The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt

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Speaker 1 We've created a world where the barrier to entry for some of the things that we've agreed on as some of the most harmful to younger kids, the barrier to entry is zero.

Speaker 1 It's literally, you click a button that says, I am 18 or older. And I remember the first time I saw that button when I wasn't 18.
It was on a computer game called Leisure Suit Larry.

Speaker 1 I don't know if you've ever heard of this.

Speaker 13 No, I haven't had.

Speaker 1 So it was a story of this man, Leisure Suit Larry, whose only goal was to have sex. That's all he was trying to do.

Speaker 13 And you get points for the number of people.

Speaker 1 And you played this game. I remember the first one, you were just at a bar and you would type on the computer, like, open door, knock on door.
And the bouncer would be like, what's the code?

Speaker 1 And you're like, what is the code? But like, when I think about like this world, I think about the option is like in the game, it would say to you at the beginning, are you 18 or older?

Speaker 1 And I said, I said, no.

Speaker 13 I was honest. I was like, no.

Speaker 1 And then the game was like, you're not old enough to play. I remember being like, oh.

Speaker 13 And you went to the end of the day. And then I know what I booted it again.
No, I booted it up again. And then I went, I am 18.

Speaker 1 And it was like, welcome to the game.

Speaker 1 Something is happening to our kids.

Speaker 1 Anxiety, depression, and loneliness are on the rise. And it looks like it's not just a phase.

Speaker 1 Parents are overwhelmed, young people feel lost, and no one's quite sure what or who is to blame. But today's guest has spent years trying to answer just that question.

Speaker 1 Jonathan Heitz is a leading social psychologist, a professor at NYU, and the author of The Anxious Generation, a book that's sparking urgent conversations around the world today.

Speaker 1 In this episode, we unpack what's going wrong and what we might still be able to do to get it right.

Speaker 1 this is what now

Speaker 1 with trevor noah

Speaker 1 so when you wrote anxious generation did you think you were tapping into the

Speaker 1 i mean arguably like one of the the most

Speaker 1 what would you call it the most pertinent moments of of this generation

Speaker 1 Because I mean, you've written a few books, and every author who's writing about something, especially someone as learned as you, is thinking about the world.

Speaker 1 But this feels like it tapped into every single parent and everyone who's in the zeitgeist. It completely, I mean, it's still,

Speaker 1 you know, the last I checked, it's still on the New York Times bestsellers list.

Speaker 1 It just stays there as robust as ever.

Speaker 13 Still talking about

Speaker 13 those groups.

Speaker 1 What do you think it is about the topic that connected with people as much as it has? Yeah.

Speaker 13 Well,

Speaker 13 what I discovered

Speaker 13 once the book came out, and even before it came out, was that there is a desperation among mothers in particular, that all over the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time.

Speaker 13 Everyone hates it. We didn't ask for it.
It wasn't like this in 2010. I mean, of course, there are always arguments over TV.
But once kids got touchscreen devices, which are much more addictive,

Speaker 13 you have a stimulus response loop, which is much more addictive than watching a story on a screen. And so family life changed, and people couldn't like, what the hell is going on?

Speaker 13 And my sense is that mothers felt their kids being pulled away much more than fathers did. Fathers were often like, oh, you know, cool video game.
Hey, let's play this. But mothers really felt it.

Speaker 13 And so that's what's driven the success of the book is it's mothers around the world and all the political changes, all the laws that are being introduced.

Speaker 13 Oftentimes, it's either a female governor like Sarah Huckabee Sanders in

Speaker 13 in Arkansas, or it's the governor or prime minister's wife who reads the book

Speaker 13 and says, you know, and this is what happened in Australia.

Speaker 13 The wife of one of the premier of South Australia read the book and she said to, she was reading it in bed and she turns to him and says, Peter, you've got to read this book and then you've got to fucking do something about it.

Speaker 13 Wow. So he did.
And that's what started the process in Australia.

Speaker 14 You know what?

Speaker 14 There's probably some people listening now who haven't read the book. And I've read the book, so has Trevor.
And

Speaker 14 one thing that you do in the book, you make the distinguishment between a play-based childhood and a phone-based childhood.

Speaker 14 And you said there's been a rupture, and we went from having a play-based childhood where kids were outside, unsupervised, breaking bones, doing crazy stuff.

Speaker 14 Their parents get really afraid of these things that maybe aren't things we should necessarily be that scared about.

Speaker 14 And children go back into the home, and it coincides with them having phones and having this phone-based childhood. Tell us more about that.

Speaker 13 I can summarize the whole book by saying that we've over-protected our children in the real world and we've underprotected them online. Another way to say it is the book is a tragedy in two acts.

Speaker 13 Act one, we lose the play-based childhood. And this really kicks in in the 1990s.
So older millennials, people who grew up in the 70s and 80s,

Speaker 13 there was a huge crime wave at that time in America, at least, but all kids played outside. It was just, you just go outside and play.

Speaker 13 And then it's the 90s, which is actually when crime is dropping and life is getting safer and drunk driving is going down. We freak out in the 90s

Speaker 13 and we start saying, oh, it's too dangerous out there. It's too dangerous.
You know, stay home. You have to always be supervised or you'll be abducted.
We freaked out about child abduction.

Speaker 13 So that's act one of the tragedies. We pull the kids indoors.
We don't let them have play and free play is crucial for development. And then act two is very, very sudden.
It's between 2010 and 2015.

Speaker 13 In 2010, kids are going through puberty with a flip phone. And a flip phone or basic phone, you can text your friends, you can call your friends.
And there was a game called Snake, I think.

Speaker 13 I love Snake. Okay, but that's about it.

Speaker 13 You weren't talking to groups of 50 strangers. You weren't talking to strange men who wanted sex from you.
I mean, it was like,

Speaker 13 you know, it was a communication device. So if you're born in 1995, that's the last year of the millennials.
Suppose you're a girl born in 1995. In 2010, you're 15.

Speaker 13 You're through early puberty, but you did it on a flip phone without Instagram. But suppose you were born in the year 2000.

Speaker 13 So now you turn 15 in 2015, which means that your first phone was probably a smartphone with a front-facing camera because that comes out in 2010, with Instagram, because that becomes popular in 2012, with high-speed internet.

Speaker 13 So you went through early puberty constantly on your phone, taking photographs of yourself, people talking about you, communicating with strangers. The phone moves to the center of your life.

Speaker 13 So anyway, in all these ways, we had this five-year period where childhood is transformed into a screen-based or phone-based childhood that I believe, and I argue in the book, is just not conducive to human development.

Speaker 14 And I, what I do love that you do in the book is that you really

Speaker 14 kind of preempt any arguments because there's some people say, well, the world was always bad.

Speaker 14 They had, we had TVs, and you actually pin it down and you say, the depression and the anxiety and the loneliness we're seeing, I believe it's due to the smartphones. Can you talk more about that?

Speaker 14 Because that I was, I'm one of these people I say to Trevor all the time, Hitler didn't have screen time and he like turned out to be a pretty horrible person.

Speaker 14 So like, I think there's been some moral panic around phones and screens, but you make the case that no, you don't think you think these are really dangerous.

Speaker 13 Yeah. So the main criticism I get is that this is a moral panic, just like we freaked out about television and comic books and radio and everything else.

Speaker 13 And there is some truth to that, that the older generation always thinks the younger generation is being harmed by whatever they're doing.

Speaker 13 And sometimes that's wrong, like with comic books. And sometimes it's right, like with smoking or,

Speaker 13 you know,

Speaker 13 drug use, where we think, you know, kids shouldn't be doing this. So the question is,

Speaker 13 am I warning people? Am I raising an alarm that doesn't need to be raised and I'm just frightening people and there's really no problem?

Speaker 13 Or am I calling attention to what I think is the biggest threat to mental health, humans, children's mental health in modern history? So that's the question. Am I right or am I wrong?

Speaker 13 And some people say, oh, you know, correlation doesn't equal causation. The fact that mental illness rates all go up around 2012, 2013, it could be because of

Speaker 13 school shootings, they say, like, because we had this horrible school shooting 2012, the Newtown massacre, and after that, our kids had these lockdown drills. Okay, so 2012, that does fit the timing.

Speaker 13 But then why did girls in Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, across Europe, why did they start cutting themselves in 2012, 2013? Why did they start checking into psychiatric emergency wards?

Speaker 13 And so the fact that it happens all over the developed world, we don't have good data from the developing world, but all over the developed world, these rates go up and they were pretty stable for the years before.

Speaker 13 I don't know of another explanation for that.

Speaker 1 Let's talk a little bit about the two different worlds because I, you know, to Christiana's point, I actually love that you broke them down.

Speaker 1 On the play side, Christiana will tell you, I don't have any kids, but I'm vehemently against the way I see kids living now.

Speaker 1 And one of the big ones for me was just like when I moved to New York, I don't know why. I've been so like,

Speaker 1 I'll be at like playgrounds. No, I won't be like at the playground.

Speaker 13 Let me not say it that way.

Speaker 1 I'll be walking past the playground. You walk in New York, you know?

Speaker 1 And every time I'm there, I see every parent with a kid or every child minder with a kid or every nanny with a kid or everybody's playing with each other.

Speaker 13 Exactly. The parents are playing with the kids.
Exactly. And often they're on their phones at the same time.
Yeah, they're monitoring that. They're not in surveillance.
Yeah, they're not.

Speaker 1 And I go, guys, this is a prison yard. I keep saying it.
I go, find me the difference between this and a prison yard.

Speaker 13 Well, I'll tell you the difference. Federal prisoners, they're guaranteed two hours a day of outdoor time.

Speaker 1 But I watch this and I think to myself, where are the kids learning how to resolve conflicts amongst themselves? Where are they learning what games they do and don't want to play amongst each other?

Speaker 1 Where are they learning? None of this. One kid cries, parents swoop in.
One kid falls, parents swoop in. Kids argue with each other.
Parents swoop in.

Speaker 1 Like it's the dogs at the dog park have more freedom than the children do at a children's park.

Speaker 13 And the pigs actually wrestle and bite each other.

Speaker 1 It really, it really is interesting. And I see this, and then parents would say to me, oh, but you don't know what it's like to have a kid.
And I go, yeah, but I remember being a kid. That's right.

Speaker 13 And those parents were kids. All of those parents had free-range childhoods.

Speaker 13 All of them got to play outside. And the most exciting, I always do this with

Speaker 13 older audiences. Think of the most exciting things in childhood.
Call into your mind, remember what it was like to be a kid. Were your parents there? Were you watching a screen?

Speaker 13 No, it's outdoors running around with friends, hanging out. And that's exactly what we've sucked out of childhood and replaced it with mindless entertainment, 15-second videos.

Speaker 14 One of my core memories is I'm the eldest of four gals, but my younger sister is like 11 years younger than me. So there was a bit of distance between us.

Speaker 14 But it's taking my two younger sisters to school. I was like nine years old.
I had them one in each hand. And we'd walk up this thing, this hill called Beulah Hill.
It's a big hill.

Speaker 14 And then we'd walk back with other friends and their siblings. And it's one of like, I always recall it when I think of like a certain time in my life.

Speaker 14 It's just the image of me and my sisters walking up Beulah Hill with our friends.

Speaker 1 You know, so now let's talk about what it robs you of, because when I say this to people who have kids, people think I'm doing the grumpy old man thing.

Speaker 13 And my day, you ran around and you scraped your knee and it didn't, you know.

Speaker 1 And I'm not trying to say that. I believe that it's helping you assess risk.
I believe that it's helping you understand, you know, hierarchies. It's helping you understand social dynamics.

Speaker 1 It's preparing you for the world that you're going to live in, is what I always say.

Speaker 1 But you've actually done the work and you've done the research. So if a parent out there is saying to you, Oh, Jonathan,

Speaker 1 I don't want my kid being bullied at a playground.

Speaker 13 I don't want them being punched by someone or getting hurt.

Speaker 1 They're going to fall off the bars and

Speaker 1 they're going to hurt their knee. How can I allow this? What are they losing by not allowing this? Yeah.

Speaker 13 Well, start with the big picture, which is what is childhood for and what is play for?

Speaker 13 And because we're mammals, mammals have this really interesting evolution of having much more investment in the child.

Speaker 13 I mean, our women literally make food off of the skin of their chest and feed it to, you know,

Speaker 13 so it's a huge sacrifice. It's a huge gift to the kids.
And so mammals have this long childhood. And the reason what it does is it makes possible having a large brain.

Speaker 13 And especially really social mammals like chimpanzees and humans. How do you wire up that brain? And that's why we have this very long childhood.

Speaker 13 And the way you wire up a brain is by exploring, trying things and failing. Explore, try, fail over and over and over again.

Speaker 13 So when a kid tries to build a block tower, it falls over, they do it again. So

Speaker 13 play builds brains. It's all the things you just said.
Once they can master their, you know, building block towers and running and that stuff, then it becomes social. And it's exactly that.

Speaker 13 It's basically, these are the skills of democracy. In a democracy, the whole idea is we are self-governing.
We make the rules ourselves. We enforce them ourselves.

Speaker 13 That was the amazing innovation of the American experiment, it's called. And how do you learn to be self-governing? By being self-governing as a child.
And so

Speaker 13 when the kids are on the playground, it's the things you said. They have to choose what to do.
Like, what game should we play? Well, some of us want to play the, well, let's work it out.

Speaker 13 Okay, we'll do yours today. We'll do that one tomorrow.

Speaker 13 You have to make the rules and you have to enforce the rules. Wait, that was out of bounds.
No, it wasn't. And you adjudicate it.

Speaker 13 But what we've been training our kids to do since the 90s, since we got them hyper-supervised all the time, is we're training them to report each other to the adult.

Speaker 13 So if there's a conflict, he hit me. Yeah.
And that's training for authoritarianism.

Speaker 13 There's always an authority who will enforce things. We don't have to work it out ourselves.
Damn. Wow.

Speaker 1 We're training kids to what's like a primary

Speaker 13 shit.

Speaker 1 We really are. It sounds like we're priming them.

Speaker 1 That's a wild way to think of it actually. It's like you're not teaching them to be a part of a society.
You're teaching them to be a part of a monitored power structure within authority.

Speaker 13 That's right.

Speaker 14 Trevor, something that you say that you also bring up in the book, Jonathan, is that this kind of rise in intensive parenting, like these super scheduled kids, right?

Speaker 14 And I'm guilty of this myself, right? So I don't want to pull myself out of the equation. Like I think about my eldest son's schedule right now.
I'm like, well, he's got something on Monday.

Speaker 14 He's got piano on Wednesday. He swims three, four times a week, fortunately in the school.
And I'm a parent that's trying to not overschedule this child, right?

Speaker 14 And then I'm like, and then my daughter, who's like 19 months, she's got gym on one day, she's got music class on another,

Speaker 14 you know, they're just singing songs in a circle. She's got that on Tuesday.
She's got park dates on Wednesday. And it's like, these are kids that have, like, sometimes my parents try and FaceTime me.

Speaker 14 They're like, where are the kids?

Speaker 13 And I'm like, oh, they're at their things.

Speaker 14 And my mom was like, what things do children have?

Speaker 14 And I'm like, and then when I'm like, I want them to play with other friends, their friends also have their schedules.

Speaker 13 The schedules are clashing.

Speaker 14 You listen, when they get to eight and they get into ballet and they get into stuff like baseball, which is in, and then the travel teams, even if I wanted to break out of the schedule I'm already creating for my kids, there'd be no other kids for them to play for.

Speaker 13 Because I think culturally.

Speaker 14 All parents are over scheduling their children.

Speaker 13 That's right. There are two parenting styles that have been discovered that used to be class differentiated, but now they're not so much.

Speaker 13 And this is Unequal Childhoods. I've forgotten the name of the sociologist who

Speaker 13 did this. But she found in the 90s that sort of college educated cultures, they did what she called concerted cultivation parenting.
Concerted cultivation. Concerted cultivation.

Speaker 13 Yeah, like you're a little plant and I'm going to do all these things. I'm going to give you these experiences.
I'm going to

Speaker 13 make you grow.

Speaker 13 Whereas working class families had what she called natural growth parenting, which is, you know, the kids are running around, they get into some trouble, they get out of trouble.

Speaker 13 And so there used to be that class difference.

Speaker 13 But what has been found in more recent research is that now even middle class and working class, we're all doing the concerted cultivation. And it's a cross-race group, racial groups as well.

Speaker 13 That's right. There's not any big race differences I've found.
That's right. Yeah.
So we're basically denying children the main training they need in childhood.

Speaker 13 And that's actually how I first got into this was noticing that the students who arrived on campus in 2014, 2015 were different than than anything we'd ever seen.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 14 what was the difference for you?

Speaker 13 Very high rates of anxiety and depression. They filled up the mental health centers.

Speaker 13 They would sometimes be

Speaker 13 very anxious or

Speaker 13 even get upset if there was a speaker coming to campus that they didn't like. They thought this could be dangerous.
And we're like, what do you mean dangerous?

Speaker 13 Like, what do you mean you need a safe space?

Speaker 1 So this was... a distinct shift that you noticed.
So it wasn't like a gradual thing. It was like all of a sudden, bam.
That's right.

Speaker 13 That's right. Because we thought at the time that the students coming were millennials.
We thought the millennial generation starts in 1981. We'll go maybe to 2000, we thought.

Speaker 13 But it turns out that if you're born in 1996, you just on average, of course, there's a huge difference. Yeah, right.
On average, you're more anxious.

Speaker 13 And so you come to school and now you see like someone has a very different opinion. And you're like, you know, this is dangerous.
This is terrible. I don't want to engage with this person.

Speaker 13 And so that's how I first noticed it. And so this is, it's, you know, just the things you guys are talking about.
It's like, if you block the kids from having these interpersonal skills,

Speaker 13 you put them into a space where they see more things as threatening, they're not going to thrive in college. In college, you need to be in discover mode.

Speaker 13 I have a whole chapter on discover mode versus defend mode. And it was a very sudden switch.
Kids born in 1996 and later were more likely to be in defend mode.

Speaker 1 It's interesting that you bring that up because I've often wondered how much we devalue exposing children to, you know, for lack of a better term, adverse events in life, you know?

Speaker 1 And I think to myself, like, when we were at the playground, when we were kids, and like

Speaker 1 there were, there were kids I didn't want to see. There were people you didn't, you were like, oh, God forbid that kid is there on the swing.
They're not going to let anyone swing.

Speaker 1 Or let them catch you swinging.

Speaker 1 They're going to start coming and swinging you and you won't be able to get off and then you're going to have to jump and you might hurt yourself and it'll be a whole thing.

Speaker 1 But what I did enjoy about it afterwards was the fact that it taught me how to navigate these situations in life, right?

Speaker 1 Because life is going to be filled with people you don't agree with or people who are making your life adverse or people who are, do you get what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 It just creates, it creates a realistic expectation of what life is going to be, whether you like it or not.

Speaker 1 And it actually,

Speaker 1 I'm sure you've seen this. I think it was Canada who sort of like their surgeon general or something who said they're going to switch it up when it comes to children now.

Speaker 1 They are now encouraging schools and playgrounds and everything to allow kids to engage in what they call quote-unquote dangerous play. So they said they've sanitized playgrounds too much.

Speaker 1 You know, like even in America, for instance, there's playgrounds that have like a soft, spongy ground.

Speaker 14 A lot of them have that soft.

Speaker 1 Do you know they found that that's not good for kids?

Speaker 14 Oh, yeah. You know, I'm in the crunchy pipeline.

Speaker 13 Yeah, it's like it's terrible.

Speaker 1 It's terrible for you. Yeah, they said because it's like falling is something that you need to learn.
You need to understand the consequences of falling.

Speaker 13 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 And it also, this is the part I didn't realize.

Speaker 1 I knew, I would have thought intuitively, oh yeah, it's good for a kid to to fall and know that falling can hurt them.

Speaker 1 But what I didn't know was it encourages them to take risks and to and to think of what risk means. Exactly.

Speaker 14 Also, learn how to fall well, which is something

Speaker 13 my son to do. That's right.
Your hands, brace yourself. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 So Canada was able to do this because they have a wonderful researcher, professor at the University of British Columbia named Mariana Brussoni.

Speaker 13 And I talk about her work in chapter three of The Anxious Generation.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 she's been pushing this for a long time that kids need risky play. Risk is a feature, not a bug, of childhood.
And as she says, playgrounds should be as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.

Speaker 13 Whereas in America, in part because we have so many lawyers, everyone's afraid of being sued.

Speaker 13 And so playground guidelines will say things like, there must not be exposed roots of a tree near the playground

Speaker 13 because the kids might trip. which of course teaches them to expect no obstacles.
Everything should be clear and easy and safe. And then you go out into the world and it's full of obstacles.

Speaker 13 And so that's part of the reason we think why the kids began to freak out those who were born in 1995 they weren't prepared for life

Speaker 1 i often think that when i when i look at dating for younger generations now and i'm often intrigued by how they'll see dating and not all of them but oftentimes they'll see dating as a

Speaker 1 you know it's like a binary

Speaker 1 that failed it it was bad and it was good like you know red flags like that type of thing and then i always say to people i go well i I think because dating is still interpersonal communication and it's interpersonal relationships, they're going to be bumps.

Speaker 1 There's going to be bumps. So when people are, that's a red flag.
I go like, yeah, everyone is a red flag. There are no, no red flags.

Speaker 13 Do you get what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 But the red flag does not mean that you shouldn't be doing the thing. It just means that this is something that you might need to be aware of.
It's the roots.

Speaker 13 And I love that you said that because it's like, do we want kids to live in a world where there are no roots, which isn't going to be the world?

Speaker 1 Or do we want to prepare them for a world where there may be roots? And so they learn what tripping means, they learn what falling means, and they learn what getting back up means?

Speaker 13 That's right. And this is the dilemma that we're in as parents, because we love our children.
We see something bad happening to them. We see kids picking on them or excluding them.

Speaker 13 We want to swoop in. And it used to be when we were out away from our home, they couldn't swoop in because they weren't there.

Speaker 13 But now either they're there or we're all connected by text or they're tracking us. And so a question that I would ask is for everybody to think about, okay, you've got three young kids.

Speaker 13 What is the ideal number of times that you want each of your children to be excluded socially by the time they reach 18? Is it zero?

Speaker 13 Do you hope that they're never excluded from anything and suffer the pain of exclusion? Or would you like it to happen, you know, several times a month?

Speaker 14 Or I mean, it depends who's excluding them. Honestly, there's some people I don't want my kids around.

Speaker 14 It's like, if people don't want to hang with you because you don't want to do the things that they're doing that are perhaps not very good, I'd be like, oh, I'm doing a good job.

Speaker 14 You should probably be, it's a good lesson. If it's consequences of maybe somebody hitting or being mean,

Speaker 14 I would want that to be an occurrence. Do you know what I mean? So I'd, but I wouldn't want it to happen all the time.

Speaker 14 One of my kids was struggling with making friends. And I remember it really,

Speaker 14 they were into parallel play for a longer time than

Speaker 14 should be.

Speaker 14 They were struggling with cooperative play. Okay.
When I'd go and pick them up, and the teacher would say, oh, they played alone today.

Speaker 13 It really would hurt. Like, I, maybe it was my ego, but I was like, Saddles, I don't want them playing alone.
Wait, wait, how old were they?

Speaker 14 At the time, they were, they just turned three. And so, like, the thought of my kids being alone does scare me a bit.
Um, so of course it scares me.

Speaker 14 So, when you say how many times do you want them to be excluded, not so much that it would give them a complex, but enough that they would know that, oh, you have a responsibility to other people.

Speaker 13 That's right. So, the principle of inoculation is really powerful here.

Speaker 13 We all understand the immune system now, especially since COVID, that if you're exposed to a little bit of something, your body then develops antibodies to it. It learns how to defend against it.

Speaker 13 And so that's, this is called anti-fragility. There's a couple of words for it, anti-fragility.
If we think our kids are fragile, then we're going to protect them. We don't want them excluded.

Speaker 13 It'll hurt. It might traumatize them.

Speaker 13 But if we realize that they're the opposite of fragile, that they actually, they need to fall down, they need to be excluded sometimes to feel the pain of exclusion.

Speaker 13 This then causes them first a better understanding of how to be included and excluded and sympathy for the other kids who are excluded because they know what that pain is like.

Speaker 13 So, in all these ways, these negative childhood experiences are essential. Now, to be clear, bullying, especially if it goes on for multiple days, that's the most horrible thing.

Speaker 13 And there's no evidence that that's beneficial. But conflict is normal.
The kids have to learn how to have conflict and cooperation. They go together.

Speaker 1 We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.

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Speaker 15 Hi, everyone. I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of Crime Junkie, the go-to crime podcast for the biggest cases and the stories you won't hear anywhere else.

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Speaker 14 Do you have one thing I want to ask, and this is maybe a controversial question, but like, me and my sisters, when we were kids, we used to fight.

Speaker 13 Meet me. I have two sisters

Speaker 13 every day.

Speaker 14 Pull hair, scratch, punt. Oh, my God.
They used to call us the jungle girls.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I hope these weren't white people. No, it was not.
fortunately no it was like my it was my uncles and aunties yeah because otherwise you're like oh man

Speaker 14 we would have these like what you took my top

Speaker 14 it was i mean now that doesn't happen right and then i think about this like role of violence among children now.

Speaker 14 If a child hits another child, like it's, you can be suspended, you can be excluded, and you're on the track to occupational and behavioral therapy, which is a, it's a very normal primal response.

Speaker 14 What do you think about like the role of violence and now that like the absence of even like pushing and pulling and things that kids just used to do to learn limits? Yeah.

Speaker 14 Do you, is it something you think is good that we've lost it completely?

Speaker 13 Or do you think it still has a place? If you describe it as violence, I'm not going to say that, oh, there's a kids need violence. I would never say that.
But we're mammals.

Speaker 13 We love rough and tumble play. When I was a kid, one of the main, you know, like, what do you want to do? She should play this.
You want to wrestle? Sure, let's wrestle.

Speaker 13 And then we just like go at it and we try to pin each other.

Speaker 13 And, you know, so kids are physical. And if you ban, you know, some schools I've heard, they have a no-touch policy.
You can't touch another child.

Speaker 14 Yeah. And for boys, I think it's affecting a lot of boys.
That's right. And I don't want to be stereotypical, but like the rough housing that a lot of boys want to engage in is being really demonized.

Speaker 14 Exactly. And boys don't know how to, like, I think especially between like three and 11, they don't know how to engage in play with other.
kids right now. That's right.

Speaker 13 So I'm sorry, you have a son and then

Speaker 13 a son and then two daughters. Okay.

Speaker 13 So when we look across mammal species, especially across primates, the young males do a lot more rough and tumble play. They wrestle more.
That's just a, you know, it's a biological difference.

Speaker 13 It's an effect that prenatal testosterone has on the brain. And what we've done in our schools is in the 1980s, we freaked out about how American test scores were behind those of some other nations.

Speaker 13 There was a report, a nation at risk. Oh, we need to get rid of most of, you know, recess and art and summer vacation.
Let's lengthen the school year, give them more math, more science.

Speaker 13 And this was especially bad for boys. And this is when boys begin to drop out.

Speaker 13 Boys don't do well just sitting and listening.

Speaker 13 They're more physical. They're more

Speaker 13 subject to ADHD, for one thing. And so schools have become increasingly non-receptive or hostile to boys, even.

Speaker 13 And I would say having an absolute ban on any sort of pushing or physical, that would be really bad for boys.

Speaker 14 And I think we're seeing the consequences of that with like boys not really being a big feature on college campuses.

Speaker 14 We're just seeing like educational attainment and employment attainment is going down, especially for Gen Z men. Exactly.
They seem like almost like a lost generation.

Speaker 13 That's right. So so much of the attention is on girls.
And in the book, I focused especially on the data showing that social media is particularly harmful for girls.

Speaker 13 And that's actually what got me into the book.

Speaker 13 Those were the scientific findings that were most solid. That sort of got me studying that.
And I thought the story of the book was going to be especially social media is hurting girls.

Speaker 13 And I didn't know what the story was for boys when I started the book. I thought, is it going to be video games? Is that going to be the same thing for...

Speaker 13 And what we learned, and this is work I did with Zach Rausch, the lead researcher on the book, we drew on a wonderful book by Richard Reeves. He has a book called Of Boys and Men.

Speaker 13 And he is really leading the charge for a totally non-politicized effort to help boys. Because of course,

Speaker 13 everything gets in this country, everything gets culture war.

Speaker 13 Anyway, the point is, the story that we took from Richard and adding on a lot more about technology is that boys, of course, used to dominate. The world was made for boys and men.
But

Speaker 13 as societies change, as physical strength no longer matters so much, as America shifts to a service economy, that's bad for men, good for women. So that's great that women are rising up.

Speaker 13 But as schools and workplaces are becoming less hospitable to men, they're investing less of their effort.

Speaker 13 And boys are about six months to a year behind girls anyway, especially for emotional development.

Speaker 13 And so girls are outperforming boys at every level from kindergarten through PhD. Wow.
There's more girls who are succeeding, more girls going on at every level. So boys are dropping out.

Speaker 13 But at the same time that they were dropping out in the 80s and 90s, the technological world was getting amazing.

Speaker 13 So when I was a kid in the 70s, the only video game that you could play at home was Pong. Whereas when you, you know, you're younger than me.
What video games did you have when you were a little bit?

Speaker 1 So the first games I was playing, I would say, was around like,

Speaker 13 what was it?

Speaker 1 Was Asteroid, I think, was what I was playing.

Speaker 13 That was an old one. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Asteroid was what I was playing.

Speaker 1 And then I was stepping into the generation of, let's say, when I was at a gaming age, like that's when it's like Mario, Super Mario Brothers, you know, Street Fighter, all of these things are happening.

Speaker 1 Mortal Kombat. Yeah, Contra, Mortal Kombat, Sonic, et cetera.
That's now you're in like the prime time of

Speaker 1 images moving across a screen in a way that looks quote-unquote real.

Speaker 13 That's right. So the videos are getting better and better.
Now, at this point, you were growing up, the porn was still on paper. There wasn't porn on your computer.
You could find it anywhere.

Speaker 1 You've just tapped into my childhood, my friends. You could not find it anywhere.
This was the.

Speaker 13 Because he didn't have an older brother or anything. Oh, no, I was the older brother.

Speaker 1 I was the pioneer. You couldn't find it.
Let me tell you something. I try and explain this to my younger brothers now.
And I often say to them, I go, I am not against porn.

Speaker 1 I think the porn industry is terrible in many ways. Not against porn itself.
I think it's as old as time. However, I think we have too much porn now.

Speaker 1 And I think we have too much access to porn, right? So for me, porn was still like this magical thing you would bump into.

Speaker 1 It was this unattainable, there would be a magazine in a random store somewhere that had it on a shelf wrapped in plastic. So you couldn't even see what was happening.
That was porn.

Speaker 1 So yes, to your point, video games, yes.

Speaker 13 Porn, no. Okay, right.
But let's trace it on now for people younger than you. Suppose you're born in the late 90s.
Well, the multiplayer video games only come in after we get high-speed internet.

Speaker 13 So it's only the late 2000s, 2008, 2009, that you're really beginning to get these incredible multiplayer games where you're in your house with your headset and this avatar on the screen.

Speaker 13 They're amazing. And they go through many product iteration cycles to figure out what can we do? What's the point structure to keep boys on the longest?

Speaker 13 Because if we keep them on, they don't go to another platform. So,

Speaker 13 you know, the dose makes the poison. So when you get these incredibly immersive games that are designed to keep you on.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 And for boys, if you, you know, after school, if you want to play with your friends, you can't go over to their house. No.
You have to go home so that you can be on your headset.

Speaker 13 So the boys are having fun. They're enjoying the video games.
And once you get high-speed internet, you get porn, not just pictures, but video. Anyone can go on pornhub.
There's no identification.

Speaker 1 You click a button. You click a button that says you are over 18, which I love.

Speaker 13 I'll take it.

Speaker 1 By the way, I love that you pointed out how flimsy and fake.

Speaker 1 the checks and the protections are, which is a paradox to what you're saying.

Speaker 1 It's the same generation that won't let their child go down a slide that is beyond a certain degree of angle because they've deemed it unsafe and there's no roots of a tree.

Speaker 1 But then at the same time, your child can go into a world that can completely obliterate their brain and the way they see themselves if they just click a button.

Speaker 13 Yeah. That's right.
The way to understand how we got into this insane situation is to trace it out from the 90s on.

Speaker 13 So when the internet came out, the 1994 was when I first saw a web browser, it was miraculous. I mean, it was like God came down to us and said, do you want to know everything instantly? Type it in.

Speaker 13 You'll get an answer. We're like, are you kidding me? This is amazing.

Speaker 13 And so the early internet really was amazing. And your generation grew up.
You, you know, you were a kid when the first internet came out. And you played on it in all sorts of ways.

Speaker 13 Sure, some bad stuff happened, but your day wasn't dominated by a few companies that were experts at addicting. Yeah, they did.
So you could wander around. You saw a lot of stuff.

Speaker 13 You saw some bad stuff, but it was mostly good stuff.

Speaker 14 And it was also really slow.

Speaker 13 That's the other thing, like a web page

Speaker 13 would be like friction. I mean, I'll forget it.
That's right.

Speaker 13 And the other thing that happened in the 90s was as you get the fall of the Berlin Wall and the spread of democracy, and then you get the rise of the internet, we're all convinced that the internet is going to be the best thing ever to happen to democracy.

Speaker 13 You know, what dictator could possibly oppose the people connected in this way?

Speaker 13 And you go all the way from the 90s all the way through the Arab Spring. We still think that.
We still think by 2011, 2012, we're still thinking, oh, the internet is amazing. It's great for democracy.

Speaker 13 And we're still thinking, I think it's good for kids. I mean, it's the future.
I mean, the kids need to be on it because that's the technology.

Speaker 13 So as late as 2012, 2013, we're still all techno-optimists. And so we kind of know that our kids, all you have to do is click a button and you can be talking to strange men.

Speaker 13 There was this, did you, did you ever see Omegle? It was, there was a site. It was like.

Speaker 13 There's motto was, talk to strangers. Oh, wow.
Yeah. And a lot of them were naked men masturbating and trying to find kids to talk to to masturbate.

Speaker 13 And so a lot of, you know, 11, 12 year old girls remember these experiences.

Speaker 13 And the fact that we're so careful about letting our kids to a place where maybe some man will molest them, like Boy Scouts or anything else, we're so afraid, you know, or the playground.

Speaker 13 The child molesters are not at the playground. That's too dangerous.
They're all on Instagram. They're all on Snapchat.
That's where you can use a fake name.

Speaker 13 find kids, get them to send you a photograph. And then once they send you a photograph, you've got them.
You can now extort them. So terrible things are happening to our kids online.

Speaker 13 And I think we're finally, it's finally coming to us. The internet is actually overall a pretty risky place.
We let adults do what they want and take their risks.

Speaker 13 But my God, how the hell are these companies able to get to my kids and your kids without our knowledge or consent?

Speaker 13 We need to have some age gating on the internet or we can't just let kids wander on it.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I just want to go back to the boys piece because I feel very invested because one, I have a son and two, I have two daughters and this affects the husband market 20 something years from now yes right no it does like

Speaker 14 yeah yeah just being true and i'm like you know so it's gonna be a seller's market for the boys that are functional i don't know what's gonna happen

Speaker 14 what did that pornography exposure and the excessive gaming and the use of social media yeah and the absence of play do to boys in particular in a way that it didn't do to girls because girls also can watch porn yeah you know what i mean but there are almost no girls who are having a porn problem there are almost no girls who are addicted or watching it every day do we know why

Speaker 13 yeah i mean you know the evolutionary speculation is there's a whole bunch of research on on differences in mate searching and selection and yeah you know men are more attracted to youth and visual and so there's all kinds of reasons why this would be but you find this over and over again it just the nature of male sexuality and female sexuality, whether you're gay or straight, doesn't really matter.

Speaker 13 It's, you know, it's a male-female is just different about visual stuff.

Speaker 13 In any case, the way to understand what's happening to boys, I've come to see really more since writing the book, is imagine your boy is out there in the world and these sort of these fish hooks come down from the sky and they've got all kinds of bait on them.

Speaker 13 So the first hook is video games. And then you're a little older, down comes incredible porn.
And so, again, you know, some boys can just enjoy it with no problem.

Speaker 13 But again, you find usually between 5% and 15% for each of these get addicted. They have a behavioral addiction.
And then they get a little older, they find ways to gamble even before they're 18.

Speaker 13 And that's all set up to catch boys. You got the crypto investing, you got stock investing, all of it is gamified for boys.
Oh, and you got the vaping and the marijuana pens and all of that.

Speaker 13 And so imagine a boy whose day is filled mostly with video games, porn,

Speaker 13 you know, watching TikTok and YouTube videos, especially the very short videos. And a lot of the, for the boys, their feeds often have a lot of violence.

Speaker 13 They often have, you know, funny videos of people falling out a window, like 10 stories and dying, like or being run over by a car, things like that.

Speaker 13 and so imagine if that's what your boy does for half the day his brain his dopamine system the reward motivation pathways respond by by dampening down so that they require more stimulation just to be normal which is why if you take your if your son is playing a lot of video games and you take him away if he becomes anxious and irritable and possibly even violent that's a definite sign of dopamine change that your boy's brain has been changed now it'll change back but what happens if boys boys are doing this from the age of five through 18?

Speaker 13 Those might be permanent. We don't know.

Speaker 13 But there's a good reason to think that if you go through puberty with these distortions of your dopamine system, that it could well change the way you are for the rest of your life.

Speaker 13 And the way you'd see it is that everything off of the screen is more boring. So your boy comes into class.

Speaker 13 Now, half of the school day or third of the school day is on a screen nowadays, which is horrible. And that's a COVID thing.

Speaker 13 But what we're finding is that kids are having a lot of trouble paying attention to anything that's not on a screen.

Speaker 13 And it's because their brains have been gamified and the dopamine circuits have been changed.

Speaker 1 You know, I think of, you know, personal anecdotes.

Speaker 1 I've played video games my whole life.

Speaker 1 And our version of multiplayer used to be you'd have to be at somebody's house when there was split screen.

Speaker 13 Next to each other. Yeah.
But it's social. You're having a lot of fun.
It was so much farther.

Speaker 1 And it was a split screen and you hung out together and you literally were in the same room. And they would find a way to put you all on that.
You know, I think Mario Kart still does it.

Speaker 1 Like Nintendo, in my opinion, might be the healthiest gaming company out there. So I didn't play these games.
COVID hits.

Speaker 13 We all locked up.

Speaker 1 And then a few friends of mine said, hey, we play this game, Call of Duty, Warzone. I was like, I haven't played Call of Duty in years.
I'm not really a big first-person shooter guy, whatever.

Speaker 1 I got on. Let me tell you something.

Speaker 1 Even say now to like my friends, because I've made friends from around the world because of this game. But many of them who are a little bit younger will go like, hey, where are you now?

Speaker 1 And I go, guys, the only reason I'm not addicted to this game the way you are, the only saving grace was that i've experienced grass in my life before this game came but i don't understand how anyone would not be fully addicted to this that's right because i'm i come from a hybrid childhood half my childhood is swing seesaw jungle gym adventure merry-go-round that in my brain is still like a lot of fun even when i walk past playgrounds now which i don't stare too long you want to spin i just look i actually think it's terrible that adults can't just go and swing on things i'm just going to put it out there but anyway i still look at that with like oh man, that's a fun place.

Speaker 1 But if you, as you're saying, Jonathan, if you, if you're the now generation, let me tell you something. I sat on that console.

Speaker 1 I've spent an embarrassing amount of money playing these games because to what you're saying,

Speaker 1 they use a drug dealer model. Brilliant.
First and foremost, the game's free now. They never used to do that.
In my day, you had to pay for the game.

Speaker 13 So you just download the game. No, no, game's free.

Speaker 1 Go. Fortnite.
Free, free, free. Go, go, take it.

Speaker 13 I don't know. Warzone, free, free, free.
All of it. Take it.
Take the game.

Speaker 1 Play it. and then what they do is they just like sort of like just give you these little drops of dopamine as you say

Speaker 1 sounds upgrades levels and you're trying to get somewhere and you're trying to unlock a new gun or a skin a packet and then they deny it all the time but some of them are better than others and so now you're going i'm getting left behind and you're competitive so you want to and the amount of time and money that young boys will spend in this world where now to your point your whole community exists yeah that's right if you're not in that world you don't have a community now yeah you know, but now if you are, if you get left behind in that world, you also don't have a community.

Speaker 1 So now you have to pay to stay a part of your community.

Speaker 1 And so now there's kids who I can only imagine are raiding their parents' credit cards or like finding ways to get money because the game perpetually wants from you.

Speaker 1 And if you talk to game companies now, they'll say, oh, no, but it's free to play. It's like, yeah, that's the same thing.

Speaker 13 Just give us your soul. Exactly.

Speaker 14 But Jonathan, you say something in the book about the importance of communities that have a cost to join and a cost to leave and are also embodied. So you need to physically be there.

Speaker 14 And these video games are the opposite of that because it's free to

Speaker 1 join, free to leave.

Speaker 14 And it's not embodied. And those things are really, really terrible for like a growing and emerging.

Speaker 13 Yeah, so what does what does that do?

Speaker 1 So let's say you're a parent of boys listening to this right now, or you may be one of those boys. Tell us why it's so bad.
Because I, I, in COVID, for instance, I loved it.

Speaker 1 And then now, because it's not in my life in the same way, like literally, I think this morning a friend sent me a link, one of the crew, and he was like, oh, are they bringing back for dance?

Speaker 1 Are you coming? And I was like, ah, we'll see.

Speaker 13 I don't know.

Speaker 1 But, but for somebody who's really in it, and they go, no, Jonathan, this is my community, my life. I have fun.
I enjoy myself. I see nothing wrong.
What is the wrong that we may not be seeing?

Speaker 13 So,

Speaker 13 so. Girls really thrive if they have a couple of close friends.
They tend to get together in small groups and talk.

Speaker 13 Boys tend to choose larger groups and then they'll break up into teams to do sports or competition. That's what kids do when they can do what they want.

Speaker 13 And with the girls, what happened was once they all got onto Instagram, now it's not just you and a couple of friends. Now you're communicating with all these so many more people.

Speaker 13 And we thought maybe 10, 15 years ago, well, maybe this is good. They're super connected.

Speaker 13 But it turns out that if you're having hundreds and hundreds of communications each day with lots of people, then there's no time for you to have those close friendships.

Speaker 13 And so for the girls, social media seems to connect them virtually, but at the cost of connecting them in real life.

Speaker 13 And so the girls got lonely, even though social media is supposed to be so, you know, it's supposed to help you find community. But the girls get lonely, lonelier once they get on it.

Speaker 13 With boys, the video games are better than social media in that at least it's synchronous. That is, if you, you know, so my son, we finally let him have Fortnite when COVID started.

Speaker 13 And I'm very glad we did because that was the only way that the boys were getting together. And I would hear him laughing his head off with his, he had his headphones on.
So at least for the boys,

Speaker 13 what they're doing is at least synchronous. And so that's good.
And they're laughing, which is good. But what we're seeing now is that there's really something special about being together in person.

Speaker 13 A lot of us, we've seen this since COVID. Now that we do a Zoom, you know, like what we're doing now, like I've done a lot of interviews on Zoom, like this is so much more fun.

Speaker 13 Do we sitting on the phone?

Speaker 13 That's what we talk about.

Speaker 1 That's why we did this because we go like, you, nobody, we haven't been able to quantify it.

Speaker 13 Right.

Speaker 1 And I, you know, I know people will be like, oh, but we can do it it over Zoom and it's efficient. And I think this is what I think people have missed.

Speaker 1 And I know I was guilty of it at some point as well. Yes, it is more efficient.
It is way more efficient to have a meeting over Zoom or to run your whole business day from Zoom. It is more efficient.

Speaker 1 However, there's something we forget. Life is not only about efficiency.
That's right. Life is not only about getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

Speaker 1 Life is about sharing connections with other human beings, sharing a vibrancy, sharing a resonance, sharing a frequency. It's literally about that.
And people don't realize this.

Speaker 1 And I'm sure you've experienced it. Think of all the Zoom meetings you've had and think of how little connection you share with the people, right?

Speaker 1 There's very little fluff. And I think we forget, and I've often said this, look, I think most office work is fake.
And it's fine. I don't care about that.

Speaker 1 I think it's good that it's fake because I think people just need to come together and have a purpose.

Speaker 1 But the thing that makes the meeting, the meeting is, yes, there's a little bit of work, but it's more just about these people coming together, looking into each other's eyes, which I think helps us as people.

Speaker 1 And we see micro expressions and we regulate each other and we laugh together and we get sad together and then we think together and that collectiveness of people, I think we lose.

Speaker 1 And so if you're right, if we were having this conversation over Zoom, you give us information, but you give us no feeling and we give you no feeling and we don't, you know, and I think we have yet, it's almost impossible to quantify it.

Speaker 1 But I love that you said that.

Speaker 13 So, no, my brain is going really fast here because I'm making a connection. I wish I had this in the book.

Speaker 13 In my book, The Righteous Mind, I cover the work of Michael Tomasello on joint attention.

Speaker 13 And Tomasello did this amazing work with children and chimpanzees.

Speaker 13 And he found that even though chimpanzees are really smart, and when you compare a chimpanzee to a two-year-old child that's solving physical tasks, like using tools, they're equal.

Speaker 13 But when you have a social task about like the experimenter gives you a signal, like open, like, look at that cup. It's there.
The reward is under that cup, not that one.

Speaker 13 The monkeys have no clue.

Speaker 13 The apes have no clue. They don't take signals, whereas the kids are communicating even before they can speak.
They understand what is being communicated.

Speaker 13 And he points out, and I think this is really important here. He points out that we have this ability to do joint attention, which is where, like right now,

Speaker 13 we are all totally aware that we are doing a podcast together. Yes.
And we all kind of know we're dividing dividing the labor and we're taking turns. Yes.
All of that is happening.

Speaker 13 So Thomas Sella says, it is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimps carrying a log together. So they could easily escape from their enclosure if they could pick up the log and go.

Speaker 13 And they're brilliant as individuals, but they can't do things together. So we humans, we have this magical ability.

Speaker 13 And you know this, if you know, you traveled a lot, sometimes you're in a country where you don't speak the language. but you can still kind of like

Speaker 13 you can still kind of communicate because we're all we all understand oh yeah i think he probably is trying to find the bathroom. Whatever.

Speaker 13 So we have this joint attention. And it just occurred to me now as you were talking about Zoom.
Zoom, that kills that.

Speaker 13 Like you don't, I mean, you don't, you don't have, at least you don't have it as much.

Speaker 13 And then to bring it back to the kids, you know, my son was laughing his hat off, but he wasn't in the room with anyone else. And so I think there's really something missing.

Speaker 13 You don't have the joint attention, and the shared, the shared laughter is not as good if you're not in the room.

Speaker 1 Now it's time for a segment we call call Where in the World, brought to you by Uber. Whether it's your best friend's wedding or your niece's first ballet recital, Uber is on their way.

Speaker 1 So you can show up for what matters most.

Speaker 14 So, Trevor, where are you right now?

Speaker 1 Ah, I'm in South Africa.

Speaker 13 Oh, Satafrika.

Speaker 1 Johannesburg,

Speaker 1 Josie, Mabuening.

Speaker 13 I want to whistle. Some people call it.
I want to whistle. Yeah, you should.
Yeah, Richard Ritual.

Speaker 1 some people say Jayberg. Don't ever do that.
Whoever you are, whoever started Jayberg, if I find you, I'm going to hurt you. There's been a random, I don't know.

Speaker 13 How do they do that? You say Joe Berg.

Speaker 13 Joe Berger.

Speaker 1 You say Jayberg, you say Jorzy, you say Johannesburg. Don't say Jayberg.
Whoever this person is, just please don't do that. It's like saying, it's like saying, are you from NY City?

Speaker 13 Don't do that.

Speaker 1 Just don't do that.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 14 And that sounds like if Chat GPT became a human, then he's like,

Speaker 14 and wise,

Speaker 13 yeah, yeah, you're like, this is weird, yeah, but it's been good.

Speaker 1 I've been with my people, eating my food. Uh, I started cooking.
Have you ever heard of pup? I started cooking pup.

Speaker 14 What is that?

Speaker 1 It's like our version, our maize dish.

Speaker 13 Nigerians have a version of it. It's a pound cam, right?

Speaker 1 Sort of, yeah. Yeah, but then we use maize meal for hours.
Yeah, so I've been doing that.

Speaker 1 I've become like fufu.

Speaker 13 It's exactly fufu, actually. It's like fufu, yeah.
It's the same thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's pretty much exactly fufu.

Speaker 14 So you've been like on the stove, like pounding.

Speaker 1 Ah, Ah, no,

Speaker 1 I found an automatic.

Speaker 13 Oh, my God, Trevor.

Speaker 14 Trevor, come on. You're not making it then.
You're not making it. That's not real.

Speaker 13 Wow. No, that's not real.

Speaker 1 How quickly we went from joy to judgment.

Speaker 14 No, you need to make it the way the grandmothers made it outside

Speaker 13 the real deal.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and then, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I mean, you're right, but I don't know. I don't have the forearm strength that my grandmother had.

Speaker 1 You have to have like a specific technique when you're making any type of maze-related. You, yeah, it's, I know, you know what, I'll try.
I feel like you've guilted me enough, and now I'll try.

Speaker 1 In fact, right after this, I'm gonna try. Well, that was today's Wear in the World brought to you by Uber.

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Speaker 1 Can I tell you the most fun we had during COVID was, you know, like everyone was in the bubble phase.

Speaker 1 The most fun we had, and this I stole from my younger days, was there used to be what they called internet cafes when I was growing up.

Speaker 1 And these were little stores that had a bunch of computers connected to the internet because you couldn't get internet at home.

Speaker 1 And what would happen is people would host gaming tournaments there.

Speaker 1 And that I found was the perfect hybrid, right? So, but what I did for the COVID thing was because we were already in a bubble. It was me and my bubble people.

Speaker 1 We put all our PlayStations in the same room, in the same room, and we connected them up. Let me tell you something.
All that laughter,

Speaker 1 you thought you were laughing before. Yeah.
And I will encourage any parent who has kids who play these games, like, don't kill the thing. Don't try and find the hybrid.
I know it's going to be work.

Speaker 1 I know it's going to be a mission, but I promise you now, put these kids in the same room, still with their screens, little monitors, and their video game consoles.

Speaker 1 Put them in the same room doing the same thing.

Speaker 1 The exponential gain in connection, laughter, love, joy, everything that you experience, I can't even like I can't, because this is what I realized it does is

Speaker 1 it reminds you that the connection is not coming from the game. It's coming from the people you are playing the game with.

Speaker 13 That's right. The game should be a sort of a thing that brings you together in person.

Speaker 1 That's what I felt. Every time I took off the headset and I turned off the console, there was a deep sadness I felt because I was like, ah, my community is gone because they were during COVID.

Speaker 1 But when I had the bubble and we did that, it was like over the Christmas period, you turned off the console and now you went and sat on the couch together.

Speaker 1 So now we laughed and we talked, and it reminded me that, no, no, no, no, the community was the thing. The game was just something we did together.
Oh, good.

Speaker 13 So let's bring in Bob Putnam here because I listened to your conversation. Yeah, you're right.
That was so good. I mean, he is absolutely phenomenal.

Speaker 13 So, for everybody listening, he wrote the famous book, Bowling Alone.

Speaker 13 And so, you know, we social scientists, we all love his work. We've been citing him for, you know, certainly for 25 years.

Speaker 13 His work is really important here because, you know, Putnam describes how up through the mid-70s, America had a lot of social capital, a lot of trust.

Speaker 13 So even though there's a lot of crime, we all played outside.

Speaker 13 And, you know, we all knew like if I wipe out on my bicycle and I'm badly hurt, my friend could knock on any door and say, can you call his mom? Yeah.

Speaker 13 But after the 70s, it begins declining our trust in each other. And so the reason we don't let our kids out in the 90s is not because the world's getting more dangerous.
It's actually getting safer.

Speaker 13 It's because we're losing trust in our neighbors, we're losing the sense of community.

Speaker 13 And once we lose the sense of community, the sense that all of us are at least a little bit responsible for other people's kids, now it's like, as we just, as we joked about, like, you know, you say, I walked by a playground.

Speaker 13 Oh, no, you're a man. You can't go near a playground.
You're going to molest a child.

Speaker 13 So as we all freaked out about that, and it's not that there was nothing to freak out about, but boy, did we overdo it by saying, like, let's just not get involved in anyone else's child.

Speaker 13 Now it falls all on the mother. Now the responsibility falls especially on the mother.
And if a kid is seen playing outside without supervision, all the blame goes to the mother. How dare you?

Speaker 13 She could be abducted.

Speaker 14 There was a recent case where a woman sent her child to get milk or something, and I think someone

Speaker 14 was.

Speaker 1 Yeah, she was arrested. She was put in jail.

Speaker 13 Which is insane. The boy was 10.
Yeah. And she didn't even send him.
The boy was 10, and he decided to walk. you know, a little bit to a store.
Which is a credit to her, by the way.

Speaker 13 That's the hero's like, oh, I'm going to go to the store. Yeah, that's right.
So, so a lot of the fear in America is not just of abduction.

Speaker 13 Some people are afraid of abduction, which is almost unheard of in this country.

Speaker 13 But others of us are afraid that a neighbor will call the police on.

Speaker 13 So it's safer.

Speaker 13 It's safer.

Speaker 1 But it's funny you say this.

Speaker 1 And I'm always cautious in how I say this, but I feel like Americans really need to be aware of this.

Speaker 1 So much of what America is experiencing and doing right now is akin to what you would hear in like communist, like Soviet, you know, USSR times, like it was like where it was like neighbor might call the police on you.

Speaker 1 And it was all about that. It was all about like, it wasn't just that the state was surveilling you.
It was that you didn't know who even your family was surveilling you.

Speaker 1 It was, and I, I, I literally think about what you're saying and I go, if we live in a world, if you call the police to tell your neighbor that their music is too loud.

Speaker 13 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 Then like you don't understand that you are furthering a society where you are destined to be governed by some autocratic power and some because you can just knock.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you can literally knock and say, hey, the music is very loud. Are you guys going to turn it? Just...
Because I don't think your neighbor's trying to destroy your life by playing music.

Speaker 13 Do you get what I'm saying? But if we don't know each other, we're afraid they'll yell at us. They might be armed.
Who knows? Yes.

Speaker 13 Yes, it all becomes...

Speaker 1 But now to your point, now the next generation hasn't even met people in person. They haven't even, they've never had a conflict in person

Speaker 13 and so they live in a world where they go oh no you just report for offensive content report for you know report report report but they themselves have never actually said to another human being hey would you mind not doing that that's right there's a really interesting observation about america from alexis de Tocqueville you know the French sociologist or aristocrat but he who traveled in America in the 1830s and he wrote Democracy in America which many American kids used to read in the middle school And de Tocqueville observes that in America, it's the most amazing thing.

Speaker 13 When a town, when they need to build a bridge over the stream, they need to build a school or a hospital, the townspeople get together and somebody figures is going to lead it and they figure out how to raise the money and then they do it.

Speaker 13 Whereas in France, we wait for the king to do it. And in Britain, you know, they wait for the nobles to do it.
And this is an amazing thing about America.

Speaker 13 And this is really the whole, the whole Ben Franklin thing. Like, let's start institutions.
There's a problem. Let's solve it.

Speaker 13 And this is part of what made America amazing and special and different is that we had such a vast country and such a weak central government that you couldn't really count on government.

Speaker 13 So that was part of the American character. But now we're blocking children from developing that.
We're blocking children from having the ability to say, hey, we've got a problem.

Speaker 13 Let's figure out how to solve it. Let's just call in the authorities.
So once again, we're preparing our kids for authoritarianism, not for democracy.

Speaker 14 I wanted to talk more about gals.

Speaker 13 Yep. Let's go back to that.

Speaker 14 And the thing that really leapt out to me, and I knew this

Speaker 14 intuitively, because I think social media has destroyed millennial women's sense of self-esteem.

Speaker 14 And the reason a lot of us are getting certain surgeries and Botox and it, because we're like, on our feeds, we're like, oh, I feel like I look bad. Let me fix it.

Speaker 14 We have the disposable income to fix it.

Speaker 14 I want to talk a lot about the self-harm that we're seeing about with girls and their exposure to certain images on social media, with affecting their body image.

Speaker 14 And you mentioned another thing about role models. Basically, look, what were you telling girls to look to via Instagram, et cetera? Can you talk more about that? Because I was really struck by it.

Speaker 13 Yeah. Yeah.
So for girls, the central harm, the most important harm, comes through social media.

Speaker 13 And so one way to think about this is if you're a company and you want to trap girls, what you would do is you would say, hey, here's social information.

Speaker 13 Do you want to see what so-and-so said about so-and-so? Do you want to see who's friends with who? Who's dating who? So that's much more appealing to girls.

Speaker 13 That's right, gossip. That's right.

Speaker 13 Girls and women have a more developed sense of social relationships. They have a map in their head.

Speaker 13 You know, it's a common joke, whereas like, you know, a lot of men have to, you know, say, honey, how do I know that person? Like, my friend?

Speaker 13 So girls and women, they're more interested in it. They're more socially savvy.
And so they all rush onto Instagram, especially around 2012, and now they're in it.

Speaker 13 Okay, but once they're in it, and this is pushing out real-world relationships, it's pushing out gossiping with two friends in person. What are they looking at?

Speaker 13 They're looking at photos of each other who are often enhanced or at least carefully selected to look at their best.

Speaker 13 So on average, the average woman is below average, at least compared to what she sees.

Speaker 13 And so

Speaker 13 that's the healthy stuff, just seeing your friends. Okay, then there's all the influencers.

Speaker 13 Kids need role models. I have a whole chapter in the book on puberty.
Part of what's happening at puberty is you're making the transition from child to adult.

Speaker 13 And so you're looking desperately for role models. I'm a girl.
How do I become a woman? Oh, I should, you know, I dress this way. I wear makeup.

Speaker 13 And if girls are exposed to inappropriate influencers, this is why we now have nine and 10-year-old girls going to Sephora, buying euthanizing youth anti-Asian. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 13 So it's completely insane. So

Speaker 13 just exposing girls to all these models that show them what matters about you is your looks. What matters about you is your skin, your hair, your breasts.
That's what matters.

Speaker 13 And that's what you have to be conscious of. This is a terrible thing to do to girls during the most difficult period of their lives.
But it gets darker.

Speaker 13 So suppose a girl wants to be thin because there's so much pressure to be thin. So she types in something about dieting on Instagram or TikTok.

Speaker 13 And many reporters and attorneys general and law enforcement agents have done this. You create an account, you say you're a 13-year-old girl, you say, give me stuff on dieting.

Speaker 13 And before you know it, you're getting eating disorder stuff. You know, like no food tastes as good as being thin.

Speaker 13 The new mantra is lean is law, which is coming across. Oh, that's what does that mean? What does that mean?

Speaker 14 Lean is law. Like being lean is the thing that you have to adhere to.
That's the social.

Speaker 1 That's the new thing they say. Yeah.
Right. Oh, yeah.
The one is, what is it? Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.

Speaker 13 Thank you. That's what I was trying to remember.
Yeah. So this is a really sick thing to do to girls.
And at the same time, the screen-based life is causing them to be more obese.

Speaker 13 So we have a whole generation that I think the average is 12 minutes of vigorous exercise a day and eight to 10 hours of screen time a day, not including school.

Speaker 13 The phone-based childhood is making them heavier while at the same time telling the girls you have to be thinner, which is almost impossible to do.

Speaker 13 The other thing that is important about girls is that they're more emotionally connected. They're more emotionally savvy.

Speaker 13 They pick up more when someone is feeling something but doesn't express it. Whereas boys are a little more clueless.
So the point is, Boys are on together.

Speaker 13 They're not really picking up each other's emotions. They're just laughing about, you know, sports or war or sex or funny videos.

Speaker 13 When girls get on, they're just much more sensitive to the emotions being expressed and they take on each other's emotions more. And I think this can explain a mystery in the data.

Speaker 13 When we graph out all of these mental illness stats, the boys are doing worse too, no question about it. But the boys' curves are gradual.

Speaker 13 Whereas the girls, it's stable from the 90s on most things through 2011. And then 2012 is like a hockey stick and it goes up very sharply.

Speaker 13 And I think it's because before then, the girls were connecting on their flip phones and then getting together in person and that's perfectly healthy.

Speaker 13 But you get a sudden movement of everyone onto social media and now you've got all this social comparison and all this people expressing anxiety.

Speaker 13 And if you're expressing anxiety, I'm going to be more anxious. So I think that's why we see such a sudden change for the girls is the contagion of emotions.

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Speaker 14 The moms and dads listening to this at home, they're panicking now. They're looking at their kid, they're like, I've ruined this kid.

Speaker 14 The boy's never going to get a job, and the girl's going to have an eating disorder. What can they do? Like, what are the protective measures?

Speaker 13 Thank you for pulling me back from the doom and gloom because I can go on forever. Oh, no, I like doing food, but you know, okay.

Speaker 13 So, let's hope that nobody tuned out before this point of the conversation. So, here's what I can say with some confidence:

Speaker 13 The brain is still pretty plastic until the early 20s.

Speaker 13 In puberty, so the brain is changing very rapidly in the first couple of years and it's growing very rapidly, but then it reaches full size, almost full size by about age six.

Speaker 13 And after that, the game is not growth. The game is like which neurons are going to wire up to which, which neurons are going to disappear.

Speaker 13 And so they're tuning up with cultural input. And so, and it especially speeds up in early puberty.
I want everybody to really focus on early puberty. Try to protect your kids during that period.

Speaker 13 But suppose your kid is 15, she or he has already been on the video games, the social media. You know, one possibility is that the changes could be long-lasting.

Speaker 13 It is possible that if you went through puberty this way, it could change things in ways that are lasting. We don't know.
But here's what I can say for sure.

Speaker 13 When kids take steps to regain control of their tension, they get miraculous results. And I know this because I teach a class at New York University.

Speaker 13 I'm a professor in the business business school there. And I teach one of my classes called Flourishing.
And it's 35 undergraduates. They're mostly sophomores, around 19 years old.

Speaker 13 They all spend too much time on their phones.

Speaker 13 And the project is you have to, over the course of the semester, you have to change yourself in a way that will improve your happiness and flourishing by the end of the semester.

Speaker 13 So a lot of them work on their phone habits. And I say, if you're spending three hours a day or more on social media, you have to work on this one because there's no point doing anything else.

Speaker 13 And the ones who are doing a lot of social media and some have like five or six hours just on TikTok,

Speaker 13 when they move it off their phone and onto their computer, they get a lot of relief. It goes way down.

Speaker 13 And then if they take it off the computer and just stop, especially for TikTok,

Speaker 13 they tell these miraculous stories. Like, I can do my homework now.
I have, it's not just that I have enough time. It's that I can actually focus on it.
And I have more time with my friends.

Speaker 13 And we're doing fun things. And I'm sleeping better.
And so what I can say for sure to parents whose kids are late teens is it's not too late, but they have to regain control of their attention.

Speaker 13 They have to largely get off of social media. I'm not going to say that boys shouldn't play video games at all, but

Speaker 13 just keep an eye on their dopamine circuits. Anything they're doing every day for an hour or two, there's a risk that it's changing them in ways that make everything else more boring.

Speaker 13 So do not give up hope. It's hard to do it yourself.
So, you know, to say to your 17-year-old daughter, you need to get off social media, even though all your friends are still on it.

Speaker 13 That's a social death sentence. It's going to be very hard to persuade your girl to do that.
So the trick is do it in a group.

Speaker 13 And that's why the class is so successful because they're all supporting each other. They're all doing it.
And then they sometimes they go out together.

Speaker 14 So is that like connecting with other parents and being like, hey, whether it's at your school, at their gymnastics club, being like, hey, I'm doing this. experiment.
Will you join me?

Speaker 13 That's right. Especially when your kids are younger.
You know, we all know the parents of our kids' friends because we arrange pickups and birthday parties and all that.

Speaker 13 So if you get a group of friends,

Speaker 13 the parents all agree to do this. We're going to follow the four norms that I lay out in the book, then it's actually much easier and it's a lot more fun.

Speaker 14 Yeah, can you say the four norms?

Speaker 13 Because we haven't got into that. So the four norms to roll back the phone-based childhood are pretty simple.
They are, first, no smartphone before high school or age 14.

Speaker 13 You want to communicate with your kid? Give them a flip phone, give them a basic phone, give them a Gab phone, a pinwheel phone.

Speaker 13 There's all kinds of options that don't have a browser, don't have social media. And I think the way to think about it is this.

Speaker 13 Across the Western world, we all have our previous iPhone in a a drawer someplace, and we all give that to our two-year-old. I just saw an incredible study.

Speaker 13 It found that 40% of American two-year-olds have their own iPad.

Speaker 13 And so we're just giving this advanced technology to two-year-olds.

Speaker 14 And do you know why that is? Because if they use your iPad, it gets grubby.

Speaker 13 They crack the screen.

Speaker 14 Guys, there's a reason for it.

Speaker 13 Okay. It's terrible.
Okay. But we do it, I think a large part of it is because we all discovered just give them the iPad.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 it's a digital passifier. Digital pacifier.

Speaker 13 It's like giving them a little bit of opiate. It calms them down.

Speaker 14 It's an iPad babysitter.

Speaker 13 That's right. So it's very effective, but I think it's also very damaging.
So my point is, don't start with that stuff. I mean, they're going to have that eventually.

Speaker 13 You know, give them, you know, if they're in third, fourth grade, you want to send them out into the world, give them a phone watch, not an Apple Watch that has too much stuff on it, but just a phone watch.

Speaker 13 I gave my daughter, I think it was called the Gizmo gadget. She could call three phone numbers.
That was it. And that was great for sending her out in the world.
So start real simple.

Speaker 13 Now, in high school, then

Speaker 13 many will want to wait later, but I'm just trying to propose a norm. What if there's a norm that we all adopt as a minimum? That would have so much benefit for all of us.

Speaker 13 So again, the first norm, no smartphone before high school. Second norm, no social media till 16.
And here's where what we really need is a law. implementing a minimum age.

Speaker 13 And Australia has done that for us.

Speaker 13 It'll take effect November and let's hope it works smoothly and then a lot of countries will follow.

Speaker 13 But anyway, try to keep your kids off from opening a social media account, especially TikTok and Instagram and Snapchat until they're 16. The third norm is phone-free schools.

Speaker 13 If you can text your child during the day, during class,

Speaker 13 that means that all the kids are texting each other and everyone has to check because nobody wants to be the one kid at lunch who didn't know about the thing that happened in the third period. So

Speaker 13 schools must take the phone in the morning. put it in a locker or a locked pouch at Yonder pouch or just a manila envelope in the front of homeroom by the teacher's desk.

Speaker 13 But take the phones away in the morning and phone watches and AirPods, everything, give it back when they leave. And that way they pay attention to the teacher and the other kids.
That's what we want.

Speaker 13 The fourth norm is the hardest, and we've already been talking about it. The fourth norm is far more free play, independence, and responsibility in the real world.

Speaker 13 Because the point here isn't just, you know, let's take away the screens. The point is, let's give them back an amazing childhood.
They need fun. They need interaction.

Speaker 13 They need to wrestle, put their arms around each other, laugh together, eat together. So we've got to give them back more time together.
And that's hard because we don't trust our neighbors anymore.

Speaker 13 It's hard to just say, go out and play.

Speaker 14 And we don't have third spaces.

Speaker 14 We don't have third spaces.

Speaker 14 A lot of cities don't have public transportation. I think like...

Speaker 1 But can I tell you a secret, though?

Speaker 1 And I agree with you on this because I like really

Speaker 1 like try and figure out how we can solve this issue, especially after we talked to Robert Putnam on the podcast.

Speaker 1 I think the truth is that we think we don't have the third spaces, but

Speaker 1 it's just because we've made every space a private space. Like I was just thinking this walking around like parts of Brooklyn the other day.
I've noticed a dip in how many block parties there are.

Speaker 1 Just that was a simple event where you closed the streets.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You agreed, neighbor at the end, neighbor at the end, we all agree.

Speaker 1 On Saturdays, we are going to close our block and everyone's going to just open their door and like walk out and the kids can kick a ball and can hit a ball.

Speaker 1 And I've seen a few parts of New York where they do it now. Like this is like in Manhattan, by the way, like Chelsea, somewhere there.

Speaker 1 I remember driving one day and I was irritated because I was in the car trying to get to an airport and the road was closed.

Speaker 1 But I loved the fact that like, I saw like someone hitting a ball, a baseball, and then people running. The whole street was just closed.

Speaker 1 And I was like, oh, we've been tricked into thinking the thing that's right outside our door is not a third space.

Speaker 14 No, but that's not a third space.

Speaker 13 It's a home.

Speaker 14 Third spaces are like actual.

Speaker 13 I'm talking about parks, libraries.

Speaker 14 They have decimated that.

Speaker 1 I'm with you, and I'm telling you that when I grew up, they didn't exist. Okay.
Black kids couldn't go to a library.

Speaker 13 Oh, yeah, there was no park.

Speaker 1 There was no during apartheid, none of this exists. But I have the full childhood that you're talking about.
Okay, because the third space was the street.

Speaker 1 Okay, I get what you're saying. Your grandmother told you.

Speaker 13 When you travel around the world, sometimes you don't see girls, but you always see boys playing in the streets.

Speaker 1 Yes, the third space is the streets. That's right.
So you you go, you tell the kids.

Speaker 14 We need to get rid of these SUVs. I would let my son play in the street if Americans didn't have these huge old cars.

Speaker 14 And I'm like, if he runs in front of the car,

Speaker 1 but that's what I mean by close the street. Yeah, yeah.
So I go, I would love to live in a society where we go. Like we used to do this on,

Speaker 1 I wish I could like take you to the picture in my brain. We as the kids ran the streets as if we were adults.
So we would close the street with people.

Speaker 13 We would take responsibility.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we would take bricks and we would put them at the beginning of each road and close each road.

Speaker 1 And then, when a car would need to turn into the street, because this is like a road, you know, it's not a public, I'm not talking about like main roads.

Speaker 1 So, if you're listening to permission, I'm not talking about the highways, an informal thing, yes, yes, I'm not talking about a highway, I'm not talking about a main road, I'm talking about like

Speaker 13 yeah, your neighborhood.

Speaker 1 It was a township, but it was still a neighborhood. We'd put bricks there, a car would need to turn, there would be kids stationed at every corner, and you'd shout, Koloi, you know, car.

Speaker 1 And then you'd run there together, you'd move the bricks,

Speaker 1 everyone would clear the road the car would drive either through where it needs to go to or it would like stop at the house that it's stopping at and then we'd put the bricks back on the road and then we'd continue playing and because i agree with you i'm not saying like go play in the street but i'm saying sometimes we look at problems in life and they they seem insurmountable because we're looking at them the wrong way

Speaker 1 Okay, no phones and no this and no. And where now are we going to build third space? How much is a third space? Where do you get it? How do we build a park? Do we get permits?

Speaker 13 Guys, everyone, if you are lucky enough to have a house if you're lucky enough to be renting a space if you you literally have the third space right outside your door that's right you just have to claim it back yeah you literally just have to claim it back collectively i think i think that that's really good because what you're saying is we have to be much more deliberate about this my parents grew up in new york city it was very similar they'd play stickball in the street and if a car's coming they step back exactly so we can't just say to our kids you know you're you're nine years old get out of here don't come back till the streetlights come on don't come back till dinner in some parts of america you can you can do that there are rural parts or places where people trust their neighbors but especially for those of us in cities we're gonna have to be a lot more deliberate and what you're saying is an example of of a community or a couple of leaders taking a step to make something happen right right here in chelsea so that's great i want to bring in here an organization that i co-founded called let grow if if you have young kids um go to letgrow.org it's it's run by a wonderful woman named lenore skinese who wrote a book called free range kids it's all about how do we help americans actually let go and let their kids grow with these sorts of experiences.

Speaker 13 And so we have two really simple programs. The simplest of all is called Play Club.

Speaker 13 And what it is, is a school, it's based around schools and school playgrounds. In a lot of places, parents don't trust anything, but they do trust the school playground.

Speaker 13 That's the one place that they will let their kids hang out after school. And so it's so simple.
A school just says, okay, one after-school activity that you can choose is Play Club.

Speaker 13 And so let's say your eldest son, you sign him up for Fridays, let's say. So he's part of Play Club on Friday, along with 10 or 20 other kids who are always there on Friday.

Speaker 13 And there's an adult nearby. There is an adult around if someone gets hurt, but there's nobody blowing a whistle.
There's nobody supervising. There's nobody directing.

Speaker 13 And so you were talking about your one-year-old being overscheduled.

Speaker 13 Luna has, Luna's a diva. She's got a lot going on.
Okay, but when she starts, when she starts school, especially say kindergarten, first grade, they love running around in the playground.

Speaker 13 So, play club is so simple. It doesn't cost anything.
Okay, you need to have like one staff person stay after, but the results are so amazing.

Speaker 13 Teachers often volunteer to do it because it's so wonderful to watch.

Speaker 13 So, just using the local school playground. Now, some schools in New York City, I talked with a principal up in the Bronx.

Speaker 13 He said there is no outdoor space. So, there are, it's not that.

Speaker 1 Well, that's a lot of New York City in general. Even the fancy schools, by the way.

Speaker 13 They usually have a little fenced in. They usually have something.
Yeah. They'll have some.

Speaker 1 But I'm I'm saying like a lot of them, you'll be shocked at how there's just like it's the city.

Speaker 13 It's the curse of a city.

Speaker 13 But but so we have to be intentional and clever. We've got to find spaces for our kids to play without adults directing them.
And it's going to be tricky, but we can do it.

Speaker 13 And there's a, you know, this is an enormous need. I teach in a business school and I've really come to see,

Speaker 13 you know, entrepreneurs are not saying, how can I get rich, rich, rich? They're saying,

Speaker 13 where's something that needs doing? Where's there a market for something? Where's there a desire?

Speaker 13 One of the biggest desires in the world is parents who want to give their kids a better childhood but they don't know where to do it there's there's no third space so um in britain there's a company i think it's called the den and they have they have these i i suppose it's for i don't know if it's for-profit or non-profit i should look that up but uh it's a place that teens can hang out and there are games and there's food and there are adults around we used to call that a youth club do you remember

Speaker 13 like the young people

Speaker 13 have been cut back yeah just going so we i think we have to really double down on that community is not going to happen naturally the way it used to. And we have to be more deliberate.

Speaker 14 Some of the things, ideas you had made me like vibrate a little. Vibrate.

Speaker 13 Which ideas made you vibrate?

Speaker 14 I'm realizing that a lot of the things I like critique other parents for, like I have myself, it's just projection. And I really need to surrender and be less fearful and anxious about.

Speaker 14 my children in the world, like fear of them having an accident or something happening to them.

Speaker 14 Like, because you know, when you're talking about that unsupervised play, I'm like, oh my God, this kid is going to swing off something. And then

Speaker 14 we all think is painful. And then I'm like, well, okay, he does swing off something.
And they do break their arm.

Speaker 14 And like, you always, because I think a lot of parents are catastrophic, catastrophizing.

Speaker 14 Yes. Because we are in this world of my father and his brothers survived a civil war, the Afro War.
They had far more danger and risk than I can ever imagine.

Speaker 14 And I'm afraid to let my five-year-old play with his Legos alone because I'm worried.

Speaker 14 No, I'm worried the 19-month-old is going to swallow it. You know, I'm like, and so I think that because my world is so, our worlds are really so safe and sanitized.
They really are.

Speaker 14 We don't have that sense of proportion.

Speaker 14 And then because of that, I'm afraid of like a thing that's really basic. And I, I, I.

Speaker 13 I've got a therapy for you. Okay.
I've got, so this is our second program at Let Grow. Again, it's so simple.
It's called the Let Grow experience. Okay.
Here's all it is.

Speaker 13 It's made for schools, but you can do it by yourself at home. So imagine you got an elementary school and imagine that you say all the third graders are going to do the let grow experience.

Speaker 13 You give them a piece of paper with instructions. They take it home.
It says,

Speaker 13 work with your parents to pick something that you think you can do by yourself that you've never done before. You're going to do it with your parents' permission, but without your parents.

Speaker 13 Let me give them some examples. Like maybe you think that you have a dog and you've never walked it by yourself.
You know, you're eight years old. You've never been like around the block with the dog.

Speaker 13 But mama, I think I can do that.

Speaker 14 It's so so funny, you said that thing about the dog, and I was like, Right, great, I'll let you do it, but I'll put an air tag in your shoes, right?

Speaker 13 Yeah, right,

Speaker 13 you know what? Look, if it takes that to let you do it, do it, start that way, or make breakfast for the family. Yeah, because one of the things that happened around 2011 is teenagers began much more

Speaker 13 likely to agree with the statement, My life feels useless. Oh my god, our kids are they feel useless, all they do is consume content, they don't do anything.

Speaker 13 And so, the Lecro experience is do something new,

Speaker 13 useful.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 two amazing things happen. The first is, you know, let's say you send your kid out, there's a store three blocks away, your eight or nine year old can go get a quart of milk and come back.

Speaker 13 The first thing is they are jumping up and down when they return. They are so excited.

Speaker 13 You know, they did something. And it's, and the key is that it's a little scary at first because they've never done it before.
But that's how we get over our fears.

Speaker 13 we you get over your fears by experiencing a stimulus nothing bad happens and then the next time you have less fear so the kids are changed and the kids have a sense of competence and capability but the unexpected effect or maybe actually this was planned by the by lenore and others who invented it is the parents fear goes down because and you know because like the first time we had my wife and i the first time we let our son walk to school i tell this story in the book we only let our son walk to school in fourth grade when he was nine because because we were friends with Lenore Skinese.

Speaker 13 Other, you know, no kids were walking to school at nine, even at 10, even fifth grade. It started in New York City, it starts more at sixth grade.

Speaker 13 But we were a little early on it, but the first time we did it, it was terrifying.

Speaker 13 And, you know, we tracked him. We gave him my old iPhone because we didn't know any better.
And we tracked him and we were like, oh my God, is he going to make it? And we're watching it.

Speaker 13 Wait, he must, he's at 7th Avenue, but that's a really complicated intersection. Is he going to make it? Is he going to make it? We were really nervous.

Speaker 13 And even though I know all this stuff, but this is, you know, I'm I'm a parent, like this is what we feel. And so, so then the second day, we were just a little nervous.
And the third day, not at all.

Speaker 13 And that was it. We never tracked them again.
Yeah. So the let-grow experience.
So if you do it in a school, imagine all the third graders in the town are doing this.

Speaker 13 So beginning of September, you see a whole bunch of eight-year-olds walking to the store. And maybe they're together and laughing, or maybe they're alone.

Speaker 13 And once you see a lot of it, you realize like, oh, okay, I guess eight-year-olds walk to stores now. Nobody's seen that since 1992.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 but but if you do it as a community, suddenly you change the norms in the community.

Speaker 14 I love that you're saying that because I was thinking about how can I do it with my friends, like the people who own my community.

Speaker 14 But it's like a collaboration between not just the parents, but schools. It's the shopkeeper.
It's saying, by the way, there's going to be some eight-year-olds coming in.

Speaker 14 They may steal, but they're going to buy some stuff.

Speaker 14 I think shoplifting is a good experience to have.

Speaker 13 And to be caught. I think being caught is a lot of people.

Speaker 14 I think that being being caught and then you learn like it's punitive and then you don't eventually steal a car one day.

Speaker 14 But like whatever it is, you say, you tell the shopkeeper, there's going to be some kids coming in. Like it just requires you to speak to different stakeholders.

Speaker 13 That's right. We have to be more deliberate.
And so that's a good point. I was emphasizing like, you can do it yourself as one family.
It's better if you do it with a few families.

Speaker 13 It's best if you do it by the whole school. However, you do it.

Speaker 13 I had thought before, and I sometimes say, you might even go talk to the chief of police and say, what do you think about this? We want to do this. Do you think this is okay? Because

Speaker 13 if you warn the police ahead of time, and they're probably going to be supportive, if you talk to them ahead of time, then there's not much risk.

Speaker 13 You know, if some nosy neighbor calls the police, they're going to say, it's okay. We know about this.
But I hadn't thought of talking to the shopkeepers. So that's a great idea.

Speaker 13 If there's a store that your kid can walk to, talk to them and say, is it okay if I send my kid in here? Oh, they're going to love it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 This is amazing. This has really been, and I mean, there's so many more we could speak about, but luckily, that's why there's a book.

Speaker 1 And I really encourage everyone to read it because I think if you don't have kids, I think it still applies to you as somebody who does have a phone, who might struggle with community, who might have anxiety, who might not even realize how much these latent effects have affected them.

Speaker 13 I could just say, just first, if you don't have kids, there's a whole chapter in the book on spiritual degradation.

Speaker 13 All of us are feeling it. It's affecting us all.
So the book, I hope, does speak to all ages.

Speaker 13 So there is a movement brewing around the world. I love it.
Parents are sick and tired of this. They are revolting.
Gen Z is sick and tired of it. They see what's happening.
They are revolting.

Speaker 13 So, even though this problem seemed insurmountable a year ago, what we're finding is the will to solve it is so widespread that people are coordinating, people are acting together.

Speaker 13 So, if we act together, I think we can beat this. I think we can restore a fun, exciting, play-based childhood in time for your kids.
Oh, amazing.

Speaker 15 And the husbands.

Speaker 1 Jonathan Haidt, thank you so much.

Speaker 13 Thank you.

Speaker 13 Great to see you both.

Speaker 1 What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jodi Avigan.

Speaker 1 Our senior producer is Jess Hackle. Claire Slaughter is our producer.
Music, Mixing and Mastering by Hannes Brown. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 1 Join me next Thursday for another episode of What Now.

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