Jonathan Haidt: Why Social Media Has Caused a Collapse in Mental Health & #1 Way to Solve Your Anxiety

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
There has never been a global synchronized collapse of mental health.
This is far larger than anything we've ever seen in
terms of its effects on kids. This is way way
larger than COVID.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
How much buzzed about book The Anxious Generation is available
now is of course Jonathan Hite.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Girls are extraordinarily anxious and depressed. Boys are extraordinarily undeveloped.
We shouldn't have kids with a massive entertainment center in
their pocket by which strangers can reach them. This is
complete insanity.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
Hey everyone, I've got some huge news to share with you.
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(00:51):
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Speaker 1 (01:05):
The number one health and wellness.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
Podcast, Jay Sheety Jay Chetty see dyet, Hey everyone, welcome
back to On Purpose to place you tune into to
become happier, healthier, and more healed.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
Thank you so much for investing in your growth and
your journey by being here today as I'm about to
interview one of my favorite authors, a researcher, a professor
that I'm so excited to talk to. I've been wanting
to have this conversation with him about many of his books,
and we're finally here for his latest installment. It's called
The Anxious Generation, How the great rewiring of childhood is

(01:42):
causing an epidemic of mental illness. Please welcome to On
Purpose Jonathan Heit. Jonathan, thank you for being here, Thank
you for making the time and spending this energy with us.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Oh my pleasure, Jay, Thanks for having me.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
This is a conversation that I feel, as I was
saying to you offline, which is so critical and central
for our listeners. I know that everyone who's tuned in,
whether it be right now on YouTube or listening to
us on an audio platform, this is of the number
one concern in their life, which is their personal mental
well being and then the mental wellbeing of their children

(02:16):
and the people that they care about and love. And
I think when I first saw the title the Anxious Generation.
I was thinking about how there's this rhetoric that has
become quite normal in society around how every generation has
had their anxiety, whether it was the World Wars, whether
we talk about, oh, we have social media, but you know,

(02:39):
kids back in the day had black and white TVs
and then color television, and then they had video games,
and so I feel like there's been this rhetoric that
social media is just the latest installment in a host
of previous technologies that have made old people worried about
young people. Why is this different?

Speaker 1 (03:00):
So that is the main counter argument I get is
from people say, oh, we've been through this before. When
I was a kid, we watched too much television, but look,
it didn't do anything to us. And it is true
that ever since modernity began, so beginning in the seventeenth century,
when the pace of change really begins to accelerate, generation
and generation, the next generation actually is a little different
from the previous one. And generally we think the next

(03:22):
generation they're kind of soft, you know, they don't have
our virtues, they have funny habits. So that's always been
going on, and that's what I'm a late baby born
I was born in nineteen sixty three, so that's what
we thought about, you know, you know, the millennial generation.
You know, oh, there are always just you know, folks
on their coffee and their avocado toast. They're not serious.
But actually, and you're a millennial, I believe, right, Yes, yeah,
that's correct. Some millennials are born in nineteen eighty one

(03:44):
through nineteen ninety five roughly. But the millennials, their mental
health was actually pretty good, better than Gen X actually,
and they're an amazingly successful generation. They were creative, they
traveled the world, they start companies. So that's the normal
intergeneration difference. This time is really really different because all

(04:05):
of a sudden, in twenty twelve twenty thirteen, it's like
someone flicked on a light switch, and all over the
developed world. We don't have data from the developing world,
but all over the developed world, certainly the English speaking
countries Scandinavia, girls in particular, began to get depressed, anxious,
they began to cut themselves, they began checking into psychiatric

(04:25):
words right around twenty thirteen. In the US, it's very sharp.
Right around twenty thirteen. It sometimes is a little bit,
but it's basically the early twenty tens. This has never
happened before. There has never been a global synchronized collapse
of mental health. This is far larger than anything we've
ever seen in terms of its effects on kids. This
is way way larger than COVID. This is affecting most kids.

(04:46):
So I'm engaged in debates with other scholars about, well,
why did this happen? And what I'm marshall in the
book is the evidence that it's not just a coincidence.
It's not just a correlation that, oh, that's exactly when
when kids basically switch from flip phones to smartphones was
between twenty ten and twenty fifteen all over the world.
But I'm showing that there's a lot of experimental evidence

(05:10):
that shows causation. And another film makes us different. The
kids themselves say it. So when I was a kid,
we watched too much TV. But you didn't see kids
organizing to keep kids off TV. You didn't see kids saying, oh,
please save us from TV. You know we're stuck watching it.
We don't want to be watching it. But that's what
young people are saying about social media. I just saw
a survey the majority, the majority of people of all ages,

(05:33):
including young people, say they would rather that TikTok was
never invented. They're spending time on it because everyone else is,
but they see that they're trapped. So this is so
different from any previous moral panic.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
That's so fascinating to hear that. It's the first time
that people are actually saying, well, kids are actually saying
that this experience is something that we're feeling, yet we
feel so trapped, addicted in exactly.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
And that's what my students say at NYU. That's what
students say on surveys when you ask them, why do
you think mental health is so bad in your generation?
The most common answer is social media. They see it happening,
The parents see it happening to the kids, the teachers
see it happening to the kids. So there's all kinds
of eyewitness testimony, like people see this happening. It's not
just like hmm, I wonder if it's the phone. It's like, no,

(06:17):
we see the evidence of it.

Speaker 3 (06:20):
I'm fascinated.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
Why are people debating you, Well, there are so you know,
I'm an academic and we publish our articles and journals,
and there are some people who have been studying media
for a long time, and many of them are very technophilic.
They like technology. They some of them like video games.
Have been writing about the benefits of video games, and
there are some And so I think they come to

(06:41):
this prepared to believe that this is just another moral panic.
We've been through this with television and video games and
before that comic books. The eighteenth century was novels. People
didn't want young women to read novels because stimulate their
sexual appetites. So they sort of approach it with like,
you know, this is just another one of those moral panics.
And then I keep in this work with Gene Twangient
and Zach Rausch, we keep showing like no other explanation works,

(07:04):
this time is different. This is not just some artifact
of kids being more willing to talk about it. This
is the same curves and self report you see those
same curves and hospital admissions and psychiatric emergency department business.
So this is not just some illusion. But you know,
there's about four or five the five or six researchers,
you know, they're serious researchers, and they look at the

(07:25):
same data I do, and they they say, well, the
correlations are too small to explain it, or they say,
you know, it's mostly correlational, they're not enough experiments, and
I say, okay, look, I found twenty five experiments, sixteen
of which do show a causal effect. You know, with
a random assignment. The kids who are the young people
who are assigned to do less social media in the
first few days, maybe the mental health is bad because

(07:47):
they're addicted, but if you wait three or four weeks
on average, they feel better. So I say, look, here
are all these experiments, and they say, well, the experiments
aren't good enough. Here's a flaw in that one, here's
a flaw on that one. So this is a normal
academic debate. I'm not going to change their minds ever.
They're not going to change my mind ever. This is
just the way these things go. But as we argue
it out in public, the rest of the world can

(08:08):
look and they can say, what are my arguments? What
are their arguments, and then they'll decide.

Speaker 3 (08:11):
Yeah, absolutely. And from reading your book and your work,
what I understand is you, actually, I'm not saying social
media doesn't have benefits either. That's not really what you're saying.
You're not saying that there is no validity to it.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
Well, well, what I would say is for adults, social
media has many benefits. So you know, obviously many people
start their businesses. Look, I use Twitter to get my
research out. So for adults, so think about this. These
are these These used to be called social networking sites
because originally they were just ways to connect people. And
as an adult, I have a need to network and

(08:44):
it's useful to me. And LinkedIn is useful, Twitter is
useful many you know, Facebook groups are used. These are
all useful for adults. But let's talk about middle school kids.
So in America, middle school is roughly ages eleven to thirteen.
Let's talk about kids just beginning puberty. How much need
do they have to network? How much do they need
to meet strangers, strange men who are approaching them? How

(09:07):
much do they need that? How much do they need
social media to connect with their friends? The telephone was
an amazing invention. You pick it up, you press some numbers,
and you can talk to your friend anywhere in the country,
anywhere in the world. So we already had that. How
much more help did eleven and twelve year old need
to connect with their friends? And so I would argue,

(09:29):
then when we look at middle school, this is my
main focus is early puberty. Early puberty, the brain is
extremely vulnerable because the frontal part of the brain is
rewiring very rapidly. Growth is slow during childhood, but it's
very rapid in puberty. And so I would say that
for eleven, twelve, thirteen year old kids, I'm willing to
say there aren't really any benefits and the harms are extraordinary.

(09:51):
So that's why I say we need to just raise
We need to raise the ages. We should have a
norm that no one gets a smartphone before high school.
We shouldn't have kids with a a massive entertainment center
in their pocket by which strangers can reach them, companies
can reach them. And we should raise the age of
social media opening account from thirteen, which is at present

(10:11):
not enforced, to sixteen, and enforce it. If we do
those two things, we'll really get at Lisa handle. We'll
protect kids during early puberty.

Speaker 3 (10:18):
Yeah, and I want to get on to all of
those points. I think one thing before that, I think
the word anxiety. In some cases, we've become so numb
to it. Yeah, it's become so normalized. It is the
norm to hear someone you know as anxiety, someone you
love as anxiety, children have anxiety, and I feel that
word has been so repeated over the last five to
ten years, maybe that we've become numb to it, and

(10:42):
because of that, we don't really understand, and which you
do spend a lot of time in the early parts
of the book not only defining what anxiety is an experience,
but the extent to which anxiety affects our normal, everyday functioning.
Could you give us a short summary on that, which
I want people to dive into the book to read
the deeper research on, but could we at least explore

(11:03):
what are the implications what is anxiety and what are
the implications of anxiety in the long term, if not
for some of these recommendations you're suggesting.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
So, the most important emotion for animals is fear. Fear
is across all the different species vertebrates and vertebrates. There's
a very you know, huge lung evolution. A lot is
known about fear because if you've ever been snorkeling or
out in the woods, you know that life for animals
is you're looking food. You're looking for food, and then

(11:34):
you're dead because someone jumped on you. So all of animals,
including us, have a hair trigger alarm system. That's normal,
that's healthy. So that's fear. Now, sometimes that's when you're attacked,
you're threatened. Now, sometimes you're in an environment where you
don't see a threat per se, but it's you're very
wary of it. And so let's say, you know, so

(11:56):
humans are much more afraid in the dark because in
the dark you're much more likely killed by nocturnal hunting animals.
So we have an innate fear of the dark. It
doesn't mean we're necessarily for it, but we're just a
little more on edge. And so that's your brain saying, okay,
we're gonna shift the alarm system over. We're gonna make
you a little warier. If anything happens, you're gonna jump,
whereas if it was broad daylight, you would just look

(12:18):
and say what was that. So our brains are these
incredible survival machines that have very very deep circuits for fear,
which mobilizes us to fight or to flee or fight,
and then for anxiety, which is more diffuse, just a
general sense of threats. Now, when the fear system is
triggered and then you take action and then it shuts off.

(12:39):
That's normal, that's healthy. But as many of your listeners
will know, chronic stress causes an increase in circulating cortisol.
It keeps your stress system on. Stress is not bad.
Kids need stress, but short term stress, but we have
long term stress. Now you have hormonal dysregulation, You have cortisol,
which has many functions in the body, but high levels

(13:00):
of court is all exposed you to all kinds of
health problems, joint problems, immunity, I mean, I forget the
whole list. Of course, has so many effects. So what's
happening is young people they've always been anxious young people.
Some people are set to anxious, some people are set
to more calm. That's always been the case, but there's
a shift so that more and more kids are closer

(13:21):
to the anxiety side. Now part of this is they're
told there's a lot of talk actually just this week
or two, there's a lot of talk about how these
programs that teach kids to label their emotions, and they
talk about, you know, where you're afraid, where you anxious.
They seem like they're well intentioned. It seems, you know,
social emotional learning There is some basis to that decades ago,

(13:44):
but it seems that it's moving in a direction of
teaching kids to dwell on their own emotions, always be
looking in word, how did that make you feel? How
do that make where you anxious?

Speaker 3 (13:53):
You know? What we know?

Speaker 1 (13:54):
Where can you go for help that this there's actually
not much evidence that this is helping, and there's some
new studies suggesting that this stuff backfires, This is actually
making kids more anxious. What kids would I argue in
the book is what kids really really need to overcome
anxiety is exposure. Go out and play, and sometimes you
will be afraid, and sometimes you'll climb a tree and
you'll go too high and you're afraid. I remember those

(14:15):
feelings from my childhood. But that's how you get over
childhood anxieties. We're sitting inside in a classroom with a
teacher giving you an emotion circle and saying, which of
these emotions are you feeling right now? Johnny? You know?
And sometimes they're asked, have you thought about suicide? Have
you thought about harming yourself? And they ask this over
and over again. So this suggests to kids that they

(14:35):
are weak, that they have these emotions and if they
have these emotions, it's a problem. So I think we're
you know, the mental health community, you know, I think
we're just we're not we're not recognizing what's driving the epidemic,
and we're not doing things that would effectively reverse it.

Speaker 3 (14:51):
What is the root of that? Because I feel like
the research oscillates in some cases, or at least as humans,
we like to oscillate. There's this idea of the past,
and I human it's the opposite of what you just said,
where when you were young you weren't allowed to feel.
I think everyone's experienced that idea of oh, don't worry,
everything will be okay, or oh it doesn't matter that
you feel pain, like everything will be fine, let it go,

(15:13):
or you know, don't cry or things like that. And
so that was one extreme, and then the other extreme
is what you're saying now, where it's like, well, let's
talk about every emotion and give it equal waiting and
give it equal priority. What is the middle?

Speaker 1 (15:26):
And Yeah, so I'm saying kids need adversity, they need
to sometimes be excluded. So all of that is necessary.
If you ask any parent, how many times would you
like your child to be excluded? You just have a
newborn child. Your child's going to turn eighteen eighteen years.
In those eighteen years, how often do you want your
child to be excluded and to feel excluded? And anybody
who says zero, they're speaking from their heart, but they're

(15:48):
not speaking from their head. I would never hire someone
who's never been excluded. This person is going to be
very difficult to have normal human relationships. Sometimes they won't
be included, and that's not a big deal. So we
need adversity now. I think what you're saying is it
used to be we were too insensitive, and that's true.
And there are a couple of categories, especially so bullying.

(16:09):
Bullying is really really bad. But what we have to
be clear about is bullying is not aggression. Bullying is
aggression or humiliation directed at a kid day after day.
It has to be over time, because aggression is a
normal and necessary part of childhood. You have to let
kids experience aggression, express aggression, express hostility. You have to

(16:31):
allow that and let them work it out now now,
and then there will be a problem. There'll be one
kid who is picking on another kid, and that kid
doesn't want to go to school. And if that goes
on for more than a day. Now it's bullying, and
now we need to be responsive. When I was a kid,
we weren't. In the seventies that we weren't and in
some countries I know at the time, you know, in
Japan and Korea there were horrible I mean, the culture
around bullying and English boarding schools I've heard. So it's

(16:54):
great progress that we're being more SENSI about bullying. Obviously,
the shaming of LGBTQ kids that it was constant when
I was a kid, but now it's much much better.
So in many ways we do need to be more sensitive.
But I think the gist of your question is have
we overshot?

Speaker 4 (17:10):
Have we?

Speaker 1 (17:11):
And I would say yes, we have really overshot. You know,
if there's any you know, recess in America is often
very heavily monitored, and as soon as there's any kind
of conflict, adult comes in. When my kids, my kids
went to New York City public schools, they go they're
still there in high school, and so that kind of
attention to let's make sure no one's upset, let's make
sure no one's excluded. You know, my daughter and her

(17:33):
friend they formed a little club, but they were, you know,
on the playground. They were like, no, you can't do that.
You can't exclude anyone. That's crazy. Kids need to play
with that. So anyway, that's I think we've gone too far.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
Yeah, talking about recess, I believe is in your book
that you said that the average recess time will outdoors
Thomas thirty seven minutes.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
The numbers vary, it depends on but in elementary school,
I've heard numbers as low as twenty seven minutes as
the average average. Yeah, across the day, and sometimes that's
combined with lunch. Some kid it's only yet twenty five
minutes including lunch, and so you go to you know,
you're kids need to run around, they need recess. There's
a lot of research on this play helps them learn,
helps them attend later. But in America at least, and

(18:12):
in East Asian countries, I imagine we're so focused on
test scores on that we think what five and six
and seven year olds is needed is more math, and
they don't. They don't need more math. What they need
is more play time and then they'll learn more in
a shorter amount of math. In the United States, if
you are in a federal maximum Security penitentiary, you are

(18:33):
guaranteed two hours a day of yard time. You can't
keep it inhumane to keep them in their cells all
day two hours of yard time. But if you're an
elementary school student the United States, you have no guarantee,
and it's it's very often as little as twenty seven minutes,
including lunch, which means you have to stand in the
lunch line that takes ten minutes. You get your lunch,
you have, you know you will fit down in five minutes.

(18:55):
You have whatever five minutes left to play. This is
complete insanity. If we want to get to handle on
the mental health crisis, I think we need to back
off on the adults instructing kids about their emotions, do
a lot less of that, and take all the money
and all the time we're spending on that and give
kids more play.

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You talk about what we need as children, you're talking

(19:56):
about the need for play. Is play truly just play?
Or is there certain parameters, certain ideas, certain thoughts that
make play more effective.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
Yes, play is a mammalian universal. So mammals, you know,
the first mammals whenever it was that some females began
to secrete milk from glands in their skin. It's kind
of an amazing evolutionary adaptation for having a longer childhood.
You know, other animals they lay an egg and that's it.
Animals on their own. But mammals, we have this long,

(20:28):
long childhood and that allows us to have much larger
brains and much more complex social behavior compared to say, reptiles,
and so we have this long childhood and especially the
social animals, so dogs more than cats. But you know
dogs and humans and are incredibly playful creatures. We have
a puppy at home. She's now a year and a half.

(20:48):
She still looks like a puppy. She wants to play
all the time, and she has to play. That's the thing,
since all mammals play when they're young, and they take risks.
So evolution isn't stupid. Evolution didn't say we're going to
let these these baby animals practice jumping out of trees
and practice getting in fights for no good reason. No,
there's a very good reason. That's what you have to

(21:09):
do to train your brain to reach adulthood. And that's
why for hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years,
you could say, all human children played unless they were
being seriously deprived of play and stuck in a factory.
So we and in America, we had play all the
way up through the nineteen nineties. That's when we begin
to lose it. In the nineties we freak out in
America and Britain in Canada and we say it's too dangerous.

(21:30):
You'll be abducted, you'll be sexually molested. No, you stay home,
or you stay under supervision. Oh, and there's this fabulous
new Internet, So why don't you spend more time on that.
That's what happened in the nineties, and that's when childhood
really departed from the human need for play and independent
activity and became oversupervised, helicopter parented, restrained, restricted, And you

(21:55):
can play on a video game in a way, but
it's not embodied. Whereas we're physical creatures. We need to run, jump, touch, wrestle, hug.
You know, I remember doing all those things with my
with my friends when the second or third grade, we
would sometimes hug each other or pick each other up,
or wrestle.

Speaker 3 (22:10):
You know.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
It's children are physical like puppies. But but now you
know kids, they're on their screen all the time. There
can be a playful element, but there's no risk, there's
no physicality. They don't learn the social skills that you
do from face to face encounters.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
When you were saying that, I was actually thinking back
to a trip I took to Rwanda two years ago,
and I was thinking about our gorilla friends who we
share I believe over ninety six percent of our DNA
with and watching the young gorilla's play outdoors and even
you to about wrestling, and.

Speaker 1 (22:43):
That's right. Yeah, and it was such a huch because
we're primates. Primates have arms, and primates use their arms
in play, and you see it with all you know,
with chimpanzees and bonobos and gorillas. Yeah, and it's so cute, right.
We love watching it because we mammals as adults, we
are primed for cuteness because that triggers in us a

(23:04):
protective instinct over the kids. So we have this protective
instinct and unfortunately it's kind of run rampant.

Speaker 4 (23:12):
You know.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
It used to be the kids are out of the house,
you don't see them, but now we can monitor kids
all the time, and we're just we're swooping in too quick.

Speaker 3 (23:19):
Yeah. No, I mean I think we all resonate with that,
even as adults. There's this beautiful quote from George Bernard
Shaw where he said that we don't stop playing because
we get old. We get old because we stop playing. Beautiful, Yes,
And I think that we can relate to that. I
can relate to the as this idea that I misplay.
I think the challenge is that, as you said, in

(23:41):
the nineteen nineties, when things started to veer off course,
now children given the choice generally are going to choose
indoor video games, phone time, ipadd and they're not going
to choose play. So I think the challenge becomes, now
that our taste buds have become technological, how do we

(24:02):
rewired that taste bud when we've been so diverted. That's right.

Speaker 1 (24:07):
So it's not clear whether it's that the taste buds
have become technological or that the technology has adapted so
profoundly that it now knows exactly what we most want.
So I was born in nineteen sixty three. I remember
when the game Pong came out. It's the first video
game you could get on your home television. So it
was very, very crude, but it's amazing. You turn a

(24:28):
knob and you can play tennis. And I'd sit there
with my friend and we'd do that for you know,
twenty thirty minutes, then we go do something else. So
these video games were not immersive. They were fun and
you played with a friend. But once you get you know,
you get graphics cards, you get color monitors, you get
high speed internet, you get multiplayer video games. These games

(24:49):
are incredible. I mean, my son plays Fortnite. I didn't
let him on in sixth grade when he was eleven,
but I did let him on thirteen around COVID time.
These games are incredible and as a boy, what's most
is wargames, and so the games just get better and better.
And this is actually something we need to talk about.

Speaker 4 (25:07):
You know.

Speaker 1 (25:08):
So much of the talker is about social media and girls.
With boys, it's a different problem boys. There are many
that are harmed by social media. Many are driven to suicide.
I don't want to say it's okay for boys, but
social media is is not so correlated with depression and
anxiety for boys it is for girls. For boys, what's
happening is the technology is so amazing and the real

(25:28):
world is getting more and more inhospitable to them. I mean,
we've been really trying to reduce prejudice against girls and
open up girls and bring them into every that's all great,
but girls are just so much better in school. They
just do better in school. They school is made for
more of a female child than a male child. You
sit still, you learn, you please the teacher. And we've

(25:51):
we've pushed out rough and tumble play. We've reduced recess.
There's no more shop class, So boys aren't enjoying school
as much as girls. Boys are enjoying the technology more
and more. And it's not just the videogainst also the pornography.
So you know, war games and sex those are deeply
appealing to boys and young men. And as the technology
gets better and better. Now, you know, if you're a

(26:14):
boy with budding sexual urges and you have two choices,
one is the most incredible pornography you've ever seen, and
then soon there'll be goggles. Soon they'll be put into
sex dolls and robots. I mean, you can have this
amazing sex life that you can customize. You can customize
the body size, you can customize the personality. You know,
you can have virtual girlfriends and boyfriends now, so boys

(26:34):
are finding a video game, play in pornography more and
more satisfying. And it's just difficult to arrange a soccer
game with your friends, that's just difficult, where let's just
meet online, And it's difficult to flirt with the girl
and develop a relationship and fall in love and have sex.
That's really hard. So I think we're losing boys. And
it's not just because their taste buds are rewired. It's

(26:56):
because the technology is amazingly good at learning. What do
we most want, Let's deliver that. But it's not what
we most need, it's what we most want.

Speaker 3 (27:06):
And what's the cost of that. What's happening to boys'
brains and minds?

Speaker 1 (27:10):
So the big picture is that boys are failing to
have the kinds of experiences that will toughen them, teach
them skills, teach them virtues, and turn them into men.
Boys development is different from girls development. All around the world. Traditionally,
boys generally initiation rights involve more toughening toughness demonstrations. And

(27:31):
we can say this is terrible and patriarchal, but I
actually think it's important. So you know, all kids start
off in the female sphere we live. We're all raised
by mothers and girls and aunts traditionally around the world,
and so girls stay within the female world, and girls
initiation rights are usually pegged to puberty to menstruation, and

(27:52):
then they're taught all the secrets of being a woman.
All that boys have to make the transition from the
women's world into the men's world and less. So today,
I'm not saying it needs to be this way, So
I'm just saying it generally is to some extent, boys
development is different from girls development. And boys if you
give them the easy way out all the time, many

(28:13):
of them will take it, and then they don't grow,
they don't toughen, and so I think what we're seeing
now is a generation gen Z born after nineteen ninety
six and later, in which the girls are extraordinarily anxious
and depressed, much more so than the boys. But the
boys are extraordinarily undeveloped. Many people say they have no
social skills, they don't look you in the eye, they

(28:35):
don't know how to behave in public. They certainly don't
know how to talk to a girl. So I think
we're seeing just a massive, massive blockage of development. And
you know, gen Z the oldestar twenty eight. We'll see,
we'll see if they come out of it. But when
the millennials were twenty eight, they had already invented so
many companies, they were inventing technologies. I mean, the millennials

(28:58):
by twenty eight they were like, you know, a meeting,
you're streaking across the sky. And gen Z seems much
more to be hunkered down, like you know, talking about
their anxiety. So I'm not blaming them at all, it's
not their fault. We deprive them of play, we put
touch screens in their hands. Then they had the bad
luck to you basically come out of college, the eldest

(29:18):
of them, right into COVID. So those in their twenties now,
their work experience was truncated. What they need is mentoring
in a real office or a real job, and they
didn't get it. So again I'm not blaming, but man,
we have to have a lot of sympathy and we
have to make sure this stops. We have to stop
this right now.

Speaker 3 (29:36):
And I think that's the challenge. Right. A lot of
people say, well, people are going to have virtual girlfriends
and we are going to live in the virtual world,
and everyone's going to go home and put their headset
on and you know, disappear, disappear into the abyss and
then we'll be wearing it all day, not just in
the evenings. And so there's that belief system that actually,
we're just getting better at using the technology that will

(29:57):
define our future success anyway, or future failure if we
don't know it. But you're saying that, there's just what
are the I guess the harsher implications of what does
this look like in twenty years time.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
Okay, so I'm very influenced by. One of the puzzles
that I first tried to deal with is why, you
know what made gen Z?

Speaker 3 (30:18):
Why?

Speaker 1 (30:18):
Because when I started this work, when I started writing
The Carlie the American Mind with Greg Lukianov, we first
wrote an article in twenty fifteen in the Atlantic, and
we thought college students were millennials. You know, the millennial
generation started in nineteen eighty one, and it was expected
to be if you're born all the way up through
two thousand, you're a millennial. That's what we thought. But
then Gene Twangi came out with her book Eye Jen

(30:39):
and her research showing that kids born around nineteen ninety
six and later are very different, much higher rates of
mental illness. And so when you look at the millennial generation,
their mental health is actually pretty good. You know, the
youngest millennials are a little bit more like gen Z.
But for the most part, the millennials mental health is fine.
They made it through puberty before they got their first

(31:01):
smartphone and social media account. So if you didn't get
a so you know, millennials, like a lot of them,
got you know, Facebook, when they were in college. In fact,
originally Facebook was only for college students. You had to
be in college to get Facebook. So what we see
in the data is that if you didn't get a
smartphone in social media until you were eighteen or older,
your mental is fine.

Speaker 4 (31:22):
Now.

Speaker 1 (31:22):
You know, let's say you're a thirty five year old.
Right now, you might feel overwhelmed. You might feel that
this thing was stressing you out, but you had normal
brain development. You you used technology when you were a kid.
You had a flip phone. You used it to connect
with other kids. You used it. You know, you'd have
to text, and it was hard to text, and you
had to use your thumbs and press number keys. But
you use the technology as a tool to help you
meet up with your friends where maybe you called them

(31:43):
on the phone. That was it. That's all your phone
could do. But if you got a smartphone in social
media at the start of puberty, which is what almost
all kids do now, that means you're going through puberty
on social media and with a massive entertainment, with a
supercomputer and an entertainment system in your pocket with you
all the time. So my point is this, if we
can protect childhood and let kids get through puberty and

(32:06):
then we give them the goggles and the virtual girlfriends
and everything else. Their lives are still going to be
kind of messed up by this stuff, but at least
their brains matured and they're probably not going to be
depressed anxious for life if we keep giving it. You know,
it used to be at you know, ten eleven is
when kids get their first smartphone. Now it's more it's
going down to five or six. If we keep giving

(32:26):
little children a touchscreen device, including an iPad, and using
it as a babysitter and saying, oh, yeah, yeah, you
just you know, here, here's here's your device. I'm busy,
I'm doing email, I'm cooking, here's your device. If we
keep doing that, we're not Our brains are not going
to adapt to that. Children's brains are not going to
somehow evolve so that that becomes okay. It's not going

(32:47):
to be okay.

Speaker 3 (32:48):
Yeah, and it's it's it's such a harsh reality, but
it's true that people have less time. We have less,
we are doing so much more. It seems we are
living further away from family. There's so many reasons why
the iPad is becoming the babysitter that feels validated because
we're not living in bigger family spaces. We don't have
the support of our neighbors. We don't have we don't

(33:10):
have the resources or the funds to have a paid
babysitter or whatever it may be. So there's so many
almost valid reasons for why we even say take the iPad.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
No, that's right again. You know, in my book, I
have almost no really no criticism for parents. And some
people say, you know why, it's the parent's responsibility. It's therefore,
why aren't you blaming the parents, to which my answer is,
you know, I'm a parent. I know a lot of parents,
a lot of us are really trying and it's really hard.
I mean, the technological environment now is such that you know,
if you don't give your kid a smartphone, she's left out,

(33:42):
and she, you know, says dad, I'm the only one.
I'm left out. So parents are trying. And as a
social psychologist who studies morality, I know that if one
person does something that seems evil, well maybe they're maybe
they're evil. But if an entire society and if an
entire planet change is at the same time in the
same way, it's not individual's fault. And so if parenting changed,

(34:05):
certainly across the English speaking world, we can't blame the
parents for that. There must be some reason why we
all freaked out and began overprotecting. So yeah, I don't
blame I don't blame the parents. I say we're stuck
in systemic problems, and I'm proposing norms by which we
can escape.

Speaker 3 (34:22):
And I think anyone when I've been mentioning you were
coming on the show, I was talking to people about
your work, and I was talking about your recommendations of
no social media before sixteen, no phones before fourteen. And
I don't think there's any adult that I spoke to
that had any debate with either of those. I think
everyone looked to me. You know, I'm talking to everyone
twenty five and up, But anyone that I talked to

(34:42):
twenty five and up, when that makes perfect sense, I
think that's a great idea, and what a brilliant recommendation.
Like when do we get started?

Speaker 2 (34:50):
That's right?

Speaker 3 (34:50):
Right, that's right.

Speaker 1 (34:51):
People are ready to get started because everyone sees it,
everyone's sick of it.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
Yeah, And obviously in the book you hold, you say,
here's what governments can do. Here's what technology companies can do,
his what schools can do. I think my question is,
and I know you've talked about what they can do
in so many other places, which is fantastic. My question is,
how do we actually get that to be a reality?
Like what does it actually take to change norms? Because
I was trying to think, and I'd love your take

(35:16):
on this, like when was the last time we tried
to do that in any sphere of life? Oh? Sure,
and how did it go? Oh and so did it work?
And where did it fact?

Speaker 1 (35:24):
So we have a lot of experience with norm changes.
So one of the clearest is smoking. It took twenty
or thirty years. When I was in high school in
the seventies, you know, a bunch of kids smoked. Most
of us didn't put a bunch of high school kids smoked,
you know age, you know, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, And beginning
in the eighties or nineties, there was an anti tobacco
campaign and it took a few decades, but the rates

(35:46):
of smoking are very very low. Now now there's vaping.
Kids moved on to vaping, which is bad, but not
as bad as smoking. Norms around LGBTQ and shaming and
bullying and using racial slurs. These norms have changed radical
in the last twenty or thirty years. So norm change
normally happens over the space of a few decades, and
we have many, many examples we've been studied. So some

(36:09):
things get more moralized, like smoking is now seen as evil,
whereas homosexuality, which used to be seen as evil, is
now seen as perfectly okay. So norms change over the
course of decades. What's happening now is very different. What's
happening now The digital world has put us into an
environment in which things can spread within minutes. I mean

(36:29):
this has never happened in human history. Norms can spread
around the world in days, and not norms, but ideas
or means can spread around the world in days. And
what that means is that norms can change very quickly too,
And so all over the world, all over the develop world,
in twenty ten, kids had flip phones, no social media
on their phones. In twenty fifteen we have now the

(36:51):
phone based childhood. All over the world. Kids are behaving
the same way. So that changed very quickly, and that
put pressure on everyone else to do the same thing. Okay,
so we're stuck in this collective action problem that emerged
very very quickly. But by the same token, we can
escape very very quickly, because wherever I go, the main
counter argument I get is parents who say, ugh, you know,

(37:14):
it's just it's too late. The trains left the station.
What are we going to do? This is the way
of the future. So resignation is really the only obstacle
I'm facing. But most parents, so many parents are upset
by this that they're ready to act if only some
way can be found to coordinate them. So in the UK,
I just got back from London a few days ago.
In the UK, the Parents' Revolution started in February. A

(37:36):
couple of mothers, Daisy Greenwell and Claire Reynolds, they just
put up on an Instagram post. They put up that
they'd started a WhatsApp group for parents who wanted a
smartphone free childhood. They were going to delay giving their
kids smartphones, and like overnight, tens of thousands of British
parents signed up. There's a limit on WhatsApp groups they

(37:57):
had to form locally. They had to form hundreds of
WhatsApp groups. It's spread like wildfire and what I'm finding
I've been involved in a lot of efforts to change
ideas and norms. It's very hard, takes decades on this one.
I don't have to convince anyone on this one. It's
like everyone's ready to act. They just need to know
what to do. And so you know, I'm proposing these

(38:17):
four simple norms as you said, the two that I
would add that I add that we haven't mentioned our
phone free schools. We must keep the phones out of school,
just lock them up as soon as you come in.
That is doable. This can be done by September.

Speaker 3 (38:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:29):
And the fourth is give far more free play and
independence in the real world. That's the hardest one, actually,
but that's incredibly important. So let me actually just take advantage.
I'm actually very excited that you have this gigantic global audience.

Speaker 3 (38:40):
Next question, Okay, how can we help?

Speaker 1 (38:41):
Great?

Speaker 3 (38:42):
What can we do? Because I want to be a
part of the mission.

Speaker 1 (38:44):
Great? Great, So here's what I can say. First, let
me just give a little background, which is is this
just happened in the United States. No, if listeners, if
you so all over the world, please go to after
Babbel dot com. After B A B. E. Al it's
my sub stack. It's free, nothing's behind a paywall. That's
where we're putting our research out and you'll find articles there.

(39:07):
We have one post on how the mental health epidemic
is hitting all the Anglosphere countries, and so Zach rouse
this was his first international post. We've gathered all the
mental health data we can from around the world. Most
countries don't have any, but the developed countries often do,
so we can show that the same thing is happening
at the same time in all the Anglo countries. And

(39:27):
then he moved on to Scandinavia. Same things happening at
the same time in the Scandinavian countries. Now that's very
interesting because I just had an interview with a Finnished
journalist this morning and she said, you know, in Finland
we let our kids out, like our kids at seven
eight they're out playing. But even still, she says, they
go outside to play and they sit down and they're
on their phone because they all have phones from the

(39:48):
age of you know, six or seven. So this is
happening all over the developed world in Europe. Zach has
a post on the rest of Europe. It's especially northern Europe.
It's a little less so in Eastern Europe in southern Europe.
So first, there is variation around the world in mental
health that is definitely important. But what I'm finding is
parents everywhere are seeing their kids not playing. They're seeing

(40:13):
them sit on their phones at recess. In countries where
the kids can have a phone in their pocket at recess,
the kids are often sitting down on their phones. They're
not running around and yelling and laughing. So, wherever you
are in the world, figure out, you know, figure out
whether you have this problem. You probably do that. Your kids,
even if they're not depressed, they're missing most of childhood,
They're missing adventure. There, probably have fewer hobbies, they probably

(40:34):
don't read books, they probably don't spend much time with
other people. So this is going to influence them in
a bad way around the world. And then start talking
to other parents. The simplest thing. Most of us are
on a text thread with the parents of our kids friends.
Because you had to arrange for this birthday party, Okay,

(40:54):
I'll pick them up and you know, so we're all
in contact with the parents of our kids friends. Just
start with that, say do you know, do you see
this problem? Are you concerned, and especially if you have
younger kids, you can delay when you know, you can
delay when you give your kid a smartphone. If your
kid's friends are in the same boat, then it's not hard.
That's the point of this collective getting out of the

(41:15):
collective action problem. I would also urge anyone around the
world bring up the subject of phone free schools if
you're child. So a number of countries France, Australia, a
few countries have and Britain just have guidance that schools
must go phone free. They must either lock them up

(41:36):
or lock up the phones in a locker, special locker
or in a yonder pouch of lockable pouch. But if
your country doesn't do that, start advocating for it. If
you go to Anxious Generation dot com, that's the website
for the book. We have a whole research page. Look
at that. Send that to people. I have all kinds
of talks I've given on YouTube. You can find my
YouTube channel lectures about why we need to go phone free.

(41:56):
So that's right, that's the thing we can do this year.
We can do it in twenty twenty four is make
all our school's phone free and that will allow our
children to learn more because when they're sitting in class,
they don't have the world's greatest entertainment center in their hand,
and they're not texting, and they're not bullying each other,
and they're not doing TikTok challenge. They're actually listening to

(42:18):
the teacher or passing notes with other kids, which is fine.
They're interacting with other kids. That's actually okay with me.

Speaker 3 (42:24):
Why school's done it already? I feel like it's.

Speaker 1 (42:26):
Because a few parents complain. In the United States, the
only problem, the only reason they don't do it is
that American parents are so overprotective, many not all so overprotective,
and they've gotten so used to being able to text
their kids throughout the day. So it could be you know, hey, Johnny,
how did your math test go? And they might even
text that during the math test, and the kid checks

(42:47):
his phone during the math test, you know, or oh,
I'm going to be late for pickup, like okay, did
the kid need to know that during English class?

Speaker 4 (42:55):
Like why not?

Speaker 1 (42:56):
Just you know? Let when he gets his phone back
he can see, okay, you'll be late for pickup. And
in America we have the problem that because we do
have school shooting. Now they're extremely rare, but they're happening
more so. Some parents think, oh, if there's a school shooting,
I want to be able to talk to my child.
And this is a huge mistake because if there actually
was a shooter on a school campus, what you want

(43:17):
is the kids to follow directions and do what they
were trained to do. You don't want every kid pulling
out their phone and crying to mom and dad. So
I've spoken to many principles or heads of school and
I ask them, why don't you ban the phones and
they always say the same thing. They'd be right among
the parents, well, only among some parents. And so if
you're listening to this podcast and you have kids in school,

(43:39):
talk to the head of school and say, no, I
want my kid to be in a phone free school.
I want my kid to listen to the teacher and
to interact with other kids. So that's something we can
all do right away.

Speaker 3 (43:48):
And do you have resources on how to have that
conversation effect?

Speaker 1 (43:50):
Yes, I do so. At Anxious Generation dot com we
do have some You go to resources, you take action,
and then there's a tab for parents. There are also
two organizations in the United States, the Smartphone Free Schools
dot org and Smartphone Free Schools Movement dot orgs. We
have two different organizations that are they show you here's

(44:11):
a sample letter that you can say, here's what you
can do. In the UK there's Smartphone Free Childhood dot
co dot UK. So within a number of countries there
are already movements. But you know what, you can just
use the resources from the American or the British one
and you know what, this global audience start your own.
Come to anterest generation dot com. We have a list

(44:31):
of aligned organizations, mostly in the US and the UK,
but there are a couple in Canada, there's I think
one in Germany there's one, and somewhere in Latin America.
So people are starting, These parents are rising up all
around the world. Let's join them.

Speaker 3 (44:44):
Let's talk about before we dive into spirituality, because I
was curious to see you at a chap to dedicate
it to that inside the book, talk to me about
the differencing girls in the use of social media versus boys,
because like you said, and I'm glad we talked about
young boys because often they can get forgott conversation. But
let's talk a bit about young girls and how social

(45:04):
media is having a far more adverse effect on their
mental health.

Speaker 1 (45:07):
First, the evidence of a link is just very clear.
For girls. With girls, their mental health was very stable
until twenty twelve, and then in twenty thirteen it starts rising.
It really is a light switch. For boys, it's not
so sharp, it's more gradual. Secondly, the correlations for girls
are much higher. The correlation three time spent on social
media and mental health problems. So for girls the evidence

(45:29):
is much clear. Now why the connection. In the book,
I go into the psychology of motivation, and there are
two categories of motivation. They're very important to understand. Agency
and communion. So agency is the desire to be an
agent to make things happen. You know, when I was
a kid, it was so exciting to take a BB
gun and shoot at tin cans because I pull a

(45:50):
trick and the thing falls over. It's an incredible thrill.
So that's agency making things happen. Communion is connection, being
with friends, bonding, sharing story, is sharing emotions. I really
enjoyed that too. Everyone has both motives on average. On average,
boys and men have a little bit more on the
agency side. It matters more to them when you let

(46:11):
them choose what to do, they're going to go out.
They're going to build a tower and then knock it over.
My friends and I we used to build model airplants,
like World War two fighter jets, and then we'd put
like rubbing alcohol in them and then we'd light them
on fire. Like that was really fun to do. So
that's the agency making things happen. Communion is connection girls.
If you let kids play, the girls are much more
likely to sit and talk. They want to connect. And

(46:34):
what are they talking about other girls? They're talking about relationships.
They're developing their mental map of space. So girls are
a little more sophisticated about social relationships. They think more
about them, they share emotions more, and that's the strength.
That's something that's why women excel in certain professions and
men excel in other professions. But the differences aren't so

(46:55):
much how good they are. They're what they enjoy doing.
And so when the companies come along and they say, hey,
do you want to see what everyone's doing? Do you
want to see what everyone's saying? Do you want to
see what they're saying about you? This is like catnip
for girls. This is this is they really target this
at girls in securities and they get girls to come on,

(47:17):
and then there's drama which brings more girls on. Now
boys are affected by this too, but it's just not
as alluring. And if you give so when everyone gets
multiple screens, you know, by twenty ten, twenty eleven, the
iPad comes out multiplayer video games. Everyone is tempted by screens.
The boys go rushing into multiplayer video games and porn,

(47:37):
they do a lot more of that. The girls go
rushing for Instagram, Pinterest, Tumbler, especially the visual platforms. Okay, so,
now why is this so bad for girls? And I
go through I think five reasons in the book. So
one is just the social comparison. Girls are always judged
more on their looks. I just came across a quote
from Epictetus I read Stoic writings in the Mornings. Epictetis

(47:58):
commented an ancient about how when they turn fourteen, girls
are are judged as sexual partners and they focus, They're
made to focus too much on their looks. And you know,
this is a sad thing that these girls are just
becoming focused on their looks. What's happening now? Because girls
it's constant social comparison with other girls who get praised
for being not just beautiful but sexy. So, whether they

(48:20):
know it or not, they're copying porn star type poses,
porn star type looks. They're being hyper sexualized, massive social comparison,
and on average they don't measure up because if everyone
on Instagram is actually appears much more beautiful than in
real life, well then everyone else is below average. So
the social comparison hurts girls more than boys. The nature

(48:43):
of aggression is such that boys aggression is more physical
and it's ultimately about who can dominate, who, who can
beat up who. If it came to that, Girls aggression,
of course, are just as aggressive, but it's different. Girls
aggression historically, and a cross cultures and even across species,
is more relational. Girls will damage another girl's reputation or relationships,

(49:04):
and boy to social media allowed them to do that
anonymously and on the weekends too. It used to be
the girls were safe from bullying on the weekends, but
because they're out of school, but now they're not so.
And then there's the sexual predation. You know, there're sexual
predators that are going for boys, but if you're a
boy on the internet, you're not being constantly sexually propositioned
by older men. I mean, it happens, but it's not

(49:26):
that common if you're a girl on the internet. We
just published an article from Antonio Bihar, who was a
Facebook whistleblower, and his research within Facebook, within Instagram actually
was that thirteen percent of teenagers thirteen to fifteen year
old teenagers had gotten some sort of a sexual proposition
or someone coming on to them, a stranger coming on
to them in the past week. In the past week

(49:49):
thirteen percent. So if you're a girl online, it's just
you're just living among predators. You're like, you know, the
animals we talked about before, in the woods after dark,
you're more frightened. So for all these re when kids
shifted from a play based childhood to a phone based childhood,
it was more devastating for the girls.

Speaker 3 (50:07):
Vianna, we're talking about this yesterday. What's your take on
He was suggesting this idea of everyone on social media
being verified. Oh yeah, having to be verified.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
Oh oh my god, of course that has to happen.
So think about it. You know, we're in America. We're
afraid to let our kids out in part because we
think they'll be abducted, There'll be a stranger hanging out
by the playground luring them into a car, and that
has happened in America. It's very very rare. If there's
only about one hundred, one hundred and fifty cases of
true kidnapping by a stranger in this country every year,

(50:38):
so it's extremely rare, but it does happen. We're very
afraid of strangers approaching our children. But guess what. The
strangers are not at the playground anymore. They've moved to Instagram. Okay,
So the idea that we're going to put our kids
on platforms where strange men can reach them, flirt with them,
say that they're a twelve year old boy or fifteen

(50:59):
year old boy, change fake photos, including a photo of
your daughter in a bathing suit or less. This is
complete insanity. I don't think we should be having children
interacting with complete strangers. The sextortion rings now it used
to be just ten or twenty thousand a year reported
in the United States. It's way more now. There's a
Nigerian gang, the Yahoo Boys, I think it's called. They've

(51:21):
industrialized it, so we don't know but you know, hundreds
of thousands, millions of boys are getting sextorted now and
dozens are known to have committed suicide. It's probably hundreds
who've committed suicide. Most we don't know about because you know,
they're flirting with what they think is a girl and
then this criminal gang tricks them into sending a nude
photo and at that point then they say, I have
what I need to ruin your life. Send us send

(51:43):
me five hundred dollars right now, or I will send
this to all of your contacts. This is complete insanity
that we let our boys and our girls interact with
criminals day and night. So what I would like to
see is, first we just have to raise the h
so you know, below six they just shouldn't be on
it at all. They need to be in contact with

(52:04):
each other over sixteen. Okay, this is the nature of
the world. People are going to be interacting with strangers.
There are some benefits to that. There's networking issues, but
if you were on a platform like LinkedIn. LinkedIn people
use their real names. You don't hear problems about LinkedIn.
The problems are especially on Instagram, Snapchat, any platform that

(52:25):
has anonymous strangers interacting. So if we had both age verification,
which is essential we have to get age verification eventually,
and then also identity verification now here. I'm not saying
that the government needs to mandate identity verification on all platforms.
The world would be a much better place if we
did that. There would be many fewer threats to democracy.

(52:47):
If we did that, Russian agents and Chinese agents couldn't
like just drop crazy rumors and make us hate each
other in America the way they do. So I would
prefer that we live in a world where every platform
has mandatory I dedentity verification. You could still post with
a fake name, but in order to open an account
you have to show I'm a real person in this
country and I'm old enough. But I would be content

(53:10):
even if it's not mandated. I would be content if
platforms just made this the default. What if meta or
let's say not meta. They're not going to do it,
But what if there was an alternative to Instagram in
which people had to be verified and then they had
all kinds of other safety features if they have an
immune system built in. Now, how would I feel about

(53:33):
letting my sixteen year old daughter on that much better
than on a platform where she's interacting with criminals from
around the world. Have you spoken to Meta, Yes, I've
spoken to They don't. Well, they say they're working on it.
They say they're working on age verification, but they I've
seen nothing from them. They have I shouldn't say that
they haven't done nothing. They've done a few things. One
thing is they, at least I think they set the

(53:54):
privacy defaults to high for under sixteen. I think it
is whereas it used to be. You know, you know
you're a nine year old, you lie, you say you're thirteen,
and what you say is public. That's completely insane. So
they have taken a few steps, but not much. And again,
Antonio Behar's testimony to the Senate last year was I
showed them what's happening, the sexual solicitation of teens. I

(54:16):
told them a simple way to have this reported. They
didn't do anything. So I think Meta in particular has
shown itself resistant to changes suggested by people within. And
that's why we have a couple of Facebook whistleblowers. So
I'm hoping that market competition will help. I'm hoping that
Congress will repeal the mistakes it made in the United States.

(54:37):
We created this problem for the world. Our companies created
this stuff. Our Congress said that we're not allowed to
sue them for what they do to our kids. They
can show our kids whatever they want and we can't
sue them. It's a special law that says we can't
sue them. But in other countries they can. And so
I'm really hopeful that all around the world people initiate
lawsuits when their kids committed suicide because of things that

(54:57):
happened on social media. I hope that people will initiate
proceedings if they can, if it's clear that it was
caused by online activity. And then Congress, the US Congress
created this very ridiculous law that the age at which
you can sign a contract with a company and give
away your data without your parents' knowledge, without your parents'
consent is thirteen, which is insanely low. It should that

(55:22):
that I think needs to be sixteen or eighteen, but
it was set to thirteen and nineteen ninety eight with
no enforcement. In fact, the way the law is written,
as long as Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat, as long
as they don't know you're underage, they're fine. But if
they ask, and then they find out that you're under thirteen. Well,

(55:42):
now they're responsible. So it's very important for them that
they not know how old their users are, and we
have to change that. We have to get to the
point where they have to know. Of course, they do
know how old their users are. They know everything about
their users, but they don't kick them off. So we
have to get to the point where the companies are
held responsible for underage use in the physical world. It's like,
it's so absurd, you know, people say, tell me, well,

(56:03):
it's the parents job to keep them off. Okay, imagine
a world in which we generally think kids should not
be exposed to hardcore sex, to drugs, to violence, and
to addiction. So we have age limits on bars, strip clubs, brothels.
There are you know, the brothels in Nevada and in Europe,
and casinos we have age limits on those. What if

(56:25):
someone said, you know, it's the parent's job to keep
the kids out of that. If they don't want their
thirteen year olds in a brothel, they should stop them
from going into brothels. Like no, that's not the way
it works. Like no, this is a business. This business
is hurting kids. This business is responsible for checking IDs,
for keeping out children. Yet in the online world, we say, well,
you know, what are you going to do? You know,
nine year olds are going to be watching beheading videos.

(56:47):
They're gonna be watching anal sex, They're gonna be watching
the cat in a blender video. Have you heard of
this one? Captain a blender one? That's exactly what it
sounds like. And this is something that kids are exposed to.
It's an actual cat put in a blender and killed.

Speaker 2 (57:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
I have not watched the video because I don't ever
want to see it because I'll never unsee it. But
I did enough research to know this is not just
an Internet rumor. This actually happened, and it was in China.
So you know, this is the world that our kids
are now inhabiting. And I'm saying no, no, wait, at
least till you're sixteen, get part way through puberty before
you immersed in this garbage, and that is a great

(57:20):
transition to our spiritualities discussion.

Speaker 3 (57:23):
Well, it's an ironic situation where we were glorifying the
millennials to have been much more productive and effective, but
a lot of the millennials who created amazing companies of
the companies exactly now creating.

Speaker 1 (57:35):
This challenge, right, that is an irony.

Speaker 3 (57:38):
Yeah. But I read something around over ten years ago
and it talked about how humans defined what was most
important to a community, a city, or a town based
on the tallest building that was built. And so previously
it was the church or the place of worship. A
few years later that transformed. A few decades later that

(57:58):
transformed to the government building. Yeah, and then decades later
that transformed to the corporate offices, and now the tech
companies or the financial institutions. And so we saw how
society has shifted its north star. I was curious to
see why you brought a chapter on spiritual elevation and
degradation into this conversation, and how is it connected.

Speaker 1 (58:19):
Yeah. So my first book was called The Happiness Hypothesis,
Finding Modern Truth and Ancient Wisdom. What I did in
that book it grew out of my teaching psych one
oh one introductory Psychology at the University of Virginia. I
noticed when I was trying to explain psychology to three
hundred students, I would quote Shakespeare. You know, there's nothing
good or bad, but thinking makes it so well that

(58:41):
insight is actually also Marcus Aurelius and Buddha. Buddha says
we are what we think with our minds, we make
the world. And so I realized that, wow, you know,
across the millennia, across the continents, people have come to
these deep insights about psychology, about happiness, about love, about consciousness.
So I collected, I read a lot of ancient wisdom

(59:03):
all over the world, and I took out every psychological
claim and I organized them and I made it into
ten chapters. And you know, so some of them are
you know, like, you know, be slower to judge, quicker
to forgive. You know, Jesus says, judge, not that se
be judged, you know. And I have a whole chapter
on how our moral psychology is such that we jump
to judgments. We care about our tribe, we don't care

(59:23):
about the truth, you know. So so that was my background.
I wrote that book on ancient wisdom, and then I
wrote The Coddling the American Mind with Greg Lukianov, and
we've talked about these three great untruths, the ways that
students are being taught, you know, that they're fragive. Ancient
wisdom is you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
There's quotes from all over the world about that. But
kids are being taught no, you're fragile, like you know,

(59:45):
if someone says a word or a name, that can
be violence against you. So we're making mistakes here. So
that's sort of my background's thinking about ancient wisdom and psychology.
All right. So then I end up writing this book,
The Anxious Generation, and it's July of last year, and
I'm way behind deadline, and I'm already really stressed about like,

(01:00:07):
you know, I'm so far past the deadline in order
for us to get the book out. But I felt like,
you know what, I just read this whole book about kids.
I haven't said anything about adults, but we're all feeling it.
Most of us at least are feeling something is wrong.

Speaker 4 (01:00:20):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
You know, when I got my first ifelhe it was
so amazing. I loved it. But these technologies have become
our master They're changing our lives. And I decide, you
know what, I'm going to write a chapter for adults.
I'm just going to stick in a chapter what is
it that's happening to all of us? And I just
started making a list. You know, it keeps us indoors,
it keeps us distracted. And I suddenly realized, Wow, almost

(01:00:44):
all the ancient insights into how to live the phone
based life is the opposite. And once I saw that,
I said, oh my god, that's the structure for this chapter.
So I opened it with my earlier work on moral elevation.
I studied moral emotions. I used to have writings on
moral elevation which everyone will recognize when you see a

(01:01:04):
story about you read a story you see you know
on the news, or anything about heroism, about loyalty, about devotion.
You know a dog that you know was so devoted
to its master and it keeps coming to the train
station to greet him. I mean, you know, we're easily
moved and we feel it. We feel it in our
chest and it's the vagus. Nerve gets activated, our heart

(01:01:27):
rhythms change. There are hormonal effects. There's oxytocin is released
women lactate. I showed that experimentally in the study with
Jennifer Silvers. So I did all this research on moral elevation,
and the key to it is the psychology of up
and down. Some things make us feel closer to God.
Some things make us feel further from God. That's the

(01:01:48):
way cultures talk about it. And it's always a vertical metaphor.
God is up, the devil is down. So this is
my view. I'm a Jewish atheist myself. I don't I'm
not a believer, but I've had some religious experiences. They've
had a number of spiritual experiences, so I know these
are an important part of human psychology. And once I
put in that framework that ancient traditions are trying to

(01:02:10):
move us up. They're saying, you know, meditate, you know,
Hindu traditions, Buddhist traditions, you know, everything out of India
is much more. Get control of your attention, get control
of your consciousness. Otherwise it just gets drowned in trivia.
But no, you know, meditate, live purely, do your work
with mastery. Come out like the moon, come out from
behind the clouds and shine. That's a loose translation from

(01:02:32):
the Dama Pada. But what does a phone based life do?
Constant notifications, constant interruptions. My students at NYU, you know,
they get two or three hundred notifications a day on
average on their phones. Many of them never go ten
minutes without interruption. So I just made a list, and
it was things like spiritual practices involve making something sacred

(01:02:54):
and we all agree this thing is sacred and we
worship it. We have sacred days. On the Jewish religion,
we have the Shabbat, you know, Sabbath. You're not supposed
to use electronics if you're Orthodox. Things are sacred and
it's sharing. The sacredness binds us together. That's what every
religious community does. But a life online nothing is sacred.

(01:03:14):
There's no there's no sacred time. There's the internet never closes.
It's global, there are no holidays, there are no holy days,
and the constant demand for you to post about your brand,
what you're doing. Look at the amazing life I have.
So we have a posted after Babel. We were just

(01:03:35):
taking on this really wonderful British writer. A young woman
named Freya India gen Z, a writer and she has
a post which starts with you see a photo of
a young woman posing for a sexy selfie on the
train tracks in front of Auschwitz. Here she is, she's
on some tour of Auschwitz, the concentration camp. But it's

(01:03:56):
a nice day in Poland and so she poses in
a sexy way in front of the gates of hell.
And so you know, if everyone's a brand manager all
the time, nothing is sacred. Oh, and it's all about you,
whereas one of the keys to spirituality is it's not
all about you. You actually are not that important. It's
only when you can transcend yourself, transcend yourself interest, that

(01:04:17):
you can open your heart to God, to our higher motives,
to love to other people. So you know, you just
go through the list. Whatever the ancients urge us to
do to achieve spiritual progress, a life lived online, even
for us adults, pulls us in the opposite direction.

Speaker 3 (01:04:35):
I could agree with you more, and I think, what's
really interesting when I'm hearing that? And that's primarily why
I started this show. The goal and the intention behind
this show was how can we avoid gossip? How can
we avoid the juiciest scoop? How can we avoid the
lowest hanging fruit and still get as many or more

(01:04:57):
views than everyone else on the inter and beautiful because
my belief system was that if you were able to
make wisdom go viral, then you could actually raise consciousness.
And if we keep feeding people junk food and junk content.
It's actually not that hard to get clicks and views.

(01:05:17):
But if you actually just as if you've retrained your habits,
when you put a healthy meal in front of someone,
it can taste like the tastiest meal in the world
because you've retrained. And we've seen that, Like I know
that the audience that listens and watches us, which is
all across the world, every age bracket and every demographic,
is choosing to do something healthier with their time. But

(01:05:39):
I wonder, when I'm listening to you, Jonathan, I'm hearing
the challenge again goes back to the ironic point I made,
which is, if creators are not informed and trained in
sacred creation, you end up creating things that have the
flaws of the creator and.

Speaker 1 (01:05:57):
So beautifully put right when I look at what the
flaws of the creator's beautiful.

Speaker 3 (01:06:03):
Yeah, Like I've always thought when everyone's like, oh, do
you think AI will be manipulative of off, I'm like,
of course, because we're manipulative, Like it's it can't not
be anything that we've seen, so we'll like AI is
going to take over the world, and it's like, yes,
because humans did, Like, it's not it's not that surprising.
And so when I think of the challenges that I
see in even TV content and streaming content and how

(01:06:25):
dark it's got. And whenever anyone says to me in
my coaching practice that I have anxiety, the first thing
I asked them is what did you watch last night?
And it's there's such a direct correlation between these cliffhanger
chemicals that are released in everyone's brain in order to
keep them addicted. And so I go, where does this
education come in? Because we can take away and I

(01:06:50):
agree with you, by the way, I'm fully with you.
We take away what is currently causing an amplification of insecurity, envy,
ego and the accelerat it. But the challenge is that
the seed of that still remains and then gets exercised
in adulthood.

Speaker 1 (01:07:09):
What do we do well? So the first thing is
we need to understand what's happening to us. And this
is all so new. And my argument is that the
world changed. Life changed between twenty ten and twenty fifteen,
and my book is about how it changed for kids,
but it changed for all of us, and we're confused,
we don't understand it. These things are powerful tools we adults,

(01:07:33):
We benefit from them in many ways, but we don't
understand what's happening to us. And so my hope is
that you know, with my book, with your show, with
a lot of people who are writing about this, I
think people are coming to realize. You know, we were
confused in the twenty tens. It was so new, and
I think we were beginning to get there to see
this is a problem, and then COVID hit and we
all got super confused by COVID and we needed our

(01:07:54):
online devices all the time in COVID. But I think
the reason why things are changing so fast now is
because now that we're coming out of COVID, now everyone
sees the wreckage. They see it in the new patterns,
and their children they see it in the new patterns,
and themselves. They're sick of being on zoom calls all
the time. They want crave human contact. So let's just
see how far we can get just by raising awareness

(01:08:14):
of this, as you're doing on your show, as many
people are doing. So two things I would urge people
to think about are you need to control your own attention.
Your tension is the most precious among the most precious
resources you have, So once you see your attention as
a precious resource. You can stop letting companies just steal
it from you. This is perhaps the most effective thing
I do with my students that at New York University,

(01:08:35):
and they're mostly nineteen years old plus or mine is,
and I show them how important attention is. They're business students,
they want to have an effect on the world, they
want to create something. And I show them if you've
given away all your attention to notifications, to TikTok, you
have no attention left. So you're not going to be
able to do anything in this life. Do you want that? No,
they don't. Well, okay, how about if we turn off

(01:08:57):
almost all your notifications. How about if we take social
media off of your phone. So I'm hoping that some
of them will quit entirely, But let's just start by
just don't have it on your phone. You can use
your laptop at home, whatever, if you need to check,
you need to keep up with things. Just by making
a few changes, they regain their attention. Now Suddenly they
have the mental capacity to think, to think big, to

(01:09:20):
do things. So we need a global aware and a
global recognition that our attention is being drained away as
if there was a like a giant mosquito, like a
giant drill stuck into our brain, sucking out our attention,
we got to say stop. We've got to pull the
needle out. That's the first thing. Another is to recognize
that we need to be rooted in real communities, with

(01:09:42):
real relationships and face to face and touch, and so
we need to resist taking the easy way. It's so
much easier to set up a zoom meeting than it
is to get in your car and go to visit someone,
and there's many times we need to do that. But
we need to rehumanize our lives, and that means more
time with real people, not feeling so rushed, and being

(01:10:02):
able to be open to people and sharing experiences. So
that's another There's so many I could list. I'll just
list one more area where I want to really raise awareness,
which is time in nature. So the modern world, we're
further and further away from nature, and as we get
busier and busier, we have no time. And so after
twenty twelve, when everyone's on social media all the time,
everyone's on their phones, people are spending less time. In America,

(01:10:26):
church attendances has plummeted. Since twenty eleven or so twenty twelve,
because no one has time. Everyone's so busy with their
notifications and they're in their posts. So exposing ourselves to beauty,
to nature, going out for all walks, go out for
a walk. I have my students go out for a
walk in a park with no phone and no headphones.
They can't listen to music. They have to go just
walk slowly, and the effects are amazing because many of

(01:10:49):
them they've never noticed, they've never noticed how beautiful the
world is. So we can we can take steps to
rehumanize our lives, and.

Speaker 3 (01:10:58):
How do we respiritualize it? Like how do we going
back to that chapter, I feel like it's also spiritualizing
of intention, right if someone's creating something, and I'm assuming
when you do your research and the books you've written,
and even the one happiness hypothesis that you started with
and the journey that you've gone on, it seems like

(01:11:19):
your intention has been to uplift people through your work.

Speaker 1 (01:11:23):
Certainly my early work I used to study positive psychology,
and the goal there was very explicit. The whole movement
started by Martin Seligman in the nineteen nineties. The whole
movement was psychology is pretty good at taking people from
negative six up to zero. We have some ways to
bring you up to zero, but most people are actually
above zero. Most people are actually doing reasonably well, and

(01:11:43):
they want to go from plus two to plus seven,
and psychology had nothing to say to them. So yes,
a lot of my early work was about how do
we get to plus seven, But especially with the Carling
the American mind and now the anxious generation, I'm now
talking about how do we get from negative ten up
to up to zero? I mean, that's the first step.
Just help kids, help the next generation get out of

(01:12:06):
defend mode, out of performance mode, and into a more human,
real childhood.

Speaker 3 (01:12:12):
It's almost like your students and the you know, the
people that will go on to become entrepreneurs and business leaders.
It's almost like the challenge still becomes that even if
people think big and think successfully and think scaled and
are open minded, it's almost like without the inherent belief
that I should create something to help others, without that

(01:12:35):
no matter what you create will in some way harm
or cause difficulty to others, because it wasn't therein not
saying that you can do something perfectly and not saying
you could build something without any flaws completely that's no
one can do that. But this idea that at least
if that's my intention, if that's at least my north star,
if that's my compass, and I'm wondering where people are

(01:12:59):
getting that from.

Speaker 1 (01:12:59):
If tool Yeah, I'll take what you said and I'll
just make it a little bit more business friends, what
you said seem to be something like, if you intend
to make something that's good for people, or you know,
if you have a positive intention, this is going to
help people. And so you know, many people think like, oh,
you know, I should go into a nonprofit work, I
should go into charity work. You know, a lot of

(01:13:20):
young people are headed towards nonprofit work, and a lot
of the nonprofits don't do very much, and they're wasting
their talents there. Since I moved to a business school
in twenty eleven, I used to teach in the psychology
department at University Virginia, but I've been at the Nyustern
School of Business since twenty eleven. What I've come to
see is that is that almost all businesses make the
world better because they're creating something that people need. And

(01:13:42):
I once heard a philosopher say, in an ideal capitalist society,
the only way to get rich is by making other
people better off. And so you don't have to be
all pro socially. You can just say, look, there's a
need for this kind of ranch. I invented this ranch
the world's better off people needed, and and then I
make money. That's great. You know, if I tell my

(01:14:03):
students of all you do is create goods and services
that increase the general welfare of humankind because it's a
useful product, that's great. You're you're part of progress. But
now when we look at it that way, now we
get a new view of social media, because social media
is not a normal consumer product. A normal consumer product,

(01:14:24):
if it hurts the customers, they'll stop buying it unless
they're addicted. But with social media, and especially the advertising
driven business model at Facebook developed originally, now many of
them are copied. The customer is the advertiser, that's who
pays the money. The consumer is the product. They're the
victim in a sense of this, and that explains why,

(01:14:48):
especially for TikTok and Instagram. I've seen a couple of
surveys now and I did with my own class, you say,
do you use TikTok? So let's do it this way.
I asked my students, how many of you use Netflix?
How many've watched Netflix least once a week? Almost all
hands go up. How many of you wish Netflix was
never invented? Nobody? Nobody, Netflix's stories, full length stories. We

(01:15:09):
enjoy it. Maybe we watch too much, but we don't
feel it's ruining our lives. Okay, how many of you
use TikTok once a week? Most hands go up? How
many of you wish TikTok was never invented? Most hands
go up. Same thing for Instagram. So we have this
bizarre situation where a couple of big platforms, especially TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter,
a few others, they're sucking up most human attention. Billions

(01:15:33):
and billions of people are spending hours a day. Most
human attention is being drained away for a product that
most people wish never existed. So this is I think
the greatest destruction of human value in human history. These
products should not exist, or at least they should not
exist in their present form, unregulated, not responsible for the

(01:15:54):
harm they cause, causing massive harm. The people who use
them don't overall wish they didn't this. Something is deeply,
deeply wrong with our society and the nature of these companies,
which are now some of the biggest richest companies on Earth.

Speaker 3 (01:16:11):
Yeah, and you could argue that fast food companies and
young food companies have done the same for years and
got away with it too.

Speaker 1 (01:16:16):
Well, that's true, that's true. But at least there people
are making a decision. Now, it's a part of it
is addiction, but at least they're you know, like I
really enjoy freedoms. I just love FreeDOS. It's just, you know,
it's something an M and M is there a few
consumer products that I love and you know, I know
they're bad for me to make a decision about it,
and I don't think and now they are. Of course
they are adding to obesity. But I think social media

(01:16:38):
is so much more pernicious because if I eat FreeDOS,
that doesn't make anyone else eat FreeDOS. But if I
get on social media that you know, the more of
us are on, the more pressure there is to be
on and that's especially hitting our kids.

Speaker 3 (01:16:50):
We've got to break that up absolutely. Jonathan, It's been
such a joy talking to you and so insightful. I'm
so glad you gave our audience so many great call
to actions, and will make sure we put them in
the caption and the comment sections so people can find
them easily. We end every episode of On Purpose with
a fast five or a final five, at least to
be answered in one word to one sentence, so you

(01:17:12):
have something to play. Okay, drink of water.

Speaker 1 (01:17:14):
Let me compose myself. This is be difficult, Jonathan and I.

Speaker 3 (01:17:17):
These are your final five. The first question is what
is the best advice you've ever heard or received?

Speaker 1 (01:17:23):
Well, what comes to mind. I don't know if it's
the best, but it comes right away to mind is
what my father said when he dropped me off at college.
And he said, John, the most important things you learn
you're not going to learn in the classroom. And it
was just, you know, it's just advice to go have experience.
And and that's actually something I tell my students now.
It's just you take risks, have experiences.

Speaker 3 (01:17:43):
Beautiful. Question number two, what is the worst advice you
had to receive?

Speaker 1 (01:17:48):
The worst advice I ever received? Hard to say, but
I think generally a piece of bad advice that young
people receive is you know, just follow your passions. That's important.
But I think many young people now think that they

(01:18:09):
need to be engaged in work which is not just
rewarding but socially valuable. Like as though, my first job
after college has to have all these features. And what
I try to tell on them is no, no, you
want to end up there. You want, you know, in
a decade or two, you want to have work that
you love. That doesn't mean you have to love every
moment of it. You know, think long term. Think about

(01:18:30):
the skills you need, think about the toughening you need,
think about the experiences you need. And it might even
be unpleasant for a while, but think long term.

Speaker 3 (01:18:37):
Great question number three an experience that you never thought
you'd ever try, but you're glad you did.

Speaker 1 (01:18:43):
I'm really pro experience. I'm very high in openness to experience,
and I always kind of wanted to try everything, so,
you know, whether it was psychedelic drugs or you know,
travel all over the world. So I actually can't think
of anything.

Speaker 3 (01:18:58):
You've done them all.

Speaker 1 (01:19:00):
I've done it. I mean, I've done a lot of
different things in my life. I think I saw that yeah, yeah,
which I've talked about on some podcasts. Now that now
that Michael Polland has written a book on it, now
that people can talk about psychedelic experience that is you know,
I mentioned before I've had a number of spiritual experience
and some of the most intense ones were on psychedelics.

Speaker 3 (01:19:16):
Question number four, An experience that you're excited to try this.

Speaker 1 (01:19:19):
Year experience I'm excited to try this year. Well this well,
actually going to Wimbledon my son.

Speaker 3 (01:19:25):
It's going to be amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:19:26):
My son is graduated from high school and I wanted
to give him something special, and I said, what's something
that that you know, what's the experience you want to have?
And he said Wimbledon. He loves tennis. We go to
the US Open in New York, but he's never been
to Wimbledon. Yeah, so I was able to scrounge up
a few tickets and we'll go a couple of days.

Speaker 3 (01:19:44):
Fantastic. That would be great. Okay, Fifth and final question.
We asked this to every guest who's ever been on
the show. If you could create one law that everyone
had to follow, what would it be.

Speaker 1 (01:19:53):
I mean, I'm thinking kind of practically here, you know, yeah, please,
you know, one would be that businesses that impose costs
on others that are not party to the exchange should
have to bear the cost. So basically, get rid of externalities.
And social medium poses so many externalities. But if I,
if I have just like one dart to throw, one
thing to ask right now, I'm just going to say,

(01:20:14):
let's get effective mandatory age verification on the Internet so
that some sites are actually like porn sites are actually
not open to children. I think a law like that
would be that's going to be the big hard one,
that would be a real game changer. So again, not
very you know, hoping, you know, great if I could

(01:20:35):
come up with, you know, some version of Kant's categorical
imperative here, but no, I'll just go with those are
the ones I've been thinking about.

Speaker 3 (01:20:42):
Fantastic everyone, Thank you so much for listening. The book
is called The Anxious Generation, How the great rewiring of
childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Jonathan h
thank you so much for joining us on purpose. I
really am encouraging everyone who's been listening and watching to
go ahead to the sites that Jonathan recommends. See if
we can be a part of the mission support the

(01:21:02):
work that Jonathan and his team are doing because I
couldn't agree with you more. I think this will This
is what I love about what you've done is often
I find a lot of thinkers and thought leaders create
fear based arguments and without any concrete solutions, and I
feel that only adds to the fear and anxiety in
the world. And so I'm very grateful that we have
very tangible, specific things that we're fighting for here, and

(01:21:25):
I really really hope that you'll lean on us to
help you and help be a part of this with
you so well.

Speaker 1 (01:21:30):
Thank you, Jay. I am wildly optimistic that this is
a problem we can solve in a year, at least
get most of the way towards solving. I really appreciate
your help in getting the word out. I'm so excited
to reach a global audience because this is this is
a pan human this is a global problem.

Speaker 3 (01:21:44):
I'm so thank you Jay, Thank you, Jonathan, thank you.
If you enjoyed this podcast, you're going to love my
conversation with Michelle Obama where she opens up on how
to stay with your partner when they're changing and the
four check ins you should be doing in your relationship.
We also talk about how to deal with relationships when
they're undistressed. If you're going through something right now with

(01:22:07):
your partner or someone you're seeing, this is the episode
for you.

Speaker 4 (01:22:11):
No wonder our kids are struggling. We have a new
technology and we've just taken it in hookline and Sinker,
and we have to be mindful for our kids. They'll
just be thumbing through this stuff. You know, their mind's
never sleeping.

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