The Anxious Generation w/ Jonathan Haidt

This week Scott is joined by NYU social psychologist and author Dr. Jonathan Haidt. Scott and Jonathan discuss the "great rewiring of childhood" and how it is negatively affecting the mental health of teenagers. They also discuss why a return to play based childhoods are better for kids in the long run and review the criticism of his research with an eye toward nuance and the recommendation of better studies to address one of the most pressing issues of our time.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The law is you have to say that you're thirteen
in order to give away your data without your parents'
knowledge or consent. But the law has written such that
companies have to have affirmative evidence that you're underage. So
if they have proof that you're under thirteen, then they're responsible.
They're not supposed to open account for you. But as
long as they don't know it's yours, it's not their fault.

(00:21):
They have no obligation.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Today we have doctor Jonathan Heights on the podcast. Jonathan
is a social psychologist at ne York University's Stern School
of Business. Heights research examines the intuitive foundations of morality
and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. He
also writes about positive psychology and the decline of teen
mental health. His latest book is The Anxious Generation, How

(00:51):
the Great Rewiring of Childhood is causing an epidemic of
mental illness. This book is the main topic of our
discussion today. Jonathan argues that the disappearance of a play
based childhood has been replaced by the great rewiring of
childhood that came with the emergence of smartphones and social
media around twenty twelve. He argues that this had a

(01:12):
big impact on the mental health of teams all around
the developed world, most so for young girls. In this episode,
we do a deep dive of the research surrounding his argument,
as well as the criticisms that have been leveled against
his hypothesis. This was a stimulating conversation with a friend
who I admire and I appreciate that he was so
open to discussing criticisms and having such a nuanced discussion

(01:34):
about such an important and pressing topic. So that further
Ado I bring you doctor Jonathan Height.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Jonathan Height, Doctor Jonathan Height, is so great to have
you back in the Psychology podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
Scott Barry Kaufman. It's great to be back with you.
We go back a long way.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
We do. Now. I know you from the positive psychology world,
and I used your textbook The Happiness Hypothesis in my
pen Psychology positive psychology class for years. So that's that's
the context where I first met you.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
If I remember correctly, it was Marty Seligman had a
retreat on creativity in the sciences, and like you were
in charge of it. What was the name of that
project you.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
Were doing it? So I ran the imagination Institute with
Martin Seligman. We did these imagination retreats and you were
you were. We tapped you as one of the most
imaginative psychologists on the punnet.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
So who can refuse that invitation?

Speaker 3 (02:27):
Yeah, yeah, you can't refuse such a thing. So how
did you transition from the positive psychology world into kind
of the world you're in now, which is not And
we're going to get into this because there is a
really deep integration of positive psychology with the work you're
doing now that many people might not be aware of.
But sort of when did you kind of shift your
interests in researcher?

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yeah, so, so just the brief course, I mean, actually,
I'm realizing now looking back, it actually all makes sense,
even though it seems disjointed. So Ever, since my second
year of grad school at Penn, I picked moral psychology,
morality and the emotions and how morality varies across cultures.

(03:07):
So that's what I've always done, and then over time
I shifted that. Oh so the moral emotions. So when
I moved to Uva after grad school. When I moved
to Uva in nineteen ninety five, I was reading something
from Thomas Jefferson about the emotions of reading great literature,

(03:28):
and he says, you know, he talks about how does
it not you know, a great passage does not elevate
the sentiments as much as any example from history can provide.
And he talks about a feeling of opening in the chest.
So I began studying I've been studying disgust in grad school,
moral disgust, you know, violations of food and sex taboos

(03:49):
and just horrible moral violations. And I decided to study
the opposite of disgust, like because there's this emotion and
Jefferson described it perfectly. So I said, wow, yeah, that
really is something that should be studied. So I started
study moral elevation. And that was like nineteen ninety eight,
which is right when Marty Seligman was president of the
American Psychological Association, and that's when he started positive psychology

(04:11):
and he invited a bunch of young scholars down to Accoma, Mexico.
So originally I was, you know, I was really part
of the positive psychology movement, focusing on sort of moral psychology,
positive moral emotions. And then at UVA, I eventually started
teaching a course called Flourishing, which is as Marty said,
it's the most fun you'll ever have teaching, and it

(04:32):
really is. So I taught that at UVA, and so,
you know, positive psychology and moral psychology there was a
lot of overlap. But then I started also looking at
politics as culture because the cultural war was heating up
beginning of the nineteen nineties but getting really bad in
the two thousands. So I started looking at left and
right as though they were different cultures, different moral cultures,

(04:53):
and that kind of pulled me away from positive psychology
into my long dark period because it's really great. I mean,
what's happening to us as a country is really really grim, and.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
The op positive psychology.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
It really is. No, it really is. And you know,
I don't want to get too negative on this podcast,
but you know, liberal democracy depends on certain founding assumptions
and those assumptions might no longer hold. So I'm really
concerned about that, and that sort of pulled me away
from positive psychology into political psychology. And then I started
looking at the role of social media in particular as

(05:28):
causing political chaos, and then I started looking at what's
it doing to kids? And when when I wrote The
Calling of the American Mind with Greg Lukianov. We just
had a speculation in the book that you know, it's
mostly about overprotection. That's what the whole book is about, coddling,
you know, stop over protecting. But you know, the timing
fits with social media. You know, maybe social media something
to do with it. In twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, we

(05:50):
wrote that, but we didn't have the evidence. We didn't know,
and now I believe we know, and that's what I'm
assuming you and I will talk about a lot.

Speaker 3 (05:57):
Anyway.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
There you go, thumbnail sketch from the nineties.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
Now now in Coddling the American Mind, which did excellent,
you know, sold very well, But you didn't mention social
media that much in that book. So that's interesting to me.
At what point were you like, I really need to
look at I need a double click on this.

Speaker 1 (06:16):
That book is set up to explain the mystery, which
is what the hell happened in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen,
we experience what is essentially a cultural revolution on campus
with intense moralism, hatred of the top, pulling people down,
spinning on professors. I mean, it was like a hurricane
from out of nowhere in twenty fifteen. So the book
was about that. And there's like six different causes we

(06:38):
analyze in the book. And there's rising political polarization, and
there's the bureaucratization of the universe. There's all kinds of causes.
One of them, though, was the rising anxiety, because by
twenty sixteen, when we were writing, it really became clear
there is eighteen mental health crisis. Now we know it
began around twenty thirteen, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen when things
go up, but it takes a couple of years before
the data kind of makes it, you know, from the

(06:59):
time it's collected to the time we sort of are
looking at it. A couple of years. So Gene Twangy
called attention to this in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, and
so that's when I got more interested in it. After
the coddling came out, some other researchers challenged me and said, oh,
Heighte says that might be social media. Now he's completely wrong.
There's no evidence. There's no evidence, and so I had

(07:22):
a look, like, you know, this is I wasn't a
social media researcher, This wasn't my feeling. Maybe I did
get it run. So I started collecting because there's all
these studies on both sides, I couldn't keep them all straight.
So I started collecting all the studies on all sides
about there's correlational studies, there are longitudinal studies, their experimental studies,
and I organized them. If you go to Anxiousgeneration dot

(07:44):
com slash reviews where I have a lot of Google
docs created with my research partner, Zach Rausch, and one
of them is social media and mental health. And so
just engaging in that debate, especially engaging the debate with
those other researchers, and like they'd publish a paper saying
there's nothing going on, there's no correlation, and then I'd
look at it and say, well, actually wait, you know,

(08:05):
if you look in their own data, actually you do
see it. So that's a normal academic debate. But so
that really began an ernest in twenty nineteen and then
it's just been ever since because I feel like we
now have a global mystery. It's not just American college students.
We have a global mystery. Why did teen mental health collapse?
All around the world. We don't know about the developing world,

(08:27):
but all around the Developed World East Age again we
don't know. But Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand.
Why did teen mental health collapse around twenty twelve? And
it always always more so for girls? Why That's the mystery,
and I think that deserves you know, I mean, like
this is like, you know, in terms of the numbers affected,
this is like as big as COVID. I mean, obviously

(08:48):
you know there's a huge increase in suicide, but the
death toll, well, the death toll overall is nothing compared
to COVID, but the harm this is having on children
is much greater than COVID. Very very few children died
from COVID, but a lot or dies now from suicide.

Speaker 3 (09:01):
Okay, good, So I love how we're starting with this
fact that there is this mental health crisis. And the
interesting question is what are the factors that play a role,
and then which ones should we prioritize amongst all this
complex web of societal factors. And you double click on
this one social media, can you weigh out as clearly
as possible the argument, you know, just because I think

(09:25):
a lot of people get confused with the argument, and
I've seen people distort your argument and say that you're
claiming that it's all the fault of social media, and
I know that's not what you're saying, so I want
to give you a chance to say as clearly as possible.

Speaker 1 (09:38):
Sure. So at first I thought that it was the
story with social media because I was thinking girls. This
is about girls. The increases their biggest, and the evidence
is clearest. The correlations between ours of social media use
and poor mental health are much larger, but two or
three times larger for girls than they are for boys.
So at first I was studying what social media doing
to girls, and so we know that there's a direct

(10:04):
relationship there, and there's experiments that we can get into
as well, But it took me much longer to figure
out the story for boys. And once Zach and I
figured out the story for boys, it became clear this
isn't just about social media. This is about the transformation
of childhood, what we call the great rewiring of childhood,
and so it's not just social media. So let me
just lay it. It's simple to put it this way.

(10:27):
It's a tragedy in two acts. First act. The first
act is the loss of the play based childhood in
the nineteen nineties, we stopped letting our kids out. But
the millennials who were teenagers then, they actually didn't get
more depressed. Mental health was fine. It was a little
better than gen X. The early intenet was actually pretty great.
It wasn't that exploitative. So Act one, we're taking away

(10:50):
childhood freedom, independence from kids, but the millennial mental health
doesn't drop in the nineties and two thousands. Then Act
too is the arrival of the phone based childhood. And
this was incredibly rapid. So the way to think about
it is twenty ten. You know, most all teens have
a phone, but it's a flip phone or a brick phone.

(11:11):
There's no internet browser, there's no such thing as Instagram.
There's most people, very few people have high speed internet,
so everything is slow. You can't do video on your phone.
Your phone was for communication. The millennials use their phones
to communicate with each other, to talk or to text.
That was basically it, and so they were fine. But
if you were born in the late nineties, then you

(11:35):
went through puberty. During the Great Rewiring between twenty ten
and twenty fifteen, what happens, so first social media begins
to get super viral beginning two thousand and nine. Actually
the like button, the retweet button. It's not about connecting now,
it's much more about news feed outrage content being delivered
to So social media changes. Instagram is founded in twenty ten,

(11:55):
but it doesn't get popular till twenty twelve when Facebook
buys it. Front facing camera comes out on the iPhone
and on the Samsung in twenty ten. High speed internet
goes to you know, almost everybody has it by twenty fifteen.
So if you're going through puberty in twenty fifteen, if
you let's say you're a twelve year old girl in
twenty fifteen, your brain is rewiring rapidly. That's what puberty

(12:16):
is all about. It's sort of converting from the child
form of the brain to the adult form of the brain.
And you're being guided not by the elders in your culture,
not by books and literature. You're being guided by just random,
weird stuff that you're watching on the Internet that was
selected by algorithms. You're in this tornado of crazy stuff,
including a lot of pornography and violence and short videos

(12:39):
of people getting run over by cars and just all
kinds of horrible stuff, especially for boys. So my argument
is it's not just about social media. It's a there's
a human form of childhood which involves a lot of
play in independence, and then you gradually learn to be independent.
And then there's an inhuman form, which is where we
give our kids a touchscreen, whether it's an eye phone

(13:00):
or a tablet. By the age of eight or nine,
most kids have their own touch screen. By then we
give it to them, and then that moves to the
center of their life and it'll be there. It's going
to be there at the center of their life for
the rest of their life. I mean, it's never going
to go away until Elon Musk puts it on a
chip and then it'll be planted directly into our brains.
But so that's what I think happened, the complete rewiring

(13:23):
of childhood. It's not just social media.

Speaker 3 (13:26):
Yeah, I saw you say somewhere That gave me a chuckle.
You said, look, you know, we we have a disappearance
of a play based childhood that lasted from about two
hundred million BC to nineteen ninety six if you take
a long period.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
Yeah, I took a rough guess as to when mammals
began because the whole thing about being a mammal is
you have a long childhood, and so mammals are really playful.
You know, my daughter had got it. We got a leopard,
get go for her, but he doesn't play with her.
You know, they're not plateful. And now we got a
puppy a year and a half ago, and she wants
to play all day long like puppies have to play
so to children.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
Absolutely, So let's let's go through at a little greater
granularity some of the evidence that you present in the book.
So obviously you know, correlation is not causation, and I
think that's a that's a big a lot of your
critics they seem to keep saying that over as a
like you don't know that you don't know the correlation
of nico cultation. But I want to give a specific

(14:23):
one there read because it's in Nature. Nature is very
well respected journal by a well respected We start Candice
ours Oddires, and you know, she really says that we
have looked at the evidence over and over and over
again and we just do not see this causation that
you claim is there. They see it more of it,

(14:43):
She sees it more of as an issue of well
depressed people are more attracted to certain content on social media.
That's why there's a correlation there.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
Right, So that's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. If A is
correlated with B, it might be that A causes B.
It might be the B causes or might be that
C causes AMB. Perfectly reasonable starting point. And Adres has
done some comprehensive review studies, but they're all of the
correlational studies. I don't know that she's done one of
the experiments. So let's go into first, what's the correlational data,
then we'll do the experiments. The correlational studies use very

(15:18):
crude measures self report generally self report of how many
hours a day are you spending zero, one to two,
three to five, So you have basically have like a
number from one to five. That's your data on social media.
Then you have a self report, maybe it's a single
light and maybe it's three items. How's your mental health
or anxiety? So you have like a one to five there. Now,

(15:39):
how much of the real of the real experience of
a child. How much is can you capture in that
one to five variable? Very very little of their mental health?
How much can you capture how accurate is it on
the output side on the dependent variable side, very very little.
So you would never expect these two numbers to correlate
point five. As you know, almost nothing in the behavioral
sciences correlates that are equals point five. Epidemiological work using

(16:02):
crude measures, correlations are almost all between point one and
point three. That's basically the ballpark that we're playing in.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
Now.

Speaker 1 (16:08):
If you could have perfect measurement, you could get above
point three. But we don't. We have very crude mission.
And what I think a lot of my critics do
is they I believe that they are confusing the variants
explained in a data set with the variants explained in life.
So so. Andrew Shabilski is another one of the main critics.
Shabilsky and Dodgers, I think are the two most most

(16:30):
outspoken people who doubt me, which is great, I mean
it really is. Chris ferget Oh, yes, yeah, Chris Ferguson definitely,
although Chris yeah, things are very collegial with Chris we
you know, you know, it's so yeah, I mean, you know,
Chris health.

Speaker 3 (16:42):
Things are more awkward with the other two.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
I mean, it's a normal academic debate. But there's not
like a friendship there with with with Chris, with Chris
and with Jeff Hancock, I think there is. I'm just
on better with them personally in any case. So there's
a thing in psychology and stats, as you know, if
you take the correlation coefficient and you square it, that
tells you the percent of variants explain just an abstract
concept that very few people understand. So if the correlation,

(17:09):
if the correlation is generally around zero point one to
point one five, we're actually all coming to agree that's
the correlations point one to point one five, but for
girls it's higher. So for girls it's actually point one
five to point two. So what Andrew Shabilski did and
Amy Orbit, they got three huge data sets, they ran
complex statistics on it, and they reported that the correlation

(17:32):
was equivalent to around er point oh four in that ballpark,
which really is trivial. And Andrew Schabilski has said ninety
nine point seventy five percent of the variance in your
happiness has nothing to do with social media. Now that
is not a correct statement if he'd said in this
data set, according to our analyzes, ninety nine point seventy
five are the variants in this output variable had nothing

(17:54):
to do with this. But to say that, to say
that socialism nothing to do I mean, most young people
seem to think it's really messing them up. Most school
principles see that it's messing up the kids. I mean,
everybody is wrong. Everybody's imagining this. But anyway, back to
the debate. So we debate how big the correlation is,

(18:15):
and many of the critics say, well, even if it's
a correlation of point one five, that's too small to explain.
But that's not true a correlation of point one five.
So put it this way, if would you let your child,
if you had a twelve year old girl, would you
let her do something was correlated with depression and anxiety
at our equals point one five. Because the other way

(18:35):
to look at it is the odds ratio. The odds
ratio is let's just compare. We have imperfect measurement all around,
so we're never going to get high correlations. But here's
a trick that we can do to tease out the
signal and the data, which is, let's look at the
correlation for the heavy users as a function or compared
to the correlation for the light users, and if those

(18:56):
are the same correlation, well then there's no dose response.
You know, that's a bad sign. But if the heavy
users are two or three times the correlation then the
light users, that means the odds ratio is two or three,
which is huge if something doubles your risk. So if
triples actually for girls, would you let your daughter go
on Instagram at the age of twelve if you knew
that it's going to triple her risk of depression and anxiety?

(19:19):
So so that's what's going on the correlational data. We
disagree on that. We actually agree on the side of
the correlation, but we disagree on the meaning of it.
Is that clear? Anything you want to click on?

Speaker 3 (19:27):
It is? Yeah, there are a bunch of things I
want to double clicking that that is clear. Thank you
so much for elucidating that. You know, what if we
looked at what if we zoomed out and we saw
a bigger picture where in the whole priority of things
there we identify things that are more in the point
four range, point six range, you know, and then we
have limited resources and what we should be double clicking

(19:48):
on or what we should be given resource to is
could someone make the argument that there are other systemic
problems upon which the social media issue is just an
outgrowth of that, and therefore we should be folks and
the ones with the larger effect sizes? What would you say?
This is that?

Speaker 1 (20:02):
Well the perfectly reasonable approach. So let's talk about it.
What are these other what don't you know? Who is
the true killer here?

Speaker 3 (20:10):
That's the million dollar that's the million dollar questions. And
I and that question right there, I will actually want
to double click on because I think it's such an
important question who's the real killer? Because it leads me
to believe that we could do so much better with
the quality of these studies in terms of the precision
we get in understanding what's going on. So to me,
just time on task seems not nearly as satisfying as

(20:31):
if we could actually do content analysis, if we could
actually start to pinpoint. To me, it's just like, how
informative is that just saying to me, that's just saying
if you're compulsive on something, you know it might not
even be social media. We might find the same people
who spend more time on social media spend more time
not doing their homework. Spend more time, you know what
I mean, They just it could be a general factor of.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
Right, and that's key, that's crucial that if you were
to crucial that, if you were to have that, I
totally agree. If you were to map out what activities
are causing what harms supuzz you drew this all out,
there'd be like twenty different activities that kids are doing.
There's video games, there's violent video games, there's porn, there's

(21:13):
there's so many things they are doing, and then there's
so many different outcomes. And so let's just take the
case of let's take the case of sex stortion. So
large numbers of boys are now being sex storted love
that so that's where a boy is like a girl
sends him notes and begins flirting with him on Snapchat

(21:34):
or Instagram. It's pretty much never the case that an
unknown sexy girl wants to have sex with you. That
just is not the way the world works. But teenage
boys don't know that, and so this really sexy girl
is flirting with them and friending them, and then you know,
the relationship progresses and she says, well, you know, let's
send each other nudes, and you know, then she sends

(21:54):
a nude and it's really sexy, and then he sends
a nude. As soon as he sends that nude, she said,
as now I have everything I need to ruin your life.
Oh now I've got you. I know all your contacts
because I'm a friend of yours on Instagram and Snapchat.
So unless you send me five hundred dollars in the
next hour, I'm going to send this photo of you
and your penis to everyone. You know. Now, this is

(22:16):
not just happening to a few dozen kids the FBI.
Last year, the FBI found twelve documented cases of suicide
because of this, the number of boys. It's now getting
so easy to do this. There's a Nigerian ring called
the Yahoo Boys. They've automated it with AI. It's good.
You know, anyone will be able to do it to
millions of boys every day. So boys are getting this request.
It's not that most are getting it. But you know,

(22:37):
if you have thousands and thousands of boys being sex storted,
and let's say only one percent of them commit suicide,
this is a gigantic harm. This does not show up
in that point one correlation, and that's just one causal
path that's just one.

Speaker 3 (22:50):
I wholeheartedly agree that. I just think that the methods,
you know, there'd be so much richer information we'd get
if we could do that kind of analysis. We start
to look more at the specific causal outcomes of specific
kinds of content.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
Yeah, well, that's right, And that points to a real
problem in the social psychology mindset or the social science mindset,
which is we're dealing with really complex causal situations. We're
trying to figure out what causes what.

Speaker 3 (23:17):
You know.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
Sometimes like people say, like, oh, it's not rocket sciences.
The rocket science is hard, But rocket science is actually
easy because if you know the math, you can predict
exactly exactly what's going to happen. Whereas with the social
sciences you can. It's really hard. And so what we
do is we grab onto certainty. We say, okay, we
we have data on this. We can use this as
our as our independent varial. We have data on this

(23:38):
a one to five scale of mental health. So let's
let's we're going to draw a circle around these two
and we're going to limit our analysis to these and
then we're going to argue for ten years. Ten years,
we're going to argue over whether is the correlation point
oh five? Is it point one five?

Speaker 3 (23:53):
What is it?

Speaker 1 (23:54):
Now? This is one of thirty different causal pathways of harm,
And so I believe that the skeptics have misconceptualized, if
they've misconceptualized the situation. Now it's called operationalization. We have
to operationalize a question in order to get quantitative answers. So, so, yes,
let's talk about the correlations. But then let's also talk

(24:15):
about the testimony. I mean, most kids, most older kids,
say this messed me up, this is bad. That's evidence
a lot of kids have committed suicide. Now that's not
a correlation, that's a causation. I mean, the skeptical view
would have to be, yeah, this boy killed himself, but
that's just a you know, the day he killed himself,
the day after he was six storted, But that's just
a coral He would have killed himself anyway. Now, obviously

(24:37):
that's absurd. I don't mean to imply that they think that.
But what I'm saying is there are so many documented harms,
and so to pin everything on saying, well, the correlationals
says aren't large enough. There was a snapchat put out
some astonishing number. I mean, it was something like forty
or fifty percent of boys have had something like this.
It's hard to believe. But if that's the case, you know,

(24:58):
if even one percent of them fall for it, it's
probably more than one percent. You know, if half of
all boys are being contacted and a small percentage fall
for it, we're talking about millions of boys around the
world whose lives are getting ruined. And you know, I don't.
So you know Andrew Schbilski's claim that ninety nine point
seventy five percent of your happiness has nothing to do

(25:19):
with social media, I don't think it holds up.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
Hey, hey, John, this is so rich that I really
want to ask some nuanced questions here. So without that
full mapping of the specific content, I wonder how much
of your arguments are are you projecting your own morality
onto the situation versus actually going by the data, since

(25:46):
we do lack so much of the data on the
specific content. Ord Now, the example you give, I hope
we can all agree from a moral perspective is not good.
But there are other areas where, you know, even like pornography.
You know, like some people listening to this podcast may
have no moral qualms with pornography, right, So, like, you know,

(26:07):
you make some arguments. I'm wondering how you separate your
own sort of like, oh, that content is bad for everyone,
we need to ban it, versus that's based on the
data versus your own morality. Does that make sense? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (26:19):
But you know so, I think there's a couple of
things going on here. One is I make an enormous
distinction between minders and adults. I don't want to tell
adults what to do. But at the same time, I
don't want companies dropping hooks in the water to catch
my son and addict him to pornography, to gambling, to
video games without my knowledge, no consent. So the book

(26:40):
isn't entirely except for chapter eight, which we'll talk about.
The book is entirely about what's happened to young people.
And there is a broad consensus in the United States
that we do have laws to protect children. And I've
even won arguments with libertarians, Libertarians who are opposed almost
all regulation. I've won arguments with them when I say

(27:02):
we're only talking about children. Do you agree that we
need something to protect children from addictive substances, from hardcore
pornography and from horrible graphic violence like beheading videos, and
then they'll say, well, yeah, okay, I can see that.
So once we agree that children are vulnerable and that
companies can't treat children the same as they do adults,

(27:24):
now we're in a very different ballgame. And right now,
as long as you're old enough to lie about your age,
if you are nine years old and you're old enough
to say that you're thirteen, you can open an account
anywhere you want except porn Hub for their whatever you know.
To porn site, you have to say that you're eighteen.
That's it. There's no verification. So as soon as you
give your kid the Internet in their pocket, they it's

(27:45):
not just that they can reach everything, including the horrible stuff.
It's that everyone in the world can reach them, including sextortionists.
And so far as far as I know, the sextortionists
are actual people on the other end of the of
the keyboard somewhere, not usually in America. They're probably somewhere
else in the world. But that's not going to be
true for very long because AI is so good at this.
AI is now so conversation. Within a year, I think

(28:08):
sextortion is going to be mostly AI, and then it's
going to be you know, tenfold, one hundredfold, because anybody
can open a sextortion business and they can sex stort
a million boys in a day. So I think this
is going to get a lot worse. So my point
is we have to establish the principle that children are different,
whereas the US Congress unfortunately established the principle that children
have no protections whatsoever.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
None.

Speaker 1 (28:27):
Companies is going to do whatever they want to them
because the law is you have to say that you're
thirteen in order to give away your data without your parents'
knowledge or consent. But the law's written such that companies
have to have affirmative evidence that you're underage. So if
they have proof that you're under thirteen, then they're responsible.
They're not supposed to open an account for you. But as

(28:49):
long as they don't know it's not yours, it's not
their fault. They have no obligation. And so that's why
our children are everywhere on the internet. And that's why
my basic argument in the book is we have overprotected
our children in the real world, which has gotten increasingly
safe since the nineties, and we have underprotected our children
online which has gotten increasingly dangerous since the nineteen nineties.

Speaker 3 (29:10):
Thank you. I'm so glad as well that I'm giving
you this opportunity to quarify, because I hear exaggerations of
your own argument from various people. So you're not against
fun and entertainment of fun. I know, I know, but
I see almost as separate. I see like the darker issues,

(29:32):
and then I also see an issue with the developing
dopaminergic brain of teenagers where I can say that I
get it, because that's why I deleted TikTok from my account.
I used to do hip hop dancing on TikTok. I
have a whole account of people want to see me
do dancing on TikTok. I have a whole acount where
you can see me do hip hop dancing. But on TikTok,
I was starting to find myself spending too much time

(29:54):
watching harmless entertaining like Old Granny's dancing. Know, like it's
captivating to me, But so there, I feel like there's
a separate issue here that's not as dark as the
other examples you're talking about, but are still a waste
of our lives, and we could be using our time
usually more and more productive ways.

Speaker 1 (30:14):
But it's much more than the waste of time. So
I just I just talked with Andrew Huberman last week
and he really helped me work through the dopamine issues.
And I read analem Ke's book Dopamine Nation last year
while I was writing the book. And so the key
to keep in mind is, look, if you're a grown
up and you want to get yourself addicted to TikTok
or slot machine gambling, it's sad. There should be some protections,

(30:38):
but you're an adult. If you want to throw at
your life, you can do that. But we don't want
companies to addict our kids without our knowledge or consent.
And the key to keep your the key thing to
focus on is is it easy dopamine or is it
hard dopamine? And so dopamine is not, you know, as
Ubren explained as I say in the book, but he
really goes into a detail. Dopamine is not a real

(31:00):
ward chemical. It's not like you do the thing and
then you get the reward, because if so, you'd be okay,
I can stop, I got the reward. Dopamine is a
reinforcement chemical that says keep going do more of this,
do more of this, do more of this. And so
let's imagine the case of a fifteen year old boy
who has a sex drive, wants a girlfriend that you know,
most boys want a girlfriend. Of the heterosexual boys, you know,

(31:23):
many of them are lonely. And there's two paths that
this boy can take. One is he can satisfy his
sexual urges on a porn site and that's very quick,
easy dopamine. And what Huberman pointed out to me is
that after orgasm, the male brain is flooded with prolactin,
which kind of shuts off the dopamine but encourages bonding.
So you're lying there with a woman you've just made

(31:45):
love or you just you know, and and it really
strengthens the pair bond and that's how you fall in love.
So if you imagine a boy on porn hub, he's
getting quick and easy dopamine and there's nobody there for
him to bond with except for computer. Now, instead, imagine
you know what it was like for me, and I
suppose for you there was some pornography, but it was

(32:07):
like playboy and a couple other things. You know, I
really wanted a girlfriend and I worked at it for
years and you know, tried to get one. I finally
did get a girlfriend my senior year of high school,
and you know, I took her out on dates and
I'll never forget the day we first held hands and
then there's the first kiss, and you work up gradually.
That was hard dopamine. Like, I really worked for that,

(32:29):
and that was one of the best things in my
early life. And so I would ask anyone watching this think,
especially if you're a parent, what do you want for
your kid. Do you want your child to spend ages
eleven through twenty one getting buckets of cheap quick dopamine
with no work, no work, you just you know, you
go to a site, you get the dope. Or do

(32:51):
you want your child to work at things, develop skills,
develop social skills, learn how to flirt, learn how to court,
learn how to fall in love, learn how to have
sex so that they get harder and dopamine. And it's
the same in school, it's the same in work. Whereas
porn and video games. Now, the video games are so amazing.
You know, when I was a kid, Pong came out.
It was like a tennis you know, It's like it

(33:11):
was like ping pong. Remember it was fun. It was fun,
but it was not like super addictive. It was just like,
oh this is you know, this is interesting.

Speaker 3 (33:18):
Actually I found it pretty addictive.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
Did you really punk?

Speaker 3 (33:20):
Yeah? Okay, yeah I did? Okay, well then in general.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
Okay, So anyway, the point is it's not just that
TikTok is wasting your life. Yeah, it's that keep your
eye on whether there's a feedback loop between a behavior
and reinforcement. So television, you know, it said that we
waste a lot of time on television. That's true. I
showed I Dream of Genie to my kids and they said,

(33:47):
this is really stupid, and I said, you know, you're right,
this was a stupid show. But when you're watching TV,
there's not a feedback loop between behavior and response. You
can turn the volume up or down, and you can't
change the channel, but that's it. That's it. You sit
there with your sister or your friend, you watch it together.
You're entertained. Contrast that with watching TikTok videos or YouTube

(34:11):
shorts or Instagram reels, and there you're doing a lot
of tapping. You tap and then you get something. You
tap and you get something. That's the way you train
a rap that's the way train a dog. That's the
way you train a child. If you can get that
rapid feedback loop, you can train them. You know, the
way Bef Skinner could train pigeons to play ping pong.
He could train to do anything by give them that

(34:32):
rapid reinforcement. So, and that rapid reinforcement is a little
hitt dopamine. So this is why I'm really coming to
see that in all of social media, the short videos
are the worst of the worst. I don't think anyone
should let their kid watch TikTok or YouTube shorts or
Instagram reels, at least until eighteen. I think we really

(34:52):
you know, again, I can't I can't prove that these
are worse. I don't have the data show that this
is worse than other things. But from everything I'm learning
about dopamine, from my conversation with Huberman, this is the
you know, this is about as bad as it gets.
Now there's porn also, I can't equate, you know, hardcore porn,
massive high definition hardcore porn available on demand. But but
those those are two that are clearly messing up the

(35:12):
development of the dopamine reinforcement system.

Speaker 3 (35:15):
Yeah, from what I understand of a dopamine as well,
that's uh yeah, that's a that's a real serious issue.
And just with the whole expectation of reward and when
you no longer receive it, you know, the wanting versus
liking systems there it seems like, yeah, it's like the
wanting system is what the social media keeps us going perpetually.
That's right.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
Yeah, So okay, so can we talk about the experiments,
because often I go into the correlational studies and then
somebody I never get to the experiments. Yes, please, all right,
So you asked before, how do we know that this
is causation not just correlation. So there's a whole class
of studies called longitudinal studies where you look at whether
an increase a time one predicts an increase in something
else at time too. And uh, I just points out

(35:55):
that there are some studies that find reverse correlation. There
are some studies that show that when you get an
increase in depression at time one, you know later on
you get increase in social media use. Okay, there are
some studies, but most of the studies find straightforward correlation.
Most of the studies find in effect of if you
use more social media at time one, you're more depressed
and exious at time too. Now it's not proof of causality,

(36:17):
but it's just more evidence that this causal story is
more likely than the reverse. And we have this, all
of this, we have this all laid out, all the
studies on all sides at Anxious Generation dot com, slash reviews.
And when you take out the studies that just use
a one day interval, because some studies track kids like
a day at a time, When you take out the
short term intervals, those don't necessarily show the results I'm

(36:40):
talking about. But when you go to a month or longer,
then you get the result. And this is important because
we're going to see the same pattern of the experiments.
All right, let's talk about the experiments. That's really the
gold standard for testing causality now. So the main kind
of experiment that's been done is you take college students
because it's hard to do experiments on high school kids.
You don't have permission, so it's mostly done with college

(37:01):
students are young adults, and you pay them or you
give them credit, and you ask you randomly assign half
of them to reduce their social media consumption to like
an hour a day, you know, from three or four
hours a day down to an hour a day, or
down to fifteen minutes a day, or in some studies
you ask them to get off entirely, and then the
question is does this make them happier? And Chris Ferguson

(37:23):
just published a meta analysis of these studies and his
claim was, on average, no, on average, there's no effect.
But are There are a couple of problems with Chris's
meta analysis. You know, again, I like Chris a lot.
I respect them, but a couple of problems. One is
Chris included all of the studies, even the short interval ones.
If you ask people to go out for a day
or two, is that going to make them happier? All

(37:45):
of the effects are mostly effects are driven by the
heavy users. They're the addicts. They're the ones who are
really being harmed, the ten fifteen percent or heavy users.
If you're a heavy user, if you're addicted to getting
that dopamine hit, did people like my video? You know,
what do they say about me? If you're addicted to
that and you take part in the study where you
have to get off social media for twenty four hours
or forty eight hours, Are you gonna be happy? Hell no,

(38:06):
you're in withdrawal. So what we're finding, So we're gonna
have a response to Ferguson's met anoulynce. I mean again,
this is this is the way the debate works. It's great,
it's constructive. We're gonna have response soon showing that when
you set if you sort all the experiments, and there's
I can't remember, like fifteen or twenty or twenty twenty five,
I can't remember. There's a certain number in this set,

(38:27):
and almost all the ones that use a day or
two show negative effects, people are less happy, But all
the ones that use a month or longer show almost
all show a positive effect. And so that is random
assignment RCT studies, which find that if you go off
social media, it hurts it first, but then you're happier.
And let me point out the way this is operationalized.

(38:50):
You know, my critics act like this is the experiment
that tests whether it's good or bad. But threat this
whole debate, most people have missed the collective action aspect
of this. So if you say to a college student,
why why don't you stop using Instagram for a month.
Now they're going to be cut off. They're cut off
from their friends. Everyone's on all their friends are on Instagram.

(39:12):
So now they're separated. So that's going to push against
their happiness. But even still, even still on average, they're
happier by a month later. What if we did the
real experiment should be you take friend groups or sports
teams or classrooms and you randomly assigned let's sake, let's
bose we had an eighth grade classroom or a ninth
grade classroom, and we randomly assigned half of you know,

(39:35):
half of the classes to all get off for a month,
and the other half is business as usual. Well, now
it's not just you're not taking in the social media.
Now it's like, hey, what are you doing after school?
You want to hang out, Hey, let's go play basketball,
Let's go get pizza. Like now you have the restoration
of normal childhood relationships. So I think we need to

(39:56):
look at multiple kinds of experiments. My argument is that
when you look at the central class of experiments, the
get off social media experiments, they do actually show a
causal effect. So the claim that I have no evidence
of causation, the claim that I have mistake and correlation
for causation. You know, I believe that I can show
that that is not true if listeners will go to

(40:16):
Afterbabbel dot com. That's my sub stack and Zach Rausch
and I have we put all our studies there, we
put all our data. We've got a lot of interesting stuff.
We're beginning to have voices of gen Z. We're having
young people write for us SO and we're looking for
contrary voices. We put a call out, can we find
a member of gen Z who will write in defense
of the phone based childhood? I have not found one.

(40:38):
I can't find one on this planet. Yeah, if you
talk to people in their early twenties, they generally say, wow,
this did a number on me. You know, I was
talking with naked ten when I was ten. There was
used to be think called omegle. It was a herreadimly
meet stranger's video and a lot of them have been
masturbating and so, you know, ten year old girls like

(41:00):
it was a funny thing to do, Like you'd be
with your girlfriends, like let's go on, omego, let's let's
you know, see, let's look at naked men like but
they're actually communicating with with sexual abusers, they're actually communicating
with men who I mean anyway, My point is, yeah,
I get it. Yeah. So so the fact that gen
Z generally says this was really bad for us and

(41:21):
we should change I think that also counts as evidence
of causality.

Speaker 3 (41:26):
Yeah, thank you for talking about that. So just two
areas I think are right for more research. One is
what are the individual difference factors that are protective factors?
I think that would be a very interesting line of research,
you know, because not I think there are individual differences
and who is more susceptible to certain content than other case?
And the other the second thing unless you want did

(41:47):
you want a double cluty?

Speaker 1 (41:48):
No, no, give me the second one.

Speaker 3 (41:49):
We'll see if we do it. The second one, which
is one that I know that you've brought up and
I'm right there with you, is less, uh not less,
but more group based research because a lot of what
you're describing as the effects of individuals, but it would
be very interesting to see if certain you know, how
certain populations are more susceptinable to particular content than other populations.
That's right.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
So let me answer the second one first, because it'll
lead to the first one. So the key to the
whole book is to see everything as a collective action problem.
Social media is socially addictive. Cigarettes are biologically addictive. Social
media is socially addictive. Everyone has to be on because
everyone else is on. And once you see that, then

(42:29):
you can understand why we shouldn't be studying it by
taking one person off. We should be studying by taking
the whole group off. Those are the experiments that need
to be done, and so phone free schools are a
great example. Every school that goes phone free reports fantastic results.
I've put calls out on Twitter. Can anyone find a
story about a school that went phone free, meaning you
lock the phones up in the morning, you give them

(42:49):
back at the end of the day. Can anyone even
find a news story? And nobody can. There was one
story in Florida. We had a lot of enforcement problems
and they gave up. But almost every step, almost every
school that does it, the teachers and administrators report they
hear laughter in between classes now, whereas it used to
be everyone was silent because everyone was on their phone.

(43:11):
Every school that does it has a fantastic result. So
it's very important to look at groups, and we want
to restore group dynamics for children. We don't want them
on their individual phones throughout puberty. All right, So now
back to your question of individual differences. So Gene Twangy
is the master of those studies. She's looked at all
kinds of demographic differences, and what she reports is that

(43:32):
it's up for pretty much everybody. It's up, you know,
for black and white, about the same, rich and poor
about the same. There's some small differences, but most of
the demographic variables that we would think of don't seem
to matter. This was a change in childhood globally across
the Developer. There are two or three big ones. The
biggest is gender, so women girls go up much more,

(43:56):
their mental health deteriorate's much more, much faster. There's another
and a little smaller. But there's another one, which is politics.
So this is actually very revealing and important. Conservative kids
are up a little. Liberal kids or kids from liberal
fans are up a lot. Now let me add in
then religion. As you'd think, kids who are religious are
up a little. Kids who are from secutive families are

(44:18):
up a lot. And so what Zach and I think
is going on. We have some essays on this on
our substack is that human beings need to be rooted
in community. There have to be adults around, there have
to be constraints, there has to be a moral order,
there has to be punishment for bad behavior. There have
to be stories being told by the adults. You know,
kids need the help of a community to turn into

(44:38):
an adult. But we stopped all that. And in secular
liberal families, especially the kids have a lot of freedom.
And freedom used to be good for kids. But what
we think is happening is the kids who are not
rooted in community. When the title wave came in around
twenty eleven to twenty twelve, they're the ones who got

(44:59):
washed out. To see and Gene Twankie has shown that
it's liberal girls use social media much more than everyone else. Plus,
liberal girls are marinating in the three great untruths that
I talked about with you when we talked, I think
we talked about the cognitive American mindus that the last
time you had me on. Yeah. So so there are
some you know, these cognitive distortions that Greg Lukianov product.

(45:20):
So for a variety of reasons, liberal girls get washed
away more, their mental health is horrible, whereas religious conservative
boys are barely up at all. For example, in Orthodox
Jewish households, everyone has to go phoneless for twenty five
hours a week, like they all have practice. And what
are they doing? Are they sitting having withdrawal symptoms? Now

(45:40):
they're playing with each other? So structure, order and community
is really really protective, that's the main thing.

Speaker 3 (45:53):
Well, this is a great segue into spiritual elevation and degradation.
So how can we morally well, how can we spiritually
uplift people? And can social media? Does social media have
any potential? Are you throwing the baby away from the
with the bath water completely in your in any of
your policy thing? Is there anything that can be saved here?

Speaker 1 (46:14):
For kids in middle school? I see no redeeming features.
If we want to talk about eighteen year olds or
even sixteen year olds, look, I recommend you know we
need to have four norms, one of which is no
social media till sixteen. I can see that there are
some things that a sixteen year old can do with
social media. Now key is to say everybody seems to think, well,
if they don't have social media, how can they find information,

(46:37):
how could they connect with someone? Really, in the nineties
and late nineties early two thousands, before social media, nobody
could find information, nobody could connect with each other. So
people think that I'm saying keep kids away from the
entire internet, lock them up, and don't let them see
a computer. No, they can. You know, families, I think
it's good to have a computer in the kitchen or
the living room, even when your kids are in second, third,

(46:58):
fourth grade. There's a lot of good stuff they can do
on a computer. As for hooking them up to talk
with strangers all around the world, again, I can see
how a sixteen year old engaged in some social change
project wants to be networking with strangers. I can see that.
I think it's still really bad for them, but I
can see some benefits. If we're talking about twelve year olds. No, no,
I see zero benefits to having my twelve year old

(47:19):
daughter she's now fourteen, but I see zero benefits to
having her spend her entire life talking with people straight
posting photos, comments, likes getting approached by men who want
to see a photo of her in her bathing suit
or stuff like that. Like, no, yeah, I'm going to
throw the baby out with the bathwater for middle school.
And right now there's no restriction. Right now, you can
be seven and open as many accounts as you want,

(47:40):
and that has to stop.

Speaker 3 (47:42):
It seems like algorithms matter so much in this discussion,
Like my Instagram feed is one example of moral elevation
after another. I don't see that as a way like
I'm bragging. I'm just saying the way for whatever kind
of algorithm that I've gotten into. In my Instagram, I
have a lot of inspirational videos going through, and I
am actually seeing lots of examples of moral elevation.

Speaker 1 (48:03):
No, that's right, that's right because you because that's what
you click on. But if you ask young boys, this
is what I suggest. If you talk to twelve, thirteen,
fourteen year old boys and girls, ask them what their
TikTok feed is, Ask them how much violence there is.
Ask them if they see people getting run over by
cars or getting punched in the face, or videos of
school yard fights. The girls are generally not seeing that

(48:24):
because they don't click on that, but a lot of
the boys are. They see a lot of people getting killed.
And this is horrible, this is degrading, you know, It's
one thing. When I was young, there was violence in movies.
I'll never forget some scenes from the Godfather. But that's fiction,
and we process it as fiction. There's a kind of
a second order emotion with fiction. But I remember the

(48:46):
very few times I saw a video of a person
getting their arm chopped off or they're head chopped off,
like cause write my disgust research Paul Rosin and I
watched a video called Faces of Death. This was like
nineteen ninety two. Faces of Death. It was a compilation
of videos of people and animals being dismembered, murdered. It
was horrible and it really affected me. And I was

(49:09):
twenty eight. Imagine being twelve and you're getting this again.
Not all kids are getting this, but a lot of
our boys are so spiritually degrade. Let's stick with the
elevation degradation thing. So this chapter is my favorite chapter
in the book. Chapter eight I was my favorite chapter

(49:29):
as well as it should be. You are mister humanistic psychology,
the voice of Maslow. So actually, you know what, I'll
lay some stuff out and then I want you to
give me a Meslovian interpretation of how phone based childhood
is affecting flourishing and development. So my first book was
called The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.
I read the wisdom literature of every culture I could find,

(49:51):
east and West from thousands of years ago, and there's
ten chapters with a bunch of like So. One of
them is there's nothing good or bad, but think makes
it so. It's the principle of appraisal. Another is what
doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Another is judge not
lest you be judged. So the ancients generally tell us

(50:11):
to be more forgiving, not less, to be slower, to judge,
not faster. They tell us to sit quietly and calm
our minds. That the ancients knew nothing about chemistry and physics,
but a lot of the cultures, especially in the East,
were incredible experts on consciousness, and so a lot of
them focus on meditation, because it's only when you quiet

(50:33):
the jumping monkey of your mind that you can open
your heart, be it to God or nature or other people.
Something happens when you meditate, when you slow yourself down.
And so what I realized when I was almost done
with the book is that I'd written a whole book
about children and I hadn't really said how this is
affecting adults, and when it made a list of how
this is affecting us all I realized, oh my god,

(50:55):
it says though. You know it says though. The social
media companies read the happiness hypothesis red agent wisdom and said,
what can we do to push people exactly in the
opposite way of what agent wisdom recommends. Let's encourage them
to judge immediately, constantly, no context, no forgiveness, no compassion.
Let's fill their eyes and ears with stuff, always stuff,

(51:16):
never a moment of silence. If they're in the elevator,
they'll be scrolling on Instagram. We don't want them to
be in an elevator for you know, forty seconds with
no stimulation. So in so many ways, you know, yes,
your feed can be elevating. And I used to do
research at UVA on moral elevation. We'd show them videos, so, yeah,
you can see elevating videos. There could be a role
for that. But if you give your twelve year old

(51:38):
a phone, yeah they might watch a few elevating videos,
but they're going to give up almost everything else. They're
going to be on for five to seven hours well,
middle school five to seven hours a day, high school
more like seven to nine, and it's going to push
out everything else. So that's my basic argument that the
online life with extraordinary amounts of stimulation and social media, oh,
another one another. You know, you can summarize a lot

(51:59):
of ancient wisdom by stop this is not all about you.
Stop thinking entirely about yourself. Suppress your self, your ego,
put others first. But a social media platform says, we're
going to give you a platform. You can dance on
the platform, but your real motivation is to get people
to like what you did. We're going to hook people

(52:20):
to this kind of feedback and then if you're successful,
you're an influencer. So over and over again, what we
find is that the phone based life, not just for children,
the phone based adulthood pushes us towards spiritual degradation, not
spiritual elevation. Yes there's you know, I love insight, timer
I meditate sometimes, so yes, there are some good things

(52:42):
for spiritual progress. So that's my very negative view. Scott,
what's yours? What would you say?

Speaker 3 (52:48):
Like?

Speaker 1 (52:48):
What would what would Maslow say about what's happened to us? Then?
What do you say about what's happened to us.

Speaker 3 (52:52):
Absolutely, and then and then I have a specific criticism
of your transcending the Self section. Okay, good, Okay, So
from a nauslow perspective of it, you know, we think
of it at prepotency of needs. We think of the
needs for self esteem. We need to think of the
need for connection, for safety as more in taking more prepotency,
all the algorithms basically are designed to fulfill those needs,

(53:15):
you know, or to keep us perpetually perpetually trying to
fulfill those needs, you know, like we're lonely, so we
think our don't mean expects, you know, the reward even
if we don't get it of connection, self esteem, you know,
oh I don't you know, safety, so we we try
to get with our tribe or or are you know,
to complain about how and safe we feel and everything.

(53:38):
So the self transcendent needs, the self actualization needs kind
of take a back seat. So that's how I see
it from a mass of perspective.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
Okay, I should have put that in the book. Yeah,
that's very good. Okay, Now how about you, what else
can you add?

Speaker 3 (53:51):
Well? So the transcending the Self section of the book
I'm right there with you with your argument about the
importance of transcending this self, but you the neuroscience of it.
I don't think it's quite right.

Speaker 1 (54:03):
So you tell you because amazing.

Speaker 3 (54:06):
So you pick on the default mode network there, even
calling it the profane mode network. Now I actually call
it the imagination brain network. And and and Mary Helen
and Emmerdino Yang and I have written arguing articles arguing specifically
that the problem with social media is it's not allowing
kids to engage in their default mode network. So the

(54:26):
exact opposite argument, so we would actually argue that the
default mode network, it's so in this I think actually
dovetails the argument about play is that social media is
actually engaging our executive attention network so much on the
wrong things that we're not able to have internal constructive reflection.
We're not able to make meaning out of our experiences

(54:47):
in a personally meaningful way that are productive. We're not
imagining our future and our own personal futures. It's actually
taking us away from our imagination networkA.

Speaker 1 (54:55):
Waits, let me understand this. Are you saying or are
you and Mary Mary Helen? Are you saying?

Speaker 3 (54:59):
I take you a paper I could say no, please.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
Do Yeah, are you saying that if you take a kid,
you take a teenager and you have them stare at
a wall no stimulation coming in, that's going to increase
activation of the default mode network because now they're just
they're thinking, they're reflecting. Would that be true?

Speaker 3 (55:15):
So it's all it's I mean with neurosciences, soalvvery contextual.
So the best use of the default mode network is
to engage people in stories that are uplifting and give
us a sense of perspective taking and capassion. So a
lot of Mary Helen's studies have shown that the extent
which people activate the default mode network and considering the

(55:36):
suffering of another person actually increases their capacity to have
compassion for that person. Okay, so we require those braid
networks to have perspective taking in a compassion because it
allows us to imagine and perspect and take the perspective
and project of what someone else might be feeling. And
the social media actually takes us away, takes us away
from those cognitive there's important cognitive capacities. Of course, they

(55:58):
are examples where the default network we get stuck neurotically
in our own stories and we ruminate and that could
lead to depression. But I see a lot of this
narrative going around. The default will network is universally bad,
and you know, I see it in the psilocybin research,
and I've been criticizing that. I've been criticizing that. I know,
and I write, I write, I write quite a bit
about how we need it's so simplistic, you know that, like, oh,

(56:20):
if we get rid of the default No, actually, the
default MOE network is where we are human. You know,
that's where we construct our own sense of who we
are and our sense of who we could be in
the future. You take that out, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:32):
Okay, So two questions. One, if a person becomes an
accomplished meditator and they're in a trance state, what happens
to default mode network?

Speaker 3 (56:40):
This is this is great. So what happens in the
research I've reviewed is not that they show less activation
the default mode network, but they show a different connection
to their executive attention network. So it's all about the
rearrangement of how these things, how the different brain networks
communicate with each other. You actually see greater communication among
different networks, which a lot greater flexibility of attention. The

(57:02):
goal should be flexibility of attention, not getting rid of
your default moll. It's in my argument. That's been my argument.

Speaker 1 (57:08):
Yeah, okay, no, thank you. I mean I was drawing
on my friend, you know, Dakra Keltner has this great
book on AWE. I know, and so I quote Daker
as a lot of people vanishes. Other studies have shown
all shifts us from a competitive doggy dog mindset to
perceive that we are part of networks of more independent,
collaborating individuals. Anyway, so I don't I don't write a

(57:28):
lot about the brain because I know it's you know,
it's complicated and it's not like a one to one
correspondence of anything. So I could well be wrong about
about that speculation of the diffault.

Speaker 3 (57:38):
What's interesting is that the default will network seems to
be highlink to the flow state of creativity, so you
can imagine being in the all state.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
You know.

Speaker 3 (57:46):
For instance, they put rappers, Nathei, Mari machine poets, they
find much higher default mode network activity and reduced executive
attention critical activity to really suggest they're getting in the
flow of what they're doing now the ways that they
really enjoy.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
So what's your best. If you could summarize why do
we have a default mode network? What is its function?
Is the why?

Speaker 3 (58:06):
Sense of it does? It does give us a sense
of self that is true, and that's why that's why
a lot of the Buddhists related people hate it. But
I would say, let's not throw the baby out with
the bath water there, because so much of creativity is
self expression, and so much of creativity really is tapping
into the deepest recesses of your soul and creating meaning
from that and and conveying that meaning to the world.

(58:29):
So I do think that from a consciousness perspective, the
default network is a really important part of the evolution
of human consciousness because it allowed us to actually, when
it's properly or healthily connected to the other brain networks,
allows us to do self reflection in a compassionate and
uh and take perspectives of others. So it has a
real useful function. But you do see it, you can

(58:51):
go haywire when it's disconnected from the rest of our
brain network.

Speaker 1 (58:54):
Scott, you are a man of many towns. I had
no idea that you knew so much about neuroscience, and
I just I just looked on your WESBS.

Speaker 3 (59:00):
I've got my degree in neuroscience. That's neuroscience of intelligence.
That's what I studied.

Speaker 1 (59:05):
Oh, I know you did intelligence creativity. And I just
saw you've written ten books. I was just on your website.
Ten books. You've been in this game half as long
as I have, and I've got four. So you write
like a book every other year.

Speaker 3 (59:19):
Pretty much every two years. I have a new one
coming out next year. I can't wait to share with
you because we're gonna, okay, we're gonna We're gonna really
have a lot of mutual interest in that.

Speaker 1 (59:26):
Okay, good, what's the title?

Speaker 3 (59:28):
I haven't I haven't announced that to the world yet.

Speaker 1 (59:31):
Okay, so can you tell me what it's going to
be about?

Speaker 3 (59:33):
More or less, it's about how to overcome a victim mindset?

Speaker 1 (59:38):
Oh? Yes, yes, we talked about this.

Speaker 3 (59:40):
Yes, empower yourself?

Speaker 1 (59:42):
Yeah, oh my god? Is that necessary?

Speaker 3 (59:44):
Is young?

Speaker 1 (59:44):
Many young people need that? I hope that would be
mandatory reading for all incoming freshmen at every university in
the country.

Speaker 3 (59:51):
I hope so as well. So let's end this and
thank you for saying that. Let's end this interview by
you know, really emphasizing our shared view on this because
all the neuroscience nerdiness I just said, outside, the concept
remains that there's so much more we could be doing
to spiritually uplift and transcend young people. You know, all
the neuroscience stuff that's just like nerdy stuff, right, But

(01:00:14):
at the end of the day, this is a really
important message. You have anything else you want to say
in terms of getting kids more nature, having them done
more to the all states? The all state is great, a
paper a doctor about.

Speaker 1 (01:00:24):
This, Yes, No, I definitely want to say something else,
which is, let me say it. So the four norms
that I recommend are to change childhood and restore the
play based childhood. So the four norms are no smartphone
before high school or age fourteen, roughly, no social media
before sixteen, phone free schools, and far more independence, free play,

(01:00:46):
and responsibility in the real world. So my key piece
of advice to anybody listening who has children is, if
you try to do this by yourself, you just say no,
you're not getting a phone till you're fourteen, You're not
getting Snapchat till you're sixteen. You're gonna be cut cutting
off your child. But if you if you just communicate
with the parents of your kids' friends. Let's suppose your

(01:01:07):
kids in fourth grade, you surely are on a text
thread with because you had to arrange pick up at
a birthday party. Whatever. You know who the parents are.
And if you say, hey, you know, I read this
book about what social media do into our kids, and
you know, do you share this concern? How about how
about if we all get together and say we're going
to get you know, in fifth grade, you're going to
get a flip phone or a phone watch actually Apple watch.

(01:01:28):
Parents are having good luck with watches.

Speaker 3 (01:01:30):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:01:30):
Next year, we're going to be sending you out. You
guys are going to be playing a lot more outside.
We want you to have the kind of fun childhood
that we had and that your grandparents had. So we're
going to be sending you out. But we're not going
to give you a smartphone until you're in high school.
And we're not going to let you have Snapchat or
Instagram or TikTok an account at least until you're sixteen. Now,
if you do it as a group, now you're solving

(01:01:52):
the collective action problem. You're not putting your kid at
a disadvantage. Very quickly. In every school, it's going to
be the cool kids are getting together after school and
doing stuff. They're going places, whereas the losers are going home,
sitting on their bed, flicking through Instagram. And for the boys,
they're just playing video games all afternoon and porn. So

(01:02:14):
I think we can change this, but it has to
be a collective action. So I would urge anyone, whether
you're a parent or a teacher, or if you just
care about kids, please go to Anxious generation dot com.
We have a huge We have a great website with
a huge amount of information, a lot of suggestions for
parents and teachers, a lot of resources. Parents are rising

(01:02:36):
up all over the world. That's happening all over the
world in the last few months because everyone's sick of it.
And so don't be resigned. Don't say, oh, well, you
know it's everywhere. This is the future. What are you
going to do? Say? We gave away children's childhood. We
gave it over to a few giant companies that hook
them and keep them on for years and years. How
about we stop doing that, and how about we do

(01:02:57):
it together. If we do it together, we can do it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:00):
Oh man, I love it. John I'm so honored that
you came on podcasting. You were you're like super of
course famous right now you have a number one New
York Times best selling but we're just when we finished
bragging about you for a second, you've literally your book
shot to number one in New York Times bestsellersts. You
were starting a whole movement. You know, You've always been
a rock star in psychology, but now you're like an

(01:03:21):
actual rock star in the world. I'm so honored that
you came on my show today, and I'm really rooting
for you in this movement that you're doing well.

Speaker 1 (01:03:28):
Thank you, Scott. I mean, first of all, you and
I have been friends for a while. I love your podcast,
I love your work, so I'm very very happy to
come on. And I think the part of the reason
that my book has been so successful is that the
timing could not have been better. We were all confused
during COVID. We thought, oh, kids need social media to communicate,
which they did, but we thought so, and now that
COVID is receding, we're seeing the wreckage all around the world.

(01:03:50):
So I think my timing. I mean, you know, as
you know, with the book, you sign a contract, you
agree on a pubdet. You have no idea what's going
to be happening on the pub date. But twenty four
parents all over the world are so sick of this
and they want to change, and it's happening all over
the world.

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
Yeah. Well, the collective action is happening and you're you're
really contribute to it in a big way. So thank
you Jonathan for being on the Psychology Podcast again.

Speaker 1 (01:04:16):
Thank you Scott for having me. I look forward to
our next talk me too.