Dr. Jonathan Haidt: How Smartphones & Social Media Impact Mental Health & the Realistic Solutions

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.240 | where we discuss science

00:00:03.680 | and science-based tools for everyday life.

00:00:05.880 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.120 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.120 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:14.640 | My guest today is Dr. Jonathan Haidt.

00:00:16.740 | Dr. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist

00:00:18.960 | and professor at New York University.

00:00:21.120 | He is also the author of several

00:00:22.680 | important best-selling books,

00:00:24.280 | including "The Coddling of the American Mind,"

00:00:26.520 | and more recently, "The Anxious Generation,"

00:00:29.200 | how the great rewiring of childhood

00:00:31.000 | is causing an epidemic of mental illness.

00:00:33.680 | And today we talk mainly about "The Anxious Generation."

00:00:37.280 | However, it is not a purely pessimistic conversation.

00:00:40.540 | Indeed, Dr. Haidt offers several clear solutions

00:00:44.560 | to the mental health crisis that now exists

00:00:47.040 | and that we have all created

00:00:48.600 | through the use of smartphones,

00:00:50.560 | in particular in kids entering

00:00:52.840 | and transitioning through puberty.

00:00:54.800 | During today's episode,

00:00:55.740 | we discuss so-called critical or sensitive periods

00:00:58.680 | for social development,

00:01:00.400 | for the development of an understanding

00:01:01.960 | about competition and violence,

00:01:03.920 | about sex, and how boys and girls

00:01:06.240 | are impacted differently by smartphone use,

00:01:08.540 | and the specific solutions that do exist

00:01:10.680 | and that Dr. Haidt has created

00:01:12.720 | that can place boys and girls,

00:01:14.280 | as well as young adults,

00:01:15.520 | back on the trajectory of mental health.

00:01:18.080 | So today's discussion is really one

00:01:19.740 | that brings together an understanding

00:01:21.800 | of neurobiology, psychology, social psychology,

00:01:25.860 | and technology in ways that are designed

00:01:28.840 | to serve the most critical members of our species,

00:01:31.100 | meaning our youth.

00:01:32.420 | And for those that have already gone through youth,

00:01:34.380 | today's discussion is also relevant to you,

00:01:36.920 | because as many of you know,

00:01:38.620 | and perhaps have experienced,

00:01:40.340 | most everybody nowadays is challenged in some way

00:01:43.060 | by smartphones, both for the utility

00:01:45.500 | and the ways in which they can diminish

00:01:47.380 | our social and family interactions,

00:01:49.580 | academic performance, and more.

00:01:51.480 | So thanks to Dr. Haidt,

00:01:52.560 | today's discussion really is a solution-based one,

00:01:55.580 | and it's one that is sure to educate,

00:01:57.660 | inform, and inspire specific positive action.

00:02:01.100 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize

00:02:02.860 | that this podcast is separate

00:02:04.220 | from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:02:06.460 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:02:08.600 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:02:10.440 | about science and science-related tools

00:02:12.380 | to the general public.

00:02:13.720 | In keeping with that theme,

00:02:14.780 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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00:06:20.920 | And now for my discussion with Dr. Jonathan Haidt.

00:06:24.040 | Dr. Jonathan Haidt, welcome.

00:06:26.600 | - Thank you, Andrew.

00:06:27.680 | I'm a longtime listener.

00:06:28.880 | I've developed many good habits because of you.

00:06:31.640 | Thank you.

00:06:32.460 | - Thank you.

00:06:33.300 | Well, you look very healthy,

00:06:34.120 | and I'm delighted to have you here.

00:06:36.560 | I'm a longtime fan of your work.

00:06:38.720 | I've read "The Coddling of the American Mind."

00:06:40.880 | It's an incredibly important book.

00:06:42.960 | "The Anxious Generation," incredibly important book.

00:06:46.140 | I'll just start off with an easy question,

00:06:47.820 | which is how are we doing as a species?

00:06:50.580 | - How are we doing as a species?

00:06:53.420 | Well, as a species, as one of my friends said,

00:06:55.960 | we're going to be pretty hard to kill off.

00:06:57.460 | We'll be like cockroaches,

00:06:58.720 | and we're pretty inventive in that way.

00:07:01.640 | But as a civilization,

00:07:02.940 | I think we might well be at a point

00:07:06.200 | of there are peaks and valleys,

00:07:08.060 | and there are some cycles in history.

00:07:10.560 | And we may be at one of those turning points,

00:07:14.100 | and it's going to be pretty unclear

00:07:15.960 | what happens over the next five or 10 years.

00:07:18.960 | It's a very interesting time to be a social scientist.

00:07:21.120 | I'll just leave it at that.

00:07:23.220 | - I suppose we can't point to any one factor,

00:07:26.080 | but we wouldn't be sitting here today.

00:07:28.980 | You wouldn't have written "The Anxious Generation,"

00:07:31.560 | and it wouldn't be having the incredible impact

00:07:34.000 | that it's having were it not for the fact

00:07:36.120 | that smartphones have dramatically, profoundly changed

00:07:40.940 | the way that we interact as a species.

00:07:43.200 | In fact, a colleague of mine at Harvard, Jeff Lichtman,

00:07:46.920 | who's world-famous for neuroplasticity,

00:07:50.120 | said a few years back,

00:07:51.240 | this is probably the first time in human history

00:07:53.000 | that humans have written with their thumbs,

00:07:56.600 | implying that the brain representation of the thumbs

00:07:58.760 | is probably very different in all of us

00:08:00.760 | than it was prior to that,

00:08:03.320 | because the brain is an adaptive map

00:08:04.960 | of our experience in many ways.

00:08:07.340 | That's a somewhat innocuous example

00:08:09.920 | of the changes that have occurred,

00:08:11.840 | the use of the digits, the thumbs, to write,

00:08:16.000 | but there's so much more going on now

00:08:18.320 | as a consequence of smartphones.

00:08:19.720 | So if you were to say the day, the date,

00:08:24.720 | the year in which everything changed,

00:08:28.680 | would it be the day that most everyone had

00:08:32.080 | and has a smartphone, somewhere around 2010, 2011, 2012,

00:08:37.040 | or did all this start prior?

00:08:38.920 | - Right. - Yeah.

00:08:39.800 | - Well, actually, if it's okay with you,

00:08:40.920 | I'll answer that by giving sort of the history,

00:08:43.040 | 'cause the short answer would be 2010 to 2015,

00:08:46.000 | but it'll make more sense

00:08:46.840 | if I just sort of go through how we got there.

00:08:49.200 | So changes in technology, when you connect people more,

00:08:52.560 | you get roads, you get telephones.

00:08:54.640 | These things are all great.

00:08:56.200 | They lead to massive gains in knowledge, productivity.

00:08:58.400 | Yes, sometimes there are disruptions,

00:08:59.960 | but in the history of humanity, they've been great.

00:09:03.040 | The internet was that when, you know,

00:09:04.880 | you and I are old enough to remember.

00:09:06.120 | Do you remember the first time you saw a web browser?

00:09:08.040 | - I do.

00:09:08.880 | - And it was like, you mean, I just like,

00:09:10.680 | I type in a question and I get the answer?

00:09:13.560 | I don't have to go to the library?

00:09:14.800 | It was, I mean, it was miraculous.

00:09:16.720 | And I can talk to people for free.

00:09:19.800 | I had that by email, which was free.

00:09:22.000 | So in general, connecting people is good.

00:09:23.520 | And we were all very optimistic

00:09:24.640 | about the internet in the 1990s.

00:09:26.240 | It was amazing.

00:09:27.320 | And in our conversation today, I wanna make it very clear.

00:09:29.680 | The internet is absolutely amazing.

00:09:30.920 | This is not about how the internet is bad.

00:09:33.480 | Smartphones or the iPhone, you know, is absolutely amazing.

00:09:37.040 | Although there are some things about it

00:09:38.240 | that are problematic.

00:09:39.560 | It's really especially social media,

00:09:41.040 | which has changed things.

00:09:42.640 | And so if we look at a kid, let's take a teenager in 2010,

00:09:47.640 | and let's say January, 2010.

00:09:50.960 | At that point, there's no Instagram,

00:09:52.800 | there's no front facing camera.

00:09:55.640 | They all have, mostly they have flip phones.

00:09:57.280 | The iPhone came out in 2007,

00:09:59.480 | but they don't mostly have them.

00:10:00.320 | And so in 2010, most teenagers are using the flip phone

00:10:04.000 | as a tool to call each other, text each other, meet up.

00:10:08.280 | So when technology helps us achieve our goals, that's good.

00:10:11.600 | By 2015, everything's different.

00:10:14.400 | By 2015, the great majority of Americans,

00:10:17.040 | certainly teens, have a smartphone

00:10:19.520 | with a front facing camera.

00:10:21.080 | The girls are mostly on Instagram,

00:10:23.040 | which was the first social media platform

00:10:25.160 | that you had to be on a smartphone for.

00:10:26.920 | Everything else was web-based.

00:10:29.280 | They have high speed internet, unlimited texting.

00:10:31.600 | And now it's possible to spend 10, 15 hours a day

00:10:35.400 | on your phone.

00:10:36.280 | Nobody could do that with a flip phone.

00:10:37.920 | So I point to that, it's that five year period,

00:10:40.640 | 2010 to 2015, which I've called

00:10:42.760 | the great rewiring of childhood,

00:10:45.120 | because it affects everything,

00:10:46.600 | everything about what children and teenagers are doing.

00:10:49.360 | - I can recall in 2010,

00:10:51.720 | I was actually in New York City visiting friends.

00:10:54.160 | I got my first smartphone and I recall

00:10:57.000 | I was up at 1.30 in the morning,

00:10:59.360 | scrolling on this thing and thinking,

00:11:00.800 | this is unbelievably addicting.

00:11:03.120 | Nowadays, I think of it less as addicting,

00:11:05.480 | but almost like an OCD of sorts.

00:11:09.480 | And here I'm not talking about clinically diagnosed OCD,

00:11:11.840 | but the interesting thing about OCD

00:11:13.880 | is that the compulsions, the behaviors,

00:11:17.720 | don't serve to reduce the obsessions,

00:11:19.640 | rather they exacerbate them or reinforce them.

00:11:22.720 | And in many ways, I feel like smartphone use

00:11:24.560 | and social media use in particular is an OCD of sorts.

00:11:28.720 | It's not just a habit, it's not just an addiction,

00:11:31.280 | it's an obsessive compulsive loop.

00:11:34.480 | - So it's already a struggle to pay attention.

00:11:37.320 | And ancient traditions have taught techniques

00:11:40.440 | to improve your focus, your attention,

00:11:42.680 | we're easily distracted.

00:11:44.400 | And so I don't work on my phone very much

00:11:48.200 | 'cause I hate to type on the phone

00:11:50.040 | and I'm always at a computer.

00:11:52.120 | But even for me, sitting at my computer,

00:11:54.760 | as soon as the thinking gets hard,

00:11:56.360 | as soon as I'm writing,

00:11:57.360 | I'm doing something that requires concentration,

00:11:59.360 | some little part of my brain says,

00:12:01.280 | I wonder what the weather's gonna be,

00:12:02.560 | and I go check the weather.

00:12:03.920 | Or, oh, did I get any email?

00:12:05.520 | I go check my, I might check my email,

00:12:07.280 | probably 40, 50 times a day.

00:12:08.720 | And I know that's terrible.

00:12:10.520 | So the question is, is it a compulsion

00:12:12.640 | where I feel pulled, I have to check it

00:12:15.080 | or something bad will happen?

00:12:16.480 | No, it's more like, imagine trying to do your work,

00:12:20.920 | imagine trying to be a kid in school

00:12:23.320 | and you have, on your desk in front of you,

00:12:26.200 | you have your television set, your record player,

00:12:28.600 | a walkie-talkie to talk to your friends,

00:12:30.160 | a guitar, a painting set, all arrayed in front of you,

00:12:33.280 | and your teacher is telling you about geometry.

00:12:36.080 | What are you gonna do?

00:12:36.960 | Probably one of these things.

00:12:38.400 | And so I think the smartphone or the flip phone,

00:12:41.480 | it's a tool, you pull it out

00:12:43.080 | if you wanna talk to someone, then you put it away.

00:12:45.400 | But the smartphone, there's no reason to ever put it away.

00:12:48.460 | - Talk to us about the scary statistics.

00:12:51.400 | There's just no way around this.

00:12:53.080 | And we will talk about solutions.

00:12:54.480 | You offer some incredible solutions in the book,

00:12:57.240 | actually solutions that everyone listening

00:12:59.240 | and watching can participate in, not just by restriction.

00:13:02.560 | We'll talk about what that means going forward.

00:13:05.760 | But where are we at now?

00:13:08.840 | And when did we start to see the trend

00:13:11.040 | toward diminished mental health, in particular in girls?

00:13:15.240 | So feel free to hit us with the scary truth.

00:13:18.040 | - Okay, sure.

00:13:18.880 | So let's imagine, so in the US,

00:13:20.760 | we have really good statistics

00:13:22.240 | based on annual or biannual surveys.

00:13:24.360 | There's three or four big ones

00:13:26.200 | that allow us to see what's happened since the '70s.

00:13:29.100 | And so what I'd like listeners to imagine

00:13:32.200 | is imagine a bunch of lines, maybe a line for boys,

00:13:34.840 | maybe a line for boys, line for girls,

00:13:36.640 | showing the percentage that suffer from anxiety,

00:13:39.160 | depression, or that have self-harm.

00:13:41.240 | Those three really go together.

00:13:43.280 | And imagine these lines, they move around a little bit,

00:13:45.080 | but they're actually pretty stable from the 1990s

00:13:47.600 | all the way through 2010, even 2011.

00:13:50.080 | There's no sign of a problem.

00:13:51.740 | On some measures, they get actually a little bit better.

00:13:54.120 | - So stable and low?

00:13:55.560 | - Stable, well, low, if they're around say 12, 15% of girls

00:14:00.560 | qualify as having had a major depression,

00:14:02.800 | that's much higher than we would like.

00:14:05.220 | That's a problem.

00:14:06.480 | But it's nothing compared to what it is today.

00:14:09.040 | So the lines are pretty flat until around 2012.

00:14:13.360 | And then all of a sudden,

00:14:14.840 | the lines for girls go up like a hockey stick.

00:14:17.640 | It's not a subtle thing.

00:14:18.880 | It really is, there's an elbow,

00:14:20.200 | it's like somebody turned on a light switch in 2012.

00:14:23.080 | Now that's for the American data.

00:14:24.840 | Internationally, you see very similar things.

00:14:27.480 | It's not necessarily 2012 in other countries.

00:14:29.740 | But the girls graphs are very sharp.

00:14:31.640 | The boys are also up on depression, anxiety,

00:14:34.360 | they're also way up.

00:14:35.680 | Depending on the measure, it's usually,

00:14:37.800 | everything is in the ballpark of 50 to 150%.

00:14:40.480 | Almost all the numbers are in that range.

00:14:42.920 | We're not talking 10 or 20% increases here.

00:14:45.160 | For most things, we're talking close to a doubling,

00:14:47.720 | especially for the younger girls.

00:14:50.120 | The boys curves, interestingly, are smoother.

00:14:53.120 | That is the boys are more depressed and anxious.

00:14:56.400 | But it's not 2012.

00:14:57.800 | It actually often begins more like 2009, 2010.

00:15:01.280 | And then it just keeps going up gradually.

00:15:03.920 | So that's a real clue,

00:15:05.620 | which we'll come back to when we talk about the boys story.

00:15:10.200 | A lot of people say, "Oh, it's just self-report.

00:15:12.600 | "Gen Z, they're really positive about mental health

00:15:18.160 | "and they're willing to talk about it.

00:15:19.140 | "It's a good thing."

00:15:20.640 | But the fact that we see the exact same curves,

00:15:23.040 | the very sharp uptick for girls

00:15:24.840 | in hospital admissions for self-harm,

00:15:27.920 | psychiatric emergency department visits,

00:15:29.960 | and we see this in the US, Canada, Australia,

00:15:33.160 | New Zealand, the UK, the Scandinavian countries.

00:15:37.120 | So something happened across the developed world around 2012

00:15:42.120 | and I keep, Jean Twenge was the first

00:15:46.240 | to really raise the alarm.

00:15:47.320 | She and I keep saying,

00:15:48.760 | "Well, we can't find another candidate.

00:15:50.880 | "Nothing else fits the pattern.

00:15:52.200 | "Oh, and there's actually not just correlational data,

00:15:54.620 | "there's experimental data too."

00:15:57.400 | So we think, of course, look, everything's complicated.

00:16:00.720 | Mental health is complicated.

00:16:02.440 | If you wanna understand why one person is depressed,

00:16:05.020 | there are gonna be many stories.

00:16:06.840 | But if you wanna understand why depression rates rose

00:16:09.400 | for girls faster than boys all over the developed world,

00:16:12.500 | unless someone can find like some hormone disrupting chemical

00:16:16.060 | that was suddenly sprayed over Northern Europe

00:16:18.880 | and the South Pacific and the US and Canada around 2012,

00:16:23.740 | there is no alternative explanation.

00:16:26.240 | - So we break down smartphone use in these young girls

00:16:32.160 | that correlates with and maybe is causal

00:16:35.220 | for this diminishment in mental health.

00:16:37.220 | There are a number of different variables, right?

00:16:40.560 | There's the time spent on the phone.

00:16:42.800 | There's the specific content that they're viewing.

00:16:46.960 | And that's a vast discussion that we'll get into.

00:16:49.900 | There are the social dynamics associated

00:16:52.360 | with being on a phone as opposed to in-person interactions.

00:16:56.880 | And then there's, and I can't help myself,

00:16:59.160 | but as a neuroscientist who trained in the biology,

00:17:01.240 | the visual system, there's the effect of looking

00:17:03.900 | at something at about eight inches to 12 inches away

00:17:06.880 | from you for much of the day,

00:17:08.060 | as opposed to navigating an environment the way

00:17:10.540 | that we had for hundreds of thousands of years prior.

00:17:14.120 | So there are a lot of features within this thing

00:17:15.920 | that we call smartphone use.

00:17:17.680 | There's also the disruption in sleep.

00:17:21.020 | There's additional blue light exposure.

00:17:23.220 | There's just so much to it.

00:17:25.120 | So if we pull all that together for the time being

00:17:27.400 | and put in a basket of smartphone use,

00:17:29.480 | and maybe we'll pull out each of those variables

00:17:31.600 | one by one as we go forward.

00:17:34.060 | What are the numbers in 2012 in terms of how much time girls,

00:17:39.060 | maybe you can give us an age range,

00:17:42.560 | are spending with the smartphone?

00:17:44.280 | Was it they got the smartphone

00:17:45.640 | and immediately we're spending six to eight hours a day

00:17:47.680 | on the thing or has it been gradual?

00:17:49.720 | So let's start with the time variable.

00:17:52.460 | - Sure.

00:17:53.300 | Okay, so first, the way you put it is actually very helpful.

00:17:55.960 | What I want listeners to imagine,

00:17:57.720 | let's say like imagine on the left side of a slide,

00:18:00.000 | I haven't made this slide, I'm formulating in my head.

00:18:02.600 | Imagine on the left side of the slide,

00:18:04.200 | a whole bunch of harmful changes.

00:18:07.080 | If you're getting less sleep, that's bad.

00:18:08.760 | If you're having blue light at night, that's bad.

00:18:10.420 | If you're not going out in nature, that's bad.

00:18:12.160 | If you are sedentary, if you,

00:18:14.120 | so imagine about 15 different things.

00:18:17.560 | Oh, if you're being contacted by strange men

00:18:19.040 | around the world who want to have sex with you,

00:18:20.640 | like that's not good for 11, 12 year old girls.

00:18:23.520 | So there's all these different potential harms.

00:18:26.400 | And then imagine all these different potential effects,

00:18:29.680 | one of which is depression and another is anxiety

00:18:32.040 | and another is self-harm.

00:18:33.320 | But there's doing worse in school,

00:18:35.560 | there's becoming more shallow,

00:18:37.120 | there's conflicts with your,

00:18:38.880 | so there's a whole bunch.

00:18:40.640 | And then we want to look at the causal connections.

00:18:43.060 | And what I'm trying to draw out

00:18:45.600 | is suppose we could quantify the degree to which

00:18:48.560 | sheer time, just spending five hours a day,

00:18:51.080 | does that make you more anxious automatically?

00:18:53.760 | Well, maybe a little,

00:18:55.640 | but that's probably not the main effect.

00:18:57.780 | So there's a gigantic multi-causal network of effects.

00:19:02.780 | Now, I have good numbers for how much the,

00:19:06.320 | how much teens are using these devices

00:19:08.640 | and these platforms today.

00:19:10.820 | Pew in particular did,

00:19:12.700 | has done a great job of tracking changes in this

00:19:15.500 | since the 2000s.

00:19:17.580 | What we know today from both Pew and Gallup

00:19:19.780 | is that young people in America

00:19:21.220 | are now spending about five hours a day

00:19:23.660 | just on social media, just social media.

00:19:26.580 | - Mostly Instagram?

00:19:28.340 | - So the huge time suck is the videos.

00:19:31.180 | So it's actually TikTok and YouTube

00:19:33.860 | are counted in this analysis,

00:19:35.180 | they're counted as social media.

00:19:36.460 | YouTube is marginally social media,

00:19:38.520 | it's more of an information source.

00:19:40.080 | But the point is, especially the short videos,

00:19:42.580 | the short videos are really, really addictive

00:19:44.460 | because the time between action and reinforcement

00:19:47.620 | is so quick that that, as you know, in behaviorism,

00:19:50.500 | like that's the key, it's the quick reinforcement.

00:19:53.000 | So five hours a day,

00:19:55.860 | it's a little bit more than that for girls,

00:19:57.100 | a little less for boys,

00:19:58.380 | just on social media,

00:20:00.140 | 35 hours a week of strange stuff

00:20:02.540 | coming in from random weirdos on the internet.

00:20:04.900 | 35, imagine letting your kid import 35 hours.

00:20:08.180 | Then you add in everything else,

00:20:10.540 | video games, everything else you do on a smartphone.

00:20:13.900 | So now we're up to seven to 10 hours in that range a day,

00:20:17.840 | and this is not counting school.

00:20:19.300 | Now of course in school, six hours a day,

00:20:21.780 | for a lot of kids, two or three hours of that

00:20:23.700 | is screen time as well.

00:20:25.080 | So that's why I say,

00:20:27.060 | kids used to have a play-based childhood,

00:20:29.020 | play is the basic thing mammals do.

00:20:31.080 | And since 2010 or 2012,

00:20:33.660 | our kids have a phone-based childhood.

00:20:35.940 | And I don't think that is,

00:20:37.540 | it's just incompatible with healthy human development.

00:20:40.160 | - Maybe we can back up even before 2010

00:20:44.060 | and talk a bit more about the play-based childhood.

00:20:47.700 | I heard you say last night

00:20:49.220 | at a terrific lecture that you gave

00:20:51.240 | that when we don't trust our neighbors,

00:20:53.880 | we are far less likely to let our kids out to play

00:20:57.700 | without observation or oversight.

00:21:00.180 | And that leads to a whole host of negative consequences.

00:21:04.620 | So if we were to dial back the history clock even further

00:21:08.840 | and talk about, let's say the 1950s, '60s and '70s,

00:21:13.180 | I was born in '75.

00:21:14.580 | I basically was kicked out of the house every day to go play.

00:21:17.700 | My mom would say, "Get out of the house."

00:21:19.260 | I now realize she wanted space,

00:21:21.260 | but we would go down the end of the street to the cul-de-sac

00:21:24.140 | and we would just play and do all sorts of things.

00:21:26.380 | - Get into a little trouble, adventure.

00:21:27.660 | - Destructive, some of which were good.

00:21:29.960 | And there were a lot of dynamics

00:21:32.580 | that got worked out in that process.

00:21:33.980 | My sister would go hang out

00:21:35.460 | with basically the older sisters of those boys.

00:21:37.580 | That's kind of how our neighborhood happened

00:21:39.180 | to be arranged, that was fortunate.

00:21:40.940 | And they would do their thing.

00:21:43.980 | So 1950s and '60s,

00:21:46.340 | what did social dynamics look like among kids?

00:21:49.640 | - Yeah, so I think what we need to do

00:21:53.260 | is tell this story of what happened

00:21:54.780 | as a tragedy in three acts.

00:21:57.540 | And the first act is the loss of community,

00:22:00.320 | the loss of trust in each other.

00:22:02.400 | So if we go back to the '50s and '60s,

00:22:06.180 | but we can even go back,

00:22:07.320 | my parents grew up in New York City in the '30s and '40s.

00:22:11.320 | People spontaneously organized themselves into villages.

00:22:16.100 | Village life seems to be sort of the default way of living

00:22:19.800 | that humans have preferred for several thousand years.

00:22:23.640 | And it's where you know your neighbors,

00:22:27.020 | the kids run around,

00:22:28.620 | all the adults take part in supervising all the kids,

00:22:32.340 | but nobody has to helicopter

00:22:33.620 | because the kids are playing, they're doing their thing.

00:22:35.580 | If there's a real threat, if there's a lion or invaders,

00:22:38.180 | then they all come running home, whatever.

00:22:40.020 | But kids need to be out playing with each other,

00:22:43.840 | especially outdoors.

00:22:45.120 | We evolved in savannas,

00:22:47.240 | we evolved in different parts of the world,

00:22:49.280 | we're attracted to nature.

00:22:50.620 | So that's the way it always was.

00:22:53.560 | Now, especially if we, in the 1950s and '60s,

00:22:56.880 | America had just been through a world war,

00:22:59.160 | and the greatest way to make people trust each other,

00:23:02.640 | the greatest way to boost social capital is a foreign attack.

00:23:06.240 | And of course, Pearl Harbor did more for American coherence

00:23:09.000 | than anything else in modern history.

00:23:11.400 | 9/11 did that too, but only for a little while,

00:23:13.600 | and then we lost it.

00:23:14.980 | So for a lot of reasons, people trusted their neighbors,

00:23:18.920 | kids were out playing,

00:23:20.560 | my parents grew up in the Depression in New York City,

00:23:22.180 | the kids are all out playing stickball on the street,

00:23:24.240 | or in a parking lot.

00:23:25.240 | In the 1970s, there is a real crime wave.

00:23:28.660 | Crime goes through the roof, actually.

00:23:31.520 | And it goes through the '80s,

00:23:32.560 | that goes all the way to the early '90s.

00:23:34.480 | Even still, you were kicked out of the house to go play.

00:23:37.660 | Even in New York City, all kids went out to play.

00:23:40.600 | That's just the way it was.

00:23:41.920 | But we began to lose trust in each other

00:23:43.580 | for a lot of reasons.

00:23:44.860 | Robert Putnam wrote about this in "Bowling Alone,"

00:23:46.920 | the loss of social capital.

00:23:49.320 | Many reasons for that, the changing media environment,

00:23:52.780 | air conditioning and television,

00:23:54.560 | people are not hanging out on their porch in the summertime

00:23:57.420 | to get away from the heat.

00:23:58.800 | They close the door and they put on the AC

00:24:00.760 | and they watch TV.

00:24:02.200 | Family sizes are shrinking,

00:24:03.440 | there are not that many kids around.

00:24:05.040 | So for a lot of reasons, the '90s is the key decade

00:24:08.240 | where Act II of the tragedy happens,

00:24:10.240 | and that's the loss of the play-based childhood.

00:24:12.540 | So in America and Britain,

00:24:14.200 | we freaked out about child abduction

00:24:16.620 | and child sexual abuse.

00:24:18.040 | Some of the scandals were real.

00:24:20.240 | The Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church,

00:24:21.600 | there were cases where trusted organizations

00:24:24.980 | were covering up abuse.

00:24:26.800 | - And I recall the abduction thing, the milk carton thing.

00:24:29.080 | - Yep, that's right.

00:24:30.120 | - And there was a show, I think my name is Brian.

00:24:33.200 | - Oh, okay.

00:24:34.040 | - About the kid who was abducted and then all he remembered,

00:24:36.880 | I think it's a true story,

00:24:38.080 | that his name was Brian.

00:24:39.140 | He would just remind himself every night

00:24:41.640 | about his real name.

00:24:43.160 | I think they found him eventually in Berkeley.

00:24:46.200 | Not calling out Berkeley,

00:24:47.120 | I lived in Berkeley for a long time.

00:24:48.440 | But it seemed to be the discovery of abducted kids,

00:24:53.440 | excuse me, in Berkeley.

00:24:55.120 | There are a few other cases there,

00:24:56.360 | I don't know what that's about.

00:24:58.000 | In any event, I grew up thinking

00:25:00.000 | that you could get kidnapped.

00:25:01.320 | - Right, yeah.

00:25:02.360 | Which is, so it's, I mean,

00:25:05.500 | it's the most terrifying possibility for any parent.

00:25:08.840 | But when I was doing the research

00:25:09.680 | for the Coddling the American Mind,

00:25:10.840 | I found, according to FBI statistics,

00:25:13.600 | there's only about 100 to 150 true kidnappings a year

00:25:17.800 | in our whole country.

00:25:19.260 | Because if a child, like who would take a child?

00:25:21.440 | Like it's a really difficult crime

00:25:23.160 | and you're gonna, you know.

00:25:24.360 | Who would steal a child from a store?

00:25:26.080 | You know, parents are afraid if your kid

00:25:27.540 | goes to the next aisle in the grocery store,

00:25:28.800 | they're gonna be, how are you gonna take

00:25:30.120 | a kicking and screaming kid out of a store?

00:25:32.720 | - And yet, sorry to interrupt,

00:25:33.760 | but the show America's Most Wanted,

00:25:35.440 | I believe, was hosted by a guy

00:25:37.140 | whose kid was abducted and eventually found dead.

00:25:39.200 | - Exactly, Adam Walsh, that's right.

00:25:40.440 | - Right, so there was this propagation of this fear.

00:25:43.160 | - That's right, it happens.

00:25:44.000 | - I mean, like one of the deepest fears

00:25:45.200 | of any parent I can imagine is that.

00:25:48.440 | - That's right, but the point is

00:25:49.800 | that these crimes are extraordinarily rare.

00:25:52.200 | It's almost always the non-custodial parent

00:25:54.620 | who takes a kid.

00:25:55.560 | It's a family member

00:25:56.400 | because there's a fight within the family.

00:25:59.040 | So we fear the wrong things.

00:26:00.280 | We're terrified of kidnapping.

00:26:03.200 | But locking our kids up, overprotecting them

00:26:06.440 | has spiked the suicide rate so much

00:26:08.440 | that the death toll is vastly higher

00:26:10.720 | from the extra suicides than it would be

00:26:12.900 | if we could completely wipe out kidnapping,

00:26:14.880 | which again doesn't, but the availability heuristic

00:26:18.440 | we say in psychology, if it's visible,

00:26:20.360 | if it comes to mind easily,

00:26:22.320 | then people will freak out about that.

00:26:23.880 | And that's why people sometimes are afraid

00:26:25.460 | to fly in a plane.

00:26:26.460 | They think a car is safer.

00:26:28.080 | So for a lot of reasons, we freak out in the '90s.

00:26:31.200 | We stop letting our kids out.

00:26:32.720 | We think they must always be supervised.

00:26:35.320 | So that's act two of the tragedy.

00:26:36.960 | And as that act is happening,

00:26:39.440 | we're keeping our kids inside.

00:26:42.080 | And guess what?

00:26:43.200 | These computer things that we started getting in the '80s,

00:26:45.960 | they're getting interesting

00:26:46.920 | because now we hook them up to the internet.

00:26:49.040 | In the '80s, what we can do,

00:26:50.280 | WordStar and some primitive video games.

00:26:53.260 | But in the '90s, you get the internet.

00:26:55.240 | And now the kids, especially the boys,

00:26:56.880 | the early internet was much more of interest to boys.

00:26:58.780 | Boys would take computers apart.

00:27:00.080 | They could build computers.

00:27:01.080 | They would learn to program.

00:27:02.680 | So the boys in particular,

00:27:04.240 | they're okay with losing out on the outdoor play

00:27:06.640 | 'cause the internet is so amazing.

00:27:08.640 | - And nerddom started to become cool.

00:27:10.960 | - Yes, geeks.

00:27:11.800 | - Revenge of the Nerds, Steve Jobs,

00:27:13.720 | and Steve kind of,

00:27:14.560 | and I know 'cause I grew up in Palo Alto,

00:27:16.200 | see Steve downtown.

00:27:17.200 | He had this, it wasn't really like rockstar persona,

00:27:19.640 | but he kind of weaved back and forth.

00:27:22.200 | So he was an icon, kind of like a counterculture guy,

00:27:26.280 | but then he was into design and computers, right.

00:27:28.920 | But he was still really geeky.

00:27:30.760 | Like the fonts were lame.

00:27:32.520 | - Yeah.

00:27:33.360 | - He brought beautiful fonts to it.

00:27:34.240 | He started bringing the aesthetic forward.

00:27:36.040 | - Yeah.

00:27:36.880 | - And then of course,

00:27:37.720 | girls and women got involved in computers more.

00:27:40.160 | - Yes, although that really,

00:27:41.480 | it only really evens out once you get social media.

00:27:45.080 | Boys are more interested in things

00:27:46.680 | and mechanics and systems.

00:27:48.860 | Girls have a more evolved and elaborate mental map

00:27:51.440 | of social space.

00:27:52.280 | They're more interested in social relationships.

00:27:54.260 | So once you get social media,

00:27:56.320 | that attracts the girls more.

00:27:57.800 | And then it becomes pretty even

00:27:58.920 | that all boys and girls,

00:28:00.360 | they're just incredibly attracted to the internet

00:28:02.120 | and things on the internet.

00:28:04.220 | But that sets us up for act three,

00:28:05.780 | which is the great rewiring.

00:28:07.400 | That's the arrival of the phone-based childhood

00:28:09.120 | that we just talked about between 2010 and 2015.

00:28:11.880 | That's when everything changes.

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00:30:02.840 | Okay, so we've got three acts, all of which are tragedies.

00:30:06.440 | - Loss of community.

00:30:07.280 | - Right, so community and trust is down.

00:30:09.360 | - That's right, which then makes us not...

00:30:12.680 | Then act two is we take away the play-based childhood,

00:30:15.600 | 'cause we're so afraid

00:30:16.440 | 'cause we no longer trust our neighbors.

00:30:18.040 | And then act three is as long as the kids are inside

00:30:21.960 | and on computers already,

00:30:24.440 | oh, well now just a smartphone and a tablet.

00:30:26.680 | These are just cooler computers.

00:30:28.480 | Nothing wrong with that, right?

00:30:30.040 | And that's what we thought early on.

00:30:31.280 | In the early 2010s,

00:30:32.120 | we thought these things were miraculous.

00:30:34.160 | Oh, if my kids use them,

00:30:35.900 | maybe they'll be the next Steve Jobs.

00:30:37.660 | Maybe they'll be really technically sophisticated,

00:30:40.640 | we thought, and it's not true.

00:30:42.520 | - And now we're in this third act of the tragedy.

00:30:45.040 | You touched on some of the male-female differences.

00:30:49.080 | Maybe you could talk about those a little bit more.

00:30:51.360 | So you said girls tend to focus more on social dynamics,

00:30:54.520 | boys more on systems.

00:30:56.560 | I've heard you say that the boys in general

00:31:00.160 | veer toward more, for lack of a better way to put it,

00:31:03.360 | more on the spectrum type behaviors.

00:31:05.760 | Could you elaborate on that

00:31:06.720 | and how it impacts online use and the particular sites

00:31:10.040 | that they tend to gravitate towards

00:31:11.600 | and then on the other side for girls?

00:31:14.800 | - Yeah, one of the psychological traits

00:31:18.320 | that is the biggest differentiator between boys and girls

00:31:21.240 | and between men and women,

00:31:22.760 | it's, let me state clearly,

00:31:24.640 | that sex differences in ability

00:31:26.780 | are generally pretty small

00:31:28.560 | and they're few and far between.

00:31:30.400 | Sex differences in interest are all over the place

00:31:34.000 | and they're often very large

00:31:35.360 | and they're true across cultures

00:31:36.500 | and some are true across species.

00:31:38.840 | It's what do you enjoy?

00:31:40.480 | And so, and here I'm drawing on the work

00:31:42.880 | of Simon Baron-Cohen,

00:31:44.520 | who's the cousin of Sasha Baron-Cohen in the UK.

00:31:48.340 | And Baron-Cohen's work on autism

00:31:50.880 | shows that because of prenatal effects,

00:31:55.880 | prenatal testosterone changing the body,

00:31:57.600 | changing the brain,

00:31:59.340 | we all start off as girls in utero after conception,

00:32:02.360 | but then the 10th week of gestation,

00:32:04.580 | if there's a Y chromosome,

00:32:05.760 | it triggers a little bit of a testosterone,

00:32:08.280 | which then makes the testes develop

00:32:10.760 | and then that creates testosterone.

00:32:13.360 | And all of this, the effect on the brain

00:32:15.160 | appears to be a shift away,

00:32:17.360 | a little bit away from empathizing in Baron-Cohen's terms.

00:32:20.560 | You can either be a high empathizer

00:32:22.720 | or you can be a high systemizer.

00:32:24.840 | Systemizers are people who love subway maps

00:32:28.180 | and they pick them up quickly

00:32:29.440 | and they like programming

00:32:30.560 | and they like to see how systems are related.

00:32:33.300 | It's possible to be high on both,

00:32:35.240 | but most people are more one way than the other.

00:32:38.080 | So once you see that,

00:32:39.800 | now you can understand why this amazing new internet

00:32:44.480 | drew everybody,

00:32:45.880 | but it drew the boys and the girls to different parts of it.

00:32:48.840 | And so, a metaphor that I've started using these days,

00:32:52.320 | I actually did get this from,

00:32:53.400 | Yasha Monk has a great book called "The Identity Trap."

00:32:56.360 | And Yasha points out that a trap

00:32:59.320 | has to have bait in it that's attractive.

00:33:01.880 | There has to be something

00:33:02.840 | that makes the creature want to go into the trap.

00:33:05.680 | And then once they get the bait,

00:33:07.280 | there has to be something that prevents them from leaving.

00:33:09.640 | That's what a trap is.

00:33:11.360 | And in this case, if you wanna catch a girl,

00:33:15.300 | don't show her like the operating system of a computer,

00:33:18.560 | don't show her war games,

00:33:20.560 | show her what Maria just said about Julia

00:33:23.320 | or what Julia just said about her.

00:33:26.560 | Do you wanna know?

00:33:27.440 | Of course you wanna know.

00:33:29.000 | And everybody does, but girls more than boys,

00:33:31.040 | they wanna understand the social dynamics.

00:33:33.200 | So the girls go rushing into Instagram

00:33:35.520 | where everyone's posting photos of themselves,

00:33:38.280 | of other people, of the party they were at.

00:33:40.640 | The girls go rushing into social media in general,

00:33:43.680 | Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr were the three big ones

00:33:48.200 | that girls went into in the early 2010s.

00:33:51.280 | And then once they take the bait, they can't escape

00:33:54.680 | because now that everyone is talking on Instagram,

00:33:57.080 | let's say, if you leave, you're alone,

00:33:59.960 | you're not gonna talk to anyone.

00:34:01.440 | So that's how you trap girls

00:34:02.520 | and that's what happened to girls.

00:34:04.180 | How do you trap boys?

00:34:05.060 | What are the things that boys most wanna do?

00:34:06.400 | If you let them do whatever they want,

00:34:08.000 | what are the two things that really attract them?

00:34:09.500 | One is war and the other is sex.

00:34:11.520 | So if you say, do you wanna watch a movie

00:34:15.260 | that has violence in it?

00:34:16.460 | Or do you wanna watch sports,

00:34:18.000 | which is play war?

00:34:19.520 | Boys are more likely to say yes.

00:34:21.680 | - Or play a first-person shooter game.

00:34:23.320 | - Exactly, that's right.

00:34:24.480 | So it's hunting and it's war.

00:34:27.160 | And if you can simulate that,

00:34:29.640 | when I was a kid, there was the beginning,

00:34:30.920 | I mean, I remember playing Seawolf,

00:34:32.480 | like you shoot missiles, you shoot torpedoes

00:34:35.920 | at a boat in the distance

00:34:37.260 | and it was very primitive technology.

00:34:38.100 | - Or even a battleship.

00:34:39.480 | - Yeah, oh, that's right, even a battleship.

00:34:40.840 | That's right, that's right.

00:34:41.680 | - That was a big deal.

00:34:42.500 | - Yeah, that's right.

00:34:43.340 | These little plastic boats, that's right.

00:34:44.760 | - Yeah, sinking somebody else's battleship

00:34:46.460 | by intuing where the location of their ships were

00:34:49.520 | behind a wall.

00:34:50.740 | It was so satisfying to sink somebody's battleship.

00:34:53.080 | - So boys really wanna play at war.

00:34:55.540 | And I really learned this when I was 30

00:34:58.260 | and I have a group of buddies from college

00:35:00.420 | and we get together once a year.

00:35:01.920 | And one year I hosted in Charlottesville

00:35:03.540 | and we played paintball.

00:35:05.520 | We went to a paintball place

00:35:07.260 | and there were about five or seven other guys

00:35:10.420 | and we divided up into teams

00:35:12.000 | and we were divided among ourselves on the teams.

00:35:14.580 | And it was unbelievably thrilling to work with other guys

00:35:19.060 | to hunt and shoot my friends.

00:35:21.820 | And we came out afterwards, all of us.

00:35:23.740 | And it hurts when you get hit with a paintball.

00:35:25.440 | - Yeah, those things hurt.

00:35:26.280 | - It hurts.

00:35:27.100 | - Your wealth.

00:35:27.940 | - Yeah, that's right, which is important.

00:35:28.780 | It's actually very important

00:35:29.600 | because then you really take it seriously.

00:35:30.780 | You really don't wanna get shot.

00:35:32.420 | But it was absolutely thrilling.

00:35:35.180 | It really felt like there was a room in my heart.

00:35:38.500 | As a man, there's a room in my heart for war

00:35:40.600 | that had never been opened.

00:35:42.380 | So boys wanna play at that.

00:35:44.180 | And then the multiplayer video games,

00:35:45.660 | the first person shooter games,

00:35:46.740 | all these things, let them do that.

00:35:48.700 | The other thing, of course,

00:35:49.540 | that boys wanna do is look at naked women.

00:35:51.100 | And so, it used to be Playboy Magazine.

00:35:53.300 | Now it's super hardcore sex with anal sex

00:35:55.780 | and gang bangs and choking and all sorts of things.

00:36:00.120 | So the boys really get, that's how you trap a boy.

00:36:02.900 | Show them war, let them play war games and give them sex.

00:36:06.820 | And once they do that, they can't escape.

00:36:08.380 | - So interesting.

00:36:09.520 | We did an episode long ago on sexual development,

00:36:12.320 | meaning how hormones influence brain development,

00:36:14.340 | which I spent a little bit of time on for my master's.

00:36:16.700 | And by the way, you got the biology exactly right.

00:36:18.820 | - Okay, okay.

00:36:20.300 | - And it's fascinating the way

00:36:23.060 | that these hormones organize the brain.

00:36:25.300 | And some people enjoy learning

00:36:26.940 | that it's testosterone from the testes.

00:36:29.760 | It's the Y chromosome, then the testes,

00:36:32.400 | and then testosterone that's converted to estrogen

00:36:34.580 | that then actually has the organizing effects

00:36:36.420 | of masculinizing the brain.

00:36:37.920 | There are all these flips in biology,

00:36:39.180 | counterintuitive flips.

00:36:40.100 | But I like to mention the flips

00:36:41.540 | because they normalize the idea

00:36:43.060 | that testosterone creates maleness

00:36:46.520 | and estrogen creates femaleness.

00:36:47.940 | That's actually not true.

00:36:49.280 | But you got the biology exactly right.

00:36:51.500 | But I was gonna add one more thing

00:36:53.700 | besides war, violence, and sex.

00:36:58.580 | There seems to be an interest by boys

00:37:03.500 | in remote control things.

00:37:04.860 | - Oh, absolutely.

00:37:05.820 | Action at a distance.

00:37:07.540 | - Action at a distance, so remote control cars.

00:37:09.640 | I never had a remote control helicopter.

00:37:11.200 | I would have died to get one,

00:37:12.640 | but remote control car that we built,

00:37:14.580 | my dad and I built together, that was thrilling.

00:37:17.500 | - Absolutely.

00:37:18.340 | - And then when we talk about girls

00:37:19.960 | and some of the preferences for certain activities,

00:37:23.420 | maybe we'll get into some others.

00:37:25.540 | But yeah, something about remote control,

00:37:27.340 | vehicles, and vehicles generally.

00:37:30.020 | - That's right.

00:37:30.860 | So there's an important psychological word

00:37:32.940 | called effectance made up by White in the 1950s.

00:37:37.380 | Effectance is the desire to be a cause.

00:37:40.140 | I had this effect on the world.

00:37:42.880 | And a nine-month-old infant in the crib,

00:37:47.080 | when he discovers if I pull this,

00:37:49.600 | if I hit this, a sound happens.

00:37:51.960 | It's thrilling.

00:37:53.320 | You did that.

00:37:54.840 | And this stays with us for life.

00:37:56.400 | You wanna see that the things you do have an effect.

00:37:59.440 | And especially boys are more in the physical world,

00:38:03.720 | mechanical world.

00:38:05.120 | And so shooting a gun, I remember when I was a kid,

00:38:07.080 | I had a BB gun that I bought at a church bazaar.

00:38:09.040 | I hid it from my mother, kept it in the closet.

00:38:11.400 | But my best friend and I,

00:38:12.440 | we'd set up cans on a row and you shoot them

00:38:14.280 | and boom, you knock it, it's amazing, it's thrilling.

00:38:17.820 | That does seem to be a sex difference.

00:38:21.080 | Now girls, I think, now here I'm speculating,

00:38:23.160 | but girls seem to be more interested

00:38:25.560 | in having an effect in the social world.

00:38:28.840 | So everybody wants to have an effect,

00:38:30.960 | but boys are more focused on mechanics,

00:38:32.520 | girls a bit more on relationships in the social world.

00:38:35.480 | - And I'm sure Freud had a field day with this,

00:38:37.980 | but what is the apparent,

00:38:40.880 | I don't have the numbers on this,

00:38:42.520 | obsession of girls and horses and caretaking of animals.

00:38:47.520 | And yet there are also a lot of wonderful stories

00:38:50.640 | about boys taking care of dogs.

00:38:52.720 | Like I read "Where the Red Fern Grows" maybe 50 times

00:38:55.600 | and I love dogs, I love taking care of raising my dog.

00:38:58.740 | But there seems to be something about the stereotype

00:39:02.680 | is girls and horses.

00:39:04.240 | - Yeah, that's right.

00:39:05.080 | - Yeah, well, the simple part is girls on average

00:39:09.700 | are a little bit more compassionate.

00:39:11.560 | They feel the pain of creatures more.

00:39:13.720 | Boys are more into animal cruelty as a fun thing to do,

00:39:16.680 | an interesting thing to do, effective.

00:39:19.320 | So girls are more compassionate.

00:39:21.240 | Girls tend more to wanna be a veterinarian than boys do

00:39:23.840 | 'cause girls love animals.

00:39:25.240 | My daughter was desperate for a pet

00:39:28.760 | and we got her a leopard gecko

00:39:32.080 | when she was about eight or nine.

00:39:34.000 | They're really cool, but she was crying one day

00:39:37.560 | 'cause she could tell like, "It's never gonna love me."

00:39:41.000 | And she desperately wanted--

00:39:42.200 | - You don't know, maybe it's a lynx or--

00:39:44.200 | - No, it's a reptile, no, they're not mammals.

00:39:46.800 | They don't have the bond.

00:39:48.120 | And she was desperate for a dog

00:39:49.720 | and she begged for years for a puppy.

00:39:51.520 | We finally got one.

00:39:52.800 | - She needed an animal with a forebrain.

00:39:54.520 | - She needed an animal, yeah.

00:39:55.680 | She needed a mammal, she needed a mammal.

00:39:58.360 | Now the horse thing, that's different.

00:40:00.040 | I'm not gonna speculate on that.

00:40:01.320 | I have heard some speculation that it's

00:40:03.320 | because the musculature, it's something about,

00:40:06.520 | it has a feeling of masculinity,

00:40:08.880 | but I don't know.

00:40:09.720 | - But that's very Freudian.

00:40:10.540 | I was wondering whether or not it was the--

00:40:12.200 | - I don't even got near that.

00:40:13.360 | - Yeah, I was wondering whether or not

00:40:15.820 | it was something about the healthy requirement

00:40:19.520 | for caretaking, the brushing, the cleaning,

00:40:22.080 | the caretaking of the animal.

00:40:24.400 | It's pretty elaborate when it comes to a horse.

00:40:26.880 | My first girlfriend had a horse.

00:40:28.000 | She spent more time with that horse than with me.

00:40:30.480 | And the amount of care, like if the horse was collocking,

00:40:33.800 | she would literally go sleep with it in the barn.

00:40:36.240 | And it seemed like she loved the amount of love

00:40:39.720 | that was available to give to the animal.

00:40:42.000 | Yeah, anyway.

00:40:44.440 | - I would put that in a giant bucket called biophilia.

00:40:48.200 | It's a term that I love from E.O. Wilson.

00:40:50.520 | Just that our species, we evolved in nature.

00:40:52.520 | We evolved with relationships with animals.

00:40:55.400 | And we crave it, we seek it out.

00:40:58.200 | We can fall in love with animals.

00:40:59.520 | We have relationships.

00:41:01.200 | So I think that's a healthy part of life.

00:41:02.800 | And again, it's another area where a phone-based childhood

00:41:06.320 | just takes you away from all of that.

00:41:08.400 | - It's interesting this difference

00:41:09.600 | between systems and relationships.

00:41:13.200 | I was obsessed with aquaria, still am.

00:41:15.840 | I love aquaria.

00:41:16.840 | I love freshwater tanks.

00:41:18.040 | Aquascaping is something I plan to get back into

00:41:20.560 | at some point soon.

00:41:21.760 | But the most interesting part about it

00:41:25.040 | was which fish could go with which,

00:41:26.960 | who would eat who, how many plants,

00:41:28.880 | what the density of fish needed to be

00:41:30.760 | in order to maintain the ecosystem

00:41:32.640 | and how to not get a system crash.

00:41:35.280 | It wasn't so much about the relationship

00:41:36.880 | between the fish or to the fish.

00:41:38.320 | - That's right, so it'd be interesting to see

00:41:39.920 | if there's a sex difference on aquariums,

00:41:42.240 | whether it's more a boy thing

00:41:43.360 | because of the interest in complex systems.

00:41:45.800 | But you know what I'd really like to do with you now,

00:41:49.000 | as long as we're talking about

00:41:50.560 | sort of these developmental pathways,

00:41:53.240 | I'm hoping that we can talk about,

00:41:56.160 | oh, let's stay on sexual development

00:41:58.960 | 'cause this is something,

00:41:59.800 | I just have a little section in the book.

00:42:01.880 | In the chapter on boys,

00:42:03.000 | I have a section where I review the research on pornography

00:42:07.200 | and huge amounts of study of pornography over the years.

00:42:10.180 | But the hardcore pornography, high resolution video,

00:42:16.440 | boys watching it for, many boys,

00:42:19.560 | well, a large number of boys

00:42:23.840 | go every day to pornography sites,

00:42:26.080 | often more than once a day.

00:42:28.280 | So I'd love to hear your thoughts

00:42:30.240 | on how is that gonna change sexual development

00:42:33.760 | during puberty?

00:42:34.580 | A boy who starts, let's say, at age 12, 13

00:42:36.560 | and does it for 10 years,

00:42:38.080 | could we expect that that boy will be different

00:42:42.520 | when he's 22?

00:42:43.640 | His dating life will be different.

00:42:45.920 | Tell me what you think is happening there

00:42:47.760 | in the brain and socially and hormonally.

00:42:49.680 | - Sure, absolutely.

00:42:50.700 | And I'm not going to demonize pornography

00:42:53.240 | nor am I going to celebrate it.

00:42:55.600 | All I'll say is that my understanding

00:42:57.800 | of the dopamine reinforcement system,

00:43:00.720 | and I like to call it a reinforcement system

00:43:02.280 | as opposed to a reward system

00:43:03.640 | because people generally think that

00:43:05.400 | dopamine and dopamine hits relate to pleasure,

00:43:08.000 | but dopamine is more of a motivator.

00:43:10.280 | As a neuromodulator, it creates a kind of an agitation state

00:43:13.960 | that puts us in a state of focus and foraging

00:43:16.920 | to resolve some gap between how we feel

00:43:19.240 | and how we'd like to feel

00:43:20.400 | by seeking things like sex, like food when we're hungry,

00:43:23.120 | like warmth when we're cold, like cool when we're too warm.

00:43:26.240 | It's a universal currency of pursuit,

00:43:29.400 | of craving and wanting as opposed to having.

00:43:32.440 | Dopamine does a lot more than that.

00:43:34.440 | And other neuromodulators are involved

00:43:36.440 | in wanting and craving, but dopamine is central to that.

00:43:40.040 | So I think it's not just fair to say,

00:43:44.440 | but it's a ground truth that whether or not

00:43:47.720 | it's a drug like methamphetamine, cocaine,

00:43:50.040 | crack cocaine in particular,

00:43:52.400 | or some other drug that hits the system fast

00:43:54.840 | and creates a big, big inflection in dopamine,

00:43:58.280 | that the more rapid the rise in dopamine,

00:44:02.400 | the bigger the crash in dopamine afterwards,

00:44:05.920 | and the more miserable you feel afterwards.

00:44:08.360 | And the more repeat of the behavior

00:44:11.840 | that initiated the peak will occur, aka addiction,

00:44:16.840 | or at least extreme habit formation,

00:44:19.080 | depending on how one defines those.

00:44:21.040 | When it comes to dopamine,

00:44:22.680 | the other key thing to know is that dopamine,

00:44:27.080 | in particular, high inflections in dopamine,

00:44:29.880 | big peaks in dopamine that occur without much effort,

00:44:33.560 | in particular, the kinds of effort that evolved

00:44:37.520 | to bring about the dopamine release,

00:44:39.800 | such as courting, dating, learning your preferences,

00:44:44.480 | learning the other person's preferences,

00:44:46.000 | working out issues of discussion, consent,

00:44:49.640 | negotiation, et cetera.

00:44:51.760 | When dopamine arrives quickly without effort,

00:44:55.180 | such as with amphetamine, crack cocaine, or pornography,

00:44:59.200 | the whole reinforcement loop

00:45:01.760 | becomes wired to these short timescales.

00:45:03.620 | You want something, you want it now, and you get it.

00:45:06.980 | But over time, you get less and less of the dopamine peak,

00:45:09.740 | and you get more of the dopamine trough that occurs.

00:45:12.780 | You drop below baseline afterwards.

00:45:14.720 | So all of that is a bunch of neurobiological-ish,

00:45:18.920 | nerd-speak for absolutely the ready availability

00:45:23.760 | of pornography at a few taps on the phone.

00:45:28.680 | No doubt triggers big dopamine.

00:45:30.840 | The first time requires more and more investment

00:45:33.160 | in that behavior to get less and less of the dopamine.

00:45:35.960 | You never get back to the initial value,

00:45:38.000 | and you're driven further and further down

00:45:39.460 | the pathway of addiction.

00:45:40.480 | And there's the loss of all the learning

00:45:44.640 | that the brain has evolved

00:45:47.800 | to learn how to evoke dopamine from,

00:45:51.400 | I don't want to say just mate pursuit,

00:45:52.720 | but it's courtship and eventually sex.

00:45:55.120 | So, and we know that after ejaculation, after orgasm,

00:45:58.900 | there's a dramatic decrease in dopamine

00:46:01.040 | and a huge increase in prolactin.

00:46:02.880 | - What does that do?

00:46:03.720 | - Prolactin and dopamine

00:46:05.200 | are essentially antagonistic to one another.

00:46:07.360 | It creates states of quiescence, calm.

00:46:10.240 | It's thought to facilitate pair bonding

00:46:11.920 | by keeping mates near one another,

00:46:14.860 | smelling one another, sharing pheromones.

00:46:17.320 | In fact, there's something called the Coolidge effect.

00:46:19.440 | We can talk about the sort of classic Coolidge effect.

00:46:21.440 | There are these effects that have to do

00:46:24.560 | with the inverse relationship

00:46:26.520 | between dopamine and prolactin.

00:46:28.120 | But with pornography,

00:46:30.480 | assuming that boys are masturbating to the pornography

00:46:34.360 | and they are doing that to the point of ejaculation,

00:46:36.920 | then they're getting this kind of quiescence of the system.

00:46:40.720 | They're feeling lethargic, relaxed.

00:46:43.480 | Maybe depending on their age or their motivation,

00:46:45.280 | they're doing it again and again,

00:46:46.600 | but neither the dopamine nor the prolactin

00:46:50.120 | are being devoted to anything about courtship and pursuit,

00:46:53.240 | nor is it, in the case of prolactin,

00:46:55.260 | related to anything related to pair bonding.

00:46:57.760 | They're just sitting there with their computer in their room.

00:47:00.760 | And of course, this occurred with pornography,

00:47:02.720 | as you mentioned before, classic pornography.

00:47:04.600 | But when I was growing up,

00:47:05.600 | if somebody had a penthouse or a Playboy magazine,

00:47:08.280 | they would often stash it, for whatever reason,

00:47:10.360 | behind a business or something

00:47:11.640 | so no one would get caught with it.

00:47:12.560 | And then you'd go there like a library.

00:47:14.040 | It was like a thing you'd go.

00:47:15.240 | And it was in places where,

00:47:16.880 | this is getting a little weird,

00:47:17.880 | but where people didn't use the pornography there.

00:47:20.400 | I think they remembered it, perhaps.

00:47:22.880 | But they weren't spending a ton of time with it,

00:47:24.880 | and they weren't taking, in fact, there was an unspoken rule.

00:47:27.160 | You didn't take it with you.

00:47:29.080 | And this is kind of most kids' first exposure to pornography

00:47:32.600 | or their dad had a Playboy magazine or something like that.

00:47:35.280 | So I hope I described the landscape of the biology

00:47:38.160 | well enough, but the short answer is,

00:47:40.440 | absolutely creates major problems

00:47:42.600 | in the dopamine reinforcement system.

00:47:44.220 | It's training the dopamine reinforcement system

00:47:46.500 | for fast reinforcement and diminished reinforcement

00:47:50.080 | over time, and none of it translates to the real world.

00:47:54.080 | It's not just the content.

00:47:55.620 | So I guess what we're getting at here

00:47:56.920 | is it's not just what they're seeing is so extreme,

00:47:59.080 | and that's an issue, clearly.

00:48:00.920 | It's also the whole process takes minutes,

00:48:05.680 | and it can be repeated over and over,

00:48:07.720 | depending on the refractory period,

00:48:10.120 | as opposed to real-world dating and relationships,

00:48:13.200 | which takes effort, and it takes learning.

00:48:15.500 | There's hardly any learning in the use of a drug

00:48:18.440 | like methamphetamine or cocaine

00:48:19.900 | about how your dopamine system works, unconscious learning.

00:48:23.140 | And there's hardly any, if any,

00:48:24.500 | learning about sex and courtship in pornography.

00:48:28.220 | And it's also training the dopamine system,

00:48:31.300 | the whole motivational system around sex,

00:48:33.260 | to be observational as opposed to participatory.

00:48:37.120 | And I hear a lot, because I'm in the wellness health space,

00:48:40.100 | and I'm a man, guys reach out by direct message.

00:48:43.840 | Hey, listen, they'll reach out

00:48:45.680 | that they're having real issues

00:48:47.240 | with erectile dysfunction, with anxiety.

00:48:50.440 | And these things always existed,

00:48:51.960 | but there was a kind of a learning, a communication,

00:48:54.940 | hopefully some, you know, slow your breathing down

00:48:56.920 | and communicate and kind of get back to a place

00:48:58.860 | where you're more comfortable.

00:49:00.560 | They're not able to translate anything

00:49:02.180 | about their experience of sex and pleasure

00:49:04.440 | to the real world, and as a consequence,

00:49:06.360 | they're retreating into a world where they view,

00:49:10.260 | if they're heterosexual, the opposite sex,

00:49:12.620 | or if they're homosexual, the same, potential partners,

00:49:15.900 | as like these distant foreign objects

00:49:17.540 | that they don't understand.

00:49:19.420 | - Wow, Andrew, thank you.

00:49:20.540 | That was a really powerful and clear description

00:49:23.820 | of what I was trying to say in the book

00:49:25.620 | coming just from the psychological side,

00:49:27.820 | which is to turn from a boy into a man,

00:49:32.820 | there's a certain amount of toughening

00:49:35.420 | and skill building, there's skills that have to be developed

00:49:38.560 | and I'm so glad to use the word courtship.

00:49:40.180 | I use that word a lot with my students.

00:49:42.360 | I hear almost nobody else using that word.

00:49:44.360 | It's such an important word because we did evolve

00:49:47.120 | the ability to pair bond, at least temporarily,

00:49:49.600 | and we do have courtship and it has to start slowly.

00:49:53.240 | If you jump into bed and have sex right away,

00:49:54.860 | there's no chance of courtship, that part is over.

00:49:57.800 | And so, you know, as you were talking,

00:50:00.680 | I was really trying to, I was thinking,

00:50:02.200 | and I want the listeners to imagine,

00:50:04.680 | imagine one 13 year old boy who, you know,

00:50:09.480 | really wants sex, would like to have a girlfriend,

00:50:12.800 | but he has a laptop, he has a phone, he has a porn hub,

00:50:17.000 | he masturbates two or three times a day.

00:50:19.200 | He'd still like to have a girlfriend,

00:50:20.840 | but he's sexually satisfied

00:50:22.320 | because he has all this amazing pornography.

00:50:24.520 | And he does this every day for 10 years,

00:50:28.600 | until he's 23, let's say.

00:50:30.400 | And then we have another boy who, you know,

00:50:33.080 | maybe he has a Playboy magazine, or maybe he has nothing,

00:50:36.440 | maybe he just has his imagination,

00:50:37.640 | he masturbates occasionally, as boys do,

00:50:40.200 | but he doesn't have the hardcore porn,

00:50:41.800 | he doesn't have the fast dopamine.

00:50:43.800 | And then this second boy, he puts more effort

00:50:46.640 | to actually having a girlfriend,

00:50:48.040 | and he learns how to talk to girls,

00:50:49.460 | and he's flirting and one is interested in him,

00:50:53.080 | and then they have their first kiss.

00:50:56.360 | And, you know, 'cause I'm remembering back when I was,

00:50:58.520 | you know, a teenager in my 20s,

00:51:01.000 | the most beautiful golden days,

00:51:02.660 | I mean, the most memorable days of my life,

00:51:05.000 | it was those days when you have that first kiss

00:51:07.320 | and you know like, oh, this is gonna turn into something.

00:51:10.280 | Everything sparkles after that.

00:51:11.520 | Yeah, everything sparkles.

00:51:12.520 | But the point is, it's slow and it's hard work.

00:51:16.000 | And then when you finally do have sex,

00:51:18.680 | you know, it's not like, oh, dopamine crashed,

00:51:21.000 | you know, get out of here.

00:51:22.040 | It's, as you said, it's like, ah, you know,

00:51:24.520 | prolactin rise, you know, you hug, you hold the girl,

00:51:28.420 | and, you know, at some point,

00:51:31.080 | you start thinking about marriage.

00:51:32.320 | Like, you start thinking like, is this the one?

00:51:34.000 | I mean, you know, crazy thoughts like that,

00:51:36.000 | you can't help but think that when you're falling in love.

00:51:38.880 | And at NYU, I teach an undergrad course

00:51:41.240 | and I also teach an MBA course.

00:51:42.880 | Now, the MBAs are all on the dating apps.

00:51:44.600 | They're in their late 20s, they're all on the dating apps.

00:51:46.720 | The undergrads, some of them are on dating apps,

00:51:48.460 | but they're, you know, they're 19,

00:51:49.360 | they're mostly dating and they're in their circles.

00:51:51.780 | And for the MBAs, I really have to work with them

00:51:53.800 | to see that these dating apps

00:51:57.880 | are cutting off courtship in a lot of ways.

00:51:59.880 | I mean, yes, you're texting, but it's not the same.

00:52:02.840 | So, I'm so glad you explained a lot about that.

00:52:06.320 | One is the fast, it's the fast satisfaction

00:52:09.000 | that prevents you from learning,

00:52:10.640 | where slow, hard work towards a biological goal

00:52:14.200 | like sex or dating or marriage or love

00:52:16.920 | is what builds you up into a competent man.

00:52:19.480 | Who would wanna hire, or who would wanna date,

00:52:21.240 | let's put it that way.

00:52:22.240 | Who would wanna date the kid who'd been masturbating

00:52:24.080 | three times a day to porn since he was 13?

00:52:26.880 | So, yeah, yeah.

00:52:28.720 | - Yeah, and there's all sorts of things.

00:52:30.640 | I mean, my father's Argentine,

00:52:32.480 | moved to the States in the late 60s.

00:52:34.800 | And so, I was raised in a fairly traditional home

00:52:38.480 | from the perspective of masculine, feminine roles.

00:52:41.840 | And there were all these things around chivalry.

00:52:43.840 | I remember going to my first junior high school dance,

00:52:45.840 | my dad gave me this whole tutorial about holding the door

00:52:48.220 | and how to, you know, it's interesting that nowadays,

00:52:51.920 | guys are often judged in terms of their latency

00:52:55.300 | to respond to text messages.

00:52:57.360 | You know, something I'm terrible at.

00:52:59.200 | And it's interesting that that sort of replaced chivalry,

00:53:04.220 | like how responsive somebody is.

00:53:06.160 | So, there's a kind of a bleeding for it,

00:53:07.920 | as long as we're just being very open about the past,

00:53:10.120 | present, and perhaps future of this stuff.

00:53:12.880 | I remember growing up and hearing stories.

00:53:15.800 | This wasn't how my childhood went,

00:53:17.400 | but I remember my dad telling me, you know, in Argentina,

00:53:20.040 | the young boys, when they would hit puberty,

00:53:22.200 | used to be taken to prostitutes.

00:53:23.880 | So, they would learn how to have sex.

00:53:26.320 | I mean, that's how, I mean, that wasn't that long ago.

00:53:28.640 | Okay, that wasn't my childhood.

00:53:29.760 | And I remember thinking like, what's that?

00:53:31.320 | Well, you know, is this what's gonna happen next?

00:53:33.400 | But he was explaining, that's kind of how it went.

00:53:35.720 | That doesn't tend to happen anymore, as I understand.

00:53:38.000 | - I haven't heard of it happening.

00:53:39.120 | - Right, but in terms of learning courtship,

00:53:42.360 | learning chivalry, learning, you know, who pays.

00:53:45.520 | And a lot of that's changed with the, you know,

00:53:47.360 | the changing milieu of sex and gender dynamics.

00:53:50.760 | But it's all iterative.

00:53:52.960 | It's slow and iterative.

00:53:54.200 | And everything about online use, as you mentioned,

00:53:56.240 | is it's fast.

00:53:57.400 | You can find anything with a keyword search.

00:53:59.920 | - No work, that's right.

00:54:01.060 | The technology makes everything easier.

00:54:02.960 | And if we end up talking about AI at all,

00:54:05.260 | which every conversation goes to at some point,

00:54:07.400 | that's my big fear, that AI makes everything easy.

00:54:11.800 | Now, that's great for us adults.

00:54:13.020 | When we have 50 things we wanna do,

00:54:14.880 | if I can give 30 of them to AI, that would be great.

00:54:17.600 | But, you know, how many servants do I want my,

00:54:19.960 | you know, my son is now 17.

00:54:21.560 | When he was 10, 11, 12, how many servants

00:54:24.320 | would I want him to have to take care of his needs?

00:54:26.220 | Like, probably zero.

00:54:27.260 | Like, zero is probably the best number.

00:54:29.220 | But, you know, with porn for the sexual drive,

00:54:33.060 | with multiplayer video games for sports or competition,

00:54:36.540 | that's right, our kids, they're not learning or developing.

00:54:41.040 | And this is why, you know, I work in a business school.

00:54:43.300 | I talk to a lot of people in the corporate world.

00:54:45.600 | And I always ask them,

00:54:46.440 | how's it going with your Gen Z employees?

00:54:48.800 | I've never heard a good word.

00:54:49.880 | I've never heard, oh, they're great.

00:54:52.420 | They're often people just surprised

00:54:54.400 | at how they don't take initiative.

00:54:56.800 | If, you know, if something is broken, they don't fix it.

00:54:59.600 | They wanna be told what to do.

00:55:01.440 | They don't have the confidence.

00:55:02.580 | They're very anxious.

00:55:03.840 | So, you know, I'm not ragging on Gen Z.

00:55:07.440 | I'm saying we blocked their development.

00:55:09.920 | We prevented them from having a thousand,

00:55:12.820 | millions of experiences of social interaction,

00:55:15.580 | of challenge, of failure, of fear, of thrill.

00:55:18.500 | And then when they reach their early twenties

00:55:20.580 | and they're employed,

00:55:22.420 | employers find there's something lacking.

00:55:24.500 | - So, it sounds to me like boys on smartphones,

00:55:27.340 | or sort of in this 2010 period forward,

00:55:29.840 | are getting this kind of hyper-stereotypical male experience.

00:55:34.860 | First-person shooter games, pornography.

00:55:36.820 | Girls are getting this hyper-stereotypical female experience.

00:55:40.680 | Relational, highly relational.

00:55:42.380 | But there are certain dynamics that are missing,

00:55:46.060 | or certain components that are missing.

00:55:48.060 | Yesterday, I heard you mention something

00:55:50.720 | very, very interesting to me,

00:55:52.040 | which is that in both groups, it seems,

00:55:56.040 | conflict and any kind of friction

00:55:58.680 | is not being resolved among the participants,

00:56:02.920 | but there's this sort of looking outward

00:56:04.840 | for some rule or policy, law or oversight

00:56:08.220 | to come in and intervene.

00:56:10.060 | Could you talk a little bit about this?

00:56:11.100 | This relates in an interesting way to cancel culture.

00:56:13.460 | - Yeah, that's right, that's right.

00:56:14.680 | - I would love to learn more about this.

00:56:16.140 | - Sure.

00:56:16.980 | So, aggression is a part of human nature, as is cooperation.

00:56:20.780 | And they kind of have to go together.

00:56:23.420 | To make it in this world,

00:56:24.440 | you have to be able to play politics.

00:56:25.860 | You have to have friends and allies.

00:56:27.620 | You have to stand up for yourself.

00:56:30.060 | You have to push back sometimes,

00:56:31.580 | but you have to learn to bury the hatchet.

00:56:33.460 | And if you grew up with siblings,

00:56:35.560 | you're fighting every day and you're cooperating every day.

00:56:38.560 | It's a very important practice.

00:56:40.660 | And if you're playing sports outside

00:56:42.900 | with a bunch of kids in the neighborhood,

00:56:44.860 | you're making the rules every day.

00:56:46.300 | And then part of what's important

00:56:48.740 | when kids are playing is the infractions.

00:56:51.120 | The play stops, people come together.

00:56:55.580 | That was out of bounds.

00:56:56.420 | No, it wasn't.

00:56:57.260 | You pushed me.

00:56:58.080 | No, I didn't.

00:56:58.920 | And then everybody gets practice playing judge and jury

00:57:02.900 | because everyone wants the game to go on.

00:57:04.500 | So they're very motivated to work it out.

00:57:06.600 | You have to accept the judgment.

00:57:09.060 | What are you gonna do, storm off and go home to protest?

00:57:11.420 | Then you look like a loser

00:57:12.260 | and you don't get to play anymore.

00:57:13.540 | So natural play with no adult

00:57:16.340 | forces the kids to learn social skills

00:57:18.500 | that are essential for democracy.

00:57:20.580 | How do we make rules together, just us?

00:57:22.980 | How do we decide how we're gonna govern ourselves?

00:57:25.400 | What do we do when it looks like someone violated a rule?

00:57:27.820 | Well, we're not just gonna kill them.

00:57:29.060 | We're not gonna expel them.

00:57:30.420 | We have to have a way of going on with the play.

00:57:32.900 | So these are such crucial skills for social development

00:57:36.020 | for boys and for girls.

00:57:37.700 | And kids always learn to work that out.

00:57:41.100 | But what happens when the boys are growing up on video games,

00:57:44.320 | there are no disputes.

00:57:45.340 | There can't be a dispute because the game,

00:57:48.260 | the software basically manages everything.

00:57:50.660 | There's no out of bounds or anything.

00:57:53.220 | So the play is missing a lot of the key skills.

00:57:57.980 | Now, how are conflicts resolved?

00:58:01.180 | Well, on social media,

00:58:03.140 | instead of a conflict that two girls might have had,

00:58:06.860 | just the two of them or with a group before,

00:58:09.420 | which could get worked out very, very quickly,

00:58:11.620 | it's somebody posts something indirect.

00:58:13.740 | Maybe it's an indirect criticism

00:58:14.940 | and someone takes it in a way,

00:58:16.320 | maybe it was intended that way, maybe it wasn't.

00:58:18.500 | But before you know it, it's accelerated.

00:58:20.100 | People are taking sides.

00:58:21.460 | It could blow up.

00:58:22.520 | You don't know how big it could get.

00:58:23.720 | It could be the whole school now gets drawn in.

00:58:25.860 | This is terrifying.

00:58:27.580 | So a really important idea about play

00:58:29.180 | is what's called low stakes mistakes.

00:58:31.940 | So if you make a mistake

00:58:33.720 | while playing soccer with your friends, no big deal.

00:58:37.580 | Like, you know, it's a foul, redo, whatever it is.

00:58:41.720 | But if you make a mistake on social media,

00:58:43.180 | it could blow up to the point

00:58:44.980 | where you are now a laughing stock.

00:58:47.100 | And when a kid, especially in middle school,

00:58:49.580 | when a kid is a laughing stock,

00:58:51.240 | when everyone's laughing at them,

00:58:52.940 | that is likely to trigger thoughts even of suicide.

00:58:56.780 | Shame makes us want to disappear.

00:58:58.900 | And we're putting our kids,

00:59:00.820 | our kids need to be immersed in small groups,

00:59:02.860 | small groups of other kids that are stable,

00:59:06.140 | somewhat stable over years.

00:59:08.320 | That's the healthiest environment.

00:59:09.940 | But instead we're mixing them in

00:59:11.300 | with potentially gigantic groups, including strangers,

00:59:14.980 | and people who are not engaging their normal empathy skills,

00:59:19.740 | but are being performative, judgmental,

00:59:22.980 | judging in order to be liked by others.

00:59:26.380 | So it's just an inhumane,

00:59:28.500 | it's an inhuman world in which to raise kids.

00:59:32.280 | And this is part of my point about the great rewiring.

00:59:34.380 | In 2010s, American kids still had a recognizable

00:59:37.580 | human childhood with a lot of time

00:59:39.660 | together with other friends.

00:59:41.020 | But that plunges in the 2010s to the point where now

00:59:44.660 | childhood is largely happening alone on a screen.

00:59:47.500 | I'd like to take a brief break

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01:01:24.100 | I'll never forget in middle school being at some assembly

01:01:26.780 | and a kid had got down on all fours behind me

01:01:31.780 | and someone pushed me.

01:01:33.500 | - Oh yeah, I remember that.

01:01:34.700 | - I stood up and Kevin Gassman was just sitting there

01:01:37.680 | just cackling with his face right in front of me.

01:01:39.260 | So I hit him.

01:01:40.180 | It turns out it wasn't Kevin that did it.

01:01:42.220 | And he hit me back and it was a disaster.

01:01:43.980 | And I don't remember how it panned out,

01:01:45.020 | but we ended up being friends.

01:01:46.020 | So this is kind of how things got worked out.

01:01:47.460 | - Well, that's right.

01:01:48.300 | - And cooperation, you need the two together.

01:01:49.780 | - Yeah, incredibly embarrassing,

01:01:51.380 | both for getting pushed over and for hitting the wrong kid,

01:01:54.240 | but credit for hitting somebody

01:01:55.720 | 'cause that's how boys work things out.

01:01:56.980 | I'm not suggesting people do this, not suggesting violence.

01:01:59.780 | And then both of us feeling silly.

01:02:01.580 | And then ultimately, well, I don't know,

01:02:04.060 | I made it to the eighth grade somehow, right?

01:02:06.140 | - That's right.

01:02:07.760 | - And the hierarchy among, I mostly had male friends,

01:02:12.480 | but the hierarchy was something that was very dynamic.

01:02:16.420 | I have a good friend who was a CEO,

01:02:20.580 | a commanding officer

01:02:21.420 | in one of the East Coast SEAL Team Squadrons,

01:02:23.180 | tier one SEAL Team Squadron.

01:02:24.620 | He said the reason they're so effective in those groups

01:02:27.800 | is because they embrace dynamic subordination

01:02:31.900 | where people take over

01:02:33.060 | as different skill sets are required

01:02:35.300 | and they are relentlessly hard on each other.

01:02:39.140 | This is something they are like relentlessly hard

01:02:41.180 | at the level of humor, but also, I mean,

01:02:43.540 | because it's so high risk and high consequence,

01:02:46.540 | they're just extremely hard on one another.

01:02:48.660 | But it's all about this dynamic subordination

01:02:51.020 | that sure, they're leaders by virtue

01:02:52.780 | of who's appointed leader in certain amount of authority,

01:02:56.260 | but there's this constant dynamic subordination

01:02:58.140 | and it exists in every group of males

01:03:00.420 | I've ever been a part of.

01:03:01.740 | And it's wonderful and very reassuring to me

01:03:04.380 | because it means that you both get to potentially step up,

01:03:07.700 | but you also get to rest

01:03:09.540 | and trust somebody else's skills.

01:03:11.940 | I don't know how it operates with girls.

01:03:13.820 | I've only been born with a white chromosome,

01:03:17.020 | this is all I know,

01:03:18.120 | but I imagined it exists there too in different,

01:03:21.140 | but in different ways.

01:03:23.140 | So if online, everything is fear-based

01:03:27.060 | where one is fearing a dog pile,

01:03:30.360 | like if you say the wrong thing, you're gonna get dog pile.

01:03:32.860 | You kind of wonder why anyone participates at all,

01:03:35.300 | but it seems like people are in there.

01:03:36.740 | Are they in there and timid or is boldness rewarded?

01:03:41.380 | Is it only boldness of, I guess they call it,

01:03:45.860 | slamming down to what are they called,

01:03:46.980 | dunking on other people?

01:03:48.580 | And here as I'm describing kids,

01:03:51.260 | I wanna acknowledge if you look on Twitter,

01:03:54.580 | X we now call it,

01:03:56.680 | in the academic tech and finance community in particular,

01:04:00.700 | this is how the men behave.

01:04:03.660 | This is how the women behave,

01:04:05.200 | but it's especially apparent

01:04:06.640 | that the adults are kind of acting like kids

01:04:09.420 | and the kids are kind of acting like adults.

01:04:11.580 | So what's going on?

01:04:12.940 | Are we drawn into this as well as adults

01:04:16.400 | and are we modeling this

01:04:18.340 | or is this just social media pulling on these strings

01:04:23.340 | of deep evolutionarily conserved wiring?

01:04:28.020 | - Yeah.

01:04:28.860 | Well, so first,

01:04:29.800 | let's not be too sort of monochromatic about social media.

01:04:37.460 | There is a lot of humor.

01:04:39.220 | There's a lot of jokes.

01:04:40.140 | There are a lot of funny cartoons and videos and learning.

01:04:43.420 | So there is good stuff mixed in

01:04:45.820 | and even the bad stuff is entertaining

01:04:47.540 | in the way that looking at a car crash

01:04:48.960 | or a dead body is entertaining people.

01:04:50.980 | It draws the eye.

01:04:52.100 | So young people are very interested

01:04:55.380 | and us adults too are very interested.

01:04:57.680 | It draws us in,

01:05:01.580 | but then yes, it certainly changes our behavior.

01:05:04.780 | Now, actually, there's some research on trolls.

01:05:09.240 | Is it that whenever you go on Twitter, you become a jerk?

01:05:13.740 | And actually, no, it seems more

01:05:18.740 | that what happens is there's a small number of men,

01:05:22.100 | always men, who have a personality disorder.

01:05:25.980 | They like to be jerks.

01:05:28.820 | They like to get a reaction from people.

01:05:30.900 | They get blocked a lot.

01:05:31.960 | They get kicked off platforms.

01:05:33.540 | And this small number, in a real community,

01:05:37.000 | probably when you were growing up,

01:05:37.840 | there were one or two kids who were like this

01:05:39.940 | and they got in trouble a lot

01:05:40.940 | and they probably ended up dead or in jail.

01:05:43.660 | But online, suppose it's 1% of men are psychopaths.

01:05:47.720 | So suppose it's this 2% of men, let's say,

01:05:49.980 | who are jerks like this.

01:05:51.480 | Well, online, that's who we all see.

01:05:54.860 | So in part, it's that the online world

01:05:59.820 | super empowers extremists and jerks.

01:06:03.220 | It's also that in the online world,

01:06:05.500 | everyone is feeling performative.

01:06:07.160 | Everyone is, you might, even if you're making a joke,

01:06:11.180 | you have to think three steps ahead.

01:06:12.580 | How will it be misinterpreted?

01:06:14.020 | So a metaphor that I have in my head whenever I'm online

01:06:17.100 | is it's really just like being on thin ice.

01:06:19.300 | Like you can have fun on thin ice.

01:06:20.740 | It's not all bad, but you're kind of always aware

01:06:23.780 | that you're in danger.

01:06:25.700 | Whereas when you're hanging out with your buddies,

01:06:27.700 | you know, your good friends, you feel totally safe.

01:06:30.820 | And if you accidentally insult one of them,

01:06:32.980 | you know, it's like, oh, you know, sorry.

01:06:34.700 | You know, yep, you're right, I'm sorry.

01:06:37.340 | - And as followership increases, the ice gets thinner.

01:06:40.800 | - Yeah, that's right.

01:06:41.700 | That's right, you're right.

01:06:42.540 | The higher they go, the harder they fall.

01:06:44.420 | And then a lot of people wanna see, wanna see your fall.

01:06:47.540 | Just wanna make one point.

01:06:49.020 | That was an interesting concept.

01:06:50.020 | There was something in subordination.

01:06:51.860 | - Dynamic subordination. - Dynamic subordination.

01:06:53.340 | - Kind of like a flock of birds,

01:06:54.820 | but is how it was described to me.

01:06:56.520 | But, you know, I always thought in the, you know,

01:06:59.140 | tier one special operations community that, you know,

01:07:02.860 | people would spend more years there,

01:07:04.580 | advance further and further.

01:07:05.900 | And that's true too.

01:07:06.740 | But this idea that it's just understood

01:07:09.260 | that the hierarchy evolves in real time.

01:07:11.860 | And the more people embrace that,

01:07:15.420 | the better performing the group is as a pack.

01:07:17.660 | - Yeah.

01:07:18.500 | Now the word hierarchy certainly takes on a bad name,

01:07:21.420 | especially like in our academic circles.

01:07:23.020 | Hierarchy, you know, is bad and power is bad.

01:07:25.980 | And subordination, all these things are bad.

01:07:28.220 | Power, you know, inequality.

01:07:30.420 | But I think part of what's going on there.

01:07:32.140 | So, you know, I teach in a business school

01:07:33.340 | and there's a huge amount of writing on leadership.

01:07:35.500 | And I haven't read much of it.

01:07:37.060 | But a key idea that I got, I'm trying to remember the author,

01:07:42.060 | is that the key puzzle is not why people wanna be leaders.

01:07:45.180 | It's why do they wanna be followers?

01:07:47.080 | We really need to study followership.

01:07:49.200 | And so people are willing to follow

01:07:51.920 | because part of our amazing human ability

01:07:54.700 | is to work together in groups to overcome obstacles.

01:07:57.380 | We don't have sharp teeth.

01:07:58.620 | We're not very, well, we're fast in long distance,

01:08:00.480 | but not in sprints.

01:08:02.140 | But we're able to work together.

01:08:04.120 | And when we face a common threat,

01:08:06.140 | we very willingly cede leadership to a leader,

01:08:09.180 | but we have to trust him.

01:08:10.980 | And if a leader shows that he's a narcissist,

01:08:13.020 | that he's putting himself first,

01:08:14.060 | that he's benefiting at our expense, we don't trust him.

01:08:17.480 | So what you need to do, and I think this is more clear.

01:08:19.900 | Males are more hierarchical.

01:08:20.980 | This is true in chimpanzees as well.

01:08:22.420 | Males are, they take to hierarchy more readily.

01:08:25.520 | Males benefit from having practice.

01:08:29.660 | I don't think of it as dominance and submission.

01:08:31.740 | I think what you said is actually more effective.

01:08:34.020 | It's like they need practice,

01:08:36.060 | like being the leader of this project

01:08:38.820 | and then being a follower because you grant,

01:08:40.860 | like, yeah, you lead us on this.

01:08:42.080 | You take the lead on this.

01:08:43.260 | And then something else will reverse.

01:08:45.160 | And if you have a young man who has a lot of that experience

01:08:48.780 | that's gonna be a young man that you will wanna employ

01:08:51.500 | when he's in his mid-twenties.

01:08:53.140 | Whereas one who never had that,

01:08:54.480 | it's just gonna be much more difficult to work with

01:08:56.180 | in a business setting.

01:08:57.800 | - Yeah, the groups of boys I grew up with

01:08:59.500 | and men that I've worked with and been friends with,

01:09:01.780 | it's always been understood,

01:09:02.820 | like this guy's really terrific for finding stuff.

01:09:05.940 | And this guy's great with vehicles.

01:09:07.580 | And this guy's great with girls.

01:09:09.740 | And this guy's, that people have different skillsets

01:09:12.940 | and that the group together can really mesh.

01:09:15.720 | But there isn't an attempt to be something that you're not.

01:09:19.460 | And you quickly find out who you are

01:09:21.140 | by who you're not and you find your unique skillset.

01:09:24.500 | And you evolve in that way

01:09:29.500 | by not trying to be everything to everybody.

01:09:32.940 | Whereas I noticed with my sister and her groups of friends,

01:09:35.320 | it's changed over time, of course,

01:09:36.880 | but that there tended to be one girl

01:09:38.840 | that was really dominant in the play session,

01:09:40.900 | like the whole time, the bossy one.

01:09:43.420 | - You're right.

01:09:44.260 | - And even though some stories,

01:09:47.740 | kids' books that mainly feature boys have that.

01:09:50.920 | I don't recall that being such a big part

01:09:54.640 | of my reading experience or childhood experience,

01:09:57.500 | like in the Encyclopedia Brown books,

01:09:59.140 | like there was like the mean kid.

01:10:01.060 | But people would slot in where they were most adept.

01:10:05.120 | So it was sort of like natural tendencies to excel

01:10:08.020 | were complimentary.

01:10:09.220 | And I don't know what it is for girls,

01:10:10.660 | but online, it seems, all of that's erased.

01:10:15.640 | So you've got these social dynamics

01:10:18.960 | that are very heightened,

01:10:20.680 | being played out on social media with girls.

01:10:23.840 | But boys and men are on there as well.

01:10:27.800 | And most of what's on social media is social,

01:10:30.760 | it's relational.

01:10:31.940 | So are boys and men being drawn more

01:10:34.660 | toward those sorts of interactions

01:10:36.380 | and how well are they navigating those interactions?

01:10:38.760 | Is it common for boys to make big mistakes online

01:10:42.600 | and then be shunned as a consequence?

01:10:45.680 | Or is this more common in females?

01:10:48.680 | - Yeah, no, that's a good question.

01:10:50.720 | Life online is performative.

01:10:54.340 | For girls, a much bigger element of the performance

01:10:57.240 | is perfectionism about the image.

01:10:59.880 | So girls spend a lot more time choosing a photograph,

01:11:03.480 | editing a photograph, making sure everything's perfect.

01:11:06.500 | Whereas guys, like I literally don't notice

01:11:08.440 | if my socks don't match.

01:11:09.660 | My wife has to tell me, "Your socks don't match."

01:11:12.140 | Guys just don't notice those things as much.

01:11:14.860 | - You're a professor after all.

01:11:16.460 | - Yeah, I'm a professor, I suppose.

01:11:18.340 | But my point is that life online, it does affect all kids.

01:11:22.100 | So fear of missing out is something that affects everybody.

01:11:25.240 | On Snapchat, you see all your friends are over there

01:11:27.020 | and you didn't even know that there was something going on.

01:11:29.220 | So again, boys and girls, they'll have similar insecurities.

01:11:33.300 | It's more a question of degree.

01:11:35.500 | So the perfectionism, the playing out the social dynamics

01:11:39.820 | to three steps, like girls are playing three-dimensional

01:11:42.620 | chess about social relationships.

01:11:44.940 | Well, but why did he say that if he also wanted this

01:11:48.940 | when she, he knows that, she knows that,

01:11:51.560 | and guys are like, "What?

01:11:52.400 | "What are you saying?

01:11:53.220 | "I don't even know what you're saying."

01:11:54.500 | - They're barely playing checkers.

01:11:56.520 | - That's right, that's right.

01:11:57.360 | And again, it's the organizing effects

01:12:01.700 | of prenatal hormones.

01:12:02.580 | This is not culturally taught.

01:12:04.220 | This is what kids enjoy doing based on, I believe,

01:12:07.700 | and Simon Baron Cohen, I believe, believes,

01:12:10.180 | is the prenatal organizing effects of hormones

01:12:13.860 | on the developing brain.

01:12:15.500 | - But on YouTube, where it's,

01:12:16.860 | my understanding, primarily male,

01:12:19.080 | there's a lot of clap back type comments.

01:12:21.900 | I know this 'cause I have a YouTube channel.

01:12:25.500 | And in the old days, it wasn't that long ago,

01:12:28.760 | when Rogan had full length episodes on YouTube,

01:12:31.960 | then he didn't, now he does again.

01:12:33.860 | The jokes, the comment section on YouTube

01:12:37.180 | were like their own show.

01:12:39.340 | It was outrageous.

01:12:40.220 | It was so good.

01:12:41.260 | And some of that's coming back now that he's-

01:12:43.420 | - Was it men showing off their cleverness?

01:12:45.660 | - Right.

01:12:46.500 | I mean, like, for instance,

01:12:47.320 | you might be familiar with Jocko Willink, right?

01:12:50.540 | If you had to draw a Navy SEAL, you draw Jocko.

01:12:52.700 | Kind of looks like modern day General Patton, right?

01:12:56.860 | And there's this whole category of jokes based on Jocko,

01:13:00.100 | who I think actually has risen to prominence

01:13:02.180 | in the online culture

01:13:03.060 | because he's sort of like the football coach

01:13:04.580 | that most young males never had.

01:13:07.060 | He's the guy that's gonna tell you what to do,

01:13:08.260 | when to do it, and do it even though you don't want to,

01:13:10.940 | and just do it.

01:13:11.780 | And you trust him.

01:13:13.100 | He's a very trustworthy guy, as it were.

01:13:15.880 | And he's a warrior and he has all the credentials, et cetera.

01:13:18.020 | But there's this whole category of jokes.

01:13:19.660 | Like, when Jocko was born,

01:13:22.740 | the doctor looked at his mother and said, "It's a man."

01:13:26.220 | (Zubin laughs)

01:13:27.180 | Or when Jocko left for college,

01:13:29.140 | he looked at his father and said,

01:13:30.280 | "You're the man of the house now."

01:13:32.300 | Jokes like that, there are tons and tons of these, right?

01:13:35.060 | So there's this whole- - Oh, yeah.

01:13:36.140 | - So that's very YouTube-ish male type humor.

01:13:38.460 | It's one hit, it's done, it gets a ton of likes,

01:13:41.580 | and it propagates.

01:13:43.060 | None of this two or three chess moves down the road.

01:13:46.500 | So it's very clap back sometimes,

01:13:48.540 | or in that case, building up Jocko,

01:13:50.700 | who doesn't need any more building up,

01:13:51.780 | but people do it anyway.

01:13:53.000 | So things of that sort.

01:13:54.660 | So I'm interested in the nuance here

01:13:58.420 | because you're telling me

01:14:01.100 | that girls are killing themselves more.

01:14:03.820 | They're depressed.

01:14:04.700 | - Their increase in suicide is larger.

01:14:06.880 | Boys have a much higher suicide rate.

01:14:09.040 | So many more boys die from suicide.

01:14:11.740 | - Because they put more violent means.

01:14:13.660 | - That's one of the major reasons,

01:14:15.280 | and that's especially true in America

01:14:16.620 | where we have so many guns.

01:14:18.060 | Boys tend to use a gun or a tall building or a bridge,

01:14:20.740 | whereas girls tend to use pills or cutting their wrists,

01:14:23.980 | and the great majority of girls' suicide attempts

01:14:26.260 | don't lead to death.

01:14:27.580 | - So are most of the issues with girls

01:14:30.260 | and online use, social media,

01:14:33.040 | it's sort of, it's despair.

01:14:36.860 | It's at home, anxious, sad about self,

01:14:40.460 | self-critiquing, this kind of thing.

01:14:42.660 | I mean, you're telling me there's a huge,

01:14:44.340 | and I believe you,

01:14:45.180 | that there's a tremendous increase.

01:14:46.740 | I mean, it's a hockey stick-like function.

01:14:48.780 | When we're looking at essentially capturing

01:14:54.460 | the tip of the pyramid in terms

01:14:55.740 | of like extreme social interaction.

01:14:57.700 | So take, let me, I'm not being very clear here.

01:15:00.300 | We have these neural circuits

01:15:03.220 | that evolved for social interactions

01:15:04.940 | that are more heightened in girls.

01:15:06.540 | They're getting much more of it faster,

01:15:10.020 | and the consequences are no less

01:15:13.300 | and probably even more severe than they used to be,

01:15:15.100 | but it's still shunning, shaming,

01:15:17.860 | self-attack, and anxiety, depression, et cetera.

01:15:21.700 | In boys, the neural circuits that we're talking about

01:15:24.880 | are related to sex and violence.

01:15:27.780 | Those evolved over hundreds of thousands,

01:15:30.100 | not millions of years, and those are heightened.

01:15:32.940 | So we're sort of capturing the extremes

01:15:35.500 | of these neural circuit functions.

01:15:37.140 | I'm looking at this through the lens of a neurobiologist.

01:15:39.020 | - No, this is great.

01:15:39.860 | - And this is where it seems we're running into trouble

01:15:41.800 | because the iceberg below all of that,

01:15:45.580 | the portion of the iceberg below those peaks

01:15:47.700 | of behavior and interactions,

01:15:50.020 | like none of that's happening.

01:15:51.980 | There isn't the, it's all happening faster,

01:15:55.700 | it's more potent, and the consequences are more severe.

01:15:59.800 | - That's right, that's right.

01:16:00.640 | I think there's a good analogy here to junk food

01:16:02.760 | where I've heard junk food or a cheeseburger

01:16:05.080 | described as a super stimulus,

01:16:06.840 | and ice cream is a super duper stimulus.

01:16:10.360 | It's got fat, it's got sugar.

01:16:12.000 | - Right, and a cheeseburger with a milkshake,

01:16:14.520 | and the milkshake has candy in it.

01:16:16.600 | - Yeah, ice cream.

01:16:17.440 | - And then you get a toy, and they're playing music.

01:16:20.400 | I mean, that's a dopamine bath.

01:16:22.620 | - That's right.

01:16:23.460 | So if we think about life in the presence of junk food,

01:16:27.240 | if you raise your kids with junk food,

01:16:28.900 | you're gonna have all kinds of metabolic problems,

01:16:31.140 | developmental problems, obesity, all sorts of diabetes,

01:16:33.200 | all sorts of terrible things.

01:16:35.320 | Now, if you have a normal development,

01:16:37.060 | and then as an adult, you indulge in more junk food,

01:16:39.760 | it's not good for you,

01:16:42.620 | but it's very different than being raised on it.

01:16:45.380 | The developing brain, the developing body

01:16:47.620 | are much more sensitive.

01:16:48.860 | And so the way you just put it before,

01:16:50.700 | it's like these evolved motives,

01:16:53.300 | you super satisfy them

01:16:54.660 | with these overwhelming quick, easy hits.

01:16:58.020 | It may not be so bad for an adult.

01:17:00.340 | We can choose to have, we can choose to pay for sex.

01:17:04.780 | We can choose to eat a cheeseburger and a milkshake,

01:17:09.780 | but it's very important for kids.

01:17:12.500 | We have to see the genes

01:17:13.940 | don't have that much information in them,

01:17:16.060 | but they start the brain developing,

01:17:17.420 | and then the brain has to sort of find its way.

01:17:19.740 | The neurons have to find their way,

01:17:21.580 | guided by local signals, how to develop.

01:17:23.540 | And then the child has to kind of find its way

01:17:25.520 | through its culture,

01:17:27.140 | getting a sense of how do I behave here?

01:17:29.140 | And who am I?

01:17:30.100 | And how do I relate to people?

01:17:31.580 | And it's all a very delicate process

01:17:33.180 | that has to be drawn out over many, many years.

01:17:36.220 | Everything about us develops slowly,

01:17:37.780 | especially compared to other animals.

01:17:40.100 | And if you intervene in the developmental process and say,

01:17:42.580 | "Hey kid, you want the end point without the journey?

01:17:45.460 | "Here you go, take it."

01:17:47.400 | You're cutting off development.

01:17:48.940 | And that's, I think, what life,

01:17:50.660 | that's what the phone-based childhood is doing.

01:17:53.500 | - Well, here's my concern.

01:17:54.820 | There is a reality to these things

01:17:58.100 | we call critical or sensitive periods.

01:17:59.940 | - Yes, let's talk about that.

01:18:01.640 | - Critical periods implies that it's open and shut,

01:18:04.260 | and they're actually sensitive periods

01:18:05.620 | for language learning, for brain plasticity.

01:18:07.620 | And the general contour of this is passive experience,

01:18:10.980 | up until about age 25,

01:18:12.580 | dramatically shapes the maps in the brain that we have

01:18:14.980 | of social relationships, of the visual world,

01:18:17.840 | the auditory world.

01:18:18.680 | I mean, there's just so much data to support this

01:18:20.400 | in animals and humans.

01:18:22.420 | Then after about age 25,

01:18:25.180 | you can pry open the underlying neurobiological mechanisms

01:18:30.180 | for neuroplasticity, and you can rewire your brain,

01:18:32.580 | but it takes a hell of a lot of effort

01:18:34.220 | and/or pharmacology to assist,

01:18:36.060 | which is part of what the excitement

01:18:38.140 | about some of the psychedelic therapies are about.

01:18:40.860 | Because, and I'm not suggesting people just run out

01:18:43.460 | and take psychedelics, but-

01:18:44.580 | - But they can foster change.

01:18:45.860 | - They can foster change,

01:18:46.980 | and they're either neuromodulators,

01:18:48.740 | or they stimulate the massive release of neuromodulators,

01:18:50.960 | like dopamine, serotonin, mostly serotonin and dopamine,

01:18:54.260 | when we talk about psilocybin and MDMA, LSD, et cetera.

01:18:57.160 | But the plasticity needs to be directed,

01:19:00.180 | so just taking the drug doesn't do it on its own.

01:19:02.100 | Okay, so leaving that aside, what do we know for sure?

01:19:05.220 | We know that as the brain progresses from age three,

01:19:09.420 | four, five, six, seven,

01:19:10.580 | there are milestones that have to be met.

01:19:13.220 | And in general, if a kid makes it to high school age

01:19:17.340 | or college age, regardless of whether or not they go to,

01:19:20.380 | hopefully they do, and graduate high school or college,

01:19:23.480 | there's a set of milestones that they have to reach.

01:19:27.260 | The circuits are going to develop one way or another.

01:19:29.060 | The question is, what are the thresholds

01:19:32.180 | under which dopamine is released?

01:19:33.560 | Well, I would argue, and I'll go on record saying

01:19:37.060 | that if a kid watches a lot of intense,

01:19:40.220 | high-potency, violent porn,

01:19:42.820 | and that becomes his dopamine stimulus,

01:19:46.140 | well, then other stuff probably won't do it for him.

01:19:49.100 | Whereas if there's a variety of experience

01:19:51.580 | or more, let's just say subtle,

01:19:53.460 | dare I even say healthier, right, stimuli,

01:19:57.840 | then the system is, the dopamine system

01:20:00.460 | around courting and sex is more varied.

01:20:02.820 | It's more of a, at least more of a buffet

01:20:05.060 | and hopefully a healthier buffet, right?

01:20:08.360 | Again, no judgment here of different proclivities,

01:20:10.320 | but here we're talking about the wiring of neural circuits.

01:20:12.680 | Same thing with food.

01:20:13.500 | If one grows up on highly processed,

01:20:15.760 | very, very tasty food, for a while,

01:20:19.400 | fruits and vegetables in their pure form,

01:20:21.320 | meat and fish in their plain form are boring.

01:20:23.360 | It does not evoke the same reinforcing property.

01:20:26.880 | And earlier, I forgot to mention why I prefer the word

01:20:30.280 | reinforcing as opposed to reward,

01:20:31.760 | because reward evokes this idea

01:20:33.360 | of the thing being the reward.

01:20:35.960 | But the reinforcement is, reinforcement is a verb.

01:20:39.560 | And so as a verb, it brings the mind to the fact

01:20:43.880 | that these circuits are like,

01:20:45.400 | they're churning in the background there.

01:20:46.640 | It's not just about getting the thing.

01:20:48.280 | It's the underlying biology that gets you there.

01:20:52.840 | And so I think that where I'm very concerned

01:20:55.600 | is that we've now got, what, millions and millions of kids,

01:20:59.720 | boys and girls, whose neural circuits were wired up wrong.

01:21:04.740 | And now there needs to be, it seems,

01:21:06.320 | a very active process in unwiring that,

01:21:10.800 | or at least shifting those neural circuits

01:21:12.760 | towards something that's more adaptive.

01:21:14.360 | - Yeah, so before we talk about what to do if you're older,

01:21:18.280 | because I have the great good fortune

01:21:20.480 | to be sitting here with you right now,

01:21:22.500 | I'd like to ask you to help me expand

01:21:26.060 | what I say in the book.

01:21:27.320 | So you gave a description of critical periods

01:21:30.480 | where there's a hard beginning and end.

01:21:32.440 | And of sensitive periods are periods

01:21:34.540 | in which it's just a lot easier to learn something.

01:21:36.560 | And if you don't learn, so for example,

01:21:38.400 | phonology is one of the clearest cases.

01:21:40.040 | You accent, you know, if you, you know,

01:21:42.120 | when a family moves to America from somewhere else,

01:21:44.800 | if you've got two kids in the family,

01:21:46.000 | like one of my advisors at Penn in grad school,

01:21:48.560 | Henry Gleitman had a very, very heavy German accent.

01:21:52.320 | And his younger brother, two years younger,

01:21:54.000 | had no accent whatsoever because Henry was 14

01:21:57.180 | and his brother was 12 when they came to America

01:21:59.100 | from fleeing Nazi Germany.

01:22:00.540 | And so there's a sensitive period

01:22:02.800 | that kind of closes at puberty for language.

01:22:05.240 | So I talk about that in the book.

01:22:06.380 | And then I talk about more speculative sensitive period

01:22:09.080 | that I've read about, you know,

01:22:11.120 | a few people think this exists.

01:22:12.400 | And I cite a Japanese study of Japanese businessmen

01:22:16.680 | who moved to California in the '70s

01:22:18.320 | as Japanese businesses were thriving.

01:22:20.280 | They looked at when did the kids come to feel American?

01:22:23.840 | And the answer was, if they came and left before age nine,

01:22:27.840 | nothing, they went back to Japan,

01:22:29.240 | they were totally Japanese.

01:22:30.840 | If they came when the kid was 15, nothing,

01:22:34.040 | the kid was already Japanese

01:22:35.160 | but wasn't gonna ever feel American.

01:22:37.140 | If they came and spent a few years between about nine and 15

01:22:40.340 | then they go back to Japan.

01:22:42.120 | Now, especially if the kid's now 15 or 16,

01:22:44.360 | the kid now feels American and has trouble fitting back in.

01:22:47.560 | - Puberty.

01:22:48.400 | - Well, that's right.

01:22:49.220 | There's a period, it's early puberty.

01:22:51.400 | It's like just before puberty

01:22:53.440 | to sort of midway through puberty.

01:22:54.800 | Seems to be a sensitive period for culture learning

01:22:58.940 | and for identity.

01:23:00.500 | Your very deep sense of who you are

01:23:02.000 | and how you relate to people.

01:23:03.680 | So this is speculative

01:23:05.240 | but it does seem to fit a lot of interesting data.

01:23:08.200 | And the reason why I focus on this in the book,

01:23:10.620 | I decided like late in the process,

01:23:13.000 | I knew I had to talk about puberty.

01:23:14.240 | I was gonna have like a section on it.

01:23:15.080 | I realized, oh my God, this is so important.

01:23:17.200 | I did a whole chapter on puberty.

01:23:19.540 | And I talk about initiation rights all over the world.

01:23:23.760 | Adults think kids don't just turn into men and women,

01:23:28.280 | they need help.

01:23:29.600 | They need to be given a special knowledge.

01:23:31.340 | For boys, there's usually ordeals more so than for girls.

01:23:35.020 | And so I think what's going on

01:23:36.380 | is we do have this sensitive period for culture learning.

01:23:38.460 | How do you learn to become a person in your culture?

01:23:40.880 | And I was in the Boy Scouts

01:23:42.900 | and Boy Scouts was created around World War I

01:23:45.300 | as like paramilitary training.

01:23:46.540 | Like learn virtues of self-denial

01:23:49.140 | and brave, clean, loyal, trustworthy, reverent.

01:23:52.220 | I've got the order all messed up

01:23:53.380 | but it was a set of virtues.

01:23:55.520 | So would you agree or what would you say

01:23:57.580 | about sensitive periods for this really high level stuff?

01:24:00.700 | We're not talking vision or phenology

01:24:02.700 | which are fairly low level cognitive things.

01:24:04.700 | We're talking like your sense of who you are.

01:24:06.980 | What would you think about a sensitive period for that?

01:24:10.220 | - First of all, puberty is just fascinating

01:24:13.500 | and under discussed in my opinion

01:24:15.820 | as a critical developmental milestone.

01:24:17.460 | It's also the fastest rate of aging that we ever undergo.

01:24:20.820 | - Aging meaning-- - In our life span.

01:24:23.500 | In terms of change of the brain,

01:24:25.620 | in terms of rate of, I mean, there are some theories

01:24:30.260 | that the rate of puberty and the timing of onset of puberty

01:24:34.860 | actually might predict something about longevity.

01:24:37.220 | - Oh, which way?

01:24:38.060 | Early puberty is bad. - Early puberty might be bad

01:24:40.140 | but I wanna be very careful in saying that some people,

01:24:42.740 | including myself, have a very protracted puberty.

01:24:44.660 | So I hit puberty around 14

01:24:46.620 | but I didn't get facial hair until I was out of college.

01:24:49.140 | So some people develop

01:24:50.460 | the so-called secondary sexual characteristics slowly

01:24:53.060 | but I always had this voice since I was a little kid.

01:24:55.580 | So at five years old, they call me froggy.

01:24:57.900 | Now that's me and everyone goes

01:25:00.300 | through these things differently

01:25:02.300 | but puberty is the most profound brain change

01:25:04.860 | that one can undergo.

01:25:06.140 | - Tell me more about it 'cause I just keep saying like,

01:25:07.940 | well, it starts in the back of the brain

01:25:09.500 | and then it's, but be specific.

01:25:11.460 | What is happening to the brain during puberty

01:25:13.460 | that would be relevant here to a sensitive period?

01:25:15.420 | - Okay, so this goes back to the biology

01:25:17.020 | that you accurately described earlier,

01:25:18.760 | which is that while we're in utero,

01:25:20.540 | if there's a Y chromosome,

01:25:22.260 | then a bunch of genes are made

01:25:23.660 | like mullerian inhibiting hormone.

01:25:25.420 | The mullerian ducts become inhibited,

01:25:27.940 | the testes grow, then testosterone is secreted

01:25:30.580 | and testosterone and some of its derivatives

01:25:33.260 | like dihydrotestosterone organize the brain,

01:25:36.500 | quote unquote, male.

01:25:37.940 | This is dangerous language nowadays.

01:25:39.780 | - It's less dangerous now than it was two years ago.

01:25:41.500 | - Okay, well, we're not talking about gender,

01:25:43.000 | we're talking about biological sex here

01:25:44.700 | and we're not talking about the verb sex,

01:25:45.940 | we were talking about that earlier,

01:25:46.940 | we're talking about biological sex.

01:25:48.800 | So what I'm describing here is not disputed.

01:25:53.180 | So there are these organizing effects of hormones early on

01:25:56.740 | and then there are the activating effects of hormones

01:25:58.660 | that happen during puberty.

01:25:59.620 | So then puberty hits,

01:26:01.140 | the testes start secreting testosterone.

01:26:04.060 | If there are fat stores on the body, they secrete estrogen.

01:26:06.260 | Again, testosterone and estrogen working in parallel.

01:26:08.460 | And in males, a number of different brain areas,

01:26:11.720 | in particular, the hypothalamus,

01:26:13.140 | but also the forebrain and associated areas

01:26:16.660 | undergo massive plasticity and growth relating the--

01:26:20.540 | - Wait, the forebrain, the frontal lobe?

01:26:22.500 | - Right, the frontal lobe.

01:26:23.660 | Oh, so one of the most profound changes in puberty

01:26:26.700 | that happens, especially in males, but also in females,

01:26:29.740 | is that, well, we can describe the major function

01:26:31.980 | of the prefrontal cortex,

01:26:32.980 | this neural real estate right behind the forebrain.

01:26:35.060 | It has many different subdomains involved in things,

01:26:37.260 | but one of its main functions,

01:26:38.820 | this was beautifully described by the guy

01:26:40.860 | who's now the head neurosurgeon at Neuralink,

01:26:43.060 | Matt McDougall, is to say, shh,

01:26:45.660 | to the impulse driving actions

01:26:47.460 | of the hypothalamus in particular.

01:26:49.260 | Hypothalamus houses neurons for temperature regulation,

01:26:53.020 | sexual drive, hunger, aggression.

01:26:56.540 | I mean, so much so that you can go in

01:26:57.820 | and stimulate certain neurons

01:26:59.080 | in the ventromedial hypothalamus with an electrode,

01:27:01.140 | and you would go into a rage.

01:27:03.340 | Stimulate neurons also within

01:27:05.180 | the ventromedial hypothalamus, just nearby,

01:27:07.820 | and you'd want to go spend some time with your wife alone.

01:27:11.360 | Let's just put it that way.

01:27:12.260 | I mean, a remarkable specificity of the neuronal outputs

01:27:16.020 | to behavioral change and state change.

01:27:18.220 | So all of that gets set up essentially during puberty

01:27:21.700 | because the neurons of the hypothalamus

01:27:23.340 | are responsive to these hormones

01:27:24.660 | that are coming from the gonads.

01:27:25.940 | And in females, it's, yes, mainly secretion of estrogen,

01:27:29.060 | but also testosterone.

01:27:31.180 | Okay, so the brain is changing in dramatic ways,

01:27:35.140 | not the least of which is the forebrain

01:27:37.540 | is learning how to suppress impulse, okay?

01:27:40.580 | And some of that gets feedback from behaviors,

01:27:42.980 | from parenting, learning how to suppress

01:27:45.700 | from social reward or punishment.

01:27:47.540 | It doesn't get daily practice in suppressing

01:27:49.620 | if you're able to give in to all your urges.

01:27:51.700 | 'Cause like I'm finding, like when I sit at my computer,

01:27:53.940 | my rule now, I have to say to myself out loud,

01:27:56.260 | finish what you start, finish what you start.

01:27:58.620 | No, don't go check until you've done,

01:28:00.900 | you only have two more pages to read.

01:28:02.420 | Read those two pages, but I can't do it.

01:28:05.140 | - Right, well, this is the gradual creep of sort of a,

01:28:08.180 | we don't want to make it clinical,

01:28:09.700 | but an adult like ADHD like symptoms

01:28:12.600 | that we all are suffering from, right?

01:28:14.340 | There's just, it's just, we're at a buffet, right?

01:28:17.060 | - Yeah, that's right, that's a good example.

01:28:19.540 | - So that's one of the main things,

01:28:21.740 | this forebrain to hypothalamic wiring.

01:28:24.420 | The other is, and this is not trivial,

01:28:26.740 | and you mentioned the context of language learning

01:28:28.900 | and Dr. Eddie Chang, who's a neurosurgeon,

01:28:31.620 | actually chair of neurosurgery at UCSF,

01:28:33.340 | knows a lot about this and critical periods,

01:28:35.340 | is that there are hormone effects on say,

01:28:36.780 | like thickening of the vocal cords,

01:28:38.600 | which is why on average boys have deeper voices

01:28:41.820 | than girls and so forth.

01:28:43.380 | And there's a lot of feedback from those signals

01:28:45.460 | in terms of the social world,

01:28:47.220 | because now a young boy whose voice deepens,

01:28:50.260 | who's also acquiring more knowledge,

01:28:52.700 | is talking to other people about that knowledge

01:28:54.460 | and he's being treated differently

01:28:55.620 | and there's feedback in terms of his self-concept.

01:28:57.740 | And that's where it gets kind of high level abstract.

01:28:59.420 | In girls, there's feedback of sometimes it's bodily changes,

01:29:04.380 | positive or negative feedback from peers,

01:29:06.780 | other girls and or boys, but also knowledge.

01:29:10.540 | She's out there talking about, well, you know,

01:29:12.820 | like she's brilliant in math or, you know,

01:29:15.540 | brilliant in literature and getting the feedback

01:29:17.740 | and then self-knowledge starts to accumulate.

01:29:20.100 | And the location of identity in the brain is unclear.

01:29:23.540 | It's probably a distributed network.

01:29:25.260 | It's probably an emergent property

01:29:26.600 | of a lot of different things.

01:29:28.020 | So we can't really point to one area,

01:29:29.460 | but it's learning impulse control,

01:29:31.860 | reinforcement contingencies.

01:29:33.380 | On what timescale can I get what I want

01:29:35.620 | to meet certain drives?

01:29:37.360 | And to what extent should I suppress those drives?

01:29:39.840 | And, you know, traditionally it was, I think,

01:29:42.060 | through religion and parenting and social cues

01:29:45.980 | that you learn, well, if I want something,

01:29:48.100 | is it okay to do it?

01:29:49.180 | That there are consequences to eating more or less,

01:29:51.060 | consequences to be, okay, so it's super complex.

01:29:53.940 | But that all happens sometimes in a summer.

01:29:56.860 | This is what's so amazing about puberty to me, you know,

01:30:00.420 | or the acquisition of facial hair in a boy, you know,

01:30:03.500 | suddenly he's looked at differently.

01:30:05.220 | People will start projecting all sorts of futures on him,

01:30:08.380 | you know, but we do this.

01:30:09.940 | I noticed, I'm not a child psychologist, obviously,

01:30:12.140 | but as soon as my niece started drawing,

01:30:17.140 | she's going to be an artist.

01:30:18.780 | As soon as a boy starts building or a girl starts,

01:30:22.020 | you know, gets a math problem right,

01:30:23.740 | she's going to be a mathematician.

01:30:25.700 | I mean, we project all this stuff

01:30:27.180 | and there's no question that that feeds back on identity.

01:30:30.260 | But in terms of online use,

01:30:32.560 | I can't even imagine how much of this is diminished

01:30:36.220 | by only showing a specific part of ourselves.

01:30:39.060 | And I can't even imagine how much of it is exacerbated

01:30:43.660 | in terms of what we are rewarded for during puberty.

01:30:46.020 | So here's what we know in both animals and humans,

01:30:47.880 | which is that neuroplasticity,

01:30:49.700 | while it responds to punishment, is exquisitely sensitive,

01:30:54.220 | becomes sort of a runaway train for more plasticity

01:30:56.680 | under conditions of dopamine reinforcement and reward.

01:30:59.640 | So you can imagine that the girl using the filter,

01:31:02.460 | the Instagram filter for who gets rewarded

01:31:04.900 | for looking a certain way,

01:31:07.060 | maybe excessively thin or something,

01:31:08.700 | or what leads to excessively thin,

01:31:10.380 | there's no question that rewards

01:31:13.380 | drive neuroplasticity faster than punishment.

01:31:16.140 | - Make sure I understand this.

01:31:17.380 | You're saying, suppose a girl gets onto Instagram

01:31:22.380 | and she's now consuming stuff about being thin.

01:31:25.420 | And for some reason she finds this rewarding.

01:31:28.360 | Are you saying that the quick dopamine circuits

01:31:31.620 | where she posts something and she gets likes for it,

01:31:34.140 | are you saying that that actually

01:31:35.900 | will extend neuroplasticity?

01:31:37.900 | The fact that she's getting more rapid dopamine,

01:31:40.660 | that will make her more neuroplastic

01:31:42.220 | and her brain will change more?

01:31:43.220 | - Yes, it will accelerate learning

01:31:45.940 | for whatever contingency led to that, whatever led to that.

01:31:49.140 | So we know this in animals and humans,

01:31:51.540 | even though they're exquisitely sensitive,

01:31:53.980 | plasticity is exquisitely sensitive to punishment.

01:31:57.020 | You know, it only takes one shock learning

01:31:58.540 | in one corner of a cage,

01:32:00.060 | or getting sick at one particular restaurant

01:32:02.260 | that you don't wanna go back again.

01:32:04.160 | But when it comes to social dynamics,

01:32:06.820 | we know that reward leads to almost

01:32:10.860 | what I would call runaway plasticity in the circuits

01:32:13.180 | that generated the behaviors

01:32:15.740 | that led to that particular reward.

01:32:17.820 | I mean, and there are a number of experiments

01:32:20.100 | that explain this, the work of Mike Merzenich at UCSF,

01:32:23.860 | who largely worked on adult plasticity,

01:32:25.860 | but showed that when you activate dopamine release

01:32:29.760 | in the brain, fortunately, both during development,

01:32:33.060 | but also in adulthood,

01:32:34.520 | you essentially create a window of super plasticity.

01:32:37.520 | - Okay, that's amazing. - So dopamine reward,

01:32:39.520 | that neuromodulator is a window for super plasticity,

01:32:42.240 | and evolutionarily, it makes sense.

01:32:43.620 | Like, oh my goodness, there's abundance here of something.

01:32:47.440 | - Time to learn something new. - That's right.

01:32:48.800 | We've overemphasized the extent

01:32:50.440 | to which plasticity is driven by punishment,

01:32:53.460 | but the neuromodulators that allow for plasticity,

01:32:56.680 | in particular in puberty and as adults,

01:32:59.520 | are largely dopamine dependent and acetylcholine dependent,

01:33:04.360 | the acetylcholine generally increases focus,

01:33:08.280 | broadly speaking.

01:33:09.280 | I mean, it does a bunch of other things,

01:33:10.280 | controls muscular contraction, et cetera.

01:33:11.920 | But so what we're basically saying here is that

01:33:14.440 | if a kid gets a strongly reinforcing experience,

01:33:19.440 | I'd be willing to bet both arms that the neural circuits

01:33:25.280 | that help generate whatever behaviors led to that experience

01:33:29.280 | are going to be strengthened in one trial,

01:33:33.120 | to the extent that it will be very easy

01:33:34.720 | to generate those behaviors again.

01:33:37.000 | - Okay, so, okay, thank you.

01:33:38.480 | This is exactly what I wanted to know,

01:33:40.040 | to deepen the theorizing that I do in the book.

01:33:43.840 | So now this is actually the perfect time

01:33:46.280 | for us to switch over to the four main recommendations,

01:33:50.520 | because they build exactly on what you just said,

01:33:52.280 | and they help me explain why this is so important.

01:33:54.880 | So I think one reason why the book

01:33:59.360 | seems to be doing very well,

01:34:00.560 | and people seem to like it and pass it on,

01:34:02.560 | is that it's not just doom and gloom.

01:34:03.920 | It's not just, oh, we've messed up our kids,

01:34:05.520 | oh, these terrible devices.

01:34:07.360 | Rather, it's about a vision of childhood,

01:34:10.300 | which is actually beautiful.

01:34:11.400 | It's the one that most of us older people had,

01:34:13.920 | it's with play outdoors and all.

01:34:15.880 | And so my analysis in the book

01:34:21.640 | is that the reason why it got this far

01:34:23.840 | is because it's a set of collective action traps.

01:34:26.560 | Everyone, every 10-year-old needs a smartphone now,

01:34:28.720 | because every other 10-year-old has one,

01:34:30.600 | and you don't want to make your kid be alone.

01:34:33.240 | So the four recommendations I have

01:34:34.680 | are four ways of breaking out on the trap,

01:34:36.200 | but the first two are really about delaying

01:34:39.680 | and getting past this period of plasticity.

01:34:41.960 | And you really helped me see why it's so urgent

01:34:44.240 | to delay until late puberty, at least.

01:34:47.180 | So here are the four norms

01:34:48.520 | that I think can break us out of this trap.

01:34:51.000 | Norm number one, no smartphone before high school.

01:34:54.660 | You can give your kid a flip phone,

01:34:56.160 | the millennials had flip phones, they came out fine.

01:34:58.540 | - No access or no smartphone?

01:35:00.560 | - Your own, your own, you can't have your own.

01:35:03.280 | And that would even go for an iPad,

01:35:04.940 | if you give your kid an iPad and say,

01:35:06.560 | "Here, Billy, this is your iPad.

01:35:08.680 | "You can keep it in your room

01:35:10.280 | "and use it anywhere in the house.

01:35:12.280 | "And you can take it outside even,

01:35:13.420 | "although maybe no Wi-Fi, whatever."

01:35:15.800 | The point is the internet is an amazing thing,

01:35:18.920 | and you can have a computer in your living room or kitchen

01:35:22.040 | when you have young kids

01:35:22.960 | and they can do things on the computer,

01:35:24.440 | but you do not want to give your child

01:35:27.800 | the entire internet in his or her pocket,

01:35:30.680 | and you do not want the entire world

01:35:32.360 | to be able to reach your child whenever they want to.

01:35:35.520 | So it's just insane that we're giving children,

01:35:39.400 | even before puberty, a smartphone.

01:35:42.380 | Let them have a flip phone or a simple phone,

01:35:44.040 | watch something like that, that's rule number one.

01:35:46.100 | Rule number two is the most relevant

01:35:47.280 | for what we're just talking about,

01:35:48.360 | and that is no social media until 16.

01:35:51.360 | There is, I believe,

01:35:52.440 | no way to make social media safe for children.

01:35:56.240 | That is, if they're going to be entering a domain

01:35:58.840 | in which prestige is gained by having posts

01:36:01.040 | that get the most likes and followers,

01:36:03.040 | you're making them be brand managers,

01:36:04.520 | you're making them be performative.

01:36:05.880 | This is not playful.

01:36:07.320 | They're gonna be exposed to horrible, horrible things.

01:36:10.040 | I now ask young people,

01:36:11.040 | "Is there something that you saw when you were young

01:36:12.920 | "that you really regret seeing?"

01:36:14.080 | And a lot of them have an answer.

01:36:15.920 | My 21-year-old doorman just told me about The Gauntlet,

01:36:19.160 | running The Gauntlet.

01:36:20.000 | It's a series of 20 videos.

01:36:22.140 | It's a challenge.

01:36:23.280 | Can you watch these 20 videos,

01:36:24.720 | which end with a Mexican drug gang

01:36:28.060 | dismembering a person who's alive?

01:36:30.040 | It's things like that.

01:36:30.920 | Like, "Yes, I'm tough enough.

01:36:32.280 | "I can do that."

01:36:33.120 | Really?

01:36:33.960 | At what age should you,

01:36:34.860 | do you want your kids watching people being dismembered?

01:36:37.200 | 10, 11?

01:36:38.040 | Is that okay? - Oh, and those images

01:36:38.860 | are forever. - They're forever.

01:36:39.820 | That's right.

01:36:40.660 | That's right.

01:36:41.480 | I didn't even watch the video.

01:36:42.320 | You know what?

01:36:43.160 | I'm sorry I said that.

01:36:43.980 | - No, we won't provide a link.

01:36:44.820 | No, I'll say that, you know,

01:36:45.800 | trauma is defined as an adverse event

01:36:48.060 | that forever changes the way the brain responds

01:36:50.720 | in ways that make people less effective in life.

01:36:53.120 | So don't do it to yourself.

01:36:54.520 | Like, I wouldn't watch the "Dalmer" movie.

01:36:56.080 | Everyone was talking about the "Dalmer" movie.

01:36:58.000 | All I had to see was 10 seconds of the trailer

01:37:00.300 | to know I'll pay money not to see that.

01:37:02.440 | - That's right.

01:37:03.280 | - Not because I couldn't get through it.

01:37:05.120 | I'm sure I could force myself to,

01:37:06.280 | but I don't want that in my neural real estate.

01:37:08.320 | - That's right.

01:37:09.160 | - It's just, for obvious reasons.

01:37:11.880 | - So let's go back to what you said about neuroplasticity.

01:37:14.160 | So, because if it's true that puberty is a sensitive period

01:37:18.780 | for many higher level aspects of our humanity,

01:37:22.360 | such as identity, relationship skills,

01:37:24.380 | all that stuff, then you should be extra careful.

01:37:27.580 | When your kids are nine to 15 years old,

01:37:30.120 | you should be extra careful

01:37:31.520 | about what's going into their eyes and ears.

01:37:33.280 | And instead, that's when we give up all control.

01:37:35.260 | You know, when our kids are little,

01:37:36.100 | they pay attention to us.

01:37:37.520 | We read to them.

01:37:38.360 | We have a lot of control about what our kids consume

01:37:39.800 | when they're toddlers and when they're very young.

01:37:41.880 | But as they reach middle school and high school,

01:37:43.760 | they're moving away.

01:37:44.600 | They're seeking out other stuff.

01:37:46.560 | And that's exactly when we say,

01:37:47.960 | here, here's your own device.

01:37:49.680 | You wanna go down a rabbit hole of eating disorder stuff?

01:37:52.360 | You wanna go down a rabbit hole of Tourette's syndrome?

01:37:57.360 | You're gonna copy people who have these symptoms?

01:38:00.540 | So, the last thing we should be doing

01:38:02.380 | is exposing our children in this sensitive period

01:38:05.740 | to socializing information from random weirdos

01:38:08.300 | on the internet who were selected by an algorithm

01:38:10.300 | for the extremity of their behavior

01:38:12.020 | and the degree to which that extremity earned them likes,

01:38:14.980 | which makes them extra prestigious.

01:38:17.660 | So, yeah, laws that raise the age to 16 or 18,

01:38:22.100 | I think that's what we need.

01:38:23.660 | This is just not appropriate for minors.

01:38:25.660 | Even if there's some good stuff on it,

01:38:27.260 | I think it's vastly outweighed by the bad.

01:38:29.180 | So, that's the second norm.

01:38:30.460 | No social media till 16.

01:38:32.360 | The third norm is phone-free schools.

01:38:35.700 | And again, we expect kids to learn

01:38:38.900 | and learning is brain change.

01:38:40.100 | If you're learning something, you're developing a skill,

01:38:41.980 | something about your brain has changed.

01:38:44.380 | How about instead of learning math or reading

01:38:47.620 | or litter or anything else,

01:38:48.940 | how about if you just do more phone stuff?

01:38:51.660 | You just spend more time in school on TikTok.

01:38:54.260 | There was just an article in the Wall Street Journal

01:38:56.660 | about a teacher who fought against the phones

01:38:58.300 | and finally gave up and quit.

01:39:00.140 | And one of the students in his class has quoted

01:39:02.620 | that she'd come into class and she would just go on TikTok

01:39:07.700 | and that's what she would do all class long,

01:39:09.300 | is just watch TikTok in her desk.

01:39:10.900 | And like, no, you should be learning,

01:39:14.140 | not doing more TikTok in school.

01:39:16.500 | So, it's just insane that we let kids take

01:39:18.340 | the greatest distraction devices ever invented

01:39:20.500 | into the classroom with them.

01:39:21.820 | And they can't help it. - And I would argue

01:39:22.660 | that they are learning, but what they're learning

01:39:25.380 | are these rapidly reinforced dopamine loops

01:39:29.060 | that lead to diminished amounts of dopamine,

01:39:31.840 | not just in short periods of time, but very quickly,

01:39:34.920 | and that inhibit other forms of learning.

01:39:37.500 | - Yeah, that's right.

01:39:38.340 | And the ability to pay attention to a teacher,

01:39:41.300 | which is not as stimulating as what you're seeing on TikTok.

01:39:43.660 | - Yeah, there's tons of learning,

01:39:44.500 | but it's learning of all the wrong things.

01:39:45.820 | - That's right, that's right.

01:39:46.820 | So, that's the third norm, is phone-free schools.

01:39:51.380 | You have to lock up the phone in the morning,

01:39:53.180 | either in a phone lock or a yonder pouch.

01:39:55.580 | If the policy is you keep it in your pocket,

01:39:57.340 | that's not a policy, that's just a recipe

01:39:59.180 | for constant conflict with the kids

01:40:00.580 | 'cause they can't help it, they have to text.

01:40:02.020 | If anyone's texting, they have to be texting.

01:40:04.860 | And the fourth norm is the hardest.

01:40:06.180 | The fourth norm is far more independence,

01:40:09.220 | free play, and responsibility in the real world,

01:40:11.540 | because what we need to do is not just roll back

01:40:13.820 | the phone-based childhood and make them just sit

01:40:15.980 | and do nothing, what we have to do is restore

01:40:18.340 | a really fun, adventurous childhood.

01:40:20.420 | Like what you were saying, you go out on your bicycle,

01:40:22.620 | you're hanging out with your friends,

01:40:23.660 | sometimes something happens, and boy, you have memories.

01:40:27.380 | Exciting things happen, scary things happen,

01:40:29.340 | you have memories.

01:40:30.940 | And I worry about what boys today,

01:40:34.660 | I have a group of buddies, my group of friends,

01:40:36.940 | we still talk about things that happened,

01:40:39.500 | things that are amazing, things that happened

01:40:40.940 | when we were in college or after college.

01:40:42.980 | And I wonder what boys, young boys today are gonna say,

01:40:46.100 | you know, you remember Fortnite game 27,363

01:40:49.140 | where you were trapped in that elevator shaft

01:40:50.780 | and I had to shoot you out?

01:40:52.100 | No, I don't remember that one.

01:40:53.340 | You know, like, the virtual adventures

01:40:56.300 | are just not gonna cut it, our kids need adventure,

01:40:58.260 | they need independence and adventure

01:41:00.380 | where they work out the conflicts themselves.

01:41:02.460 | So if we do those four things,

01:41:04.260 | I think we can restore childhood in the real world.

01:41:07.800 | No smartphone before high school,

01:41:09.420 | no social media 'til 16, phone-free schools,

01:41:12.300 | more independence, free play and responsibility

01:41:14.180 | in the real world, those four things.

01:41:15.620 | And these are things that we can all do

01:41:17.620 | if we work together, if we do them at the same time.

01:41:20.060 | If you're the only family that's keeping your kid

01:41:22.260 | off of a smartphone 'til high school

01:41:24.140 | and off of social media 'til 16,

01:41:26.100 | you're imposing a cost on your child

01:41:27.460 | and she may be lonely and she'll say, "Mom, I'm left out."

01:41:30.300 | Now she might still thank you, as we saw last night,

01:41:32.420 | some one of the women said her daughter thanked her

01:41:34.660 | for keeping her off, but at the time it was painful for her.

01:41:37.140 | And so my hope is by spreading these norms,

01:41:40.900 | no parent will ever be in that position again

01:41:43.460 | where their kid is the only one in the class

01:41:45.660 | who doesn't have a smartphone at age 10.

01:41:48.500 | - To have this fantastic list, I say fantastic

01:41:52.980 | because it jives with all of the neurobiology

01:41:55.420 | that I'm aware of, and because it offers solutions.

01:41:59.460 | It's really based on knowing what's happened

01:42:01.300 | and it's happening with smartphone use.

01:42:04.460 | There are a bunch of don'ts, but then there's some do's,

01:42:06.500 | which, again, I'm not an expert in behavioral change,

01:42:11.020 | but I spend a fair amount of my time talking to people

01:42:13.100 | about what they can do for their health and wellbeing

01:42:15.020 | and not just the don'ts.

01:42:16.540 | And I think it's important, as I understand,

01:42:18.900 | to have replacement behaviors.

01:42:20.220 | And also I think people of all ages want to do something

01:42:24.180 | that feels good the first time and every time,

01:42:25.940 | and that's good for them.

01:42:27.020 | And then you create that reinforcement loop

01:42:28.860 | in a different direction.

01:42:30.500 | You're offering all of that in the book and here,

01:42:32.580 | and it's fabulous.

01:42:33.780 | What I wonder about and would love to help

01:42:38.700 | in any way that I can with is,

01:42:42.140 | if you recall years ago, there was this understanding

01:42:45.020 | about the first six years of life being critical.

01:42:47.020 | It was the first six years.

01:42:48.100 | And so parents kind of overstepped it a bit

01:42:50.220 | and were playing their kids Mozart all the time

01:42:51.900 | and things like that. - Waste of time.

01:42:53.100 | - But what was interesting is that they were thinking

01:42:56.020 | about critical periods and brain plasticity.

01:42:57.980 | And so as a neurobiologist who studied brain development,

01:43:00.420 | I was delighted.

01:43:03.260 | It seems to me that if there was an understanding

01:43:07.260 | that the biology and psychology and sociology

01:43:10.980 | points to the fact that there is a critical period,

01:43:13.900 | maybe not even a sensitive period,

01:43:15.460 | but a critical period in which excessive smartphone use

01:43:18.340 | of a particular type is actually leading to more suicides,

01:43:22.880 | depression, anxiety, and less learning

01:43:26.220 | and adaptive behavior in life,

01:43:29.660 | it seems to me that it should be almost like a law.

01:43:32.500 | It should be implemented at the level,

01:43:34.940 | certainly at the national level.

01:43:36.500 | What sorts of barriers do you think exist to that?

01:43:40.260 | Obviously I'm enthusiastic in joining your effort

01:43:44.020 | and I know many people listening will be as well

01:43:47.260 | to try and implement these four things.

01:43:49.380 | But what do you think it would really take

01:43:51.980 | to get people to take their children's brains

01:43:56.500 | and lives seriously?

01:43:58.180 | Because children can't be left to their own self-care

01:44:03.140 | to that degree.

01:44:03.980 | It's just unfair, right?

01:44:05.180 | I mean, it's like telling a kid in a candy shop,

01:44:06.820 | like, hey, listen, figure it out.

01:44:09.820 | There's nutritious food down the street.

01:44:11.660 | That's unfair, right?

01:44:12.820 | It's like a puppy trying to do the Westminster championship.

01:44:16.500 | It's like, it's not gonna happen.

01:44:18.140 | But this is serious stuff.

01:44:21.620 | I mean, we're talking about the future

01:44:22.540 | not just of the United States, but of the entire species.

01:44:25.900 | So what about laws?

01:44:28.700 | What about legislature?

01:44:29.600 | How does that work?

01:44:30.440 | I don't know anything about that.

01:44:31.380 | - Sure, well, first, so let's note,

01:44:34.100 | I could be wrong about this.

01:44:36.040 | It might be that the phones aren't doing this.

01:44:38.140 | Now, I think the evidence is pretty good that it is,

01:44:40.260 | but let's suppose there's a 70% chance that I'm right.

01:44:43.300 | Let's suppose there was only a 30% chance I was right.

01:44:46.420 | The consequences are so severe, we should be taking action.

01:44:49.580 | Now, what action to take?

01:44:50.960 | I was over in the UK for the book about three weeks ago

01:44:54.220 | and in the UK and the rest of Europe,

01:44:56.980 | the first thought of everyone is ban it, ban it, ban it,

01:44:59.300 | government law, ban.

01:45:01.000 | And there are times when we need that.

01:45:02.740 | Cigarette smoking under age, just ban it.

01:45:05.180 | Like you should not have kids smoking.

01:45:06.540 | Now in Britain, there was a lot of consideration

01:45:08.220 | of should we ban the sale of smartphones to kids under 14?

01:45:12.300 | And I met with the policy unit at number 10 Downing Street

01:45:17.060 | and I said, now, wait a second, guys.

01:45:20.100 | As an American, it never even occurred to me to suggest that

01:45:24.100 | you need to get norms first.

01:45:27.020 | If you pass laws that are out of phase with people's norms,

01:45:30.820 | they're gonna really hate you and they're gonna resent it.

01:45:33.140 | So let's start with a norm change first.

01:45:35.660 | And so I think that's really happening.

01:45:39.260 | So in Britain, parents are up in arms.

01:45:40.980 | They really are changing rapidly over there.

01:45:42.780 | They're a couple of months ahead of us.

01:45:44.180 | In America, I think it's happening right now.

01:45:46.380 | And so if we just develop a consensus,

01:45:49.180 | we need to see smartphones in the hands of kids

01:45:51.740 | as being like cigarettes in the hands of kids.

01:45:53.500 | Like, you know, you just don't do that.

01:45:54.860 | You don't do that.

01:45:55.940 | Of course, they can be on a laptop.

01:45:57.460 | They can be on a computer.

01:45:58.660 | They can do some things on your iPhone sometimes.

01:46:00.820 | It's not poison, but you don't want it to be habit forming.

01:46:04.620 | So I think that for keeping smartphones

01:46:08.960 | out of the hands of kids, there's no law.

01:46:10.380 | I don't want a law banning that, but we just need a norm.

01:46:14.420 | Now for raising the age to 16, we can struggle to do that.

01:46:19.420 | I'm doing that with my kids.

01:46:20.620 | I'm saying no for my daughter, no Snapchat till you're 16.

01:46:23.860 | And she's the only one who doesn't have it.

01:46:25.620 | It's painful for her, and she's 14.

01:46:27.900 | But my hope is that no parent, again,

01:46:30.960 | will be in that situation that in every school,

01:46:32.860 | a lot of the parents are gonna say no social media till 16.

01:46:36.560 | Now, of course, the laws currently state

01:46:39.260 | that you have to be 13 in order to sign a contract,

01:46:41.600 | give away your data, and make a deal with a company

01:46:43.980 | without your parents' knowledge or permission.

01:46:46.480 | But Congress passed this terrible law in 1998

01:46:50.100 | the COPA, Child Online Privacy Protection Act.

01:46:53.660 | It was supposed to set the age to 16,

01:46:55.340 | which is I think pretty reasonable,

01:46:57.100 | but it got pushed down to 13 with no enforcement.

01:47:00.860 | The law is written such that as long as the company

01:47:02.620 | doesn't absolutely know that you're under age,

01:47:05.520 | they're fine, they're not responsible.

01:47:06.780 | - 13. - They're motivated.

01:47:08.120 | The companies are now, the law motivates the companies

01:47:10.100 | to not know how old children are.

01:47:12.100 | - There's barely any forebrain at 13.

01:47:13.780 | - That's right, that's right.

01:47:14.860 | And since all you have to do,

01:47:16.100 | you just have to be old enough to lie about your age.

01:47:17.740 | If you're old enough to lie about your age,

01:47:18.840 | you can go anywhere on the internet

01:47:20.260 | because there's no enforcement.

01:47:21.780 | So I'm saying let's take the age of 13,

01:47:23.540 | which is not enforced.

01:47:24.980 | Let's require age verification, which is complicated,

01:47:27.540 | but they're working on that in Britain.

01:47:28.980 | They're mandating that.

01:47:29.860 | It's gonna happen in Britain.

01:47:30.940 | We'll work out the technical details.

01:47:32.740 | So mandate age verification and raise the age to 16.

01:47:36.860 | That's the one place where I think we really do need law

01:47:39.700 | because social media is a social trap.

01:47:42.100 | And if half the kids are on it,

01:47:44.580 | there's gonna be a lot of pressure

01:47:45.460 | on the other half to join.

01:47:46.880 | So we need to get that down to like only,

01:47:48.920 | if 5% sneak around and they find a way on, that's fine.

01:47:52.040 | So that's where we definitely need law.

01:47:55.240 | And then the play stuff, there we could use some laws.

01:47:58.440 | So I co-founded an organization called Let Grow.

01:48:00.880 | If you go to letgrow.org with Lenore Skenazy,

01:48:04.200 | we advocate for returning play to children.

01:48:06.660 | And one of the things we've done

01:48:07.700 | is we've gotten laws passed in eight states

01:48:10.000 | that say that if you let your child out to play,

01:48:14.000 | that cannot be taken as evidence of child neglect.

01:48:17.340 | Whereas at present, laws are ambiguous.

01:48:19.260 | So if you send your eight-year-old out to a store,

01:48:22.380 | and this has happened to friends of mine,

01:48:24.220 | and some nosy neighbor says, where's your mother?

01:48:26.340 | Does she know you're out here?

01:48:27.620 | And then they call 911 and the police come

01:48:30.920 | because no one has seen an eight-year-old

01:48:32.540 | unaccompanied since the '90s.

01:48:34.140 | So the police come, and once the police come,

01:48:36.500 | they're very likely to refer it to Child Protective Services.

01:48:39.140 | And once your family is in the grip

01:48:40.980 | of Child Protective Services, you've got custody battles,

01:48:43.220 | you've got supervision, you're not allowed alone with children.

01:48:44.980 | I mean, it's crazy what happens.

01:48:47.180 | So eight states have now said, no, no more of that.

01:48:49.220 | This is insane.

01:48:50.900 | So law could help to stop incentivizing helicopter parenting,

01:48:55.900 | to provide more spaces that are safe for kids to play in,

01:48:59.780 | not car zones.

01:49:01.540 | So the book has, "The Excess Generation,"

01:49:03.780 | the whole fourth part of it is suggestions for governments,

01:49:06.540 | for tech companies, for schools, and for parents.

01:49:09.260 | There's a lot we can do to restore

01:49:11.700 | a play-based childhood in the real world.

01:49:14.220 | - I realized that some of this is dependent

01:49:17.260 | on income for a household, et cetera,

01:49:19.720 | but is there any protective effect of, say, summer camp?

01:49:23.940 | - Oh, yes.

01:49:25.060 | - Or protective effect of even just after-school sport,

01:49:28.900 | where both the kids and the parents agree,

01:49:31.660 | no phones on the field.

01:49:33.620 | You know, we're not taping for every goal.

01:49:36.140 | I mean, I love seeing my friends' kids, you know,

01:49:39.460 | getting a three-pointer at a game or something like that.

01:49:41.700 | You know, I delight in that on Instagram,

01:49:43.460 | and it's wild that my friends,

01:49:45.500 | given who I know them to be growing up,

01:49:48.020 | have these kids and the stories I could tell,

01:49:50.440 | but in all seriousness, it's wonderful.

01:49:53.140 | And yet I'm thinking they're taking a video

01:49:55.820 | of their kid playing the game.

01:49:57.380 | You know, wouldn't it be wonderful

01:50:01.100 | if there were no phones at after-school sports events?

01:50:04.140 | So it's a couple of hours, three times a week,

01:50:07.720 | or once a week even, where at least these young brains

01:50:11.820 | are exposed to a different kind of reinforcement learning.

01:50:14.500 | - That's right, that's right.

01:50:16.320 | The British have a saying,

01:50:18.060 | "Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington,"

01:50:21.060 | which is a line from an old Noel Coward song.

01:50:23.660 | And it acknowledges that especially for girls,

01:50:26.540 | for girls to grow up being looked at, admired,

01:50:28.900 | and commented on about their looks,

01:50:30.200 | it's just really, really bad for them.

01:50:32.160 | But to grow up always being photographed,

01:50:34.460 | everything you do and post it online,

01:50:36.100 | it's really bad for them.

01:50:37.920 | So yes, in response to your question,

01:50:39.460 | first, summer camps are magic.

01:50:41.320 | Never send your child to a summer camp

01:50:42.960 | that doesn't ban phones,

01:50:44.260 | because this is the best chance you have for a detox.

01:50:47.400 | And I hear this story over and over again.

01:50:49.500 | You know, my girl got an iPhone when she was 11,

01:50:53.260 | she suddenly became Surly,

01:50:54.640 | no longer the sweet, funny child she was.

01:50:56.760 | I sent her to summer camp the next summer,

01:50:58.920 | and lo and behold, the girl that comes back

01:51:00.440 | is my wonderful, sweet 11-year-old.

01:51:02.160 | You know, her personality is back,

01:51:03.880 | and then she gets back on her phone

01:51:04.960 | and she becomes Surly again.

01:51:06.440 | So summer camps are the most powerful technique

01:51:09.520 | known for a detox,

01:51:11.620 | because the kid isn't being deprived.

01:51:13.760 | They are in a bunk with other kids with no phones,

01:51:17.280 | and they're joking and talking and laughing and fighting

01:51:19.640 | and doing all those healthy things.

01:51:21.440 | So summer camp is amazing.

01:51:22.760 | The other thing that the evidence shows

01:51:25.040 | is that team sports and religion,

01:51:26.600 | those two things are very, very protective.

01:51:28.400 | So I would strongly urge people

01:51:30.580 | to encourage their kids to play team sports.

01:51:32.560 | My kids run track, which is great,

01:51:34.360 | but team sports force more cooperation.

01:51:37.020 | So there's some evidence that team sports

01:51:38.520 | are even better for their mental health

01:51:40.640 | than individual sports.

01:51:42.440 | You don't want super-duper, oversupervised,

01:51:46.160 | high-pressure sports leagues.

01:51:47.560 | I mean, that's better than nothing.

01:51:48.860 | But ideally, the more they play games

01:51:50.640 | that are more intramural, informal,

01:51:52.960 | the kids are enforcing the rules,

01:51:54.840 | all of that would be better.

01:51:56.360 | Our kids are not rooted in communities anymore,

01:51:59.120 | but sports and religion are two things that do that.

01:52:02.360 | - What about music?

01:52:03.240 | I did an episode on music and the brain,

01:52:04.920 | and one of the more thrilling and interesting parts to me

01:52:09.480 | was, and I have no musical talent whatsoever,

01:52:12.280 | singing or instrumental or otherwise.

01:52:14.080 | I love listening to music, however,

01:52:15.800 | was that kids that grow up playing an instrument,

01:52:18.120 | especially cooperatively with other people in a band,

01:52:21.040 | you know, a duet or a quartet or a band,

01:52:24.660 | or orchestra or a marching band,

01:52:27.760 | there's some very impressive data

01:52:29.360 | in terms of potential for additional neuroplasticity.

01:52:33.160 | In fact, the brain-wide networks,

01:52:35.260 | the sort of patterns of connectivity are much more broad

01:52:39.120 | in kids that learned an instrument

01:52:40.440 | and played it cooperatively than those

01:52:43.320 | that try and learn an instrument later in life,

01:52:45.360 | although there's still advantages to that.

01:52:46.720 | So I wonder if that could be added to the list.

01:52:50.600 | - Yes, playing in a band or singing in a choir,

01:52:53.300 | I think definitely should be.

01:52:55.000 | For a while, I was really interested in synchrony,

01:52:57.200 | and synchrony has all these really powerful effects.

01:53:00.760 | There's a wonderful book called

01:53:02.480 | "Keeping Together in Time" by William McNeil.

01:53:04.820 | He was, either he signed up

01:53:07.200 | or he was drafted into World War II,

01:53:09.160 | training at a camp in Texas.

01:53:11.060 | They're marching up and down with wooden guns

01:53:12.840 | 'cause they don't have real guns.

01:53:14.320 | And at first it seemed stupid to him,

01:53:15.660 | but after a few days, his unit gets it.

01:53:18.040 | And when they can, they're like a unit,

01:53:21.400 | they're like a centipede, they're imperfect, you know,

01:53:24.520 | and it was like a loss of self, it was ecstatic.

01:53:27.880 | And so he goes off to World War II,

01:53:29.280 | he writes, comes back and writes about, you know,

01:53:31.880 | men in battle, he writes, oh, that's a different book,

01:53:34.000 | a different book title.

01:53:34.840 | But those sorts of being in sync, those experiences,

01:53:39.800 | we are an ultra social species,

01:53:43.000 | we're much more social than dogs or chimpanzees.

01:53:45.300 | We have this ability to keep together in time

01:53:48.040 | and do things synchronously.

01:53:49.440 | And all around the world, that's what rituals used to do.

01:53:52.400 | It's thrilling.

01:53:53.540 | And so the self-transcending experiences that you get

01:53:58.200 | from singing in a choir, from playing in a band,

01:54:00.660 | I don't have much talent either,

01:54:02.400 | but I did play in a informal rock band when I was at UVA,

01:54:05.440 | we called ourselves Pavlov's Dogs,

01:54:07.040 | we were all in the psych department.

01:54:09.300 | But the first time we got it and we were all really in sync,

01:54:12.540 | it was totally thrilling.

01:54:15.240 | So yeah, the more you give your kids,

01:54:16.580 | I have a whole section actually in chapter two of the book

01:54:19.720 | on synchrony and attunement.

01:54:22.640 | We, you know, we need to be in sync

01:54:25.040 | and that's why face-to-face interaction is so important.

01:54:27.780 | Whereas when you're communicating on Instagram

01:54:30.400 | or any social media, it's asynchronous.

01:54:32.380 | You don't have the automatic attunement.

01:54:35.700 | - Can I get a little new agey speculative?

01:54:39.280 | - All right, let's go.

01:54:40.120 | - I have a question.

01:54:41.080 | So I've heard you and others say that, you know,

01:54:46.080 | kids and probably adults nowadays are not familiar

01:54:49.600 | with what it is to be bored.

01:54:51.120 | There's always an input.

01:54:53.440 | Movie on social media, YouTube,

01:54:57.680 | there's always words streaming at us in audio or written.

01:55:01.060 | There's this concept that I love

01:55:03.260 | from the world of mindfulness,

01:55:04.920 | which used to be considered new agey,

01:55:06.220 | but now I think every academic campus

01:55:08.340 | has at least a few grants focused on meditation

01:55:11.500 | and its benefits and respiration, breath work

01:55:14.020 | and its benefits.

01:55:14.860 | So we've come a long way.

01:55:16.300 | But there's this concept of wordlessness,

01:55:19.280 | of the importance of being in states of wordlessness

01:55:21.620 | where we're not reading,

01:55:22.740 | we're not thinking in complete sentences,

01:55:24.540 | we're not taking in sensory information.

01:55:28.060 | And we, under those conditions,

01:55:30.760 | are able to actually register how we feel about things.

01:55:34.380 | So we become better tuned to sense our environment

01:55:38.080 | and input when it comes.

01:55:39.860 | And I wonder, because my experience of social media

01:55:42.840 | has been whether or not kids are on Instagram,

01:55:47.840 | Snapchat, et cetera, and they're doing it

01:55:50.660 | out of whatever compulsion, habit, addiction,

01:55:52.760 | whatever you want to call it.

01:55:54.180 | But I'm not sure it feels good to them.

01:55:56.820 | I'm not sure it does.

01:55:58.700 | I'm not sure it's like the ice cream that tastes delicious.

01:56:01.500 | I think it might start that way.

01:56:03.200 | And occasionally, you know, they're jackpots, right?

01:56:07.140 | But that in large part, adults,

01:56:10.180 | but since we're talking about kids,

01:56:11.280 | let's talk about kids in this very critical,

01:56:13.740 | sensitive period of life, are not feeling good.

01:56:18.740 | And they might not even know they're not feeling good.

01:56:20.860 | They're just compulsively,

01:56:22.340 | and there I'm using the term loosely,

01:56:24.120 | not clinically, compulsively engaging.

01:56:26.300 | And so I wonder whether or not there's some benefit

01:56:28.680 | to kids not just being bored for experiencing boredom sake,

01:56:33.440 | but learning to actually be a better sensor

01:56:37.060 | of what they like and don't like.

01:56:39.100 | Because when I talk to my niece

01:56:40.820 | or I talk to other young people now,

01:56:44.260 | they seem to be like becoming increasingly aware

01:56:47.700 | of how much some of the online stuff sucks.

01:56:50.460 | That's the language.

01:56:51.300 | They're not like, oh, it's awesome.

01:56:52.260 | Don't take it away from me.

01:56:53.420 | They're like, I don't want to miss out,

01:56:54.720 | but it's also painful to them.

01:56:56.660 | It's, I mean, it's like they're drinking

01:56:58.080 | from a fire hose of nails.

01:57:00.140 | And then every once in a while,

01:57:01.580 | there's something that tastes good.

01:57:02.840 | It's not like they're like,

01:57:04.140 | this is so cool and that's so cool.

01:57:05.380 | But of course, if you give them a really cool video

01:57:07.140 | of a animal thing or a social dynamics thing

01:57:09.860 | or a war game or whatever, they'll get excited.

01:57:12.780 | But I don't get the impression

01:57:14.060 | that they're like, this is awesome.

01:57:16.260 | It's more like, this has me by the short hairs.

01:57:19.740 | It's got me scruffed and I'm just doing it.

01:57:22.300 | And I don't know how to stop it.

01:57:24.300 | And that's certainly the way, sorry.

01:57:26.420 | Certainly the way that boys reach out,

01:57:29.660 | guys, young guys typically reach out

01:57:31.420 | about their porn addictions.

01:57:33.060 | I hear about this thousands of messages.

01:57:35.940 | Help me get over this.

01:57:37.100 | So I refer them to our episode on addiction

01:57:39.180 | by Dr. Anna Lembke from Stanford.

01:57:40.740 | - Oh, I love her.

01:57:41.580 | - Yeah, she's amazing.

01:57:42.400 | - Oh yeah, listen to that episode.

01:57:43.240 | - Yeah, she's spectacular.

01:57:44.940 | Or it's just that they're desperate.

01:57:48.700 | They're desperate.

01:57:49.540 | So I don't see it as all pleasure.

01:57:50.820 | I see it as mostly pain.

01:57:52.220 | - That's right.

01:57:53.060 | So there's a lot going on here.

01:57:54.980 | For some of them, they are addicted

01:57:58.120 | and they feel bad for the reasons

01:58:00.460 | you were talking about, dopamine overshoot.

01:58:03.000 | They feel bad when they're not doing the addictive activities

01:58:05.700 | so they are compulsively using it.

01:58:08.060 | Just like a gambler.

01:58:09.140 | If you're addicted to slot machines, your life sucks.

01:58:11.860 | You've spent all your family's money.

01:58:13.140 | You're ashamed of what happened.

01:58:14.580 | You feel terrible.

01:58:15.900 | Oh, but if I just get back into the zone

01:58:17.420 | on the slot machine, I feel good for that two or three hours.

01:58:20.700 | - That's the most dangerous addiction

01:58:21.940 | 'cause as it's been described to me,

01:58:23.300 | I'm fortunately not a gambling addict, excuse me.

01:58:26.860 | The gambler really does believe

01:58:30.820 | that the next one could change everything.

01:58:32.780 | - Right, it's gonna cause motivated reasoning.

01:58:34.820 | It's gonna cause hopefulness that is dashed.

01:58:37.500 | So for some of them, it is a kind of self-medication.

01:58:40.940 | As soon as the boys move their social lives

01:58:43.580 | onto video games and porn

01:58:45.660 | and the girls move their social lives onto social media,

01:58:47.980 | both sexes got really lonely.

01:58:51.620 | They're getting lots of cheap and easy stimulation,

01:58:53.740 | but it's not satisfying.

01:58:55.500 | So what do they do now that they're lonely and anxious?

01:58:57.780 | Well, sometimes they do more of it.

01:59:00.340 | So some of it is driven by that feedback cycle,

01:59:03.040 | that they're now uncomfortable, so they need more of it.

01:59:06.540 | But the other part is the compulsion to consume

01:59:09.220 | because everyone else says they have to keep up.

01:59:11.820 | And so my students at NYU, I asked them,

01:59:14.380 | okay, some of you are spending four, five, six hours a day

01:59:16.940 | on social media, why don't you quit?

01:59:19.220 | Oh, I can't because I have to know

01:59:21.900 | what everyone's talking about.

01:59:23.220 | I have to see the latest video.

01:59:24.380 | I have to keep up with it.

01:59:26.380 | And since I can't deal with my email and my text,

01:59:30.300 | like those two combined,

01:59:31.180 | that's more than I can handle in a day.

01:59:32.740 | I can't stand it.

01:59:34.180 | I can't imagine having five platforms in addition.

01:59:36.780 | And most, I don't know the exact number,

01:59:38.260 | but very few of my students are on a single platform.

01:59:40.140 | Most of them are on two or three regularly,

01:59:42.740 | plus email and texting and Snapchat.

01:59:46.400 | So it is kind of like, imagine food is great,

01:59:50.100 | but imagine always having to eat.

01:59:51.820 | You have to always be eating.

01:59:53.260 | Like our system can't handle that.

01:59:55.500 | Imagine a plant always in a shower,

01:59:58.140 | like it's always, like no, you need times of taking in

02:00:02.640 | and times of digesting or processing.

02:00:04.760 | One of the most valuable,

02:00:06.900 | I'll tell you two of the most valuable exercises

02:00:09.220 | that we do in my flourishing class at NYU.

02:00:11.340 | The first is a prerequisite to everything else

02:00:14.420 | is they have to regain control of their attention.

02:00:16.800 | And once they understand that they've given away

02:00:19.040 | almost all of their attention,

02:00:20.880 | any moment that isn't taken up by a teacher or something,

02:00:24.440 | it's the phone for a lot of them,

02:00:26.540 | because there's so much to process.

02:00:28.640 | They have so many direct messages, so many group texts.

02:00:31.320 | They have to always be processing,

02:00:32.500 | or they feel like they're being left behind,

02:00:35.560 | they're not participating.

02:00:36.840 | So I make them see,

02:00:37.980 | you've got to regain control of your attention.

02:00:39.440 | You've got to shut off almost all notifications.

02:00:41.800 | You leave on Uber 'cause you want Uber to interrupt you

02:00:44.520 | to say the car is three minutes away, that's good.

02:00:47.720 | But how many of the companies,

02:00:49.280 | is it that important that they interrupt you?

02:00:51.760 | Very, very few.

02:00:52.600 | So shut off almost all your notifications,

02:00:54.280 | get social media off your phone.

02:00:55.680 | If you need to use it, you can use it on your computer,

02:00:58.120 | but don't always have it set in every,

02:00:59.680 | like at NYU, in any elevator,

02:01:02.120 | as soon as students get on the elevator,

02:01:03.920 | the phone comes up because that's like 30 seconds

02:01:06.040 | and it's awkward.

02:01:06.880 | Take the phone out, scroll.

02:01:08.480 | - I would argue the professors too.

02:01:10.160 | - Yeah, that's true.

02:01:11.000 | - I'm not you, I'm not gonna spend time

02:01:13.320 | with you in an elevator yet, but.

02:01:14.880 | - No, we do, we do, but it's less.

02:01:16.720 | - Is that right?

02:01:17.560 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:01:19.140 | And then the other one that I did,

02:01:20.840 | that is really memorable,

02:01:23.320 | and I talk about this in the book, is an awe walk.

02:01:26.200 | And I got this idea, my friend, Dacher Keltner,

02:01:29.040 | he and I did research on awe long ago

02:01:30.720 | and he really continued it.

02:01:31.800 | He wrote this amazing book called "Awe".

02:01:34.560 | And there was a great episode,

02:01:36.520 | if you just Google Keltner and Tippett,

02:01:40.000 | so with Chris to Tippett, he did this great discussion.

02:01:42.120 | He talks about how he used awe walks

02:01:44.840 | to help him process his brother's early death from cancer.

02:01:48.640 | And just walking in a beautiful environment,

02:01:51.600 | walk a little more slowly than usual.

02:01:53.640 | Don't have anything in your ears.

02:01:55.860 | Don't be listening to music.

02:01:57.200 | Don't even bring your phone and just notice.

02:02:00.520 | And it's magical.

02:02:01.800 | It's amazing what happens when you do that.

02:02:04.740 | And for a lot of my students, they've never done that

02:02:07.040 | 'cause they have to take in so much stuff.

02:02:09.220 | If I'm going from point A to point B,

02:02:10.660 | of course I'm gonna be listening to a podcast

02:02:12.760 | or scrolling on my phone while I'm walking.

02:02:16.160 | And a lot of them,

02:02:17.360 | they really had these transformative experiences.

02:02:19.720 | We're right on Washington Square Park at NYU.

02:02:21.440 | We're built around Washington Square Park,

02:02:23.320 | which is a gorgeous, gorgeous park.

02:02:24.880 | It's really one of the most beautiful in America,

02:02:26.280 | certainly one of the most beautiful urban parks, I'd say.

02:02:28.920 | And the students who did their awe walk through the park,

02:02:32.280 | a lot of them had these just amazing experiences.

02:02:34.480 | It's almost like their heart is opening.

02:02:37.120 | They feel more love for people.

02:02:39.220 | Their anxiety goes down.

02:02:41.560 | And so ever since they, so I did that myself.

02:02:44.500 | When I signed it, I did it too.

02:02:45.860 | And I had that sort of experience.

02:02:47.740 | So now, I love my AirPods.

02:02:50.180 | They're amazingly convenient.

02:02:51.460 | But I listen to them a lot less now.

02:02:52.860 | Like when I'm walking in New York City,

02:02:54.420 | I often just, just nothing, just nothing.

02:02:56.340 | Just look, process, think.

02:02:58.540 | So yes, I think young people are taking in

02:03:00.500 | way too much stuff.

02:03:02.060 | Total quantity of bytes is just 10 times what it should be.

02:03:05.540 | And they don't have time to process.

02:03:06.880 | They don't have time to develop an interior life,

02:03:09.780 | to think things through.

02:03:11.540 | So we just gotta cut it way back.

02:03:13.760 | - If I step back from everything that you've said thus far

02:03:18.020 | and is in your book, it seems as if until 2012 or so,

02:03:23.020 | what was rewarded in youth set us up

02:03:27.740 | for a more adaptive adulthood.

02:03:30.260 | But now, everything that's being rewarded in youth,

02:03:33.260 | except from schools and teachers and parents,

02:03:36.860 | but what's being rewarded on a moment-to-moment basis

02:03:39.860 | for the majority of the waking life of these young people

02:03:44.860 | is maladaptive.

02:03:46.140 | - Yeah, that's right.

02:03:47.100 | - I mean, it's so stark.

02:03:48.980 | - That's right.

02:03:49.820 | Think about it this way.

02:03:51.640 | Imagine that your children are having a life

02:03:53.900 | out in the real world.

02:03:54.740 | They're having adventures.

02:03:55.560 | They're doing things.

02:03:56.400 | They're building forts in the forest.

02:03:57.580 | They're doing all sorts of things.

02:03:58.980 | And then one day, a casino opens up nearby

02:04:03.220 | and it welcomes all the kids.

02:04:04.460 | And that's where they spend all their time is in a casino.

02:04:06.580 | And they're in the care of a company

02:04:08.140 | that is trying to extract as much money as it can from them.

02:04:10.860 | And that's what they do eight or 10 hours a day.

02:04:12.980 | It's an abomination to think that a casino

02:04:14.780 | could own our children's childhood.

02:04:16.980 | What if it wasn't a casino?

02:04:17.820 | What if it was a brothel for the boys?

02:04:19.860 | Would be more of interest, let's say.

02:04:21.060 | Like, again, inconceivable that we would let that happen.

02:04:24.140 | But what we've done is we've said,

02:04:26.140 | well, what if it's Snapchat?

02:04:27.260 | What if it's Instagram?

02:04:28.340 | What if it's Facebook?

02:04:29.220 | Well, not so much Facebook.

02:04:30.460 | What if it's TikTok?

02:04:31.980 | These companies, these are some of the largest

02:04:34.380 | and most powerful companies in the world.

02:04:36.340 | They essentially own our children's childhood.

02:04:38.180 | This is where childhood is taking place

02:04:39.660 | on a few giant for-profit platforms

02:04:42.460 | that use an advertising-based business model.

02:04:44.420 | So they are motivated, like the casino, to keep them in.

02:04:47.700 | Don't have a clock.

02:04:48.740 | Don't let them see what time it is.

02:04:50.180 | Keep them in.

02:04:51.580 | Don't let them click over to a link to another site.

02:04:53.700 | Keep them in.

02:04:54.580 | We somehow have ceded our children's childhood

02:04:58.220 | to giant companies that have shown

02:05:00.780 | that they don't really care about our kids' welfare.

02:05:02.940 | They care much more about profitability

02:05:05.220 | and they care about their customers,

02:05:06.860 | who are the advertisers.

02:05:08.540 | And these companies have been granted

02:05:10.900 | a special writ from the king.

02:05:13.300 | Congress said in Section 230,

02:05:16.500 | the Communications Decency Act in 1996, I think it was,

02:05:19.740 | Congress said, oh, and nobody can sue you.

02:05:22.420 | Nobody can sue you for what you show to their kids.

02:05:25.180 | There was a reason for that,

02:05:26.300 | that you don't want AOL to be responsible

02:05:28.220 | for everything anyone posts.

02:05:29.980 | But it's been so broadly interpreted

02:05:31.620 | that so far, any attempt to regulate social media

02:05:33.900 | or any attempt to sue them is seen as like, nope, nothing.

02:05:36.660 | So, you know, it's just, we somehow slipped into this.

02:05:40.100 | And once you see it that way,

02:05:41.860 | that it's as though our kids are being raised

02:05:43.740 | in Harrah's Casino, you know,

02:05:46.180 | like, no, we've got to stop this.

02:05:48.460 | - Last year, I had the opportunity to speak

02:05:51.500 | to some of the groups at these companies

02:05:53.660 | that are assigned to controlling the wellbeing

02:05:57.620 | of the young people that use their platforms.

02:06:00.980 | And the major emphasis was on the type of content.

02:06:04.260 | So protecting them against child predators,

02:06:06.700 | protecting them against pornography.

02:06:09.180 | But as you recall, at the beginning of the conversation,

02:06:10.820 | we broke things down into variables of time,

02:06:12.780 | specific content dynamics,

02:06:14.340 | and maybe the visual interface itself.

02:06:16.780 | I think for sake of today's discussion,

02:06:18.340 | the visual interface is probably the least interesting,

02:06:20.420 | but I can just tell you looking at things up close,

02:06:22.900 | a lot not good, the eyeball lengthens,

02:06:24.820 | you become nearsighted,

02:06:26.340 | which is why spending two hours outside,

02:06:29.500 | even if on a tablet, has been shown to offset myopia

02:06:32.060 | and thousands of people, children.

02:06:35.100 | Anyway, there's that piece.

02:06:36.580 | But the time piece is interesting, right?

02:06:39.700 | Maybe limiting the total amount of time on social media.

02:06:42.660 | Obviously the content issue is,

02:06:44.540 | it only takes one exposure to a video

02:06:47.020 | of the sort that you described, the gauntlet.

02:06:49.020 | I never want to see it.

02:06:50.500 | Whatever has to be done to my phone

02:06:51.700 | so that I never see it, please let me know.

02:06:55.740 | But it just seems as if this has been allowed to,

02:07:00.700 | it's almost like an IV drip of glucose

02:07:03.460 | or something happening in the background.

02:07:04.940 | We're saying, okay, just stay rigged up

02:07:07.180 | to the glucose drip.

02:07:09.380 | And then we wonder why we're end up with,

02:07:11.340 | let's just say cognitively obese children.

02:07:14.220 | - Yeah, that's right.

02:07:15.740 | Whenever there's new media,

02:07:17.320 | the public's emphasis is always on the content.

02:07:21.460 | And so with television, the emphasis was,

02:07:23.940 | well, violence on TV, is this gonna make them violent?

02:07:27.220 | And it turns out, not really.

02:07:28.780 | Watching violence on TV doesn't really make you violent.

02:07:31.380 | And video games, these violent video games,

02:07:33.180 | these first-person shooter games,

02:07:34.260 | are these gonna make our kids into killers?

02:07:36.220 | And there was a lot of research on that.

02:07:37.300 | It looks like, no, it doesn't really do that.

02:07:39.860 | And so many researchers then say,

02:07:41.460 | see, it's just a moral panic, it's okay.

02:07:44.500 | But that's focusing on the content.

02:07:46.940 | And this was the great lesson from Marshall McLuhan

02:07:49.060 | and Neil Postman and all these great media theorists

02:07:51.060 | in the 20th century.

02:07:52.940 | McLuhan said the medium is the message.

02:07:55.420 | Don't focus so much on the content of television.

02:07:57.980 | Focus on the transformation of human life.

02:08:00.700 | When the television becomes the family hearth

02:08:03.100 | and people sit around watching it.

02:08:05.060 | Now, from our vantage point today,

02:08:07.020 | that's pretty darn social.

02:08:08.260 | They're sitting with their family members together,

02:08:11.260 | having an experience.

02:08:12.620 | But McLuhan's point was, that's the transformative thing,

02:08:16.220 | what the technology does.

02:08:17.460 | It's not the content.

02:08:18.620 | And so in the same way, life on social media,

02:08:21.740 | in some ways it's like television, you're watching stuff,

02:08:23.940 | but it's much more behaviorist.

02:08:25.460 | With television, you didn't have the constant,

02:08:27.560 | I do something, I'm rewarded.

02:08:28.860 | I do something, I'm rewarded.

02:08:30.300 | So social media is much, much more addictive

02:08:32.500 | than television ever was.

02:08:34.180 | That's one aspect of it.

02:08:36.140 | Television is not performative.

02:08:37.660 | It doesn't make you live your life in front of a camera.

02:08:41.380 | You're not in front of a camera.

02:08:42.220 | You're a passive recipient.

02:08:43.540 | Whereas social media puts our kids in front of a camera.

02:08:46.600 | So in all these ways, we get distracted.

02:08:50.800 | And this is the way, in those Senate hearings,

02:08:53.580 | it was all focused on content.

02:08:55.760 | Can't we reduce the number of beheading videos

02:08:59.620 | and the child pornography?

02:09:01.300 | Suppose we, can't we reduce that by 90%?

02:09:03.220 | Wouldn't that be great?

02:09:04.420 | Senator, we have the world-leading technology in doing this.

02:09:08.140 | Yes, that would be nice for our kids to see

02:09:10.860 | less hardcore porn and less violent videos.

02:09:13.780 | That'd be nice.

02:09:14.700 | But if we could make Instagram

02:09:16.260 | just be happy girls living beautiful lives,

02:09:19.660 | and our daughters were to watch eight hours a day of this,

02:09:22.080 | is that good for them?

02:09:23.680 | Hell no.

02:09:25.300 | So it is important to clean up the content,

02:09:27.940 | but for kids going through puberty,

02:09:29.700 | I think the only real answer is just delay.

02:09:31.820 | Just don't let them do that.

02:09:33.220 | - How much of the issue here is modeling

02:09:35.720 | of what adults are doing and how terrible are,

02:09:40.720 | or good are adults at modulating their behavior?

02:09:45.440 | - I say modulating because, you know,

02:09:48.040 | I see a lot of parents videotaping everything

02:09:51.720 | that they're, you know, on the phone all the time,

02:09:54.600 | in line at the store while their kids are around, you know?

02:09:56.760 | And one of the reasons I think parents like devices so much

02:10:00.080 | is that it's a terrific low cost, zero cost babysitter.

02:10:04.240 | It allows them to then go be on their phones

02:10:06.260 | or do other things.

02:10:07.400 | - Yeah.

02:10:08.240 | So young children are sometimes copying their parents.

02:10:11.640 | Young children are looking for things to copy.

02:10:14.360 | And, you know, and so, I mean,

02:10:16.160 | I've got some slides in my regular book lecture

02:10:18.700 | of toy iPhones that we give to toddlers

02:10:22.040 | so that they can be just like mommy and daddy.

02:10:24.840 | For little kids, I think it might matter.

02:10:27.080 | For teenagers, you know, I'm very often asked that question

02:10:29.640 | because, and I think it's because parents,

02:10:31.480 | they feel a little guilty.

02:10:32.320 | Like they know that they're modeling bad behavior

02:10:34.040 | and they're worried, like,

02:10:34.860 | is this setting up my kid for doing that?

02:10:37.200 | But I can't say for sure,

02:10:38.040 | but my intuition as a social psychologist

02:10:39.780 | is not really, not very much.

02:10:41.340 | And the reason is because, you know,

02:10:43.560 | while your kids once looked up to you

02:10:44.860 | and they once copied you,

02:10:45.920 | like by the time they're 12, 13, 14, you know,

02:10:48.560 | if I pick up, if I start reading, you know,

02:10:50.600 | The Economist magazine,

02:10:51.980 | or if I start knitting or whatever,

02:10:54.340 | that's not gonna make my 14 year old daughter

02:10:55.960 | wanna do those things because I'm doing them.

02:10:58.440 | She is completely focused

02:11:00.820 | on what her peer group thinks of her.

02:11:02.920 | Of course she is.

02:11:03.760 | That's the nature of teenage where they're moving away

02:11:05.680 | from the family and they're trying to make their way

02:11:07.700 | on their own in a peer group.

02:11:08.800 | Lisa DeMora is great on these issues.

02:11:13.160 | So I don't, you know,

02:11:14.520 | it would be nice if parents could improve

02:11:16.320 | their phone habits and boy, phones at the table,

02:11:19.520 | that's an important place.

02:11:20.620 | That is a very, very important place.

02:11:22.160 | Get across the idea that when we're eating,

02:11:25.040 | we're with each other, we're looking at each other

02:11:27.920 | and we're tasting our food, we're experiencing the food.

02:11:29.920 | So actually they're modeling collective behaviors

02:11:33.760 | like a meal.

02:11:34.960 | I think that is actually very, very valuable.

02:11:37.080 | But if it's just that, you know,

02:11:38.320 | you're often multitasking, you're often on your phone.

02:11:40.680 | Yeah, you know, be nice if you didn't,

02:11:42.200 | but that's not gonna push your kid

02:11:43.920 | over into phone addiction.

02:11:45.520 | - So the list of four things that you provided are terrific.

02:11:48.760 | They are somewhat enforcement focused.

02:11:53.240 | As I recall, and maybe this is not true,

02:11:55.040 | but as I recall, one of the ways that media

02:11:58.320 | was effective in getting kids to stop smoking

02:12:04.600 | was to pit them against these wealthy old white men

02:12:09.440 | who were in rooms filled with smoke,

02:12:11.520 | writhing their hands together,

02:12:12.840 | cackling about the amount of money they were making,

02:12:14.860 | stealing the health of young people.

02:12:17.980 | Whereas telling teenagers that smoking was bad for them

02:12:20.720 | did very little.

02:12:21.940 | So is there a way to create a rebellion of sorts

02:12:25.060 | against the smartphone?

02:12:26.720 | Because kids love to rebel, teens love to rebel.

02:12:31.160 | - First of all, they don't anymore.

02:12:32.920 | - Oh no, really?

02:12:35.200 | - Well, they're just much more passive.

02:12:37.360 | I don't think they're authority focused.

02:12:40.320 | They're not as rebellious as they used to be.

02:12:42.800 | - That's disappointing.

02:12:44.120 | - Now, of course, now we'd have to pit them

02:12:45.460 | against a group of young white men

02:12:47.200 | who are owning the social media companies, I suppose.

02:12:50.440 | But this addiction is very different

02:12:53.400 | from tobacco or anything else.

02:12:54.720 | Tobacco is biologically addictive.

02:12:56.540 | And you can't get an entire high school

02:13:00.440 | addicted biologically, at least it didn't happen.

02:13:04.340 | In the peak year of smoking, it was 1997,

02:13:06.720 | 37% of American high school students smoked.

02:13:09.440 | Two thirds didn't.

02:13:11.180 | But with social media, you couldn't have that.

02:13:13.520 | You couldn't have just a third.

02:13:14.960 | It's either none or everybody, and it's everybody.

02:13:18.080 | And it happens in middle school.

02:13:19.640 | So the dynamics of a social media addiction,

02:13:23.000 | it's a social addiction more than a biochemical

02:13:26.600 | like nicotine or cocaine type addiction.

02:13:28.940 | So I think the way to break out isn't,

02:13:32.080 | hey, these people are exploiting you.

02:13:33.800 | That might be helpful, we should definitely study that.

02:13:36.200 | I think the way to break out is, okay, look,

02:13:38.600 | you guys actually, you can see what this is doing to you.

02:13:41.320 | You mostly agree that this is wasting your time.

02:13:43.900 | It's garbage.

02:13:45.160 | You want a way out, but you just feel like you can't.

02:13:48.120 | There's such resignation.

02:13:49.560 | But look, the cool kids over there,

02:13:52.680 | they have flip phones and they're out

02:13:55.040 | like every day after school.

02:13:56.640 | They're like, you know, they're doing stuff.

02:13:58.760 | They're down at, you know, they're in the mall,

02:14:00.440 | they're getting pizza, they're, you know,

02:14:02.920 | building a fort, you know, whatever, depending on the age.

02:14:06.020 | So I think the way out is to give kids an exciting childhood.

02:14:10.200 | Kids are so lonely now

02:14:11.800 | and they don't have much in the way of adventure.

02:14:14.280 | They don't have much in the way of thrills.

02:14:16.760 | You know, I live in New York City.

02:14:19.640 | You know, I would like bring my kids out to Coney Island

02:14:22.320 | when they were, you know, nine, 10 years old,

02:14:24.320 | bring them out and then I would just say,

02:14:25.280 | I'm just gonna sit here.

02:14:26.120 | You guys run around, you guys go have fun.

02:14:27.820 | Like, I'm not gonna be with you.

02:14:29.320 | You know, yeah, there's a chance you'll get kidnapped

02:14:31.520 | or struck by lightning, although lightning is more likely.

02:14:35.020 | So, and then it, you know, and then it got,

02:14:36.480 | once they were in, you know, in more, you know,

02:14:37.880 | like around like 13,

02:14:39.800 | now they can actually take the subway out

02:14:41.160 | to Coney Island with a friend.

02:14:42.640 | So that's cool.

02:14:45.220 | I think that's the way to do it.

02:14:46.740 | Don't make it like,

02:14:47.760 | we're gonna take away all this stuff from you.

02:14:49.560 | Ha ha ha, now you have nothing to do.

02:14:52.080 | Make it more like, I'm not trying to hurt you here.

02:14:55.120 | I want you to have fun the way I did

02:14:57.400 | and the way your grandparents did.

02:14:58.860 | We all had human childhoods full of adventure.

02:15:01.520 | I want that for you.

02:15:03.040 | And I think most Gen Z will embrace that.

02:15:05.880 | They just don't wanna do it alone.

02:15:07.780 | So the key is, if you're listening to this podcast,

02:15:10.920 | and if you have kids that are in elementary

02:15:12.800 | and middle school, be sure to talk with the parents

02:15:15.560 | of your kids' friends.

02:15:17.000 | So if you wanna make some changes in your phone policies,

02:15:19.960 | if four families do it together,

02:15:22.120 | now your kid's not gonna feel left out or deprived.

02:15:24.360 | And be sure to give them something.

02:15:26.800 | Give them, say, here, you know what?

02:15:28.400 | Every, how about every Friday,

02:15:29.920 | let's call it Free Play Friday.

02:15:32.040 | No piano lessons on Friday, no nothing on Friday.

02:15:34.600 | Fridays, you all get together.

02:15:35.880 | You can start at anyone's house, go out, do what you want.

02:15:38.480 | We'll even, you know, we'll give you more allowance

02:15:40.480 | or we'll give you money to spend, but go have experiences.

02:15:43.980 | Then it's fun, it's not deprivation.

02:15:46.700 | - I love the trust in kids to sort things out

02:15:51.200 | and to be safe enough.

02:15:52.760 | At least the statistics say that they're more likely

02:15:56.220 | to thrive under those conditions than to be kidnapped

02:15:58.640 | or have something terrible happen.

02:16:00.200 | I like it also because it merges your previous book,

02:16:03.440 | "Coddling of the American Mind" with the current book,

02:16:07.040 | "The Anxious Generation."

02:16:08.560 | I have a bunch of other questions,

02:16:12.180 | but I think the most important one at this stage

02:16:14.440 | is how optimistic or pessimistic are you

02:16:18.460 | about the changes that you're hoping for?

02:16:21.720 | And then the second question is how can we all help?

02:16:24.160 | I mean, you mentioned these four action items,

02:16:26.200 | no smartphone before high school,

02:16:27.960 | no social media until 16, phone-free schools,

02:16:30.880 | and to foster this exploration and independence.

02:16:33.800 | And we will propagate those four things

02:16:36.920 | as far and wide as we can.

02:16:38.580 | But I think everybody, parents and kids, I'm sure as well,

02:16:42.440 | want to know, like, what can we do?

02:16:44.840 | So optimism scale, zero being like you're doing this

02:16:49.160 | as a last ditch effort, but it's hopeless.

02:16:51.460 | Well, you wouldn't be here if you thought it was hopeless.

02:16:52.920 | So one to 10, one being just a sliver of hope,

02:16:55.520 | 10 being, you know, we got this,

02:16:57.360 | same way we got other stuff in the past.

02:16:59.760 | - Yeah, I'm a 10.

02:17:00.600 | - You're a 10, awesome. - 10, 10.0, yeah.

02:17:02.360 | Yeah, and the reason is because

02:17:04.840 | I've never seen a situation like this.

02:17:06.520 | I've been involved in a lot of efforts to change attitudes.

02:17:09.080 | I ran a gun control group in college when I was 20,

02:17:13.040 | and that was impossible.

02:17:14.400 | And I've been involved in non-political campaigns.

02:17:16.640 | You're trying to persuade people,

02:17:18.360 | and you can't get their attention,

02:17:20.000 | and how do you message them?

02:17:21.680 | And it's really hard.

02:17:23.080 | That's the way anybody involved in social change

02:17:24.920 | has experienced that, that's most things.

02:17:27.000 | This is like, you drop a spark and everything goes,

02:17:29.920 | everything, it just goes everywhere.

02:17:31.720 | So all over the world, all over the developed world,

02:17:35.560 | family life has become a fight over screen time.

02:17:38.560 | Almost every parent of a kid over two recognizes this.

02:17:42.040 | We all hate it, we're sick of it,

02:17:43.720 | and we've just been confused.

02:17:45.320 | The only real pushback I've gotten, I've gotten two guys.

02:17:47.320 | One is I am in a normal academic debate

02:17:49.240 | with about seven or eight researchers

02:17:51.080 | who say there's not evidence of causality.

02:17:52.840 | I believe there is, we're marshalling evidence

02:17:56.640 | against each other.

02:17:57.720 | But by and large, almost everyone seems persuaded

02:18:01.840 | because they already knew this,

02:18:03.160 | they already thought it, they already saw it.

02:18:04.880 | And what I've done with the book

02:18:06.120 | is just given them some psychological concepts

02:18:08.880 | and some clear labels and a way out.

02:18:11.920 | And I'm so confident in part

02:18:14.040 | because the revolution started in Britain in February.

02:18:17.440 | Yes, they drew on some of my older articles,

02:18:19.040 | but this was before my book came out.

02:18:21.680 | Parents are self-organizing.

02:18:23.360 | In Britain, the government is acting.

02:18:24.800 | They actually have a functioning legislature in Britain

02:18:27.080 | and the government has led efforts to pass laws as well.

02:18:31.600 | So I know it's working in Britain.

02:18:33.800 | And I see it happening here now at a massive scale.

02:18:38.040 | The point of the book is collective action.

02:18:40.560 | And parents all over the country are heeding that.

02:18:42.880 | They're forming reading groups.

02:18:44.280 | They're going in in a group to talk with the principal.

02:18:46.880 | The principals and teachers, they all hate the phones.

02:18:49.360 | It makes their lives impossible.

02:18:50.640 | They want a phone-free school,

02:18:52.440 | but they were afraid of the few parents

02:18:54.160 | who freak out if they can't text their child during class.

02:18:58.000 | If the schools are overwhelmed by parents saying,

02:18:59.960 | "Please lock up the phones.

02:19:01.600 | "Please let my child have six hours a day

02:19:03.840 | "when she can listen to the teacher

02:19:05.200 | "instead of do more TikTok."

02:19:06.760 | So I'm very, very confident

02:19:10.920 | that childhood is going to look very different

02:19:13.040 | within two years.

02:19:14.680 | I don't mean that it won't be seven-year-olds on phones,

02:19:18.480 | but in the same way that we flipped on smoking,

02:19:20.880 | we used to think it was okay to smoke in an airplane.

02:19:23.360 | We used to think it was okay to smoke in restaurants.

02:19:25.000 | It was okay to smoke everywhere, we thought.

02:19:27.400 | And now we don't.

02:19:28.240 | We don't think that anymore.

02:19:29.200 | That took a long time to change, but it did change.

02:19:32.160 | I think because of the public disgust

02:19:34.960 | with seeing children just spending their childhood

02:19:38.280 | looking at a screen,

02:19:39.360 | and because the public disgust with what we've heard

02:19:41.640 | about Meta and TikTok and a few of the other companies,

02:19:45.320 | I think within two years, it's going to be widespread.

02:19:47.760 | It'll be a norm that you just don't give kids

02:19:50.800 | social media in particular.

02:19:52.120 | I mean, iPads are complicated

02:19:53.560 | 'cause you want kids to watch movies is okay.

02:19:56.240 | Stories are good.

02:19:57.080 | I'm not saying the iPad is a terrible thing,

02:19:59.280 | but our attitudes about this are going to change radically.

02:20:02.760 | And I think the great majority of schools

02:20:05.320 | are going to be phone-free within two years.

02:20:07.520 | And we're going to see,

02:20:08.840 | we're already seeing more kids outside.

02:20:12.440 | Every day I get emails from grateful parents saying,

02:20:16.360 | because of your book, I mean, my six-year-old,

02:20:18.720 | he wanted to ride his bicycle

02:20:19.960 | down to the end of our cul-de-sac.

02:20:21.360 | He wanted to ride down, circle, and come back.

02:20:24.120 | And I never would let him because I was afraid

02:20:25.840 | that what would the neighbors say?

02:20:27.880 | But once I read your book, I decided to let him.

02:20:30.320 | And he was so ecstatic.

02:20:31.440 | He kept doing it and doing it.

02:20:32.720 | And now he's going further

02:20:33.800 | and he rides to his friends' houses.

02:20:35.600 | So people in her neighborhood,

02:20:37.200 | now they're seeing a kid on a bicycle.

02:20:39.560 | And if suppose there were 10 kids doing it,

02:20:41.680 | well, now it's normal.

02:20:43.400 | So we can renormalize human childhood in the real world

02:20:48.240 | where our kids get the chance to have independent adventures

02:20:52.200 | and learn how to be self-supervising adults ultimately.

02:20:56.280 | We can do this.

02:20:57.560 | - Okay, so you're a 10 out of 10 on the optimism scale.

02:21:01.480 | What can we do to facilitate

02:21:05.000 | and accelerate this whole process?

02:21:07.840 | - So once we understand

02:21:09.560 | that this is a collective action problem,

02:21:11.640 | that we're all stuck in this

02:21:12.800 | because everyone else is stuck

02:21:14.240 | and we can't leave if we're the only ones.

02:21:16.680 | Once we understand that,

02:21:17.960 | now you see the key is collective action.

02:21:20.720 | So talk to your friends about this.

02:21:23.760 | Talk about the book with them.

02:21:24.920 | You don't have to buy the book.

02:21:25.840 | Just go to anxiousgeneration.com.

02:21:27.840 | We have all kinds of resources.

02:21:29.480 | I have talks where I've summarized the book in videos.

02:21:33.020 | Talk about it with your friends.

02:21:36.160 | Talk about it with your family.

02:21:38.240 | Talk about it with other parents at the school.

02:21:40.200 | If you're on social media,

02:21:41.380 | social media is great for adults

02:21:43.160 | who want to pursue projects.

02:21:45.120 | I just don't think it's good for kids

02:21:47.520 | to be pursued by the social media companies.

02:21:49.540 | But if you're on Instagram in particular,

02:21:51.640 | that's where a lot of parents are, especially mothers.

02:21:54.440 | Talk about these issues.

02:21:55.520 | Say you're gonna let your kid

02:21:56.820 | have some free-range childhood.

02:21:58.100 | You're gonna try to do these four norms.

02:22:00.640 | And then if you're able,

02:22:01.560 | I hope that you'll support the projects.

02:22:04.440 | If you go to anxiousgeneration.com,

02:22:06.020 | there's a donate button.

02:22:07.400 | NYU has it set up so that people can donate

02:22:09.920 | into a research account from me,

02:22:11.160 | and that's what I use to pay my small staff.

02:22:14.080 | I have about four or five people working for me,

02:22:15.680 | and I hope to grow that to 10.

02:22:17.480 | I hope people will donate to me at anxiousgeneration.com.

02:22:20.840 | Or to Let Grow, this wonderful organization

02:22:23.720 | that advocates for giving playback

02:22:25.720 | and independence back to kids, letgrow.org.

02:22:28.800 | And if you know influential people,

02:22:31.600 | if you know state legislators,

02:22:34.160 | not a lot of, there is some,

02:22:35.440 | oh, and in Congress, there is a very important bill,

02:22:37.920 | COSA, the Kids' Online Safety Act.

02:22:39.920 | Contact your legislators about that.

02:22:41.640 | Say you support COSA.

02:22:43.040 | It could be coming up for a vote very, very soon.

02:22:45.080 | This is the one piece

02:22:45.920 | that really could get through the US Congress.

02:22:47.880 | Beyond the Congress, a lot of states are acting,

02:22:49.740 | which is very, very exciting.

02:22:51.120 | So make your views known to your state legislators

02:22:53.040 | if you know them,

02:22:53.880 | or the mayor or governor if you know them.

02:22:56.520 | This is a collective action trap.

02:22:58.560 | The only way out is together.

02:23:00.520 | So if we act together, we can break this.

02:23:02.840 | - Terrific, and we'll put links to all of those things

02:23:05.440 | you just mentioned in the show note captions.

02:23:08.040 | Jonathan, you're bringing the humanity back.

02:23:12.440 | It's remarkable.

02:23:13.920 | And as a fellow academic, I have to say,

02:23:17.720 | your depth of scholarship in terms of developing

02:23:22.400 | and researching these ideas,

02:23:24.240 | but also the vigor and the mission that you have

02:23:28.920 | around doing good and making sure that it happens soon

02:23:31.880 | as opposed to waiting another 10 years

02:23:33.600 | and seeing just how bad this can get is really inspiring.

02:23:38.600 | I feel it.

02:23:39.880 | I know for sure that people listening and watching feel it.

02:23:43.040 | And so I want to thank you for doing this work.

02:23:46.600 | Again, I loved "Coddling in the American Mind"

02:23:48.760 | because it just woke me up

02:23:49.920 | to how much things had changed and were changing.

02:23:52.960 | And it's such an important book.

02:23:54.280 | And "The Anxious Generation" is truly an important book.

02:23:56.940 | And I don't say that lightly.

02:23:58.880 | It's mission-driven, goal-driven,

02:24:01.040 | and it has actionable items

02:24:02.440 | that I'm certain many people listening to this

02:24:04.680 | are going to partake in.

02:24:07.400 | So on behalf of the listeners and viewers and also myself,

02:24:11.640 | but also the positive change to come,

02:24:14.120 | I just want to say thank you

02:24:15.200 | for taking the time out of your very busy schedule.

02:24:17.620 | You're still a professor.

02:24:18.560 | You're also a public-facing health science educator.

02:24:21.800 | - Yeah, like you, yeah.

02:24:23.000 | - Yeah, so I feel a kinship there.

02:24:25.660 | For coming here and speaking with us today,

02:24:27.560 | and we'll provide links to the books

02:24:29.600 | and to these other resources in the show note captions.

02:24:32.360 | And we'd love to have you back again,

02:24:34.960 | hopefully in the not-too-distant future,

02:24:36.720 | so that we can review all the progress

02:24:38.180 | that you've stimulated.

02:24:39.400 | So thank you so much.

02:24:40.400 | - Well, thanks so much, Andrew.

02:24:41.600 | And thanks for all the work that you do

02:24:43.040 | to make science cool and interesting.

02:24:46.360 | So I really appreciate your work,

02:24:47.680 | and I'm very grateful to you for having me on.

02:24:50.840 | - It's been a pleasure.

02:24:51.680 | Thank you.

02:24:52.880 | Thank you for joining me

02:24:53.720 | for today's discussion with Dr. Jonathan Haidt.

02:24:56.220 | To learn more about and/or to support Dr. Haidt's work,

02:24:59.200 | and to find a link to his important new book,

02:25:01.880 | "The Anxious Generation,

02:25:03.300 | "How the Great Rewiring of Childhood

02:25:05.280 | "Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,"

02:25:07.920 | please see the links in the show note captions.

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02:26:43.320 | for today's discussion with Dr. Jonathan Haidt.

02:26:46.180 | And last, but certainly not least,

02:26:48.660 | thank you for your interest in science.

02:26:50.620 | [upbeat music]

02:26:53.200 | (upbeat music)

Dr. Jonathan Haidt: How Smartphones & Social Media Impact Mental Health & the Realistic Solutions

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