The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 556. How Social Media Is Wrecking Kids' Lives and Stealing Their Childhood ｜ Jonathan Haidt

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00:00:30.000 Half of our kids say they're online almost constantly.

00:00:32.940 Once you give your kid a smartphone and Instagram or TikTok or Snapchat,

00:00:37.180 that's sort of the end of what we might have thought of as normal childing.

00:00:40.500 We've actually created machines that use reinforcement technology

00:00:44.440 to optimize the grip of reinforcement technology. 0.92

00:00:47.560 TikTok or YouTube shorts, it's just such degrading trash.

00:00:51.920 There's a race to the bottom online that's probably a consequence of something like 0.98

00:00:56.920 algorithmic competition for grip of short-term attention.

00:01:00.000 And that's completely tantamount to addiction.

00:01:02.660 Under no circumstances should 12-, 13-, 14-year-old kids be doing this.

00:01:07.060 But then there's also the problem of what children aren't doing while they're absorbed in their screens.

00:01:12.820 My overall message is once you understand what's going on in these online worlds, especially social media,

00:01:20.080 they're just not for children.

00:01:21.500 Too much supervision in the real world and no supervision at all in the online world.

00:01:26.040 You know, if our minds are like an LLM, what are you putting in?

00:01:28.600 Are you putting in movies and books and good television? 0.98

00:01:30.920 Or are you putting in little 10-second clips of people getting kicked in the balls? 0.97

00:01:34.180 This is a tremendous loss to any society. 0.96

00:01:36.700 So what's the issue that we're discussing today?

00:01:54.120 What is technology, communications technology, hyperconnectivity, social media doing to our children?

00:02:04.000 And what can you do about it?

00:02:06.460 Who am I speaking to about that topic?

00:02:09.640 Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who is one of the most precise and deep psychologists working today.

00:02:21.540 He's the author of a number of books, The Coddling of the American Mind, The Righteous Mind,

00:02:27.620 The Happiness Hypothesis, and most recently, The Anxious Generation, which is the focus of our discussion today.

00:02:35.580 What's the issue at hand?

00:02:37.060 The capture of our children's attention by machines, the interference with their development,

00:02:45.280 especially in relationship to play, the pathology of the content,

00:02:49.600 and the marked rise, particularly in depression and anxiety,

00:02:55.240 associated demoralization among young women in particular, but also young men,

00:03:00.280 and a discussion about what practically can and is being done about that.

00:03:07.960 So join us for a discussion of crucial importance, particularly if you're a parent.

00:03:16.700 Dr. Haidt, we've met and spoken a number of times, and this new book of yours, The Anxious Generation,

00:03:24.760 was, I suppose, was it of particular interest to me?

00:03:29.040 Maybe, because it delves even further into the clinical realm, even more than your last books.

00:03:36.820 You're a social psychologist.

00:03:38.000 I'm a clinical psychologist.

00:03:39.240 But you're working at an interesting intersection, which is the intersection between the social and the psychopathological.

00:03:46.720 And in this book, you're focusing on the effects of the fragmenting,

00:03:52.080 really the fragmenting and demoralizing effects of technology.

00:03:55.040 And so I thought we'd walk through your book, and I suppose we might as well start, if it's all right with you,

00:04:02.660 with the data that you aggregate, as a social psychologist, really,

00:04:08.260 on the rise in negative emotion and the decrease in positive emotion, both of those things,

00:04:15.660 because those are separate things, that you see as characteristic of really the last 15 years,

00:04:25.520 something like that, maybe with a real acceleration around 2014.

00:04:29.820 You know, you mentioned in your book that you really had a sense, for example,

00:04:33.120 that something went sideways on the campuses around 2014, which is certainly in commensurate, my experience.

00:04:39.940 So let's talk about the surge of suffering.

00:04:42.440 That's your first chapter.

00:04:43.680 Yes. So, you know, I'm a social psychologist who studies morality.

00:04:49.920 My dissertation in 1992 was actually on adolescent moral development.

00:04:54.220 So I have been studying developmental psychology in adolescence.

00:04:58.220 But my focus has been on moral and political psychology.

00:05:01.840 But something weird happened in 2014.

00:05:07.060 Greg Lukianoff, my friend who runs the Foundation for Individual Rights of Expression,

00:05:11.220 he noticed it too. He came to talk to me.

00:05:14.980 Something had changed among the students.

00:05:16.980 There was a new kind of, a new morality driven by anxiety and fragility.

00:05:22.060 And so we wrote an Atlantic article called The Coddling of the American Mind.

00:05:25.820 We turned that into a book in 2017.

00:05:28.960 We went much deeper.

00:05:30.240 And in that book, and in my early work, I thought, you know, we thought we had good evidence about the role of overprotection.

00:05:38.160 So coddling means overprotection.

00:05:40.300 And writing that book in 2017, we have a page where we say, you know, the timing is right for social media.

00:05:49.920 Like, social media comes in just at the right time to maybe contribute, but we don't really have evidence.

00:05:54.080 So that's it. That's all we said.

00:05:55.980 That was 2017.

00:05:56.860 By 2019, I'm collecting evidence because now it's clear it's not just America.

00:06:07.580 What we're seeing in, first we saw it in all of the Anglosphere countries,

00:06:11.700 is that when you look at levels of internalizing disorders, so this is important,

00:06:16.500 it's not all mental illnesses.

00:06:18.080 It's not schizophrenia.

00:06:19.460 It's internalizing disorders, which is preeminently anxiety and depression-related disorders.

00:06:25.260 They're pretty stable from the late 90s all the way through 2010, 2011.

00:06:29.620 There's really no trend in the United States or in the other English-speaking countries.

00:06:34.540 And then all of a sudden, there's an elbow, like around 2012, 2013, there's an elbow,

00:06:39.000 and the rates go up very sharply for girls with more of a curve for boys.

00:06:45.040 And that's a clue.

00:06:45.780 The different shape is an important clue.

00:06:47.660 But for girls, 2011, 2012, no sign of a problem.

00:06:50.620 2014, 2015, it's off to the races with depression, anxiety.

00:06:53.800 We see the same thing in self-harm.

00:06:56.480 And it was when I realized that it wasn't just America.

00:06:59.740 When I saw the same graphs in Canada, the UK, Australia, and more recently, we looked all over Europe.

00:07:05.820 We find it strongly in Northern Europe.

00:07:07.660 That's when it became clear something big is happening to human children, at least in the West.

00:07:13.500 We don't have good data from East Asia or the developing world.

00:07:15.760 But all across the West, something terrible began happening around 2012, 2013.

00:07:20.840 So that was the empirical puzzle that came to us as college professors and that came to us in the national data.

00:07:29.280 And that's what launched me on this book.

00:07:31.240 Yeah, well, it's an important coda that you mentioned there that it wasn't only rates of self-reported depression and anxiety, right?

00:07:40.420 Because 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.

00:07:49.500 For example, people can exaggerate their symptomatology.

00:07:53.680 They can be trained to do that.

00:07:55.300 They can do that to attract attention to themselves.

00:07:57.520 There can be competition for psychopathology.

00:07:59.860 That's part of the structure of a contagious psychological epidemic.

00:08:05.080 But you pointed out quite rightly, I thought, that you saw the same data in episodes of self-harm, particularly among young women,

00:08:15.140 which is a much more direct behavioral measure of that proclivity for negative emotion.

00:08:20.580 And 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.

00:08:33.820 Depression is more of a pain response, and it's got two aspects.

00:08:37.260 It's heightening of negative emotion, withdrawal in particular, that causes cessation of activity, but also decrease in positive emotion,

00:08:45.900 which is more associated with demoralization and lack of motivational impetus to move forward.

00:08:54.280 And those are, you described those as de-internalizing disorders.

00:08:57.360 That's not the same as the fragmentation that goes along with psychosis, or manic depressive disorder, for that matter.

00:09:05.700 This is quite a particularized, let's say, epidemic.

00:09:11.300 And so, okay, so you laid out the data that this is occurring, and you noted that it was happening cross-culturally,

00:09:19.820 so it wasn't something specific, let's say, to the United States.

00:09:22.600 What drove you to the conclusion, or even to investigate the possibility, that this had something to do with technology generally,

00:09:34.740 and with social media more particularly?

00:09:38.440 Yes, so Jean Twenge was really the first person to call attention to this.

00:09:43.660 Jean Twenge has been studying generations for 20 years,

00:09:46.420 and she had an article in The Atlantic in 2017 where The Atlantic chose the title,

00:09:53.340 Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

00:09:55.720 And so Jean laid out the evidence.

00:09:57.300 It was all correlational, which doesn't prove it, but the patterns are so consistent.

00:10:03.280 There's a correlation in time, which is when this new technology is introduced.

00:10:09.860 Around 2012 is basically, so back up, in 2010, teenagers almost all have a flip phone or a basic phone.

00:10:18.420 The iPhone exists, but it's not very common.

00:10:21.120 The front-facing camera comes out on the iPhone 4 in 2010.

00:10:25.140 Instagram becomes super popular in 2012.

00:10:27.400 So that's the period where teen social life is changing radically,

00:10:31.900 from using a phone to call your friend, saying, hey, let's get together this afternoon,

00:10:36.120 to spending all day swiping and scrolling and commenting and posting.

00:10:41.120 2010 to 2015 is the great rewiring of childhood.

00:10:45.560 And the reason why we think that that is the major cause is because, first,

00:10:52.180 when we look at the historical pattern, it's a correlation.

00:10:56.240 Lots of things happened in 2012.

00:10:57.560 We can't prove that, oh, they get on social media and instantly the girls get depressed. 1.00

00:11:02.640 That could be a coincidence.

00:11:04.380 But because it happened the same way in so many countries,

00:11:07.840 no one else has come up with an alternate theory.

00:11:10.640 No one else has said, yeah, but here's something else that happened in all these countries

00:11:14.280 that would plausibly make girls, and especially preteen girls, this is important.

00:11:19.460 The increases we're talking about are generally between 50 and 100 percent increases

00:11:25.000 in these measures of psychopathology.

00:11:28.680 For preteen girls, you sometimes get 200 percent increases.

00:11:32.600 And for self-harm, 10 to 14-year-old girls did not use to cut themselves.

00:11:36.620 It was very, very rare before 2012.

00:11:39.360 For there, you get over 200 percent increase in hospital visits for self-harm.

00:11:45.900 So the historical correlation, it doesn't prove it, but there's no other alternative.

00:11:51.600 And then you have the correlation in time use.

00:11:55.200 That is, the people who are heavy users of social media in almost every study are doing much worse.

00:12:01.180 And then you have experiments where when you get people off of social media for a couple of weeks,

00:12:05.680 only if it's more than a week, this is important.

00:12:07.680 Some studies make someone get off social media for a day or two.

00:12:10.540 And if you're addicted to something and you're deprived of it for a day or two,

00:12:13.380 you're not happier, you have withdrawal.

00:12:15.100 But when it goes longer than a week, the vast majority of those studies find that people

00:12:20.320 actually feel less anxious, they feel better.

00:12:22.420 So a variety of kinds of evidence were coming in by the late 2010s,

00:12:25.860 and this is all before COVID, coming in,

00:12:28.920 that it sure looks like it's the move onto smartphones with social media.

00:12:33.660 Okay, so let me ask you some clinically relevant questions, if you don't mind,

00:12:37.560 especially about the preteen issue and the issue with girls.

00:12:41.740 So when you say preteen, what age exactly are you speaking of?

00:12:47.040 So the CDC happens to break up data 10 to 14 and then 15 to, I think, 19.

00:12:54.860 So we have, I mean, we could probably dig into it and go find a resolution, but that's what they provide.

00:13:01.380 So here I'm specifically giving you numbers from the 10 to 14-year-olds.

00:13:05.760 I would consider preteen generally 10 to 13, let's say.

00:13:09.020 You know, at 13 is when you're supposed to be able to start using these things,

00:13:13.920 at least according to the law.

00:13:14.960 Now, nobody pays attention to that.

00:13:16.600 The age of first social media goes down and down and down.

00:13:19.140 For TikTok, it's now around age eight.

00:13:21.500 Instagram, I think, is around nine.

00:13:22.920 Instagram is around nine or 10.

00:13:24.580 So it is normal.

00:13:26.340 It is widespread.

00:13:27.440 It is probably a majority of 12-year-olds who are already on at least one social media platform.

00:13:31.460 Okay, so you're talking about really early adolescence on the female side. 1.00

00:13:37.320 Okay, so let me lay out some propositions and tell me if they're in accord with what you're observing.

00:13:42.240 So it's been known for 300 years, 400 years, that young women are more prone to social contagions.

00:13:50.860 There's a great book called The History of the Unconscious by Henri Olenbergé.

00:13:57.480 And he traces the history of psychoanalytic thought way back before Mesmer and documents the hysteria, so to speak,

00:14:06.640 which was the Freudian version of social contagion literally back, it's 300 years.

00:14:12.360 So it's very well documented.

00:14:13.920 It's a great book, by the way.

00:14:15.000 Very useful for the sort of thing that you're investigating.

00:14:18.200 And then the question might be why.

00:14:22.000 So I'm going to lay out some hypotheses, and you tell me what you think.

00:14:26.680 So the first is girls tilt more heavily towards negative emotion in general, and they're more agreeable by temperament,

00:14:36.000 which means that it may mean that consensus is more important to them, like social consensus,

00:14:41.780 but also that they experience a given unit of threat or pain with more emotional intensity.

00:14:49.200 And that really seems to kick in about the same time puberty kicks in.

00:14:53.160 Now, there's various reasons for that.

00:14:56.960 Women are more susceptible, you might say, particularly at puberty, sexually and physically. 1.00

00:15:04.420 And 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.

00:15:16.420 I think that's a reasonable hypothesis.

00:15:18.840 In 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.

00:15:28.540 Okay, so then the next question, the next issue might be, when women experience negative emotions, particularly of the self-conscious kind,

00:15:38.800 and self-consciousness, as you point out in your book, is associated with suffering, that tends to take the form of bodily preoccupation.

00:15:46.920 And 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.

00:15:59.100 And 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. 1.00

00:16:12.580 And so, you know, you talked about the front-facing camera, God only knows what that technological innovation alone.

00:16:20.960 And 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.

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00:17:19.140 It's another thing to compete with the whole bloody world in terms of maximal attractiveness.

00:17:24.760 And then there's the final issue, we might say, is that the Internet never forgets.

00:17:31.720 And that's a big problem, too.

00:17:33.340 So, I'm wondering what you think of those potential contributing factors.

00:17:38.900 Well, and also, finally, girls hit puberty earlier than boys, so they have to contend with 0.84

00:17:44.940 the complexity of the introduction of the sexual, let's say, at an age where they have less experience

00:17:52.780 than boys do when they encounter puberty.

00:17:56.060 So, anyways, those are some of the potential contributors, as far as I'm concerned, to the

00:18:01.560 differential susceptibility.

00:18:03.780 I think every one that you mentioned is plausible.

00:18:06.820 The way I approach it in the book, and again, I'm coming from social psychology, I think

00:18:12.720 we'll end up in the same place.

00:18:13.800 And especially, I want to especially flag the social contagion.

00:18:16.800 That's really powerful, really important.

00:18:19.500 The way that I approach it is drawing from, say, Simon Baron Cohen's work on autism.

00:18:25.200 And so, we all start off as girls in utero.

00:18:29.240 And if there's a Y chromosome, you get a little testosterone.

00:18:32.540 It changes the body over to the male pattern.

00:18:34.620 It changes the brain over to the male pattern. 0.98

00:18:36.360 On average.

00:18:38.340 And the male brain becomes a little less about empathizing, a little less socially connected,

00:18:43.820 and a little more about systemizing.

00:18:46.180 And this is the biggest difference in, the biggest gender difference in interest is things 0.99

00:18:50.760 versus people.

00:18:52.460 Girls and women are just more interested in people. 1.00

00:18:54.720 They want to know they have a more elaborate mental map.

00:18:57.820 They are interested in who said what about whom, and how did she know that he thought that.

00:19:03.440 Whereas guys are just much more clueless about that.

00:19:05.280 Guys are shifted over a little bit on the spectrum towards autism.

00:19:09.040 And that is going to help us explain the boys' story, because that's going to be more about video games and all sorts of other things.

00:19:14.660 It's not as much about social media.

00:19:16.560 But the girls' story focuses very much on social media.

00:19:18.800 Now, why is the curve so sharp for girls? 0.99

00:19:22.880 You almost never get such sharp curves in mental illness data.

00:19:27.580 And I think this is because, as you said, girls have long been more prone, teenage girls have long been more prone to social contagion.

00:19:37.140 And I review a study from the 90s, historical study, that there are two different kinds of social contagions.

00:19:42.260 There 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.

00:19:50.600 So there are some that are motor, and there are some that are more anxiety-related and maybe fainting.

00:19:58.160 And so girls are more subject to both of those kinds of social contagion. 1.00

00:20:03.020 And 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.

00:20:13.300 But 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,

00:20:20.580 suddenly you have these pools, these discussion groups, these, you know, places where girls are sharing their anxiety.

00:20:28.720 And the more extreme you're suffering, the more extreme your anxiety, the more support you get.

00:20:34.340 So they're incentivizing each other to be more and more extreme.

00:20:38.020 And some girls are self-harming. 1.00

00:20:40.820 And while it's not, has not been so rare for older teens, it used to be extremely rare for 10, 11, 12-year-old girls.

00:20:47.360 They didn't used to cut themselves.

00:20:48.860 So I think many of the things you said, the greater susceptibility to negative emotion, which especially comes out at puberty,

00:20:55.220 hormonal changes change, change so much about boys and girls.

00:21:00.140 The greater social connectedness, so that girls are just much more affected by what they see.

00:21:06.420 The desire to, for approval in the eyes of others.

00:21:11.840 And all of the things you said about being judged by social appearance.

00:21:16.520 There's even a quote, I think it's in Marcus Aurelius, about what a shame it is that girls are just judged for their,

00:21:22.560 you know, just judged for their beauty, their sexual potential, something like that.

00:21:26.960 You know, right at puberty, girls are, you know, girls become objects in that way. 0.98

00:21:31.420 And we haven't even mentioned porn.

00:21:33.140 So many, I mean, the premature sexualization of kids.

00:21:38.380 So for all these reasons, I think it's been tougher on girls.

00:21:42.300 Now, to be clear, we'll get to the boys' story soon, I hope.

00:21:45.880 To be clear, if we check in on kids at 14, the girls are doing worse. 1.00

00:21:50.060 There's no doubt about that.

00:21:51.120 There are measures of anxiety and depression, self-harm are worse.

00:21:54.720 Now, boys' suicide rates are much higher.

00:21:56.660 That's a different story.

00:21:57.420 Boys' suicide rates are much higher.

00:21:59.140 But the increase, the percentage increase in suicide is often a little bigger in girls than boys.

00:22:04.740 So they're both coming up.

00:22:06.800 The boys seem to be doing better at 14 because they're spending huge amounts of time on video games and porn.

00:22:14.420 And that's really fun.

00:22:15.600 They're enjoying that.

00:22:16.340 Now, they're lonely because they don't have friends the way, you know, when you and I were kids,

00:22:19.620 we had a gang of friends.

00:22:22.080 But they don't seem to be doing as bad at 14.

00:22:25.080 Now, at 28, I think they're actually doing worse.

00:22:27.180 But we'll come back to the boys' story later.

00:22:28.780 Okay.

00:22:29.280 Well, I guess there's a couple other factors that we might consider, too.

00:22:32.540 One is more abstract, the other more concrete.

00:22:38.320 The abstract one has to do with fertility suppression among females.

00:22:43.760 And 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.

00:22:54.960 That's the motif in Snow White, by the way, with the evil queen.

00:22:58.760 And 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. 0.65

00:23:16.160 Because women, when they're savaging one another, men do the same thing to each other, by the way. 0.98

00:23:23.420 And men can play the same game women do. 0.87

00:23:26.020 But this is still the female pattern of antisocial behavior is anonymized reputation savaging, right? 1.00

00:23:35.340 And exclusion.

00:23:36.660 Cancel culture, for example, looks like a manifestation of female-type antisocial behavior. 1.00

00:23:41.440 And 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.

00:23:57.460 And so I'm quite afraid that the online world, what would you say, it decreases our ability to inhibit psychopathy by a lot.

00:24:08.620 And that's a big problem.

00:24:09.760 And 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. 0.96

00:24:20.940 So those are additional potential contributing factors.

00:24:25.200 Absolutely.

00:24:26.820 Male aggression has always been backed up ultimately by the threat that if you don't back down, I could beat the hell out of you.

00:24:34.700 And so when everything moves online, you know, you're not going to beat people up online.

00:24:43.060 So life doesn't get that much worse for boys when they get on social media.

00:24:46.900 But for girls, as you say, it's reputational destruction and damaging their relationships. 1.00

00:24:52.600 It's, you know, relationships and reputation.

00:24:54.920 You can savage them both.

00:24:55.720 But 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.

00:25:12.060 This is horrible.

00:25:12.860 So it's always been hard to be, the hardest part of life, I would think, I think is being a teen, a preteen girl.

00:25:21.180 Middle school for girls has always been really, really hard.

00:25:24.700 And to have, to suddenly put this in where anyone can say anything about anyone in a forum where everyone will see it.

00:25:30.960 With no consequences.

00:25:32.760 No consequences.

00:25:33.880 So the savagery unleashed on girls and often by girls, but often by boys too.

00:25:38.680 They're quite cruel here too.

00:25:40.920 So, 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.

00:25:51.420 These are adult activities.

00:25:53.260 Talking with unverified strangers in anonymous formats.

00:25:56.740 Okay, if adults want to choose to do that, but under no circumstances should 12, 13, 14-year-old kids be doing this.

00:26:03.860 And the girls in particular are, so many of them have been destroyed by it, or damaged, harmed, I should say.

00:26:09.520 Well, 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.

00:26:22.180 And the online world is a bad proxy for the real world because the bad actors have much more free reign.

00:26:29.800 So, you know, it could easily be that the online world, in a sense, is an unplayable game.

00:26:35.160 It doesn't generalize to the real world.

00:26:37.540 So the virtualization produces a psychopathologization, or awkward terminology, especially by enabling the psychopathic types.

00:26:47.960 So that's a huge danger.

00:26:49.300 So let's move to, if we can, let's move to what children need in childhood.

00:26:56.000 You talk there also, this is chapter two and three, discovery mode in risky play.

00:27:01.560 And so, now, there's a distinction that needs to be made here.

00:27:06.400 One is the effect of the technology per se in the fragmentation of attention.

00:27:11.140 The second is the content of the online world, pornography, perhaps, and this online reputation, savaging, being foremost among them.

00:27:23.360 But then there's also the problem of what children aren't doing while they're absorbed in their screens.

00:27:29.860 So walk us through that.

00:27:31.840 Sure.

00:27:33.520 So we are mammals, and mammals have large brains comparatively, especially social mammals like dogs and dolphins and chimpanzees and humans.

00:27:43.820 And all mammals play when they're young.

00:27:47.380 Mammalianism is a long childhood. 0.99

00:27:49.440 We literally drink milk from the skin of our mother's chest.

00:27:53.540 So we have a long childhood.

00:27:56.340 And what has to happen is the child starts off fully attached to the mother for sustenance.

00:28:01.840 And as they get better motor behavior, they move further and further away from the mother to play.

00:28:07.360 And play involves risky things.

00:28:09.980 Involves learning to jump, to climb trees, if that's what your species does.

00:28:14.820 Many or most mammals play chasing games.

00:28:17.060 Predator, prey.

00:28:18.680 Tag, sharks and minnows.

00:28:20.440 So we have to do this.

00:28:21.400 We have to engage with the physical and social world over and over again, tens of thousands of times,

00:28:27.040 in a low-stakes environment, where I practice running away from a shark.

00:28:32.520 And if the shark gets me, we just laugh, and then we do it again.

00:28:35.840 And in doing so, the brain wires itself up.

00:28:41.820 The brain is actually 90% of its full size by the time you're six years old.

00:28:46.680 So it's not about growth beyond that.

00:28:48.720 It'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.

00:28:57.520 So play has to occur over a long period of time, physical, social, and then we need all sorts of other conditions.

00:29:06.940 We need sleep.

00:29:07.760 We need love.

00:29:08.520 We need food.

00:29:09.940 So what I want listeners to imagine, think back for older people, if you're over 35, let's say, think back on your childhood.

00:29:18.840 Think of all the fun things you did.

00:29:20.680 Think of the best parts of childhood.

00:29:22.140 Now 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.

00:29:32.420 But imagine that half of our kids are spending more than eight hours a day on entertainment screens, not counting school.

00:29:40.220 Half of our kids say they're online almost constantly.

00:29:43.040 So let's just take that half.

00:29:44.460 For the half of young humans that are online almost constantly, what's their childhood like?

00:29:49.160 So I'd like you to think, did you ever see sunshine?

00:29:54.380 Of course you did.

00:29:55.620 Take 50% of that out.

00:29:57.100 Imagine that you had 50% less sunshine in your life.

00:30:00.480 Did you ever laugh with a friend?

00:30:03.160 Of course you did.

00:30:04.060 Probably millions of times.

00:30:05.400 Take two-thirds of that out, because you're not with other people very much.

00:30:08.620 You're alone.

00:30:09.200 You're sharing memes.

00:30:10.020 You might laugh.

00:30:10.700 They might laugh.

00:30:11.220 But you're not laughing together.

00:30:13.640 Jointly.

00:30:15.040 Jointly.

00:30:15.500 That's right.

00:30:16.060 There's a couple of things.

00:30:17.020 I mean, this is, again, as a social psychologist, we are an ultra-social species.

00:30:21.020 We have this incredible ability to be like bees.

00:30:23.900 Bees are so powerful because they're sort of one for all, all for one.

00:30:27.340 Humans, we have the ability to get into that state temporarily.

00:30:31.760 Moving together in synchrony does it.

00:30:33.720 That puts us in that state.

00:30:35.280 Laughing together and eating together.

00:30:37.820 These are three things that have really kind of like sociologically magical powers over us to link us to others.

00:30:43.540 So, imagine that you never move in synchrony with anyone.

00:30:47.440 You know, like girls do patty cake games and things like that. 1.00

00:30:50.540 Imagine girls that jump rope, singing. 0.99

00:30:53.460 Take all that out from childhood.

00:30:55.980 Imagine you don't eat with your friends very much anymore because you're getting together online.

00:31:01.220 You don't laugh very much with them.

00:31:03.180 So, you take all that stuff out.

00:31:04.600 Now, what happens?

00:31:05.580 You're lonely.

00:31:06.640 Sure, you're connected to 200 people, but it's very shallow.

00:31:10.000 You're not laughing with anyone.

00:31:11.000 And they're all replaceable.

00:31:14.460 That's right.

00:31:15.000 That's right.

00:31:15.320 They're cheap.

00:31:16.120 That's right.

00:31:17.080 Did you ever read a book when you were a kid?

00:31:19.260 Take 50 or 70% of those out.

00:31:21.520 Did you ever have a hobby?

00:31:22.860 Take almost all of those out.

00:31:24.280 There's no time.

00:31:25.240 There's no time for books.

00:31:26.240 There's no time for hobbies.

00:31:27.480 The amount of stuff coming in that you have to respond to and know is beyond what anyone can do in a day.

00:31:33.900 So, 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.

00:31:43.820 Now, it's going to be this phone-based childhood.

00:31:46.360 And the phone-based childhood blocks out almost everything else.

00:31:50.460 Not entirely.

00:31:51.220 I mean, kids will still laugh with someone else.

00:31:52.800 But it's going to cut down almost everything that's helped.

00:31:55.400 Oh, including sleep.

00:31:56.900 And so, you know, I have some critics who say, oh, there's no evidence that this is harmful.

00:32:01.240 It's just a correlation.

00:32:03.540 I mean, imagine a technology that comes in.

00:32:06.560 It reduces your sleep, reduces your time with people, reduces your time in nature.

00:32:11.300 You know, it reduces your ability to read books.

00:32:14.080 I mean, of course it's having harmful effects.

00:32:17.180 This is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

00:32:19.620 Watch Parenting.

00:32:20.860 Available exclusively on Daily Wire+.

00:32:23.180 We're dealing with misbehaviors with our son.

00:32:25.440 Our 13-year-old throws tantrums.

00:32:27.280 Our son turned to some substance abuse.

00:32:29.900 Go to dailywireplus.com today.

00:32:34.020 Yeah, yeah.

00:32:35.180 Well, so the picture that you're painting is demolition of physical entrainment, for sure.

00:32:46.500 Right?

00:32:47.140 So that's a huge thing.

00:32:48.540 We have no—that's particularly relevant, it seems to me, for kids between about the age of 4 and 10.

00:32:53.980 You know, to play tag, to jump rope, to do those synchronous games, to play soccer, to play baseball.

00:33:01.820 Right?

00:33:02.160 Those 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.

00:33:14.900 So all of that's supplanted.

00:33:16.900 But even more perniciously, the replacement is increasingly short-term.

00:33:30.240 You 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.

00:33:41.900 Yes, yes.

00:33:42.900 And so there's this race to the bottom.

00:33:45.220 It's sort of like—we saw this in magazines, Jonathan.

00:33:48.200 You know, the logical degenerative endpoint for all magazines was People magazine, right?

00:33:55.240 These short-term, brief, gossipy, contentless, shallow representations of celebrity, let's say, that required no thought.

00:34:05.080 Time magazine eventually turned into People magazine.

00:34:09.240 And there's a race to the bottom online that's probably a consequence of something like algorithmic competition for grip of short-term attention.

00:34:18.080 And that's completely tantamount to addiction, right?

00:34:23.140 There's no difference between grip of short-term attention and addiction.

00:34:27.660 They're the same thing.

00:34:28.700 Well, 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.

00:34:37.380 You know, my critics say, oh, this is just like television.

00:34:39.980 This is just a moral panic like television.

00:34:41.740 You know, adults said that it was rotting kids' brains, but we turned out fine.

00:34:45.380 So television is an effective way to present stories.

00:34:49.280 Stories are good things.

00:34:50.700 You and I watched tens of thousands of stories. 0.99

00:34:53.060 Now, a lot of them were stupid, like Gilligan's Island, but they went on for 20 minutes. 1.00

00:34:55.920 It was one story for 20 minutes. 1.00

00:34:59.940 But there was no—

00:35:01.460 And everyone watched it.

00:35:03.340 Everyone watched it.

00:35:04.040 You could talk about them.

00:35:04.860 That's right.

00:35:05.340 And you watched it with your sister or with a friend.

00:35:07.340 So it was more social.

00:35:09.280 So, and there was no behaviorist training.

00:35:12.620 That is, you didn't do anything that you were reinforced for.

00:35:16.360 What happens when it moves on to a smartphone?

00:35:18.660 First, it's a small screen that you control.

00:35:21.000 Now you're watching alone.

00:35:22.460 You're not with your sister or brother.

00:35:23.860 You're not with your friends.

00:35:24.680 You're alone.

00:35:26.240 And the content is shorter and shorter, as you say.

00:35:30.600 TikTok discovered that the fastest way to train people is these short videos.

00:35:36.380 And what are they training to do?

00:35:37.960 So a video comes up.

00:35:39.000 You're watching it.

00:35:40.400 And you've been watching it for eight or nine seconds.

00:35:43.620 And you become an expert in saying, this is not the most interesting.

00:35:47.820 Let me try again, like a slot machine.

00:35:49.840 I'll do a behavior.

00:35:50.880 I'll swipe.

00:35:51.720 And then I get a reward.

00:35:52.720 But it's a variable ratio reinforcement schedule.

00:35:56.140 Sometimes I swipe and it's not better.

00:35:58.400 But sometimes I swipe and it is better.

00:36:01.200 And so that feeling of...

00:36:02.580 Slot machine.

00:36:04.380 Exactly.

00:36:04.940 In fact, it's modeled after the slot machine.

00:36:06.820 The pull down, you know, it was literally modeled, you know, you pull down and then it kind of bounces.

00:36:11.340 That was literally modeled on the slot machine.

00:36:13.880 And so as long as it involves little bits of dopamine in response to doing a behavior, now you're engaged in the psychology of addiction.

00:36:22.780 And this is Anna Lemke's wonderful book, Dopamine Nation.

00:36:26.400 Whereas television, you could have a habit, but it wasn't...

00:36:29.840 It didn't cause addiction in the same way.

00:36:31.480 So social media, video games, and short videos are all based on giving kids quick dopamine.

00:36:37.840 And if you don't give them quick dopamine, they're going to go to one of your competitors.

00:36:41.540 And that's why you said race to the bottom.

00:36:43.860 Tristan Harris calls it a race to the bottom of the brainstem.

00:36:47.060 If you don't go to the bottom of the brainstem and just get them, get them, get them, then TikTok's going to get them.

00:36:51.780 Yeah, well, and then it's worse.

00:36:54.140 It'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.

00:37:05.980 And 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.

00:37:15.960 So we've actually, we've created machines that use reinforcement technology to optimize the grip of reinforcement technology.

00:37:25.960 It's worse than slot machines.

00:37:28.240 That is a really cool point.

00:37:30.320 You're right.

00:37:30.660 Oh, it's terrible.

00:37:32.480 It's terrible.

00:37:34.100 Right.

00:37:34.300 So, 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.

00:37:44.580 And 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.

00:37:52.840 I think that's exactly right.

00:37:54.440 Yeah, well, it's worse, Jonathan, because it's doing that separately for each person.

00:37:59.720 Yes.

00:38:00.560 Yes.

00:38:00.840 Right.

00:38:01.240 And that's right.

00:38:02.100 But 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.

00:38:10.060 But that content was almost, was all made by people.

00:38:13.080 And 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.

00:38:21.040 So we've had algorithms for 15, 16 years guiding the content.

00:38:25.020 And they get better and better at feeding you from all the available content in the world.

00:38:30.740 It'll pick the stuff that gets you.

00:38:33.380 But 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.

00:38:53.740 So 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.

00:39:02.340 That is, if we don't get a handle on this now, that's where we're going.

00:39:05.280 It's the ultimate in narcissus mirror, right?

00:39:10.520 Because really what you're doing is you're gazing into a pool that's your fatal short-term weakness, right?

00:39:20.320 Wherever you can be hooked, you're going to be hooked.

00:39:24.020 And the problem is it's optimization for short-term grip of attention at the expense of everything else, right?

00:39:31.540 And so it's bread and circuses.

00:39:37.140 See, you remember in the Pinocchio movie that the delinquents end up on Pleasure Island, right?

00:39:42.480 So 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?

00:39:58.940 The evil clown, the carny who's gone wrong, the, yeah, and it's exactly pointing to the danger of that brainstem hedonism.

00:40:08.940 And the danger there is the sacrifice of the future and the social community for the immediate present. 0.89

00:40:17.140 So it's a reverse sacrifice.

00:40:18.940 Instead of maturity is the sacrifice of the present for the future and for others.

00:40:24.900 Immaturity is the sacrifice of the other and the community for the immediate, for the present. 0.68

00:40:29.960 And these bloody machines are going to optimize for that.

00:40:32.640 That is what's happening.

00:40:34.480 Great.

00:40:34.760 So 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.

00:40:46.600 And that is mostly worse than the girls.

00:40:49.520 But 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.

00:40:57.700 And it's for the reason that you just said.

00:41:00.360 We have to develop executive function.

00:41:02.320 We have to develop the ability to set ourselves a goal.

00:41:05.060 I want to do X and therefore I have to do steps A, B, C, and D.

00:41:08.960 But 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.

00:41:17.860 We don't develop into a competent adult, an employable adult, an adult that someone would want to marry or hire.

00:41:22.820 And as I understand it, you know, in the book, I make the distinction between slow dopamine and fast dopamine.

00:41:32.840 Fast dopamine is you do something, you get a reward.

00:41:35.040 You do something, you get a reward.

00:41:36.180 And that's video games, that's scrolling.

00:41:38.800 But slow dopamine is you pursue a goal over weeks or months.

00:41:43.020 And as you make progress on it, it feels great.

00:41:46.480 You 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.

00:41:56.480 And when that first conversation went well, like, wow, that felt great.

00:42:00.580 So it was a long-term plan with various steps.

00:42:03.700 And that's what you need to do to become an adult.

00:42:06.140 You need to-

00:42:06.320 It's also overcoming real fear there, right?

00:42:08.920 That'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.

00:42:26.900 And that isn't realized in the virtual world because there's no practice for resilience.

00:42:34.220 Like, 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.

00:42:42.700 And the advantage to that is that you develop resilience in the face of loss.

00:42:48.760 You have to accept it gracefully.

00:42:51.520 You have to learn from it.

00:42:53.040 And you have to persist, right?

00:42:55.560 And so the loss is unbelievably important, especially because in life, you probably lose more games than you win, right?

00:43:03.240 Partly because you don't have to win that many games to be successful.

00:43:07.200 You have to win some, but you definitely have to persevere through loss.

00:43:11.780 Yes, yes.

00:43:13.040 And I would add on another feature of games, which is very important, which is rule administration and litigation.

00:43:21.920 And 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. 0.97

00:43:38.160 And he would deliberately do something stupid or wrong. 0.90

00:43:41.940 And he'd wait to see what they did, how they enforced the rule, how they explained it. 0.99

00:43:46.700 And in a real game, this is perhaps the most nutritious part of all, is the rule, you know, like, that was out of bounds.

00:43:54.560 No, it wasn't.

00:43:55.180 Yes, it was.

00:43:56.000 You know, you argue about it, but everyone wants to keep the fun going.

00:44:00.120 So it's very rare that someone's going to storm out and take their marbles and say, no, I'm not going to play. 0.99

00:44:03.980 Like, you've got, there's a lot of pressure, and you'll be a crybaby and a loser. 0.96

00:44:07.720 So there's a lot of pressure to, you have to work it out somehow. 0.92

00:44:11.280 Now, what happens in a video game?

00:44:13.220 Is anything ever called out of bounds?

00:44:15.940 Does the player ever have to adjudicate anything?

00:44:19.080 Everything is done by the program.

00:44:21.060 So 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.

00:44:28.260 Right, so there's no meta negotiation about the rules themselves.

00:44:33.100 So, 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.

00:44:43.760 Then there was the ability to describe the rules that are being acted out accurately.

00:44:50.480 Then there was the ability to negotiate the rules.

00:44:54.480 Then there was the ability to come up with new rules.

00:44:57.880 Right, so that's a, like, that's a, and that's also why Piaget wasn't a moral relativist.

00:45:04.800 He thought there was a hierarchy of morality.

00:45:06.780 And that's also why he thought Thomas Kuhn was wrong.

00:45:10.240 Right, because Kuhn, arguably, it's complicated, and Piaget knew Kuhn's work.

00:45:15.800 Kuhn 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.

00:45:31.340 Right, so that was his criteria for improvement.

00:45:33.640 And that movement up that moral hierarchy, it's like, once you can act out the rules, you can play a game.

00:45:39.980 Once you can describe the rules, you can play a game and discuss it.

00:45:44.100 Once you can negotiate the rules, you can do those first two things and the negotiation, and then you can establish your own games.

00:45:51.760 Right, clear progression in terms of expansion of skill.

00:45:55.500 It also makes a mockery of the idea that games are competitive, you know, games where there's a victory.

00:46:02.460 It'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?

00:46:14.120 So you have to do that by principle.

00:46:15.740 So, 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.

00:46:28.700 So there is that real world element to them.

00:46:31.420 And the video games, and I just, I don't know that much about the video game world.

00:46:36.500 That was one thing I missed completely, being as old as I am, or almost completely.

00:46:40.920 Do 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?

00:47:05.640 Yeah.

00:47:06.300 So video games is more complicated.

00:47:08.320 When I started the book, I knew what the girl story was.

00:47:11.500 The story of social media, girls, anxiety, depression was very clear.

00:47:14.660 And I thought maybe it would be the same for boys with video games.

00:47:17.780 And it's not quite the same.

00:47:19.580 The correlational data, the experiments, video games are not as harmful to boys as social media is to girls.

00:47:27.460 Sometimes there are even signs of certain benefits from them.

00:47:31.080 So 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.

00:47:37.640 And 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.

00:47:48.320 And it's a very good thing that we did, because that was all they had during COVID.

00:47:52.600 And they would be laughing, he'd be laughing his head off with his friends.

00:47:55.380 So that's much better than what girls were doing on social media. 1.00

00:47:59.280 The problem, as I'm seeing it with video games, is two things.

00:48:03.840 One, one is the addiction.

00:48:08.020 That is, about 10% of boys develop what's called problematic use, which is compulsive use.

00:48:15.020 It interferes with other aspects of life.

00:48:16.920 It often looks like addiction.

00:48:19.900 And when we talk about, I mean, I've met so many parents whose boys are completely lost to video games.

00:48:26.300 It's, you know, that's all they can do.

00:48:28.000 They're very upset when they don't have it.

00:48:29.240 They don't do anything else.

00:48:31.160 And that's, you know, 1% to 3%, which is still a lot.

00:48:34.200 I mean, losing 1% to 3% of boys is a lot.

00:48:37.560 10% having problematic use is a lot.

00:48:39.820 So 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.

00:48:51.320 The great majority are not, that's not going to happen to.

00:48:54.360 What 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.

00:49:05.100 And this ultimately, I think, is the boys' story.

00:49:08.160 Boys, it's not just video games.

00:49:12.120 Boys are basically, it's open season on boys by companies.

00:49:16.360 And so it's the video game companies are competing for their every moment.

00:49:20.620 It's, well, porn, I don't fully understand how they monetize it, but, you know, a lot of boys get addicted to porn.

00:49:27.680 Vaping, I can't believe that people, especially young men, are vaping, consuming nicotine.

00:49:32.700 Also dopamine, addictive.

00:49:33.920 Marijuana is, you know, leads to a motivational syndrome.

00:49:38.440 So THC.

00:49:41.040 Sports gambling, when they're a little older.

00:49:42.700 You don't have to be 18.

00:49:43.600 There are ways to gamble even before you're 18 or 21.

00:49:45.840 Investing, when you're a little older.

00:49:48.840 Crypto, Robinhood, all these things are gamified, which especially attracts boys.

00:49:55.200 Girls are more interested in the social information. 1.00

00:49:57.540 Boys are more interested in, I do this and something happens.

00:50:00.240 I do this and something happens.

00:50:01.620 And 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.

00:50:17.080 Boys are more likely to have done nothing.

00:50:21.600 And so to lose, I can't say what percent.

00:50:23.700 But, 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.

00:50:33.280 This is a tremendous loss to any society to lose a substantial portion of your young men in that way.

00:50:39.640 Again, I can't put an exact number on it, but it's, you know, 10 percent is the problematic use number.

00:50:44.500 And so the percent that are damaged in some way is certainly higher than that.

00:50:49.440 How 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.

00:50:59.700 Because I would also say that there are elements of the social media world, the hyperconnected world, that are also particularly toxic to boys.

00:51:08.520 And I don't know, and a lot of this, to me, seemed to emerge around the same period of time that you're describing.

00:51:15.240 So I don't know what percentage of boys are now on ADHD medication, but it's always on the rise.

00:51:22.380 Listen, 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.

00:51:37.940 That's what it does.

00:51:39.480 Oh, absolutely.

00:51:40.160 So there was this idea, Jonathan, initially, that boys with fragmented attention had a paradoxical response to stimulants in that it increased their attentional focus.

00:51:54.600 But that's not paradoxical at all.

00:51:56.400 It does that to everyone.

00:51:58.320 But what it does is it increases the probability that you'll focus on whatever you're focusing on.

00:52:03.840 Now, what Panksepp showed very clearly, if you deprived young juvenile rats of rough and tumble play, their prefrontal cortexes didn't mature.

00:52:17.020 And then if you let them play, they would play frenetically like boys do after they've been forced to sit down forever in school.

00:52:27.180 But that you could suppress that with Ritalin.

00:52:30.820 Wow, I didn't know that.

00:52:32.260 Yeah, yeah, Panksepp's work on that, it's brilliant.

00:52:35.680 The play work plus the Ritalin work.

00:52:38.000 It's just, well, especially because he also showed failure to mature at a prefrontal level.

00:52:44.920 And 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.

00:52:56.220 So it's catch-up behavior.

00:52:57.940 So 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.

00:53:14.820 And then, as well, there was the communicated insistence that male ambition was toxic, that competitive games were bad.

00:53:27.420 And 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.

00:53:41.140 So 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.

00:53:56.400 So, look, Nietzsche said, you're best punished for your virtues.

00:54:00.500 So 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.

00:54:09.680 But it also gives you every reason to, you know, to bow out and to be irresponsible.

00:54:15.200 So 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.

00:54:22.680 Yeah. Well, so the boys' story is different from the girls' story, and it's a story of checking out of the real world.

00:54:30.120 And I draw from this in part on Richard Reeves, whose wonderful book of Boys and Men.

00:54:35.740 He points out that, you know, boys and men used to dominate the economy and society in many ways.

00:54:41.320 But beginning in the 70s, we get the transition away from physical work and longshoremen and strength and to a service economy.

00:54:48.640 And we get those, as, and girls are rising, which is great.

00:54:56.740 But as girls are rising, boys are not rising too.

00:54:59.560 In some ways, they're falling.

00:55:01.260 And by 1980, I think it is, most, half of college students were female.

00:55:06.040 Now it's 60% are female. 1.00

00:55:07.580 So boys have been kind of checking out of school, checking out of the workplace.

00:55:12.340 The electronic world, the online world, has gotten better and better, more and more attractive for boys.

00:55:16.340 They're spending more time on video games.

00:55:18.100 So 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.

00:55:27.180 And 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.

00:55:42.560 But, you know, I'd love to ask you.

00:55:43.880 Yeah.

00:55:44.260 You 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.

00:55:52.420 You've been talking to young men for a long time now.

00:55:54.560 So what do you see when you look at the malaise among young men?

00:55:59.460 I mean, part of this is what you just said about, but just what's your diagnosis about what's happening to young men?

00:56:07.320 Is it depression, anxiety?

00:56:08.660 Is it hopelessness?

00:56:09.800 What do you see happening?

00:56:11.200 Well, a huge part of it's fractured demoralization.

00:56:16.200 Like one of the things I've really noticed, it's quite the stunning and horrifying thing to see.

00:56:21.160 You 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.

00:56:34.660 It's like, well, and you know, you touch on this in your book.

00:56:37.680 Like one of the things you point out.

00:56:39.480 So let me take a bit of a sideways route here.

00:56:43.220 When the big five theorists were laying out the semantic webs associated with negative emotion, neuroticism,

00:56:53.000 McRae, in particular, with the Neo big five, noticed that self-consciousness and neuroticism were so tightly associated semantically that they were indistinguishable.

00:57:04.760 So here's the rule.

00:57:07.160 This is the rule.

00:57:08.680 And you allude to this.

00:57:10.560 If you think about yourself, you are going to be anxious and miserable.

00:57:15.960 Those are the same thing.

00:57:17.540 And you know that when you're possessed by a bout of self-consciousness.

00:57:20.960 It's not pleasant.

00:57:22.460 Okay, so then you might say, well, what do you do about that?

00:57:25.400 And one answer would be, well, don't focus on yourself.

00:57:28.880 But you can't not focus on yourself.

00:57:31.720 You have to focus on something else.

00:57:34.440 Okay, so what do you focus on if you're male?

00:57:37.460 Well, you focus on responsible service to the future and others.

00:57:43.180 Well, why?

00:57:44.280 Well, because that gives you what you described as that slow dopamine kick.

00:57:49.300 It's like that's where, and that's not happiness.

00:57:52.080 It's meaning.

00:57:53.500 Those are very different things.

00:57:55.120 Happiness is that, like, hedonistic kick that can be hijacked by the AI machines.

00:58:02.520 Meaning is less intense but more sustaining.

00:58:08.180 Okay, so where do you find that?

00:58:09.880 And that's simple.

00:58:10.760 You find that in the adoption of maximal responsibility.

00:58:14.240 That's burden.

00:58:15.440 That's challenge.

00:58:16.660 That's play if you do it right.

00:58:18.800 That's also the sacrifice that civilization is founded on. 0.96

00:58:22.540 One of the things that we might know, Jonathan, is that the default man is useless. 0.96

00:58:31.420 Right?

00:58:32.300 So, for example, I'm going to get myself in trouble here, but I don't really care.

00:58:38.560 So, in the Arab world, broadly speaking, the Arab world produces about as much as Spain.

00:58:46.800 Okay, well, why?

00:58:49.920 Well, it's part of the reason is the men don't work. 1.00

00:58:54.600 Now, that's not surprising.

00:58:57.700 What's surprising is that any men ever work.

00:59:01.660 Because work is difficult.

00:59:03.640 And it requires sacrifice.

00:59:05.600 And so the question is, and this is the anthropological question.

00:59:09.200 The question of initiation.

00:59:11.200 How do you socialize and civilize men? 0.94

00:59:14.920 Because the default is going to be trivial hedonism.

00:59:19.880 Of course it is, because it's easier.

00:59:21.620 Of course it's going to be the default.

00:59:23.560 The default's always what's simpler and more fragmented.

00:59:27.800 Well, you tell them a story of heroic responsibility.

00:59:32.320 And you draw, even more importantly, you draw a connection between responsibility and adventure.

00:59:38.620 You know, and so it's so interesting, because so many men have reflected this back to me.

00:59:42.400 And I literally mean thousands, because I've said, you know, what you do is you look for the maximum burden.

00:59:49.520 And you note that in service to that, you find meaning.

00:59:52.860 And so you can do that with truth.

00:59:54.500 You can do it with responsibility.

00:59:55.780 And 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.

01:00:06.120 And, like, everything's changed in consequence.

01:00:08.640 Everything.

01:00:08.960 And so we're doing this bigotry of soft expectations with men.

01:00:15.740 And 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.

01:00:30.120 So you could imagine the dynamic in a family is that this is a stereotype, but I'm going to go with it anyways.

01:00:37.660 The mother says to the child, you're lovely the way you are.

01:00:41.400 And the father says, I kind of like you, but you could be a lot more.

01:00:47.160 And those are good.

01:00:48.580 Those are really good together.

01:00:49.800 You know, because when the child goes out from the mother, he's encouraged, let's say, by the masculine, go out.

01:00:57.480 And then when he's exhausted or she's exhausted, for that matter, she can come back to the mother and be accepted.

01:01:02.940 And that's the standard pattern of, you know, security seeking and then exploration.

01:01:08.280 Now, what I've been doing with young men is saying to them, you could be a lot more than you are.

01:01:14.100 And 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.

01:01:22.480 And that's actually hugely advantageous, you know.

01:01:26.060 And 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,

01:01:34.160 is not asking, not requiring or even demanding nearly enough.

01:01:39.680 So they default to trivial hedonism, obviously.

01:01:44.960 Yeah, that's right.

01:01:46.140 Let's keep going on this theme about adventure, challenge, burden.

01:01:51.500 One of the most interesting findings that I came across when writing the book, in the chapter on play,

01:01:58.780 I cover work by a Norwegian psychologist named Ellen Sandseeder,

01:02:02.760 who has an article from 10 years ago, where she goes through the six kinds of thrills.

01:02:10.040 She says, thrilling play is the most powerful anti-anxiety agent.

01:02:18.260 That is, kids will choose to do things where they can get hurt.

01:02:23.820 They will choose to climb a tree to the point where they're scared, and then they'll go a little higher,

01:02:28.400 and then maybe they'll stop.

01:02:29.160 And then the next day, they can go higher.

01:02:33.480 You know, once you learn to bicycle, you learn to bicycle over jump ramps and stairs.

01:02:37.240 So kids are seeking thrills.

01:02:39.240 And she says, there's high places, fast speeds, dangerous tools, hiding, disappearing.

01:02:46.760 There's a couple others, I forget what.

01:02:48.320 Rough and tumble play, I suppose, or fighting is one.

01:02:50.000 And she points out that it's that feeling of thrill.

01:02:56.100 That's like, you know, because, you know, play, there's all kinds of imaginative games.

01:02:59.320 Those are very nice.

01:03:00.100 Imagination has all kinds of benefits.

01:03:01.820 But the most, it's like the most exciting play is where there's some danger, you might get hurt,

01:03:07.320 and you're maybe laughing and also afraid.

01:03:10.000 And that kind of play is actually what dads specialize in.

01:03:15.000 I remember when I was a kid, you know, on the beach, like my father, you know, my father would pretend to be a monster,

01:03:20.520 you know, a giant monster chasing us.

01:03:22.740 And we would, my sister, you know, we'd run, and we were kind of scared, but also laughing our heads off.

01:03:27.860 So that's thrilling.

01:03:28.680 And this is where I'm coming to see, you know, my book has really caught fire with mothers in particular.

01:03:37.360 Mothers were more concerned about this. 0.89

01:03:39.740 They felt it more.

01:03:41.320 And they're driving the efforts to get phones out of schools in general. 0.95

01:03:44.420 Men are involved too, of course.

01:03:46.680 But what I'm thinking nowadays is that men, dads in particular, really have a role to play in giving their kids more thrill and fear.

01:03:57.240 Now, fear, I don't mean fear of them.

01:03:58.820 I mean play that involves some fear.

01:04:01.540 Exposure to fear.

01:04:02.760 Exposure to fear.

01:04:03.300 Thank you.

01:04:03.760 Yes, exposure to fear and risk.

01:04:05.260 And that can even be just at an amusement park, just taking your kids to an amusement park where there's not really any physical danger.

01:04:11.120 But, man, it is scary when you go on a high roller coaster.

01:04:15.040 So, yeah, so kids need that.

01:04:17.420 It might be that boys need it more.

01:04:19.500 At least boys need more rough and tumble play.

01:04:21.400 That I'm confident.

01:04:22.660 They need more rough and tumble. 0.99

01:04:23.480 I don't know about thrills and fear.

01:04:24.680 I just don't know.

01:04:25.320 But our boys, I think, are suffering from a lack of adventure, challenge, responsibility.

01:04:31.660 You said the soft bigotry of low expectations.

01:04:36.200 And we need to give them back a world in which there are such possibilities to do something big, risky, great, thrilling.

01:04:43.640 I'm going to tell you a little story very quickly.

01:04:46.160 I hope very quickly.

01:04:47.100 I spent a lot of time recently assessing the Abrahamic covenant.

01:04:54.040 And so Abraham is characterized as the father of nations, right?

01:04:58.120 So you could imagine that he's emblematic of the pattern that maximizes reproductive success across time.

01:05:04.940 That's a way of thinking about it biologically.

01:05:09.840 The divine comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure, right?

01:05:15.680 Because Abraham is wealthy and privileged.

01:05:18.240 And he doesn't have to lift a finger, you see.

01:05:21.880 And so he's 70 when the voice comes to him.

01:05:24.620 And it says to him, you have to leave your zone of comfort and have your adventure in the world.

01:05:31.020 You have to leave your tribe. 0.80

01:05:32.180 You have to leave your family.

01:05:33.180 You have to leave everything you're comfortable with.

01:05:34.880 You have to do that voluntarily.

01:05:37.420 And you have to make the sacrifices that are necessary in its pursuit.

01:05:41.680 And Abraham agrees. 0.82

01:05:44.100 And God offers him five gifts in consequence.

01:05:47.580 And this is the alignment of the spirit of developmental adventure with the divine.

01:05:54.180 And so here's the offer.

01:05:57.580 This is the covenant.

01:05:58.440 It's very specific.

01:06:00.840 So the deal is that if you hearken to the voice of adventure and make the appropriate sacrifices,

01:06:08.620 then you'll be a blessing to yourself.

01:06:11.680 Your reputation will grow validly among your compatriots.

01:06:18.760 Your enemies will not be able to withstand you.

01:06:24.300 You will establish something of enduring permanence.

01:06:28.260 And you'll do that in a way that brings benefit to everyone.

01:06:32.380 And so imagine what that means, Jonathan,

01:06:34.900 is that that developmental impetus to move out into the world

01:06:39.440 produces that meaning because it's emblematic of expansion and development.

01:06:48.100 And it aligns the psychological and the social,

01:06:51.420 which is nothing but an expression of the fact that we are social creatures.

01:06:55.440 Like, how could it be that our impetus to develop would be in contradiction to our social utility?

01:07:04.020 It can't be that because we wouldn't be social, right?

01:07:06.820 We'd be essentially in competition with the social world.

01:07:10.220 We wouldn't be aligned.

01:07:11.580 And so the call to adventure is, it's the Abrahamic call as far as I'm concerned.

01:07:19.040 And I think it's also the antithesis of the selfish gene.

01:07:22.500 Because the idea in it is that if you imagine this,

01:07:27.180 is that you embodied that adventurous spirit properly as a father.

01:07:31.420 Well, then you establish the pattern of adaptation

01:07:34.620 that maximizes the reproductive fitness of your children.

01:07:39.520 And obviously, like what? 1.00

01:07:41.260 You're going to raise a boy who's a cringing coward. 0.99

01:07:44.160 And what? 0.98

01:07:44.760 He's going to find a successful mate and his children are going to thrive.

01:07:48.160 I don't think so.

01:07:49.420 I don't think that's how it works.

01:07:50.920 So we're asking far too little of young men.

01:07:56.500 And what we're doing with young women,

01:07:58.020 and I think this is part of fertility suppression,

01:08:00.500 you know, the evil queen in Snow White

01:08:03.160 attempts to turn Snow White into a narcissist.

01:08:09.200 She gives her a bodice that's too tight so she can no longer breathe.

01:08:13.000 That maximizes waist-to-hip ratio.

01:08:15.480 She gives her a poisoned comb.

01:08:17.040 And then she feeds her poisoned apple,

01:08:21.560 which is, that's a reference to Eve and knowledge.

01:08:24.480 And the poisoned apple,

01:08:25.340 the dwarfs can't protect Snow White from the poisoned apple. 0.98

01:08:29.060 The prince has to do that.

01:08:31.080 But I think that's part of fertility suppression among women. 1.00

01:08:35.420 And that, that, that, that...

01:08:38.140 Okay, so why am I saying that?

01:08:41.040 It's very subtle and, and destructive, you know,

01:08:44.320 because partly what we're seeing is that

01:08:46.280 not only are the girls supplanting the boys,

01:08:49.940 you know, in the socioeconomic hierarchy,

01:08:52.680 but they're doing that to the detriment of themselves.

01:08:56.520 You know, because we see this, what is it now?

01:08:59.640 You talked about East Asia, you didn't have data there,

01:09:02.180 but there is some interesting data.

01:09:03.800 30% of Japanese under the age of 30 are virgins. 0.85

01:09:08.240 It's the same in South Korea.

01:09:09.800 The birth rate has cataclysmically plummeted.

01:09:13.460 These are completely isolated people.

01:09:15.740 And we're also seeing that same thing happening in the West,

01:09:18.740 plus a political divide.

01:09:20.980 And so the, the girls in a way are being encouraged

01:09:24.280 to step into the boys' shoes

01:09:26.260 and the boys are checking out.

01:09:28.620 And that's terrible for, as far as I can see,

01:09:31.120 that's terrible for both.

01:09:32.460 That's right.

01:09:33.240 There's a wonderful line in Richard Reeves' book

01:09:35.580 of Boys and Men.

01:09:37.180 He says,

01:09:38.000 a world of floundering men

01:09:39.900 is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women. 1.00

01:09:44.060 Right.

01:09:44.640 Well, you can't pathologize one sex

01:09:46.700 without pathologizing the other.

01:09:48.680 Like, that's just not going to happen.

01:09:50.660 Yeah.

01:09:51.020 You know, and so,

01:09:51.820 and I can even understand

01:09:53.040 why the girls might step forward 0.95

01:09:55.580 if the boys step back, you know.

01:09:58.160 So it's not like you can lay this

01:09:59.660 at the feet of the girls precisely.

01:10:01.340 And it's also the case

01:10:02.940 that economies in countries

01:10:05.940 where women's rights are prioritized 1.00

01:10:08.080 tend to flourish.

01:10:09.180 We, it would be good

01:10:10.100 if we could set the situation up

01:10:11.620 so we can capitalize

01:10:13.140 on the offerings of both sexes, clearly.

01:10:16.900 But something's gone very wrong

01:10:18.720 in the balance.

01:10:20.220 And so, and demoralizing young men

01:10:22.860 is no way to deal with the pathology

01:10:24.960 of the patriarchy, let's say.

01:10:27.140 Let's talk a little bit about chapter eight

01:10:30.860 if we could.

01:10:32.020 And then we'll close with some comments from you

01:10:35.540 about what governments, schools,

01:10:37.740 and parents can do.

01:10:38.840 I was quite interested in your discussion

01:10:40.940 about spiritual elevation and degradation.

01:10:43.040 And you made a comment

01:10:44.100 when we talked at the beginning

01:10:45.340 before the podcast

01:10:47.200 that that was a chapter

01:10:48.840 that most interviewers didn't focus on.

01:10:51.660 That doesn't surprise me.

01:10:53.720 The first thing you pointed out

01:10:55.040 was the three,

01:10:56.200 you had three axis model

01:10:57.900 of orientation in the world.

01:10:59.840 Let's talk about that briefly

01:11:01.480 and then delve into it more deeply.

01:11:04.260 Sure.

01:11:05.000 So, let's see.

01:11:07.060 Gosh, where to start?

01:11:08.540 I guess I'll start at the beginning here.

01:11:10.060 You know, the first time you and I met

01:11:11.440 was when I interviewed at Harvard in 1994,

01:11:14.020 I think it was.

01:11:14.680 You were an assistant professor there.

01:11:16.980 And you were writing about religion

01:11:19.620 and Jung and archetypes.

01:11:21.740 It was a fascinating conversation.

01:11:24.040 And I guess you've been a religious Christian

01:11:26.540 for a long time, I presume.

01:11:28.580 And I'm Jewish,

01:11:29.960 but I'm not a believer, not religious.

01:11:34.000 But in studying morality

01:11:35.400 and just in my own inner life,

01:11:37.040 I've just been fascinated

01:11:38.400 by dreams,

01:11:42.460 by experiences in nature,

01:11:44.260 by self-transcendent experiences.

01:11:46.160 I wrote a paper with Dr. Keltner in 2003

01:11:48.520 on the emotion of awe.

01:11:50.340 I studied the emotion of moral elevation.

01:11:52.280 So, I've always had an interest

01:11:54.620 in spiritual matters.

01:11:55.660 And I've had some,

01:11:56.860 I have some spiritual life.

01:12:00.300 And in trying to make sense

01:12:02.300 of moral elevation,

01:12:05.280 this feeling we get

01:12:06.560 when we see moral beauty,

01:12:08.400 we see an act of carry

01:12:10.860 or courage or loyalty,

01:12:12.820 and we feel something.

01:12:15.020 And I believe,

01:12:15.720 and it's people point to their chest

01:12:17.360 and they'll often do this

01:12:18.660 with their hands.

01:12:19.120 It's kind of like a,

01:12:20.540 I don't know,

01:12:20.880 I can't really describe it,

01:12:21.800 they'd say,

01:12:22.100 but they're sort of pointing to their chest

01:12:23.280 and moving their hands up.

01:12:24.480 So, it's like an offering.

01:12:26.600 I think what it is,

01:12:28.240 is I think it's a vagus nerve response,

01:12:31.780 hormonal responses as well.

01:12:33.560 In fact,

01:12:34.200 I have a study with Jen Silver.

01:12:35.600 We showed lactating women,

01:12:37.000 we brought them into the lab,

01:12:38.100 women with their babies,

01:12:39.540 showed them elevating videos

01:12:40.780 from Oprah,

01:12:41.940 and they released more milk

01:12:44.700 into the nursing pads

01:12:45.860 when they saw elevation

01:12:47.580 rather than comedy,

01:12:48.980 meaning oxytocin,

01:12:50.440 like it releases oxytocin.

01:12:52.540 So, okay,

01:12:53.020 so what does that feel like?

01:12:54.840 And the sort of the theory

01:12:56.560 I put on it back then was,

01:12:58.720 there are these two dimensions

01:12:59.560 of social space

01:13:00.400 that you find all over sociology.

01:13:02.240 There is a vertical dimension

01:13:03.380 of hierarchy,

01:13:04.560 you can be higher or lower

01:13:05.380 than someone.

01:13:06.260 There's a horizontal dimension

01:13:07.340 of closeness,

01:13:08.680 you can be close or far.

01:13:09.680 And many languages

01:13:11.340 distinguish those two.

01:13:13.380 So,

01:13:13.720 tu versus vu,

01:13:14.920 or tu versus usted

01:13:16.160 in Spanish,

01:13:17.200 is used both for the vertical

01:13:18.800 and for the horizontal,

01:13:19.920 which I find fascinating.

01:13:22.020 Okay,

01:13:22.600 that's two dimensions.

01:13:24.380 What I came to believe

01:13:25.920 is that

01:13:26.560 there's a third dimension,

01:13:28.200 let's call it the z-axis,

01:13:29.420 sort of coming out of the page.

01:13:31.200 The z-axis

01:13:32.380 is where we feel

01:13:33.980 lifted up

01:13:34.940 in a kind of a moral

01:13:35.980 or spiritual sense.

01:13:37.840 And many societies

01:13:39.140 have an explicit

01:13:40.680 conception

01:13:41.980 of a vertical dimension.

01:13:44.340 You know,

01:13:44.460 in Hinduism,

01:13:45.340 you will be reincarnated

01:13:46.420 if you do good

01:13:47.200 in this life,

01:13:48.060 you will be reincarnated

01:13:48.720 at a higher level,

01:13:50.140 closer to gods,

01:13:51.380 the gods.

01:13:52.180 And if you do evil,

01:13:53.800 you will be reincarnated

01:13:54.800 at a lower level,

01:13:56.120 closer to the,

01:13:56.780 you know,

01:13:56.980 a worm in the belly

01:13:57.920 of a dog.

01:13:59.480 So,

01:14:00.560 in Greece,

01:14:01.940 there is the skala natura.

01:14:02.960 So,

01:14:03.820 what I'm saying is

01:14:05.100 I think our minds

01:14:06.540 perceive the social world

01:14:07.980 in three dimensions.

01:14:09.220 But in the modern

01:14:10.140 Western world,

01:14:10.680 we don't talk about

01:14:11.520 this spiritual elevation

01:14:12.700 dimension.

01:14:14.640 So,

01:14:15.220 that's sort of

01:14:16.040 the background.

01:14:17.340 Now,

01:14:18.480 that figures

01:14:19.280 in my first book,

01:14:20.320 The Happiness Hypothesis,

01:14:21.500 and again,

01:14:22.140 in my book,

01:14:22.860 The Righteous Mind,

01:14:24.000 in trying to understand

01:14:24.980 moral emotions.

01:14:26.740 Okay,

01:14:27.100 so that was my old work.

01:14:28.700 So,

01:14:28.940 here I am,

01:14:29.420 I'm writing this book

01:14:30.280 on what's happening

01:14:31.780 to teens,

01:14:32.760 what's happening

01:14:33.140 to adolescents,

01:14:34.180 why are they so depressed

01:14:35.100 and anxious.

01:14:37.880 And I write chapter seven,

01:14:39.820 which is sort of

01:14:40.520 the end of the narrative part,

01:14:42.300 like explaining the girls,

01:14:43.660 the boys,

01:14:44.540 and I'm about to move on

01:14:45.700 to the last part,

01:14:46.520 which is,

01:14:46.840 okay,

01:14:46.940 what do we do?

01:14:47.960 When I realize,

01:14:49.500 wait a sec,

01:14:50.640 I wrote this whole book

01:14:52.000 about kids,

01:14:53.380 but every time

01:14:54.600 I tell people about this,

01:14:55.760 they say,

01:14:56.120 oh,

01:14:56.200 it's happening to me too.

01:14:57.640 This is happening

01:14:58.160 to adults too.

01:14:58.920 We all feel overwhelmed,

01:15:00.000 we all feel

01:15:00.660 somehow blocked.

01:15:03.340 And as I thought about

01:15:04.920 what the phone-based life

01:15:06.800 does to us,

01:15:07.420 what is it like

01:15:08.080 to live on a phone

01:15:09.420 and social media?

01:15:11.020 It brought me back

01:15:12.000 to my old work,

01:15:12.880 to the happiness hypothesis,

01:15:14.260 because what I realized

01:15:15.840 is almost everything

01:15:18.060 the ancients tell us

01:15:19.040 about how to have

01:15:19.700 a flourishing life,

01:15:20.780 how to develop,

01:15:23.000 how to have

01:15:23.340 an advanced

01:15:23.920 spiritual life,

01:15:25.580 almost everything

01:15:26.980 is pushed

01:15:28.700 the other way

01:15:29.620 by a life online.

01:15:31.900 And so,

01:15:32.260 for example,

01:15:33.340 spiritual traditions

01:15:34.120 tell us,

01:15:35.180 you know,

01:15:35.580 be slower to judge,

01:15:36.640 quick to forgive.

01:15:37.520 Judge not this,

01:15:38.220 be judged.

01:15:39.480 But social media

01:15:40.760 says,

01:15:41.940 judge right now,

01:15:43.020 instantly,

01:15:43.400 you don't need

01:15:43.680 any context,

01:15:44.720 do it now.

01:15:45.380 If you don't judge,

01:15:46.340 you're going to be judged

01:15:46.900 for not judging.

01:15:48.140 So,

01:15:49.160 whether we're talking

01:15:49.900 about sort of

01:15:50.320 sitting still

01:15:51.140 and meditating,

01:15:52.100 like,

01:15:52.300 no,

01:15:52.600 have stuff coming in,

01:15:53.600 never have a moment

01:15:54.380 of thought

01:15:56.800 that's not filled.

01:15:58.080 So,

01:15:58.820 what I realized

01:16:00.280 was something

01:16:01.920 about this modern

01:16:02.780 phone-based life

01:16:03.540 is degrading.

01:16:04.820 And I say that

01:16:05.500 as an atheist,

01:16:06.720 I feel as though

01:16:08.020 I'm, you know,

01:16:08.940 degraded,

01:16:09.600 brought down

01:16:10.140 in a spiritual sense.

01:16:12.060 It doesn't mean

01:16:12.640 I'm depressed

01:16:13.100 or anxious,

01:16:14.140 but it does mean

01:16:14.860 that my life

01:16:15.420 is qualitatively worse.

01:16:18.760 And if you draw this

01:16:20.360 out over the whole

01:16:20.940 of society,

01:16:21.780 imagine all of

01:16:22.580 American or 0.51

01:16:23.140 Western society,

01:16:24.680 imagine most people

01:16:25.480 feeling they don't

01:16:26.720 have patience

01:16:27.160 for others,

01:16:27.820 they don't have

01:16:28.280 any grace

01:16:28.740 or forgiveness

01:16:29.340 or humility.

01:16:30.480 Like,

01:16:30.760 if we lose

01:16:31.360 all of those

01:16:31.980 things at the same

01:16:32.600 time,

01:16:33.800 then we are

01:16:34.560 degraded

01:16:35.440 as a society.

01:16:37.220 And if you

01:16:38.540 have a religious

01:16:39.040 framework,

01:16:39.640 you have the

01:16:40.220 language for it,

01:16:41.180 but even if you

01:16:41.840 don't,

01:16:42.360 you feel it.

01:16:43.040 That was my

01:16:43.460 argument.

01:16:43.800 What do you think?

01:16:45.000 Well,

01:16:45.260 the religious

01:16:46.880 framework

01:16:47.580 is a consequence

01:16:49.300 of the

01:16:50.320 acceptance

01:16:51.240 of a hierarchy

01:16:52.140 of depth.

01:16:54.820 And so religious 0.67

01:16:55.480 language emerges

01:16:56.400 when you talk

01:16:57.240 about what's

01:16:57.740 most foundational.

01:16:58.760 Okay,

01:16:58.920 so let me tell

01:16:59.560 you a couple

01:16:59.980 of things

01:17:00.320 that you'll

01:17:00.680 find extremely

01:17:01.460 useful,

01:17:02.500 I think.

01:17:03.660 Okay,

01:17:04.020 so first of

01:17:04.680 all,

01:17:05.920 Mount Sinai

01:17:06.880 is the horizontal

01:17:07.860 and the vertical

01:17:08.460 axis.

01:17:09.100 Now,

01:17:09.620 most of the

01:17:10.580 mythological

01:17:11.160 representations

01:17:11.800 of what you're

01:17:12.880 describing

01:17:13.420 collapse the

01:17:15.280 hierarchical

01:17:16.180 and the divine.

01:17:17.440 They raise the

01:17:18.300 divine above

01:17:19.020 the hierarchical.

01:17:20.280 So the

01:17:20.620 hierarchy

01:17:21.020 extends up

01:17:21.800 to the

01:17:22.080 divine.

01:17:24.180 So there'd

01:17:24.580 be king,

01:17:25.280 so imagine

01:17:26.100 there's you,

01:17:27.220 family,

01:17:27.740 community,

01:17:28.420 town,

01:17:28.980 state,

01:17:29.540 nation,

01:17:30.120 king,

01:17:30.700 God.

01:17:32.560 Right.

01:17:33.440 Now,

01:17:33.840 but God

01:17:34.600 is even more

01:17:35.260 complex than

01:17:36.000 that because

01:17:36.520 there'd be

01:17:36.920 king,

01:17:37.820 there'd be

01:17:38.320 explorer,

01:17:39.460 there'd be

01:17:39.820 hero,

01:17:40.660 there'd be

01:17:41.000 father,

01:17:41.780 there'd be

01:17:42.100 God.

01:17:42.880 So that's

01:17:43.420 the heavenly

01:17:43.840 hierarchy.

01:17:45.800 Okay,

01:17:46.140 and God

01:17:46.640 is the thing

01:17:47.200 that's at the

01:17:47.700 top of that

01:17:48.500 and it's

01:17:49.960 ineffable.

01:17:51.520 It's the

01:17:52.220 good as

01:17:52.680 such.

01:17:53.480 You see

01:17:54.300 that in

01:17:54.780 Jacob's 0.84

01:17:55.280 ladder.

01:17:57.100 So what

01:17:57.860 happens in

01:17:58.420 Jacob's ladder

01:17:59.160 is that

01:17:59.560 Jacob's a 0.97

01:18:00.100 very bad

01:18:00.720 man and

01:18:02.280 he leaves

01:18:02.740 home.

01:18:03.720 He leaves

01:18:04.180 the domination

01:18:05.680 of his

01:18:06.700 interfering and 0.95

01:18:08.280 corrupt

01:18:08.600 mother and 0.99

01:18:11.160 he leaves

01:18:11.680 and then he

01:18:12.140 swears to

01:18:13.300 change and

01:18:15.440 he builds an

01:18:16.040 altar.

01:18:16.720 So that's

01:18:17.160 the vertical

01:18:17.680 axis and

01:18:19.720 it's a

01:18:20.220 representation

01:18:20.720 of Mount

01:18:21.400 Sinai.

01:18:22.140 He builds

01:18:22.520 an altar.

01:18:23.420 He swears

01:18:24.120 that he'll

01:18:24.560 make the

01:18:25.020 appropriate

01:18:25.540 sacrifices,

01:18:27.020 which is

01:18:27.460 what you

01:18:27.860 do when

01:18:28.260 you say

01:18:28.620 you'll

01:18:28.880 change.

01:18:29.720 Then he

01:18:30.020 has a

01:18:30.400 dream of

01:18:30.920 the ladder

01:18:31.400 reaching up

01:18:32.120 to infinity

01:18:32.940 with the

01:18:33.840 angels coming

01:18:34.560 down.

01:18:35.500 And the

01:18:35.920 angels that

01:18:36.600 come down

01:18:37.260 are,

01:18:38.660 you could

01:18:39.240 call them

01:18:39.680 avatars of

01:18:40.580 conscience and

01:18:41.400 calling that

01:18:43.360 descend from

01:18:44.220 the divine.

01:18:44.920 right?

01:18:46.520 And so

01:18:46.880 that's

01:18:47.260 Jacob's 0.84

01:18:47.700 ladder.

01:18:48.660 And so

01:18:48.940 it's the

01:18:50.100 establishment

01:18:50.760 of the

01:18:51.340 knowledge of

01:18:51.900 that hierarchy

01:18:52.800 of value

01:18:53.620 in Jacob's

01:18:55.660 life as a

01:18:56.200 consequence of

01:18:56.900 his vow to

01:18:57.500 change.

01:18:59.140 And so

01:18:59.580 the intuition

01:19:00.900 that we have

01:19:01.640 of depth

01:19:02.360 in the

01:19:02.780 literary realm

01:19:03.700 is an

01:19:04.600 intuition

01:19:05.140 that different

01:19:07.200 fictional

01:19:08.360 representations

01:19:09.380 portray

01:19:11.160 different

01:19:12.360 levels of

01:19:13.220 that

01:19:13.440 hierarchy.

01:19:14.080 So there's

01:19:14.440 shallow

01:19:14.740 entertainment

01:19:15.400 which is

01:19:16.380 what we've

01:19:16.840 been talking

01:19:17.340 about with

01:19:17.800 regards to

01:19:18.380 right and

01:19:19.600 there's deep

01:19:20.360 entertainment.

01:19:22.100 Oh that's

01:19:22.400 good.

01:19:22.840 And depth

01:19:23.400 has a

01:19:23.880 nature.

01:19:25.800 That's the

01:19:26.340 thing.

01:19:27.200 Depth has a

01:19:27.960 nature.

01:19:28.460 And so

01:19:28.740 your intuition

01:19:31.220 with regards to

01:19:32.140 this dimensional

01:19:33.740 structure is

01:19:34.840 see it's

01:19:36.620 also the

01:19:37.140 case that

01:19:37.900 I'll leave

01:19:41.100 it at that.

01:19:41.640 I'll leave

01:19:41.940 it at that

01:19:42.400 for the time

01:19:43.260 being.

01:19:43.760 But it's

01:19:44.320 very useful

01:19:44.960 to know

01:19:45.440 that Mount

01:19:46.000 Sinai has 0.99

01:19:46.920 this.

01:19:47.780 Mount Sinai

01:19:48.480 is the

01:19:48.820 symbolic

01:19:49.200 representation

01:19:49.900 of the

01:19:50.540 vertical and

01:19:51.000 the horizontal

01:19:51.460 axis.

01:19:52.280 I'll give

01:19:52.560 you a cool

01:19:53.560 example of

01:19:54.180 that.

01:19:55.200 So in the

01:19:55.760 story of

01:19:56.380 the golden

01:19:57.720 calf this is

01:19:58.800 dead on to

01:20:00.600 what we're

01:20:00.980 discussing.

01:20:02.260 So

01:20:02.460 Moses is

01:20:06.240 allied with

01:20:06.960 Aaron.

01:20:08.780 Moses is

01:20:09.640 slow of

01:20:10.200 speech.

01:20:11.140 He's not

01:20:11.620 charismatic

01:20:12.120 exactly.

01:20:12.940 He can't

01:20:13.220 communicate that

01:20:14.540 well with

01:20:14.960 ordinary people.

01:20:16.820 And God

01:20:17.400 tells him

01:20:18.040 when he

01:20:19.000 encounters God

01:20:19.880 in the

01:20:20.180 burning bush

01:20:20.920 which is

01:20:21.580 something that

01:20:22.120 calls to

01:20:22.580 him.

01:20:22.800 God says

01:20:23.360 to him

01:20:23.780 Moses says

01:20:25.160 I can't

01:20:25.580 be a leader

01:20:26.000 because I

01:20:26.380 can't speak.

01:20:27.080 And God

01:20:27.380 basically says

01:20:28.300 that's your

01:20:29.220 problem.

01:20:30.180 That's for

01:20:30.800 you to sort

01:20:31.380 out.

01:20:31.740 You still

01:20:32.200 have to do

01:20:32.820 it.

01:20:33.240 And then he

01:20:33.620 gives him a

01:20:34.020 hint.

01:20:34.320 You could

01:20:34.620 ally yourself

01:20:35.440 with Aaron.

01:20:36.300 That's like

01:20:36.740 the separation

01:20:37.480 of church

01:20:38.060 and state.

01:20:39.080 That's a good

01:20:39.580 way of thinking

01:20:40.100 about it.

01:20:41.000 So now

01:20:41.440 Moses has a

01:20:42.400 political element.

01:20:43.340 That's Aaron.

01:20:44.260 And they

01:20:44.820 collaborate.

01:20:46.620 Okay, now

01:20:47.180 later

01:20:48.600 as the

01:20:50.280 Israelites make 1.00

01:20:51.020 their way

01:20:51.420 through the

01:20:51.800 desert when

01:20:52.400 they're lost,

01:20:53.500 Moses leaves

01:20:54.360 to get the

01:20:54.920 Ten Commandments.

01:20:56.000 So that means

01:20:56.720 that the

01:20:57.200 spiritual

01:20:57.720 departs.

01:20:58.660 and the

01:21:00.440 Israelites 0.94

01:21:01.060 who are

01:21:01.540 lost and

01:21:02.320 slavish,

01:21:03.500 right,

01:21:04.940 and fractious

01:21:06.720 and resentful,

01:21:07.720 they don't

01:21:08.020 have the

01:21:08.460 habits of

01:21:09.200 civilized

01:21:10.340 self-governing

01:21:11.180 people.

01:21:11.920 They immediately

01:21:12.940 collapse into

01:21:14.280 a self-serving

01:21:15.600 drunken

01:21:16.060 hedonism.

01:21:16.860 That's the

01:21:17.260 worship of

01:21:17.760 the golden

01:21:18.180 calf.

01:21:19.640 So they,

01:21:21.040 and Aaron

01:21:21.600 offers that

01:21:22.460 to them.

01:21:23.520 So the idea

01:21:24.580 is that if

01:21:25.140 the political

01:21:25.800 becomes divorced

01:21:26.920 from the

01:21:27.800 divine

01:21:29.080 hierarchy,

01:21:29.960 the system

01:21:30.880 collapses into

01:21:32.000 an orgiastic

01:21:33.680 hedonism,

01:21:34.540 which of

01:21:34.920 course,

01:21:35.820 obviously,

01:21:37.280 that's the

01:21:37.840 case.

01:21:38.920 Right, right.

01:21:39.740 So this

01:21:40.600 is as old,

01:21:41.260 this idea

01:21:41.760 is as old

01:21:42.300 as time.

01:21:43.620 And I like

01:21:44.160 this idea,

01:21:44.660 you're bringing

01:21:44.940 the dimension

01:21:45.340 of depth.

01:21:47.500 We,

01:21:47.780 we,

01:21:48.500 we feel,

01:21:49.460 we feel

01:21:50.240 lifted up

01:21:51.640 by great

01:21:52.300 literature,

01:21:53.200 great art,

01:21:54.280 a story.

01:21:55.340 Or moved

01:21:55.780 to the

01:21:56.120 foundations.

01:21:56.920 a story

01:21:58.200 that draws

01:21:58.880 us in

01:21:59.580 and,

01:22:00.020 and we,

01:22:00.900 we contemplate,

01:22:01.640 we experience,

01:22:03.140 what,

01:22:04.980 archetypal

01:22:05.780 human

01:22:06.280 patterns

01:22:07.280 and emotions

01:22:07.980 over time.

01:22:09.800 We can

01:22:10.580 feel

01:22:10.920 lifted up.

01:22:12.420 What happens,

01:22:13.220 you know,

01:22:13.320 what little

01:22:13.600 time I've

01:22:14.040 spent on

01:22:14.540 TikTok

01:22:14.880 or YouTube

01:22:15.520 shorts,

01:22:16.580 it's just

01:22:17.480 such degrading 1.00

01:22:18.640 trash. 1.00

01:22:20.180 And many 1.00

01:22:20.920 of the

01:22:21.120 boys' 0.82

01:22:21.580 feeds end

01:22:22.060 up with

01:22:23.120 a lot

01:22:23.340 of violence

01:22:23.960 in them.

01:22:24.300 That is,

01:22:24.920 like,

01:22:25.640 you know,

01:22:25.900 people being

01:22:26.440 punched in

01:22:26.900 the face 0.99

01:22:27.440 or kicked 0.83

01:22:27.940 in the 1.00

01:22:28.200 balls. 0.99

01:22:29.960 And because,

01:22:31.260 you know,

01:22:31.520 the algorithm's

01:22:32.240 going to pick up

01:22:32.780 not just what

01:22:33.220 you click on,

01:22:33.640 but it'll pick up

01:22:34.160 how long you

01:22:34.600 watch something.

01:22:35.300 So my sense

01:22:36.520 is that girls

01:22:37.300 don't end up

01:22:37.800 with a lot

01:22:38.060 of violence

01:22:38.560 in their feeds,

01:22:39.180 but a lot

01:22:39.620 of boys do.

01:22:40.240 And so if

01:22:42.460 you grow up

01:22:42.980 not with

01:22:43.500 literature,

01:22:45.040 not with

01:22:45.340 stories that

01:22:46.380 draw you

01:22:47.160 in for a

01:22:47.880 while,

01:22:48.880 but just

01:22:49.280 with little

01:22:49.700 just bits

01:22:50.340 of,

01:22:50.780 you know,

01:22:52.860 sex and

01:22:53.660 violence and

01:22:54.380 people getting

01:22:54.880 hurt,

01:22:56.040 and you do

01:22:56.460 that for hours

01:22:56.980 every day.

01:22:57.540 Anger is

01:22:57.960 half positive

01:22:58.860 emotion.

01:22:59.940 It's an

01:23:00.280 approach emotion,

01:23:01.240 yes.

01:23:01.980 Yeah,

01:23:02.240 exactly.

01:23:02.820 Well,

01:23:03.000 it's got both.

01:23:03.760 It's got both,

01:23:04.340 so it's a high

01:23:04.880 arousal emotion,

01:23:05.820 but it's got that

01:23:06.480 approach element.

01:23:07.220 So of course

01:23:08.940 it's going to

01:23:09.440 degenerate in

01:23:10.200 the absence of

01:23:11.060 anything higher

01:23:11.840 or deeper,

01:23:12.740 that's going to

01:23:13.420 be the

01:23:13.720 degenerative

01:23:14.320 capacity.

01:23:15.300 The question

01:23:15.840 is like,

01:23:16.600 what constitutes

01:23:17.740 a valid

01:23:18.240 hierarchy of

01:23:19.060 depth?

01:23:19.680 And I

01:23:20.080 actually think

01:23:20.680 that question

01:23:22.480 has been

01:23:23.720 answered.

01:23:24.440 We know

01:23:25.120 what a valid

01:23:25.700 hierarchy of

01:23:26.440 depth is.

01:23:27.200 We talked

01:23:27.700 about it a

01:23:28.160 little bit.

01:23:28.540 It's longer

01:23:29.720 term,

01:23:30.880 it includes

01:23:32.480 more players

01:23:33.820 in the game,

01:23:35.060 it sacrifices

01:23:36.000 the

01:23:36.800 intense

01:23:37.880 pleasure of

01:23:38.500 the present

01:23:39.000 for the

01:23:39.480 future,

01:23:40.000 for the

01:23:40.240 abundance

01:23:40.580 of the

01:23:41.080 future.

01:23:41.940 It's

01:23:42.280 basically

01:23:42.700 what

01:23:43.000 constitutes

01:23:43.640 civilization

01:23:44.280 and the

01:23:44.920 spirit of

01:23:45.400 civilization.

01:23:46.560 And it's

01:23:47.140 painstaking

01:23:48.120 and difficult

01:23:48.780 and requires

01:23:50.260 responsibility

01:23:51.080 and sacrifice.

01:23:52.640 And it

01:23:52.900 has that

01:23:53.660 deeper meaning,

01:23:55.320 deeper because

01:23:56.000 it,

01:23:57.320 here's a

01:23:57.960 definition of

01:23:58.720 deep.

01:23:59.460 This is worth

01:24:00.300 thinking about

01:24:01.040 technically.

01:24:02.820 The deeper

01:24:03.300 an idea,

01:24:04.020 the more

01:24:04.340 other ideas

01:24:05.080 depend on it

01:24:05.840 for the

01:24:06.200 maintenance of

01:24:06.720 their validity.

01:24:07.740 It's like a

01:24:08.240 hierarchy of

01:24:09.000 games.

01:24:10.800 Yeah,

01:24:10.980 exactly.

01:24:11.720 Exactly.

01:24:12.300 And so this

01:24:13.100 is also why

01:24:13.740 people don't

01:24:14.240 like to have

01:24:14.740 their axioms

01:24:15.480 questioned,

01:24:16.160 right?

01:24:16.340 Because it

01:24:16.700 disrupts big

01:24:17.640 sections of

01:24:18.480 their prison.

01:24:20.100 That's what

01:24:20.680 happens in

01:24:21.180 trauma.

01:24:22.640 Right.

01:24:23.060 Okay.

01:24:23.540 So let me

01:24:24.260 bring in

01:24:24.840 another chapter

01:24:25.560 that nobody

01:24:26.020 ever asks

01:24:26.580 about,

01:24:26.920 which is

01:24:27.140 chapter four

01:24:27.740 on puberty.

01:24:29.020 And I

01:24:29.280 spent a lot

01:24:29.660 of time in

01:24:30.120 that chapter

01:24:30.560 talking about

01:24:31.100 initiation

01:24:31.500 rights.

01:24:32.120 because most

01:24:35.220 societies,

01:24:35.860 traditional

01:24:36.060 societies have,

01:24:36.800 you know,

01:24:37.400 a girl has

01:24:38.700 to be turned

01:24:39.100 into a woman.

01:24:39.960 Now, girls 0.56

01:24:41.080 will, without

01:24:42.640 any socialization,

01:24:43.740 girls will begin 0.87

01:24:44.480 to menstruate,

01:24:45.100 they will become

01:24:45.660 fertile.

01:24:46.500 And so societies

01:24:48.060 almost usually

01:24:49.080 mark that point.

01:24:51.120 But for girls, 0.97

01:24:52.500 there's a sense

01:24:53.140 that this will

01:24:54.740 happen and then

01:24:55.320 they have to be

01:24:55.800 inducted into the

01:24:56.500 secrets about sex

01:24:57.760 and parenthood

01:24:58.540 and all those

01:24:58.880 things.

01:25:00.400 Boys, what I

01:25:01.320 learned from my

01:25:02.160 time in cultural

01:25:03.160 psychology, boys

01:25:04.760 is much harder

01:25:05.340 because boys don't 0.93

01:25:06.200 turn into men

01:25:06.940 just by getting

01:25:07.600 older.

01:25:09.440 Little boys are

01:25:10.440 kind of like

01:25:11.040 girls and they're 1.00

01:25:11.640 with their

01:25:11.940 mothers.

01:25:12.960 But especially

01:25:13.720 in a warrior

01:25:14.800 society, you

01:25:16.040 have to get

01:25:16.760 them from the

01:25:17.240 world of girls 0.99

01:25:17.940 and women to 1.00

01:25:19.340 become a man.

01:25:20.120 How do you do

01:25:20.660 that?

01:25:20.920 Well, a lot of

01:25:21.760 toughening.

01:25:22.140 They need a lot

01:25:22.820 of toughening.

01:25:24.040 And it's a long,

01:25:24.860 drawn-out

01:25:25.100 initiation.

01:25:26.540 And we still

01:25:27.280 see this in

01:25:27.860 fraternities and

01:25:28.440 sororities.

01:25:28.960 Sorority

01:25:29.280 initiations, I

01:25:30.100 believe, are

01:25:30.440 universally more

01:25:31.660 mild at any

01:25:32.820 university than

01:25:33.700 the fraternity.

01:25:34.580 The boys go

01:25:35.220 through much

01:25:35.740 harsher, much

01:25:36.820 harsher rituals.

01:25:38.780 But where I'm

01:25:39.520 going with this

01:25:40.100 is how do you

01:25:41.860 turn a boy into

01:25:42.660 a man or a

01:25:43.360 girl into a

01:25:43.740 woman? 0.96

01:25:43.920 How do you

01:25:44.160 turn a child

01:25:44.600 into an adult

01:25:45.760 of their sex?

01:25:47.520 You have to

01:25:48.380 have some

01:25:48.900 guidance from

01:25:49.700 elders, from

01:25:51.120 someone a little

01:25:51.700 older, who is

01:25:53.860 imparting knowledge

01:25:54.720 to them, who is

01:25:55.320 choosing what they

01:25:56.760 consume, in the

01:25:57.680 sense of what

01:25:58.260 stories, what

01:25:59.160 inputs.

01:26:00.580 And while we

01:26:01.760 didn't do a great

01:26:02.320 job of that, I

01:26:02.920 mean, when you

01:26:03.620 and I were

01:26:03.920 growing up, a lot

01:26:05.060 of the messages

01:26:05.460 came from

01:26:06.000 television.

01:26:06.960 But at least

01:26:07.460 those messages

01:26:08.100 were made, none

01:26:09.560 of the TV we

01:26:10.680 watched was by

01:26:11.320 other children.

01:26:11.980 None of it was

01:26:12.460 created by other

01:26:12.920 children.

01:26:13.720 It was all

01:26:14.160 created by people

01:26:14.760 in our parents or

01:26:15.480 our grandparents'

01:26:16.140 generation.

01:26:17.260 And it often had

01:26:18.100 a moral.

01:26:19.240 And it was, you

01:26:19.960 know, for me, it

01:26:20.460 was very American.

01:26:21.380 It was like, this is

01:26:21.920 part of...

01:26:22.760 So television and

01:26:23.760 movies used to

01:26:25.240 play a huge role

01:26:26.180 in putting in the

01:26:28.000 patterns, the

01:26:28.720 knowledge that you

01:26:29.280 need to be a

01:26:29.960 member of your

01:26:30.360 culture.

01:26:31.680 And books!

01:26:32.960 And books, thank

01:26:33.680 you.

01:26:33.840 Yes, of course, and

01:26:34.600 books.

01:26:35.320 So that's why people

01:26:36.480 have cared so much

01:26:37.080 about education and

01:26:37.900 literature, because

01:26:38.440 it's not just the

01:26:39.460 facts you're

01:26:40.000 learning, it's back

01:26:41.380 to our point earlier

01:26:42.100 about the

01:26:42.540 reinforcement learning.

01:26:43.980 You know, if our

01:26:44.440 minds are like an

01:26:45.080 LLM, what are you

01:26:45.980 putting in?

01:26:46.500 Are you putting in

01:26:47.220 movies and books and

01:26:48.460 good television?

01:26:50.080 Or are you putting

01:26:50.960 in little 10-second

01:26:51.940 clips of people

01:26:52.680 getting kicked in 0.99

01:26:53.220 the balls? 1.00

01:26:54.100 So if you're 0.98

01:26:55.900 consuming just

01:26:56.440 millions of little

01:26:57.060 short videos, you're 0.95

01:26:58.540 putting garbage in, 0.95

01:26:59.500 and your neural

01:27:00.340 network is not

01:27:01.380 going to be very

01:27:01.800 effective.

01:27:03.280 And not integrated.

01:27:04.720 And not integrated

01:27:05.560 with other people.

01:27:06.940 That's right.

01:27:07.620 And no depth.

01:27:08.580 And to bring it

01:27:09.480 back to your point,

01:27:10.560 that the depth of

01:27:11.240 an idea is the

01:27:12.360 degree to which

01:27:12.760 other ideas depend

01:27:13.580 on it.

01:27:14.580 What if you don't

01:27:15.300 have any such

01:27:16.220 ideas?

01:27:17.240 What if all you

01:27:18.020 consumed was

01:27:19.060 little 10-second

01:27:19.680 videos?

01:27:20.560 Nothing is

01:27:21.040 foundational.

01:27:21.960 It's just a

01:27:22.580 whirlwind of dust.

01:27:24.200 There's no

01:27:24.620 foundation.

01:27:26.100 Yeah, well,

01:27:26.540 that's high

01:27:28.660 entropy.

01:27:29.920 There's no

01:27:30.560 difference between

01:27:31.340 high entropy and

01:27:32.160 anxiety.

01:27:33.160 And there's no

01:27:33.920 union of

01:27:34.500 motivation, so

01:27:35.360 there's no

01:27:35.900 compelling reason

01:27:36.720 to act, to

01:27:37.560 move forward.

01:27:38.980 That's chaos.

01:27:39.980 That's the

01:27:40.580 disintegration into

01:27:42.000 chaos.

01:27:42.580 And that's

01:27:42.980 where a lot of

01:27:43.420 our kids are.

01:27:43.600 That's anxiety

01:27:44.080 and demoralization.

01:27:45.300 Yeah, a lot of

01:27:45.720 our kids are

01:27:46.220 stuck there.

01:27:46.940 Okay, let's

01:27:47.840 close this off.

01:27:49.060 By the end of

01:27:51.600 your book, you

01:27:52.220 talk about what

01:27:52.980 people can do.

01:27:54.180 And you talk

01:27:55.940 about what

01:27:57.480 people can do

01:27:58.160 at different

01:27:58.620 levels of

01:27:59.180 social organization.

01:28:00.720 Parents,

01:28:01.840 governments,

01:28:02.840 industry.

01:28:03.840 Now, a huge

01:28:04.980 part of the

01:28:05.440 problem is

01:28:06.080 technological

01:28:06.980 rate of

01:28:07.540 transformation and

01:28:08.420 the race to

01:28:09.040 the bottom.

01:28:10.040 And that's

01:28:10.640 something that's

01:28:11.460 almost independent

01:28:13.240 of the actors,

01:28:14.520 unfortunately.

01:28:15.580 It's implicit in

01:28:16.800 the technology.

01:28:17.960 But anyways,

01:28:19.160 and I'd also

01:28:19.820 like, I think

01:28:21.300 this is what

01:28:21.840 we'll do on

01:28:22.260 the Daily Wire

01:28:22.880 side.

01:28:23.340 I would like to

01:28:24.140 talk to you

01:28:24.600 about what

01:28:25.740 has happened in

01:28:26.840 consequence of

01:28:27.720 your book and

01:28:29.100 what effective

01:28:29.880 steps people have

01:28:30.960 taken.

01:28:31.360 So let's do

01:28:31.880 that.

01:28:32.180 But give people

01:28:33.300 an overview of

01:28:34.220 what you think

01:28:35.020 the institutions,

01:28:37.200 broadly speaking,

01:28:38.800 must and should

01:28:39.800 do about this,

01:28:41.220 about this

01:28:41.840 fragmentation and

01:28:43.200 race to the

01:28:43.840 bottom.

01:28:44.280 So the key to

01:28:45.900 understanding how

01:28:47.300 this problem got

01:28:47.900 so big so fast and

01:28:49.140 why it's so hard

01:28:49.700 to get out of is

01:28:50.840 the concept of a

01:28:51.620 collective action

01:28:52.340 problem.

01:28:53.540 And so any

01:28:54.620 parent who says,

01:28:55.760 no, sweetheart,

01:28:56.320 I'm not giving

01:28:56.880 you a phone,

01:28:57.700 you're 10 years

01:28:58.260 old, but mom,

01:28:59.740 all my friends

01:29:00.440 have one, I'm

01:29:01.140 being left out.

01:29:02.380 That's a

01:29:02.900 collective action

01:29:03.440 problem.

01:29:04.460 If it was only

01:29:05.260 half of the kids

01:29:06.160 had it, it would

01:29:06.860 be very easy to

01:29:07.520 resist.

01:29:07.940 Boy, your child's

01:29:08.400 the only one.

01:29:09.640 Same with social

01:29:10.340 media.

01:29:10.700 And so these

01:29:13.460 things, you know,

01:29:14.280 with cigarettes, at

01:29:15.940 the peak of teen

01:29:16.900 smoking in the

01:29:17.680 90s, it was, I

01:29:18.660 think, 37% of

01:29:19.740 American high

01:29:20.220 school students

01:29:20.740 smoked.

01:29:21.700 You didn't have

01:29:22.400 to smoke because a

01:29:23.640 third of your

01:29:24.000 classmates were

01:29:24.560 smoking.

01:29:25.920 Well, with social

01:29:26.500 media, you do.

01:29:27.540 If half your

01:29:28.700 classmates are on

01:29:29.480 and they're talking

01:29:29.960 about you, you

01:29:30.520 have to be on.

01:29:31.100 Everybody ends up

01:29:31.760 on.

01:29:33.100 So it's a

01:29:33.720 collective action

01:29:34.220 problem.

01:29:34.960 How do you solve

01:29:35.460 collective action

01:29:36.020 problems?

01:29:37.580 Collectively.

01:29:38.540 And so you

01:29:38.920 can have, so

01:29:39.840 what I, I

01:29:40.720 propose four

01:29:41.540 norms that if

01:29:43.280 we can do these

01:29:43.880 four norms, we

01:29:45.320 roll back the

01:29:45.860 phone-based

01:29:46.180 childhood.

01:29:46.940 And there's a

01:29:47.700 role for different

01:29:48.200 actors, but here

01:29:49.800 are the four main

01:29:50.440 norms.

01:29:50.880 The first is no

01:29:51.880 smartphone before

01:29:52.700 high school.

01:29:54.080 Let kids have a

01:29:54.940 flip phone, a

01:29:55.480 basic phone, let

01:29:56.020 them communicate,

01:29:56.700 let them call

01:29:57.140 each other, let

01:29:57.620 them text.

01:29:58.460 But do not let

01:29:59.740 these companies get

01:30:00.560 to them and take

01:30:01.720 up every moment of

01:30:02.680 their day.

01:30:03.460 Now, I don't

01:30:03.920 think this should

01:30:04.360 be a law.

01:30:05.860 In Europe, when

01:30:06.840 I'm there, sometimes

01:30:07.480 they say, oh,

01:30:07.980 we should pass a

01:30:08.620 law banning

01:30:09.360 smartphones for

01:30:10.200 those under

01:30:10.600 14.

01:30:11.780 You know, as

01:30:12.040 an American, I

01:30:12.560 don't think we

01:30:13.020 should say, no,

01:30:13.920 you know, you

01:30:14.180 parents, you

01:30:14.820 cannot give your

01:30:16.000 child.

01:30:16.340 I mean, so this

01:30:18.040 is a norm.

01:30:19.040 And as long as a

01:30:20.140 bunch of parents

01:30:20.720 start adhering to

01:30:21.660 it, it becomes

01:30:22.420 easier for everyone

01:30:23.220 in the community

01:30:23.580 to do it.

01:30:24.040 So that's the

01:30:24.320 first norm.

01:30:24.780 No smartphone

01:30:25.380 before high

01:30:26.300 school, or 14

01:30:27.260 if it's not in

01:30:28.260 your country, high

01:30:28.820 school.

01:30:30.440 The second norm

01:30:31.400 is no social

01:30:32.120 media till 16.

01:30:33.740 Now, this, some

01:30:34.660 of us are doing

01:30:35.160 as a norm.

01:30:35.820 I've laid this

01:30:36.560 down for my

01:30:37.120 kids.

01:30:38.220 But it's hard

01:30:39.400 because I'm imposing

01:30:40.440 a cost on my

01:30:41.240 daughter.

01:30:41.720 She says she's

01:30:42.200 the only one who

01:30:42.680 doesn't have

01:30:43.000 Snapchat.

01:30:43.740 That might be an

01:30:44.480 exaggeration, but it

01:30:45.340 feels all her

01:30:45.980 friends have it and

01:30:46.720 they communicate

01:30:47.140 with it.

01:30:48.480 Here is where we

01:30:49.400 really, really need

01:30:50.600 help from

01:30:51.620 legislators.

01:30:53.000 We have minimum

01:30:53.960 ages on things

01:30:55.580 that involve

01:30:56.260 graphic sex,

01:30:57.380 horrific violence, 0.53

01:30:58.460 addiction, and

01:30:59.020 physical harm.

01:31:00.000 If your kid's on

01:31:00.860 Instagram, Snapchat,

01:31:01.980 and TikTok, they're

01:31:02.560 getting all that.

01:31:03.160 So, these are

01:31:04.740 inherently adult

01:31:05.480 activities, talking

01:31:06.380 with adult

01:31:06.860 strangers.

01:31:08.440 It's just, we need

01:31:09.400 a minimum age.

01:31:10.400 And Australia

01:31:11.020 has done it.

01:31:12.280 Australia passed a

01:31:13.480 law, it's going to

01:31:14.000 take effect in

01:31:14.600 November, that the

01:31:16.440 minimum age is 16,

01:31:17.460 and the companies

01:31:18.100 have to enforce it.

01:31:19.060 And there are a lot

01:31:19.400 of ways to do that.

01:31:20.240 There's so many

01:31:21.320 companies do age

01:31:22.180 verification.

01:31:23.860 So, that's the

01:31:24.520 second norm.

01:31:25.520 The third norm is

01:31:27.160 phone-free schools.

01:31:28.560 This is just a

01:31:29.460 no-brainer.

01:31:30.060 When you and I

01:31:30.520 were in school,

01:31:31.720 you know, I mean,

01:31:32.340 imagine if we could

01:31:32.960 take our television

01:31:33.720 set into school and

01:31:34.800 watch TV during

01:31:35.880 class and use our

01:31:37.340 walkie-talkies and

01:31:38.080 talk to our friends

01:31:38.700 during class.

01:31:39.460 I mean, it's insane.

01:31:40.700 We never could have

01:31:41.640 done that.

01:31:42.340 But the smartphone

01:31:44.040 has a lot more

01:31:44.600 than that.

01:31:45.020 They have 50

01:31:45.980 different things to

01:31:46.660 do during class.

01:31:48.580 So, it's crazy

01:31:49.820 that we ever let it

01:31:50.400 get this far.

01:31:50.980 But many states,

01:31:53.080 about 11 or 12

01:31:53.960 states and a bunch

01:31:54.860 of countries,

01:31:55.660 have now gone

01:31:57.020 phone-free.

01:31:57.700 It has to be from

01:31:58.220 the beginning of the

01:31:58.820 day to the end.

01:31:59.920 So, that's the main

01:32:01.320 area where the world

01:32:02.000 has changed in the

01:32:02.900 last year is phone-free

01:32:03.700 schools.

01:32:04.860 And then the fourth

01:32:05.680 norm is far more

01:32:08.180 free play, far more

01:32:09.440 independence, free play

01:32:10.620 and responsibility in

01:32:11.760 the real world.

01:32:13.160 Because the book

01:32:13.940 isn't about technology

01:32:15.660 or social media,

01:32:16.280 it's about childhood.

01:32:17.700 And a childhood

01:32:19.060 spent, a phone-based

01:32:20.520 childhood is not a

01:32:21.340 human childhood.

01:32:22.540 Kids are going to

01:32:22.940 miss out on most of

01:32:23.620 the things they need.

01:32:24.860 So, we can't just

01:32:25.860 take away the devices

01:32:26.840 and say, okay,

01:32:27.780 you're an only child,

01:32:28.900 sit at home, read

01:32:30.160 books, play guitar.

01:32:31.280 Like, they could do

01:32:32.380 that a little bit, but

01:32:33.420 we have to give them

01:32:34.000 back each other.

01:32:34.660 We have to give them

01:32:35.200 back fun.

01:32:35.820 We have to give them

01:32:36.320 back thrilling adventure,

01:32:37.760 hanging out, riding

01:32:38.700 bicycles, you know,

01:32:40.320 going down and getting

01:32:41.020 in, you know, going

01:32:41.700 down to the 7-Eleven,

01:32:44.260 buying things you

01:32:44.900 shouldn't buy, whatever.

01:32:45.740 So, if we do those

01:32:48.240 four things, then we

01:32:49.860 restore childhood in

01:32:51.000 the real world.

01:32:52.120 I believe that rates

01:32:53.000 of anxiety and

01:32:53.540 depression will go

01:32:54.160 down.

01:32:54.940 I believe kids will

01:32:55.680 have more slow

01:32:56.500 dopamine.

01:32:57.080 It won't be all

01:32:57.700 quick dopamine all

01:32:58.480 day long.

01:33:00.120 Test scores, I

01:33:00.840 believe, will stop

01:33:01.400 dropping.

01:33:01.820 This is important.

01:33:02.800 Test scores in the

01:33:03.320 United States actually

01:33:04.120 rose, academic

01:33:05.220 ability actually rose

01:33:06.380 from the 70s through

01:33:07.260 2012, and then it

01:33:08.820 began to drop.

01:33:09.840 It dropped more

01:33:10.540 during COVID, but the

01:33:11.840 drop didn't start in

01:33:12.880 2020, it started in

01:33:13.780 2012.

01:33:14.420 So, our young

01:33:15.980 people are less

01:33:17.460 happy, more anxious

01:33:19.140 and depressed.

01:33:20.300 They know less, their 0.99

01:33:21.740 attention is fragmented,

01:33:23.120 they're lonely, and

01:33:24.460 they feel that their

01:33:25.140 life is pointless.

01:33:26.300 We've got to stop.

01:33:27.720 We've got to stop

01:33:28.560 what we're doing.

01:33:29.580 And the book lays

01:33:30.540 out, those last

01:33:31.100 chapters lay out what

01:33:32.120 role governments can

01:33:32.920 and should play, what

01:33:34.760 role parents can and

01:33:36.000 should play, what role

01:33:36.980 schools can and should

01:33:38.060 play, and to some

01:33:39.900 extent what the tech

01:33:40.580 companies can do, but

01:33:42.060 they have so much

01:33:43.420 money at stake here

01:33:44.160 that I don't expect

01:33:45.000 them.

01:33:45.620 I mean, there are a

01:33:46.040 few like Pinterest that

01:33:46.980 are not harming kids.

01:33:48.020 They've done some

01:33:48.520 things to really

01:33:49.000 protect kids, but the

01:33:50.260 main ones are only

01:33:51.760 going to respond to

01:33:53.120 either legislation or

01:33:54.340 litigation.

01:33:55.700 So, I'm hopeful that

01:33:56.680 their behavior will

01:33:57.340 change.

01:33:58.380 But that's what the

01:33:58.980 last part of the book

01:33:59.540 is about.

01:34:00.240 How do we solve this?

01:34:01.200 And I actually think we

01:34:01.960 can solve this in the

01:34:03.040 next few years.

01:34:04.480 So, what we'll do on

01:34:05.720 the Daily Wire side, for

01:34:06.900 those of you who are

01:34:07.720 watching and listening and

01:34:08.940 who are prone to

01:34:10.160 continue the discussion

01:34:12.240 there, is I want to

01:34:13.960 find out more from

01:34:15.400 Dr. Haidt, from

01:34:16.700 Jonathan, from John,

01:34:18.200 what steps have been

01:34:20.840 taken?

01:34:21.300 Because I know there

01:34:22.020 has been movements in

01:34:23.700 many states, many

01:34:24.660 provinces in Canada, on

01:34:26.940 the phone-free school

01:34:28.200 front, for example.

01:34:29.360 But I would like to

01:34:30.560 know how widespread

01:34:31.820 that is, who's

01:34:32.760 spearheading it, what's

01:34:33.920 being effective, how

01:34:35.500 this can be moved

01:34:36.360 ahead in the future, the

01:34:37.780 potential pitfalls of

01:34:39.140 intervention of this

01:34:40.260 sort, et cetera.

01:34:41.780 So, you can all join us

01:34:43.440 on the Daily Wire side

01:34:44.500 for that discussion to

01:34:45.600 continue.

01:34:46.800 In the meantime, it's

01:34:48.940 always great talking to

01:34:49.980 you.

01:34:50.340 I appreciate it a lot.

01:34:52.600 It's a very useful book

01:34:54.000 as far as I'm concerned.

01:34:55.100 It's a crucial problem.

01:34:57.200 It's nice to see that

01:34:58.600 there's investigation into

01:35:02.060 the sociological genesis of

01:35:05.100 psychopathology, but also

01:35:06.500 some attempt to

01:35:07.900 facilitate actual

01:35:09.280 improvement.

01:35:10.220 And so, you know, your

01:35:11.640 work has, for decades,

01:35:13.760 been right on the money as

01:35:14.860 far as I'm concerned.

01:35:15.760 And this is another

01:35:16.600 example of exactly the

01:35:18.520 same thing.

01:35:19.020 The book we were

01:35:19.660 discussing is The

01:35:21.180 Anxious Generation. 0.95

01:35:21.920 When did it come out?

01:35:23.240 It came out in March of

01:35:25.360 2024.

01:35:27.240 And viewers and

01:35:28.940 listeners can go to

01:35:30.100 anxiousgeneration.com.

01:35:31.680 We have a lot of

01:35:33.000 advice, resources for

01:35:34.460 parents, for teachers, for

01:35:35.680 legislators.

01:35:37.260 And also, please go to

01:35:38.860 afterbabble.com.

01:35:40.860 That's my substack.

01:35:41.860 It's free.

01:35:42.780 That's where we put our

01:35:43.520 research out.

01:35:45.200 We have posts from all

01:35:47.740 kinds of great writers,

01:35:49.120 members of Gen Z,

01:35:50.960 teachers, researchers.

01:35:53.700 So we have a lot of

01:35:54.320 resources for you at

01:35:55.220 anxiousgeneration.com and

01:35:56.960 afterbabble.com.

01:35:59.460 Afterbabble.

01:36:00.460 Afterbabble.com.

01:36:02.060 Right.

01:36:02.360 Well, you know, it's

01:36:03.280 after Babble that the

01:36:04.560 Abrahamic Adventure takes

01:36:05.880 place.

01:36:06.940 Let's hope we have another

01:36:07.940 Abrahamic Adventure coming

01:36:09.320 up for us.

01:36:10.820 That's the proper

01:36:11.880 solution.

01:36:12.860 Yeah.

01:36:13.980 Yeah.

01:36:14.520 Okay, great.

01:36:15.340 Well, everybody, you can

01:36:16.200 join us on the Daily

01:36:17.060 Wire side.

01:36:17.640 Thanks, Jonathan and

01:36:18.540 John.

01:36:18.820 It was great to see you.

01:36:19.860 Great to see you, George.

01:36:20.800 Thank you to all for your

01:36:21.600 time and attention.

01:36:22.800 Yeah.

01:36:23.420 My pleasure.

01:36:23.920 Thank you, George.

01:36:24.400 Thank you, George.

01:36:24.460 Thank you, George.

01:36:25.460 Thank you, George.

01:36:26.460 Thank you, George.

01:36:28.460 Thank you, George.

01:36:29.460 Thank you, George.

01:36:30.460 Thank you, George.

01:36:31.460 Thank you, George.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - June 19, 2025

556. How Social Media Is Wrecking Kids' Lives and Stealing Their Childhood ｜ Jonathan Haidt

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