TRIGGERnometry - We're Heading for Civilisational Collapse

00:00:00.960 So what we're talking about really is civilizational collapse.

00:00:04.960 So we're not going to burn the technology. We need to delay it. You know, just we can't be

00:00:09.280 raising kids on this stuff. This stuff is not suitable for children. For 12, 13, 14, 15 year

00:00:14.480 olds? No, no. Just get rid of all of it. What we're doing to kids in preventing them from

00:00:19.680 developing executive function is going to hurt them for the rest of their lives. So I think we

00:00:23.600 will see a permanent effect on Gen Z. That's a tragedy, John. Oh, this is the greatest

00:00:29.520 destruction of human capital in human history. Jonathan, hi. It has been a long time us trying

00:00:36.720 to make this happen. You are the author of some of our absolutely favorite books, which really

00:00:41.920 describe a lot of what's happening in modern society. Your latest one, The Anxious Generation,

00:00:47.120 is talking about something that is crucial to the future, I think. Tell us, what do you see,

00:00:54.400 why you wrote it, what are your concerns, and what are some of the solutions?

00:00:57.600 Sure. Well, first, you know, Constantine and Francis, thanks so much for having me on.

00:01:01.680 Yes, I've blown you off for years, but I've blown off everybody for years because it's like,

00:01:06.400 how do you get time to write a book when you have a full life? And so I had to be very rude to

00:01:09.920 everyone, but here's my baby, it came out. Now, what is it? In a sense, it's a follow-on to The

00:01:16.000 Calling the American Mind in that, in that book, Greg Lukianoff and I talked about how something really

00:01:22.160 weird happened. In 2014 or so, 2013, 2014, Greg first noticed it, and it felt to me kind of like

00:01:30.160 a glitch in the matrix, like something changed right around 2014. We saw it in college students.

00:01:37.520 They were very different than they were in 2012, and that's where you start getting the shout-downs

00:01:41.360 and the fragility and the claims about we have to stop this person, not because they're unjust,

00:01:46.960 but because of somebody's mental health. All that was new. And at first, we thought it was something

00:01:51.360 about college students, and then we talked in The Coddling about overprotection. We have a lot on

00:01:56.160 the importance of free play, being unsupervised, so we have a whole part of the story there.

00:02:01.280 And we have just like three paragraphs of speculation that, well, you know, social media might have

00:02:06.480 contributed to this too because the timing is right. And, you know, if you're born in 1996,

00:02:10.960 beginning of Gen Z, you know, you got Facebook when you were a kid and Instagram when you were

00:02:18.480 going through puberty. So the timing is right, but we don't know. The date is not clear. So that was 2017

00:02:23.760 that we wrote that book. And then things just get worse and worse on university campuses,

00:02:30.000 but also it becomes clear it's not just college students. It becomes very, very clear it's everyone.

00:02:35.280 It's everyone born after 1996. And especially once it became clear that it wasn't just the US,

00:02:41.200 it was exactly the same in Canada, the UK, Australia. We have more recent data. It's the

00:02:46.160 Nordic countries as well. In all of them, we see a very sudden shift in the early 2010s. It really is

00:02:52.160 like a glitch in the matrix. And I argue in the book here that what it is, is there was a great

00:02:58.400 rewiring of childhood that happened in those years. In 2010, almost all kids had a flip phone.

00:03:05.440 The iPhone was just coming in, but it wasn't that popular. There weren't that many apps.

00:03:09.280 It wasn't, social media wasn't on it. So in 2010, almost all kids have a flip phone or other dumb

00:03:15.040 phone. There's no front-facing camera. There's no high-speed internet. You have to pay for every

00:03:19.760 text you send. So you can't spend your whole life. In 2010, teenagers are not spending their whole

00:03:24.480 life on their phones. They're using it as a tool to connect and get together later. That's fine.

00:03:29.120 That's normal childhood. By 2015, everyone's got a smartphone, front-facing camera, Instagram on the

00:03:35.440 phone. We've got a lot of high-speed internet. You don't pay for texts anymore. So now,

00:03:40.560 and there's so much going on, so the phone now becomes an experience blocker. And all the experiences

00:03:46.320 that a kid needs blocked out by this. That's why kids born after 1996, after 1995, are just really

00:03:54.080 different from those born just a few years earlier, on average. Obviously, there are exceptions,

00:03:57.680 but on average. That's what the book is about. How did we create this anxious generation,

00:04:01.840 and then what do we do now? And I suppose the question is, given that all of this technology is

00:04:09.120 here, we're not going to be able to lud our way out of it. We're not going to be able to smash them

00:04:14.480 to pieces and whatever. So I guess it's a question of how do we manage this? How do we deal with the

00:04:22.080 reality of modern technology? Which, by the way, seems to me to be only going to accelerate from here.

00:04:27.280 Yeah. That's right. So I have a whole email inbox where I send, every day I get emails from somebody

00:04:33.440 who has an app or a website or something that's going to address the problem. And I don't even

00:04:37.520 read them anymore. I just send them to this inbox, and maybe someday someone will look at them.

00:04:41.920 I've come to the opinion that there is no way to make the nine or 10 hours a day that kids are

00:04:46.240 spending on their phones. There is no way to make that nicer and safer. We're not going to smash the

00:04:51.280 technology, but you know what? We can delay it. When cars came out, they were amazing, and a lot of

00:04:56.320 people died in them. A lot of children died in them. And eventually, we kind of realized,

00:05:02.160 we need safety features in the car. And you know what? You have to be 16 to drive. We're not going

00:05:06.480 to let a 12-year-old drive a car. And I think the same thing, we're going to come to that realization

00:05:11.120 about social media in particular. Possibly smartphones. I just got back from the UK, and all the talk is,

00:05:17.840 let's ban smartphones. Let's not let kids under 14 own a smartphone or not let them be sold.

00:05:22.080 You know, as an American, I'm not very fond of bans, but I think the norm needs to be,

00:05:29.520 you know what? We're biological creatures. We're mammals. We have an evolutionary program called

00:05:34.080 childhood. We have to let that unfold. Kids have to spend enormous amounts of time

00:05:38.800 playing with each other, hanging out, teasing each other, unsupervised. No adult coming and saying,

00:05:43.840 no, no, no, don't say that. Oh, no, you go sit and look. Just let them work it out. Obviously,

00:05:48.240 there are cases of bullying. We have to attend to that. But other than those limited cases,

00:05:52.160 let kids work it out. Let them get most of the way through puberty. This is a key idea in the book.

00:05:56.800 I really came to see that puberty is this incredibly important period where the whole

00:06:01.280 brain is rewiring from the child form to the adult form, and it happens in stages from back to front,

00:06:06.080 more or less. The last part to rewire is the prefrontal cortex. And this is happening around 13 to 16 in

00:06:12.880 that period. And it continues on to 25. But it's completely insane that when puberty starts,

00:06:20.800 which is around 11 or 12 for girls and around 13 or 14 for boys, when puberty starts is basically

00:06:26.560 when we give them a phone and say, how about no more real-world experience? How about you spend 10

00:06:30.320 hours a day on this thing? And your brain isn't going to... I mean, neural rewiring is this incredibly

00:06:36.160 complex dance. And just as if we gave our kids alcohol every hour, that would disrupt neural growth.

00:06:41.280 Well, I would say giving them four hours a day of video games for the boys or five hours

00:06:45.440 a day of video games for the girls, it's going to disrupt neural growth.

00:06:48.800 You know, and this is anecdotal, but I was a teacher for many years and everyone's going to

00:06:54.240 drink because it's now become a hack comment on this podcast from me. But one of the things that

00:07:01.040 I noticed, because I was a drama teacher, and a lot of drama teaching in the UK is you give children

00:07:06.400 a set of stimulus, and then they create their own plays, improvised plays around a stimulus.

00:07:12.160 And I remember talking with the drama teachers halfway into my career and we were going,

00:07:18.720 I think kids are becoming less imaginative.

00:07:21.200 What year was this around what?

00:07:23.040 This was around 2015, 2016. And we started to notice that, that the quality of work that the

00:07:29.840 kids were doing was degrading. There's a lot going on there. The one thing I can say with some

00:07:36.480 confidence is the fragmentation of attention. This is very general. The ability, so the one thing the

00:07:43.120 prefrontal cortex does is called executive function. It's the ability to make a plan, say, you know,

00:07:48.400 like this morning I said, okay, I want to, I would need to be here at 9.30 and I thought about the

00:07:53.520 different methods and I made a plan and then I stuck to the plan because I have a normal prefrontal cortex.

00:07:58.400 And if you disrupt that, if you're constantly, in the early teen years, if you're constantly being

00:08:06.560 divided, you have all kinds of stuff coming in, that part doesn't develop as well. So this is one

00:08:11.680 of the most common comments we hear about Gen Z is that it's very difficult for them to stay on task.

00:08:16.320 In fact, their brains have become accustomed to such a constant incoming stream of information that a

00:08:22.400 lot of them have trouble watching a video because it's not enough stimulation. So they do this thing,

00:08:27.200 there'll be, and I've seen people have sent me these things, there's like a video of me giving a talk

00:08:32.320 and underneath it is a video of a video game going on. They need two things at once, where if they're

00:08:37.360 at the computer, they need the phone as well. And so this is inhuman. This is, this is what we're doing

00:08:43.440 to kids in preventing them from developing executive function is going to hurt them for the rest of

00:08:47.360 their lives. So that's a very general comment. Now as for creativity, that's quite possible. I don't have,

00:08:52.880 I haven't studied that. I don't have like a specific mechanism, but in general, you know,

00:08:57.520 creativity requires you take in a lot of stuff and you put out stuff and then you get criticism.

00:09:02.720 So you've got to have this back and forth with the world to be creative. But, but now that kids

00:09:07.680 are basically taking in gigabyte, I mean, you know, 10, 50 times as much stuff as we did when we were

00:09:13.680 young, the stuff is coming and not a lot is coming out. And they're not doing a lot of writing.

00:09:19.120 They're not, they're, you know, they're not writing books. They're not, um, starting companies,

00:09:24.240 even they're, they're, they're taking in so much stuff. So I'm guessing I'm speculating,

00:09:28.800 but that might be part of why you'd see a reduction in creative production.

00:09:32.080 And what was interesting as well is that towards the end of my time in education, I noticed that

00:09:38.480 there were far more arguments. There were far more fights between kids because their social skills had

00:09:44.400 diminished. So they couldn't find a way to negotiate conflict. And the people were like,

00:09:50.480 oh, it's cause they're spoiled. And I was like, I don't think it is. I genuinely don't think they

00:09:55.040 know how to communicate effectively. That's right. Um, so what, you know, we,

00:09:59.840 we need to develop one-on-one communication skills and something I, you know, I realized in writing the

00:10:05.040 book cause I, I had to deal with this question of, well, you know, aren't they playing online?

00:10:09.840 Isn't that just as good? Aren't they socializing online? Like what about a kid who's isolated here?

00:10:14.320 He has lots of friends. Isn't that just as good? And what I realized in writing the book is no,

00:10:19.120 actually there are four ways in which online communication, online interaction are, are,

00:10:23.520 are not as good or very different. So the first is that real life is embodied. And just what we're

00:10:28.640 doing now, just like the rules of, you know, like you guys are looking straight at me because I'm

00:10:33.360 talking, but if I were just to look straight at you while I was talking, that would be kind,

00:10:37.680 it's kind of weird because like, you know, you don't do that. So you have to work out rules of

00:10:42.400 eye contact and we're, we're all communicating with our heads. It's not just our mouths. It's like

00:10:46.320 our head movements are very important. So anyway, there's all these nonverbal channels online. You

00:10:51.120 get emojis and you get a lot of uncertainty. You say something, you don't know how it landed

00:10:55.040 and you're anxious until they respond. So it's embodied. Um, real life is synchronous. Right now we

00:11:01.280 have instant, really rapid back and forth. Um, and now on a, you know, on a zoom call or in some

00:11:06.400 video games, you have that. So some parts of the virtual world are synchronous, but most are not.

00:11:09.760 It's text-based. You know, I, I say something, you know, you misinterpret it and then you tell

00:11:14.560 other people and we, we, we lose that, that connection. Um, the third is that real life

00:11:20.160 interactions are mostly one-to-one or in this case, one-to-two, one-to-a-few. You hang out with

00:11:24.160 a group of friends, but once it becomes like a group text where a kid is posting and there's,

00:11:28.880 you know, 80 kids, like the whole class is on this group text. It's not playful anymore. It's

00:11:33.520 performative and it's anxiety provoking because you make one misstep and your reputation is trash.

00:11:38.400 So it's scary. It's anxiety provoking. Um, and then the final one is that real life communities

00:11:44.240 in general are durable. Um, whereas online communities are evanescent, you know, maybe

00:11:50.720 there's a, you know, 500 people in a group and most will be gone by tomorrow. Almost nobody's going to

00:11:54.800 be there a year from now. So kids need to be rooted in permanent communities. This is part of the human

00:11:59.840 developmental plan. And in the online world, they just dip their toe into hundreds of little things.

00:12:05.040 This I think is one of the major reasons why the thing that happens right around 2012,

00:12:09.600 it's not just anxiety shooting up. It's not just depression shooting up. It's the sense of

00:12:14.640 meaninglessness. There's all these really sad questions on these surveys. Sometimes I feel like

00:12:19.680 my life has no meaning. Sometimes I think I'm no good at all. There's these really sad questions.

00:12:25.600 And until 2012, the rates of agreement among American high school kids were very, very low.

00:12:31.840 And then all of a sudden, right around 2012, as they move their lives onto the girls' social media,

00:12:37.040 the boys' more video games, as they move their lives into the virtual world, they're lonely and

00:12:41.920 they have a sense of meaninglessness. They're not rooted in anything. So this is why I call it the

00:12:46.640 great rewiring of childhood. And it's become something inhuman and we have to roll it back.

00:12:51.600 Just to finish this train of thought and with my experiences, one thing, again, this is anecdotal,

00:12:56.720 but still, I think it's important. So I was in high school, I qualified as a secondary school

00:13:01.680 teacher in 2008. And I remember talking to the teachers and they were saying to me,

00:13:07.680 you know what, Francis, bullying, because I always worked in rough, tough schools. They were like,

00:13:12.320 you know, look, this is, these are deprived kids. You know, it's always been a tough environment.

00:13:17.840 But the bullying since Facebook, and I'm not even talking about Instagram or any of the others,

00:13:22.880 when Facebook came into this school, the bullying got so much worse. And to put, to take your point,

00:13:29.680 I remember when I was a form tutor being handed printouts from parents of messages these kids were

00:13:36.080 sending to each other. It was vile, utterly, utterly vile. And you, you just go, this is incentivizing

00:13:44.400 this type of behavior because there is that, you know, you can just say these things and you know,

00:13:49.760 there's going to be little to no pushback. That's right. That's right. And you say them

00:13:53.040 to get the prestige where you'd never say them directly to the kid face to face for a lot of them.

00:13:57.200 So, you know, what we call middle school in the United States, grades six, seven, and eight in

00:14:02.320 roughly ages 11 to 13. This is when bullying peaks, around seventh grade is when bullying peaks.

00:14:09.840 And these are very difficult developmental years, especially for girls. Their bodies are changing,

00:14:14.560 they're insecure, they're being judged by their looks, by their breast size, you know, it's such

00:14:18.400 a difficult time for girls. And that's right when we introduced this crazy thing where everyone can

00:14:26.880 say anything about anyone, often anonymously, and you, I mean, you know, you take all the difficulties

00:14:32.560 of adolescence, especially for girls, and you multiply them by 10. Oh, and then let's add in

00:14:37.600 strangers, you can talk to strangers without your parents knowing. And, you know, with all these

00:14:41.840 platforms, they start off lovely, they start off fun, they start off playful. But any system you

00:14:48.160 create, any ecosystem you create, unless you have an incredibly elaborate, evolving immune system,

00:14:55.920 any system is going to be taken over by parasites, viruses, and exploiters. And so, for example,

00:15:00.960 I'm just so horrified, you know, one thing I learned about when I was in the UK is the rapid growth of

00:15:06.720 sextortion. You know, I'd heard about it for years, but apparently there's a Nigerian gang, the Yahoo Boys,

00:15:13.920 and, you know, the trick, you know, that strangers can talk to your kids, and they do this to

00:15:18.000 boys, because boys are stupid enough sometimes to send a naked photo. If a beautiful girl says,

00:15:22.640 let's swap photos, and she's been flirting with them for a couple of days, boys are stupid enough,

00:15:26.960 or gullible enough, or desperate enough to do it. And the instant they send that photo,

00:15:31.840 this person in the criminal gang says, now I've got everything I need to ruin your life,

00:15:35.760 you have 30 minutes to send me $500, or I will ruin your life, I know all your contacts,

00:15:40.560 I'm going to send this photo to everyone, I know where you live.

00:15:42.800 And so, I mean, this is the idea that we're exposing boys to predators who not only can

00:15:50.080 sextort them, but I read in one recent report, the FBI has linked 22 suicides of boys just to

00:15:56.800 sextortion, which means there's probably hundreds of them, which means there are tens of thousands

00:16:01.920 who are being sextorted and having their lives ruined. So the idea that in the most vulnerable,

00:16:06.800 difficult transition from child to adult, we say, how about if you could all say things about anyone,

00:16:13.040 and you can be exploited by predators, and you get these TikTok challenges urging you to do stupid

00:16:18.320 things like kick people's legs out while they're jumping so they fall on their head. I mean,

00:16:22.320 crazy, crazy stuff. So we're not going to burn the technology, but we need to delay it. You know,

00:16:29.760 just we can't be raising kids on this stuff. This stuff is not suitable for children.

00:16:33.760 And John, one of the things that is the origin story of trigonometry is our concern about

00:16:40.800 people being prevented from speaking their mind, restriction of speech. And also, it's clear from

00:16:48.000 the way that social media operates that I worry about AI as well, in the sense that AI is learning

00:16:55.520 about human beings from social media effectively, and from online communication, which we all know is

00:17:00.720 not how people actually are. It's how people actually communicate. And the reason is, one of the

00:17:06.000 reasons is what the word you used already, which is performative. So is there a way to make online

00:17:12.800 communication more human? Well, I think the telephone did an amazing job of that. When the telephone came

00:17:20.960 in, it connected everyone in a good way. And I'm sure there were people at the time who had some

00:17:26.800 objection. But overall, we've seen the telephone as a boom, when you connect people directly.

00:17:31.520 And I think when Facebook first came out, many people saw it as a boom. There was no news feed.

00:17:36.240 It was just, here's my page, I can put up pictures, and you're my friend, I connect to you.

00:17:41.040 So in theory, social media could be beneficial. But they all, especially once Facebook developed the

00:17:46.800 advertising-driven business model, where now it's not about not giving you a platform by which you can

00:17:53.680 talk with your friends. It's now about how do I keep you, how do I keep your eyes on the sites that

00:17:58.960 I can sell more ads to my customers, who are the advertisers, the users are not the customers.

00:18:06.160 So, so I think, so, you know, again, I get all the, everyone has an idea for how to do a better

00:18:12.880 online form of interaction, and I'm so sick of it. So I say, you know, maybe for over 18s,

00:18:19.200 yeah, for adults, let's have some better platforms drive out the bad platform. But you know what?

00:18:25.360 For 12-, 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds? No, no. Just get rid of all of it. Get rid of all of it.

00:18:32.800 What we have to do is give kids back normal human childhood. So, so very important point I'm trying

00:18:38.400 to make to parents, everyone's focus is on the phone stuff. You can't just take away the phones and

00:18:44.080 the iPads and all the technology from your, you know, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12-year-olds. You have

00:18:49.440 to give them back something else, which is play. You know, I'm sure you, you know, okay, fond memories,

00:18:56.160 go back to when you were 8, 9, 10. Think of a fond memory, say it. What do you see yourself doing?

00:19:00.880 Granddad's farm playing, swimming in the river.

00:19:03.280 With granddad?

00:19:04.240 With who you with?

00:19:05.040 No, with cousins.

00:19:06.800 Right. You know, other kids.

00:19:08.240 Yeah, that's right.

00:19:08.720 And this is exciting. It's thrilling. You take risks. You know, you figure how to swing. You know,

00:19:16.080 you throw a vine or a rope and you swing and you take risks and you might get hurt. That turns out

00:19:20.800 to be really important. It's very important that kids, kids need to sort of size up the risk and

00:19:25.600 each one has to adjust it to the level that he needs that day. And if you let kids do that,

00:19:30.480 they will occasionally get hurt. But at the end of the process, they really can judge risk. What we did

00:19:35.840 beginning in the 90s because the back story here, it's not just about the phones. The back story is

00:19:40.640 we got rid of the play-based childhood. In America, we freaked out about child abduction,

00:19:45.440 but even in the UK where you didn't have much of it, you still freaked out and lost trust in each

00:19:49.760 other and got hyper-concerned about traffic and said, no, we're not letting our kids out.

00:19:54.320 So what kids need is play-based childhood. That's what they had until the 1990s, early 2000s.

00:20:01.360 And instead, at the same time that we were locking them up and saying, no, you can't go outside

00:20:06.400 unsupervised, oh, but here's a personal computer and it has a dial-up modem and look, you can play

00:20:13.200 video games and oh, you can talk to your friends. And so in the 90s and early 2000s, kids were shifting

00:20:19.120 over to virtual interactions. Their mental health didn't collapse then, actually. It was actually

00:20:23.920 pretty stable in the 90s, especially in the 2000s, pretty stable. It's only once they make the jump

00:20:30.400 to from flip phones to smartphones. That's when you go from playing a bunch of video games at home

00:20:36.320 on the family computer to I have the entire internet with me all the time and I can be flirting with

00:20:41.280 strangers who claim to be sexy women. You get the craziness once you get this all the time. That's

00:20:46.720 why 2010 to 2015, that's the key period when everything collapses. And John, one of the things

00:20:52.640 that I think is inevitably something we have to be honest about is even if right now we did everything

00:20:59.520 that you're saying, we still have one, maybe two generations who've been raised in this way and

00:21:06.960 there's nothing that can be done about it. So two points on different sides. One,

00:21:12.320 I do suspect because puberty is such a crucial period of brain rewiring, I do expect that Gen Z

00:21:19.920 will be less than it could be permanently. I think that Gen Z is not, even if we look at them in 30 or

00:21:25.520 40 years, my prediction is they'll be less successful than they would have been if they'd had normal

00:21:29.920 human childhoods. So I think we will see a permanent effect on Gen Z. But that's a tragedy, John.

00:21:36.400 Oh, this is the greatest destruction of human capital in human history. We've taken an entire

00:21:42.240 generation globally, certainly I don't have any data from the developing world, but in the developed

00:21:47.920 countries we've taken an entire generation, we've taken away what they need biologically to develop,

00:21:53.520 you know, risk exposure, hanging out time, we've taken all that away and given them something

00:21:58.240 unnatural. So yes, this is, I believe, the greatest destruction of human capital in human history.

00:22:04.320 I could be wrong. I'm making an argument that this is what has happened. But now on the positive side,

00:22:10.400 on the positive side, even though there'll be a difference, you know, I'm a social scientist,

00:22:14.800 so, you know, if there's going to be an average difference, I'm going to talk about and say,

00:22:17.920 this is incredibly important. But it doesn't mean that each kid in Gen Z is condemned to a life of

00:22:23.600 anxiety because the human brain is quite malleable up through 25, and even after that we can all learn

00:22:31.040 new thinking patterns and new behavior patterns. And so what's most exciting to me is the results

00:22:36.640 I'm getting in my class at NYU. I teach a course called Flourishing. It began as a course just for

00:22:42.080 MBA students in 2014, like teaching them how to have a more flourishing career. But once it became clear

00:22:47.440 around 2019, just before COVID, that our undergrads are really depressed, just like undergrads

00:22:52.000 everywhere. And so I volunteered to convert the course over to a longer, deeper course for

00:22:58.960 undergraduate students. And so I limit it to sophomores. I want to get them pretty early in

00:23:02.320 their time at Stern, at NYU Stern. And so they're all about 19 years old. And the course, the point of

00:23:08.960 the course is to make them smarter, stronger, and more sociable. And smarter, I show them that,

00:23:16.560 you know what, since 2015, young people have had essentially zero attention. You don't have any

00:23:21.440 attention to do anything. It's all sucked up by your devices. So if you have no attention,

00:23:25.840 you really can't accomplish anything in life. Now, do you want that? Okay, none of you want it. They're

00:23:30.720 business students. They want to be successful. Say, okay, you have $100 of attention every day,

00:23:36.240 and you've given all of it away. So you have none to spend. Now, let's change that. Look at your

00:23:40.640 notifications. Look at how much time you spend on YouTube, on TikTok. One of my students was spending

00:23:45.520 six hours a day just watching TikTok, just TikTok. And then with all the other stuff,

00:23:50.560 we're up to 10, 12, 14 hours a day. But they get amazing results when they shut off almost

00:23:57.360 all notifications. I show them just shut off, leave on Uber, and a few others where, yes,

00:24:02.320 I give Uber permission to interrupt my attention to tell me your car will be here in three minutes.

00:24:07.680 Like, yes, that's worth doing. But do I give some newspaper permission to interrupt me to say,

00:24:13.920 Prince Harry says this, or major weather pattern in Brazil? Like, no, no.

00:24:19.520 You know, so when I help them regain their attention, understand risk, understand that they

00:24:26.640 need to take risks. This is one thing that's so exciting to me is that Gen Z totally recognizes

00:24:32.320 the problem. They're not in denial. They want to take risks. They want to get, they want to grow.

00:24:39.680 And so if you lay out a path and you say, here's the challenge, and then they do it together.

00:24:44.480 So it's a very collective, collectivist generation more so than previously. But if a class of kids,

00:24:48.960 or if a group of friends, or if a school, if they do it together, they make amazing progress.

00:24:53.680 Well, this is where I was going with it. And you were excited by the idea of this being a more

00:24:58.640 collectivist generation. I have some questions about that.

00:25:02.320 Yes. There's a dark side.

00:25:04.000 Well, quite. And more broadly, I guess where I was going is, even though I think what you were doing

00:25:10.800 clearly is magnificent and helping them. And I think with younger kids, there are conscious

00:25:16.640 parents who are trying to, you know, mitigate some of the consequences of this. I was sitting in a

00:25:21.520 bar in Florida the other day talking to some guys next to me, and they were saying, oh, you've got a

00:25:26.240 two year old, what are you doing? And I was sort of, well, he's not getting any screens because my wife

00:25:29.600 is a screen naughty and I fully support her, you know. And this guy was saying, oh, really?

00:25:34.320 That's it. He seemed shocked. And he was like, oh, my 12 year old has been banned from TikTok for

00:25:38.240 posting videos of him fighting with other kids, you know. So I guess what I'm getting at is,

00:25:44.400 I'd be curious to hear, given that I suspect the mass of these, this generation isn't going to be

00:25:51.360 reeducated, so to speak in a Jonathan Hyde brilliant course. What are some of the social and societal

00:25:57.920 trends that we are likely to see, especially when inevitably these kids start hitting the workplaces?

00:26:04.160 And start having influence and power and so on. What's going to happen? I thought my generation

00:26:08.560 were bad. Millennials? Millennials, yeah. But the millennials were different in the way that

00:26:13.840 every generation is different. So every generation has stereotypes of the one after them. They're soft,

00:26:18.400 they're self-involved. That's been true since about the 16th century. Once you get modernity,

00:26:24.720 you get rapid change. Each generation thinks the one behind it is defective. But that's always been the

00:26:29.840 case. What we have here is something very new. Gen Z is not just that they're different, it's that

00:26:34.880 they're really anxious, fragile, they have no attention to focus on things, and they're just

00:26:38.880 not very effective. And so I teach in a business school, I speak to a lot of people in business,

00:26:43.360 and I always ask them, how are things going with your Gen Z employees? I've only once heard a good

00:26:48.240 thing. It's almost always like, oh my god. I mean, they're so anxious, and they're always taking days off,

00:26:55.280 and they don't take initiative on things, and they expect others to come and fix things. I mean,

00:27:01.360 so Gen Z is not integrated into the workforce well. None of this is their fault. This poor generation,

00:27:06.800 they were the first that were completely deprived of play, and then they were the first to go through

00:27:10.560 puberty on smartphones. And then just as they're coming out of high school or college, just as

00:27:15.040 they're going into the workforce, COVID hits. So this is a generation that just, they were just

00:27:19.280 blocked and blocked and blocked from developing skills that will make you effective in business or

00:27:25.120 in life. So there's no criticism of them here. There's sympathy. But it's not going well,

00:27:31.520 integrating into the workplace. And let's see, what was the other part of your question?

00:27:36.320 Well, I guess what I'm asking is, what is going to be their impact on culture, politics, and

00:27:40.880 everything else? Because people who are highly anxious and all of the other things you list,

00:27:45.680 I imagine the laws that they might want to pass are going to be different to people who are resilient.

00:27:49.920 I imagine the way that they interpret existing laws is going to be different. I imagine,

00:27:54.240 you know, you mentioned being a collective generation, like, what are they going to want?

00:27:58.560 That's right. No, that's right. So one of the things I'm very concerned about, I'm very concerned,

00:28:03.760 I think you guys have talked about this too, is the difficulty of having a large diverse secular

00:28:10.160 society. Human groups, we evolved in fish infusion communities, we're very good at coming together

00:28:14.800 to fight another group. But once we reach a certain size, we tend to split. Civilization is a way of

00:28:19.680 having much, much larger groups, traditionally united by shared gods, shared blood, and shared

00:28:25.200 enemies. That's the human way. That's been true for, you know, 5,000 years. So you can have

00:28:30.640 civilizations based on shared gods, shared blood, shared enemies, and those can be very stable

00:28:34.880 for many generations. But, you know, in the West, we develop these liberal democracies. And as an American,

00:28:40.800 I'd like to take credit, I mean, there are earlier democracies, but I'll take credit for,

00:28:44.160 you know, our founding fathers were incredibly wise political philosophers. They read history.

00:28:49.440 They were amazing social psychologists. They knew that democracy is unstable because people are

00:28:54.400 passionate and the people can't just rule themselves. You can't have direct democracy.

00:28:57.760 But let's come up with a system where you don't have direct democracy, but yet the people can throw

00:29:02.720 them out of power. The people ultimately can say, no, we don't like this. So they set up this

00:29:07.680 elaborate, like almost like an elaborate clock with, you know, counterweights and gears and pulleys.

00:29:13.440 And at the time, Ben Franklin said, he was asked, the famous line, he was asked, you know,

00:29:17.920 what kind of government have you given us? And he says, republic, if you can keep it. Meaning,

00:29:23.200 if the people have sufficient virtue to keep this going, you can keep it. But if the people don't

00:29:29.840 have certain virtues, then this thing is going to fall apart. Now, the key to the American form of

00:29:37.600 government, I believe, is that we, it's been called the American experiment. And what that

00:29:43.920 means is it's an experiment in self-governance. So America, the idea was, can we govern ourselves

00:29:50.800 without a king? And the Europeans said, no, good luck. No one can do that. You need a king.

00:29:57.920 You know, you need a potentate, some power to, and we said, we're going to give it a try. And it was

00:30:02.800 chaotic at times, but we kept improving and we solved a lot of our problems.

00:30:07.200 And Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s, when he traveled around America, he said,

00:30:11.920 actually similar to what you and I were just talking about before we started filming,

00:30:14.800 that he said, you know, when there's a problem to be solved in France, everyone waits for the

00:30:20.400 king to do it. And in England, they wait for the local nobles to do it. But in America, they form a

00:30:26.160 committee and they each put in a few dollars and they say, we're going to build this bridge over

00:30:30.640 this river that we need, or we're going to build a school or a hospital, whatever it is.

00:30:34.240 So he admired this can-do spirit of Americans. And a key idea, which Greg and I developed in

00:30:40.720 the coddling, is in order to become self-governing as a nation, you need citizens who can be self-

00:30:48.320 governing in their lives. Citizens who can work out conflicts without always going to the police or

00:30:54.000 the courts. Citizens who can work out conflicts by themselves. And all of us had childhoods where

00:31:00.800 we were forced to become self-governing because there were no adults. In the afternoon or on

00:31:04.080 weekends, you're out playing. So it's those conflicts on the playground. You have a game

00:31:09.760 and you say, well, here's the boundary. And someone says, that was out of bounds. And you have to

00:31:13.360 adjudicate, like, no, it wasn't. And we want to keep the game going, so we've got to work it out.

00:31:18.880 All that is essential stuff in childhood to create self-governing individuals,

00:31:23.600 which can allow you to have a self-governing republic. What happens now? The kids are almost

00:31:30.000 always supervised, so they don't get a chance to become self-governing. Some people say, oh,

00:31:34.480 well, that's why video games are so important. It's the one place where the kids aren't being

00:31:37.840 supervised. Well, guess what? There are no conflicts on a video game. There's no out of bounds.

00:31:42.800 There's no adjudication. The platform does all of that. All you do is control your player and have

00:31:48.240 adventures, but they're not real risks. My son jumps out of planes many times a day and stabs

00:31:54.480 people and shoots people. And it's not exciting in the way that, I mean, I don't want to say it's

00:32:00.400 exciting in real life, but I'm just saying, growing up in the virtual world does not give you the

00:32:05.360 ability to become self-governing in the ways that we need. So I'm extremely afraid. That's a long-winded

00:32:11.040 way of getting back to your question. It's possible that we'll have a complete rupture in American

00:32:15.520 history. It's possible that Gen Z and later were deprived of the opportunity to develop the virtues

00:32:23.920 that we've always assumed would be there. I'm late baby boomer. Not that my generation did such

00:32:28.800 a great job. I mean, Gen Z bears none of the blame for the mess that America's in now.

00:32:34.320 But I'm afraid that we have ill-prepared them to handle this mess. We're going to have a lot more.

00:32:39.680 We've already seen it. They've been raised with these ideas of microaggressions and trigger warnings.

00:32:46.640 So many of them think that speech is violence. And Greg Lukianoff and Fire have been

00:32:54.880 charting this out. And I was doing also with Heterodox Academy, we charted out a lot of this.

00:32:59.040 Attitudes towards free speech are really changing rapidly in Gen Z. Because if we were raised with

00:33:05.200 sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never harm me. Of course, names do hurt,

00:33:09.040 but this was a way of saying, you know what? I'm not going to let like, go ahead and insult me.

00:33:12.400 I'm not going to react. But the new thing is, if you say anything that I can in any way interpret

00:33:19.920 as a criticism of me or my group, you've committed an aggression. Someone has to punish you because

00:33:24.560 you're hurting me. And this means we are stuck in endless, endless conflicts over somebody said

00:33:31.200 something. This is something I hear from business people too. Oh, you see it, especially in progressive

00:33:35.200 organizations, there have been a few articles written about the chaos within politically

00:33:39.360 progressive nonprofits, because it's just constant conflict over someone said something. Like,

00:33:45.040 can't we, you know, can't we do our work? The older people say like, no, because somebody said

00:33:48.960 something. So yes, I think we are going to see, we're going to see, we're going to see a change in

00:33:55.920 values and social abilities that may be incompatible with the American form of democracy.

00:34:00.080 Well, very much on that point, there was another thing you mentioned, and this is something that

00:34:04.880 I've been thinking about a lot. You said people can unite into civilization that's bigger than,

00:34:10.960 you know, the Dunbar number of 250 people or whatever, 150. If they've got shared blood,

00:34:20.240 shared gods, shared enemies. I would argue we've got at best one of them and the worst one,

00:34:27.680 which is we might be able to say we have a shared enemy. And even that, I think,

00:34:31.680 is in dispute at this point. That's right.

00:34:33.840 How the hell do we keep this thing together? Yeah. So here's where we need, there's a really

00:34:39.200 wonderful Arabic word called Asabiya, which I take from the 14th century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun.

00:34:46.160 Ibn Khaldun was one of the theorists of cyclical history. You get these theories in ancient Greece,

00:34:54.800 you get them in Islam, you get them today. The observation, he observed that a tribe would come

00:35:00.720 out of the desert, knock over the, you know, the soft rich people in the city, take over, enjoy their

00:35:05.840 riches, but their grandchildren are now pretty soft and the same thing happens again. So there's an internet

00:35:10.720 meme. Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men,

00:35:17.680 weak men create hard times. So I think that, I think that that is, that is happening. Now,

00:35:24.080 how do you create, keep, and those were tribal societies. These were still based on lineage,

00:35:29.840 those societies that he was writing about. In a secular liberal democracy like the United States,

00:35:34.640 we have to, oh, an Asabiya is the word for like cohesion, trust, the ability of a group to act.

00:35:42.480 And nothing creates Asabiya like a foreign attack. So World War II and especially Pearl Harbor,

00:35:49.520 that created America, I mean, that's responsible for so much of America's greatness in the 20th,

00:35:54.320 in the late 20th century, because my parents' generation, everybody who remembers that attack,

00:35:58.800 they all came together for five years, everything was for the war effort, they were united. And then when they

00:36:04.240 went on to go into politics, they could work together. That's, we call them the greatest

00:36:08.880 generation. So having some, if you keep your eye on Asabiya or cohesion, you can address this

00:36:19.200 question of what can a large liberal democracy, a secular one like the UK or the US, what can you do?

00:36:25.280 In the US, we've long had what was called the American civil religion or civic religion from Robert

00:36:31.120 Bella, sociologist. And, you know, when I was growing up, there was a real reverence

00:36:35.920 for the founding fathers, the flag, the Declaration of Independence, our founding documents, it really

00:36:41.200 is religious. It's like, you know, and the way they're presented in the archives, you know, with like

00:36:45.600 soft light, and it really is a religious thing that we had in America, the constitution and the

00:36:50.240 declaration, those were our sacred documents. So things like that can create Asabiya, and especially

00:36:57.600 in a diverse country like the United States. Of course, World War II did that, the Cold War did

00:37:02.800 it, the Cold War is over. So yeah, we don't have the common enemy. In America, we never had shared

00:37:08.560 blood. That's one of our great risk point, but it became our great strength that we found out,

00:37:13.840 how do you stitch people together without the common blood? And so I think that's why we were such an

00:37:18.080 example to the world of a liberal democracy. What shared, oh, and shared gods. To a large extent,

00:37:24.320 we did used to have shared gods. It was all Protestants at first with some Catholics,

00:37:28.880 and then sort of, you know, the Catholic Protestant thing goes into a little bit of Jews, and okay,

00:37:32.240 Judeo-Christian. So, you know, we did have a sort of a shared Western Christian, Judeo-Christian

00:37:37.600 heritage. And, you know, so diversity, diversity brings a number of benefits, but it also tends to

00:37:44.080 reduce Asabiya. So, you know, I wish, and this is one of my points with Heterodox Academy, we really,

00:37:50.240 really need good social science more than ever before. You know, maybe the 1930s,

00:37:55.200 we needed it just as much, but we really need good social science. And the social sciences are

00:37:59.360 getting so ideological, they're not capable of doing full honest exploration of any issue

00:38:05.760 on which, you know, someone will say that's not politically correct, or that's, you know,

00:38:08.880 you're not allowed to say that. So yeah, I'm very alarmed about the future of liberal democracies

00:38:14.400 based on the older model that may not be applicable. And it seems to me that this is

00:38:20.240 all tied into mental health, but also the way social media fetishizes mental health.

00:38:26.240 Ah, yes.

00:38:26.880 And as a result of that, that ties into a fragility amongst Gen Z. So I'll give you

00:38:32.720 an example. So before we started this show, I helped run a comedy club, and there was this very

00:38:37.440 young, you know, very good comedian, actually, Gen Z comic, who turned up.

00:38:40.720 And he went on, he didn't have a particularly good sets, a set, and he was booked for two sets

00:38:46.560 that night. He turned around, looked to me and went, I broke up with my girlfriend two days ago.

00:38:51.120 Um, my mental health is really bad. I can't carry on. I can't do the second set. And he just simply

00:38:57.200 walked out. And I was utterly dumbfounded because I've never seen that type of behavior before.

00:39:02.480 That's right. It's unprofessional. It's, it's, it's, but it's the norm. If you have anxiety,

00:39:08.320 the world must accommodate you. Um, so, um, so yes, let's talk a bit more about mental health

00:39:14.160 because a lot more to say on this. Uh, let me bring in, let's bring in the sex difference here

00:39:18.880 because this, this is actually very important. Um, so boys and girls, both are more, they both,

00:39:23.680 both gotten much more anxious and depressed. Um, for the girls, it was a very sharp, it was,

00:39:29.200 in all the graphs you'll see in the book, for the girls, there's really a sharp elbow right around

00:39:32.720 2012, at least in the United States. Like it was flat and then boom, it goes up like a hockey stick.

00:39:37.920 For the boys, the curve is more gradual. It's not, it's not, because 2012 is basically when,

00:39:42.480 you know, Facebook buys Instagram, all the girls get on Instagram in 2012 and by 2013,

00:39:47.520 their mental health is worse. Um, boys, it's more, they're withdrawing from the real world.

00:39:52.320 Boys are, they've been getting into video games since the nineties. They're failing to do things that

00:39:56.800 will toughen them, that will make them into men. They're failing to do things that will make them

00:40:00.880 attractive to women later on. So boys are kind of, they're, they're, they're kind of wimping out.

00:40:05.840 They're, they're not, uh, you know, up to the task of a challenge like that. Um, and they're all

00:40:12.400 marinating in this idea about mental health, mental health. Now, um, one counter argument I've gotten

00:40:19.520 is, oh, you know, it's not a real increase in, in anxiety, depression. It's just that Gen Z is so

00:40:24.560 comfortable talking about it. That's a good thing. Like they should be talking about it. We don't want

00:40:28.800 stigma. Yeah, that's right. We don't want stigma. And my entire career as a psychologist,

00:40:34.320 we've been reducing stigma. And by 2012, you know, we were very popular. I mean, there wasn't much

00:40:40.000 stigma left to saying you're depressed or anxious. Once the girls get on, um, uh, various groups on,

00:40:46.240 there are YouTube groups, TikTok groups, Instagram groups about mental illness. Now what you have is

00:40:52.880 girls talking to each other. It's overwhelmingly female, the mental health groups, girls talking to

00:40:57.760 each other with no professionals in sight, um, and an algorithm that means that whoever is the most

00:41:03.440 extreme becomes the most prestigious. And so in certain pockets of, of social media, you get the

00:41:11.200 extreme valorization of mental illness. And this is a horrible thing to do to girls. This makes them

00:41:17.840 sicker. So this idea that, oh, social media is great. They find a support community. They're like,

00:41:22.880 no, stop it, stop it. And here, I think Abigail Schreier has been great. I haven't read her book

00:41:27.200 yet. I've been so busy with this, but I've heard her on podcasts. Um, you know, just immersing kids

00:41:32.320 in these ideas about illness, as opposed to giving them opportunities to grow. It's a pretty good way

00:41:37.040 to make them ill. And also as well, there's also always been a social contagion element when it comes

00:41:42.720 to mental illness with teenage girls. And you see that with anorexia. Exactly. And actually,

00:41:49.840 and I remember in one school that I didn't work in, but was near to me, one girl committed,

00:41:55.040 tried to commit suicide and about, I think four or five of her friends then proceeded to do the

00:41:59.760 same as well. That's right. And these girls were left with life-changing injuries as a result.

00:42:03.520 That's right. That's right. So, uh, I go into this in the book, one of the main differences between

00:42:08.080 boys and girls, um, is that because of the influence of prenatal testosterone, it shifts the brain over

00:42:14.560 into what Simon Baron Cohen in the, in the UK, autism researcher says, you know, the male,

00:42:19.520 the male brain, you know, it's all derived from the original brain, which is a female form.

00:42:23.680 The male brain is shifted over to be a little higher on systemize and a little lower on empathizing.

00:42:28.080 And so boys were a little more socially clueless, more interested in things and machines,

00:42:33.120 more drawn to computers and, and, and video games, but less open to each other's emotions.

00:42:38.320 They just don't notice necessarily. Um, whereas girls are more socially perceptive,

00:42:44.480 more socially concerned. They, they have a much more elaborate, uh, mental map. They want to know who's,

00:42:49.920 who's fighting with whom, who's dating whom they have, they're more socially concerned.

00:42:53.600 And so that can be a great strength, but it also became a huge vulnerability when social media

00:43:00.640 companies develop this, this, um, uh, advertising driven model where now you got to get attention.

00:43:06.960 You have to, you know, play on their insecurities. You ping them. Oh, somebody, do you want to see

00:43:11.200 what somebody just said about you? Oh, somebody commented on your photo, you know, come back,

00:43:14.400 come back. And as we all know, you're busy, but you say, I'll just check it out for a second.

00:43:18.640 And before you know it, you've spent 20 minutes going. So, um, so the girls are particularly

00:43:23.520 vulnerable, um, to being exploited by social media. They're particularly vulnerable to sharing,

00:43:29.360 um, emotions, especially negative emotions, anxiety, depression, um, anorexia. So, you know,

00:43:35.040 this is, so, you know, Abigail Schreier and I, you know, we, you know, I just, from what I've heard

00:43:39.200 on podcasts, we, we generally agree about what's happening to kids. Um, she, you know, we only,

00:43:44.160 our only disagreement I think is that she thinks that I'm putting too much emphasis on the phones

00:43:48.000 rather than, you know, the therapy and what the adults are doing. And I agree, I didn't talk much about

00:43:52.240 that. She's right that that's a big piece of it. Um, but part of my argument is it was the move

00:43:57.280 onto permanent full-time phones and social media that allowed the crazy over-therapization by

00:44:02.560 unprofessionals and, and people faking, not faking it, but, you know, that all floods in around 2012,

00:44:10.160 because that's when we have the great rewiring. And also, if you look at what's happening to girls,

00:44:14.960 particularly with Instagram, you get this, for want of a better term, pornification of society.

00:44:19.600 Yes. Yes. Where you see girls being hyper-sexualized and I'm 42 years old. And I

00:44:25.600 remember I went for dinner recently on a night out and I looked around at all these young women

00:44:31.360 and they'd all make, you know, they'd all had the lip fillers. They'd all had, you know, that kind of

00:44:36.320 hyper-sexualized plastic surgery at the age of 22 or 23, where they're in the full bloom of youth. And

00:44:43.200 you're thinking to yourself, you don't need plastic surgery. Yeah. And you wonder what that's doing

00:44:49.360 to women's mental health and self-perception when they get, you know, when you get, when you see

00:44:55.600 photos of people who don't look like they do in real life, but on Instagram, they look a certain way

00:45:02.160 and also pornography as well on top of that. Exactly. That's right. There's so much to say about that.

00:45:05.840 Just this morning, I sometimes read Stoic writings in the morning. And just this morning, I was reading

00:45:11.920 Epictetus. And he has a line about how girls at the age of 14, we call them ladies,

00:45:18.880 and we evaluate them on their beauty. And this makes them, you know, this makes them very focused

00:45:24.080 on their looks, their beauty. He's sort of commenting on what a waste, how sad it is

00:45:28.240 that girls suddenly are just appreciated as physical, and he says, as sexual partners.

00:45:33.200 So this is always a risk in society, that as girls are entering puberty, suddenly

00:45:37.760 men are more interested in them. And, you know, me growing up in the 70s and 80s, it was kind of like,

00:45:44.240 my recollection was, it was a constant struggle to tell girls, you don't have to wear makeup,

00:45:50.320 you don't have to look pretty, you should have a career, you should become an independent person.

00:45:54.560 And boy, did we make progress in the 70s, 80s, 90s. And so to see now, you know, to see now,

00:46:01.360 middle school girls, they're spending a lot of time in Sephora, they're going to Sephora to buy

00:46:06.720 expensive face creams and skin treatments. You know, they're 11 and 12 years old, they have perfect

00:46:12.480 skin, they shouldn't be thinking this way. But because everything is about how you how you look,

00:46:18.720 especially for girls. And the way the best way to look is sexy. That is, so they pose in the same

00:46:26.960 way, you know, boobs out, you know, lips, lips larger, there's a kind of a porn pose, porn seeps

00:46:32.960 down into the things they do. They've all seen porn, I mean, you can't be on the internet and not see porn.

00:46:38.560 So they've all seen it. But it filters into the way the girls self present. And again, just like,

00:46:44.560 an unbelievable destruction of human capital. You know, it's really clear with the boys who are

00:46:49.600 dropping out of life, but it's really clear with the girls who are being shunted into a focus on

00:46:54.640 beauty and sexiness. It's so sad.

00:46:56.880 And what effect is this exposure via the phone to hardcore pornography? We're seeing it in girls,

00:47:02.480 but what is the effect that it's having on boys?

00:47:04.640 Yeah. So we cover this in the book. There is some research. It's a very difficult

00:47:11.760 field to do experiments in, especially with under 18. You know, you can't do experiments

00:47:17.360 with under 18. All you can do is surveys of what are you watching. And we know that very few girls

00:47:24.240 are daily, you know, all girls have seen pornography, but very few of them look at it every day.

00:47:30.080 Whereas the percent of boys who do is growing a lot. I don't know if it's the majority,

00:47:36.000 but it's 20, 30, 40%. I mean, a lot of them are watching every day. And it's not like, you know,

00:47:42.640 a Playboy centerfold, a beautiful woman that you then fantasize about having sex with. It's hardcore,

00:47:48.640 you know, close-ups of anal sex. You don't need to fantasize.

00:47:52.160 Yeah, that's right. It's all there.

00:47:53.920 It's all there. That's right. And it shows a way, you know, it shows a way of treating women,

00:48:00.480 you know, roughly, very rough, and then they love it. So if you imagine, you know,

00:48:06.320 a boy just beginning to feel sexuality, and, you know, whether they're gay or straight,

00:48:10.960 it's all beginning at the same time. I don't know anything about gay porn, but for heterosexual boys,

00:48:16.000 you know, the attitude, what is beautiful? How do you have sex? What are women like? What do they want?

00:48:21.840 And so one of the most disturbing things is the choking, that the boys are increasingly choking

00:48:27.680 girls during sex. And some of them say, well, the girls ask for it. And I don't know, maybe some of

00:48:32.880 them do, but I'm sure many of them don't. The point is, it's hard enough for boys and girls to

00:48:37.680 understand each other. It's hard enough to learn to flirt, to be effective at it, to the point you

00:48:42.720 can then have a boyfriend and girlfriend, to the point where you might, you know, go steady,

00:48:46.640 to the point where you might fall in love, the point where you might eventually get married.

00:48:50.720 All that has always been very difficult. And I think the pornification of childhood makes it

00:48:55.680 much more difficult. I think we're going to see plummeting rates of marriage and childbearing.

00:49:01.120 Those numbers have been going down steadily since the 70s, I think. You know, marriage and childbirth

00:49:07.120 have both been going down, around the developed worlds, not just the US, down steadily. But my

00:49:11.600 prediction is when we get to Gen Z is now 28, the oldest. So I think we're going to see a real

00:49:16.880 steepening, a drop in birth rates to be more like Korea, where it's less than one child per woman.

00:49:23.360 So what we're talking about really is civilizational collapse.

00:49:26.880 If things keep going the way they're going, then yes. The trends are so bad that if we don't

00:49:32.560 do something about it, then yes, we will have an ever shrinking population of ever more anxious

00:49:37.920 people. That's the way we're headed. But I think we're going to do something about it.

00:49:42.880 Mm-hmm. And what I'm so excited about with this book is, you know, I'm used to being Cassandra and

00:49:48.960 prophesying doom and gloom in our universities and our democracy and all these problems and now AI.

00:49:55.520 You know, I have a lot of writing that's doom and gloom. But this one is the most optimistic

00:50:01.360 thing I've ever done. Because once you understand how we got into this, once you understand that it's

00:50:06.320 a collective action problem, that the reason why, now in the UK, I was just in Britain,

00:50:11.760 24% of your five to seven-year-olds have their own smartphone, their own smartphone five to seven.

00:50:17.520 That's insane.

00:50:18.080 That's insane.

00:50:18.160 Because it's just like, yeah, just, you know, it keeps them quiet. It's a babysitter. You know,

00:50:22.560 life is easier for us if our five-year-old has his own phone. But we got into that for a lot of

00:50:28.640 reasons. But one of the main ones is because if you don't give, and you're going to find,

00:50:32.720 if you don't give your kids screens and everyone else has them, your kid is going to feel left out,

00:50:36.960 if he's the only one. So the trick is, how do you make that nobody's the only one?

00:50:41.680 Right.

00:50:42.160 We don't have to get 100%, but if we can get even 20 or 30%, suddenly, you know, it's easy.

00:50:48.080 There's a community there for you to be part of.

00:50:50.320 Exactly.

00:50:50.960 The non-phone community.

00:50:52.400 Yeah, that's right. So what I propose in the book is, you know, there's a lot of specific

00:50:56.640 suggestions for parents, for teachers. But the four norms, if we understand it's a collective

00:51:03.760 action problem, then with four norms, we can break the collective action problem,

00:51:06.960 we can escape collectively. They're so simple, and we can do them all. I'll just list them.

00:51:11.440 No smartphone before 14. I'm sorry. No smartphone before high school. In the United States,

00:51:16.880 we had this nice clean break between eighth and ninth grade. So just keep them out of middle school

00:51:21.520 and below. Let kids have a flip phone or a phone watch, but no smartphones. No social media until

00:51:26.560 16. This stuff is not appropriate for minors, but I think 16 is a reasonable sort of minimum age

00:51:34.000 at which we would allow kids on. Phone-free schools, and this is a no-brainer, and this is really

00:51:40.640 happening. The phones are such gigantic distraction devices. Test scores around the world have literally

00:51:47.040 been going up for decades and decades and decades until 2012, and now they're going down and down

00:51:51.360 and down. Not just from COVID. It started in 2012. So phone-free schools from beginning to end

00:51:56.400 of the day. And then the fourth is far more independence, free play, and responsibility

00:52:01.200 in the real world. So if constantly you told me you and your wife are raising your kid without screens,

00:52:08.080 that's going to be a very lonely life unless you have a few other families. Soon your son will have

00:52:15.520 friends. Just be in touch with the friend's parents. They probably share your concerns. And if you all

00:52:20.960 agree, we're not giving screens, but you know what we're going to give? Every week they're going to

00:52:24.400 have a sleepover, these four boys. Every week they're going to have a sleepover. It's going to go

00:52:27.360 two days long. They can go down to the store and buy candy for all we care. Just let them have fun

00:52:33.360 together. Now it's thrilling. Now it's not deprivation. It's fun. And that's what we have

00:52:38.800 to give them back. So if we do those four things, we can actually fix this problem in the next year or two.

00:52:43.440 Well, we're British, so your unbridled optimism is offensive to us. But John, I want to talk about,

00:52:51.520 I think none of the three of us are actually that keen to get involved in political conversations.

00:52:55.600 And what I'm about to ask you isn't coming from that place. But we were talking before we started

00:53:01.440 about where we see ourselves politically. And you talked about being in the center and attempting to

00:53:08.240 see things rationally without too much passion. And I think one of the other reasons Francis and

00:53:13.840 I had this felt sense about starting trigonometry and the things that we were concerned about is the

00:53:18.800 sense that, you know, Jordan Peterson talks about this, you know, order and chaos, that it's not that

00:53:25.760 we are these sort of like hardcore conservatives who want there to be absolute order and everything,

00:53:31.920 but just the sense that when society moves too much towards chaos,

00:53:35.680 that that's not A, that's not good in and of itself. And B, that will, that will often trigger

00:53:40.880 a snapback that can be very harsh as we've seen in the 20th century towards societies obsessed with

00:53:46.320 order. Even, you know, Diana Fleischmann, who we had on, who's an evolutionary psychologist,

00:53:50.880 she talked about the fact that when there's a higher prevalence of disease in society,

00:53:55.680 people become more small C conservatives. I think it's fair to say we've seen that in the last few years.

00:54:00.000 That's right. That's right. So I definitely feel that part of the reasons we do,

00:54:05.680 the reason we do what we do is we're concerned about the increasing chaos, whatever, you know,

00:54:10.800 whether that's high levels of crime, whether that's illegal and whatever. And I'm worried about

00:54:16.640 the snapback. Yeah. What do you see? Oh, yes. So let me put on the table here,

00:54:21.280 a really powerful theory from a political scientist named Karen Stenner, Australian political scientist.

00:54:26.880 She wrote this amazing book called The Authoritarian Dynamic, which was really influential on me when

00:54:31.440 I wrote The Righteous Mind. And what Karen's work shows is that whenever people perceive what she

00:54:38.560 calls normative threat, that means a threat to the moral order. So it's like it activates,

00:54:46.720 it's like you press a button in their heads, and she finds that about a quarter or a third of all people

00:54:51.440 have this authoritarian response. And they're not all on the right. They're often on the left.

00:54:57.040 Yeah, we've seen that.

00:54:58.480 Exactly. That's right. That's right. Exactly. You got it. You got it. So when there's a perceived threat

00:55:06.080 to the moral order, it's like the super organism comes back together, and you could call it asabia if

00:55:10.880 you want. It is a kind of a cohesion where we have to come together and kick out the deviants, the aliens.

00:55:18.640 And so in her research, she would do things like she found if you give people an article about like

00:55:23.840 Mexicans coming over the border, they become more racist against Mexicans, but also against black

00:55:29.280 people. Like they just see, they just want to like clamp down on, like we have to return to, you know,

00:55:34.640 the moral order and who we, so she calls it the authoritarian dynamic, and it's very powerful.

00:55:40.480 And chaos sweeps authoritarian dictators into power. If you have chaos, you're going to, you know,

00:55:46.480 Adolf Hitler or, you know, someone can just come to power, a strongman. You know, in Brazil, I think

00:55:52.240 on the flag, it says, you know, order and progress. So chaos tends to push many people to the right,

00:56:02.000 or at least towards an authoritarian. And so that's the first piece. Now let me add on to that, you know,

00:56:08.000 the analysis I gave in The Righteous Mind, because we know that politics is highly heritable,

00:56:12.560 whether you are on the left or the right, if you have an identical twin separated at birth,

00:56:16.240 you're probably going to have similar politics, because it's a temperament thing about openness

00:56:20.320 to experience and conscientious, all sorts of things. So if you have a society in which some people,

00:56:26.240 they just really want to change, they question everything, why do we do it this way? Why don't

00:56:30.080 we do it differently? Well, it's good to have some people who do that. But then you also have some

00:56:34.480 people who say, no, the old ways are tried and true. You know, let's not go changing them until

00:56:39.360 we, you know, unless we really need to. And so this is, you know, Edmund Burke. This is the conservative

00:56:43.440 impulse. So when I started The Righteous Mind, I was a progressive. I wanted to help the Democrats

00:56:48.640 stop losing, you know, to George W. Bush. And I was very much on the left. But by the time I finished

00:56:54.720 the book, I realized, wow, to have a good society is so difficult. And you've got to get the settings

00:57:01.520 just right. And if you have some people pushing for change, and some people resisting,

00:57:06.240 you get this dynamic that can be incredibly productive. That's when I really became a

00:57:10.480 centrist. As a social scientist, I was kind of, I was increasingly bothered that most social

00:57:16.400 scientists are on the, not just, no, almost all are on the left, other than some economists.

00:57:21.280 They're almost all on the left, but many of them act as though they are the support team for the

00:57:25.280 Democratic Party. And I used to be like that too. And I think that is unprofessional. We've got to stop.

00:57:30.080 So I became a principled centrist. By principled, what I mean is, it's not like I'm a centrist on

00:57:38.000 every issue because the answer is in the middle. No. I'm a centrist because of human imperfections,

00:57:43.360 because of confirmation bias, we need people to disconfirm. We need to interact with people who

00:57:48.400 disconfirm our bias. In fact, can I bring on the John Stuart Mill book? Where is that?

00:57:51.120 Of course. Of course you can.

00:57:52.000 Let's see. Yeah, let's bring it on. Okay. So this is, so John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is one of the

00:57:57.920 greatest works of Western philosophy, the greatest thing ever written about the importance of free

00:58:04.000 speech. And in particular, you know, in particular what Mill does is he points out that when we shut

00:58:10.720 people down, we don't just hurt them, we hurt ourselves, we make us all stupider. You know,

00:58:15.360 the most famous line in here, I know it by heart, he who knows only his own side of the case knows

00:58:21.600 little of that. And it just, you know, so I took, at Heterodox Academy, we took chapter two of On

00:58:30.320 Liberty. You know, it's 15,000 words with a lot of obscure historical examples. And with Richard Reeves,

00:58:36.880 this great British intellectual policy person, now American, we've got him. But so he and I

00:58:43.920 condensed it down to half that, to 7,000 words. And this amazing artist, Dave Cicerelli,

00:58:50.320 came to me and said, can I help you? I love what you do with Heterodox Academy. And I said, yeah,

00:58:53.920 read, read this chapter, and then illustrate the metaphor. So you get these amazing, you know,

00:58:58.400 illustrations of people locked, you know, people locked into their head, you know, prison of thought.

00:59:02.720 What John's saying, Gen Z, is they've even put in pictures for you. Go read it. There's a

00:59:09.280 coloring in bit as well. Beautiful, beautiful illustrations. So I'm an intuitionist. That is,

00:59:14.640 I believe that we need to feel something and then also get the reasons, and then we know it. So that

00:59:20.000 was our idea with this book. And Dave is so brilliant that then he checked in with me again last year and

00:59:24.960 said, hey, John, how are you doing? I said, Dave, the publisher's come up with a terrible cover for my

00:59:29.680 book. I don't like it. Can you do better? And he did this. It's, you know, it's a girl kind of

00:59:34.000 drowning in a ball pit of emojis and smiles. And he and I did this guerrilla art campaign. Dave

00:59:40.960 created these 12-foot-tall milk cartons that say on them, missing childhood. So anyway, there you go.

00:59:49.040 Yeah. So here, work by Dave Cicerelli. Awesome. We've actually done our hour and I want to spend

00:59:55.760 another 40 minutes or so on locals talking about some more controversial stuff, more difficult

01:00:01.200 stuff, etc. So we're going to go and do that in a second. We're going to ask you some questions

01:00:04.400 our supporters have submitted. Before we do that, we always end the main part of the interview with

01:00:09.440 the same question, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think

01:00:14.080 we should be? Hmm. Ah, let's see. And there's so much, I mean, there's, you know, there's so much

01:00:21.440 that we don't talk about because we're afraid of the social consequences. So, you know, exploring the,

01:00:26.640 just a pure sociological exploration of the effects of diversity, I think would be extremely

01:00:31.040 important to do. And the socials and sociology should be doing that. But sociology is incredibly

01:00:36.480 ideological field. They're, you know, they're not a lot of sociologists. Well, it's a sacred subject

01:00:41.120 really, isn't it? Exactly. We've given these things sacred status. That's right. So diversity is our

01:00:46.640 strength is a thing that you're not supposed to investigate because you might find that it's not.

01:00:52.400 And then what are you going to do with that? That's right. Because it's an Orwellian sort of

01:00:56.080 phrase. And so a whole other line of writing that I have is on fiduciary duty and professional

01:01:02.320 responsibility. I think as professors, as academics, we have two fiduciary duties. Fiduciary duty is

01:01:08.800 way above normal legal obligations. It's pure, perfect. You must never betray it. You must never

01:01:14.560 act in a way that helps you, but harms the person that you are fiduciary for.

01:01:20.240 I think as professors, we have two fiduciary duties. One is to our students' education,

01:01:24.880 not to their welfare, to their education. We must never act in a way that puts our politics ahead

01:01:30.480 of their education. And we do it all the time. So that I think is a horrible violation of our

01:01:34.880 fiduciary duty. That's one reason why America, especially not just on the right, but Americans in

01:01:39.520 the center have lost a lot of trust in higher ed in this country. But the main fiduciary we have

01:01:45.360 as scholars is to the truth. We must never, ever say something that is not true because somebody

01:01:50.560 paid us money to do it. Now, that almost never happens. Money is not the big threat in the academic

01:01:55.280 world. We must never, ever say something that is not true because our politics demands it. And that's

01:02:00.960 everyday life in the social sciences and the humanities. So the corruption of academic research

01:02:08.640 is not from money. I mean, in medical areas it is, but for the most part, it's not from money. It's

01:02:13.280 from the fact that we have almost no viewpoint diversity and therefore certain things become

01:02:17.360 sacred, not the truth. That's why I co-founded Heterodox Academy with other social scientists and

01:02:23.680 with a legal scholar, Nick Rosencrantz, because we were not, it wasn't about a left-right thing. It was about,

01:02:29.440 we love universities. We want them to work. They're not working. And they're, you know,

01:02:33.920 so anyway, I think universities have made their bed by allowing this stuff to happen and now they're

01:02:39.840 lying in it and unable to, unable to have a clear voice on, on protests and, and intimidation.

01:02:47.040 Well, we're going to talk about protests on campus. We're going to talk about diversity. We're going to

01:02:51.280 talk about what you can do with your kids in terms of solving the problems that we've talked about

01:02:56.320 so far and a lot more, including your questions on local. So head on over there now.

01:03:01.760 Orthodox Jews disconnect for one day in seven. Has anyone measured the Orthodox Jewish community's

01:03:08.160 mental health and contrast it with the general population? And I should probably add my own

01:03:13.120 question. Should we all just become Amish at this point?

TRIGGERnometry - August 11, 2024

We're Heading for Civilisational Collapse - Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt

Episode Stats

Length

Words per Minute

Word Count

Sentence Count

Misogynist Sentences

Hate Speech Sentences

Summary

Transcript