‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’

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Speaker 10 From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

Speaker 10 In March of last year, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published his book called The Anxious Generation, which caused, let's call it, a stir.

Speaker 11 The subtitle of this book says it all.

Speaker 10 How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. I don't think anybody can dispute that.
What he says is controversial.

Speaker 4 Oh my God, enough with the panic about kids using smartphones.

Speaker 10 Facing enormous pushback from other researchers.

Speaker 13 You cannot distangle cause from effect.

Speaker 11 Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story that many parents are primed to believe.

Speaker 10 I always found the conversation over this book a little annoying

Speaker 10 because it got to me at one of the difficulties we're having parenting, one of the difficulties we're having in society.

Speaker 10 which is this tendency to instrumentalize everything into social science. Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it's bad.

Speaker 10 It is, to me, a collapse in our sense of what a good life is, what it means to flourish as a human being.

Speaker 10 And so I stayed a bit out of that debate because, on the one hand, I couldn't settle it. And on the other hand, I didn't think I should come in and say it wasn't important.

Speaker 10 We're a year later, though, and two things have happened. One is Heidzbuck has never left the bestseller list.

Speaker 10 That is rare. It is Fruck Accord.

Speaker 10 The other is that policy is moving in Heights' direction.

Speaker 12 Well, the governor of Utah has signed a sweeping bill to limit children's access to social media.

Speaker 11 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed one of the most restrictive social media laws in the country.

Speaker 11 This asshole Ron DeSantis might have done something I agree with. The no cell phones in schools movement is going national.

Speaker 10 Florida classrooms. All schools in the Buckeye State.

Speaker 13 Michigan, South Carolina. this morning, Virginia.

Speaker 12 We're talking statewide at all Arizona schools. And now nine other states are considering the bans as well.
How are your phones boned?

Speaker 10 We are seeing a genuine policy revolution happening in places governed by Republicans, governed by Democrats, in how we treat children in this era of social media.

Speaker 10 I feel a lot more confident as a parent. We're going to figure this out by the time my kids are old enough for it to matter.

Speaker 10 And then, of course, the truck of AI is about to T-bone whatever consensus we socially come to, which scares, to be quite honest, the hell out of me.

Speaker 10 So I wanted to have Height on the show to talk about it. He is a professor at New York University Stern School of Business.

Speaker 10 He is also the author of The Righteous Mind, which I think is one of the best books on political psychology, as well as a bunch of other books.

Speaker 10 And he is also the author of the After Babble substack, which is free, where he and some co-authors are continuing to prosecute the case and think through the research around social media.

Speaker 10 As always, my email, ezraklein show at nytimes.com.

Speaker 10 John Haidt, welcome to the show. Ezra, it's great to be back with you.
So I want to just begin with the big question. What is childhood for?

Speaker 10 Childhood is evolution's answer to how do you have a big-brained cultural creature. You have to play a lot.

Speaker 10 You have to practice all sorts of things, all sorts of maneuvers, all sorts of social skills in order to tell your brain how to wire up to have the adult form.

Speaker 10 So if you focus on brain development, and especially for a big-brained cultural species like ours, there's a plastic period, a period where stuff comes in and it shapes who you are.

Speaker 10 And then once you've got that, now you're ready to convert to the adult form, be reproductive, have a baby.

Speaker 10 But if you don't have play in the childhood, you're not going to reach the adult form properly.

Speaker 10 You had one statistic in the book that I think I've actually read before, but every time I read it, it shocks me anew. And maybe now because I have a five-year-old who just turned six.

Speaker 10 But that at five years old, the human brain is 90% of its adult size and it has more neurons than it will when you're an adult. That's right.

Speaker 10 Because we're used to thinking of bodily growth as just time equals bigger. But the brain is this amazing thing that has all these neurons that have the potential to connect in all kinds of ways.

Speaker 10 And as neuroscientists say, neurons that fire together wire together. So if you repeatedly climb trees or do archery, systems will form in your brain that make you really good at that.

Speaker 10 Whereas if you repeatedly swipe, tap, swipe, tap, and just respond to emotional stimuli, your brain's going to wire to do that. So almost everybody over 35 or so, I guess you're an older millennial.

Speaker 10 How did you grow up? I am among the eldest of millennials. The elders, the millennial elders.

Speaker 10 Tell me when at what age you could go out on your bicycle with your friends and go around the neighborhood. I don't remember exactly, but I do remember I spent a lot of time.

Speaker 10 I lived on a cul-de-sac in a suburb. And I do remember I spent a lot of time as part of a just a roaming pack of kids who lived on my street.

Speaker 10 And we would be playing kickball on somebody's garage door. And the other thing I remember about it that I feel like I see less of now is that it was highly age diverse.
Exactly. That's right.

Speaker 10 So this is what human childhood has always been.

Speaker 10 There are periods, the Industrial Revolution, where maybe kids didn't have a childhood.

Speaker 10 But Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist who co-founded Let Grow With Me, he has some writing on hunter-gatherers. And hunter-gatherers raise their kids in that way.

Speaker 10 There's no thought that the mother has to be supervising the four, five, six, seven, nine-year-olds. They're all off playing with the other kids.
And there are nine and ten-year-olds there.

Speaker 10 And so they learn to look out for each other. The older kids learn to care for the younger kids.

Speaker 10 And the younger kids, remember, they're trying to wire up their brain to like, what is a functional member of this society? And the best role models for them are not kids their age.

Speaker 10 It's kids a few years older.

Speaker 10 And so in America and the West, we've got these, you know, factory kind of schools where we put all the eight-year-olds are together and then all the the nine-year-olds are together.

Speaker 10 But the healthiest is what you just said. And so my point is, everyone before the millennials had this childhood.
The millennials are the transitional generation. So you were on the elder side.

Speaker 10 You got it. Even though the rates are microscopic in this country.
And even though crime was plummeting. in this country in the 90s, that's the decade, and you can see it in the charts.

Speaker 10 That's the decade when we really pulled our kids in. We thought it's, you know, they'll get abducted.
We can't let them go in a different aisle of a supermarket or a man with a white van.

Speaker 10 I mean, all this crazy stuff comes in in the 90s.

Speaker 10 Something you mentioned about the 90s in the book is I am familiar with the statistic that parents today, despite working two jobs much more often than they did in the past, despite fathers being more involved, they both spend much more time with their kids than they did before.

Speaker 10 I hadn't realized that that was not a sort of steady increase over the decades, that it's sharply an increase in the 90s. That's right.
That's right.

Speaker 10 There's this weird graph that I have in the book, which shows the number of hours that women spend in parenting, you know, what you would consider time with your kid doing something.

Speaker 10 And the astonishing thing is that in the 50s, 60s, 70s, women were not spending five hours a day parenting because... the kids were raised the way that you just said.

Speaker 10 It's not the parent's job to socialize the child all along. It's the parent's job to provide the right environment, to provide certain kinds of moral frameworks.

Speaker 10 But the real work of brain development doesn't happen when you're with your parents. Your parents are home base.
They're your attachment figure.

Speaker 10 When you feel securely attached, then you go off and explore. And that's the mammal way.
That's what other mammals do.

Speaker 10 You go off progressively further from your home base, and that's where the learning happens. It's playing kickball, trying to decide, what do we do today? Oh, he broke the rules.
No, he didn't.

Speaker 10 I want to get it. tension in there with at least the culture of modern parenting.

Speaker 10 I think a lot of parents believe that the simplest way to ask, were you a good parent this week, is how much time you spend with your quality time. Quality time.
That's right. I feel that.
Yeah.

Speaker 10 And you're saying here that's not true. It's definitely not true.
It's definitely not true. You want to give your kids a quality childhood.

Speaker 10 You want to be a quality parent, but that doesn't mean that you have to spend a lot of quality time with your kid. You need a warm, trusting, loving relationship.

Speaker 10 You need to provide structure and order and discipline. But this is what changed in the 90s.
And it's in part because we stopped trusting our neighbors.

Speaker 10 If you think of all the Robert Putnam stuff about bowling alone and the loss of social capital, we used to at least trust that if our kids were out playing without us, other adults would look out for them.

Speaker 10 If something really went wrong, they could knock on a door, like someone would help. But we begin losing that trust.

Speaker 10 And this is really bad for the kids because the kids don't grow as much if their attachment figure is there. And it's really bad for the adults, especially the women.

Speaker 10 The mothers pick up a lot of this, even though they're working outside the home. So, yes, modern parenting is not good for the kids and and certainly not good for the adults.

Speaker 10 So if you're tracking dynamics here, you have the 90s were getting more afraid of danger.

Speaker 10 You're having this deterioration in social trust, this deterioration in, is the whole community parenting your kid? Right. And it's right about now

Speaker 10 that you begin having an explosion in screen possibilities. That's it.
So I remember when I was younger, I remember Nickelodeon emerging. Okay.
Right.

Speaker 10 Before then, there wasn't a TV channel that was programming for children at all times. Right.
Right. Before then, it's like there are cartoons sometimes.
There was kids show saddle.

Speaker 10 Sunday mornings and not

Speaker 10 all the time.

Speaker 10 And obviously from there, you get an explosion of cable channels, eventually the internet, eventually,

Speaker 10 you know, iPads and iPhones and video game consoles and all the rest of it. So talk about the

Speaker 10 sort of handoff. So it's the conversion over to this smartphone-based, tablet-based childhood.
That's when all the indicators of mental illness start rising around 2012, 2013.

Speaker 10 Now, I focused on the 2010 to 2015 period, but I think your question points out something I hadn't really thought much about, which is cable TV. I was born in 1963.

Speaker 10 So I grew up in the late 60s, early in the 70s, on, you know, I Dream of Jeannie and, you know, Gilligan's Island. You know, I showed those shows to my kids, and I said, this is so stupid.

Speaker 10 Like, they were really simple plots. Well, that's all we had.
Whereas you had cable, which was more engaging. And console video games.
Okay.

Speaker 10 I got a Nintendo, the NES, not the Super Nintendo, the first mass available console and mass adopted.

Speaker 10 There were, you know, you could argue about the Atari or whatever, but the Nintendo Entertainment System. What year was that? I don't remember now, but I was young.
You're talking about yourself.

Speaker 10 To me, that's a big dividing point because the things that Nickelodeon and the NES do is they make it possible to put something on the television at any second of the day. Yeah.

Speaker 10 They'll entertain a child intensely. Yeah.
That's right. That's a good point.

Speaker 10 I've been more focused on the arrival of the internet, but the Nintendo didn't require the internet, right? No. Right.
Okay. So maybe you were not a gamer, John.

Speaker 10 Well, I was, because when I was a kid, the game was Pong. Like, there, you know, they were, they were.
This is 8-bit Mario, man. This is, you know, this is the early stuff.

Speaker 10 Okay, so, so the early stuff was great fun, but it was not multiplayer. You had a, your friend had to sit next to you to play, right? Right.

Speaker 10 So I hope this will be a theme that I'm thinking a lot more about this. Like, don't just think about screen time.
Think about what is it that makes it good or bad?

Speaker 10 Because I remember like just as video games was coming in and you'd hook it up to your TV. So like my friends and I would get together and we'd say, what do you want to do? Play video games?

Speaker 10 Like, okay, we'll do that for a little bit. And then we'd go off and do something else.
Nothing harmful about that.

Speaker 10 What happens in the 2000s, once you begin to get the multiplayer games, because this requires not just the internet, it requires high-speed internet in order to have these amazing graphics shared in multiple screens at the same time without a lag.

Speaker 10 So that's only, you know, like 2008, 2009, it begins to get popular. But then it's in this great rewiring period, 2010 to 2015, this is when everyone's trading in their flip phones for smartphones.

Speaker 10 This is when high-speed internet is increasing greatly. So by 2015, boys are all on these multiplayer games.
My son played Fortnite.

Speaker 10 I didn't let him on till he was 13, but they laughed their heads off. The boys at least had that synchronous laughter.
They're not in the same room, so it's not as good. But they at least had that.

Speaker 10 Whereas the girls are each alone on their own Instagram account, they might laugh at a meme at something, but they're not having shared laughter.

Speaker 10 One of the reasons I felt myself a little put off by the debate that emerged around your book with the sort of like endless back and forth on the identification strategy of, you know, was this really the cause of anxiety or a correlative anxiety and what's going on in South Korea?

Speaker 10 Is it got at this feeling I keep having, which is that we have lost any kind of independent and I would positively say paternalistic

Speaker 10 idea of what we want human beings to be.

Speaker 10 And we have allowed it all to be dominated by metrics. So on the one hand, there is, are you getting good grades? You're getting good grades and you're fine.
It's not really true.

Speaker 10 We definitely see it's not true now because we're watching kids, I mean, partially through grade inflation, get plenty of good grades, not get pregnant as teenagers, not do a bunch of drugs, and they're doing terribly.

Speaker 10 The other side of it, though, is that then there's this, I would call it the logic of capitalism, the logic of the consumer economy, which is that if you enjoy doing it, if you want to do it, then we need to have a very high bar for a reason to stop you, right?

Speaker 10 Our view is that kids should not freebase crack all the time. We've decided like that's not something we should let them do.

Speaker 10 But if they're playing massive multiplayer online games all the time and they enjoy it and their grades are fine, like what are you really going to say?

Speaker 10 And somewhere in this, some texture is lost. Like I think that I associate more with classical education or something.

Speaker 10 But we are trying to develop certain facilities that are part of being a human being.

Speaker 10 I always think about attention as one of them. What kind of attention? We hear all this concern now that kids are graduated in high school, even kids going to good colleges, can't read a full book.

Speaker 10 Can't cook. Can't watch a movie.
But there's more than that. I think we care about if our children are nice or kind.

Speaker 10 We sort of have that. But there's a lot about all kinds of virtues that we've just lost the way to talk about and that we're not comfortable saying.
I mean, I see it with parents all the time.

Speaker 10 You need some great reason to say the kids shouldn't be on the iPad.

Speaker 10 And maybe it's that you think their grades will be bad or their anxiety will be high, but you can't just say, like, nobody feels that comfortable saying, it's just bad.

Speaker 10 I just don't want you looking at the screen all the time. I think it's bad.
I think it's not the way to be a human being. That's right.
What you're describing is the loss of any moral framework.

Speaker 10 And if you try to raise kids without a moral framework, it's not going to go well. So that's what I'd like you to talk a bit about.
You have one chapter on this in the book. It's a little shorter.

Speaker 10 It's about spirituality. But your first book is all about moral frameworks.

Speaker 10 Connect these for me because I do, we lost paternalism.

Speaker 10 Like, I do think parenting lost an idea that it is confident about

Speaker 10 what we are trying to raise people towards. And this, yeah.

Speaker 10 And while I want to stay away from politics in our talk in general, what you're bringing up is one of the divisions that I talked about in the righteous mind between left and right.

Speaker 10 And that is that, you know, in general, the right, you know, conservatism, conserve what we have. There's a wisdom to our ancestors.
This is Edmund Burke.

Speaker 10 And so the right tends to see, they have what's called a constrained view of human nature. If kids don't have structure and order and punishment for bad deeds, they'll come out badly.

Speaker 10 Whereas the left tends to habitually, you know, question existing arrangements and pull things down if they seem unjust.

Speaker 10 And the left is much more afraid to make value judgments and to impose a moral order on kids.

Speaker 10 That's why it's always the right that's concerned about the garbage being placed on TV, because the right is very concerned about the moral diet coming in.

Speaker 10 Now, I think in the modern era, I think parents should be more like the conservatives in that respect. And here's why.

Speaker 10 We already talked about the way the neurons are growing, they're wiring up, and you learn to run, climb trees, do all sorts of things.

Speaker 10 But a big thing you're doing, especially in later childhood, is you're learning the moral order. And humans evolved within a moral order.
And I'm a, you know, I'm a secular Jewish.

Speaker 10 I was always on the left. Now I'm nothing.
I'm not on any team. But when I was writing that book, I was really sort of exploring ancient wisdom and discovering, wow,

Speaker 10 every other society, they had this rich moral framework. They have a conception of the gods.
There are reasons why you have to do things.

Speaker 10 And when you raise kids within a moral order, they have a sense of their place in the world and a sense of meaning.

Speaker 10 And when you take all that out and you say, you know, all that matters is what feels good, or all that matters is rights, or all that matters is some measure of material success.

Speaker 10 Basically, what you have is what Emil Durkheim called anomie, or normlessness.

Speaker 10 And there's a question on the Monitoring the Future study where since the 70s, we've asked high school seniors, my life feels useless. Do you agree or disagree with that on a five-point scale?

Speaker 10 And until 2010, it's like around 9% say yes. And then all of a sudden, 2012, it shoots up, it doubles within five or 10 years.

Speaker 10 And so I think part of this is if you're immersed in stories that have a moral order to them, which is what I was immersed in when I was a kid, all the stories had some sort of, you know, moral.

Speaker 10 And, you know, even I Dream of Genie, I mean, you know, if you,

Speaker 10 there was a moral framework that was put in by the adults who made the show. But what you see on TikTok and Instagram, they're not really stories.
They're really amoral or immoral.

Speaker 10 A lot of them are just horrible things. The boys are seeing lots of videos of people getting in accidents or violence.
And so, a long way to answer your question: kids need moral formation.

Speaker 10 They need a structure, a shared moral framework. Morality only works like language.

Speaker 10 You can't have your own language and you can't have your own morality. It only works as a shared system, an order.

Speaker 10 And once kids move on to social media, it's just a million little fragments of nonsense. There's no moral order.
I think it was you. I was listening to a conversation with you some years ago.

Speaker 10 And you said something like:

Speaker 10 It is just bad for teenage girls to be endlessly posting pictures of themselves on the internet for other people to rate right through

Speaker 10 stand by that bold assertion and i i remember thinking that's so unbelievably fucking obvious and so much not how we actually just talk about it right because what you were making there was fundamentally a moral judgment i know behind it there's evidence and but i i do find that within the conversation about social media and the way we're we're constructing childhood, there is this demand to bring the studies, right?

Speaker 10 And I've said this before.

Speaker 10 I think if you could prove to me that it doesn't matter at all for anxiety at 16 or earnings at 23, whether or not kids spend 2.5 hours or three hours a day on TikTok, I think it would change my view of whether they should do that 0%.

Speaker 10 Okay.

Speaker 10 Because I just think it's a bad way to live.

Speaker 10 And it's a bad way to live for other reasons, right? I think it'll create, by nature, it creates self-obsession,

Speaker 10 right? By nature, it creates this management of the personal brand.

Speaker 10 And even if I couldn't find correlates there of bad outcomes, I have a view on what it means to be a like a flourishing human being

Speaker 10 that should not include too much of that, right? That wants to keep that boxed up a little bit in the human psyche. And this is where things feel like they ran aground to me in a lot of the debates.

Speaker 10 I feel like parenting and the culture parents come from now, unless you are in some form of church, basically,

Speaker 10 is incredibly insecure about making these judgments. That's right.
That's right. I don't fully understand why.
I don't think it is just a loss of trust thing.

Speaker 10 I think it is some set of forces that I don't really understand.

Speaker 10 But I don't feel like it was like that as much when I was young. And it definitely wasn't like that as much in the past.
That's right.

Speaker 10 And sort of separate almost from everything else, I think this is a huge failure in parenting culture, this just inability to say, we have views on what is good or bad. That's right.

Speaker 10 And they don't require 16 years of randomized controlled trials. They're just actually our views on virtue.

Speaker 10 And there I see this generational change. You can see sort of the tight moral order of the 1950s.
And when you look at old movies like from the 30s and 40s, there was a really tight moral order.

Speaker 10 And like it would be dramatic whether a woman could like go into a man's apartment. That was like a, you know.

Speaker 10 So there was a really intense moral order, including around gender and all sorts of things. And that, of course, begins to loosen up in the 60s.

Speaker 10 And there are many good things that happen because of that.

Speaker 10 But one of the concerns about sort of modern secular society has been you gradually lose this moral framework within which to raise children.

Speaker 10 And I'm really aware now of how we each, we're all influenced by our parents and just maybe a little bit by our grandparents.

Speaker 10 Culture has always sort of come down vertically through generations, but that link is getting weakened.

Speaker 10 So I think there is a progressive weakening of a sense of a moral order, which affects how you parent.

Speaker 10 And then we end up with a kind of an amoral focused on grades and I guess be nice and a few other things, but it's a very thin moral gruel, I'd say.

Speaker 10 And you can, I think, see this spreading throughout society. The idea that this is just about the kids is wrong.

Speaker 10 I know you don't want to be political. And I I know that the John Hyde agenda is being adopted in red and blue states alike and we will talk about that.

Speaker 10 But you were saying earlier, look, liberals and conservatives have these different moral foundations and conservatives care a lot more about the moral inputs. And maybe that was true.
I look around.

Speaker 10 I don't see it.

Speaker 10 I'm not asking you to say whether Donald Trump is a moral or immoral person, but what I will say is that the Republican Party under him has become unconcerned with what was traditionally understood as vice in a very different way.

Speaker 10 So some of that is politeness and etiquette, but some of it is what should the policies be about sports gambling?

Speaker 10 Right. There is a massive deregulation of sports gambling.
It's horrible. Which is

Speaker 10 consuming young men. Yes.
Right. It's destroying sports.
Crypto is an adjacency of that. There's

Speaker 10 perfectly fine things about crypto, but what we are

Speaker 10 specifically permitting is crypto as a casino.

Speaker 10 I was somebody who was very supportive of marijuana legalization, and I think it's gone terribly.

Speaker 10 And it's gone terribly because, I mean, among other things, because we have just allowed capitalism to get its hooks into it and create more and more and more potent products that are advertised everywhere.

Speaker 10 I don't know if either side is practically concerned with vice right now,

Speaker 10 but the right has embraced a lot of this too. And I think part of that is just a collapse, right?

Speaker 10 There is no one left who has political power in this society who feels confident making, I would say, judgments that go against the market, right? There was a market for sports gambling.

Speaker 10 So we're going to allow it. There is a market for crypto.
I think about a lot of things in modernity as capitalism is itself a kind of moral logic.

Speaker 10 And it is a moral logic built on individual expression of wants in the moment. And it was counterbalanced.
by much more potent religious logics. And these two sort of forces held each other

Speaker 10 at a rough equilibrium for much of 20th century America. And at some point, the religious counterforces weakened so much that the system fell out of equilibrium.

Speaker 10 And now the religious forces are just not very powerful at all. I am not myself highly religious, but I do think that these were countervailing players and we just don't have them anymore.

Speaker 10 And like the evidence of that being a problem is actually all around us.

Speaker 10 No,

Speaker 10 I think that's exactly right. I'll just shadow, I'll just bring a couple of points to bear.
One is there's an incredible book called The Age of Addiction by David Courwright.

Speaker 10 And he chronicles how people have always wanted sugar and they foraged for fruit, but then you learn to refine sugar and now you get sugar-based products and then you get candy.

Speaker 10 And then so once we get a market-based economy in the industrial revolution, we find more and more ways to make these products that our brains evolved to crave, but now they're limitless.

Speaker 10 You can have limitless quantities effortlessly. And the same is true for opiates.
You get opium to heroin to fentanyl.

Speaker 10 A free market society, the best definition of it I heard was from a philosopher who said, a good free market society is one in which you can only get rich by making other people better off.

Speaker 10 And for the most part in our economy, that is still true. But now let's look at the products we're talking about.

Speaker 10 If you're a sports betting company, if you're a crypto company, if you're a video game company, if you're a social media company, are you making your money by making people better off?

Speaker 10 Or are you playing on addiction, manipulating social forces? Are you spreading enormous negative externalities around society?

Speaker 10 And I would argue that's what's happening. And partly it is due, I think, to the deregulatory impulse, to the fact that we have lost the ability to regulate things in a smart way.

Speaker 10 And so one principle I really want to make clear in all of this is we have to distinguish between children and adults.

Speaker 10 So we are a generally libertarian country compared to Europe where they're happy to ban anything. When we're talking about adults, I think we're generally right.

Speaker 10 Generally, we should let adults do what they want unless there's compelling evidence, some reason. But when we're talking about kids, it's entirely different.

Speaker 10 And when you have entire trillion-dollar industries,

Speaker 10 where do they make their money from? I didn't pay them a penny. You didn't pay them a penny.
Our kids didn't pay them a penny.

Speaker 10 That entire value is created by breaking up the day into tiny little bits and sucking out the attention and selling it to advertisers and selling the data.

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Speaker 10 I want to think about this, and I guess I'm going to make this next point a little bit to be provocative. I'm not sure how much I believe it.

Speaker 10 I understand,

Speaker 10 argumentatively and politically, why you want to just say,

Speaker 10 look, it's fine for adults to do basically anything they want, but kids, kids are, the children are our future.

Speaker 10 We got to do something very different there. Fine.

Speaker 10 I think in practice, it doesn't work. Why is that?

Speaker 10 Because

Speaker 10 if you are going to allow something

Speaker 10 to be both highly morally and legally permissible, the moment somebody is 18, or frankly, in a lot of your frameworks, 16,

Speaker 10 I'm not saying it is literally impossible that you will implement such a hardcore age verification system that it will be impossible to do beneath that. It's probably going to be pretty hard.

Speaker 10 Now, I think there are places where it works, but typically you want friction that is both moral and structural. It's a little bit more of a gradation throughout society.

Speaker 10 So what we have lost in a lot of places is friction. Yes.
And there are things that you want to have some access to, but there'd be friction, right?

Speaker 10 We had access to things like sports gambling, but you had to drive to Vegas, you know, at least on the West Coast where I grew up.

Speaker 10 Taking away all the friction, making it available virtually everywhere and online, has just then made it very, very, very dangerous to people because, you know, some percentage of people are going to develop a gambling problem.

Speaker 10 And we know that pretty well. What we have done, and I mean, this is the genius of capitalism.

Speaker 10 What it does is it seeks out how to make the thing more interesting, more potent, more seductive, more alluring. And that's really great.
until a certain point. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 10 At which point the friction between you and the thing becomes too low. And then it's very, very, very hard for the limited software of the human mind to regulate the wants, at least in some people.

Speaker 10 And so there's something about the loss of friction. And I suspect that, and again, this is partially moral frameworks.

Speaker 10 If we're going to be completely fine with it at 19, it's going to be very hard for it to not be too present at 17. Okay.
All right. Hold on a second here.
So.

Speaker 10 In general, I agree with you that the technology makes everything easy. And for adults, that actually is often good, not always, but often good.

Speaker 10 But for kids, it's disastrous because kids need to learn to do hard things. And the technology makes it easy for them to not do hard things.

Speaker 10 But if I could just add on, you started this off by saying, oh, you don't think that, you know, we're not going to get an actual age verification system.

Speaker 10 The one real

Speaker 10 obstacle that I have faced, and once I put the book out, you know, parents love it. They're embracing it.
Teachers are embracing it. The main objection I get is resignation.

Speaker 10 It's just people saying, oh, what are you going to do? You know, the technology is here to stay. You know, the kids, they're going to have to use it when they're adults.

Speaker 10 Might as well learn when they're kids. You know, can't put the genie back in the bottle.
But actually, we can, and we're doing it.

Speaker 10 So I just really want to make the point that we don't have easy age verification now.

Speaker 10 But if we incentivize it, we'll have it within a year.

Speaker 10 So my colleague at NYU Scott Galloway gives the example of how the social media companies, this industry, they put a lot of research and money into advertising.

Speaker 10 And so they figured out a way that when you click a link anywhere on the internet, when you click a link and then the page loads, in between that time, there has been an auction among thousands of companies for the right to show you, you, this particular ad.

Speaker 10 This is a miracle of technical innovation. And they did that because there was money in it.
And now the question is, do you think maybe they could figure out if somebody is under 16 or over 16?

Speaker 10 Also, that auction knows how old it thinks you are. Yeah, that's right.
Exactly. They know everything about us.
And they're saying, oh,

Speaker 10 what are you going to do? The kids are going to lie. Like, what are we supposed to do? So we're going to get age verification.
Australia is pushing it. It's going to work.

Speaker 10 It doesn't have to be perfect at first, but within a few years, it will be very good. So I will stop just trying to be provocative because I do believe you can do age verification.

Speaker 10 One reason I wanted to have you on right now

Speaker 10 is it feels like the world is tipping in this. Yeah.

Speaker 10 So, so run me through.

Speaker 10 Let's stay not in Australia, but in the U.S. I feel like every day I turn on the news and I see some other governor or mayor announcing no phones in schools.

Speaker 10 Tell me the scope of this at the moment.

Speaker 10 So the way to understand why it's changing so quickly is to go back before COVID.

Speaker 10 Gene Twanky comes out with her famous article in 2017, Have Smartphones Destroy Degeneration? Now, at the time, the empirical evidence was not clear at all.

Speaker 10 And she was savagely attacked by other researchers that, oh, this is just a correlation. No, you have no evidence.
It's not causal. So that's 2017.

Speaker 10 With 2019, we're beginning to see, actually, wait, there is some evidence. And everybody's now seeing something's creepy about this.
And we're seeing our kids drift away. And then COVID comes in.

Speaker 10 What happens? What kids desperately needed in 2019, Gene and I were saying, was more time outside playing, less time on screens. What happens? We freak out.
We put in way too strict restrictions.

Speaker 10 We say, no, you can't. In New York, they closed the playgrounds.
They closed down the ball fields. So no playing outside.
You might catch COVID.

Speaker 10 So things get far, far worse over the next couple of years, but the kids have to be on screens. So it's only as COVID began to clear away, people are sort of coming back to their senses about this.

Speaker 10 And that's why everybody's sort of ready to act. And that's why when my book came out a year ago, it came out in late March of 2024, I didn't have to persuade anyone.

Speaker 10 Almost everybody saw, wait, something is going terribly wrong here.

Speaker 10 And so what's happening happening around the world is that legislators are mostly parents and they've seen it and they're uncomfortable with it. It doesn't matter if they're Democrat or Republican.

Speaker 10 Heads of state mostly are parents.

Speaker 10 The way the Australia bill got started was in South Australia, one of the states, the wife of the premier was reading The Anxious Generation in Bed and she turns to him and says, Peter, you've got to read this book and then you've got to effing do something about it.

Speaker 10 It's the way that he described it, at least. And I think mothers have felt it more keenly than fathers.
Mothers just,

Speaker 10 they're more emotionally emotionally connected in ways where they could feel the kids being pulled away. So that's why it's happening everywhere because it's obvious.
It's common sense.

Speaker 10 Most people see it. What is happening everywhere? So I would say it's a parents' revolution saying we're sick and tired.
We're not going to take this anymore.

Speaker 10 All over the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time. We're all fed up.
We want to do something about it. Okay, what do we actually do?

Speaker 10 I wrote the book as an American, assuming that we'll never get help from Congress. Now, I hope I'm wrong.

Speaker 10 There are some bills that could get through, but I was just sort of assuming we have a dysfunctional Congress. Let's try to do this the way Tocqueville said that we do it.
Like, let's get together.

Speaker 10 Let's figure out how to do this. And so that means action among families and at schools and at states.
I am finding states are incredibly responsive.

Speaker 10 States in the United States are either mostly red or blue, but this is a bipartisan issue.

Speaker 10 So the number one step that they're all taking is so easy and so obvious, and it doesn't cost anything, which is phone-free schools. Check your phone in the morning.

Speaker 10 What are some of the states that are doing it? Well, Florida was one of the first, but they did it just during instructional time, which is worthless because then everyone rushes for their phone.

Speaker 10 They're on their phone in between classes. They don't talk to each other.
So I'm not sure where they are now. Arkansas, Utah, but...

Speaker 10 And Utah is interesting here because that of every state has still the strongest religious culture because of the Church of Latter-day Saints.

Speaker 10 And they have by far the strongest regulations on social media around children. That's right.

Speaker 10 I mean, you sort of see the way those two things, that sort of moral framework and that willing to regulate what feels like a vice is happening there. That's right.

Speaker 10 They also have a really excellent governor. Governor Cox has been just superb.
He wants to make Utah the most family-friendly state. And many states want to.

Speaker 10 And if we feel that we can't let our kids out and our kids are rotting away on screens and there's screens all day in the school, that's not a family-friendly place.

Speaker 10 So yeah, Utah has been great on this. Oh, here we are in New York.
Governor Hochul has been great on this. We're going to get phone-free bell-to-bell legislation here in New York.

Speaker 10 New Jersey is moving that way, Connecticut. So we're seeing it all over the country.
That's the phone-free schools. So in the book, I say there are four norms.

Speaker 10 With four norms, we can roll back the phone-based childhood. The first is no smartphone before high school.
Do not give your kid a touchscreen. This includes an iPad.

Speaker 10 Don't give them their own touchscreen before high school or age 14. And that's not a law.
That's a norm that we're trying to promote. The second is no social media till 16.

Speaker 10 And that could be sort of a norm. I mean, if enough of us do it, it gets easier, but we really need law.
That's where we really need law. And that's why I'm so excited about Australia.

Speaker 10 Indonesia is, I believe, planning on it. A whole bunch of nations.
If it works in Australia, it's going to go global very quickly. I'm just the clarification, and I actually don't know.

Speaker 10 Australia is no smartphone or no social media before 16. The key is the age of internet adulthood.

Speaker 10 At what age are you old enough to sign a contract with a giant corporation to give away your data and your rights and let them stuff stuff into you chosen by their algorithm? At what age?

Speaker 10 And current American law says as long as you're old enough to lie, you're old enough to do this. If you're 10, just say you're 13 and you can, the companies can do whatever they want for you.

Speaker 10 Oh, and we can't sue them. They're freed from that by Section 230.
So that's the current law is that there is no age of internet anywhere in the world. Like you just lie.

Speaker 10 But what Australia is saying is you're going to have the companies are going to have to figure out how to do this, that you have to do some sort of age assurance so that if you're 16, you can sign this away without parental consent.

Speaker 10 Your parents don't have to know. And right now, 10-year-olds are getting on Instagram and TikTok, even eight-year-olds.
So this has to stop.

Speaker 10 And Australia, they finally put their foot down and said, this is going to stop here. Okay.
So that was the second. The third is phone-free schools.

Speaker 10 And that, I think we're going to, I don't know how many, but I think it's going to be the majority of kids, the majority of American kids are going to be in phone-free schools within two years.

Speaker 10 Phone-free, away for the day.

Speaker 10 So many states have done it already. And I think a lot of the rest are going to implement it by next September.
So that one has moved.

Speaker 10 That's the main norm where there's been spectacular change around the world. And then the fourth is far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.

Speaker 10 Because what I urge people to do is don't just focus on taking away the screens.

Speaker 10 Focus on restoring a fun childhood, as we were talking about before, a human childhood, a childhood spent not under your parents' gaze doing homework or

Speaker 10 on a screen, but a childhood where you're having fun with your friends in mixed age groups.

Speaker 10 So one of the things that I think is interesting and important about this, and it's very present in your book, is how hard it is for parents to do it individually.

Speaker 10 And it feels like it's why it's such an interesting and important place for legislation, because it really is hard to be a parent saying your kid can't have what all the other kids have and be on these messaging systems that they're all using to plan things.

Speaker 10 And right, like you actually do at a certain point, isolate your child at this moment that you're trying to figure out a way to give them deeper social bonds.

Speaker 10 So legislation here, I mean, I find it very, very encouraging. It would be freeing.
That's right. What you're describing is a collective action trap.

Speaker 10 And so the reason why we have to give our kids phones and Instagram is not because we like it, but because they say, mom, everyone else has it. I'm excluded.
I'm being left out.

Speaker 10 And so the way you get out of a collective action trap is with collective action. And so that's what I'm really urging in the book.

Speaker 10 It can be as simple as just talk to the parents of your kids' friends, agree that you're all going to have these norms. And then they're not the only one.

Speaker 10 And especially if you get the kids together a lot, then they have a fun childhood. Two horrendous statistics that I can't get out of my mind.

Speaker 10 The first is 50%, which is the percentage of American teens that are, that say that they're online almost constantly, almost constantly.

Speaker 10 You know, they're not necessarily looking at the phone 16 hours a day, but if they're talking to you, they're actually thinking about the drama going on that they can't wait to check.

Speaker 10 So half of our kids are basically their consciousness, their lives are owned by a few big social media companies. Here's the other stat that I just learned last week.
40%.

Speaker 10 That's the percentage of two-year-olds, two-year-olds in America who have their own iPad, their own iPad, because we've all discovered just give the kid an iPad or give them your old phone that you traded up from, and she'll be quiet.

Speaker 10 And you can do your email, and you can cook dinner and you can do what you want.

Speaker 10 And so it's become normal to give kids this little babysitter, which is really like, I think, giving them morphine or something like that. I remember when I

Speaker 10 gave our kids an iPad to use.

Speaker 10 And I remember what age it was, you know, called three or four, probably one of them was sick. And

Speaker 10 I realized pretty quickly that YouTube was terrifying. Yeah.

Speaker 10 And I don't just mean because they would end up in weird computer generated garbage that sometimes turned very creepy, although that happened too,

Speaker 10 but that it was the endlessness of it.

Speaker 10 They would never even watch a full thing. That's right.
Because they were always like hitting the next thing. Because there's always something more interesting.

Speaker 10 And this was sort of when I began thinking a lot more about friction. Yeah.

Speaker 10 Because the difference between me putting a movie on for them, right, a Pixar movie or something, and then having access to the algorithm. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 10 You could really tell the difference in it, what the difference in what it asked of them, right?

Speaker 10 I think there's a place I want to bring in something that obsesses me, maybe just strangely, which is attention.

Speaker 10 When I think about what it is I want to try to parent in my children, yeah, I want them to be kind.

Speaker 10 I want them to be interested and curious about the world, but I want them to have healthy attentional faculties. I want them to have like healthy bodies and healthy attention.

Speaker 10 And I don't really know how to do it. I have some theories, but this is one of these things that just terrifies me, right?

Speaker 10 When I read these things about, you know, these kids graduating who can't read a book, it's not because they're stupid. It's because we have raised them on technologies that have deranged their

Speaker 10 attention to develop the attention necessary to read detailed distance.

Speaker 10 That is,

Speaker 10 you are developing an attentional faculty that changes the literal shape of your brain. And I think that was good.
I think that the written word and creating the literal brain was good.

Speaker 10 And we are un-creating it now. So two things.
The first is in the anxious generation, I think I grossly underestimated the harm that's that's happening because I focused on mental illness.

Speaker 10 But the bigger damage, I think, is the destruction of human attention in millions, possibly tens or hundreds of millions of kids around the world.

Speaker 10 You know, when you talk to pre-K teachers, they're saying the kids are coming with language delays, social problems because they were raised on iPads.

Speaker 10 So let me give a suggestion to parents like you with your young kids. I wish I'd understood this when my kids were young.

Speaker 10 Let's distinguish between a pretty good use of screens and a really, really bad use of screens. So a pretty good use of screens is to put on a long long movie, like 90 minutes.

Speaker 10 They're going to pay attention to a long movie about characters in a moral universe. So there's issues of good and bad and norms and betrayal.

Speaker 10 And it's part of their moral training, their moral formation. And they're watching it with another person.

Speaker 10 Now that can be you, ideally, but it's okay if it's a sibling or a friend because it's social. Here's what's really, really bad.
iPad time by yourself, because that's exactly the opposite.

Speaker 10 It's solitary. It's not stories.

Speaker 10 And if they are stories, there are 15 second stories that are amoral or really immoral, really disgusting, degrading things, and people doing terrible things to each other.

Speaker 10 And then the other thing that I really want parents to understand is that this is not like TV. TV is a good way of entertainment.

Speaker 10 TV puts out a story, but a touch screen is a behaviorist training device.

Speaker 10 A touchscreen, you get a stimulus, you make a response, and then you get a reward, which gives you a little bit of dopamine, which makes you want to do it again and again and again.

Speaker 10 So a touchscreen can train your child the way a circus trainer can train an animal. TV isn't like that.
So iPad time, iPhone time for your three, four, five-year-old is just not a good thing.

Speaker 10 Well, it trains us all. I mean,

Speaker 10 to go back to something I was saying earlier, one reason I am skeptical of this very sharp cut between kids and adults is I think adult adults' attentional faculties are being deranged, including, by the way, mine.

Speaker 10 I professionally need to keep my attention healthy.

Speaker 10 And it is a day-to-day fucking struggle. That's right.
And so for adults too. And also kids become adults, right? All these kids you're talking about from this generation you're talking about.

Speaker 10 I mean, 24-year-olds were 16-year-olds not very long ago, right? They were growing up in this.

Speaker 10 And this is one of the things I worry about it for democracy, but I just worry about it. I think there are

Speaker 10 more and less healthy forms of attention.

Speaker 10 And I think that we have tipped at some point

Speaker 10 into a societally less healthy form of attention. And we don't really know what to do about that.
And we don't want to scold people about it. We barely even have the language for it.
Yeah.

Speaker 10 But I think we're developing it because everyone feels, most people feel what you just said. I feel it.
We all feel it.

Speaker 10 I've focused on kids because in terms of policy, the ability of our country or states to put limits on kids for their own protection is very, very high.

Speaker 10 As soon as you turn 18, it's an entirely different game. So I don't think we're going to ask for a lot of legislation to protect us adults from the things on our phone.

Speaker 10 Johan Harry has this wonderful book, Stolen Focus, and I believe he's right when he says if we adults clear it out, well, take the Shabbat, although Sabbath is one day, that's not enough.

Speaker 10 You need a couple of weeks actually to get the dopamine circuits to readapt to normal levels. But if we adults clear it out, then we can regain our attention.
I think he's right in saying that.

Speaker 10 Whereas if you go through puberty doing this, if we have 10-year-olds on TikTok and they stay on it till they're 18, there's a possibility, we don't know, but there's a possibility that it will cause permanent changes and that they will permanently less able to pay attention, to read a book.

Speaker 10 This is a way in which I think we have trouble talking about it. Take the fight we've been having about TikTok.

Speaker 10 We are willing to have this debate. about whether something as attentionally important as TikTok, right?

Speaker 10 TikTok is, I would call it, critical attentional infrastructure, should be owned by a Chinese company. Yeah, that's right.
It's the greatest demolisher of attention in human history.

Speaker 10 Well, you know, whether you even want to go that far, which I would too, but it is something that is capturing an almost unfathomable amount of the attention of Americans every single day.

Speaker 10 So we can have this conversation about, do we think it should be owned by a Chinese company?

Speaker 10 We are not willing to really have a conversation about, is it good?

Speaker 10 that so many people are training themselves to have such fast attentional change. For many of them, hours a day, right? The stickiness of TikTok use is extraordinary if you look at it.

Speaker 10 If you look at Survey Data on its user base, and I mean, it's built to be that way.

Speaker 10 It is successful because it is sticky. And we've unleashed this or allowed this to be unleashed on the entire country.

Speaker 10 I teach a course at NYU Stern called Flourishing. These are all business students.
They're mostly sophomores, 19 years old. And I say, do you want to be successful? And they all say yes.

Speaker 10 Say, well, if you give away all of your attention, I can almost promise you, you're not going to be successful. You're not going to do anything.

Speaker 10 So step one in this course is you must regain control of your attention.

Speaker 10 And the students who are heavy social media users, who cut down from four hours a day to less than one, they get transformative results. They have so much time.
They can do their homework.

Speaker 10 They're not as distracted. They're more open to other people.

Speaker 10 But something you just said, it goes back to this question that sits for me about what are we connecting our judgments to? Because you said, well, look, these are business school students.

Speaker 10 You're telling them you can't be successful and not have control of your attention. I would say you absolutely can be successful and not have control of your attention.
So give me a layout of pen.

Speaker 10 Elon Musk is highly successful and is a man who is clearly attentional.

Speaker 10 You don't think, wait, yes, okay, but you don't think that when he was building these businesses, you don't think that he sometimes went hours at a time focusing on a problem?

Speaker 10 I think probably when he was building, but this is a bit of what I mean, that everybody who is in these worlds can see people now who are by any measure successful, in part by dominating the attentional sphere and posting constantly.

Speaker 10 And I don't think Donald Trump has great attentional faculties. I do think you can be successful in the modern world.
We are reshaping the modern world. There's a whole category of influencer, right?

Speaker 10 I think part of being an influencer is almost by nature, having truly adapted yourself to this attentional environment, in part because these systems, these platforms are building themselves to reward it, right?

Speaker 10 They are encouraging this. You will, you know, you have to post enough, or you're not going to get into the algorithm and get what you want out of it.
I'm not sure it's healthy.

Speaker 10 I'm sure it's not healthy. I'm sure it's not healthy.
But I think that part of how Elon Musk became the richest man in the world was harnessing all this attention, much of it negative.

Speaker 10 Part of how Donald Trump became the president of the United States twice is harnessing all this attention, really embodying the attentional ethic of these sites.

Speaker 10 And even in a smaller way, it's there are fewer newspapers now. There are fewer stable jobs and institutional media.

Speaker 10 In many ways, it's probably more likely that you can become an independent creator, certainly than it was like 20 years ago.

Speaker 10 Is there a danger that the sort of

Speaker 10 way you want us to raise children is actually suffused in nostalgia for an economy, for a politics that no longer exists. It's not being deformed.
It's being adapted. Right, right.

Speaker 10 In theory, yes, there is a danger of that. And history would suggest examples of it.
Every generation is wary of the technology that comes in that the kids are using. But

Speaker 10 if it turned out that our kids were flourishing, then I would just be an old man shaking his head at the clouds.

Speaker 10 But our kids are the least flourishing generation we know of ever, certainly in modern times. If it was the case that our kids love this stuff and they said, no, we love TikTok.

Speaker 10 No, let us keep TikTok. Then maybe I just don't understand it.
But we did a survey with the Harris poll. 50% of Gen Z said they would prefer that TikTok was never invented, never invented.

Speaker 10 They feel trapped by it. So if you've got the kids, they don't want to give it up, which is the paradox.
No, but they don't want it, but they don't want to be the only one.

Speaker 10 If we could all give it up, then they actually most of the people who are not going to be able to do it. Well, but the idea they'd be banned was not greeted with flowers and chocolate.

Speaker 10 No, but guess what? There wasn't much objection. There were creators.
There were people making money from it. But I was surprised.
There was not a youth rebellion saying, no, let us keep TikTok.

Speaker 10 I think you're not on TikTok. Well, and And you're not a legislator getting

Speaker 10 letters about this. Well, right, because TikTok motivated a lot of them to write to their legislators.
But the point is that when you survey them, they feel trapped and they're looking for an escape.

Speaker 10 They're just terrified of being the only one. So in theory, I could be wrong and we will adapt this, but I think the way you described it, well, no, they're just, you know, they've adapted to it.

Speaker 10 I would say they've been deformed by it. So there's a sense in which they fit, but they fit not as agents.
They fit not as full human beings who are making a future of themselves.

Speaker 10 They They fit as human fodder that has been sucked into the machine and molded to what the machine wants out of them, which is their attention.

Speaker 10 This is one of the tricky things about success right now, because visible success

Speaker 10 is almost definitionally

Speaker 10 constantly present, which is very different than the kind of success of a tremendous physics researcher whose work you can't read. Right.
Right.

Speaker 10 Because it's very complicated and they're not posting a lot of memes about it. Yeah.
So what you're describing is a path that opened up to prestige. So teenagers are desperate for prestige.

Speaker 10 And what the social media companies did, and we know this from things that insiders have said, is they hacked that.

Speaker 10 They said, you know, normally throughout history, to become prestigious, you had to become a good archer or a good leader or a good basket weaver.

Speaker 10 You had to do something in the world and then people would respect you and you would gain in social status. That's the way it always used to be.

Speaker 10 And what social media is able to do is say, you don't have to do anything. Just do whatever it takes to get people to follow you.
And bingo, you've got prestige. And where does it end?

Speaker 10 I'll tell you where it ends. And one of the most disgusting apps I've ever seen.
Well, there are lots of competition, but there's a thing called Famify.

Speaker 10 And the idea is lots of young people are lonely. They're not able to get followers.
They're putting stuff out there. Nobody's watching.
Well, that's really crushing.

Speaker 10 Imagine you're a nine-year-old not getting any followers. But if you give her Famify, Famify will generate as many followers as you million? You want millions? You got it.
Millions of followers.

Speaker 10 And you can see them. You know, they're praising you.
They're giving you hearts.

Speaker 10 So Famify is a way to take what you just said: that, oh, well, yes, well, they actually, they are searching for a way to be successful without any attention. No need.
Just give them Famify. And this.

Speaker 10 This is AI followers. AI followers, that's right.
Oh, this is the most blackmail shit I've ever heard. Exactly.
Exactly.

Speaker 10 And this is why I am so passionate about how we have to move quickly this year, 2025. This is really our last year before AI really has a big impact on life.

Speaker 10 You know, now that we're moving not just from you can know everything to now we have agents, you can do everything.

Speaker 10 I mean, the internet, in a sense, gave us omniscience, but now AI with agents is going to give us omnipotence. And that would be horrible for children.

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Speaker 10 Let's talk about AI.

Speaker 10 If you ask me, do I think that by the time my three and six-year-old are in middle school, we will have figured out the smartphones and social media in schools question? I think we will. We will.

Speaker 10 But AI.

Speaker 10 And it goes for me back to friction. What AI is,

Speaker 10 is functionally the collapse of all friction

Speaker 10 between you and any desire

Speaker 10 that can be fulfilled on a computer. That's right.
So

Speaker 10 relationships are the one I actually think about the most. I've said this many, many times before.
I'm a believer in transformational artificial intelligence. I think it's coming very, very fast.

Speaker 10 If you ask me if I think we will see economic supergrowth anytime soon, I would say no.

Speaker 10 I think it is going to be more evident in its upheaval of relationships before it transforms our economy because our economy has all kinds of friction in it. It's very hard to rebuild firms around AI.

Speaker 10 But what about when you can have any kind of digital friend you want, or for that matter, digital lover?

Speaker 10 And that friend, that lover, there's a really good daily on this recently about AI sex bots.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I listened to that. That was great.

Speaker 10 The sound in that, though, is frightening to me because

Speaker 10 you got why the AI was a good partner. More responsive than any man, probably.
More responsive than any man. And it is so much worse at doing that right now than it will be in two years.

Speaker 10 Yes, that's right. Like it is going to be so good.

Speaker 10 And it's going to endlessly adapt to what you want from it. That's right.
And I think the friction of relationships between human beings is really, really important.

Speaker 10 It's good for me as a person that my wife just does does not adapt herself into whatever I want her to say, right? It is part of being a healthy human being that other people

Speaker 10 exist with friction to you.

Speaker 10 I was a very lonely kid. I did not have many friends.
What if I'd had a lot of AI friends? And that began to pattern my expectations of other human beings. And then when they did not fulfill them,

Speaker 10 then that was a frustration to me. And it made my AI community

Speaker 10 that much more alluring.

Speaker 10 This scares the hell out of me. I'm not saying that on a 20-year timeframe, we won't adapt, but on a five or 10, we don't even know how to think about it.

Speaker 10 The way we adapt is by preventing kids from having these friendships. So, here I'll draw on a really insightful analysis from a Christian writer, Andy Crouch.
I did a session with him at NYU.

Speaker 10 We had a conversation, mostly on chapter eight of The Anxious Generation, on the spirituality chapter. And he said something so powerful.
I always bring it up because it's so helpful.

Speaker 10 He said, What is magic? Magic is instant, effortless effect on the world. Snap your fingers, something appears.
It's always been the human dream. And technology is essentially magic.

Speaker 10 Technology allows us to do things. You want a car to come pick you up, press a button.
Hey, here's this car. So the technology is magic.
And he says, now let's look at how children are formed.

Speaker 10 How do you get an adult? And again, he's coming from a Christian perspective. So they care a lot about the moral formation, the religious formation of their children.

Speaker 10 And he says, the three areas of formation for children are home, school, and church, or any religious organization. So he says, those are the three areas.

Speaker 10 And he says, all three of those areas are now colonized by tech. All three of them, and all three of them, kids have magic available to them all the time.

Speaker 10 Even in church, I'm hearing from pastors, say, pull out your Bible, they pull out their phone, they look at the passage, but then they go on and do something else. So I think we have to stop.

Speaker 10 This is not even about the content. We have to stop saying, oh, we just need better content moderation.
No, we don't.

Speaker 10 We need to realize kids have to go through a childhood in the real world with other kids within a moral universe where they experience the consequences of their own action.

Speaker 10 And they have to learn how to deal with real people who are frustrating.

Speaker 10 And if we give them AI companions that they can order around, they will always flatter them, we are creating people that no one will want to employ or marry. So we've got to stop.

Speaker 10 As I alluded to, I was a pretty friendless kid. I had a lot of trouble socially.
I would often have like one or two friends, but for a lot of my childhood, I alienated people.

Speaker 10 And I remember at one point, my mom saying she wanted to, this is kind of a sad story, but wanted to pay this nice older kid on the street to sort of watch me, but function to be my friend.

Speaker 10 I sort of had the embarrassment or the presence of mind to say no to that.

Speaker 10 Okay.

Speaker 10 I try to imagine though,

Speaker 10 as I was like moving school to school to get away from bullying and was having that much trouble, and my parents had no answers for me because they did not, trying to keep that kid, as that kid's parent, from disappearing into the computer, right?

Speaker 10 Disappearing into this world where, well, somebody will be, something will be his friend, something will be his companion.

Speaker 10 And of course, what's going to be the thin edge of the wedge is AI tutors, right? Which are going to be very effective. That's very powerful.
That's right. And are going to be positive too.

Speaker 10 It's not that this technology will have no good

Speaker 10 adaptations.

Speaker 10 Even now, I sometimes use ChatGP with my kids and we sit together and we make up stories and it illustrates them, which is like a really fun thing to do. And it's great.

Speaker 10 It's all easy to sit here and say, well, I don't want my 13-year-old having a sex bot or an array of sex bots in their pocket, but it's not going to come in like that, much in the way that the internet came in more benignly before it got jacked up to 11.

Speaker 10 It'll come in

Speaker 10 for kids who are are having a lot more trouble socially, but now there's somebody for them to talk to. For kids whose parents work multiple jobs, neurodivergent kids.
And a lot of it will be good.

Speaker 10 It will be good for some kids. But the more adoption there is,

Speaker 10 and the more these companies are already in the door and competing with each other then for your kids' attention.

Speaker 10 the more the sort of darker side of it will begin to flower. That's right.
And that's what worries me here. It's all so new, but it's it's all so adaptable.

Speaker 10 I was talking with somebody who works at one of the big AI companies about this. And he was saying to me, oh, but the good thing about AI is that it's really flexible.

Speaker 10 You can tell it, you can give it whatever value prompt you want to give it, right? If you want to tell it to not just do whatever your kid wants, right? You could do that.

Speaker 10 And yeah, it's sort of always true that you could.

Speaker 10 But when I look at the way the markets actually work here, that eventually what's going to happen is we're going to give people what they want, not what we think they should want. And that's the part.

Speaker 10 I can imagine negotiating structures on this over a long period of time as we have a social media maybe,

Speaker 10 but we're not going to understand it for a long period of time. That's right.
We'll never catch up with it. And it's going to be evolving very rapidly during this period of time.

Speaker 10 And it really frightens me as a parent. Yeah, as it should.
So a couple of concepts here. One is the concept of entanglement.

Speaker 10 So Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology points out that social media has gotten so entangled in our world that it's really hard to roll it back. Many schools communicate on Instagram.

Speaker 10 They require their kids to have smartphones. So it's really hard to rip it out once it's already taken root.
Both of my kids' schools communicate with me by app. Yeah, that's right.
That's right.

Speaker 10 It's like hard not to have a phone. They don't, it's like, it's by app.
It's not even by the computer. It has to be on my phone.
It has to be your phone. That's right.
So social media is so entangled.

Speaker 10 It's very hard to rip it out. It's going to be very hard to get it out of our kids' childhoods, but that's what we're working on.
AI is not yet entangled.

Speaker 10 AI is just coming in, and in two or three years, it will be entangled. And as you say, there are many good applications.
Khan Academy uses AI very well.

Speaker 10 And if we could have a device that just did Khan Academy and nothing else, that I can see would have a positive impact on education. Maybe we don't have to throw out all the iPads from the schools.

Speaker 10 Maybe we could use them if we can reduce them to one function.

Speaker 10 The one thing I worry about with using the AI to draw everything my kid wants to draw is that does it reduce the interest in actually drawing?

Speaker 10 Oh, yes. Yeah, that's right.
It does. I mean, you know, kids are losing the ability to draw, to write.

Speaker 10 These technologies, so far, Silicon Valley has a horrible track record at living up to its promises, especially for kids. So social media is going to connect everyone.

Speaker 10 No, it actually disconnected everyone.

Speaker 10 So when the purveyors of AI say, oh, it's going to be all these amazing uses, and AI, there clearly will, and there already are, I'm finding that Claude and ChatGPT are just really helpful adjuncts to research.

Speaker 10 So I love AI as an adult, but we have to understand children are not adults. And given the track record so far, we have to assume that these AI companions will be very bad for our children.

Speaker 10 That's what the Silicon Valley people themselves say, in the sense that they have already voted to keep their kids away from social media and technology. They send their kids to Waldorf school.

Speaker 10 So we have to approach all of this with a really skeptical eye, especially for our children. Start by assuming it's harming your kids, and then you can bring in some uses where it's not.

Speaker 10 Let me ask you about another dimension of this, which I've found myself obsessing over recently. So you're a professor at business school

Speaker 10 and you're a professor at an elite school.

Speaker 10 And we were talking about instrumental education earlier. I think that it was a pretty reasonable expectation.

Speaker 10 I think parents would raise their kids and push them to study with the sort of expectation that, you know what, if they could get to the NYU Stern School of Business, they're probably going to be okay out there in the economy.

Speaker 10 And then you mentioned how good AI is getting at being an adjunct to your research.

Speaker 10 And I already see that. You know, I've been playing around with deep research and I can already see how good that is getting at research and how quick it is.

Speaker 10 And it would change what I needed in terms of research.

Speaker 10 It feels like an event horizon to me

Speaker 10 of what should my children be educated towards.

Speaker 10 In many ways, I would say it'll be much safer to be educated towards being an electrician than to be educated towards being, you know, a contract lawyer.

Speaker 10 And I doubt there has been a moment as a parent when what society, the economy will want or value or reward

Speaker 10 in people in 15 or 20 years has been as liquid. Yeah, that's right.
How do you think about this?

Speaker 10 So the way I think about it is that I often hear the argument, well, you know, this is the world the kids are in.

Speaker 10 And for them to be successful, they need to master the technology and it's going to be in the workplace. And my answer is very simple.
I'm teaching these kids.

Speaker 10 If you want to send me someone who's going to do well at NYU Stern, don't send me someone who has mastered Instagram. Send me someone who is homeschooled, never had any of this garbage.

Speaker 10 They're able to pay attention. They're able to read a book.
They're, you know, in a sense, our brains are LLMs, in a sense. And so don't send me kids whose LLMs were filled in by TikTok.

Speaker 10 Send me a kid whose LLM was figured in within a stable moral community. And that kid is going to be adapted for the future because he didn't have the current technology when he was growing up.

Speaker 10 The current technology is a giant obstacle to human development. And so if you want to prepare your kid for the future, think very carefully about the technology you immerse him in.

Speaker 10 I do feel like this is a connecting thread in a lot of your work, which is that human beings

Speaker 10 need to develop as human beings around other human beings in little human societies. Yep.
That's what we evolved. And that the more we,

Speaker 10 particularly in childhood, pull them away from that, the worse they will turn out in terms of mental health, but probably a lot of other things.

Speaker 10 I would never say that as a blanket rule. We don't have to raise our kids the way hunter-gatherers did.
There are many aspects of modern life that are improvement.

Speaker 10 So I would not endorse a blind sort of, you know, well, this is the way it used to be. So this is what we should do.

Speaker 10 But when we begin to see evidence, and it's just kind of obvious, what do you think? Do you think kids should be raised around other kids or around screens? Like, it's just kind of obvious.

Speaker 10 So yes, I've always studied morality, but I've always done it from multiple perspectives. I've always been a developmental psychologist, a social psychologist, an evolutionary psychologist.

Speaker 10 I read anthropology. So you put all these together and you get this view of this amazing, amazing species that developed culture.
No other species has culture. I mean, chimps have a tiny bit.

Speaker 10 And the miracle of our ability to develop these skills and the ability to communicate. And then we come in and we radically change childhood and we think, oh, maybe it'll be okay.
Well, it's not okay.

Speaker 10 It's pretty clear it's not okay.

Speaker 10 We didn't radically change childhood. We didn't think about radically changing childhood.
A few companies did. A few companies have radically changed childhood and we've accepted it.
That's right.

Speaker 10 And we feel we can't stop them. And they're able to stop bills in Congress.
And they're able to, they have giant PR budgets and they're able to manipulate the narrative behind the scenes.

Speaker 10 So yeah, it's a hell of a struggle. But what we're seeing is a parents' revolution around the world.
And I think if most parents rise up and say no more, I think we're going to win.

Speaker 10 It's interesting that you've had to sit down and ask, what is a syllabus on flourishing?

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 10 What is a syllabus on flourishing? Oh, I can tell you in just a few words. The course is organized around making you stronger emotionally.
So stronger, smarter, and more sociable.

Speaker 10 Because if we can do that together, if we can, you have to cultivate new habits, make changes to your routine.

Speaker 10 If you can become stronger, smarter, and more sociable, then you are likely to be more successful in love, broadly construed relationships, in love and in work.

Speaker 10 And that's the modern formula for happiness, success in love and work, as Freud originally said. And if you are more successful in love and in work, then you will be happier.
That's almost guaranteed.

Speaker 10 So that's what the course is about. What that you assign Connects the most?

Speaker 10 Oh, this. Well, I know you're going to ask me about the three books.
You know what? Let's just do the three books right now because this is the three books. Okay.

Speaker 10 The three books for the undergrads, especially, and this is what I would recommend to any member of Gen Z, any young person in their 20s, anybody who feels their attention has been fried and they want to get it back.

Speaker 10 Here are the three books. The first is The Stoic Challenge by William Irvine.
It really really makes stoicism just so accessible.

Speaker 10 When you get setbacks, the students learn to say, I just missed the subway. Now I'm going to be late.
Like stoic challenge. You just say stoic challenge.

Speaker 10 It's as though they're stoic gods and they're testing me to make me strong. And yeah, I missed my train, but am I going to also hurt myself by stewing for 20 minutes? Nope.

Speaker 10 I'm going to be calm about it. And so you develop that habit of more stoic reactions and they get stronger.
They're not so anxious. They don't get angry or irritated at other people so much.

Speaker 10 So stoic challenge. The second book is by Cal Newport.
It's called Deep Work. And this is why I'm so passionate about attention.
Without your attention, you can't do anything.

Speaker 10 And as Newport says, a deep life, where you do a lot of deep work, a deep life is a good life. It is a rich life.
And so Cal Newport, we work on that to regain their attention.

Speaker 10 We work on turning off almost all notifications, on moving social media off your phone, onto your computer, and then for some, deleting it from the computer. So that's a wonderful book.

Speaker 10 And then the third book is Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It is timeless.
He is writing in the 30s and he is such a great social psychologist.

Speaker 10 So I urge everybody, listeners, if you have not read Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, I urge you to read it. Ideally, in the 1936 edition, it's so charming.

Speaker 10 Don't get the modern one for the digital age. It's completely rewritten.
It's not, the writing's not nearly as good. But those are the three books.
So the first one makes you stronger.

Speaker 10 If you do the stoic challenge over a couple months, you get stronger. You're not as reactive to negative things.

Speaker 10 If you read deep work and take it seriously, you're going to spend a lot less time on social media, you're going to take control of your time so that you have time for deep work.

Speaker 10 And if you read Dale Carnegie, you're going to be just much more effective in conversation and maintaining relationships. That's it, those three books.
John of the Knight, thank you very much.

Speaker 10 Thank you, Ezra.

Speaker 10 This episode of the Ezra Clancho is produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair.
Mixing by Isaac Jones with Aphim Shapiro and Amin Sahuta.

Speaker 10 Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, and Kristen Lynn.

Speaker 10 Weave Original Music by Pat McCusker, Audience Strategy by Christina Simuluski, and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

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