This is your kid on smartphones

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0:01:52 The kids are not all right.
0:01:56 The younger one seems to be living in a world of tension and great anxiety.
0:02:00 Are we finding rock music the new pornography?
0:02:04 I think every generation says something like this at some point in their evolution into
0:02:10 oldness.
0:02:11 School officials in many cities report high school students are forming satanic groups.
0:02:16 These video games send the wrong message and we live in a completely different day and
0:02:20 age.
0:02:21 They are not all right and they haven’t been for quite some time.
0:02:24 So when you hear it, it’s totally understandable if the response is an eye roll.
0:02:32 But, and hear me out for a second, what if the kids actually aren’t all right?
0:02:44 This is bound to be the case every now and again and when it is, we really should try
0:02:49 to figure out what’s wrong.
0:02:54 There is quite a bit of data piling up on the mental health of kids and the picture
0:02:59 is pretty disturbing.
0:03:02 Whether you look at anxiety or depression or suicide or even quality of friendships,
0:03:09 the trends are not good.
0:03:12 So what’s behind that and how concerned should we be?
0:03:20 I’m Sean Elling and this is the Gray Area.
0:03:33 Today’s guest is Jonathan Haidt.
0:03:35 He’s a professor at NYU and the author of a best-selling new book called The Anxious
0:03:41 Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Children is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
0:03:48 Haidt has a pretty straightforward answer to that question about what’s behind all these
0:03:53 negative trends and the answer is smartphones and social media.
0:04:00 He says these technologies have transformed the lives of adolescents in all kinds of
0:04:05 ways, most of them bad.
0:04:08 And if you’re looking for a master variable to explain the trends in mental health, this
0:04:14 is where we should look.
0:04:17 The book has provoked a ton of commentary and criticism, which isn’t all that surprising.
0:04:23 This is a huge topic of importance for basically anyone with children and anyone who might
0:04:29 have children.
0:04:32 So I invited Haidt on the show to talk through his research and some of the responses to
0:04:46 it.
0:04:47 Jonathan Haidt, welcome to the show.
0:04:48 Sean Elling, it’s always great to talk to you.
0:04:49 Nice to be on the podcast now.
0:04:50 We’ve talked before, but I don’t think you’ve been on the pod, right?
0:04:51 I think I must have interviewed you a while back.
0:04:52 No, that’s right.
0:04:53 In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you.
0:04:54 I didn’t know what you looked like until we just logged on.
0:04:55 You didn’t know how lucky you were.
0:04:58 Okay.
0:04:59 Before we really get into this, can we just get some clarity on the basic picture of mental
0:05:05 health for young people right now?
0:05:07 Because the data is not encouraging, so just lay this out for us as best you can to get
0:05:14 us going.
0:05:15 Sure.
0:05:16 So there’ve always been concerns about youth mental health, and there is a slow rise since
0:05:20 around the 1950s in depression and anxiety.
0:05:23 As we get wealthier, as we get further away from difficult times, people get more fragile.
0:05:27 But there was a big spike up on suicides and other things in the ’70s and ’80s.
0:05:32 And then that receded.
0:05:33 And actually, if we go into the ’90s and the 2000s, the millennials, when they were teenagers,
0:05:38 they actually had better mental health than Gen X.
0:05:41 So things are actually pretty stable from the late ’90s through 2010.
0:05:45 Levels of depression, anxiety, self-harm.
0:05:48 Suicide is dropping early in that period.
0:05:49 It begins to rise a little around 2008, ’09.
0:05:52 But then all of a sudden, right around 2012, 2013, you get hockey stick shapes in most of
0:05:57 the graphs.
0:05:58 Anything to do with internalizing disorders.
0:05:59 So that’s anxiety, depression, self-harm, especially.
0:06:03 What you get is hockey stick shapes for the girls.
0:06:05 The girls is very, very sudden.
0:06:07 There’s no sign of a crisis in 2011.
0:06:09 And by 2014, 2015, everything is going up that’s related to depression, anxiety, self-harm.
0:06:13 And it’s not just that they say that they’re depressed.
0:06:15 It’s actual emergency room, psychiatric emergency room visits.
0:06:18 And it’s not just us.
0:06:19 It happens exactly the same way at the same time in all the English-speaking countries.
0:06:24 Suicide is up almost 50% overall from 2010 to 2019.
0:06:28 So much of the rise is before COVID.
0:06:30 COVID is small, very small, compared to whatever happened in the early 2010s.
0:06:35 Even major depression symptoms in relative terms have jumped something like 150% for boys
0:06:42 and girls.
0:06:43 Is there any historical precedent for a spike in that amount of time?
0:06:48 No, no.
0:06:49 I mean, we don’t have data going back to the 19th century on this.
0:06:52 So it’s conceivable that, you know, bubonic plague, I’m sure, was very, very bad.
0:06:57 But depression isn’t caused because bad things are happening.
0:07:01 When a country is attacked, depression and suicide go down.
0:07:05 People have a much stronger sense of collective.
0:07:06 They come together.
0:07:07 Their lives have meaning.
0:07:09 It actually makes you want to be an activist, and that gives you a sense of meaning and
0:07:12 purpose.
0:07:14 There are a lot of things that are glaring about the data.
0:07:18 One of the most obvious things that jumps out at anyone looking at it is that this
0:07:22 seems to have been much worse for girls, young girls, than it has been for boys.
0:07:26 I mean, the rates of self-harm among young adolescent girls have nearly tripled.
0:07:32 From 2010 to 2020, what’s going on there?
0:07:35 Why has this been so disproportionately difficult for young girls?
0:07:40 Yes.
0:07:41 Increases are generally larger for girls.
0:07:43 I’ve been in a debate with the skeptics since 2019 all over the depression anxiety data,
0:07:49 and there there are very clear links for girls between ours on social media and their mental
0:07:54 health.
0:07:55 Very clear links.
0:07:56 They’re not huge in correlational terms, but they’re quite clear and consistent as something
0:08:00 is going on.
0:08:01 For girls in social media, there are many reasons why it hits them more.
0:08:05 The main one is you just look at what boys and girls want to do when you give them freedom.
0:08:09 Boys want to get together and form teams to compete.
0:08:12 So they’ll do that on the playground, but if you can do it online, especially this online
0:08:17 video game, online multiplayer games, they’re amazing.
0:08:19 So the boys rush home after school.
0:08:21 They sit alone in their room in order to play with their friends.
0:08:24 They’re happy.
0:08:25 They enjoy that.
0:08:26 But then in the long run, that leads them to not develop face-to-face friendships, not
0:08:30 develop social skills.
0:08:32 So the boy’s story is about disengaging from the real world, disengaging from people, and
0:08:36 just really immersing themselves in video games and pornography.
0:08:39 Girls in their hand are more interested in social space.
0:08:43 They want to know who is mad at who, who’s friends with who, who’s dating whom.
0:08:48 So social media promises all that and it promises connection, but it doesn’t deliver it.
0:08:54 What girls need is a few close friends.
0:08:56 To make it through puberty, if a girl has two or three close friends, she’s probably going
0:08:59 to be okay.
0:09:00 And if she has a hundred shallow friends and no close friends, she’s probably going to
0:09:04 be depressed and anxious.
0:09:06 There’s also the aggression aspect.
0:09:08 Girls do relational aggression, boys do physical aggression, and social media, especially those
0:09:12 apps that allow anonymous comments.
0:09:14 Those are just devastating.
0:09:16 Girls use them to ruin each other’s relationships and reputations.
0:09:20 Do we have a good sense of what percentage of young people are actually using smartphones
0:09:26 and for how many hours a day?
0:09:28 What are we talking about here?
0:09:30 So in 2010, very few had a smartphone.
0:09:32 Everybody had a flip phone.
0:09:34 We just couldn’t find ourselves to America, Britain, Canada, those countries.
0:09:38 The numbers are well over 90% for having a phone in 2010, but only about maybe 30% have
0:09:44 a smartphone.
0:09:46 By 2015, I think we’re up to 70% have a smartphone.
0:09:50 And now I forget what the latest number is, but I think it’s around 90% have a smartphone.
0:09:54 So this is just a part of life.
0:09:56 I just got back from the UK, their office that regulates this, Offcom reported that
0:10:01 of the five to seven year olds in Britain, 24% of them have their own smartphone.
0:10:07 Now, that doesn’t mean they have it with them all the time, but it’s just become normal
0:10:11 because it’s such a damn good babysitter.
0:10:14 I mean, you can have peace and quiet in your home if you just give the kid a screen.
0:10:20 Everyone’s happy, but the kid has no life experience and is more likely to end up depressed,
0:10:25 anxious, and incompetent.
0:10:27 I read in the book that teens in this country get on average around 192 notifications a day.
0:10:36 And they’re in school most days.
0:10:40 Every educator I’ve spoken to to a person feels like this has been an absolute nightmare
0:10:47 for education.
0:10:48 Now, that’s right.
0:10:49 There are a couple of studies that have found that and I tested it with my own students.
0:10:52 I teach a course at NYU called Flourishing.
0:10:55 And I have them pull out their phones, we go through the notifications, it varies.
0:11:00 Some of them have less than 200, but some have 500 to 1,000 notifications a day.
0:11:05 If you’re on group chats, group texts, they’re just constantly coming in.
0:11:09 Look, we adults have the same problem, but our prefrontal cortex got a normal human development.
0:11:14 If you didn’t get smartphones until you’re in your 20s, then your brain probably had a
0:11:18 normal development.
0:11:20 And the millennials who didn’t get smartphones and social media until college or later, they’re
0:11:24 fine.
0:11:25 Their mental health is fine.
0:11:26 So it’s a very sharp division between millennials and Gen Z.
0:11:28 Well, that’s a question I did want to ask.
0:11:30 These spikes in psychological distress, to use a very generic category, is the data for
0:11:36 adults comparable or is this exclusively or disproportionately a young people problem?
0:11:43 So you look at what’s happened to people over 50 and the answer is they are no worse off
0:11:48 psychologically than they were 10, 20 years ago.
0:11:51 Sometimes they’re a little better off.
0:11:52 People in their 30s, you do see a little bit some increase, but it’s really Gen Z that
0:11:56 stands out.
0:11:57 And the bottom line is, if you went through puberty with the world’s greatest distraction
0:12:02 device in your pocket, and especially if you had social media like Instagram for the girls,
0:12:07 if you went through puberty from the age of 11 or 12, spending hours a day on your phone,
0:12:12 constantly worried about what people are saying and doing and commenting on your photo and
0:12:15 your posting and everything is about image, you’re more likely to be depressed and anxious
0:12:20 than if you made it through puberty before getting a smartphone and social media.
0:12:25 Let me just say, we’ll get into some of the criticisms in a bit as well as some of your
0:12:29 solutions, but I really want to unpack your argument as best we can before we get there.
0:12:36 It’s clear enough that the mental health trends for kids are not good since 2010, 2012, whenever
0:12:43 you want to start the clock in that general area, 2012.
0:12:47 As with any social problem this large, I think there’s very rarely a monocausal explanation,
0:12:54 but give me your case that smartphones and social media in particular are driving this
0:13:01 phenomenon.
0:13:02 So first, my theory is not monocausal, it’s sort of bi-causal.
0:13:05 So it’s not just that the phones make us ill directly.
0:13:08 My theory in brief is that humans had a play-based childhood for millions of years where mammals,
0:13:13 all mammals have a play-based childhood, we need it to wire up our brains.
0:13:15 We gradually deprived kids of that starting in the 1990s.
0:13:18 So by 2010, kids have not had a full normal suite of outdoor activity on supervised.
0:13:23 But yet their mental health didn’t go down during that period.
0:13:26 It’s only when phase two, you get the arrival of the phone-based childhood, that’s really
0:13:30 what did them in.
0:13:31 And so it’s not one cause, it’s two.
0:13:34 And as a social scientist, I share the view that things are usually complicated, it’s
0:13:37 usually all kinds of interactions.
0:13:40 But sometimes there are things like leaded gas.
0:13:42 Leaded gas had a huge impact, especially on Gen X.
0:13:46 Leaded gas had a pervasive effect on kids around the world, especially on boys because
0:13:50 it disrupts the frontal cortex development, so you get a huge crime wave in many, many
0:13:54 countries around the world.
0:13:55 And then we then leaded gas around 1981 plus or minus, and then crime plummets 15, 17 years
0:14:02 later all around the world.
0:14:03 So sometimes you can have a single factor that actually does cause global effects.
0:14:08 The same is probably true with some plastics, some hormone disruptors.
0:14:12 So I hope that my fellow social scientists will say, “Yeah, usually it’s not monocosal.”
0:14:19 But you know what?
0:14:20 Sometimes it could be.
0:14:21 We should be open to the possibility that it was one big thing.
0:14:23 Okay.
0:14:24 Now, what’s the evidence?
0:14:25 When I got into this in 2019, after writing The Coddling of the American Mind with Greg
0:14:29 Lukianoff, some people challenged us.
0:14:31 I made a gentle assertion in the book that, “Well, you know, it’s mostly the overprotection,
0:14:35 the coddling, but maybe social media, the timing is right, maybe social media had some
0:14:41 do with it.”
0:14:42 And some people said, “No, you’re wrong.
0:14:43 There’s no evidence.
0:14:44 There’s no evidence that social media is harmful.”
0:14:46 And there were a bunch of correlational studies back then.
0:14:48 And some of them found correlations and some didn’t.
0:14:51 And so that was the state of affairs.
0:14:52 And there were a few experiments back then, too.
0:14:54 You know, we use experiments to establish causality.
0:14:56 If you have random assignment and one group is asked to get off social media and the
0:14:59 other isn’t, you know, you look at that and you can see the causation.
0:15:02 So there were some experiments that showed effects actually, even back then.
0:15:05 And so you might say, “There’s been evidence of causation all along.
0:15:08 Now we can debate how strong that evidence is.”
0:15:11 As we’ve gone on in time, there are a lot more experiments.
0:15:13 There’s a lot more correlational studies.
0:15:15 There are a lot of longitudinal studies.
0:15:16 And there are now a lot of quasi-experiments, where you look at what happens when high-speed
0:15:20 internet comes into like one part of British Columbia, a couple of years ahead of another
0:15:24 part of British Columbia, things like that.
0:15:26 So I’ve organized all of the studies, and I did this work with Zach Roush and Gene Twengey.
0:15:31 We’ve organized hundreds and hundreds of studies.
0:15:33 We lay them all out by category.
0:15:36 We get everything we can that shows an effect, everything that doesn’t show an effect.
0:15:39 And guess what?
0:15:40 The correlational studies are overwhelming.
0:15:42 There are some that don’t show an effect, but the great majority do, and it’s usually
0:15:45 larger for girls, and it’s very similar.
0:15:47 The longitudinal studies are a little different.
0:15:49 It’s like if you use more social media at time one, does that mean you’re more depressed
0:15:53 at time two?
0:15:54 And most of those studies suggest that kind of linear causal effect.
0:15:57 A few show a reverse, but most suggest that.
0:16:00 And then there are the experiments.
0:16:01 There’s about 25 experiments in our Google Doc at present.
0:16:03 16 of them show a significant effect.
0:16:05 And so the skeptics now are saying, “Well, there’s no evidence.”
0:16:09 Like, “Wait, wait a second.
0:16:11 There’s a lot of causal evidence.
0:16:13 Just in the experiments, we can debate whether you’re convinced by them, but you can’t say
0:16:16 there’s no evidence.
0:16:17 There are now a lot of experiments.
0:16:19 It’s not just correlational data.”
0:16:20 In the studies that we have, how statistically significant is the relationship between hours
0:16:26 of use on smartphones and measures of depression and anxiety?
0:16:32 So the thing is to not focus on statistical significance, because if you have a large
0:16:36 enough sample size, everything is significant.
0:16:38 The thing to focus on is the effect size.
0:16:40 And this is part of the confusion.
0:16:42 A study by Orbit and Shibilsky that gets cited a lot reported that the correlation is the
0:16:47 equivalent of a correlation coefficient of 0.04, which in this giant data set, it was
0:16:51 about the same as the correlation between eating potatoes and being depressed.
0:16:56 And so they say, “If you’re afraid of social media, you should be equally afraid of potatoes.”
0:17:02 First of all, what the skeptics tend to do is they tend to combine everybody and everything
0:17:05 and report that there’s very little or no correlation.
0:17:08 So when you mix together boys and girls at all-screen media, including Netflix, including
0:17:13 having a computer, including watching TV, it was what they do, then they report there’s
0:17:17 almost no correlation.
0:17:19 But Gene Twenge and I went into the exact same data sets.
0:17:22 We used their exact code to run this complicated statistical analysis, but we limited it to
0:17:27 social media and girls.
0:17:29 And guess what?
0:17:30 We found a much larger effect, equivalent to a correlation coefficient of around 0.2,
0:17:35 which is much larger than potatoes.
0:17:36 It’s in the ballpark of binge drinking and heavy drug use.
0:17:38 In terms of the correlation between the activity and mental health.
0:17:42 Now social scientists will say, “Okay, even a correlation of 0.2, that’s not very big.
0:17:47 You square that, you get 0.04, so this explains 4% of the variance.”
0:17:50 Oh, that’s trivial.
0:17:52 But here’s the big mistake that I think the skeptics make.
0:17:54 They say, “If this correlation explains 4% of the variance, they think that means the
0:17:59 variance in life.”
0:18:01 And there’s a quote from Shibilski.
0:18:02 He says, “Something like 99% of the variation in your happiness has nothing to do with social
0:18:07 media.”
0:18:08 And I think he’s doing there is mistaking the correlation in a data set.
0:18:11 We have very crude measurement on the incoming side.
0:18:15 It’s just how many hours a day, self-report.
0:18:17 You have very crude measurement on the output side.
0:18:21 How’s your mental health or symptom checklist?
0:18:23 And so, of course, if you have very, very rough measures on both ends, you can’t possibly
0:18:26 capture half the variance.
0:18:28 You can’t even capture a quarter of the variance.
0:18:29 You’re looking at shadows dancing on the wall in Plato’s cave, and yet you still find a
0:18:34 relationship over and over again.
0:18:36 The one last thing I’ll say, when you look at the correlational studies, the other way
0:18:39 to look at it is not percent variance explained.
0:18:42 It’s odds ratios.
0:18:43 And what we find over and over is that the girls who are heavy users have two or three
0:18:47 times in the biggest study we have here, the millennial cohort study, it’s three times.
0:18:51 Three times the rate of being depressed as those who use it little or none.
0:18:56 So when people say the correlations are tiny, well, that doesn’t mean that the effect in
0:19:01 the world is tiny.
0:19:02 It’s not.
0:19:03 It’s actually quite large.
0:19:04 You’ve given me nightmares in my first stats course in grad school.
0:19:08 No.
0:19:09 Well, it was the most plausible alternative explanation you have encountered to explain
0:19:14 this trend.
0:19:15 There really isn’t one.
0:19:16 That’s the funny thing.
0:19:17 So if it was just the United States, if that’s all, then there’d be a lot.
0:19:21 But I want to put people back into this time, 2012, President Obama, his first term is ending,
0:19:28 he wins reelection.
0:19:30 If you’re a progressive, you should be thrilled.
0:19:33 So many advances on women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, animal rights.
0:19:37 I mean, the last 50 years have been amazing.
0:19:40 And now it looks like the Republicans are dead in the water 2012.
0:19:44 So Obama’s second term should have been a pretty happy time for liberals.
0:19:48 But actually liberal girls are the ones who get the most depressed during Obama’s second
0:19:53 term.
0:19:54 And I’ve seen efforts to explain it by, well, there was the rise of right wing something
0:19:57 or other.
0:19:58 Come on, come on.
0:19:59 This is not a time when progressives should have suddenly all gotten depressed.
0:20:03 But the girls and especially the younger girls suddenly get depressed.
0:20:06 I don’t know how you can explain that from the global financial crisis.
0:20:09 That’s the other one.
0:20:10 Some of my critics say, “Oh, if you listen to height, you’re not going to see the real
0:20:13 causes of the crisis,” which is the global financial crisis and its effects on low SES
0:20:18 people.
0:20:19 That just doesn’t make sense.
0:20:20 That was 2008.
0:20:21 Why would it affect the younger girls especially?
0:20:23 It just doesn’t make any sense.
0:20:25 Let’s get back into the causal mechanisms here a little bit.
0:20:28 There’s a shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood.
0:20:32 Now apart from just simply not going outside as much, why is that so poisonous to the mental
0:20:37 health of young people?
0:20:39 So I thought I was going to write a short book on what social media is doing to kids,
0:20:42 especially girls.
0:20:44 But what I realized is, wait, I have to write a chapter on childhood.
0:20:47 And then I actually needed two chapters on childhood, one of which was for just a whole
0:20:50 chapter on risky play and the importance of risk-taking.
0:20:53 And then I realized, wait, now I need a whole chapter on puberty.
0:20:56 And so the book, it starts off with a chapter on all the stats, but then I’ve got three
0:20:59 chapters on child development.
0:21:00 And I think that might be why people are coming away from the book almost always persuaded.
0:21:05 Because once you understand that human childhood, like all mammals, they have to play in order
0:21:10 to wire up the brain.
0:21:11 If you were to lock a kid in, give them good nutrition, but not let them play, well, we’ve
0:21:15 done this with rats and they come out socially deformed.
0:21:18 They’re anxious.
0:21:19 They’re not sociable.
0:21:20 We’ve done it with Reese’s monkeys, same thing.
0:21:22 And since 1990, we’ve done it with our children.
0:21:24 If you don’t let your kids out to play for always supervising, if they don’t learn to
0:21:27 be self supervising, we don’t want to take risks, kids must take risks.
0:21:31 They’re attracted to things that are risky, where there’s a possibility of getting hurt.
0:21:35 And then they go closer and closer to it and they take a little risk and then they back
0:21:38 off.
0:21:39 They did it.
0:21:40 Okay.
0:21:41 And then the next time they go a little further.
0:21:42 So our neural development program has to be an interaction with the world, the three-dimensional
0:21:45 physical world and the social world.
0:21:47 That’s the way we evolved.
0:21:49 That’s what the brain needs to wire up.
0:21:51 And if you say, “Not just you can’t go outside and play.
0:21:53 You can’t go unsupervised with another kid, but here’s a screen.
0:21:57 Here’s a screen.
0:21:58 Leave me alone.
0:21:59 Here.
0:22:00 You’re happy.
0:22:01 Here’s a screen.”
0:22:02 You now have such enormous amounts of stimulation coming in and the screens do something television
0:22:06 never did.
0:22:07 The touch screen allows you to act and get reinforcement instantly within a 10th of a second.
0:22:12 Television didn’t do that.
0:22:13 So instead of their outside playing, they’re basically being trained by a behaviorist conditioning
0:22:17 machine for hours and hours a day, every day for 15 years.
0:22:21 Yeah.
0:22:22 That’s going to affect brain development.
0:22:23 It’s interesting that we don’t see any meaningful spikes and mental health disorders with the
0:22:29 rise of personal computing and the internet.
0:22:32 Whatever’s going on now, it doesn’t seem to have begun in earnest until we got social
0:22:38 media and smartphones and the iPad.
0:22:41 You know, my son will be five next month, so we are not at the smartphones and social
0:22:47 media stage.
0:22:48 It’s not a problem for us yet, but we do occasionally let him use, you know, the little iPad tablet.
0:22:54 And I have mixed feelings about it.
0:22:57 I can absolutely see the effect that screens and entertainment and instant gratification
0:23:03 have on his attention and his mind.
0:23:05 He is already so accustomed to slicing and dicing reality on the tablet, switching shows,
0:23:13 rewinding, whatever he wants on demand, that reality itself becomes almost intolerably
0:23:17 boring.
0:23:18 Exactly.
0:23:19 You call smartphones and tablets and the hands of children experience blockers.
0:23:24 And I like that.
0:23:25 I mean, based on what I’m seeing with my son, I kind of think of them as reality diminishers,
0:23:28 but I guess those are just two phrases for the same thing.
0:23:31 No, that’s right.
0:23:32 I mean, one of the remarkable things about kids, you know, and you probably saw this
0:23:34 in your kid’s early birthday parties, you get your kid a present, and they might be
0:23:38 just as interested in the box or the ribbon.
0:23:40 They’re very curious.
0:23:41 They get in the box, they swing the ribbon around, kids are curious, but as soon as they
0:23:46 get a phone, nothing is as interesting as the phone.
0:23:49 So I’d like to give parents listening just a couple of principles here.
0:23:52 Stories are a good thing.
0:23:54 Humans live in stories.
0:23:55 Humans have always told stories around the campfire.
0:23:58 So letting your kid watch a 20 minute or 10 minute story, like on Netflix or on PBS Kids,
0:24:05 that’s fine.
0:24:06 I wouldn’t do it before age two, but you know, your child, four or five, six years old stories
0:24:10 are great.
0:24:11 But what if there’s a story, but if he touches something, he gets a different story.
0:24:14 And if he touches something else, he gets a game.
0:24:17 So if you can’t even learn to pay attention to the story, now you’re fragmenting attention.
0:24:21 You’re not training attention on a 20 minute story.
0:24:23 You’re fragmenting attention.
0:24:25 Now multiply that every hour for the next 15 years or for the rest of their life, because
0:24:29 once you give a kid a phone, the phone will be in the center of their life for the rest
0:24:33 of their life until the phones are implanted directly into our heads.
0:24:46 When we get back from the break, height responds to some of the criticisms of his work.
0:24:51 Stay with us.
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0:28:58 What do you think is the most significant thing young people lose when more and more
0:29:03 of their life consists of virtual experiences and fewer and fewer embodied real world experiences?
0:29:12 I would say they lose any sense of rootedness.
0:29:15 What I mean by that is what you really see happening around 2012, 2013 is a huge increase
0:29:22 in the sense of meaninglessness, pointlessness, loneliness.
0:29:26 I imagine like a plant that is full and green and you pull it up by the roots and you just
0:29:33 leave it up in the air and within hours it begins to wilt and within a couple of days
0:29:36 it’s dead.
0:29:38 Kids need to be rooted in the physical world without directivities, with friends, with family.
0:29:43 They need to be in communities and a community is a group of people.
0:29:47 Most of them are still going to be there in a year or two.
0:29:49 Most will still be there in five or 10 years, but instead you give them this device that
0:29:53 connects them to everyone.
0:29:54 Well, if you’re connected to everyone, if you’re letting your kid develop roots in
0:29:59 this always churning fake world of people who are not using their real names and they’re
0:30:04 almost all be gone in a day or two, there’s no community there.
0:30:08 It’s like you’re pulling your plant up by the roots and saying here, flourish in the
0:30:11 air and it can’t be done.
0:30:14 The thing I’m constantly thinking about, at least on this front in particular, the real
0:30:20 three-dimensional social world is really difficult and thorny and fraught and awkward and unpredictable.
0:30:28 Exactly.
0:30:29 But that’s kind of where you learn the art of living, for lack of a better phrase.
0:30:33 And the safety of the phone in isolation shields you from all of that.
0:30:38 And I don’t think that’s good.
0:30:40 And the more and more I see life dictated by algorithms and screens, the more and more
0:30:46 it seems to me that people are terrified of engaging the world and other people unless
0:30:53 those engagements are mediated by the safety and the isolation of technology.
0:30:58 And if you don’t think that’s producing more anxiety in people, I don’t know what to say
0:31:02 other than I vehemently disagree.
0:31:06 That actually is one of the keys is technology makes things easy.
0:31:11 And so for us adults, it used to be sometimes hard to get a cab in New York City, but now
0:31:15 it’s super easy.
0:31:16 You press a button and it comes.
0:31:17 So we’re losing our cab hailing skills.
0:31:19 But who cares?
0:31:20 Do you want to play a game?
0:31:21 Well, you could go out and look for some friends to play with and find a space and make the
0:31:25 rules.
0:31:26 That’s kind of hard.
0:31:27 Just log on any point day or night.
0:31:28 You can find four people to play a game with you.
0:31:30 They can be strangers anywhere that’s easy.
0:31:32 You want sex?
0:31:33 What’s really hard to, if you’re a boy, okay, you’re going to flirt with a girl, which girl?
0:31:38 What’s going to happen?
0:31:39 I mean, it’s really hard to get sex when you’re a boy, but you work at it and you develop the
0:31:43 skills and you learn how to flirt and you eventually fall in love.
0:31:47 And then you break up and you fall in love again.
0:31:49 All of that is cut off when everything goes through the apps.
0:31:52 Everything is easy.
0:31:53 You find someone who’s willing to have sex.
0:31:54 You swipe.
0:31:55 There’s very little courtship.
0:31:56 There’s very little love.
0:31:57 And amazingly, there’s less sex.
0:31:59 The ease with which you can meet a sexual partner now, it’s 1,000 times easier than when I was
0:32:03 in college or when I was in my 20s.
0:32:06 But yet there’s less and less sex, young people having less and less sex.
0:32:09 You know what, even married people are having less sex because we’re all so busy.
0:32:13 We all are spending five, seven, nine hours a day on our phones.
0:32:17 There’s not time for anything else, including sex or religion or friends or nature.
0:32:22 If you’re an adult, you have a normal brain and then you decide to give away all your attention
0:32:25 and live this weird life, that’s your choice and you already have a normal brain.
0:32:29 But if you were to say, and I’d ask any parent here, how about if you could make life easy
0:32:33 for your child?
0:32:34 Your child will never have to struggle.
0:32:36 Nothing will ever be difficult.
0:32:37 It’s kind of clear, that would break your child.
0:32:40 You can’t do that to your child.
0:32:41 But when you give them an online life, that’s kind of what you’re doing.
0:32:44 Everything is easy.
0:32:45 I love that phrase by Sherry Turkle that he used, “We are forever elsewhere.”
0:32:50 Even when we’re together in real life, so much of our attention is redirected by our
0:32:55 phones so that even when we are present, we’re not really present or not reliably present.
0:33:01 And I see that in everyone, not just young people.
0:33:03 I see it in myself.
0:33:04 I see it in my friends.
0:33:05 I see it in everyone.
0:33:06 Because a moment of silence can be awkward.
0:33:08 That’s right.
0:33:09 Even if you’re sitting with your friends, my NYU students tell me, you know, they go
0:33:11 to lunch and they’re sitting with their friends, but if there’s a little lull in the conversation,
0:33:16 one person checks their phone, and then once they do, others do.
0:33:20 And so you never have times like you’re joking around, you’re really having fun, you’re laughing.
0:33:25 Those times are much less common nowadays because someone’s on their phone in K through
0:33:29 12 classes, kids are on their phone in between classes.
0:33:33 When schools go phone-free, an almost universal comment is, “You hear laughter in the hallways
0:33:37 again.”
0:33:38 Teachers say, “I haven’t heard that in 10 years.”
0:33:40 So I mean, I’m exaggerating.
0:33:41 Sometimes there’s life.
0:33:42 But the point is, the normal sound of kids between classes is not what it’s been for
0:33:46 the last 10 years.
0:33:47 It’s been closer to silence.
0:33:48 And the strange thing about, in a sense, being online most of the time on your phone, it
0:33:53 is safer.
0:33:54 It is easier.
0:33:55 But it’s also more emotionally destructive in other ways.
0:33:59 Someone who’s experienced anxiety knows what that feels like.
0:34:03 Always being self-conscious, always worried, always anticipating threats and being online
0:34:08 all the time feeds into this.
0:34:10 The constant performativity, the brand management, the status-seeking, that’s bad enough for
0:34:15 adults.
0:34:16 But it’s not hard to see why it’s even worse for kids.
0:34:19 That’s right.
0:34:20 Because one-to-one is the best.
0:34:23 You’re talking, you’re joking, you’re laughing.
0:34:24 If you say something wrong, your friend may give you a funny look.
0:34:27 Your friend may even get mad at you.
0:34:28 But then you learn to apologize and you keep going.
0:34:31 But once you get into these group chats where there’s maybe 30 or 50 people, now it’s not
0:34:35 communication.
0:34:36 It’s performance.
0:34:37 You’re performing at them.
0:34:38 You’re anxious before you press send or whatever it is.
0:34:41 Because if you get it wrong, the costs are very high.
0:34:43 What kids need is low-cost situations to make mistakes.
0:34:47 They have to make bad jokes.
0:34:48 They have to hurt someone’s feelings, realize it, and apologize.
0:34:51 But when kids are raised on social media and on screens, it’s like they’re being raised
0:34:54 on the stage, and a stage with an audience is just no place for a child.
0:35:01 One of the counterarguments I’ve seen to your book is people will say, “Okay, sure, reported
0:35:07 cases of anxiety and depression and these sorts of things are up.”
0:35:12 But a big part of that is that people are just more willing to be transparent about
0:35:18 their struggles now because it’s no longer a source of shame or stigma and that’s a good
0:35:22 thing.
0:35:23 Do you buy any of that?
0:35:24 I don’t explain the whole story, but surely it explains some of the story.
0:35:28 I don’t know.
0:35:29 Where do you land?
0:35:30 I would assume so.
0:35:31 But now that I think about it more, I’m actually a little more skeptical because when I was
0:35:34 growing up in the ’70s, my mother sent me to a psychologist for a brief time.
0:35:37 It was very shameful.
0:35:38 I didn’t want anyone to know.
0:35:40 There was real shame to any sort of mental health issue in the ’70s and into the ’80s.
0:35:44 By the ’90s, the stigma is beginning to drop, but in the 2000s, it’s really dropping, yet
0:35:49 we don’t see the numbers rising.
0:35:51 We don’t see young people saying, “Oh, yeah, I’m more anxious.
0:35:54 I’m more anxious.
0:35:55 I’m more anxious.”
0:35:56 We don’t see that.
0:35:57 By the time we get to 2012, mental health issues have been largely desigmatized.
0:36:01 In fact, the weird thing, once the girls get on social media, girls share emotions much
0:36:05 more than boys.
0:36:07 Any girl who shares that she’s anxious gets a lot of support.
0:36:10 The more anxious she is, the more support she gets.
0:36:13 This is not just a general law of psychology.
0:36:15 This is the way the algorithms work.
0:36:17 The more extreme posters in these mental health forums get the most likes and the most followers.
0:36:23 I think what’s happening is that mental illness is becoming valorized, and that’s the last
0:36:28 thing we want.
0:36:29 The last thing we want is for kids, especially girls, to think that it is somehow desirable
0:36:35 for them to be depressed, anxious, feeble, traumatized, so no, I actually don’t buy it.
0:36:41 Is it possible that some of these associations between social media use and psychological
0:36:48 distress are a reflection of kids who maybe already have mental health issues, and they’re
0:36:54 disproportionately using these platforms or using them in different ways than their more
0:36:59 healthy peers?
0:37:00 In other words, maybe we’ve just created platforms that tease out the problems that were already
0:37:04 there.
0:37:05 Well, it’s not exactly teasing out.
0:37:06 It’s then amplifying.
0:37:07 Yes, it has generally been found that people who are … Because look, long before social
0:37:12 media, some two, three, four-year-olds were anxious, and you could see it.
0:37:17 They’re exposed to something new they pull away, so kids who are set to anxiety, there
0:37:21 are some suggestions that they are more likely to move to social media, in part because it’s
0:37:27 easier than talking to people, so some portion of these correlations can be reverse correlation.
0:37:32 That’s true.
0:37:33 The big protective factor is kids who are rooted.
0:37:35 Kids who play team sports are active in their religion have been largely protected or partially
0:37:39 protected from this tsunami of mental illness.
0:37:43 Has there been changes in diagnostic criteria in the way hospitals and clinics code these
0:37:48 sorts of things that might explain some of the changes in reported cases?
0:37:53 This is one of the main skeptic arguments, is that there have been a couple of changes.
0:37:57 There was a big change that would affect things globally around 2015.
0:38:00 That’s true, but yet we don’t find a big jump at 2016.
0:38:03 We find it at 2012, 2013.
0:38:06 The skeptics loved it.
0:38:07 They’ll find an … There’s some study in New Jersey seemed to show that maybe suicide
0:38:11 rates didn’t go up in New Jersey.
0:38:12 Well, okay, fine.
0:38:14 One study found that in New Jersey, but the CDC data is pretty damn clear about the whole
0:38:18 country.
0:38:19 Yeah, I think the skeptics are often cherry picking.
0:38:22 They’re finding the occasional study that doesn’t find an effect.
0:38:26 The chutzpah bad is that they accuse me of cherry picking when I’m the only one who’s
0:38:29 picking every single cherry.
0:38:31 I don’t pick just the ones that favor me.
0:38:34 I’d say probably the most familiar reaction to this kind of thing is to say, “Okay, John,
0:38:40 okay, okay, I get it.
0:38:42 This is a very recycled argument, right?
0:38:46 Every time there’s a new technology, whether it’s TV or video games or-
0:38:50 Comic books, novels, yep, I’ve heard it all.
0:38:53 There’s always a moral panic over how it’s poisoning the youth and the culture, but in
0:38:58 the end, it’s just changed and changes constant as is adaptation, so we’ll be fine.
0:39:06 That is the most common argument I get.
0:39:08 You’re right.
0:39:09 That is what animates all of the skeptics.
0:39:11 I believe they’ve been studying technology for a long time, and so they’ve seen previous
0:39:13 moral panics like over video games, especially violent video games.
0:39:17 Playing violent video games turns out not to make kids violent, so they come at this
0:39:20 with skepticism that is rooted in their real experiences as social scientists, and I freely
0:39:25 grant that that’s a reasonable hypothesis and it’s a reasonable starting hypothesis.
0:39:29 Let’s assume this is just another moral panic, but now let’s be open to the evidence that
0:39:33 it’s not.
0:39:34 In any previous moral panic, the kids themselves are not calling out for help.
0:39:39 There are not a lot of kids who say, “Oh, these comic books free us from the comic books,”
0:39:44 but you talk to Gen Z about social media and smartphones, and while they don’t want to
0:39:48 get off because everyone else is on, if you say, “How about if everyone got off?”
0:39:51 They say, “Oh, yes, we’d love that.”
0:39:53 If you have a consumer product that’s sucking up most of the world’s attention and most
0:39:56 of the people using it wish it was never invented, this is a very different technology.
0:40:01 Another difference is that a traditional moral panic, nothing terrible really happens, but
0:40:07 some story about a kid who read comic books and then he murdered his mother.
0:40:12 Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t, maybe it was schizophrenia, whatever it is, you
0:40:16 get a moral panic.
0:40:17 The media is essential for a moral panic in the past.
0:40:21 That’s not what’s happening now.
0:40:22 Right now, almost everyone has seen it.
0:40:24 If not in their own family, they’ve seen it in the children of people that they know.
0:40:28 The kids are all right.
0:40:31 It’s just the media.
0:40:32 It’s just people like John Height and Gene Twengey trying to scare up people.
0:40:36 Talk to any human being with children and they’ll say, “Yeah, I’ve seen it.”
0:40:39 I think this might have come up in your interview with Tyler Cohen.
0:40:43 Oh, that was a fun one.
0:40:45 That’s one word for it.
0:40:48 Maybe he’s right.
0:40:49 His point was that lots of good has come from social media and smartphones and no doubt
0:40:53 lots of good has come from those things.
0:40:55 Not for kids.
0:40:56 No, I don’t think so.
0:40:57 Not for middle school kids.
0:40:58 I don’t think so.
0:40:59 Well, okay.
0:41:00 That’s fair.
0:41:01 For adults, sure.
0:41:02 We’re experiencing the downsides and the externalities in real time.
0:41:05 Many of them are very, very bad.
0:41:06 But in the fullness of time, there will be a net improvement.
0:41:09 Maybe that’s true, but one thing I came to believe pretty firmly while writing my book
0:41:16 on media and democracy is that Marshall McLuhan was right that-
0:41:22 Oh, he really was.
0:41:23 Oh my God, yes.
0:41:24 He really was.
0:41:25 He was right that electronic media was a kind of extension of our nervous system in the
0:41:30 sense that it connected our-
0:41:31 Oh, that’s such a cool point.
0:41:32 Yeah.
0:41:33 It connected our consciousness with the rest of the world, but digital technology and smartphones
0:41:37 and social media in particular has this truly terrible dual quality.
0:41:42 They bombard us with all this negative feedback and all the bad news in the world all the
0:41:48 time while also leaving us mostly impotent in the face of all that awfulness.
0:41:54 It’s not just bad for our mental well-being.
0:41:56 I think at scale, it also amplifies some of our worst social and psychological pathologies.
0:42:03 That is my opinion.
0:42:04 Oh, no, I fully agree.
0:42:05 For this project, I began reading some Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman.
0:42:08 They’re just so brilliant.
0:42:11 One of their main points, McLuhan said it so famously, the medium is the message.
0:42:15 He was pointing out that in the ’70s and ’80s or back when he was writing, everyone’s focused
0:42:20 on the content.
0:42:21 There’s too much violence and sex on TV.
0:42:24 We have to get the sex and violence off TV, and his point was, well, okay, the sex and
0:42:28 violence, but the real thing isn’t what’s on the TV.
0:42:30 The real thing is, how did life change when TV moved to the center, when everyone got
0:42:34 a TV in their living room, and now the rhythms of life now revolve around sitting and watching
0:42:39 the screen?
0:42:40 That has very pervasive effects on us, and I would say in the same way, when we go from
0:42:44 2010 to 2015, that’s the great rewiring of childhood, in 2010, kids are still using the
0:42:48 technology to meet up with each other.
0:42:50 You text your friend on your cell phone, you have to press the seven key three times to
0:42:53 make an S, so it’s like, see you at the pizza shop at four.
0:42:58 By 2015, everything’s different.
0:43:00 You’re now posting stuff and hoping strangers will like it or follow you.
0:43:03 You are not active as much.
0:43:04 You don’t touch as much.
0:43:05 You don’t put your arm around anyone as much.
0:43:07 You’re not out in nature as much.
0:43:08 You don’t laugh as much.
0:43:10 Life is different in 2015 from 2010, and that’s the point that McLuhan and Postman would have
0:43:14 made if they had seen this happening.
0:43:24 After one more short break, we’ll hear some of Height’s practical solutions to the problems
0:43:29 we’ve been talking about.
0:43:31 Stay with us.
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0:46:54 You know, every book like this has the obligatory, “All right, here are my 10 steps to solving
0:46:59 the problem I just diagnosed over the last 275 pages.”
0:47:04 Maybe I roll my eyes at this, but I honestly think you have some serious practical suggestions
0:47:10 that even people who aren’t persuaded much by your general argument would probably find
0:47:16 agreeable.
0:47:17 That’s right.
0:47:18 Could you maybe just lay out some of those now?
0:47:19 Yeah, sure.
0:47:20 So the key to understanding how we fell into this trap and how we get out is to see that
0:47:24 we’re stuck in a collective action trap.
0:47:27 And the reason why parents are pressured to give their kid a phone at an early age is
0:47:30 because everyone else did.
0:47:32 And the reason why every kid, you know, my daughter wants to be on Snapchat, because
0:47:35 everyone else is.
0:47:37 And so it’s painful.
0:47:38 And I’ve said, “No,” and I’m not going to let her on.
0:47:41 She’s 14.
0:47:42 She’s a freshman in high school.
0:47:43 So I’m not going to let her on because lots of bad stuff happens on Snapchat, you know.
0:47:46 It’s an app created for strangers to send disappearing pictures, you know, for strangers to reach
0:47:51 out to you.
0:47:52 No, no, thank you.
0:47:53 But I’m imposing a cost on my daughter.
0:47:55 And what I’m hoping to do is say, “You know what?
0:47:57 If we just set a few norms, and even if only half of us follow them, it becomes very easy
0:48:03 to do the right thing.”
0:48:04 And so the four norms, they’re so simple.
0:48:06 No smartphone before high school.
0:48:08 Just give your kids a phone watch or a flip phone if you want to keep in touch with them.
0:48:11 Those are good for communication.
0:48:12 They’re not giant distraction devices.
0:48:14 The second norm is no social media till 16.
0:48:16 Let kids get through early puberty.
0:48:18 Early puberty is when the most damage is done, especially for girls.
0:48:21 Girls 11 to 14 should absolutely not be on social media.
0:48:25 Early 18, it really isn’t appropriate for minors, but I want a norm that we might actually
0:48:28 meet.
0:48:29 So I’m trying to set it at 16.
0:48:30 Can’t we all agree?
0:48:31 Let’s just wait till 16.
0:48:32 Just to be clear, you’re not suggesting that the state should ban this.
0:48:35 This is something that parents are going to have to implement with their own children?
0:48:38 Yes.
0:48:39 So as an American, I assume that our Congress is broken and we’ll never do anything.
0:48:43 And so I wrote this as norms that we could follow.
0:48:46 And if even a half of us stick to it, it’s very easy, because now your daughter comes
0:48:51 to you and says, “Mom, half of the kids have Instagram.”
0:48:54 And you say, “Okay.”
0:48:55 Well, you’ll be with a half that don’t.
0:48:57 So the third norm is phone-free schools.
0:48:59 And this is one where the data is unbelievably clear.
0:49:02 When I was in high school, if they’d said, “You know what?
0:49:04 You can bring in your television set, your VCR, your walkie-talkie, bring it all in,
0:49:09 put it on your desk, play with it during class,” like, “No, we would not have learned anything.”
0:49:13 So phone-free schools.
0:49:14 And that is happening.
0:49:15 That’s happening very fast, thank God.
0:49:17 And then the fourth is actually the most important in the sense that if we’re taking
0:49:20 away most screen time, which we have to do, we have to give them back a fun childhood.
0:49:26 And so the fourth norm is more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real
0:49:31 world.
0:49:32 That’s the rootedness.
0:49:33 Kids have to be rooted in the real world.
0:49:35 They have to be running around the physical world with other kids, unsupervised, making
0:49:39 the rules and forcing the rules, getting into arguments, settling arguments.
0:49:43 And so, you know, what I would urge you to do as the parent of a four or five-year-old
0:49:46 is in a year or two, your son might start having some friends that he plays with.
0:49:50 And by the time it’s seven or eight, you really could have a group of friends.
0:49:53 Try to find ways for the kids to hang out together unsupervised.
0:49:55 You know, I’m not saying at seven, they should be walking down to a store and buying stuff,
0:49:59 although that’s what most people did back during the crime wave.
0:50:02 But by eight or nine, they should have some independence.
0:50:04 And it’s so exciting for them when they’re out on their own.
0:50:08 So give them back a fun childhood.
0:50:09 Don’t make it like, “I’m going to deprive you of the thing that you most want.”
0:50:12 Make it like, “No, I want you to have fun in your childhood.”
0:50:16 And on the phones and schools thing, lots of schools have actually banned phones.
0:50:20 No, not really.
0:50:21 Well, some have, right?
0:50:22 No, they say they have.
0:50:23 So some have, yeah.
0:50:24 The ones that actually do it, the ones that actually do it, have tremendous results.
0:50:27 Where it has been tried in schools have banned phones.
0:50:31 What have the results been?
0:50:32 So most schools say they banned phones.
0:50:33 But all they mean is you’re not allowed to take out your phone during class.
0:50:37 You have to hide it in your lap or go to the bathroom if you want to text or look at pornography.
0:50:41 And that was the case in New York City public schools.
0:50:43 But going phone-free means you lock up the phone either in a special phone locker or in
0:50:49 a yonder pouch, which is these magnetic locking pouches.
0:50:51 That’s the only thing that counts as phone-free.
0:50:53 You need the phone to get to school.
0:50:54 I understand.
0:50:55 Come in, you put the phone away.
0:50:57 Now you have six hours, six or seven hours you have to actually be with other people.
0:51:02 You’re not forever elsewhere.
0:51:04 But if people have access to their phones, they’re forever elsewhere.
0:51:06 Why bother coming to school?
0:51:08 If all you’re going to be doing is be on your phone, why bother coming to school?
0:51:10 Just be remote.
0:51:11 So I’m collecting stories.
0:51:13 I’ve asked for counter stories.
0:51:14 No one can find one.
0:51:15 When a school goes phone-free, they say within weeks, within weeks, the amount of laughter
0:51:21 and fun goes up, discipline problems go down, bullying goes down, violence and detentions
0:51:26 go down.
0:51:27 I mean, this is the cheapest and easiest and most powerful cure for depression, anxiety,
0:51:32 loneliness in school.
0:51:33 It costs nothing.
0:51:34 I mean, honestly, unless you’re making some absurd libertarian case for personal autonomy
0:51:39 or something like that, I cannot even imagine what the argument would be.
0:51:43 Oh, it’s school shooters.
0:51:44 That’s the argument.
0:51:45 That’s the argument there.
0:51:46 Oh, the argument is, what if there’s a school shooter?
0:51:47 I want to know that my kid’s okay.
0:51:49 I want my kid to be able to call for help.
0:51:51 But school security experts say, if there is an actual intruder in the school, if there’s
0:51:55 someone with a gun in the school, what you want is for all the kids to be quiet and to
0:51:59 do the things that they drilled for.
0:52:01 What you don’t want is for all the kids to pull out their phone and start crying to their
0:52:04 parents.
0:52:05 Boy, I have lots of thoughts on that, but I’m just going to set that aside because that
0:52:08 would open up a whole other thing.
0:52:11 I guess a big lingering question here is, do you think we have the institutional and
0:52:15 collective will to implement any of these changes, much less all of them?
0:52:20 Yes.
0:52:21 I’m confident that we do.
0:52:22 You and I have both been deep into the problems of democracy and the role of social media
0:52:27 in making liberal democracy difficult.
0:52:30 And there, I have a few ideas that might help, but we’re never going to do them.
0:52:33 And even if we did, I don’t know how much they would help.
0:52:35 I’m pretty pessimistic about what technology is doing to our democracy.
0:52:39 But what it’s doing to our children.
0:52:40 The solutions are so easy.
0:52:42 They cost nothing.
0:52:43 They’re totally bipartisan, red states, blue states, Democrats and Republicans in the
0:52:48 Senate and the House, like everyone’s in favor of these things.
0:52:50 So here is one of the biggest national problems we face that we’re harming our children.
0:52:56 We’re reducing their abilities.
0:52:57 The solution is actually pretty easy.
0:52:59 It costs almost nothing and we can do it within a year.
0:53:02 So it’ll take longer to work its way through.
0:53:05 It’s hard to take the phones away from high school kids who’ve been on them for years.
0:53:08 But if we can get it entirely out of elementary and middle school, it’ll just take a few years
0:53:13 before those kids are the ones who are in high school.
0:53:16 So I think we can really solve this problem in three or four years.
0:53:19 There may be lingering questions about causality and we’re obviously talking about an incredibly
0:53:25 complicated social environment, but, and this is just my opinion, people can quibble with
0:53:32 the specifics of your case.
0:53:35 But the point about phones and social media creating problems for all of us, fragmenting
0:53:41 our attention, distracting us from learning, pulling us away from the real world and real
0:53:46 connections with other people, dragging us into these shallow, never-ending status games.
0:53:52 This is not good and we know it’s not good and I don’t need a peer-reviewed study to
0:53:57 tell me that it’s not good.
0:54:00 In this case, it’s not like we’re reviewing for an academic journal and we’re saying we’re
0:54:04 not going to let anything in until we’re certain.
0:54:06 When there is an epidemic, there’s a public health threat, and when the cost of action
0:54:10 is trivial, nobody gets hurt if we impose my four norms, and the risk of not acting,
0:54:16 if I’m right, is beyond comprehension, another generation lost to mental illness and reduced
0:54:21 learning.
0:54:22 Of course, look, it’s always good that we have skeptics.
0:54:23 They keep me and Gene Twenge honest.
0:54:25 They push us on certain points.
0:54:26 But to say there’s no evidence and we don’t think we should do anything until we’re certain,
0:54:32 that’s a misunderstanding of the role of science in society.
0:54:36 Science doesn’t require absolute certainty.
0:54:38 It doesn’t even require settled science before we can act.
0:54:41 The tobacco industry, the oil industry, they’ve tried to muddy the waters and say, “Oh, it’s
0:54:45 not settled science.
0:54:46 There’s some contradictory findings.”
0:54:48 Now there, the cost of acting was quite expensive, but we did it anyway.
0:54:51 Here the cost is nothing.
0:54:53 That’s why I think we can do it.
0:54:54 We’re seeing action by legislators, oh, and in Britain, they’re way ahead of us.
0:54:58 Parents are rising up, forming groups.
0:55:00 Their government is acting.
0:55:01 They’ve mandated phone free schools.
0:55:03 So in Britain, they’re going to take care of it.
0:55:05 I just continue to believe that to tinker in such fundamental ways with our minds and
0:55:10 our attention and our presence at this scale is pretty wild.
0:55:16 And if you use these technologies, you can’t tell me that they haven’t changed you in some
0:55:22 way.
0:55:23 How many people listening to this can’t go to the bathroom or brush their teeth or cook
0:55:28 a meal without grabbing their phone?
0:55:30 I’m not even saying you’re a bad person or it’s necessarily a bad thing.
0:55:32 I do it.
0:55:33 I’m just saying that we have engineered this compulsion and that’s a pretty big deal.
0:55:39 We may not fully understand the implications yet, but it’s a big deal.
0:55:43 I couldn’t put it any better.
0:55:45 Whatever tools we have, it becomes like an extension of our bodies, of our nervous systems.
0:55:49 So we are fundamentally rewiring our sense of self and our interaction with technology.
0:55:54 I don’t want to say no, we shouldn’t do that, but I sure as hell want to say we shouldn’t
0:55:58 do it on children unless we have strong evidence that it’s not harmful.
0:56:02 And since what we’re getting is increasingly strong evidence that it is harming at a scale
0:56:05 beyond anything you can imagine.
0:56:08 This is, I think, the greatest destruction of human capital in human history.
0:56:12 I don’t think there’s ever been a 10-year period where we destroyed more human capital
0:56:15 than we have in the last 10 years.
0:56:17 Is there a happier point on which to end?
0:56:20 Yes, that we’re going to fix this this year.
0:56:23 And I don’t mean everything gets all better in a year.
0:56:25 What I mean is our expectations, our understanding of technology in children is just different.
0:56:30 And a year or two from now, it’ll be common knowledge that you just don’t give a two or
0:56:34 three-year-old an iPad to play with for hours each day.
0:56:38 It’ll be common knowledge that it’s okay to sit and watch a story with your kid, but
0:56:41 you don’t give the device to the kid when they’re very young.
0:56:45 You don’t let your 11-year-old daughter lie about her age and go on Instagram and open
0:56:50 an account and share photos of herself in a bathing suit with strange men.
0:56:53 You just don’t do that.
0:56:54 So I think we can change, and we’re going to change, our expectations about this and
0:56:59 our norms.
0:57:00 We’re going to change it within a year or two.
0:57:01 A year or two from now, it’s going to be very different.
0:57:02 And it’s going to be much easier.
0:57:03 So it’s just in time for you, Sean, because when your kid is begging for an iPhone, the
0:57:08 best that he’ll be able to say is, “Dad, 25% of the kids in my class have an iPhone.”
0:57:14 Well, when I tell him he can’t have one, I’m going to say, “It’s Jonathan Hight’s fault.”
0:57:17 So I’ll forward your contact information to him.
0:57:20 Fine.
0:57:21 But you also have to tell him, “Oh, and the playdates that you have, the two-day sleepovers
0:57:24 that you have with your four best friends, thank Jonathan Hight for that too.”
0:57:28 Once again, the book is called “The Anxious Generation.”
0:57:31 Jonathan Hight, thanks so much for doing this, man.
0:57:33 Sean, thanks for your many, many years of excellent work on social science, and it’s
0:57:38 always a pleasure to talk to you.
0:57:39 Thank you.
0:57:40 All right, another one in the books.
0:57:51 I really appreciate this conversation.
0:57:53 As you can tell, I was pretty honest about this at the beginning.
0:57:56 I mostly agree with Hight.
0:57:58 I think he’s right, or I think he’s right enough, certainly, to take seriously.
0:58:03 And I tried to be honest about that, but also push a little bit in some of the opposite directions,
0:58:09 and hopefully we got some clarity there.
0:58:12 I’m curious if you felt the same way.
0:58:14 Do you think I’m right?
0:58:15 Do you think he’s right?
0:58:16 If you think I missed something, or if you think he missed something, send me an email
0:58:20 and let me know.
0:58:21 You can drop us a line at thegrayarea@box.com, and please rate, review, subscribe.
0:58:27 That stuff helps get the show in front of more ears.
0:58:30 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd,
0:58:37 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:58:40 New episodes of The Gray Area Drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe.
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