don't find an association between social media and depressive
00:52:43.840symptoms this is sort of like how uh paul atreides son finds the golden pad i mean basically you're
00:52:50.040like i was gonna say uh dr strange who does like 16 million scenarios and only two of them have us
00:52:54.960beating thanos it's basically they're like in in a tiny minority of scenarios like statistical
00:53:00.900analyses do you find any association and when you do find an association it's a really small effect
00:53:05.640it's they said it's roughly the same as the effect of kids who eat potatoes like their
00:53:09.820depressive symptoms and kids who are on their smartphones you have to control for britishness
00:53:13.780as well there so there's this one study that sort of aims to like end the debate they're like look
00:53:18.160we barely find association when we do it's so underpowered that it's like on par with eating
00:53:22.280potatoes which is basically meaningless and then john height and gene twenge then published this
00:53:27.240paper they're like no we re-ran it with different controls and we actually found a much larger
00:53:32.860effect in this what they seem to think is the sort of culminating work on this like okay we
00:53:38.340finally ended the debate, they have this table with all of these different effects. And it's
00:53:42.520like, how much do various things affect teen depression? Right. And they have social media
00:53:47.760is like way higher. It's like a 0.2 correlation, which in any other study is like considered very
00:53:55.320weak. What if you combine that with the effect of eating potatoes? Then where are we? This is the
00:54:00.340thing. So they're trying to be transparent about like how big the effect of social media is. But
00:54:05.100even in this like allegedly argument ending study, the effect of social media is still smaller than
00:54:10.400kids who eat breakfast every day. Okay. And when you sort of circle back to these statistics that
00:54:16.840Hyatt was referencing in terms of like hospitalizations for self-harm, right? That's
00:54:23.440where like in the UK, he was talking about a 400% increase nearly. Yeah. I guess the point being,
00:54:29.080if that flows directly from social media use, then surely you can produce more than the tiniest
00:54:38.680sliver of a percentage change here. Yes, exactly. And something that is not on par with something
00:54:44.740like eating breakfast, where we know that that's reflecting other things, right? It's probably
00:54:48.320people whose parents tend to be at home and have time. Yeah, a little more family stability,
00:54:52.960et cetera. Yeah, it's like it's a reflection of other things. And then if we're then putting it
00:54:56.580on par with like kids who eat breakfast, it also compares it to kids who eat fruit. It's like
00:54:59.640barely more important than kids who eat fruit every day. It's like, okay, well, if those,
00:55:03.720we can all acknowledge that like eating breakfast, that's not what's causing the depression, right?
00:55:08.380It's obviously a cluster of other things. Well, then maybe social media is a cluster of other
00:55:11.240things too. I'm just like, I'm so sick of these studies where they're just like, oh,
00:55:15.140we found this correlation between this thing and that thing. I just don't think that you actually
00:55:18.780understand complex social phenomena this way, like through these averages. So I really was
00:55:24.540planning on going much deeper into the quantitative debate and like the methodology fight. But in the
00:55:29.320end, you realize that the debate is between the academic consensus, which is that there's
00:55:35.100essentially no connection at all. And on the other side, John Haidt and Gene Twenge, who say that
00:55:41.700there's an extremely small effect, which does not prove cause and is highly contingent on like a
00:55:49.040very specific set of parameters. So there really isn't that much of a debate. Like there's not
00:55:55.300that much to go into. Everybody agrees that we're not really looking at something strong
00:56:00.980and obvious here. There's also like if the argument is that social media causes kids to
00:56:07.880feel depressed, we should be able to capture that in other ways. So one of the things people start
00:56:13.100doing in the 2010s is they start doing longitudinal studies, which is like you track the same people
00:56:18.220over time. If cell phones are causing kids to be depressed, then we would find like kids who get
00:56:23.600cell phones at age 11 are going to be depressed earlier than kids who get cell phones at 13.
00:56:29.440And these don't really find anything. Most of the longitudinal studies don't actually find like
00:56:34.960kids are fine and then they start using their phones and then they're depressed. The majority
00:56:38.900of them actually find the opposite effect that if you follow kids who are depressed,
00:56:43.420you find them over time using smartphones more. That doesn't mean that it's like irrelevant,
00:56:47.520right i mean if if smartphones are something that makes depressed kids more depressed that's
00:56:52.240something that like we need to take seriously like that's not a null result right but we don't see
00:56:57.600this kind of tobacco metaphor of like i was fine and then i got a phone and now i'm sad right that's
00:57:03.200not really something that shows up in the longitudinal data we also have diary data where
00:57:07.580people write down like every day how is your mood and then oftentimes they'll either have like a
00:57:12.120tracker on their phone for like how much are they using social media or they'll also write down like
00:57:15.300how much was I on social media today? And you don't find associations between on days when I
00:57:20.300was on social media, I was more depressed. In the book, John Haidt kind of attempts to show
00:57:27.340that social media is causing mental health. So one of the studies that he mentions numerous times
00:57:33.180is a experiment at the University of Pennsylvania, where they got 143 undergraduates. And for half
00:57:39.340of them, they told them to only check Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram 10 minutes a day. They
00:57:44.860limited them to like very little social media use. And after a month, the undergraduates were
00:57:49.920happier. They were less depressed and less lonely. And so he's like, all right, if you stop using
00:57:53.720social media, you're happier. But I mean, this is obviously like a very small study and undergraduates
00:57:59.940are not a remotely represented sample, but the much bigger problem is that 80% of the participants
00:58:05.520in the study dropped out before a month. The researchers say like, yeah, we probably shouldn't
00:58:10.260have given them extra credit at the beginning of the study. We probably should have waited
00:58:14.000incredible the end of the study incredible these these are the people who believe that they know
00:58:19.320what's best for children and also i think people who dropped out of the study like people who can't
00:58:23.540hack it are probably the people who are like less happy right like the only people who are going to
00:58:27.540stick with it are like yeah this is working really well to not be on social media so i'm going to
00:58:30.320stay with this study so it's like well yeah for some people they're going to be happier but if
00:58:33.78080 percent of people drop out you're basically removing all of the people for whom this did
00:58:38.000nothing yeah another argument that he makes is that it's not that it's making individuals sad
00:58:43.380directly, but it's destroyed the social environment. So a school where like everybody
00:58:49.580has a smartphone is an environment where it's harder to make friends. It's easier to be lonely,
00:58:55.460et cetera. I actually find this relatively interesting as a hypothesis. However,
00:58:59.540there's also no real evidence for it either, but this is one of the theories that he gives for
00:59:05.160causality. And this is one of the studies that he uses as evidence for this. So let me send you this
00:59:13.360There is one small but important class of experiments that does measure group level effects by asking, how does a whole community change when social media suddenly becomes much more available in that community?
00:59:25.320For example, one study took advantage of the fact that Facebook was originally offered only to students at a small number of colleges.
00:59:31.680As a company expanded to new colleges, did mental health change in the following year or two at those institutions compared with colleges where students did not yet have access to Facebook?0.96
00:59:39.260Yes, it got worse with bigger effects on women.
00:59:43.360The authors found that the rollout of Facebook at a college increased symptoms of poor mental health, especially depression, and led to increased utilization of mental health care services.
00:59:53.120So this is like a natural experiment. Remember how Facebook rolled out to different colleges?
00:59:57.380I do remember. And I was going to say, I was in college when this shit was happening. So, like, I have a vague recollection of the Facebook rollout.0.99
01:00:06.700I do feel like it made me sad. I don't know because I like it's hard to explain how minor of a cultural phenomenon it was at the time. Like it was popular, you know, but it wasn't it wasn't something that was like a big part of anyone's life.
01:00:22.920So this is another study that is like a little bit implausible.
01:00:26.040It basically shows that as Facebook rolled out to different colleges, those colleges
01:00:30.700experienced almost a one standard deviation increase in mental health problems.
01:08:28.760Like there's – it just kind of depends on the kids.
01:08:32.360And it's interesting when – there are some surveys of kids where kids actually say this.
01:08:36.600So in the infamous, like, leaked internal Facebook polls where they talk to their users about, like, how much is Facebook and Instagram harming you, about 20% of kids said, I feel worse when I use Instagram.
01:08:48.800And that appears to be the high watermark.
01:08:50.880I mean, some kids feel worse when they use Instagram, so they just don't use Instagram.
01:08:54.640And it doesn't really have, like, a systematic effect on their mental health.
01:11:09.600It's true that if you think about it, most people play video games and it just doesn't have that much of a role in their life.
01:11:14.860for some people video games can be a real like social thing or they get into e-sports or whatever0.83
01:11:19.060like it can be really wholesome and for some kids it's really fucking bad for them he says
01:11:22.720around seven percent of kids who play video games have like a really toxic relationship with them
01:11:27.200and they get addicted and it's compulsive and they do it too much and it's sort of like well
01:11:30.420yeah that's probably the same with tv right if you look at previous technologies of you know the
01:11:34.980automobile has also had great benefits for human society and huge drawbacks and those just all kind
01:11:41.320have exist at the same time. And it's like only with social media that people want this like
01:11:46.360really one dimensional explanation. And that just hasn't really been true with any previous
01:11:51.080technological advance. So he looks at video games and basically gives them the nuanced treatment
01:11:55.860that he should be giving social media, which is what his whole fucking book's about.0.97
01:11:59.460It's also very funny. He has like a little debunker where he's like, well, what about0.98
01:12:02.840the benefits of social media? And then he's like, well, a lot of that's based on self-reported data
01:12:07.240and a lot of the definitions aren't actually clear with what they're saying. And a lot of
01:12:11.280it's correlational. And it's like, John, that's the problem with all of the data and all the
01:12:16.260fucking data for the benefits and the drawbacks. It's all like it's just really hard to say0.94
01:12:20.500anything definitive. I'm probably being speaking a little too broadly here, but it almost makes
01:12:24.300no sense that all of the benefits have data problems. And none of the stuff about drawbacks
01:12:31.760has data. Those two things can't quite sit side by side. So I do think this book is maybe a kind
01:12:39.680of airport book that we haven't really talked about before, where it's a book that is diagnosing
01:12:45.020a real problem and investigating a real social phenomenon, but that is written by a fundamentally
01:12:52.820unserious person. And so the next section of the book, the last section of the book
01:12:57.300is the solutions. He's very clear about the fact that these will have large and major and rapid
01:13:03.660effects. So he says, if most of the parents and schools in a community were to enact all four of
01:13:08.940these recommendations, I believe they would see substantial improvements in adolescent mental
01:13:13.440health within two years. So these are big effective changes. They are one, no smartphones before high
01:13:20.660school, two, no social media before 16, three, phone free schools, four, far more unsupervised
01:13:29.480play and childhood independence. I have to say there's nothing too outlandish in there within
01:13:34.740the context of this book. All four of these honestly sound fine to me. It's interesting
01:13:38.720that in a book that is kind of written by this reactionary centrist guy, he comes to, I think,
01:13:44.180pretty justified conclusions. But then one of the weird paradoxes of this book, in the same way that
01:13:48.720we started out by saying all of these kind of fundamentally contradictory statements,
01:13:52.880all of these solutions, I think, are basically fine. Although I would quibble with things like
01:13:58.100no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16. I think parents are in a better
01:14:01.900position to... Yeah, that's a little aggressive. You know, your kid might be in a position where
01:14:05.040it's appropriate for them earlier. But kind of like, he sort of admits this. He's like, yeah,
01:14:08.460whatever. Also, parents can be flexible. It's not that big of a deal. But even though I agree
01:14:13.280roughly with all four of these recommendations, this is by far the worst section of the book.
01:14:19.240And so once we get into the solutions section, this is the final third of the book,
01:14:23.600he separates the solutions into what companies can do, what governments can do, what schools can do,
01:14:31.800and what parents can do. So we're going to start with what governments and tech companies can do
01:14:36.320to solve this problem. His core recommendation is to raise the age of internet adulthood to 16.
01:14:44.100He points out that, you know, we now have this thing of like, you must be 13 to use Instagram
01:14:47.420or whatever. But like, you literally just tick a box. You're like, yes, I'm 13. Or if it's a
01:14:51.980porn site or whatever, you tick the I'm 18 box. But there's no actual verification. So he says
01:14:57.540that we should basically bump this up to 16. He says that's not necessarily for like using the
01:15:03.000internet like it's fine for kids to be on the internet like they're whatever using wikipedia
01:15:06.520to write essays for school that's all fine but as far as setting up social media accounts we should
01:15:12.120raise the age from 13 to 16 this basically would involve some way of verifying kids ages yeah if
01:15:19.840you raise it to 16 there's just going to be a box that says are you 16 and you tick the box what if
01:15:23.600when you create an instagram account you get a message from someone asking you for a pick and
01:15:29.240And then you send the pic and they judge whether or not you look like you're under 16.0.98
01:15:35.040I think this is actually like kind of interesting as a social problem where I think most people would agree that like, yeah, it would be really nice if we could verify that like fucking 10-year-olds and 11-year-olds are not on Instagram.0.88
01:15:44.680I think that's like a perfectly reasonable thing to be concerned about.
01:16:24.480I like how immediately his solutions are drastically more dangerous than the existing problem.
01:16:31.800He says – he also has this kind of like weird cockamamie thing.
01:16:34.420He says, Clear, a company known for rapid identity verification in airports, is now used as a quick way for its clients who previously verified their age to prove that they are old enough to buy alcohol at stadium events.
01:16:50.100so essentially like whether or not you think that this thing of raising the internet age to 16 is a
01:16:57.660good idea or not it feels like almost like a moot point to me just because the way of doing it would
01:17:03.200be more problematic than the system we have now yeah or at least like introduce new variables that
01:17:09.920no one really understands or knows how to control he kind of admits this he just says there's not
01:17:14.800at present any perfect way of implementing a universal age check there is no method that
01:17:19.560could be applied to everyone who comes to a site in a way that's perfectly reliable and raises no
01:17:23.740privacy or civil liberties objections right he also the only other kind of like specific thing
01:17:29.640that he mentions is there's various legal efforts to do something along these lines
01:17:36.360the closest thing we have in america is this thing called the kids online safety act or cosa
01:17:42.180i think one of the the real problems with this book is because he's a reactionary centrist and
01:17:48.480like a both sides guy, he can't look at a law like this and notice that it's just a very obvious
01:17:54.880Republican moral panic law. Right. I was going to say, isn't COSA is the law that is like,
01:18:02.020okay, I'm trying to, well, all right. Yeah. I'm not gonna remember accurately what it's about.
01:18:06.080I just remember that there's like huge civil libertarian objections and concerns from the
01:18:12.380LGBTQ community. This is the actual text of the law. I've condensed this down from the legalese,
01:18:17.040but this is roughly the core of the law. It says, platforms shall take reasonable measures to
01:18:23.400prevent and mitigate the following harms to minors. One, anxiety, depression, eating disorders,
01:18:28.700substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors. Two, patterns of use that indicate or encourage
01:18:33.660addiction-like behaviors. Three, online bullying and harassment. Four, sexual exploitation and
01:18:39.420abuse. This is one of the clearest examples of moral panic legislation I've ever seen.
01:18:43.980It's basically saying it's illegal for tech companies to harm teenagers, but that's so broad that it can be interpreted in almost any way, and it leaves the sole authority for determining that up to state attorneys general.
01:18:57.440And so if an attorney general just says, oh, yeah, it harms kids to come across things that like, oh, you might be transgender, well, that's harming kids, that's causing them to be depressed, they could then strip that from the internet and like essentially censor or ban it very easily.0.97
01:19:10.640And the co-sponsor of COSA, Marsha Blackburn, has said the purpose of this law is to protect minor children from the transgender in our culture.
01:19:26.980You see them in the distance like a fire golem in Elden Ring.
01:19:30.260When you have a law this broad, when we don't have a clear definition of really what the problem is, and we have no evidence on this at all, you're essentially just handing a huge amount of power over to whoever defines the term harm.0.87
01:19:44.440This is a major problem with many sort of vague bullshit laws that shouldn't be passed.
01:19:51.100But like the essence of this law is like, what if we made it illegal to hurt people?0.90
01:19:56.780this is i think the output of moral panic media cycles yeah but also it's just fundamentally0.87
01:20:05.600stupid you don't need to like contextualize it that much to realize it okay so then so that was0.97
01:20:10.300what governments and tech companies can do pass the dumbest law in the world have we thought about1.00
01:20:15.220this so the next section is what schools can do hell yeah so i'm gonna send you his little vignette
01:20:23.720where he starts to say why schools should ban cell phones.
01:20:28.360Mountain Middle School in Durango, Colorado,
01:20:30.700went phone-free back in 2012 at the start of the mental health crisis.
01:20:34.920The county around the school had among the highest teen suicide rates in Colorado
01:20:38.520when Shane Voss took over as head of school.
01:20:41.340Students were suffering from rampant cyberbullying,
01:20:43.640sleep deprivation, and constant social comparison.
01:23:06.880Yeah, it's huge. It's three quarters. That was even pre-pandemic. And most of the problem is
01:23:12.540actually with enforcement. So most of the kids I talked to already went to schools where they banned
01:23:17.300phones. And they said that like at the beginning of the school year, it's like, we're banning
01:23:21.720phones, no phones out. And they're really strict about it. But then over time, people kind of
01:23:25.620drift. And then, you know, you have your phone out for a second. You're like, oh, I'm just using the
01:23:29.080calculator. And they're like, okay, okay, okay. And then before you know it, after like a month,
01:23:32.860kids are basically on their phones most of the time, right? And one thing my friend,
01:23:37.720the public high school teacher says is that like, it's really unfair to kind of leave this
01:23:41.560enforcement up to the teachers i just thought of a solution you know how phones have airplane mode
01:23:45.920what if there was a school mode and there's an app where the teacher controls it and school mode
01:23:52.840only allows 911 and a calculator and maybe like text from one number you get to get text from
01:24:00.660your mom or something i was gonna say emp blast it just like shut down all the phones i would like
01:24:06.240to do that in movie theaters too while we're at it there's many places i would like all of the
01:24:09.500phones to die actually cut my idea from the podcast i'm gonna call google and i'm gonna become
01:24:13.660so fucking rich school mode this is why i think it's it's a much better idea for schools to have0.76
01:24:20.060these much more comprehensive policies where like you just put your phone in like a weird little0.98
01:24:23.540locker at the beginning of the day yeah and you get it back at the end of the day yeah this is
01:24:26.980what my friend wants in his school him and the other teachers have been pushing for this all
01:24:30.020year it's mostly parental resistance actually because they're like i might need to contact my
01:24:34.180kid that's interesting and i i think that um it's framed often as a problem with children but like
01:24:40.580parents who aren't used to having any separation from their children no exactly all of a sudden
01:24:47.020with the advent of smartphones you don't really ever need to not be in contact with your kid
01:24:53.180yeah and so some school being like there's now going to be an eight hour block where you're not
01:24:59.320every single day probably feels pretty overwhelming to a lot of parents i do support this policy
01:25:03.860However, this thing of like everyone was a zombie and now there's laughter in the hallways thing.
01:25:09.060It's just not true because we've had these phone bans in place for so long.
01:25:12.680There's tons of studies on the effects of phone bans in school.
01:25:16.380So there's a really interesting natural experiment in Spain where two regions of Spain passed laws saying all schools have to ban smartphones.
01:25:24.100And so you can compare them to the other regions of Spain.
01:25:26.960and they saw a 15% reduction in bullying and a pretty modest but noticeable increase in test
01:25:34.880scores. There's one in Denmark that shows that kids did more physical activity at recess because
01:25:40.340they took away their phones during recess. There's one in Norway that was reported as saying students
01:25:47.600had better mental health after a bunch of schools banned smartphones. But if you read the actual
01:25:53.220study the schools didn't ban smartphones they just made kids turn their phones on silent and
01:25:58.120it's a little implausible that they would have such a large effect and the study hasn't been
01:26:01.980in a peer-reviewed journal so in general studies seem to find extremely modest effects and most of
01:26:09.320those effects are measured by teacher perceptions okay i do favor these bans i mean partly because
01:26:15.000like i think if teachers perceive kids to be doing better that's like worth noting like that's not
01:26:20.740that's not nothing yeah but height starts that anecdote by saying you know before they ban
01:26:26.480phones the school had a problem with bullying and sleep deprivation and social comparison
01:26:32.140and now they don't have those problems anymore and like smartphone bans just aren't going to
01:26:36.880affect that kind of stuff kids can still bully each other after school yeah kids can still overuse
01:26:41.280their phones height is quite explicitly proposing this as a silver bullet and it just isn't one
01:28:39.420In the very first semester, he made these changes. Kevin started noticing a shift in his students. Quote, our students are happier, kinder, have fewer behavior problems, have made more friends, feel more in control of their day and their life in general, and in some cases have dramatically changed course from bullying behaviors and frequent office referrals to no bullying behaviors and no office referrals.
01:29:00.780Okay. So all three of these three solutions are just recess.
01:37:29.160We're putting this on the loudspeaker at Davos, Peter.
01:37:31.620The problem, lack of collective effervescence.
01:37:34.120The solution, 30-minute recess before schools.
01:37:37.800Also, I can think of a lot of experiences online that I felt were examples of a collective effervescence.
01:37:43.180Like, I don't think he was around when we bullied Iggy Azalea off of Tumblr.0.98
01:37:47.560When Trump got COVID that night on Twitter, that was some of the most intense collective effervescence I've ever felt in my fucking life.0.96
01:38:35.380So if you look at the actual literature on radicalization, there are specific beliefs that predict radicalization.
01:38:43.400And a lot of them are things like in-group dominance, like thinking that you're part of a group that is superior to other groups, believing that you are experiencing relative deprivation, right?
01:38:54.160That like black people are getting all the jobs, but like you can't even be a white person in America anymore.0.55
01:38:58.360Negative attitudes toward the government and the political system, like they're all out to get you, conspiratorial beliefs.0.66
01:39:03.460But these are things that he cannot address because they require acknowledging that right-wing radicalization is a much bigger problem in America than left-wing radicalization.
01:39:12.360But he has dedicated his entire career to pointing out left-wing radicalization.
01:39:16.680All he can do is make this incoherent argument that the virtual world is this desiccated black and white version of social interaction that is also so good that it's tempting kids out of their real life relationships.
01:39:34.240What we need is more religious fervor is never an argument that's going to like really sit well with me.
01:39:39.620He seems to think that online interactions are qualitatively worse than in-person interactions, right?
01:39:46.140And every interaction that's online is bad.
01:39:48.320And every interaction that's in person is good.
01:39:50.800And like, I read a couple articles about the panic over TV, right?
01:39:54.180Kids are on their screens too much in the 1980s.
01:40:05.840It's really silly to say that the medium is more important than the content.
01:40:10.100I like the idea of trying to get more spirituality and more like, you know, less self-centeredness
01:40:15.340and more reflection in our lives, I think that's really great. But it's not the case that that
01:40:19.880isn't available online. And it's not the case that like this sense of the lack of collective
01:40:25.920effervescence is what's causing political radicalization. Whenever conservatives,
01:40:30.200like moderate conservatives, point to the decline in church attendance as like a sort of sign of
01:40:36.440the downfall of these in-person communities, the question that pops up to me is like, why
01:40:42.400are the communities where church attendance is very common and popular, some of our most
01:40:47.240politically radicalized. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just not entirely seeing it. And it feels
01:40:51.900like a lazy analysis that's only looking at half of the issue. His solution for this, like, you
01:40:57.540know, what parents can do to foster this kind of collective effervescence among their children
01:41:02.040is a much greater focus on in-person activities. And his first recommendation is just like more
01:41:08.580kids doing sports, which honestly seems great to me. I have no problem with that. But he says,
01:41:14.700research consistently shows that teens who play team sports are happier than those who don't.
01:41:19.260Humans are embodied. A phone-based life is not. Screens lead us to forget that our physical
01:41:24.940bodies matter. If you think that intramural sports would help, then just say that. Don't
01:41:30.280talk to me about collective effervescence and then be like, and the solution, more soccer.
01:41:35.620And then if you go to the footnote, he acknowledges the fact that just because kids who play sports are happier does not mean the sports are causing them to be happier.
01:41:43.580It could be that happier kids play sports.
01:42:11.960And when you're struck by this sense of awe, like I'm small in the world, and you're looking at, like, majestic mountains and a sunset, that it grounds you in the physical self.
01:42:21.320And he recommends his students at NYU to go on awe walks in New York City.
01:51:51.860Well, it's very obvious with many things with TikTok, trans stuff, and there's a lot of different things that they're encouraging.
01:52:01.960And, you know, people that are opposed to that are being banned, which is also very odd.
01:52:08.360And specifically like female athletes, we had Riley Gaines, who was the female athlete that competed against Leah Thomas.
01:52:14.640And she has said that male, biologically male athletes should not be able to compete with biologically female athletes because they have a significant advantage.
01:52:23.640And she was banned from TikTok just for saying that.
01:52:27.620So this relates to the larger issue that we talked about last time and that I hope we'll continue to talk about today, which is that social media has brought us into an environment in which anyone has the ability to really harm anyone else.
01:52:41.380There's an extraordinary amount of intimidation available via social media.
01:52:45.700And so this has led the leaders of all kinds of organizations to run scared.
01:52:50.640Greg Lukianoff and I saw this in universities.
01:52:53.460Why don't the university president stand up to the protesters who are shouting down visiting speakers?
01:52:58.160And then we saw it in journalism, newspapers and editors who wouldn't stand up for journalistic principles.
01:53:03.160And so I think what has happened here is that social media allows whoever is angriest and can mobilize the most force to threaten, to harass, to surround, to mob anyone.
01:53:17.020And when people are afraid to say something, that's when you get the crazy distortions that we saw on campus or that Riley Gaines was seeing too, just that people are afraid to speak up.
01:53:27.820And in a democracy, in a large, secular, diverse democracy, we have to be able to talk about things.
01:53:37.620It's like you can't even say certain things anymore without everyone getting mad at you online.
01:53:44.100Riley Gaines is still on TikTok, by the way.
01:53:48.400When you listen to his interviews and when you really go through the book, you don't get the sense of somebody who truly cares about teen mental health.
01:53:56.360you get the sense of somebody who hates social media yeah the experience of social media that
01:54:02.000he's describing here where like everybody's walking on eggshells and you can get yelled
01:54:06.400at at any time and it's bringing out the worst in people that is not the experience of like a 13
01:54:11.940year old girl on instagram that is the experience of a middle-aged center-right political pundit
01:54:18.700on like twitter and substack yeah throughout this book he shows no interest in what kids are
01:54:24.460actually doing on their phones. Like you learn nothing about teenage social media use from
01:54:29.360reading this book. Like I think there's something more complicated to this than just a straightforward
01:54:33.640moral panic, but he speaks about social media the way that previous moral panickers talked about TV
01:54:41.200and video games. God damn it. He says in this like awestruck section of the book, he says,0.99
01:54:46.680social media is a fountain of bedevilments. It trains people to think in ways that are exactly
01:54:52.660contrary to the world's wisdom traditions here we go think about yourself first be materialistic
01:54:58.060judgmental boastful and petty seek glory as quantified by likes and followers yeah here's0.99
01:55:04.060this dumb conservative bullshit one thing that is sort of easy to forget about all of his solutions0.99
01:55:10.120is that none of them are about teen mental health yep all of his solutions are about getting kids1.00
01:55:15.520off their phones you see it with the uh the way they were talking about gaza they just believe
01:55:21.600that there is no way that young people could organically be left of center.
01:55:34.000There's surely something off here.1.00
01:55:36.000It's perhaps the Chinese trying to meddle or something similar.1.00
01:55:40.200I also am like fairly uncomfortable with like, you know, this guy's kind of out in front1.00
01:55:43.780leading this societal conversation about this issue.
01:55:46.180And like the way that he speaks about actual teenagers is really stigmatizing.
01:55:49.320And this analysis of just like they lack resiliency, they're too fragile, they've been coddled their whole lives is a terrible starting point for a useful conversation about how to help treat mental illness among teenagers.
01:56:03.840And one thing that I found when I spoke to Amy Orban and Andrew Shabilsky for this is that both of them said that like a much more productive way to think about this is not like social media is harming teens.
01:56:13.440A better way is there's a teen access to treatment crisis in America.
01:56:18.920Yeah. Teens have some of the highest rates of mental health problems and some of the lowest rates of access to care. Right. And when I talked to Emily Weinstein, this researcher who's interviewed hundreds of kids, she said like the most important thing that sticks out to her is that like kids want recognition. Kids want to feel real. They want to feel like adults. They want to feel like they're being listened to.
01:56:38.320And there's nothing in John Haidt's book, like for all of his advice to parents, right?
01:56:42.960It's all about like controlling the way that they use the internet.
01:56:45.500There's nothing about just like make sure your kids know that you love and support them