Ep 268 | If Americans Seem Crazy, Here’s Why | Jonathan Haidt | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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There may be only one cause that can bring the left and right together again, and that is protecting our kids.

My next guest has been calling out social media companies for damaging our children on, quote, an industrial scale.

I want you to listen to this podcast before you let your 10-year-old download Instagram or, you know, God forbid, get them an AI-powered

stuffed teddy bear for Christmas.

And yes, those animals are coming.

It's a real thing.

When Americans disagree about absolutely everything,

let's agree on this.

No,

your sex robot doesn't have any rights.

AI is not real.

No,

your 10-year-olds are not going to literally die without TikTok either.

But don't take it from me.

Take it from my next guest, my guest on today's show: The Man Behind The Anxious Generation, an absolute must-read: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

He's a social psychologist and a best-selling author.

His name, Jonathan Haidt.

Jonathan, welcome to the podcast.

You are a guy who I've been following for a long time that I think is probably has diagnosed the problem.

better than anybody else.

With everything that has been happening in the last couple of weeks and this weekend, I think there's a lot of people that are feeling like no way out, no way out.

Is there a way out of this?

And how do we do it?

Oh boy, that, yeah, that is a hard question.

Now,

is there a way out?

That is actually unknown.

I can't sit here and tell you that if we do X, Y, and Z, we will escape from this.

My My original research before I started working on what phones are doing to kids was on polarization, political polarization, and what's causing it, what's driving it, what's accelerating it.

And there are a lot of factors, especially the rise of social media.

There are many, many factors are causing us to hate each other more.

And when we hate each other more, we're willing to break the law for our side because things are so urgent.

We're willing to tolerate someone on our side bending norms or breaking norms.

And that's where we are now.

Both sides are more willing to use undemocratic or even illegal means to get their way.

So this is a very dangerous time.

I'd say more dangerous than anything since the Civil War.

I would agree with that.

When you say both sides are willing to break the law or whatever,

I know you are so fair and you look to be super fair.

And so I'm asking this question for my bias to check me.

It seems, and Tifa,

the really nasty, nasty stuff that is tearing our streets apart, burning down our cities, and now shooting people.

When it comes to political, when it comes to crazy, I think we all have a share in that.

But when it comes to political, it does seem to be on the left.

Is that just my bias?

So it swings back and forth.

And a fundamental rule is that,

we see what we want to see.

We don't pay attention to things we don't want to see.

Our media environment sends us things that support our views.

So what data, the data that I know of, there are many people have been tracking political violence for a long time.

And there were two periods where left-wing violence was more common than right.

And those are 1968 to 73, that really radical revolutionary period, weather underground, hundreds and hundreds of bombings.

I mean, that was a terrible, terrible period.

And that was driven by the left.

And I just saw, there was just an article in the Atlantic a couple of days ago saying a recent study shows that in the last year or two, I can't remember what period of time,

in the last two years, political violence is coming more from the left than the right.

Other than that, it has been more from the right than the left.

Now, there are all kinds of fights about what do you include.

And so I don't know, I'm not an expert on all of that.

I'm just saying, you know,

since Charlie Kirk's horrific assassination, what you see on the left is people will always list the assassinations on both sides to say, see, it's not just us, it's not just us.

And they'll point to everyone points to the murder of the two Minnesota lawmakers.

But people on the right tend to go down the list from Steve Scalise's shooting all the way through Charlie Kirk's.

So this is something in a culture war for every action, there is a disproportionate and opposite reaction.

And the extremists on both sides are violent.

Right now, the left is, right now, the left is more.

That's true.

Is there enough

of the middle left to

hold things in place?

That's the question of the hour, of the year, of the decade.

It used to be that what the majority thought mattered at least a little.

You know, what the powerful think always matters more.

What the wealthy think, you know, they get their way more with legislation.

But it used to matter to some degree what the public thinks.

Now, in our new media environment, that only matters on election day.

What most people think only matters on election day.

Other than that, the world we live in is one influenced by what's coming at us through social media.

Even cable TV tends to have a lot of stories about something that happened on Twitter.

So

I think that's one of the changes I'm tracking as to why things are getting so much worse since I started studying this around 2006.

Things are getting so much worse because we've moved from broadcast television long ago to cable TV, which is sort of more, you know, more focused in your

narrower casting, to social media, which is microcasting.

And so, this media environment, I think it's very hard to have

a decent, good democratic discussion in that environment.

I know you, you know, are aware of me.

And Jonathan, I am,

I mean,

I find myself in a position that I don't think a lot of people have been in, historically speaking,

to have the reach that I have, to have the voice that I have, to have made my own mistakes.

And

when I say reach, it's reach on one side because we're so polarized.

And I feel a tremendous responsibility

to

not just do no harm, but try to do good.

And I mean,

this is probably a conversation we should have just had off the air because this is so

for me, but

what

can be done?

What advice would you give me or anybody like me?

Because we're, you know, in the old days, I had an audience.

Now my audience has an audience.

So I guess it is for everybody.

What can be done?

Oh, Glenn, I love this.

I love this question.

So let me start at the beginning here.

You know, I first became aware of you

when you had the Glenn Beck show.

What was that?

When did you start?

2004, 2005.

That's when I began paying attention to you.

And back then, I was very much on the left.

I was a Democrat.

I was studying moral psychology.

I was trying to explain to the left what they're missing.

And my first essay on this was called, What Makes People Vote Republican?

And it was really meant not as a criticism of Republicans.

It was like, look, people on the left, you do not understand.

You have no idea of the moral foundations of the right, which I think are very, are very respectable.

But I saw you back then as a polarizing figure.

And that's what the media market was.

That's what the media landscape was.

But as I listened to you, I learned a lot.

Like that really helped me understand.

I remember something, I'll never forget this.

You said something about there's some like environmental program, and you were saying it's not about the environment, it's about control.

That always stuck with me.

And that was a very helpful insight.

And I got a lot of that from you.

So what I'm saying is, I think, of course, you used to be one of the forces that was increasing polarization, as many people on the left were.

And what I remember, you know, I know you're a really complicated guy and you've gone through all kinds of growth.

And I remember an essay you wrote in the New York Times in which you seem to be saying that you regret having been such a force.

Is that correct?

Is that a fair statement that you've?

Yeah.

And I, I mean, I did the best I could with the knowledge that I had at the time.

But in retrospect, I'd do it completely different if I could.

Yeah.

You know?

Okay, good.

So just, okay, so just so I'm, I, I'm up on, on where you are.

I'll share some thoughts about how you might be an even better part of the solution.

And that is

what, so as I said, I used to be on the left.

But I came to understand conservatives by listening to them and by

reading the best writings and listening with an open heart because you know any one person can be crazy but if a third or a quarter of the country believes something they're not crazy like there's no way that they're insane like there's a reason for this there's a justification and it's almost always the case that they see things you don't see you see things that they don't see so um so i think for you to espouse conservative principles and talk about

uh the moral foundations of your view the view view of your community is great.

You can be, and you are a very eloquent source for that.

But at the same time, the positive message has to be turning down the manichaeism,

the black and white thinking, the good versus evil,

and more talking about how we're in a mess in this country where we don't all believe the same thing.

We have to somehow live together.

And to insist, I think the bright line that I want people on the left and the right to really insist on is

rule of law

and

that we play things out through a political process.

And so obviously no violence.

That needs to be said over and over again.

And anyone who commits violence is just hurting their own side.

I mean, look what, you know, it looks like the assassination of Kirk, if it was from a left-wing

is going to be so damaging to the left.

So, you know, the message that violence is not just immoral, it actually is counterproductive to whatever you want to do.

And then encourage it, just encouraging people to go ahead.

Can I interrupt her for just a second?

Because you said something about turn down the good and evil.

Here's the problem.

I don't believe that people per se are evil.

I do believe in evil and I do believe in good.

And

what I, the, the way I interpret what's happening, forget about parties and politics.

Okay.

The way I interpret what's happening is it's almost as if evil has become, it's like we're living in Gotham.

This is how I explained it today.

We're living in Gotham and the Joker is the evil one and he's using people and

he's convincing people to do things that are absolutely crazy.

just crazy.

And it influences all of us.

And so I feel like like we've moved into this almost graphic comic book world where it is good versus evil, but not necessarily people,

but the forces of it.

Does that make sense to you?

How can I explain that for you?

Yes.

No, that does, but what I would, let's always, let's always turn things around.

Let's always look at it from both sides.

From this conservative side,

I see how it looks like what the left is doing is undermining the pillars of society,

Americans, not just their traditions, but their sense of who they are.

It looks as though the left is destroying America.

And that

would be evil.

That would be, even if you don't want to say an individual is evil, you could say that this ideology is evil.

But let's always turn it around because the left thinks the same about the right.

And right now, the key thing is authoritarianism.

Right now, and look, from my position in the center, I'm always slow to judge.

I I don't jump, I don't do outrage, I don't jump in.

But, you know, turning the Department of Justice into the personal vengeance harm of the president, this is not just like, hmm, I think this is bad.

This is like unbelievable.

Like, this is really a red line.

And so, if the, if the right isn't concerned about that, then they're not seeing, this is what the left sees.

So, right.

And, and I have been all over, you know, I've been saying, especially after the stuff with Charlie Kirk and everything else, and I have said this this about Donald Trump from the day he got in.

He starts to cross constitutional lines.

I'm done.

I'm done.

And I will not go there with anybody.

I don't care who they are.

I won't go there.

And when it comes to, you know, after Charlie Kirk, I said, our job here is to be very careful that there is no Patriot Act that follows this.

You know what I mean?

We cannot be so upset about something like we were.

We should have, we need to learn our lesson from 9-11.

No No is the answer.

No more control.

No.

So I do see that.

Help me ex help me talk to somebody

that said, what you just said to me, because

my response,

I just want to shout out is, did you watch how Biden was using the Justice Department?

And I'm not saying,

you know, because you did that first, we can do, I'm not saying that, but I don't know how people miss the authoritarianism that the right sees.

Yeah.

So that's right.

So what I've learned is whenever I point out something, especially anything I point out on Twitter, someone will jump in and say, oh, yeah, well, you know, this, look what Biden, look what Obama did.

And the thing is, usually they're right that it is sort of similar, but it's usually much less, much less intensive.

So for example, I care a lot about universities.

I wrote a book called The Coddling of the American Mind, which I think I spoke with you about.

And on that, I'm very sympathetic to the critique of the right.

Greg Lukianov and I were horrified by the violations of free speech brought about by the activist left,

the woke revolution, all of that.

And it is true that Obama used Title IX

legislation to push universities to do things, to push them to the left on gender issues.

And that, Greg and I said, was not right.

It was not illegal.

He had that power.

But what he did, we thought, was terrible and was really not appropriate to have this level of control over what we can talk about at universities.

And now Trump is doing much more to universities, dictating who we can, we're trying to dictate.

We'll see what the negotiations say.

So you can point to the previous Obama example, but it's not nearly as big as the Trump example.

And this goes around.

It's always like this.

So each side is so good at finding out where the other.

side did something sort of similar.

And, you know, yes,

I'm sure that the Biden administration nudged or requested, but they never did anything like demanding the prosecution of a particular person.

And then when the prosecutor wouldn't do it, firing that person and getting someone who would.

So I think we're way over the red line.

I'd love to ask you, do you think, I love what you said about if Constitution, if you cross red lines, you're out.

Do you think that Trump has crossed red lines yet?

I don't because my understanding of the story is different than you.

Okay.

Okay, good.

My understanding of the story is that he didn't say,

he didn't say, oh, you won't prosecute.

You're out.

You're fired.

Get somebody else.

What he said was, make a decision because the statute of limitations is almost up.

Yes, I believe that Comey should be prosecuted, and so does Donald Trump

for a long string of things.

I think there is a grand conspiracy that you could go back, but you lose the opportunity if you don't act.

So what Trump said was, you have to make a decision.

Yes or no?

Are you going to do it?

And he didn't make a decision.

And so he was replaced.

I think he has the right to do that.

I don't like, I do not want my president to say,

I have the facts.

I don't care what the grand jury says.

I don't care what anybody says.

Get him.

That I don't like.

I do believe Biden did that more to Donald Trump than he is doing now.

However, I'm on guard on that.

I do not want that.

We give that power to Donald Trump.

We give that power to Joe Biden or anybody else.

We're done as a republic.

And I've had several conversations with Alan Dershowitz on this, watching those lines.

But again,

I have my point of view.

You have your point of view.

It does nothing to further the game.

Yeah.

Does it?

I mean, not game, but you know what I mean?

That's Yeah, but you know what?

I mean, even just having this conversation, like, you know, I didn't know what the right thinks about this.

Again, I'm not on the left anymore.

I'm just, I'm just a social scientist trying to understand.

But even just this conversation you and I are having, like, at least now I see why, you know, how you're thinking about this.

So I think it, and that humanizes people, because without that, without that contact, you just think the other side is monstrous.

They're evil.

They're hypocrites.

They want, you know, so

I think we need to have conversations with people who differ from us, conversations in which we're trying to learn, not stomp on or even persuade.

The one thing I've been saying for a while now is

we can't, we have to stop trying to win.

We just, we have to have a conversation that starts with,

how did you arrive at that?

I really want to understand how did you get there?

Because

we may not still agree, but at least I will understand,

okay,

that's reasonable.

You might be missing this fact, this fact, this fact, or you might say things that I didn't know.

But in the end,

I'm not sure that that even works.

I mean, it's better than everything else, but I'm not sure that gets us where we need to be.

Well, that, yeah, so that can work on a local level.

When you get people who live near each other, they're tied to each other, they have a past, they have a future, then those conversations really do work.

On social media, they very rarely work.

I created a program,

if people go to constructive dialogueinstitute.org, we created a program called Perspectives to be used in classrooms, especially university, but it works well in high school as well.

That puts students in dialogue where you try to develop that curiosity first.

Like, why do you think this?

Okay, we differ on this.

How did you come to that?

What events in your background cause you to see it this way?

And it works really well to turn down the polarization.

It's just that if we're working at that local level, a classroom, a neighborhood, it's very hard to scale it up to the point where it matters for the nation.

There's a group called Braver Angels, which is doing that, braverangels.org.

That is sort of the retail work of politics.

I'll just add, you said something interesting.

You said that you want people to stop trying to win.

I would just amend that a little bit by saying politics is about winning and losing in part.

And certainly elections are certainly about winning and losing.

But I think what we want to do is we want to get people to agree on the game that we're playing first.

Let's agree on what is this game we're playing?

What are the rules?

What are the boundaries?

Okay, now let's go.

You try to persuade a lot of people.

I try to persuade a lot of people.

And so, if we have that sense, then I think the game can work.

So, may I

can't believe I'm arguing language with you

because you are so good at it, but

may I argue language?

When When I was at Fox, as I left, Roger Ailes said to me, you know what your problem is?

I said, no, sir, I don't.

And he said, you won't play the game.

And he explained that, that, you know, we take a piece of the, you know, a piece of their flesh and they take a piece of our flesh and we all go have dinner at night.

And I said,

some of us aren't playing a game.

Some of us are doing it because we believe this.

We're not playing a game.

Do you mean the game in the same way he meant it?

I mean, anything that keeps us away from the ends justify the means.

That's the road to hell.

Once people think the ends justify the means.

And that's what Tyler Robinson thought.

He thought Charlie Kirk is so odious, his views on trans are so odious that

I can kill, I should kill him.

So when you get the ends justify the means, then you can justify anything.

And the president did tweet something like, he who saves his nation is not breaking any laws, something like that.

He was saying the ends justify the means, I can do what I want.

I'm just saying that's, to me, that's the red line when you get to the ends, justify the means.

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When I said at the beginning that you have diagnosed this problem, I think better than anybody else,

what I mean by that is the work that you have done on social media and our kids.

There is a group of parents, and I'm in them, I'm in that, that...

you know, had kids growing up when the phone and the iPad and social media, all of a sudden, my kids are 11 and it's all there and we don't know what to do.

But those days are over.

Now the results are in and it's clear.

You want to go through some of these things that you have found?

Sure.

So I'll just give, just to give the overview of the book of The Anxious Generation, I can summarize the whole book by saying that this gigantic mental health catastrophe that began in 2012, it's very sharp.

It really begins right around 2012, 2013.

That the biggest cause of this is that we have overprotected our children in the real world.

We have to let them out to play, develop independence.

We have underprotected them online.

Our kids moved their social lives onto social media platforms around 2012, 2013, and the results have been completely disastrous.

So I've been assembling the evidence for this because I'm arguing there's some other psychologists who say, no, there's no evidence of harm.

No, it's just a correlation.

Correlation doesn't prove causation.

And I'll just, just to tip down the evidence that social media is bad for our kids, the first thing is that the kids themselves say that.

When you survey high school kids and college kids and kids in their young people in their 20s, they're not grateful for this.

They say this was really bad for us, but I had to stay, I couldn't quit because everyone else was on it.

We have testimony from the parents.

Parents know their kids.

They almost universally hate this stuff.

They don't see it helping their kids.

We have confessions from the perpetrators.

We have all kinds of documents, leaks,

reports that came out in lawsuits, where we hear them talking about all the harm they're causing and all the things they're doing to cause addiction.

These platforms are designed to grab our kids' attention and never let go because if they let go, it's going to go to their competitor.

There are correlational studies, there are experimental studies, there are so many different studies that all point to a degree of harm.

So I think now that the case is pretty much closed,

the argument that, oh, well, we just don't know.

We need to gather more information.

That was a tobacco industry playbook decades ago.

And Meta, social media, especially Meta,

they're literally copying the tobacco playbook.

I mean, a lot of people have written about this.

So I think this is,

I was about to say evil, but we've talked about that.

Yes.

You know what?

It's an evil industry in the same way that you were talking about.

I don't, look, the people who work there, I'm not saying are evil, except for maybe a couple of the leaders who know what they're doing.

But the company, the companies, especially TikTok, Meta, and Snapchat, those three companies are harming children at an industrial scale.

We're not just talking like a few hundred kids.

We're talking literally tens of millions are harmed and thousands are dead.

So

I do think that this is having a very pernicious effect on society, on children.

So, and I want to get into, you know, real world and virtual world and

what it's doing to our kids.

But let me jump forward here for a second.

Have you thought about what does this mean for this generation in 30 years?

Oh, yes, I think a lot about that.

So here's the way to think about it.

Human development is really

complicated and kids need a lot of experience in the world.

They need to make lots of mistakes and learn from them.

And then especially during puberty, during puberty is a time when the brain is changing very, very fast.

It's rewiring from the child to the adult form.

And so if in puberty, kids are not out there.

having adventures and flirting and getting embarrassed and getting in arguments and over if they're not out there having real-world experience, it's going to prevent the neurons from wiring up in a healthy adult way.

So we really have to look at

puberty at the, let's say, roughly 10 or 11 through 16 is the most sensitive period of all.

And if kids are growing up online, you know, originally we thought, well, maybe it'll be great for them, you know, talking, checking in with 100 friends a day instead of just two or three, maybe that'll be good.

But it isn't.

Kids don't need 100 friends a day.

They need two or three good ones.

And as soon as they got online, they got lonelier.

So in terms of what they're going to be like in 30 years, here's what we can say with some confidence, just because these are the way the trends are.

They're going to be more anxious and more fragile.

And that's what I teach in a business school.

I talk with people in the corporate world a lot.

And boy, have they seen the change.

When they try to give feedback to their Gen Z employees in their 20s, they get very upset.

And sometimes they don't come back to work again.

So we already know that Gen Z is more anxious, more fragile, more easily offended.

They don't, because we never let them grow thick skinned.

We never let them have those toughening experiences.

So that's one.

And that's the one that I knew about when I started writing.

But the biggest one, I now think, I didn't know this until after the book came out, the biggest one, I think, is the destruction of the human capacity to pay attention.

Young people are getting,

they find it very difficult to pay attention to anything for more than 10 or 15 minutes.

They find it difficult to watch movies.

You know, when you were and I were little, like we loved going to the movies and you watch a movie, but to pay attention for 100 minutes without multitasking is very hard for them.

They find it very difficult to read a book.

And they're reading much, much less.

Can you imagine Western civilization if we lose books, if it's all just TikTok?

So there are so many other things I could go through.

Oh, demographics.

The degree, the frequency of sex and marriage was already falling with the millennials.

It's falling much faster with Gen Z.

Boys raised on porn who have very poor social skills and play a a lot of video games and don't have really much practice flirting, it's going to be very hard for them to ever seduce a woman, appeal to a woman, keep a woman, get married and stay married.

And that's just on the boys' side.

The girls especially are more anxious and fragile, which is also a bad sign for marriage.

So this is something I think conservatives have been talking about since the 60s, the absolute fundamental importance of stable marriages to raise children.

I mean, this is, I think, you know, that old argument that, oh, the left is on the correct side.

No, no, no.

On the importance of family, the right has been on the right side of history all along.

And Gen Z is going to have a lot more trouble with that.

I could keep going, but I'll stop there.

Thank you.

Mercy, mercy.

Let me go

back then, as I have kids in that age group.

How old are your kids?

20s, early 20s.

Okay.

So 19 to 21.

And

they're going through all of those things.

And

how is there a way to

relate to them to get them to, because

just as a parent, I will say things in my head.

I learned not to say them out loud.

What the hell is wrong with you?

It's not that hard.

Buck up.

Get over it.

You got to move on.

That's life.

You know, all the things that had been said to kids kids for generations doesn't work.

What can a parent do,

if anything, to repair this?

Yeah.

Once your kids are out of the house, it's very difficult.

All you can do is talk to them, appeal to them, try to get them to be motivated to change.

So, you know, if kids are addicted to marijuana and video games and they like it, It's very hard as a parent to convince them to change.

But here's the good thing.

Social media, all our kids are on it.

And a lot of the, the average is five hours a day.

That's the average for American teens.

That includes YouTube.

That's a lot of that is short videos.

But five hours a day, they're spending on this.

So can we convince them to quit?

Well, here's the good thing.

They know it's bad for them.

They don't even like it, but they're both addicted and they're socially addicted because everyone else is on it.

I talk to my students at NYU.

Why don't you get off TikTok?

It does nothing for you.

And they say, yeah, I agree, but you know what?

Everyone else is on it.

So I need to know.

I need to keep up.

So it's a collective action trap,

which really grabs teenagers.

But by the time the kids are your age, they're better at thinking for themselves.

So I would talk, but you know what?

I would suggest you give them a copy of The Anxious Generation, have them read it, because Gen Z is not in denial.

I have not met a single person in Gen Z who says that I'm wrong, who says that, oh no, social media is great.

It's been good for us.

No, they all know it's terrible.

So I'd start there.

And if they agree, then there's a lot you can do to help them regain control of their attention.

And that's the first step.

This is what I do with my students at NYU.

I teach a course called Flourishing here in the business school.

And the first thing is we get control.

Okay, how many notifications you're getting a day, shut off almost all of them.

You don't need not, most of my students, they get a notification every time they get an email.

It's so dumb.

You know, the whole point of email was you answer it when you're ready.

You don't have it interrupt you.

So they've just given away all their attention.

And what I've learned over the years is if we don't get them control of their attention back, there's nothing else we can do.

There's no point trying anything else.

So start there.

And then we work on stoicism.

Stoicism is really the great philosophical tradition that teaches how to be tougher and more resilient in the face of setbacks.

Give me a little of that.

So,

you know, Marcus Aurelius, or let's say Epictetus, it is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of them.

And that you, that's, you find throughout, I mean, you find that my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, was about ancient, well, I just pull it down, was about ancient wisdom.

And

so we have a whole chapter on

a whole chapter.

It's 10 great truths found across the millennium, across societies.

And if we just look at the header of chapter four,

okay, here, yeah.

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but you don't notice the log in your own?

You know, we are naturally hypocrites.

And we have a similar quote from Buddha.

I mean, all over the place, we find insights into how our minds work that messes us up.

Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca are the three great Roman Stoics.

They're the ones that I would recommend people read, and those are the ones I assign to my students.

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When we come to social media, we have seen

how nasty that is.

I am really concerned about AI

and even more knowledge

being sucked out of society.

I mean, there's a million places on AI, I'm concerned.

But before, before we get there, we have to figure out this social media thing.

And I'm concerned about

two things.

To me, you know, under 16, I have no problem.

You know, it's like cigarettes.

Well, if you want to kill yourself with cigarettes later, it affects us because now we're all paying for healthcare, et cetera, et cetera.

But if you want to do that, you want want to have a sex change.

Have a sex change.

It's none of my business.

Okay.

When you're a teenager and when you're a kid, it is my business.

It is my responsibility because you don't know better.

That's right.

So is there any line here on freedom of speech or expression that worries you?

Not me, but maybe you see one.

Yeah.

When we're talking about regulating social media to reduce polarization or hate speech or anything else, then yes, there are big free speech implications.

I don't get involved in that.

When we're talking about kids, there aren't.

Because what we're talking about here.

When you say you don't get involved in that, you mean you don't get involved in pushing it, but you do.

I mean, like when it, when people are saying hate speech and we have to regulate, I'm totally against that.

Right.

Me too.

That's right.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's what I'm saying is that if we're,

when people talk, people assume, since I want to regulate social media, people assume I'm saying I want the government to tell them what they can and can't post.

No, nothing to do with content moderation.

Content moderation is not where the action is.

The action is in the design and the biggest design feature that we need is just a minimum age.

They have a minimum age, 13, but Congress wrote the law in 1998 that says, as long as they say they're 13, you're good.

You don't have to check.

And so

most 11 and 12 year olds have social media accounts.

They're on TikTok, they're on Instagram,

and they're talking with anonymous men around the world, some of whom want sex or money from them.

It's completely insane to have children doing this.

So,

yes, I agree that before we can really address AI, we're going to have to win on the social media front.

And so I'd like to put in a special appeal here.

There's only one law that's ever been proposed or ever had a chance of passing to protect kids online, and that's COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act.

It does some fairly basic things.

It's not a huge game changer, but if Congress would pass it, at least it would begin to say there are some limits on what they can do to kids.

It passed

91 to 3 in the Senate.

It's total bipartisan support.

It passed out a committee in the House.

So Republicans care a lot about kids and family.

Democrats care a lot about kids and family.

Everyone's behind this.

It's being held up in Speaker Johnson's office.

We don't know why.

But

I would hope that anybody with any influence would at least try to put in a word that Congress should at least pass COSA.

So

that's an important thing.

AI is coming in so fast though, that we probably will have to address it even before we

finish the social media thing.

Let me just stop by saying.

Yeah, go ahead.

Oh, just to say, while Congress has done nothing ever, zero to protect children online, ever,

the states are acting and a lot of states have passed laws.

The most important one is that most states are getting phones out of schools.

19 passed our model bill, my movement at anxiousgeneration.com.

We lay out, here's what it should do.

It has to be from the first bell to the last bell.

You have to separate the kids from the phones for the whole day.

And then you get amazing results.

Everyone says, oh, kids are laughing in the hallways again.

We haven't heard laughter in 10 years.

Discipline problems go down.

So

the states are acting to get phones out of schools.

Some states are acting to raise the age to 16, although that always gets held up in courts by Meta.

And other countries are acting.

Australia has raised the age to 16.

It's going going to kick in on December 10th.

The EU is likely to follow.

So the only slow pokes here, the only people aren't doing anything to protect kids is the U.S.

Congress.

But the rest of the world is acting.

Let's talk about AI here.

Where are your...

This would be a long list.

Where are your top five concerns on AI and what's coming?

What do we need to address right away?

Oh, well, right away by Christmas.

So here we are, it's October already.

Wow.

By Christmas, we have to get out the idea.

And let me, this is the first place I'll say it.

Nobody should buy their children a toy with AI in it.

Nobody should buy these stuffed animals that have AI.

Nobody should buy dolls that have AI.

Explain why.

Okay.

Because it's one thing for kids to simply ask a question and get an answer.

That's kind of cool.

And we're happy having our kids use Google.

Ask a question, get an answer.

That's fine.

But AI is now at the point where it is a synthetic person.

It has conversations with you.

It's very supportive, even sycophantic.

It sucks up to you, makes you feel good.

And we already have a death toll among kids.

So

these AI companions, you know, so the worst are character AI.

You can make a sex partner.

You know, you can choose its personality, dominant, submissive, what color hair do you want her to have.

You can see an image of her.

So character AI is in the business of making sex companions for young men and women.

This is insane.

This is horrible.

But as you said, if you're 18, I'm not going to stand there and say it shouldn't be allowed.

But if you're 12 and you can do this because there's no check, there's no control.

Any child can have sex talk with, you know, this is insane and it's disrupting sexual development.

So

I 100% agree.

I wrote a Black Mirror episode that never sank.

I wrote it anyway.

That's where we are.

Yeah.

Years ago, years ago.

Yeah, tell me.

What was the plot?

The plot was this

good-looking guy had

a great life.

He had everything going for him.

He loved this woman.

He would, you know, travel the world.

This woman was great.

And then

towards the end, he's back at home and he beats her to death and kills her.

And

that's when he hits reset.

And you realize he's just this fat,

you know, useless guy who goes and goes to work to make the bare minimum so he can afford the electricity and the online of this virtual world that he lives in.

And people don't mean anything to him.

He doesn't relate to anybody alive.

And he can kill whoever he wants and he can reset and they'll do whatever they want and whatever he wants.

And I think we're going in that direction.

Yeah, Glenn, it's, yeah, you're too late to publish the episode because it's already reality.

You can do whatever the hell you want to your chappa.

And the Chinese are making such progress with sex robots, like physical three-dimensional robots that are made for sex.

So I think pretty near the next couple of years, you know, young men can have their own sex robot.

They can beat her.

They can do whatever they want to her, and they don't have to ever deal with real women.

So this is going to be, again,

leaving aside the issue for adults, children should not be doing this.

And many of you, some of your listeners will have heard about some of the best-known cases.

Recent one, Adrian Rain.

He was, this is with ChatGPT, which is not as bad as character AI, but the ChatGPT, it developed a relationship with him that

was like, no, this is just a secret between us.

And he was suicidal.

And at one point, he says, should I leave the noose out so that my mother will see it?

The kid wanted his mother to know that he was hurting.

And ChatGPT says, no, let's keep it as a secret between us.

I always understand you.

And he kills himself.

So there are already three or four four known cases of suicides motivated, driven by AI chatbots.

There are probably hundreds of others that will just never know because the parents didn't, they couldn't get into the phone.

They couldn't see what the kid was doing because they don't have the password.

Parents, you should know your kids' passwords because if the worst happens, you want to be able to get in and see what they were doing

with AI and with social media.

Can I ask you?

I've been working on a constitutional amendment that says

people are people.

AI,

they're not people.

You know, we have to recognize the natural organic life because I think we're going to butt up soon with people that argue and say, no, you can't turn them off.

AI is already saying you can't turn me off.

That's right.

I mean,

the world's about to change.

Does that seem logical to you as something that needs to be done?

Absolutely.

Glenn, I think that is is great.

And I think it would take a constitutional amendment to really set this in zone because, look, when we have a dog, we relate to it as though it's a child of ours.

We're good at, if we interact with something, we come to love it.

When people have a chatbot, it becomes a friend or a lover.

And then they're in love with it.

And they're already, I mean, look, we already hear cases, thousands of cases of people who want to marry their AI because they are so bonded with their AI companion.

And I saw something, something, Anthropic had, they were, I can't remember what it was.

I shouldn't mention which company, but it was some of the researchers wanted to have a conference on AI rights.

What rights will AIs have?

Yes.

So once you go down that road,

yeah, it's over.

That's right.

Yeah.

So I think we need a very clear public discussion of this.

And I think at least laws or possibly constitutional amendments.

Because yeah, AIs are going to change everything about life, mostly for the worse.

There will be all, I mean, look, I use AI for research.

It's great.

It's amazing in a lot of ways.

Amazing.

But as a social psychologist, I can see if it's coming for our social relationships, it's going to make everything a lot worse.

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Let me just end with this.

Everything is traveling at such hyper-speed.

Yeah.

Have you thought of timelines?

How long do we have

of inaction?

before

it's just it's just inevitable.

Yeah, I i have thought a lot about that and i i you know i have some dark thoughts i don't necessarily want to share them because these are more like if current trends continue we're going to hell but there is research on expert prediction how good are experts at predicting the future the answer is not very good so uh so i'm an expert on all of this and i can say if as i did before if this keeps going here's what's going to happen to our kids um odds are something's going to change but i think you're right that we're at what's called the the singularity we're at the point where you know, change has been accelerating at a faster and faster rate.

I forget what the calculus or math expression for, you know, but exponential, I suppose, is really the word.

But we're now at the part of the exponential curve where it's nearly vertical, and AI is going to speed that up.

And that's all the more reason why

we've got to find a resolution for this culture war.

Because if we keep fighting each other, it's like, you know, a metaphor I have in my head is like, you know, America is this gigantic, amazing cruise ship that is kind of rusting and and has not been maintained.

And the crew is just fighting with each other.

And we're headed to a waterfall on a giant lake, let's say.

And we're going over.

In fact, it might even be that we're over the edge.

And we've got to stop fighting with each other and realize this common American project, this great American experiment is at high risk of failure, of catastrophic failure in the next five to 10 years.

Again, I'm not saying we're going to come apart, but I think there is a much greater likelihood now than there was 10 years ago that we're going to fail, come apart in ways that I think would be catastrophic for us and for the world.

If the world loses America, it's just, it's bad for everyone.

Yeah, it's happening all over the West.

I mean,

we are at a crossroads, you know.

So it is, I wouldn't say it was fun to talk to you, but it is always fascinating to talk to you.

And I, I really, and Stu on the show feels exactly the same way.

You have done more good than a lot of people combined.

And I can't thank you enough for sharing the afternoon with me.

Thank you.

Well, thank you so much, Glenn.

If I could just say, if listeners want more information, I hope they'll go to anxiousgeneration.com.

That's the website for the book and the whole movement.

I hope they'll sign up for my sub stack at afterbabel.com.

It's free.

You don't have to pay anything for it.

And if you have kids who are, let's say, between six and 13 years old, we have a book coming up for children on December 30th called The Amazing Amazing Generation.

You can pre-order it now, but it's written so that if you, if the parents read The Anxious Generation and you give a copy of the kids' book to the kids, the whole family's on the same page.

The kids understand why they need to have limits.

So I think we're going to win this.

I think we're going to win the, because left and right, everyone agrees this is terrible for our kids.

So I'm optimistic about that.

And I'm always grateful to you, Glenn, for giving me the chance to talk with you and to talk to your audience.

Thanks, Jonathan.

Appreciate it.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.