We've created a world where the barrier to entry for some of the things that we've agreed on as some of the most harmful to younger kids, the barrier to entry is zero. It's literally you click a button that says, I am a title holder. And I remember the first time I saw that button when I wasn't 18. It was on a computer game called Leisure Suit Larry. I don't know if you've ever heard.
So it was a story of this man, Leisure Suit Larry, whose only goal was to have sex. That's what he was trying to do.
And you get points for the numbers, and you played this game.
I remember the first one.
You were just at a like a bar and you type on the computer like open door, knock on door, and the bouncer would be like, what's the code? And you're like, what is the code? But like when I think about, like this world, I think about the option is like in the game, it would say to you at the beginning, are you 18 or older? And I said, I said, no, I was honest. I was like, no. And then the game was like, you're not old enough to play. I remember being off and you know what I did? And then I went, I am 18, and I was like, welcome to the game.
Something is happening to our kids. Anxiety, depression and loneliness were on the rise, and it looks like it's not just a phase. Parents overwhelmed. Young people feel lost and no one's quite sure what or who is to blame. But today's guest has spent years trying to answer just that question. Jonathan Haidt is a leading social psychologist, a professor at NYU, and the author of The Anxious Generation, a book that's sparking urgent conversations around the world today. In this episode, we unpack what's going wrong and what we might still be able to do to get it right. And this is what Mao with Trevor Noah asks.
So when you wrote The Anxious Generation, did you think you were tapping into the, I mean, arguably like one of the most, what would you call it, the most pertinent moments of this generation? Because, I mean, you've written a few books and every author who's writing about something, especially someone who's learned as you, is thinking about the world, but this feels like it tapped into every single parent and everyone who's in it completely. I mean, it's still, you know, the last I checked, it's still on the New York Times bestsellers list. It just stays there. Mom is still talking about it. What do you think it is about the topic that connected with people as much as it has?
Yeah. Well, you know what I discovered once the book came out, and even before it came out, was that there is a desperation among mothers in particular, that all over the world, family life is turned into a fight over screen time. Everyone hates it. We didn't ask for it, it wasn't like this in 2010. I mean, of course there are always arguments over TV. But once kids got touch screen devices which are much more addictive, you have a stimulus response loop, which is much more addictive than watching a story on a screen. And so family life changed and people couldn't like, what the hell is going on? And my sense is that mothers felt their kids being pulled away much more than fathers did. Fathers were often like, oh, you know, cool video game. Hey, let's play. But mothers really felt it. And so that's what's driven the success of the book is that it's mothers around the world and all the political changes, all the laws that are being introduced. Oftentimes it's either a female governor like Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas, or it's the governor or prime minister's wife who reads the book and says, you know, and this is what happened in Australia. The wife of the premier of South Australia read the book, and she said she was reading in bed and she turns to him, says, Peter, you've got to read this book and you've gotta fucking do something about it. So he did. And that's what started the process in Australia.
You know, there's probably some people listening now who haven't read the book, and I've read the book. And one thing that you do in the book, you make the distinction between a play-based childhood and a phone-based childhood. And you said there's been a rupture. And we went from having a play-based childhood, where kids were outside unsupervised breaking bones, doing crazy stuff that parents get really afraid of, these things that maybe aren't things we should necessarily be that scared about. And children go back into the home, and it coincides with them having phones and having this phone-based childhood. Tell us more about that.
I can summarize the whole book by saying that we've overprotected our children in the real world, and we've underprotected them online. Another way to say it is the book is a tragedy in two acts. Act one, we lose the play-based childhood and this really kicks in in the 1990s. So older millennials, people who grew up in the 70s and 80s, there was a huge crime wave at that time in America at least. But all kids played outside. It was just you just go outside and play. And then it's the 90s, which is actually when crime is dropping and life is getting safer and drunk driving is going down. We freak out in the 90s. And we start to say, too dangerous out there. Too dangerous, you know, stay home. You have to always be supervised or you'll be abducted. We freaked out about child abduction. And so that's act one of the tragedies. We pull the kids into us. We don't let them have play. And free play is crucial for development. And then act two is very, very sudden. It's between 2010 and 2015. In 2010, kids are going through puberty with a flip phone. And a flip phone or basic phone, you can text your friends, you can call your friends. And there was a game called Snake. I think that's okay, but that's about it.
Yeah, you weren't talking to groups of 50 strangers. You weren't talking to strange men who wanted sex from you.
I mean, it was like the, you know, it was a communication device. So if you're born in 1995, it's last year. The millennials, suppose you're a girl born 1995. In 2010, you're 15, you're through early puberty, but you did it on a flip phone without Instagram. But suppose you were born in the year 2000, so now you turn 15 in 2015, which means that your first phone was probably a smartphone with a front-facing camera, because that comes out 2010, with Instagram, because that becomes popular in 2012, with high-speed internet. So you went through early puberty constantly on your phone, taking photographs of yourself, people talking about you, communicating with strangers. The phone moves to the center of your life. So anyway, in all these ways, we had this five-year period where childhood is transformed into a screen-based or phone-based childhood that I believe, and I argue in the book, is just not conducive to human development.
And what I do love that you do in the book is that you really, you kind of preempt any arguments because there's some people say, well, the world was always bad. We had TVs, and you actually pin it down and you say the depression and the anxiety and the loneliness, we're saying, I believe it's due to the smartphones. Can you talk more about that? Because I'm one of these people, I say to Trevor all the time, Hitler didn't have screen time. I mean, he turned out to be a great, horrible person. So like, I think there's been some moral panic around phones and screens, but you make the case that, no, you don't think these things are really dangerous.
Yeah. So the main criticism I get is that this is a moral panic. Just like we freaked out about television and comic books and radio and everything else. And there is some truth to that, that the older generation always thinks the younger generation is being harmed by whatever they're doing. And sometimes that's wrong, like with comic books, and sometimes it's right, like with smoking or, you know, drug use where we think, you know, kids shouldn't be doing this. So the question is, am I warning people, am I raising an alarm that doesn't need to be raised and I'm just frightening people, and there's really no problem? Or am I calling attention to what I think is the biggest threat to mental health, children's mental health in modern history? So that's the question, am I right or am I wrong? And some people say, oh, you know, correlation doesn't equal causation. The fact that mental illness rates all go up around 2012, 2013, it could be because of school shootings. They say, like, because we had this horrible school shooting, 2012, the Newtown massacre. And after that, our kids had these lockdown drills. Okay, so 2012, that does fit the timing. But then why did girls in Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, across Europe, why did they start cutting themselves in 2012, 2013? Why did they start checking into psychiatric emergency wards? And so the fact that it happens all over the developed world, we don't have good data from the developing world, but all over the developed world these rates go up. And they were pretty stable for the years before. I don't know of another explanation for that.
Let's talk a little bit about the two different worlds, because I, you know, to Christina's point, I actually love that you broke them down on the play side. Cristiano will tell you, I don't have any kids, but I'm vehemently against the way I see kids living now. And one of the big ones for me was just like when I moved to New York. I don't know why I've been so like, I'll be at like, playgrounds. No, I won't be like at the playground. Let me not say it that way. I'll be walking past a playground. You walk in New York, you know, and every time I'm there, I see every parent with a kid or every childminder with a kid or every nanny with a kid. And I look at this thing with each other. The parents are playing with the kids. And often they're on their phones. It's the monitoring, the surveillance. Yeah, that's what it is. And I go, guys, this is a prison yard. I keep seeing it. I go, find me the difference between this and a prison yard. I'll tell you the difference. Federal prisoners, they're guaranteed two hours a day of outdoor time. Hahahahahahahaha. But I watch this, and I think to myself, where are the kids learning how to resolve conflicts amongst themselves? Where are they learning what games they do and don't want to play amongst each other? Where are they learning? No, this one kid cries, parents swoop in. One kid falls, parents swoop in. Kids argue with each other, parents swoop in like it's the dogs at the dog park have more freedom than the children do at a children's park. And the thing is to actually wrestle and bite each other. It really is interesting. And I see this and the parents would say to me, oh, but you don't know what it's like to have a kid. And I go, yeah, but I remember being a kid.
That's right. And those parents were kids. All of those parents had free-range childhoods. All of them got to play outside. And the most excited I was, do this with, you know, older audiences. Think of the most exciting things in childhood. Call them to your mind. Remember what it was like to be a kid with your parents there? Watching a screen? No, it's outdoors, running around with friends, hanging out. And that's exactly what we sucked out of childhood and replaced it with mindless entertainment. 15-second videos.
One of my core memories is, I'm the eldest of four girls, but my youngest sister's like 11 years younger than me, so there was a bit of distance between us. But it's taking my two younger sisters to school. I was like nine years old. I have one in each hand and we walked up this thing, this computer hill, was a big hill. And then we'd walk back with other friends and their siblings, and it's one of like, I always recall it when I think of like a certain time in my life. It's just the image of me and my sisters walking up the hill with our friends, you know? So now let's talk about what it robs you of. Because when I say this to people who have kids, people think I'm doing the grumpy old man thing. In my day, you ran around and you scraped your knee and it didn't. You know, and I'm not trying to say that I believe that it's helping you assess risk. I believe that it's helping you understand, you know, hierarchies. It's helping you understand social dynamics. It's preparing you for the world that you're going to live in, is what I always say. But you've actually done the work and you've done the research. So if a parent out there saying to you, oh, Jonathan, I don't want my kid being bullied at a playground, I don't want them being punched by someone or getting hurt. They're going to fall off the bars and they're going to be like, they're going to hurt their knee. How can I allow this? What are they losing by not allowing this?
Yeah. Well, let's start with the big picture, which is what is childhood for and what is play for. And because we're mammals, mammals have this really interesting evolution of having much more investment in the child. I mean, our women literally make food off of the skin of their chest and eat. I know, you know, I know. So it's a huge sacrifice. It's a huge gift to the kids. And so mammals have this long childhood. And the reason what it does is it makes possible having a large brain and especially really social mammals like chimpanzees and humans. How do you wire up that brain? And that's why we have this very long childhood. And the way you wire up a brain is by exploring, trying things and failing. Explore, try, fail over and over and over again. So when a kid tries to build a block tower, it falls over. They do it again. So, play, build, bench. It's all the things you just said. Once they master their, you know, building block towers and running and that stuff, then it becomes social. And it's exactly that. It's basically these are the skills of democracy. In a democracy, the whole idea is we are self-governing. We make the rules ourselves. We enforce them ourselves. That was the amazing innovation of the American experiment. It's called. And how do you learn to be self-governing? By being self-governing as a child. So when the kids are on the playground, it's the things you said, they have to choose what to do. Like, what game should we play? Well, some of us want to play that. Well, let's work it out. Okay, we'll do yours today. We'll do that one tomorrow. You have to make the rules and you have to enforce the rules. But that was out of bounds. No it wasn't. And you adjudicate it. But what we've been training our kids to do since the 90s, since we got them hyper-supervised all the time, is we're training them to report each other to the adult. So there's a conflict. He hit me. And that's training for authoritarianism. There's always an authority who will enforce things. We don't have to work it out ourselves. We're training kids. That's like a primary relationship. We really are.
It sounds like we're priming them, right? That's a wild way to think of it, actually it is. Like you're not teaching them to be a part of a society. You're teaching them to be a part of a monitored power structure. Authority. That's right. But you say that you also bring up in the book, Jonathan, is that this kind of rising intensive parenting, like these super scheduled kids, right? I'm guilty of this myself, right? So I don't want to pull myself out of the equation. Like I think about my eldest son's schedule right now, I'm like, well, he's got something on Monday. He's got piano on Wednesday. Yeah, he swims three, four times a week, fortunately in the school. And I'm a parent that's trying to not overschedule this child. Right. And then I'm like, and then my daughter, who's like 19 months, she's got a mom one day, she's got music class lessons. You know, they're just singing songs in a circle. She's got that on Tuesday, she's got park dates on Wednesday. And it's like, these are kids that have like, sometimes my parents try and FaceTime me. They're like, where are the kids? And I'm like, oh, they're at their thing. So my mom was like, what things do children have? I miss? And I'm like, and then when I'm nights, I want them to play with other friends. Their friends also have their schedules, the schedules, a classroom. You listen when they get to a and they get into ballet and they get into stuff like baseball, which is into and then the travel team, even if I wanted to break out of the schedule I'm already creating for my kids, there'd be no other kids for them to play for, because I think culturally, all parents are overscheduling their children.
That's right. There are two parenting styles they've been discovering. They used to be class differentiated, but now they're not so much. Yeah, and this is unequal childhoods. I've forgotten the name of the sociologist who did this, but she found in the 90s that sort of, you know, college-educated cultures, they did what she called concerted cultivation parenting. Concerted cultivation. Like you're a little plant, and I'm going to do all these things. I'm going to give you these experiences. I'm going to, you know, make you grow. Whereas working-class families had what she called natural growth parenting, which is, you know, the kids are running around, they get into some trouble, they get out of trouble. And so there used to be that class difference. But what has been found in more recent research is that now even middle class and working class, we're all doing the concerted cultivation. And it's a constant race group. That's right. Yes as well. That's right. There's not any big race difference I found. That's right. Yeah. So we're basically denying children the main training they need in childhood. And that's actually how I first got into this, was noticing that the students who arrived on campus in 2014, 2015, were different than anything we'd ever seen.
What was, what were you noticing, like, what was the difference?
Very high rates of anxiety and depression. They filled up the mental health centers. They would sometimes be very anxious or even get upset if there was a speaker coming to campus that they didn't like. They thought this could be dangerous. And we're like, what do you mean, dangerous? Like, what do you mean? You need a safe space.
But so this was a distinct shift that you noticed. So it wasn't like a gradual thing. It was like all of a sudden, bam!
That's right, that's right. Because we thought at the time that the students coming were millennials. We thought the millennial generation starts in 1981. We'll go maybe to 2000, we thought, but it turns out that if you're born in 1996, you just on average, of course, there's huge difference. Yeah. Yeah. Right. On average, you're more anxious. And so you come to school and now you see like someone has a very different opinion and you're like, you know, this is dangerous. This is terrible. I don't want to engage with this person. And so that's how I first noticed it. And so this is, it's, you know, just the things you guys are talking about. It's like if you block the kids from having these interpersonal skills, you put them into a space where they see more things as threatening. They're not going to thrive in college. In college, you need to be in discover mode. Chapter on discover mode versus defend mode. And it's a very sudden switch. Kids born in 1996 and later were more likely to be in defend mode.
It's interesting that you bring that up because I've often wondered how much we devalue exposing children to, you know, for lack of a better term, adverse events in life, you know, and I think to myself, like when we're at the playground, when we're kids and that they were kids, I didn't want to see there were people you didn't. You were like, oh God forbid that kid is there on the swing. They're not going to let anyone swing or let them catch you swing. They're going to start coming and swinging you, and you won't be able to get off. And then you have to jump and you might hurt yourself, going to be a whole thing. But what I did enjoy about it afterwards was the fact that it taught me how to navigate these situations in life. Right? Because life is going to be filled with people you don't agree with, or people who are making your life adverse, or people who are, you get what I'm saying? Yeah, it just creates a realistic expectation of what life is going to be, whether you like it or not. And it actually, I'm sure you've seen this. I think it was Canada who you sort of like the surgeon general or something, who said they're going to switch it up when it comes to children now. They are now encouraging school rules and playgrounds and everything to allow kids to engage in what they call, quote unquote, dangerous play.
Yeah. So they said they've sanitized playgrounds too much. You know, like even in America, for instance, there's playgrounds that have like a soft, spongy ground, right? A lot of them have that soft. Do you know, they found that that's not good for kids.
Oh yeah. You know, I mean the crunchy pipeline. Yeah. It's like it's terrible. It's terrible for you. Yeah. This is because it's like falling is something that you need to learn. You need to understand the consequences of falling. Yeah. Exactly. And it also, this is the part I didn't realize. I knew I would have thought intuitively. Oh, yeah, it's good for kids to fall and know that falling can hurt them. But what I didn't know was it encourages them to take risks and to think of what risk means exactly. Also learn how to fall well, which is, oh yeah, to teach my son to do, like, take your hands, brace yourself. Yeah, yeah.
So Canada was able to do this because they have a wonderful researcher professor at the University of British Columbia named Mariana Brussoni. And I talk about her work in chapter three of The Anxious Generation. And she's been pushing this for a long time, that kids need risky play, risk as a feature, not a bug of childhood. And as she says, playgrounds should be as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible. Whereas in America, in part because we have so many lawyers, everyone's afraid of being sued. And so playground guidelines will say things like there must not be exposed roots of a tree near the playground. Oh wow. Because the kids might trip, which of course teaches them to expect no obstacles. Everything should be clear and easy and safe. And then you go out into the world and it's full of obstacles. And so that's part of the reason, we think, why the kids began to freak out. Those who were born in 1995, they weren't prepared for life.
I often think that when I look at dating for younger generations now, and I'm often intrigued by how they'll see dating, and not all of them, but oftentimes they'll see dating as a, you know, it's like a binary that's failed. It was bad and it was good. Like, you know, red flags, like that type of thing. And then I always say to people, I go, well, I think because dating is still interpersonal communication and interpersonal relationships, there's going to be bumps. You know, there's going to be bumps. So when people are, that's a red flag. Yeah. Everyone is a red flag. There are no red flags. Did you get what I'm saying? But the red flag does not mean that you shouldn't be doing the thing. It just means that this is something that you might need to be aware of. It's the roots. And I love that you said that because it's like, do we want kids to live in a world where there are no roots, which isn't going to be the world, or do we want to prepare them for a world where there may be roots? And so they learn what tripping means, they learn what falling means, and they learn what getting back up means.
That's right. And this is the dilemma that we're in as parents, because we love our children, we see something bad happen to them. We see kids picking on them or excluding them. We want to swoop in. And it used to be when we were out away from our home, they couldn't swoop in because they weren't there. But now either they're there or we're all connected by text or they're tracking us. And so a question I would ask is for everybody to think that, okay, you've got three young kids. What is the ideal number of times that you want each of your children to be excluded socially by the time they reach 18? Is it zero? Do you hope that they're never excluded from anything and suffer the pain of exclusion? Or would you like it to happen, you know, several times a month or...
I mean, it depends who's excluding them. Honestly, there's some people I don't want my kids around. It's like, if people don't want to hang with you because you don't want to do the things that they're doing that are perhaps not very good, I'd be like, oh, I'm doing a good job. You should probably be. It's a good lesson. If it's consequences of maybe somebody hitting or being mean, I would want that to be an occurrence. Do you know what I mean? So I wouldn't want it to happen all the time. I don't know, one of my kids was struggling with making friends. And I remember really they were into parallel play for a longer time than they should be. They were struggling with cooperative. Okay. When I'd go and pick them up and the teacher would say, oh, they played alone today. It really, but I like, yeah, maybe it's my ego, but I was like, I don't know, I don't want to play in a lonely way.
How old were they at the time?
They'd just turned three. And so like the thought of my kids being alone does scare me a bit. So of course it scares me. So when you say how many times you want them to be excluded, not so much that it would give them a complex, but enough that they would know that, oh, you have a responsibility to other people.
That's right. So the principle of inoculation is really powerful here. We all understand the immune system now, especially since Covid, that if you're exposed to a little bit of something, your body then develops antibodies to it. It learns how to defend against it. And so this is called antifragility. There's a couple of words from antifragility. If we think our kids are fragile, then we're going to protect them. We don't want them excluded. It'll hurt. They might traumatize them. But if we realize that they're the opposite of fragile, that they actually need to fall down. They need to be excluded sometimes to feel the pain of exclusion. This then causes in them first a better understanding of how to be included and excluded, and sympathy for the other kids who are excluded because they know what that pain is like. So in all these ways, these negative childhood experiences are essential. Now to be clear, bullying, especially if it goes on for multiple days, that's the most horrible thing. And there's no evidence that that's beneficial. But conflict is normal. The kids have to learn how to conflict and cooperation. They go together.
We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.
And Jonathan, I want to ask, and this is maybe a controversial question, but like me and my sisters, we were kids. We used to fight, like me, I have two sisters. We day who has scratch hunt. Oh my God, we were, they used to call us the Jungle girls. Yes. Yeah. Hope these were not white people. Know what you didn't know? It was like my, it was my uncle not. Yeah. Because otherwise he's like yeah. Oh man. We were in trouble. We would have these like what? You took my top bow. I was, it was. I mean now that doesn't happen right. And I think about this like role of violence among children. Now if a child hits another child like it's, you can be suspended, you can be excluded and you're on the track to occupational and behavioral therapy. Yeah. Which is a very normal primal response. What do you think about like the role of violence. And now that like the absence of even like pushing and pulling and things that kids just used to do to land limits. Yeah. Is that something you think it's good that we've lost it completely?
Well, what do you think is so has a place you describe it as violence? I'm not going to say that. Oh, there's a kids need violence. I would never say that. But we're mammals. We love rough and tumble play. When I was a kid, one of the, you know, like, what do you want to do? She play this with you? You want to wrestle? Sure. Let's wrestle. And you just, like, go at it and we try to pin each other, and, you know, so kids are physical and if you ban, you know, some schools, I've heard you have to have a no touch policy. You can't touch another child.
Yeah. And it's for boys. I think it's affecting a lot of boys.
And I don't want to be stereotypical, but like the roughhousing that a lot of boys want to engage in is being really demonized. And boys don't know how to like, I think especially between like three and 11, they don't know how to engage in play with other kids right now.
That's right. So when, so you have a son and then two boys, the son and the two daughters. Okay. So when we look across mammal species, especially across primates, the young males do a lot more rough and tumble play. They wrestle more. That's just a, you know, it's a biological difference, in effect that prenatal testosterone has on the brain. And what we've done in our schools is in the 1980s, we freaked out about how American test scores were behind those of some other nations. There was a report, Nation at Risk. Oh, we need to get rid of most of, you know, recess and art and summer vacation. Let's, you know, lengthen the school year, give them more math, more science. And this was especially bad for boys. And this is when boys began to drop out. Yeah. Boys don't do well just sitting and listening. They're more physical. They're more subject to ADHD, for one thing. And so schools are becoming increasingly non-receptive or hostile to boys even. And I would say having an absolute ban on any sort of pushing or physical, that would be really bad for boys.
I think we're seeing the consequences of that with like boys not really being a big feature on college campuses. Yeah. But just seeing like education attainment and employment attainment is going down, especially for Gen Z men. Exactly. They seem like almost like a lost generation.
That's right. So so much of the attention is on girls and in the book I focused especially on the data showing that social media is particularly harmful for girls. And that's actually what got me into the book, was that those were the scientific findings that were most solid. That sort of got me studying that. And I thought the story of the book was going to be especially social media's hurting girls, and I didn't know what the story was for boys. When I started the book, I thought, is it going to be video games? Is that going to be the same thing for, and what we learned, and this is work I did with Zach Roush, the lead researcher on the book. We drew on a wonderful book by Richard Reeves. There's a book called Of Boys and Men. Okay. And he is really leading the charge for a totally non-politicized effort to help boys because, of course, you know, everything gets in this country, every culture war, every kid. Anyway, the point is the story that we took from Richard and adding on a lot more about technology is that boys, of course, used to dominate, the world was made for boys and men. But as societies change, as physical strength no longer matters so much as America shifts to a service economy, that's bad for men, good for women. So that's great that women are rising up. But as schools and workplaces are becoming less hospitable to men, they're investing less of their effort. And boys are about six months to a year behind girls anyway, especially for emotional development. And so girls are outperforming boys at every level from kindergarten through PhD. Wow. There's more girls who are succeeding. More girls going on at every level. So boys are dropping out. But at the same time that they were dropping out in the 80s and 90s, the technological world was getting amazing. So when I was a kid in the 70s, the only video game that you could play at home was Pong. Was when you, you know, you're younger than me, what video games did you have on you?
So the first games I was playing, I would say was around like, what was it, Asteroids, I think was what I was playing with.
Yeah, yeah. Asteroids were the thing. And then I was stepping into the generation of, let's say, when I was at a gaming age, like, that's when it's like Mario, Super Mario Brothers, you know, Street Fighter, all of these things are happening. Mortal Kombat. Yeah, Contra, Mortal Kombat, Sonic, etc.
That's now you in like the prime time of images moving across a screen in a way that looks quote unquote real. That's right. So the video games are getting better and better now at this. When you were growing up, the porn was still on paper. There wasn't porn on your computer. Could you find it anywhere?
You just tapped into my childhood. You could not find it anywhere.
This was because he didn't have an older brother or anything?
Oh, no, I was the older brother. I was the pioneer you couldn't find. Let me tell you something. I try to explain this to my younger brothers now, and I often say to them, I go, I am not against porn. I think the porn industry is terrible in many ways, but against porn itself, I think it's as old as time. However, I think we have too much porn now and I think we have too much access to porn. Right? So for me, porn was like this magical thing you would bump into it. Was this unattainable? There would be a magazine in a random store somewhere that had it on a shelf wrapped in plastic, so you couldn't even see what was happening. That was porn. So yes, to your point, video games? Yes. Porn? No. Okay. Right.
But let's trace it out now for people younger than you, suppose you're born in the late 90s. Well, the multiplayer video games only come in after we get high-speed internet. So it's only the late 2000s, 2008, 2009 that you're really beginning to get these incredible multiplayer games where you're in your house with your headset and this avatar on the screen with, you're amazing, and they go through many product iterations, cycles to figure out what can we do, what's the point structure to keep boys on the longest? Because if we keep them on, they don't go to another platform. So, you know, the dose makes the poison. So when you get these incredibly immersive games that are designed to keep you on you, and for boys, if you, you know, after school, if you want to play with your friends, you can't go over to their house. No, you have to go home so that you can be on your headset. So the boys are having fun, they're enjoying the video games, and once you get high-speed internet, you get porn. Not just pictures, but video. Anyone can go on Pornhub. There's no identification. You click a button, you click a button that says you are over 18, which I know I'll take it.
By the way, I love that you pointed out how flimsy and fake the checks and the protections are, which is a paradox to, you know, to what you're saying. It's the same generation that won't let their child go down a slide that is beyond a certain degree of angle because they've deemed it unsafe and there's no roots of a tree. But then at the same time, your child can go into a world that can completely obliterate their brain and the way that they see themselves if they just click a button. Yeah.
That's right. The way to understand how we got into this insane situation is to trace it out from the 90s on. So when the internet came out in 1994 was when I first saw a web browser, it was miraculous. I mean, it was like God came down to us and said, do you want to know everything instantly? Type it in, you get an answer. We're like, are you kidding me? This is amazing. And so the early internet really was amazing and your generation grew up, you, you know, you were a kid when the first internet came out and you played on it in all sorts of ways. I'm sure some bad stuff happened, but your day wasn't dominated by a few companies that were experts at addicting you. Yeah. They did. Yeah. So you could wander around. You saw a lot of stuff. You saw some bad stuff, but it was mostly good stuff. And it was also really slow. Yes, I think web browsing would be like friction, you know, forget it. That's right. And the other thing that happened in the 90s was, as you get the fall of the Berlin Wall and the spread of democracy, and then you get the rise of the internet, we're all convinced that the internet is going to be the best thing ever to happen to democracy. You know, what dictator could possibly oppose the people connected in this way? And you go all the way from, you know, the 90s all the way through the Arab Spring. We still think that, we still think by 2011, 2012, we still think, oh, the internet's amazing. It's great for democracy.
And we're still thinking, I think it's good for kids. I mean, it's the future. I mean, the kids need to be on it because like, that's the technology.
So as late as 2012, 2013, we're still all techno-optimists. And so, you know, we kind of know that our kids, all you have to do is click a button and you can be talking to strange men. There was this, did you ever see Omegle? It was, there was a site. It was like its motto was talk to strangers. Oh, wow. Yeah. And a lot of them were naked men masturbating and trying to find kids to talk to, to masturbate. And so a lot of, you know, 11, 12-year-old girls remember these experiences. Yeah. And the fact that we're so careful about letting our kids to a place where maybe some men will molest them, like Boy Scouts or anything else, we're so afraid, you know, or the playground. The child molesters are not at the playground. That's too dangerous. They're all on Instagram. They're all on Snapchat. That's where you can use a fake name, find kids, get them to send you a photograph. And once they send you a photograph, you've got them. You can now extort them. So terrible things are happening to our kids online. And, you know, I think we're finally, it's finally coming to us. The internet is actually overall a pretty risky place. We let adults do what they want and take the risks. But my God, how the hell are these companies able to get to my kids and your kids without our knowledge or consent? We need to have some age gating on the internet or we can't just let kids wander on it.
Yeah, I just want to go back to the boys piece because I feel very invested because one, I have a son and two, I have two daughters, and this affects the husband market. Yeah. 20-something years from now. Yes. Right. No it does. It's like everything. Yeah, yeah. Just being true. And I'm like, you know. So it's just going to be a seller's market. It's going to be the boys that are functional. I don't know what's going to happen. What did that pornography exposure and the excessive gaming and the use of social media. Yeah. And the absence of play due to boys in particular in a way that it didn't do to girls. Yeah. Because girls also can watch porn. Yeah. You know what I mean. But there are almost no girls who are having a porn problem. They're almost no girls who are addicted or watching it every day. Do we know why?
Yeah. I mean, you know, the evolutionary speculation is there's a whole bunch of research on differences in mate searching and selection. And, you know, men are more attracted to youth and visual. And so there's all kinds of reasons why this would be. But you find this over and over again. It's just the nature of male sexual and female sexual. Whether you're gay or straight doesn't really matter. It's males, you know, it's a male-female is just different about visual stuff. In any case, the way to understand what's happening to boys, I've come to see really more since writing the book, is imagine your boy is out there in the world, and these sort of fishhooks come down from the sky and they've got all kinds of bait on them. So the first hook is video games. And then your little older down comes incredible porn. And so I get, you know, some boys can just enjoy it with no problem. But again you find usually between 5 and 15% for each of these get addicted. They have a behavioral addiction. And then they get a little older. They find ways to gamble even before they're 18. And that's all set up to catch boys. You got the crypto investing. You got stock investing. All of this gamified for boys. And when you got the vaping and the marijuana pens and all of that. And so imagine a boy whose day is filled mostly with video games, porn, you know, watching TikTok and YouTube videos, especially the very short videos, and a lot of the, for the boys, their feeds often have a lot of violence. They often have, you know, funny videos of people falling out a window, like 10 stories and dying. Yeah, like, or being run over by a car, things like that. And so imagine if that's what your boy does for half the day. His brain, his dopamine system, the reward, motivation pathways respond by dampening down so that they require more stimulation just to be normal. Which is why if you take your, if your son is playing a lot of video games, you take him away. If he becomes anxious and irritable and possibly even violent, that's a definite sign of dopamine change, that your boy's brain has been changed. Now it'll change back. But what happens if boys are doing this from the age of five through 18? Those might be permanent. We don't know. But there's a good reason to think that if you go through puberty with these distortions of your dopamine system, that it could well change the way you are for the rest of your life. And the way you'd see it is that everything off of the screen is more boring. So the boy comes into class now, half of the school day or a third of the school day is on a screen nowadays, which is horrible. And that's a Covid thing. But what we're finding is that kids are having a lot of trouble paying attention to anything that's not on the screen, and it's because their brains have been gamified and the dopamine circuits have been changed.
You know, I think of, you know, personal anecdotes. I've played video games my whole life, and our version of multiplayer used to be you'd have to be at somebody's house and there were splits next to each other. Yeah, but it's socially, you it so much farther. That's for the screen. And you hung out together and you literally were in the same room, and they would find a way to put you all on that. You know, I think Mario Kart still does it, like Nintendo, in my opinion, might be the healthiest gaming company out there. So I didn't play these games. Covid hits. We all locked up, and then a few friends of mine said, hey, we played this game. Call of Duty Warzone. I was like, I haven't played Call of Duty in years. I'm not really a big first-person shooter guy. What have I got on? Let me tell you something. Even say now it's like my friends, because I've made friends from around the world because of this game. But many of them who are a little bit younger will go like, hey, where are you now? Where am I? I go, guys, the only reason I'm not addicted to this game the way you are, the only saving grace was that I've experienced grass in my life before this game came, but I don't understand how anyone would not be fully addicted to this.
Because I come from a hybrid childhood, half of my childhood is swing, seesaw, jungle gym, adventure, merry-go-round. That in my brain is still like a lot of fun even when I walk past playgrounds now, which I don't dare. You want to spin? I just look at it. I actually think it's terrible that adults can't just go and swing on things. I'm just going to put it out there. But anyway, I still look at that with like a, oh man, that's a fun place. But if you, as you're saying, Jonathan, if you're the now generation, let me tell you something. I sat on that console. I've spent an embarrassing amount of money playing these games because to what you're saying, they use the drug dealer model. Brilliant. First and foremost, the game's free now. They never used to do that in my day, you had to pay for the game. So you just download the game, game's free. Call of Duty, Fortnite, free for free. Go, go, take it. Oh what was on free? Every one of it. Take it. Take the game, play it. And then what they do is they just like, sort of like just give you these little drops of dopamine, as you say. It sounds upgrades, levels, and you're trying to get some when you're trying to unlock a new gun or skin a pack. And then they deny it all the time, but some of them are better than others. And so now you're going, I'm getting left behind and you're competitive. So you want. And the amount of time and money that young boys will spend in this world, where now to your point, your whole community exists. Yeah. That's right. If you're not in that world, you don't have a community now. Yeah. You know, but now if you get left behind in that world, you also don't have a community. So now you have to pay to stay a part of your community. And so now these kids, who I can only imagine are raiding their parents' credit cards or like finding ways to get money because the game perpetually wants from you. And if you talk to game companies now, they'll say, oh no, but it's free to play. And it's like, yeah, that's the same thing. Just give us your soul. Exactly. But Jonathan, you say something in the book about the importance of communities that have a cost to join and a cost to leave and are also embodied. So you need to physically be there. And these video games are the opposite of that because it's free to. Yeah, it's free to join, to join free. And it's not embodied. And those things are really, really terrible for like a growing and emerging. Yeah. So what does that do? So let's say you are a parent of boys listening to this right now. Or you may be one of those boys, tell us why it's so bad because I, I in Covid, for instance, I loved it. And then now because it's not in my life in the same way, like literally
I think this morning a friend sent me a link, one of the crew, and he was like, oh, they bring him back. Verdansk, are you coming? And I was like, we'll see. I don't know, but for somebody who's really in it and they go, no, Jonathan, this is my community, my life, I have fun, I enjoy myself, I see nothing wrong. What is the wrong that we may not be seeing?
So girls really thrive. If they have a couple of close friends, they tend to get together in small groups and talk. Boys tend to choose larger groups, and then they'll break up into teams to do sports or competition. That's what kids do when they can do what they want. And with the girls, what happened was once they all got onto Instagram, now it's not just you and a couple of friends. Now you're communicating with all these so many more people. And we thought maybe ten, 15 years. Well, maybe this is good. They're super connected, but it turns out that if you're having hundreds and hundreds of communications each day with lots of people, then there's no time for you to have those close friendships. And so for the girls, social media seems to connect them virtually, but at the cost of connecting them in real life. And so the girls got lonely.
Even though social media is supposed to be, you know, it's supposed to help you find community.
But the girls get lonelier once they get on it. With boys, the video games are better than social media in that at least it's synchronous. That is, if you know, so me and my son, we finally let them have Fortnite when Covid started. I'm very glad we did because that was the only way that the boys were getting together.
Yeah, and I would hear him laughing his head off with his headphones on.
So at least for the boys, what they're doing is at least synchronous. And so that's good. And they're laughing, which is good. But what we're seeing now is that there's really something special about being together in person. A lot of us, we've seen this since Covid. Now, you know, like what we're doing now. Like I've done a lot of interviews on Zoom. Like, this is so much more fun to be sitting.
Yeah. You say that. Yeah. That's what we've been talking about. That's why we did this. Because we go like you. Nobody, we haven't been able to quantify it. Right. And I, you know, I know people be like, oh, but we can do it over Zoom. And it's efficient. And I think this is what I think people have missed. And I know I was guilty of it at some point as well. Yes, it is more efficient. It is way more efficient to have a meeting over Zoom or to run your whole business day from Zoom. It is more efficient. However, there's something we forget. Life is not only about efficiency. Life is not only about getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Yeah, life is about sharing connections with other human beings, sharing a vibrancy, sharing a resonance, sharing a frequency. It's literally about that. And people don't realize this, and I'm sure you've experienced it. Think of all the Zoom meetings you've had and think of how little connection you share with the people, right? There's very little fluff. And I think we forget, and I've often said this, look, I think most of our work is fake and it's fine. I don't care about that. I think it's good that it's fake, because I think people just need to come together and have a purpose. But the thing that makes the meeting, the meeting is, yes, there's a little bit of work, but it's more just about these people coming together, looking into each other's eyes, which I think helps us as people.
And we see microexpressions and we regulate each other and we laugh together and we get sad together, and then we think together. And that collectiveness of people, I think we lose. And so if you're right, if we were having this conversation over Zoom, you give us information, but you give us no feeling and we give you no feeling, and we don't, you know, and I think we have yet, it's almost impossible to quantify. But I love that you said that.
So now my brain is going really fast here because I'm making connections. I wish I had this in the book. In my book The Righteous Mind, I cover the work of Michael Tomasello on joint attention. And Tomasello did this amazing work with children and chimpanzees, and he found that even though chimpanzees are really smart, and when you compare a chimpanzee to a two-year-old child, it's solving physical tasks like using tools, they're equal. But when you have a social task about, like, the experimenter gives you a signal like, look at that cup, it's there, the reward is under that cup, not that one, the monkeys have no clue, the apes have no clue. They don't take signals, whereas the kids are communicating even before they can speak. They understand what is being communicated. And he points out, and I think this is really important here, he points out that we have this ability to do joint attention, which is where, like, right now, we are all totally aware that we are doing a podcast together.
And we all kind of know we're dividing the labor and we're taking turns.
Yes, all of that is happening.
So Tomasello says it is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimps carrying a log together so they could easily escape from their enclosure if they could pick up a log and go. And they're brilliant as individuals, but they can't do things together. So we humans, we have this magical ability, and you know this, if you know you traveled a lot. Sometimes you're in a country, you don't speak the language, but you can still kind of like, yes, you can still kind of.
Yeah. Because we're all, we are all. Yeah. I think he probably is trying to find out what do you. Yeah.
So we just joint attention. And it just occurred to me now as you were talking about Zoom. Zoom that kills that, like you don't.
I mean, you don't, you don't, at least you don't have it as much.
And then you bring it back to the kids. You know, my son is laughing his head off, but he wasn't in the room with anyone else. And so I think there's really something missing. You don't have the joint attention and the share. The shared laughter is not as good.
Now it's time for a segment we call Where in the World, brought to you by Uber. Whether it's your best friend's wedding or your niece's first ballet recital, Uber is on their way so you can show up for what matters most. So, Trevor, where are you right now?
I'm in South Africa, South Africa, Johannesburg, Jozi, Maboneng. I want to call it. I want to whistle.
Yeah, you should. You probably need to do that.
Some people say Joburg, don't ever do that. Whoever you are, whoever started Joburg, if I find you, I'm going to hurt you. There's a random, I don't know. How do you say, Jose, Joe? But you say Jose, you say Johannesburg. Don't say Joburg. Whoever this person is, just please don't do that. It's like saying, it's like saying, are you from NY city? Don't do that. Just don't do that. Yeah. I was like, if ChatGPT became a human, are you nice? Oh yeah. Yeah. You like, this is weird. Yeah, but it's been good. I've been with my people, eating my food. I started cooking. Have you ever heard of Bob? I started cooking Bob.
It's like our version. Our maize dish.
It's like, is it like sadza?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but then we use maize meal for hours. So I've been doing that. I've become, like fufu.
It's exactly fufu actually for food.
Yeah. It's the same thing. Yeah. It's pretty much exactly food.
So you been, like, on the stove, like pounding?
No, I found it. I found, I found an automatic.
Oh, my God. Trevor, Trevor, come on, you're not making it. Then you're not making it. That's no real. Wow. No, there's no real.
How quickly we went from joy to judgment.
No. You need to make it the way the grandmothers made it outside, the real deal.
Yeah. And then I don't know. I mean, you're right, but I don't know. I don't have the forearm strength that my grandmother had. You have like, you have to have, like a specific technique when you're making any type of maize related. You. Yeah. It's, I know, you know what? I'll try. I feel like you've guilted me enough, and now I'll try. In fact, right after this, I'm going to try.
Well, that was today's Where in the World, brought to you by Uber. Whether it's your best friend's wedding or your niece's first ballet recital, Uber is on their way so you can show up for what matters most. Uber on our way.
Can I tell you, the most fun we had during Covid was, you know, like everyone was in the bubble phase. The most fun we had, and this I stole from my younger days, was they used to be what they called internet cafes when I was growing up. And these were little stores that had a bunch of computers connected to the internet because you couldn't get internet at home. And what would happen is people would host gaming tournaments there. And that I found was the perfect hybrid. Right? So but what I did for the Covid thing was because we were already in a bubble, okay? And my bubble people, we put all our PlayStations in the same room, in the same room, and we connected them up. Let me tell you something. All that laughter. You, you thought you were laughing before.
And I will encourage any parent who has kids who play these games, like don't kill the thing. Don't try and find the hybrid. I know it's going to be work. I know it's going to be a mission. But I promise you now, put these kids in the same room, still with their screens, little monitors and the video game consoles. Put them in the same room doing the same thing. Yeah, the exponential gain in connection, laughter, love, joy, everything that you experience, I can't even like, I can't because. Because what this is what I realized it does is it reminds you that the connection is not coming from the game, it's coming from the people you are playing the game with. That's what the game should be, a sort of a thing that brings you together in person. That's what I felt every time I took off the headset and I turned off the console. There was a deep sadness I felt because I was like, my community's gone because they were during Covid. But when I had the bubble and we did that, it was like over the Christmas period, you turn off the console and now you went and sat on the couch together. You people I know, we laughed and we talk and it reminded me that no, no, no, no, the community was the thing. The game was just something we did together.
Okay. So let's, let's bring in Bob Putnam because I listened to your conversation.
Yeah, yeah. You're right. It was so good. I mean, he is, he is absolutely. He's phenomenal.
So, so for everybody listening, he wrote the famous book Bowling Alone. And so, you know, we social science, we all love his work. We've been citing him for, you know, certainly for 25 years. His work is really important here because, you know, Putnam describes how up through the mid-70s, America had a lot of social capital, a lot of trust. So even though there's a lot of crime, we all played outside.
And you know, we all knew like if I wipe out on my bicycle and badly hurt, my friend could knock on any door and say, can you call his mom?
But after the 70s begins declining our trust in each other. And so the reason we don't let our kids out in the 90s is not because the world is getting more dangerous and safer. It's because we're losing trust in our neighbors. We're losing the sense of community. And once we lose the sense of community, the sense that all of us are at least a little bit responsible for other people's kids, now, it's like as we just, as we joked about, like, you know, you say, I walk by a playground like, oh no, you, you're a man. You can't go near a playground, you're going to molest a child.
So as we all freaked out about that, and it's not that there was nothing to freak out about, but boy, did we overdo it by saying, like, let's just not get involved in anyone else's child. Now it falls all on the mother. Now the responsibility falls, especially on the mother. And if a kid is seen playing outside without supervision, all the blame goes to the mother.
How dare you? How so? He could be. That was a recent case where a woman sent her child to get milk or something.
Yeah, and I think she was arrested.
She was always put in jail, which was insane.
And she didn't even send him. The boy was ten, and he decided to walk, you know, a little bit to a store, which someone said it to her, by the way. That's like, oh, I'm going to go to the store.
Yeah. That's right. So, so a lot of the fear in America is not just of abduction. Some people are afraid of abduction, which is almost unheard of in this country. But others of us are afraid that a neighbor will call the police.
So it's safer. It's safer. It just seems right. But it's funny you say this, I, and I'm always cautious in how I say this, but I, but I feel like Americans really need to be aware of this. So much of what America is experiencing and doing right now is akin to what you would hear in like, communist, like Soviet, you know, USSR times, like it was like, it was like neighbor might call the police on you and your, it was all about that. It was all about like, it wasn't just that the public was surveilling you, it was that you didn't know who even your family was surveilling you. It was. And I literally think about what you're saying, and I go, if we live in a world, if you call the police to tell your neighbor that their music is too loud.
Then like, you don't understand that you are furthering a society where you are destined to be governed by some autocratic power and something because you can just knock. Yeah, you can literally knock and say, hey, the music is very loud, or you guys are going to turn it. Just because I don't think your neighbor is trying to destroy your life by playing music, you get them saying, but if we don't know each other, we're afraid they'll yell at us. They might be armed. Who knows?
Yes, yes, it becomes, it will.
But now, to your point. Now the next generation hasn't even met people in person. They haven't even. They've never had a conflict in person.
And so they live in a world where they go, oh, no, you just report for offensive content, report for, you know, report, report, report. But they themselves have never actually said to another human being, hey, would you mind not doing that?
That's right. There's a really interesting observation about America from Alexis de Tocqueville, you know, the French sociologist or aristocrat, but he, who traveled in America in the 1830s and he wrote Democracy in America, which many American kids used to read in middle school. And de Tocqueville observes that in America, it's the most amazing thing when a town, when they need to build a bridge over the stream, they need to build a school or a hospital, the townspeople get together and somebody figures is going to lead it, and they figure out how to raise the money and then they do it. Whereas in France we wait for the king to do it. And in Britain, you know, they wait for the nobles to do it. And this is an amazing thing about America. And this is why the whole, the whole Ben Franklin thing, like, let's start institutions, there's a problem. Let's, let's solve it. And this is part of what made America amazing and special and different is that we had such a vast country and such a weak central government that you couldn't really count on government. So that was part of the American character. But now we're, we're blocking children from developing that. We're blocking children from having the ability to say, hey, we've got a problem. Let's figure out how to solve this.
Yeah, let's just call on the authorities.
So again, once again, we're preparing our kids for authoritarianism, not for democracy.
I wanted to talk more about girls.
Yeah. Please go back to that.
And the thing that really leapt out to me, and I knew this intuitively, because I think social media has destroyed millennial women's sense of self-esteem. And the reason a lot of us are getting certain surgeries and Botox, and because we're like, when our kids were like, oh, I feel like I look bad, let me fix it. We have the disposable income to fix it. I want to talk a lot about the self-harm that we're seeing with girls, and their exposure to certain images on social media is affecting their body image. And you mentioned another thing about role models, basically, like what were you telling girls to look to via Instagram, etc. Can you talk more about that? Because I was really struck by it.
