Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, The Coddling of the American Mind, The Righteous Mind, and The Happiness Hypothesis, joins me to talk about his new book, The Anxiety Generation.
00:06:56.480And it was when I realized that it wasn't just America.
00:06:59.740When I saw the same graphs in Canada, the UK, Australia, and more recently, we looked all over Europe.
00:07:05.820We find it strongly in Northern Europe.
00:07:07.660That's when it became clear something big is happening to human children, at least in the West.
00:07:13.500We don't have good data from East Asia or the developing world.
00:07:15.760But all across the West, something terrible began happening around 2012, 2013.
00:07:20.840So that was the empirical puzzle that came to us as college professors and that came to us in the national data.
00:07:29.280And that's what launched me on this book.
00:07:31.240Yeah, well, it's an important coda that you mentioned there that it wasn't only rates of self-reported depression and anxiety, right?
00:07:40.420Because I know there was a criticism directed at your work by a psychiatrist who pointed out or claimed that the self-report data might be unreliable.
00:07:49.500For example, people can exaggerate their symptomatology.
00:07:55.300They can do that to attract attention to themselves.
00:07:57.520There can be competition for psychopathology.
00:07:59.860That's part of the structure of a contagious psychological epidemic.
00:08:05.080But you pointed out quite rightly, I thought, that you saw the same data in episodes of self-harm, particularly among young women,
00:08:15.140which is a much more direct behavioral measure of that proclivity for negative emotion.
00:08:20.580And I should point out clinically, just for those who are watching and listening, that anxiety is a response to the threat of destruction, psychological or physical.
00:08:33.820Depression is more of a pain response, and it's got two aspects.
00:08:37.260It's heightening of negative emotion, withdrawal in particular, that causes cessation of activity, but also decrease in positive emotion,
00:08:45.900which is more associated with demoralization and lack of motivational impetus to move forward.
00:08:54.280And those are, you described those as de-internalizing disorders.
00:08:57.360That's not the same as the fragmentation that goes along with psychosis, or manic depressive disorder, for that matter.
00:09:05.700This is quite a particularized, let's say, epidemic.
00:09:11.300And so, okay, so you laid out the data that this is occurring, and you noted that it was happening cross-culturally,
00:09:19.820so it wasn't something specific, let's say, to the United States.
00:09:22.600What drove you to the conclusion, or even to investigate the possibility, that this had something to do with technology generally,
00:09:34.740and with social media more particularly?
00:09:38.440Yes, so Jean Twenge was really the first person to call attention to this.
00:09:43.660Jean Twenge has been studying generations for 20 years,
00:09:46.420and she had an article in The Atlantic in 2017 where The Atlantic chose the title,
00:09:53.340Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
00:14:22.000So I'm going to lay out some hypotheses, and you tell me what you think.
00:14:26.680So the first is girls tilt more heavily towards negative emotion in general, and they're more agreeable by temperament,
00:14:36.000which means that it may mean that consensus is more important to them, like social consensus,
00:14:41.780but also that they experience a given unit of threat or pain with more emotional intensity.
00:14:49.200And that really seems to kick in about the same time puberty kicks in.
00:14:53.160Now, there's various reasons for that.
00:14:56.960Women are more susceptible, you might say, particularly at puberty, sexually and physically.
00:15:04.420And then you could also make a case that their nervous systems are wired for the protection of infants rather than for their own optimal social functioning.
00:15:16.420I think that's a reasonable hypothesis.
00:15:18.840In any case, it's well documented across the world that differences in negative emotion and agreeableness seem to emerge early at puberty, and then they're permanent.
00:15:28.540Okay, so then the next question, the next issue might be, when women experience negative emotions, particularly of the self-conscious kind,
00:15:38.800and self-consciousness, as you point out in your book, is associated with suffering, that tends to take the form of bodily preoccupation.
00:15:46.920And the hypothetical reason for that is that women are judged more harshly in consequence of their physical appearance by men, arguably, but even more intensely by other women.
00:15:59.100And then the final kicker might be that the forms of social interaction that women appear to prefer, girls, online are short form and heavily image related.
00:16:12.580And so, you know, you talked about the front-facing camera, God only knows what that technological innovation alone.
00:16:20.960And then you could imagine one final thing, which is, you know, it's one thing to compete for social priority on the basis of your appearance, all things considered, with a small, close group of peers.
00:16:36.360Did you know that over 85% of grass-fed beef sold in U.S. grocery stores is imported?
00:16:40.880That's why I buy all my meat from GoodRanchers.com instead.
00:16:45.220Good Ranchers products are 100% born, raised, and harvested right here in the U.S.A. by local family farms.
00:16:50.940Plus, there are no antibiotics ever, no added hormones, and no seed oils.
00:19:16.560But the girls' story focuses very much on social media.
00:19:18.800Now, why is the curve so sharp for girls?
00:19:22.880You almost never get such sharp curves in mental illness data.
00:19:27.580And I think this is because, as you said, girls have long been more prone, teenage girls have long been more prone to social contagion.
00:19:37.140And I review a study from the 90s, historical study, that there are two different kinds of social contagions.
00:19:42.260There are those that involve motor behavior, like ticks, and also dancing fevers, where people in the Middle Ages would dance for days and sometimes die of exhaustion.
00:19:50.600So there are some that are motor, and there are some that are more anxiety-related and maybe fainting.
00:19:58.160And so girls are more subject to both of those kinds of social contagion.
00:20:03.020And so I think the reason why it's so sharp for girls, and especially self-harm, is that that is a very particular behavior that very few people would think of doing on their own.
00:20:13.300But when you super-connect all the girls in 2012, because they all get on Instagram, not all, you know, most get on Instagram right around 2012, 2013,
00:20:20.580suddenly you have these pools, these discussion groups, these, you know, places where girls are sharing their anxiety.
00:20:28.720And the more extreme you're suffering, the more extreme your anxiety, the more support you get.
00:20:34.340So they're incentivizing each other to be more and more extreme.
00:22:29.280Well, I guess there's a couple other factors that we might consider, too.
00:22:32.540One is more abstract, the other more concrete.
00:22:38.320The abstract one has to do with fertility suppression among females.
00:22:43.760And so that's a pronounced tendency in primate communities, by the way, that the females aggregate, conspire, you might say, to suppress the fertility of other females.
00:22:54.960That's the motif in Snow White, by the way, with the evil queen.
00:22:58.760And the other issue with regards to social media that's extremely relevant as far as I'm concerned is that social media, the online landscape, I think, facilitates female psychopathy very specifically.
00:23:16.160Because women, when they're savaging one another, men do the same thing to each other, by the way.
00:23:23.420And men can play the same game women do.
00:23:26.020But this is still the female pattern of antisocial behavior is anonymized reputation savaging, right?
00:23:36.660Cancel culture, for example, looks like a manifestation of female-type antisocial behavior.
00:23:41.440And it's really amplified by social media because you can denounce anonymously, not only with no cost, but likely the consequence of it is that you'll attract attention and even positive attention.
00:23:57.460And so I'm quite afraid that the online world, what would you say, it decreases our ability to inhibit psychopathy by a lot.
00:24:09.760And so the proclivity of women to attack one another, such as it is, is likely amplified on social media and the consequences of it decreased.
00:24:20.940So those are additional potential contributing factors.
00:24:55.720But the fact that you can now do it anonymously, and especially these, I mean, the most savage thing that kids were exposed to, or these various apps like Yik Yak, there was a YOLO, I think it was called, where tea, like spill the tea, where you can anonymously gossip about anyone.
00:25:40.920So, you know, my overall message is, once you understand what's going on in these online worlds, especially social media, they're just not for children.
00:25:53.260Talking with unverified strangers in anonymous formats.
00:25:56.740Okay, if adults want to choose to do that, but under no circumstances should 12, 13, 14-year-old kids be doing this.
00:26:03.860And the girls in particular are, so many of them have been destroyed by it, or damaged, harmed, I should say.
00:26:09.520Well, and you make a very interesting juxtaposition in your book about too much supervision in the real world and no supervision at all in the online world.
00:26:22.180And the online world is a bad proxy for the real world because the bad actors have much more free reign.
00:26:29.800So, you know, it could easily be that the online world, in a sense, is an unplayable game.
00:26:35.160It doesn't generalize to the real world.
00:26:37.540So the virtualization produces a psychopathologization, or awkward terminology, especially by enabling the psychopathic types.
00:27:33.520So we are mammals, and mammals have large brains comparatively, especially social mammals like dogs and dolphins and chimpanzees and humans.
00:27:43.820And all mammals play when they're young.
00:28:48.720It's about actually pruning out the neurons that don't get used and emphasizing and ultimately myelinating or sort of insulating the circuits that do get used.
00:28:57.520So play has to occur over a long period of time, physical, social, and then we need all sorts of other conditions.
00:29:22.140Now imagine, let's take some stuff out, because you probably spent three or four hours a day on television, but you had a lot of other time on weekends.
00:29:32.420But imagine that half of our kids are spending more than eight hours a day on entertainment screens, not counting school.
00:29:40.220Half of our kids say they're online almost constantly.
00:31:27.480The amount of stuff coming in that you have to respond to and know is beyond what anyone can do in a day.
00:31:33.900So, once you give your kid a smartphone and Instagram or TikTok or Snapchat, that's sort of the end of what we might have thought of as normal childhood.
00:31:43.820Now, it's going to be this phone-based childhood.
00:31:46.360And the phone-based childhood blocks out almost everything else.
00:33:02.160Those are all—and those are all activities that are analogous to healthy adult activities, because they require principle-governed behavior and social cooperation towards a goal.
00:33:16.900But even more perniciously, the replacement is increasingly short-term.
00:33:30.240You know, one of the distressing things I've seen—YouTube, for example, has degenerated staggeringly in the last three years, because YouTube has started to attempt to compete with TikTok.
00:33:42.900And so there's this race to the bottom.
00:33:45.220It's sort of like—we saw this in magazines, Jonathan.
00:33:48.200You know, the logical degenerative endpoint for all magazines was People magazine, right?
00:33:55.240These short-term, brief, gossipy, contentless, shallow representations of celebrity, let's say, that required no thought.
00:34:05.080Time magazine eventually turned into People magazine.
00:34:09.240And there's a race to the bottom online that's probably a consequence of something like algorithmic competition for grip of short-term attention.
00:34:18.080And that's completely tantamount to addiction, right?
00:34:23.140There's no difference between grip of short-term attention and addiction.
00:34:28.700Well, let's run it through—OK, let's run it through the sort of the stimulus-response dopamine loop, because this is important for people to understand.
00:34:37.380You know, my critics say, oh, this is just like television.
00:34:39.980This is just a moral panic like television.
00:34:41.740You know, adults said that it was rotting kids' brains, but we turned out fine.
00:34:45.380So television is an effective way to present stories.
00:36:54.140It's worse than you say even because the AI systems are monitoring that attentional focus and they're optimizing for grip of short-term attention.
00:37:05.980And they're learning with reinforcement learning to do that, which makes them even better at that than any behavioral trainer who's human could possibly be.
00:37:15.960So we've actually, we've created machines that use reinforcement technology to optimize the grip of reinforcement technology.
00:37:34.300So, of course, then an LLM is like a brain in the sense of just having lots of like neurons or a system that are learning by reinforcement learning.
00:37:44.580And what you're saying is by reinforcement learning based on your behavior, it's learning how to reinforce you for the behavior that the company wants.
00:38:02.100But it's going to get even worse in the next year or two because the first encounter with AI was algorithms that are choosing content.
00:38:10.060But that content was almost, was all made by people.
00:38:13.080And so the algorithm is, for the last, you know, I guess the algorithms coming around 2009, 10, 11, in that range, they become very common.
00:38:21.040So we've had algorithms for 15, 16 years guiding the content.
00:38:25.020And they get better and better at feeding you from all the available content in the world.
00:38:33.380But now with generative AI, what we're going to be seeing, I think we're already beginning to see it, is this algorithm is going to be able to generate whatever short video, whatever pornography, whatever image of a person being punched or stabbed or beaten, whatever image will most engage you, it can generate it for you.
00:38:53.740So it's the ultimate solipsistic empty, you know, it's like the beginning of the matrix where everybody's just in their pod hooked up to a machine.
00:39:02.340That is, if we don't get a handle on this now, that's where we're going.
00:39:05.280It's the ultimate in narcissus mirror, right?
00:39:10.520Because really what you're doing is you're gazing into a pool that's your fatal short-term weakness, right?
00:39:20.320Wherever you can be hooked, you're going to be hooked.
00:39:24.020And the problem is it's optimization for short-term grip of attention at the expense of everything else, right?
00:39:37.140See, you remember in the Pinocchio movie that the delinquents end up on Pleasure Island, right?
00:39:42.480So you remember, this is so interesting because one of the motifs in horror, common motif, is the vicious criminal psychopath sadist who lurks on the fringes in the amusement park, right?
00:39:58.940The evil clown, the carny who's gone wrong, the, yeah, and it's exactly pointing to the danger of that brainstem hedonism.
00:40:08.940And the danger there is the sacrifice of the future and the social community for the immediate present.
00:40:34.760So this is the perfect transition to the boy's story because, you know, as I said, well, so I wrote the book focused on the mental illness, focused on depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicide.
00:40:46.600And that is mostly worse than the girls.
00:40:49.520But what I've come to see since the book came out a year ago is that I think the bigger destruction is the destruction of the ability to pay attention.
00:40:57.700And it's for the reason that you just said.
00:41:00.360We have to develop executive function.
00:41:02.320We have to develop the ability to set ourselves a goal.
00:41:05.060I want to do X and therefore I have to do steps A, B, C, and D.
00:41:08.960But if we just get stuck at A all the time because A is so interesting and it just hooks us, we never get to B, C, D, or X, then we don't develop into an adult.
00:41:17.860We don't develop into a competent adult, an employable adult, an adult that someone would want to marry or hire.
00:41:22.820And as I understand it, you know, in the book, I make the distinction between slow dopamine and fast dopamine.
00:41:32.840Fast dopamine is you do something, you get a reward.
00:41:36.180And that's video games, that's scrolling.
00:41:38.800But slow dopamine is you pursue a goal over weeks or months.
00:41:43.020And as you make progress on it, it feels great.
00:41:46.480You know, like, you know, like when I, you know, like with my first girlfriend, like I sort of had my eye on her and then I got up the courage to talk to her.
00:41:56.480And when that first conversation went well, like, wow, that felt great.
00:42:00.580So it was a long-term plan with various steps.
00:42:03.700And that's what you need to do to become an adult.
00:42:06.320It's also overcoming real fear there, right?
00:42:08.920That's another thing is that it's not only the sacrifice of distraction in the pursuit of a goal over the long run, but in the example you used, it's you're moving towards a goal, but you're also moving towards a goal in the face of your own fear.
00:42:26.900And that isn't realized in the virtual world because there's no practice for resilience.
00:42:34.220Like, part of the utility of games, which we didn't go into, is that half the time when you play a real game, you lose.
00:42:42.700And the advantage to that is that you develop resilience in the face of loss.
00:43:13.040And I would add on another feature of games, which is very important, which is rule administration and litigation.
00:43:21.920And so the great Swiss development psychologist, Jean Piaget, in The Moral Development of the Child, which is like the classic text of moral development, he would get down on his hands and knees and he would play marbles with kids in Geneva.
00:43:38.160And he would deliberately do something stupid or wrong.
00:43:41.940And he'd wait to see what they did, how they enforced the rule, how they explained it.
00:43:46.700And in a real game, this is perhaps the most nutritious part of all, is the rule, you know, like, that was out of bounds.
00:44:21.060So a video game is really like the junk food of games in that it doesn't have the nutritious part, which is the disagreements, the arguments.
00:44:28.260Right, so there's no meta negotiation about the rules themselves.
00:44:33.100So, you know, one of the things Piaget pointed out in terms of his development of a moral hierarchy was there was the first the ability to act out the rules.
00:44:43.760Then there was the ability to describe the rules that are being acted out accurately.
00:44:50.480Then there was the ability to negotiate the rules.
00:44:54.480Then there was the ability to come up with new rules.
00:44:57.880Right, so that's a, like, that's a, and that's also why Piaget wasn't a moral relativist.
00:45:04.800He thought there was a hierarchy of morality.
00:45:06.780And that's also why he thought Thomas Kuhn was wrong.
00:45:10.240Right, because Kuhn, arguably, it's complicated, and Piaget knew Kuhn's work.
00:45:15.800Kuhn and Piaget also pointed out, you know, when there was a stage transition in development, that the new stage did everything the previous stage did plus something additional.
00:45:31.340Right, so that was his criteria for improvement.
00:45:33.640And that movement up that moral hierarchy, it's like, once you can act out the rules, you can play a game.
00:45:39.980Once you can describe the rules, you can play a game and discuss it.
00:45:44.100Once you can negotiate the rules, you can do those first two things and the negotiation, and then you can establish your own games.
00:45:51.760Right, clear progression in terms of expansion of skill.
00:45:55.500It also makes a mockery of the idea that games are competitive, you know, games where there's a victory.
00:46:02.460It's like, they're not sure you try to win, but the cooperative element subsumes the competitive element, because as you said, everyone wants to keep the game going and play, right?
00:46:15.740So, okay, and so in video, let's talk about video games, because boys at least do aggregate together and cooperate in relationship to a goal.
00:46:28.700So there is that real world element to them.
00:46:31.420And the video games, and I just, I don't know that much about the video game world.
00:46:36.500That was one thing I missed completely, being as old as I am, or almost completely.
00:46:40.920Do you see, how clear do you think the evidence is that disappearing into the video game rabbit hole is a breeding place for isolated, like pathologies of isolation, compared to, let's say, texting instead of meeting and pornography instead of relationships?
00:47:19.580The correlational data, the experiments, video games are not as harmful to boys as social media is to girls.
00:47:27.460Sometimes there are even signs of certain benefits from them.
00:47:31.080So with video games, what I'm coming to see, and just to point out, they have one really good feature, which is they are synchronous.
00:47:37.640And so when my son, I didn't let him on Fortnite in sixth grade, but just before COVID came in, we let him get an Xbox, he started playing Fortnite.
00:47:48.320And it's a very good thing that we did, because that was all they had during COVID.
00:47:52.600And they would be laughing, he'd be laughing his head off with his friends.
00:47:55.380So that's much better than what girls were doing on social media.
00:47:59.280The problem, as I'm seeing it with video games, is two things.
00:48:39.820So the first thing I can say is that some boys are going to basically become like addicts and miss out on much else in childhood.
00:48:51.320The great majority are not, that's not going to happen to.
00:48:54.360What I'm coming to see is that the attention fragmentation, the loss of the ability to do things that aren't full of dopamine, full of quick dopamine, is crippling.
00:49:05.100And this ultimately, I think, is the boys' story.
00:50:01.620And so I think what we're seeing is when we check in on the kids at the age of 28, which is the oldest Gen Z, if we look at them in mid-20s, what we see is that the girls are more likely to have finished high school, more likely to have finished college, more likely to have a job, more likely to not be living with their parents.
00:50:17.080Boys are more likely to have done nothing.
00:50:21.600And so to lose, I can't say what percent.
00:50:23.700But, you know, 10, 20 percent of boys become kind of drones because they can't really, as we were saying, they can't set long-term goals and it executes on them.
00:50:33.280This is a tremendous loss to any society to lose a substantial portion of your young men in that way.
00:50:39.640Again, I can't put an exact number on it, but it's, you know, 10 percent is the problematic use number.
00:50:44.500And so the percent that are damaged in some way is certainly higher than that.
00:50:49.440How much, I mean, one of the things I've seen, because I've spent a lot of time talking to young men, watching them, let's say, is that, and I'm wondering how you separate this out.
00:50:59.700Because I would also say that there are elements of the social media world, the hyperconnected world, that are also particularly toxic to boys.
00:51:08.520And I don't know, and a lot of this, to me, seemed to emerge around the same period of time that you're describing.
00:51:15.240So I don't know what percentage of boys are now on ADHD medication, but it's always on the rise.
00:51:22.380Listen, Gioch Panksepp, who, the affective neuroscientist who established the existence of the play circuit, pointed out that the primary effect of Ritalin is play suppression.
00:51:40.160So there was this idea, Jonathan, initially, that boys with fragmented attention had a paradoxical response to stimulants in that it increased their attentional focus.
00:51:58.320But what it does is it increases the probability that you'll focus on whatever you're focusing on.
00:52:03.840Now, what Panksepp showed very clearly, if you deprived young juvenile rats of rough and tumble play, their prefrontal cortexes didn't mature.
00:52:17.020And then if you let them play, they would play frenetically like boys do after they've been forced to sit down forever in school.
00:52:27.180But that you could suppress that with Ritalin.
00:52:38.000It's just, well, especially because he also showed failure to mature at a prefrontal level.
00:52:44.920And that if you let the rats, the juveniles, play frenetically and exhaust themselves, say, over some reasonable period of time, their prefrontal cortexes would develop.
00:52:57.940So I saw, hypothetically, an increased war on male play and interest preferences that made itself manifest, I would say, with the hyperfeminization of the school system.
00:53:14.820And then, as well, there was the communicated insistence that male ambition was toxic, that competitive games were bad.
00:53:27.420And that, you know, to the degree that the patriarchy is a corrupt institution, that any sign of that demand for victory, let's say, a competitive victory on the male front was actually a sign of psychopathology.
00:53:41.140So I think part of the reason that the boys have been demoralized or, no, are failing to participate is because they've been demoralized and that that's provided them also with an excuse to be irresponsible.
00:53:56.400So, look, Nietzsche said, you're best punished for your virtues.
00:54:00.500So the conclusion is, is if you're going to be punished for being ambitious and goal-directed, then that's going to be very effective as a punishment.
00:54:09.680But it also gives you every reason to, you know, to bow out and to be irresponsible.
00:54:15.200So I don't know what you think about that in combination with the things that you're seeing on the, you know, the more specifically technological front.
00:54:22.680Yeah. Well, so the boys' story is different from the girls' story, and it's a story of checking out of the real world.
00:54:30.120And I draw from this in part on Richard Reeves, whose wonderful book of Boys and Men.
00:54:35.740He points out that, you know, boys and men used to dominate the economy and society in many ways.
00:54:41.320But beginning in the 70s, we get the transition away from physical work and longshoremen and strength and to a service economy.
00:54:48.640And we get those, as, and girls are rising, which is great.
00:54:56.740But as girls are rising, boys are not rising too.
00:55:07.580So boys have been kind of checking out of school, checking out of the workplace.
00:55:12.340The electronic world, the online world, has gotten better and better, more and more attractive for boys.
00:55:16.340They're spending more time on video games.
00:55:18.100So it is a story of male achievement, male motives, being kind of hijacked or turned towards trivial, pointless pursuits that don't add up to anything.
00:55:27.180And so I would agree with you about the discouragement of male ego, ambition, desire to be great, the subversion of that into just wanting to do, you know, higher up on a video game leaderboard, I suppose.
00:55:44.260You know, because I've been, I've only really, I only really began turning to the boys story about three years, three or four years ago when I began working on the book.
00:55:52.420You've been talking to young men for a long time now.
00:55:54.560So what do you see when you look at the malaise among young men?
00:55:59.460I mean, part of this is what you just said about, but just what's your diagnosis about what's happening to young men?
00:56:11.200Well, a huge part of it's fractured demoralization.
00:56:16.200Like one of the things I've really noticed, it's quite the stunning and horrifying thing to see.
00:56:21.160You know, I think the biggest impact, what I've said on young men has been my drawing of a relationship between meaning, adventure, and responsibility.
00:56:34.660It's like, well, and you know, you touch on this in your book.
00:56:39.480So let me take a bit of a sideways route here.
00:56:43.220When the big five theorists were laying out the semantic webs associated with negative emotion, neuroticism,
00:56:53.000McRae, in particular, with the Neo big five, noticed that self-consciousness and neuroticism were so tightly associated semantically that they were indistinguishable.
00:59:55.780And the young men will come up to me, and they do this daily, I would say, and say, you know, five years ago, I decided I was going to start taking responsibility for myself and tell the truth.
01:00:06.120And, like, everything's changed in consequence.
01:00:08.960And so we're doing this bigotry of soft expectations with men.
01:00:15.740And one of the things I got right right at the beginning was, see, the male attitude towards younger men isn't the feminine ethos of acceptance.
01:00:30.120So you could imagine the dynamic in a family is that this is a stereotype, but I'm going to go with it anyways.
01:00:37.660The mother says to the child, you're lovely the way you are.
01:00:41.400And the father says, I kind of like you, but you could be a lot more.
01:00:49.800You know, because when the child goes out from the mother, he's encouraged, let's say, by the masculine, go out.
01:00:57.480And then when he's exhausted or she's exhausted, for that matter, she can come back to the mother and be accepted.
01:01:02.940And that's the standard pattern of, you know, security seeking and then exploration.
01:01:08.280Now, what I've been doing with young men is saying to them, you could be a lot more than you are.
01:01:14.100And that's, it's an insult in a way because it means you're not good enough now, but it prioritizes the optimized future self.
01:01:22.480And that's actually hugely advantageous, you know.
01:01:26.060And so I think what we're doing that's wrong with young men, well, and I think we're doing it to young women, too, in a more subtle manner,
01:01:34.160is not asking, not requiring or even demanding nearly enough.
01:01:39.680So they default to trivial hedonism, obviously.