How Smartphones Are Wrecking Your Life: Jonathan Haidt (Transcript)

Both of those things, because those are separate things that you see as characteristic of really the last 15 years, something like that, maybe with a real acceleration around 2014.

You mentioned in your book that you really had a sense, for example, that something went sideways on the campuses around 2014, which is certainly commensurate with my experience. So let’s talk about the surge of suffering. That’s your first chapter.

The 2014 Turning Point

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. So, you know, I’m a social psychologist who studies morality. My dissertation in 1992 was actually on adolescent moral development. So I have been studying developmental psychology and adolescence, but my focus has been on moral and political psychology. But something weird happened in 2014.

Greg Lukianoff, my friend who runs the Foundation for Individual Rights of Expression, he noticed it too. He came to talk to me. Something had changed among the students. There was a new kind of morality driven by anxiety and fragility. And so we wrote an Atlantic article called “The Coddling of the American Mind.” We turned that into a book. In 2017, we went much deeper.

And in that book and in my early work, I thought, we thought we had good evidence about the role of overprotection. Coddling means overprotection. Writing that book in 2017, we have a page where we say the timing is right for social media. Social media comes in just at the right time to maybe contribute, but we don’t really have evidence. So that’s it. That’s what we said. That was 2017.

By 2019, I’m collecting evidence because now it’s clear it’s not just America. What we’re seeing in first we saw it in all of the Anglosphere countries is that when you look at levels of internalizing disorders, so this is important. It’s not all mental illnesses. It’s not schizophrenia. It’s internalizing disorders, which is preeminently anxiety and depression related disorders.

They’re pretty stable from the late 90s all the way through 2010, 2011, there’s really no trend in the United States or in the other English-speaking countries. And then all of a sudden there’s an elbow. Around 2012, 2013, there’s an elbow and the rates go up very sharply for girls with more of a curve for boys. And that’s a clue. The different shape is an important clue.

But for girls, 2011, 2012, no sign of a problem. 2014, 2015, it’s off to the races with depression, anxiety. We see the same thing in self harm. And it was when I realized that it wasn’t just America, when I saw the same graphs in Canada, the UK, Australia, and more recently we’ve seen, we looked all over Europe. We find it strongly in northern Europe.

That’s when it became clear something big is happening to human children, at least in the West. We don’t have good data from East Asia or the developing world. But all across the west, something terrible began happening around 2012, 2013. So that was the empirical puzzle that came to us as college professors and that came to us in the national data. That’s what launched me on this book.

Beyond Self-Report Data

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, it’s an important coda that you mentioned there that it wasn’t only rates of self reported depression and anxiety. Right. Because I know there was a criticism directed at your work by a psychiatrist who pointed out or claimed that the self report data might be unreliable. For example, people can exaggerate their symptomatology, they can be trained to do that, they can do that to attract attention to themselves. There can be competition for psychopathology. That’s part of the structure of a contagious psychological epidemic.

But you pointed out, quite rightly, I thought that you saw the same data in episodes of self harm, particularly among young women, which is a much more direct behavioral measure of that proclivity for negative emotion. And I should point out clinically, just for those who are watching and listening, that anxiety is a response to the threat of destruction. Psychological or physical depression is more of a pain response.

And it’s got two aspects. It’s heightening of negative emotion, withdrawal in particular, that causes cessation of activity, but also decrease in positive emotion, which is more associated with demoralization and lack of motivational impetus to move forward. And those are, you described those as the internalizing disorders. That’s not the same as the fragmentation that goes along with psychosis or manic depressive disorder for that matter. These are, this is a quite a particularized epidemic.

And so, okay, so you laid out the data that this is occurring and you noted that it was happening cross culturally. So it wasn’t something specific to the United States. What drove you to the conclusion or even to investigate the possibility that this had something to do with technology generally and with social media more particularly?

The Great Rewiring of Childhood

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. So Jean Twenge was really the first person to call attention to this. Jean Twenge has been studying generations for 20 years and she had an article in the Atlantic in 2017 where the Atlantic chose the title “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” And so Jean laid out the evidence. It was all correlational, which doesn’t prove it, but the patterns are so consistent, there’s a correlation in time, which is when this new technology is introduced.

Around 2012 is basically so back up in 2010. Teenagers almost all have a flip phone or a basic phone. The iPhone exists, but it’s not very common. The front facing camera comes out on the iPhone 4 in 2010. Instagram becomes super popular in 2012. So that’s the period where teen social life is changing radically. From using a phone to call your friend saying, “Hey, let’s get together this afternoon,” to spending all day swiping and scrolling and commenting and posting. 2010-2015 is the great rewiring of childhood.

And the reason why we think that that is the major cause is because first when we look at the historical pattern, it’s a correlation. Lots of things happened in 2012. We can’t prove that. Oh, they get on social media and instantly the girls get depressed. That could be a coincidence. But because it happened the same way in so many countries, no one else has come up with an alternate theory. No one else has said, “Yeah, but here’s something else that happened in all these countries that would plausibly make girls, and especially preteen girls,” this is important.

The increases we’re talking about are generally between 50 and 100% increases in these measures of psychopathology. For preteen girls you sometimes get 200% increases. And for self harm, 10, 14 year old girls did not use to cut themselves. It was very, very rare before 2012. There you get over 200% increase in hospital visits for self harm.

So the historical correlation, it doesn’t prove it, but there’s no other alternative. And then you have the correlation in time use. That is the people who are heavy users of social media in almost every study are doing much worse. And then you have experiments where when you get people off of social media for a couple of weeks, only if it’s more than a week, this is important. Some studies make someone get off social media for a day or two. And if you’re addicted to something and you’re deprived of it for a day or two, you’re not happier, you have withdrawal.

But when it goes longer than a week, the vast majority of those studies find that people actually feel less anxious, they feel better. So a variety of kinds of evidence were coming in by the late 2010s, and this is all before COVID coming in, that it sure looks like it’s the move onto smartphones with social media.

The Preteen Crisis

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so let me ask you some clinically relevant questions, if you don’t mind, especially about the preteen issue and the issue with girls. So when you say pre teen, what age exactly are you speaking of?

JONATHAN HAIDT: So the CDC happens to break up data 10 to 14 and then 15 to, I think 19. So we have, I mean we could probably dig into it and go find a resolution, but that’s what they provide. So here I’m specifically giving you numbers for the 10 to 14 year olds. I would consider pre teen, generally 10 to 13, let’s say, you know, at 13 is when you’re supposed to be able to start using these things, at least according to the law.

Now nobody pays attention to that. The age of first social media goes down and down and down. For TikTok, it’s now around age 8. Instagram I think is around 9, Instagram’s around 9 or 10. So it is normal, it is widespread. It is probably a majority of 12 year olds who are already on at least one social media platform.

The Impact on Girls: Social Contagion and Vulnerability

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: My daughter was very ill for several decades. She was doomed with her illness and she figured it out and she’s like firing on all cylinders. So who knows what you can manage if you maintain your upward orientation. You don’t have to have all the answers, you just have to have answers to the questions he’s asking.

Okay, so you’re talking about really early adolescence on the female side. Okay, so let me lay out some propositions and tell me if they’re in accord with what you’re observing. So it’s been known for 300 years, 400 years that young women are more prone to social contagions. There’s a great book called “The History of the Unconscious” by Henri Alleberger and he traces the history of psychoanalytic thought way back before Mesmer and documents the hysteria, so to speak, which was the Freudian version of social contagion. Literally back it’s 300 years. So it’s very well documented. It’s a great book, by the way, very useful for the sort of thing that you’re investigating. And then the question might be why?

So I’m going to lay out some hypotheses and you tell me what you think. So the first is girls tilt more heavily towards negative emotion in general and they’re more agreeable by temperament. Which means that it may mean that consensus is more important to them, like social consensus, but also that they experience a given unit of threat or pain with more emotional intensity. That really seems to kick in about the same time puberty kicks in.

Now there’s various reasons for that. Women are more susceptible, you might say, particularly at puberty, sexually and physically. And then you could also make a case that their nervous systems are wired for the protection of infants rather than for their own optimal social functioning. I think that’s a reasonable hypothesis. In any case, it’s well documented across the world that differences in negative emotion and agreeableness seem to emerge early at puberty and then they’re permanent.

Okay, so then the next issue might be when women experience negative emotions, particularly of the self conscious kind. And self consciousness, as you point out in your book, is associated with suffering that tends to take the form of bodily preoccupation. And the hypothetical reason for that is that women are judged more harshly in consequence of their physical appearance by men, arguably, but even more intensely by other women.

And then the final kicker might be that the forms of social interaction that women appear to prefer girls online are short form and heavily image related. And so, you know, you talked about the front facing camera, God only knows what that technological innovation alone. And then you could imagine one final thing, which is, you know, it’s one thing to compete for social priority on the basis of your appearance, all things considered, with a small close group of peers. It’s another thing to compete with the whole bloody world in terms of maximal attractiveness.

And so, and then there’s the final issue we might say is that the Internet never forgets. And that’s a big problem too. So I’m wondering what you think of those potential contributing factors. Well, and also finally, girls hit puberty earlier than boys so they have to contend with the complexity of the introduction of the sexual, let’s say at an age where they have less experience than boys do when they encounter puberty. So anyways, those are some of the potential contributors as far as I’m concerned, to the differential susceptibility.

Gender Differences and Social Media Impact

JONATHAN HAIDT: I think every one that you mentioned is plausible. The way I approach in the book, and again I’m coming from social psychology, I think we’ll end up in the same place. I want to especially flag the social contagion. That’s really powerful, really important.

The way that I approach it is drawing from say Simon Baron Cohen’s work on autism. We all start off as girls in utero and if there’s a Y chromosome, you get a little testosterone. It changes the body over to the male pattern, changes the brain over to the male pattern on average. And the male brain becomes a little less about empathizing, a little less socially connected and a little more about systemizing.

And this is the biggest difference in, the biggest gender difference in interest is things versus people. Girls and women are just more interested in people they want to know. They have a more elaborate mental map. They are interested in who said what about whom and how did she know that he thought that. Whereas guys are just much more clueless about that. Guys are shifted over a little bit on the spectrum towards autism. And that is going to help us explain the boys story because that’s going to be more about video games and all sorts of other things. It’s not as much about social media, but the girl’s story focuses very much on social media.

Now why is the curve so sharp for girls? You almost never get such sharp curves in mental illness data. And I think this is because as you said, girls have long been more prone teenage girls have long been more prone to social contagion. And I review a study from the 90s historical study that there are two different kinds of social contagions. There are those that involve motor behavior like tics and also dancing fevers where people in the middle ages would dance for days and sometimes die of exhaustion. So there are some that are motor and there are some that are more anxiety related and maybe fainting. And so girls are more subject to both of those kinds of social contagion.

So I think the reason why it’s so sharp for girls and especially self harm is that that is a very particular behavior that very few people would think of doing on their own. But when you super connect all the girls in 2012 because they all get on Instagram or not all, most get on Instagram right around 2012, 2013, suddenly you have these pools, these discussion groups, these places where girls are sharing their anxiety. And the more extreme your suffering, the more extreme your anxiety, the more support you get. So they’re incentivizing each other to be more and more extreme.

And some girls are self harming. And while it’s not, has not been so rare for older teens, it used to be extremely rare for 10, 11, 12 year old girls. They didn’t used to cope themselves. So I think many of the things you said, the greater susceptibility to negative emotion, which especially comes out at puberty, hormonal changes change so much about boys and girls. The greater social connectedness so that girls are just much more affected by what they see. The desire for approval in the eyes of others. And all of the things you said about being judged by social appearance.

There’s even a quote, I think it’s in Marcus Aurelius about what a shame it is that girls are just judged for their beauty, their sexual potential, something like that. At puberty girls become objects in that way. And we haven’t even mentioned porn. So many, I mean the premature sexualization of kids. So for all these reasons, I think it’s been tougher on girls.

Now to be clear, we’ll get to the boy story soon. I hope to be clear, if we check in on kids at 14, the girls are doing worse. There’s no doubt about that. There are measures of anxiety and depression. Self harm are worse. Now boys suicide rates are much higher. That’s a different story. Boys suicide rates are much higher. But the increase, the percentage increase in suicide is often a little bigger in girls than boys. So they’re both going up.

The boys seem to be doing better at 14 because they’re spending huge amounts of time on video games and porn and that’s really fun. They’re enjoying that now. They’re lonely because they don’t have friends the way, when you and I were kids, we had a gang of friends but they don’t seem to be doing as bad at 14. Now at 28, I think they’re actually doing worse. But we’ll come back to the boy story later.

Female Aggression and Online Psychopathy

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay. I guess there’s a couple other factors that we might consider too. One is more abstract, the other more concrete. The abstract one has to do with fertility suppression among females. And so that’s a pronounced tendency in primate communities, by the way, that the females aggregate conspire, you might say, to suppress the fertility of other females. That’s the motif in Snow White, by the way, with the evil queen.

And the other issue with regards to social media that’s extremely relevant as far as I’m concerned, is that social media, the online landscape, I think, facilitates female psychopathy very specifically because women, when they’re savaging one another, men do the same thing to each other, by the way, and men can play the same game women do. But this is still the female pattern of antisocial behavior is anonymized reputation savaging. Right. And exclusion cancel culture, for example, looks like a manifestation of female type antisocial behavior.

And it’s really amplified by social media because you can denounce anonymously, not only with no cost, but likely the consequence of it is that you’ll attract attention and even positive attention. And so I’m quite afraid that the online world, what would you say it decreases our ability to inhibit psychopathy by a lot. And that’s a big problem. And so the proclivity of women to attack one another, such as it is, is likely amplified on social media and the consequences of it decreased. So those are additional potential contributing factors.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Absolutely. Male aggression has always been backed up ultimately by the threat that if you don’t back down, I could beat the hell out of you. And so when everything moves online, you’re not going to beat people up online. So life doesn’t get that much worse for boys when they get on social media. But for girls, as you say, it’s reputational destruction and damaging their relationships. It’s relationships and reputation, you can savage them both.

The fact that you can now do it anonymously and especially these. I mean, the most savage thing that kids were exposed to or is various apps like Yik Yak. There was a yolo, I think it was called, or tea, like Spill the Tea, where you can anonymously gossip about anyone. This is horrible. It’s always been hard to be the hardest part of life, I would think, I think is being a preteen girl. Middle school for girls has always been really, really hard. And to have to suddenly put this in where anyone can say anything about anyone in a forum where everyone will…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: See it with no consequences.

JONATHAN HAIDT: No consequences. So the savagery unleashed on girls, and often by girls, but often by boys too, they’re quite cruel here too. So my overall message is once you understand what’s going on in these online worlds, especially social media, they’re just not for children. These are adult activities, talking with unverified strangers in anonymous formats. Okay, if adults want to choose to do that. But under no circumstances should 12, 13, 14 year old kids be doing this. And the girls in particular, so many of them have been destroyed by it or damaged, harmed, I should say.

The Real World vs. Online World Paradox

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, and you make a very interesting juxtaposition in your book about too much supervision in the real world and no supervision at all in the online world. And the online world is a bad proxy for the real world because the bad actors have much more free reign. So, you know, it could easily be that the online world in a sense is an unplayable game. It doesn’t generalize to the real world. So the virtualization produces a psychopathologization or awkward terminology, especially by enabling the psychopathic types. So that’s a huge danger.

So let’s move to, if we can, let’s move to what children need in childhood. You talk there also. This is chapter two and three, Discovery Mode and Risky Play. And so now there’s a distinction that needs to be made here. One is the effect of the technology per se in the fragmentation of attention. The second is the content of the online world, pornography perhaps, and this online reputation savaging being foremost among them. But then there’s also the problem of what children aren’t doing while they’re absorbed in their screens. So walk us through that.

The Nature of Childhood Development and Play

JONATHAN HAIDT: Sure. So we are mammals. And mammals have large brains, comparatively, especially social mammals like dogs and dolphins and chimpanzees and humans and all mammals play when they’re young. Mammalianism is a long childhood. We literally drink milk from the skin of our mother’s chest. So we have a long childhood.

And what has to happen is the child starts off fully attached to the mother for sustenance. And as they get better motor behavior, they move further and further away from the mother to play. And play involves risky things, involves learning to jump, to climb trees, if that’s what your species does. Many or most mammals play chasing games, predator prey, tag sharks and minnows. We have to do this. We have to engage with the physical and social world over and over again, tens of thousands of times in a low stakes environment where I practice running away from a shark, and if the shark gets me, we just laugh and then we do it again.

And in doing so, the brain wires itself up. The brain is actually 90% of its full size by the time you’re six years old. So it’s not about growth beyond that. It’s about actually pruning out the neurons that don’t get used and emphasizing and ultimately myelinated or sort of insulating the circuits that do get used. So play has to occur over a long period of time. Physical, social, and then we need all sorts of other conditions. We need sleep, we need love, we need food.

What I want listeners to imagine. Think back for older people, if you’re over 35, let’s say, think back on your childhood. Think of all the fun things you did. Think of the best parts of childhood. Now imagine, let’s take some stuff out because you probably spent three or four hours a day on television, but you had a lot of other time on weekends. But imagine that half of our kids are spending more than eight hours a day on entertainment screens, not counting school. Half of our kids say they’re online almost constantly. Let’s just take that half.

For the half of young humans that are online almost constantly, what’s their childhood like? I’d like you to think. Did you ever see sunshine? Of course you did. Take 50% of that out. Imagine that you had 50% less sunshine in your life. Did you ever laugh with a friend? Of course you did, probably millions of times. Take two-thirds of that out because you’re not with other people very much. You’re alone, you’re sharing memes. You might laugh, they might laugh, but you’re not laughing together.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Jointly.

JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s jointly. That’s right. There’s a couple of things.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I mean, this is.

The Power of Synchronous Social Connection

JONATHAN HAIDT: Again, as a social psychologist, we are an ultrasocial species. We have this incredible ability to be like bees. Bees are so powerful because they’re one for all, all for one humans. We have the ability to get into that state temporarily. Moving together in synchrony does it. That puts us in that state, laughing together and eating together. These are three things that have really sociologically magical powers over us to link us to others.

Imagine that you never move in synchrony with anyone. You know, like girls do patty cake games and things like that. Imagine girls that jump rope singing. Take all that out from childhood. Imagine you don’t eat with your friends very much anymore because you’re getting together online. You don’t laugh very much with them. So you take all that stuff out. Now what happens? You’re lonely. Sure, you’re connected to 200 people, but it’s very shallow. You’re not laughing with anyone.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And they’re all replaceable.

JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. That’s right. They’re cheap. That’s right. Did you ever read a book when you were a kid? Take 50 or 70% of those out. Did you ever have a hobby? Take almost all of those out. There’s no time. There’s no time for books, there’s no time for hobbies. The amount of stuff coming in that you have to respond to and know is beyond what anyone can do in a day.

So once you give your kid a smartphone and Instagram or TikTok or Snapchat, that’s sort of the end of what we might have thought of as normal childhood. Now it’s going to be this phone based childhood. And the phone based childhood blocks out almost everything else. Not entirely. I mean, kids will still laugh with someone else, but it’s going to cut down almost everything that’s held. Oh, including sleep. And so, you know, I have some critics who say, “Oh, there’s no evidence that this is harmful. It’s just a correlation.” I mean, imagine a technology that comes in, it reduces your sleep, reduces your time with people, reduces your time in nature. You know, it reduces your ability to read books. I mean, of course it’s having harmful effects.

The Race to the Bottom of Attention

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, yeah, well, and so, so the picture that you’re painting is demolition of physical entrainment for sure. Right, so that’s a huge thing we have. No, that’s particularly relevant it seems to me, for kids between about the age of 4 and 10, you know, to play tag, to jump rope, to do those synchronous games, to play soccer, to play baseball. Right, Those are all. And those are all activities that are analogous to healthy adult activities because they require principle governed behavior and social cooperation, cooperation towards a goal.

So all of that’s supplanted, but even more perniciously, the replacement is increasingly short term. One of the distressing things I’ve seen, YouTube, for example, has degenerated staggeringly in the last three years because YouTube has started to attempt to compete with TikTok.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes, yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And so there’s this race to the bottom. It’s sort of like we saw this in magazines, Jonathan. You know, the logical degenerative endpoint for all magazines was People magazine, right? These short term, brief, gossipy, contentless, shallow representations of celebrity, let’s say that required no thought. Time magazine eventually turned into People magazine and there’s a race to the bottom online that’s probably a consequence of something like algorithmic competition for grip of short term attention. And that’s completely tantamount to addiction, Right? There’s no difference between grip of short term attention and addiction. They’re the same thing.

Television vs. Social Media: The Addiction Difference

JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, let’s run it through. Okay, let’s run it through this sort of the stimulus response dopamine loop. Because this is important for people to understand. You know, my critics say, “Oh, this is just like television. This is just a moral panic like television.” You know, adults said that it was rotting kids brains, but we turned out fine. So television is an effective way to present stories. Stories are good things. You and I watched tens of thousands of stories. Now a lot of them were stupid, like Gilligan’s Island, but they went on for 20 minutes. It was one story for 20 minutes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And everyone watched it.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Everyone watched it. You could talk about them. That’s right. You watched it with your sister or with a friend. So it was more social. So. And there was no behaviorist training. That is, you didn’t do anything that you were reinforced for.

What happens when it moves onto a smartphone? First it’s a small screen that you control. Now you’re watching alone. You’re not with your sister or brother, you’re not with your friends, you’re alone. And the content is shorter and shorter, as you say, it’s. TikTok discovered that the fastest way to train people is these short videos. And what are they training to do?

So a video comes up, you’re watching it, and you’ve been watching it for eight or nine seconds and you become an expert in saying this is not the most interesting. Let me try again. Like a slot machine, I’ll do a behavior, I’ll swipe and then I get a reward. But it’s a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. Sometimes I swipe and it’s not better, but sometimes I swipe and it is better. And so that feeling of slot machine. Exactly.

In fact, it’s modeled after the slot machine. The pull down. It was literally modeled. You pull down and then it kind of bounces. That was literally modeled on the slot machine. And so as long as it involves little bits of dopamine in response to doing a behavior. Now you’re engaged in the psychology of addiction. And this is Anna Lemke’s wonderful book, Dopamine Nation. Whereas television, you could have a habit, but it wasn’t, it didn’t cause addiction in the same way.

So social media, video games, and short videos are all based on giving kids quick dopamine. And if you don’t give them quick dopamine, they’re going to go to one of your competitors. And that’s why you said race to the bottom. Tristan Harris calls it “a race to the bottom of the brain stem.” If you don’t go to the bottom of the brainstem and just get them, get them, get them, then TikTok’s going to get them.

AI-Optimized Addiction Technology

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, and then it’s worse. It’s worse than you say even, because the AI systems are monitoring that attentional focus and they’re optimizing for grip of short term attention. And they’re learning with reinforcement, learning to do that, which makes them even better at that than any behavioral trainer whose human could possibly be. So we’ve actually, we’ve created machines that use reinforcement technology to optimize the grip of reinforcement technology. It’s worse than slot machines.

JONATHAN HAIDT: That is a really good point. You’re right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Oh, it’s terrible. It’s terrible.

JONATHAN HAIDT: It’s terrible. Right. So of course then an LLM is like a brain in the sense of just having lots of like neurons or system that are learning by reinforcement learning. And what you’re saying is by reinforcement learning based on your behavior, it’s learning how to reinforce you for the behavior that the company wants. I think that’s exactly right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, it’s worse, Jonathan, because it’s doing that separately for each person.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes, yes, right. And that’s right. But it’s going to get even worse in the next year or two because the first encounter with AI was algorithms that are choosing content, but that content was all made by people. And so the algorithm for the last, I guess the algorithm’s coming around 2009, 10, 11, in that range, they become very common. So we’ve had algorithms for 15, 16 years guiding the content. And they get better and better at feeding you from all the available content in the world. It’ll pick the stuff that gets you.

But now with generative AI, what we’re going to be seeing, I think we’re already beginning to see it, is this algorithm is going to be able to generate whatever short video, whatever pornography, whatever image of a person being punched or stabbed or beaten, whatever image will most engage you, it can generate it for you. So it’s the ultimate solipsistic empty. It’s like the beginning of the Matrix where everybody’s just in their podcast hooked up to a machine that is. If we don’t get a handle on this now, that’s where we’re going.

The Narcissus Mirror and Pleasure Island

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s the ultimate in Narcissus mirror, right? Because really what you’re doing is you’re gazing into a pool. That’s your fatal short term weakness, right? Wherever you can be hooked, you’re going to be hooked. And, and the problem is the it’s optimization for short term grip of attention at the expense of everything else, right? And so it’s bread and circuses.

See, you remember in the Pinocchio movie that the delinquents end up on Pleasure Island, right? You remember this is so interesting because one of the motifs in horror, common motif, is the vicious criminal psychopath sadist who lurks on the fringes in the amusement park, right? The evil clown, the carny who’s gone wrong. And it’s exactly pointing to the danger of that brainstem hedonism.

And the danger there is the sacrifice of the future and the social community for the immediate present. So it’s a reverse sacrifice instead of maturity, is the sacrifice of the present, for the future and for others. Immaturity is the sacrifice of the other and the community for the immediate, for the present. And these bloody machines are going to optimize for that. That is what’s happening.

The Destruction of Attention and Executive Function

JONATHAN HAIDT: Great. So this is the perfect transition to the boys story because as I said so I wrote the book focused on the mental illness, focused on depression, anxiety, self harm, suicide, and that is mostly worse in the girls. But what I’ve come to see since the book came out a year ago is that I think the bigger destruction is the destruction of the ability to pay attention.

And it’s for the reason that you just said we have to develop executive function. We have to develop the ability to set ourselves a goal. I want to do X and therefore I have to do steps A, B, C and D. But if we just get stuck in A all the time because A is so interesting and it just hooks us, we never get to B, C, D or X, then we don’t develop into an adult, we don’t develop into a competent adult, an employable adult, an adult that someone would want to marry or hire.

And as I understand it in the book, I make the distinction between slow dopamine and fast dopamine. Fast dopamine is you do something, you get a reward. You do something, you get a reward. And that’s video games, that’s scrolling. But slow dopamine is you pursue a goal over weeks or months and as you make progress on it, it feels great. Like when I with my first girlfriend, like I sort of had my eye on her and then I got up the courage to talk to her and when that first conversation went well, like, wow, that felt great. So it was a long term plan with various steps. And that’s what you need to do to become an adult.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s also overcoming real fear there. Right? That’s another thing is that it’s not only the sacrifice of distraction in the pursuit of a goal over the long run, but in the example you used, it’s, you’re moving towards a goal, but you’re also moving towards a goal in the face of your own fear. And that isn’t realized in the virtual world because there’s no practice for resilience.

Like part of the utility of games which we didn’t go into is that half the time when you play a real game, you lose. And the advantage to that is that you develop resilience in the face of loss. You have to accept it gracefully, you have to learn from it and you have to persist. Right. And so the loss is unbelievably important, especially because in life you probably lose more games than you win. Right. Partly because you don’t have to win that many games to be successful. You have to win some, but you definitely have to persevere through loss.

The Importance of Rule Administration in Real Games

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes, yes. And I would add on another feature of games which is very important, which is rule administration and litigation. And so the great Swiss development psychologist Jean Piaget, in “The Moral Development of the Child,” which is like the classic text of moral development, he would get down on his hands and knees and he would play marbles with kids in Geneva, and he would deliberately do something stupid or wrong, and he’d wait to see what they did, how they enforced the rule and how they explained it.

And in a real game, this is perhaps the most nutritious part of all is the rule. You know, like, “that was out of bounds.” “No, it wasn’t.” “Yes, it was.” You know, you argue about it, but everyone wants to keep the fun going. So it’s very rare that someone’s going to storm out and take their marble. “No, I’m not going to play.” Like, there’s a lot of. And you’ll be a crybaby and a loser. So there’s a lot of pressure to. You have to work it out somehow.

Now, what happens in a video game, is anything ever called out of bounds? Does the player ever have to adjudicate anything? Everything is done by the program. So a video game is really like the junk food of games in that it doesn’t have the nutritious part, which is the disagreements, the arguments.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. So there’s no meta negotiation about the rules themselves. So, you know, one of the things Piaget pointed out in terms of his development of a moral hierarchy was there was the first, the ability to act out the rules, then there was the ability to describe the rules that are being acted out accurately. Then there was the ability to negotiate the rules. Then there was the ability to come up with new rules. Right. So that’s a. Like, that’s a. And that’s also why Piaget wasn’t a moral relativist. He thought there was a hierarchy of morality.

And that’s also why he thought Thomas Kuhn was wrong, because Kuhn, arguably, it’s complicated. And Piaget knew Kuhn’s work. Kuhn and Piaget also pointed out when there was a stage transition in development, that the new stage did everything the previous stage did, plus something additional. Right. So that was his criteria for improvement.

And that movement up that moral hierarchy, it’s like, once you can act out the rules, you can play a game. Once you can describe the rules, you can play a game and discuss it. Once you can negotiate the rules, you can do those first two things and the negotiation. And then you can establish your own games. Right. Clear progression in terms of expansion of skill.

It also makes a mockery of the idea that games are competitive. You know, games where there’s a victory, it’s like they’re not sure. You try to win, but the cooperative element subsumes the competitive element. Because, as you said, everyone wants to keep the game going and play. Right. So you have to do that by principle.

Video Games and Boys: A Complex Picture

So, okay, and so in video. Let’s talk about video games. Because boys at least do aggregate together and cooperate in relationship to a goal. So there is that real world element to them and the video games. And I just, I don’t know that much about the video game world. That was one thing I missed completely, being as old as I am or almost completely. Do you see how clear do you think the evidence is that disappearing into the video game rabbit hole is a breeding place for isolated, like pathologies of isolation compared to, let’s say, texting instead of meeting and pornography instead of relationships?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. So video games is more complicated. When I started the book, I knew what the girl story was. The story, social media, girls, anxiety, depression, was very clear. And I thought, maybe it’ll be the same for boys with video games. And it’s not quite the same. The correlational data, the experiments. Video games are not as harmful to boys as social media is to girls. Sometimes there are even signs of certain benefits from them.

So with video games, what I’m coming to see, and just to point out, they have one really good feature, which is they are synchronous. And so when my son, I didn’t let him on Fortnite in sixth grade, but just before COVID came in, we let him get an Xbox. He started playing Fortnite. And it’s a very good thing that we did because that was all they had during COVID. And they would be laughing, he’d be laughing his head off with his friends. So that’s much better than what girls were doing on social media.

The problem, as I’m seeing it with video games is two things. One is the addiction. That is about 10% of boys develop what’s called problematic use, which is compulsive use. It interferes with other aspects of life. It often looks like addiction. And when we talk about, I mean, I’ve met so many parents whose boys are completely lost to video games. That’s all they can do. They’re very upset when they don’t have it, they don’t do anything else. And that’s 1 to 3% which is still a lot. I mean losing 1 to 3% of boys is a lot. 10% having problematic use is a lot.

So the first thing I can say is that some boys are going to basically become like addicts and miss out on much else in childhood. The great majority, that’s not going to happen too. What I’m coming to see is that the attention, fragmentation, the loss of the ability to do things that aren’t full of dopamine or quick dopamine is crippling. And this ultimately I think is the boys story.

Open Season on Boys: Multiple Addictive Industries

Boys, it’s not just video games. Boys are basically, it’s open season on boys by companies and so it’s the video game companies are competing for their every moment. It’s well, porn. I don’t fully understand how they monetize it but a lot of boys get addicted to porn. Vaping. I can’t believe that people, especially young men are vaping, they’re consuming nicotine. Also dopamine, addictive marijuana is, you know, leads to a motivational syndrome. So THC, sports, gambling, when they’re a little older, you don’t have to be 18. There are ways to gamble even before you’re 18 or 21. Investing when you’re a little older. Crypto, Robin Hood, all these things are gamified, which especially attracts boys.

Girls are more interested in the social information. Boys are more interested in “I do this and something happens. I do this and something happens.” I think what we’re seeing is when we check in on the kids at the age of 28, which is the oldest Gen Z, if we look at them in mid-20s, what we see is that the girls are more likely to have finished high school, more likely to have finished college, more likely to have a job, more likely to not be living with their parents.

Boys are more likely to have done nothing and so to lose. I can’t say what percent but 10, 20% of boys become kind of drones because they can’t really, as we were saying, they can’t set long term goals and execute on them. This is a tremendous loss to any society to lose a substantial portion of your young men in that way. Again, I can’t put an exact number on it but 10% is the problematic use number. And so the percent that are damaged in some way is certainly higher than that.

ADHD Medication and Play Suppression

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: How much? I mean, one of the things I’ve seen, because I’ve spent a lot of time talking to young men, watching them, let’s say, is that, and I’m wondering how you separate this out because I would also say that there are elements of the social media world, the hyperconnected world, that are also particularly toxic to boys. And I don’t know, and a lot of this to me seemed to emerge around the same period of time that you’re describing.

So I don’t know what percentage of boys are now on ADHD medication, but it’s always on the rise. And Jacques Panksepp, who, the affective neuroscientist who, who established the existence of the play circuit, pointed out that the primary effect of Ritalin is play suppression. That’s what it does.

Oh, absolutely. So there was this idea, Jonathan, initially that boys with fragmented attention had a paradoxical response to stimulants in that it increased their attentional focus. But that’s not paradoxical at all. It does that to everyone. But what it does is it, it increases the probability that you’ll focus on whatever you’re focusing on.

Now, what Panksepp showed very clearly, if you deprived young juvenile rats of rough and tumble play, their prefrontal cortexes didn’t mature. And then if you let them play, they would play frenetically, like boys do after they’ve been forced to sit down forever in school, but that you could suppress that with Ritalin.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Wow, I didn’t know that.

The Role of Play in Development and Male Demoralization

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, yeah. Panksep’s work on that is brilliant. The play work plus the Ritalin work, it’s just… Well, especially because he also showed degenerate or like failure to mature at a prefrontal level. And that if you let the rats, the juveniles play frenetically and exhaust themselves, say over some reasonable period of time, their prefrontal cortexes would develop. So it’s catch up behavior.

So I saw hypothetically an increased war on male play and interest preferences that made itself manifest, I would say, with the hyper feminization of the school system. And then as well there was the communicated insistence that male ambition was toxic, that competitive games were bad, and that to the degree that the patriarchy is a corrupt institution, that any sign of that demand for victory, let’s say a competitive victory on the male front was actually a sign of psychopathology.

So I think part of the reason that the boys have been demoralized or no, are failing to participate is because they’ve been demoralized and that that’s provided them also with an excuse to be irresponsible. Look, Nietzsche said “you’re best punished for your virtues.” So the conclusion is if you’re going to be punished for being ambitious and goal directed, then that’s going to be very effective as a punishment. But it also gives you every reason to bow out and to be irresponsible.

So I don’t know what you think about that in combination with the things that you’re seeing on the more specifically technological front.

Boys Checking Out of the Real World

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, well, so the boy’s story is different from the girl’s story and it’s a story of checking out of the real world. And I draw from this in part on Richard Reeves, whose wonderful book “Of Boys and Men.” He points out that boys and men used to dominate the economy and society in many ways. But beginning in the 70s, we get the transition away from physical work and longshoremen and strength to a service economy.

And girls are rising, which is great. But as girls are rising, boys are not rising too. In some ways they’re falling. And by 1980, I think it is most half of college students were female. Now it’s 60% are female. So boys have been checking out of school, checking out of the workplace, the electronic world, the online world’s gotten better and better, more and more attractive for boys. They’re spending more time on video games.

So it is a story of male achievement, male motives being hijacked or turned towards trivial, pointless pursuits that don’t add up to anything. And so I would agree with you about the discouragement of male ego, ambition, desire to be great, the subversion of that into just wanting to do higher up on a video game leaderboard, I suppose.

But I’d love to ask you. Because I’ve only really begun turning to the boys story about three, three or four years ago when I began working on the book. You’ve been talking to young men for a long time now. What do you see when you look at the malaise among young men? I mean, part of this is what you just said about. But just what’s your diagnosis about what’s happening to you? I mean, is it depression, anxiety, is it hopelessness? What do you see happening?

The Connection Between Meaning, Adventure, and Responsibility

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, a huge part of it’s fractured demoralization. One of the things I’ve really noticed this. It’s quite the stunning and horrifying thing to see. I think the biggest impact what I’ve said on young men has been my drawing of a relationship between meaning, adventure and responsibility.

Well, and you touch on this in your book. One of the things you point out. So let me take a bit of a sideways route here. When the Big Five theorists were laying out the semantic webs associated with negative emotion neuroticism, McCrae, in particular with the Neo Big Five, noticed that self consciousness and neuroticism were so tightly associated semantically that they were indistinguishable.

So here’s the rule. This is the rule. And you allude to this. If you think about yourself, you are going to be anxious and miserable. Those are the same thing. And you know that when you’re possessed by a bout of self consciousness, it’s not pleasant.

Okay, so then you might say, well, what do you do about that? And one answer would be, well, don’t focus on yourself. But you can’t not focus on yourself. You have to focus on something else. Okay, so what do you focus on if you’re male? Well, you focus on responsible service to the future and others. Well, why? Well, because that gives you what you described as that slow dopamine kick. That’s where… And that’s not happiness, it’s meaning. Those are very different things.

Happiness is that hedonistic kick that can be hijacked by the AI machines. Meaning is less intense but more sustaining. Okay, so where do you find that? And that’s simple. You find that in the adoption of maximal responsibility. That’s burden, that’s challenge, that’s play. If you do it right, that’s also the sacrifice that civilization is founded on.

The Default Man and the Need for Socialization

And one of the things that we might know, Jonathan, is that the default man is useless. Right? So, for example, I’m going to get myself in trouble here, but I don’t really care. So in the Arab world, broadly speaking, the Arab world produces about as much as Spain. Okay, well, why? Well, it’s part of the reason is the men don’t work.

Now, that’s not surprising. What’s surprising is that any men ever work because work is difficult and it requires sacrifice. And so the question is, and this is the anthropological question, the question of initiation. How do you socialize and civilize men? Because the default is going to be trivial hedonism. Of course it is, because it’s easier. Of course it’s going to be the default. The default’s always what’s simpler and more fragmented.

Well, you tell them a story of heroic responsibility and you draw, even more importantly, you draw a connection between responsibility and adventure. And so it’s so interesting because so many men have reflected this back to me, and I literally mean thousands because I’ve said, you know, what you do is you look for the maximum burden. And you note that in service to that, you find meaning. And so you can do that with truth, you can do it with responsibility.

And the young men will come up to me and they do this daily. I would say and say, “You know, five years ago I decided I was going to start taking responsibility for myself and tell the truth. And everything’s changed in consequence. Everything.”

The Bigotry of Soft Expectations

And so we’re doing this bigotry of soft expectations with men. And one of the things I got right right at the beginning was, see, the male attitude towards younger men isn’t the feminine ethos of acceptance. So the… You could imagine the dynamic in a family is that this is a stereotype. But I’m going to go with it anyways. The mother says to the child, “You’re lovely the way you are.” And the father says, “I kind of like you, but you could be a lot more.”

And those are good. Those are really good together, because when the child goes out from the mother, he’s encouraged, let’s say, by the masculine go out and then when he’s exhausted, or she’s exhausted for that matter, she could come back to the mother and be accepted. And that’s the standard pattern of security seeking and then exploration.

Now what I’ve been doing with young men is saying to them, “You could be a lot more than you are.” And it’s an insult in a way because means you’re not good enough now, but it prioritizes the optimized future self. And that’s actually hugely advantageous.

And so I think what we’re doing that’s wrong with young men, well, and I think we’re doing it to young women too, in a more subtle manner, is not asking, not requiring or even demanding nearly enough. So they default to trivial hedonism, obviously.

The Power of Thrilling Play

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, that’s right. Let’s keep going on this theme about adventure, challenge, burden. One of the most interesting findings that I came across from writing the book in the chapter on play, I cover work by a Norwegian psychologist named Ellen Sansetter who has an article from 10 years ago where she goes through the six kinds of thrills.

She says thrilling play is the most powerful anti anxiety agent. That is, kids will choose to do things where they can get hurt. They will choose to climb a tree to the point where they’re scared and then they’ll go a little higher and then maybe they’ll stop and then the next day they can go higher. Once you learn to bicycle, you learn to bicycle over jump ramps and stairs.

So kids are seeking thrills. And she says there’s high places, fast speeds, dangerous tools, hiding, disappearing. There’s a couple others. I forget what rough and tumble play I suppose of fighting is one. And she points out that it’s that feeling of thrill that’s… Because there’s all kinds of imaginative games. Those are very nice and imagination has all kinds of benefits. But it’s the most exciting play is where there’s some danger you might get hurt and you’re maybe laughing and also afraid.

And that kind of play is actually what dads specialize in. I remember when I was a kid, on the beach, my father would pretend to be a monster, giant monster chasing us. And we would, my sister, we’d run and we were kind of scared, but also laughing our heads off. So that’s thrilling.

The Role of Fathers in Providing Adventure

And this is where I’m coming to see, my book has really caught fire with mothers in particular. Mothers were more concerned about this. They felt it more and they’re driving the efforts to get phones out of schools in general. Men are involved too, of course. But what I’m thinking nowadays is that men, dads in particular, really have a role to play in giving their kids more thrill and fear.

Now, fear. I don’t mean fear of them. I mean play that involves exposure to fear. Exposure to fear and risk. And that can even be just at an amusement park. Just taking your kids to an amusement park where there’s not really any physical danger. But man, it is scary when you go on a high roller coaster.

So kids need that. It might be that boys need it more, at least. Boys need more rough and tumble play that I’m confident they need more rough and tumble. I don’t know about thrills and fear. I just don’t know. But our boys, I think, are suffering from a lack of adventure, challenge, responsibility. You said the soft bigotry of low expectations. And we need to give them back a world in which there are such possibilities to do something big, risky. Great. Thrilling.

The Abrahamic Covenant and the Call to Adventure

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I’m going to tell you a little story very quickly, I hope very quickly. I spent a lot of time recently assessing the Abrahamic covenant. And so Abraham is characterized as the father of nations, right? So you could imagine that he’s emblematic of the pattern that maximizes reproductive success across time. That’s a way of thinking about it.

Biologically, the divine comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure, right? Because Abraham is wealthy and privileged and he doesn’t have to lift a finger, you see? And so he’s 70 when the voice comes to him and it says to him, “You have to leave your zone of comfort and have your adventure in the world. You have to leave your tribe, you have to leave your family. You have to leave everything you’re comfortable with. You have to do that voluntarily. And you have to make the sacrifices that are necessary in its pursuit.”

And Abraham agrees. And God offers him five gifts in consequence. And this is the alignment of the spirit of developmental adventure with the divine. And so here’s the offer. This is the covenant. Very specific. So the deal is that if you hearken to the voice of adventure and make the appropriate sacrifices, then you’ll be a blessing to yourself. Your reputation will grow validly among your compatriots. Your enemies will not be able to withstand you. You will establish something of enduring permanence. And you’ll do that in a way that brings benefit to everyone.

And so imagine what that means, Jonathan, is that that developmental impetus to move out into the world produces that meaning because it’s emblematic of expansion and development, and it aligns the psychological and the social, which is nothing but an expression of the fact that we are social creatures. How could it be that our impetus to develop would be in contradiction to our social utility? It can’t be that. Because we wouldn’t be social, right? We’d be essentially in competition with the social world. We wouldn’t be aligned.

So the call to adventure is the Abrahamic call, as far as I’m concerned. And I think it’s also the antithesis of the selfish gene, because the idea in it is that if you imagine this, is that you embodied that adventurous spirit properly as a father, well, then you establish the pattern of adaptation that maximizes the reproductive fitness of your children. And obviously, what? You’re going to raise a boy who’s a cringing coward, and what, he’s going to find a successful mate and his children are going to thrive? I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s how it works.

The Crisis of Modern Gender Dynamics

So we’re asking far too little of young men and what we’re doing with young women. And I think this is part of fertility suppression. You know, the evil queen in Snow White turns, attempts to turn Snow White into a narcissist. She gives her a bodice that’s too tight so she can no longer breathe. That maximizes waist to hip ratio. She gives her a poison comb, and then she feeds her poisoned apple, which is a reference to Eve and knowledge and the poisoned apple. The dwarfs can’t protect Snow White from the poisoned apple. The prince has to do that.

But I think that’s part of fertility suppression among women and that. Okay, so why am I saying that? It’s very subtle and destructive. Because partly what we’re seeing is that not only are the girls supplanting the boys in the socioeconomic hierarchy, but they’re doing that to the detriment of themselves, you know, because we see this. What is it now? You talked about East Asia. You didn’t have data there, but there is some interesting data. 30% of Japanese under the age of 30 are virgins. It’s the same in South Korea. The birth rate has cataclysmically plummeted. These are completely isolated people.

And we’re also seeing that same thing happening in the west, plus a political divide. And so the girls, in a way, are being encouraged to step into the boys’ shoes, and the boys are checking out, and that’s terrible for. As far as I can see, that’s terrible for both.

JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. There’s a wonderful line in Richard Reeves’ book “Of Boys and Men.” He says “A world of floundering men is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women.”

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Well, you can’t pathologize one sex without pathologizing the other. That’s just not going to happen, you know. And so. And I can even understand why the girls might step forward if the boys step back, you know, so it’s not that you can lay this at the feet of the girls. Precisely. And it’s also the case that economies in countries where women’s rights are prioritized tend to flourish. It would be good if we could set the situation up so we can capitalize on the offerings of both sexes. Clearly. But something’s gone very wrong in the balance.

And so. And demoralizing young men is no way to deal with the pathology of the patriarchy. Let’s say, let’s talk a little bit about chapter eight, if we could. And then we’ll close with some comments from you about what government schools and parents can do. I was quite interested in your discussion about spiritual elevation and degradation. And you made a comment when we talked at the beginning before the podcast that that was a chapter that most interviewers didn’t focus on. That doesn’t surprise me. The first thing you pointed out was the three. You had three axis model of orientation in the world. Let’s talk about that briefly and then delve into it more deeply.

The Three-Dimensional Model of Social Space

JONATHAN HAIDT: Sure. So let’s see. Gosh, where to start? I guess I’ll start at the beginning here. You know, the first time you and I met was when I interviewed at Harvard in 1994, I think it was. You were an assistant professor there was. And you were writing about religion and Jung and archetypes. It was a fascinating conversation. And I guess you’ve been a religious Christian for a long time, I presume. And I’m Jewish, but I’m not practicing. Not a believer, not religious.

But in studying morality and just in my own inner life, I’ve just been fascinated by dreams, by experiences in nature, by self-transcendent experiences. I wrote a paper with Dr. Keltner in 2003 on the emotion of awe. I studied the emotion of moral elevation. So I’ve always had an interest in spiritual matters and I’ve had some. I have some spiritual life.

And in trying to make sense of moral elevation, this feeling we get when we see moral beauty we see an act of caring or courage or loyalty, and we feel something. And it’s. People point to their chest and it. And they’ll often do this with their hands. It’s kind of a. I don’t know. I can’t really describe it, they’d say, but they’re sort of pointing to the chest and moving their hands up.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So it’s an offering.

JONATHAN HAIDT: I think it’s. I think what it is is it’s. I think it’s a vagus nerve response, hormonal responses as well. In fact, I have a study with Jen Silver. We showed lactating women. We brought them into the lab, women with their babies, showed them elevating videos from Oprah, and they released more milk into the nursing pads when they saw elevation rather than comedy, meaning oxytocin. It releases oxytocin.

So, okay, so what does that feel like? And the sort of. The theory I put on it back then was there are these two dimensions of social space that you find all over sociology. There is a vertical dimension of hierarchy. You can be higher or lower than someone. There’s a horizontal dimension of closeness. You can be close or far. And many languages distinguish those two. So “tu” versus “vous,” or “tu” versus “usted” in Spanish is used both for the vertical and for the horizontal, which I find fascinating. That’s two dimensions.

What I came to believe is that there’s a third dimension, let’s call it the z axis, coming out of the page. The Z axis is where we feel lifted up in a kind of a moral or spiritual sense. And many societies have an explicit conception of a vertical dimension. You know, in Hinduism, you will be reincarnated. If you do good in this life, you will be reincarnated at a higher level, closer to gods. The gods. And if you do evil, you will be reincarnated at a lower level, closer to the, you know, a worm in the belly of a dog. So in Greece, there was the scala natura.

So what I’m saying is I think our minds perceive the social world in three dimensions. But in the modern Western world, we don’t talk about this spiritual elevation dimension. So that’s sort of the background now that figures in my first book, “The Happiness Hypothesis,” and again in my book, “The Righteous Mind,” in trying to understand moral emotions.

How Phone-Based Life Degrades Spiritual Development

Okay, so that was my old work. So here I am, I’m writing this book on what’s happening to teens, what’s happening to adolescents, why are they so depressed and anxious? And I write Chapter seven, which is sort of the end of the narrative part, explaining the girls, the boys. And I’m about to move on to the last part, which is, okay, what do we do? When I realize, wait a sec, I wrote this whole book about kids, but every time I tell people about this, they say, “Oh, it’s happening to me too. This is happening to adults too.” We all feel overwhelmed, we all feel somehow blocked.

And as I thought about what the phone-based life does to us, what is it to live on a phone and social media, it brought me back to my old work, to “The Happiness Hypothesis.” Because what I realized is almost everything the ancients tell us about how to have a flourishing life, how to develop, how to have an advanced spiritual life, almost everything is pushed the other way by a life online.

And so, for example, spiritual traditions tell us, you know, “Be slower to judge, quick to forgive. Judge not lest ye be judged.” But social media says “Judge right now instantly. You don’t need any context, do it now. If you don’t judge, you’re going to be judged for not judging.” So whether we’re talking about sort of sitting still and meditating, no, have stuff coming in, never have a moment of thought that’s not filled.

So what I realized was something about this modern phone-based life is degraded. And I say that as an atheist. I feel as though I am degraded, brought down in a spiritual sense. It doesn’t mean I’m depressed or anxious, but it does mean that my life is qualitatively worse. And if you draw this out over the whole of society, imagine all of American or Western society. Imagine most people feeling they don’t have patience for others. They don’t have any grace or forgiveness or humility. If we lose all of those things at the same time, then we are degraded as a society. And if you have a religious framework, you have the language for it, but even if you don’t, you feel it. That was my argument. What do you think?

The Religious Framework and Hierarchy of Depth

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, the religious framework is a consequence of the acceptance of a hierarchy of depth. And so religious language emerges when you talk about what’s most foundational. Okay, so let me tell you a couple of things that you’ll find extremely useful, I think.

Okay, so first of all, Mount Sinai is the horizontal and the vertical axis. Now most of the mythological representations of what you’re describing collapse the hierarchical and the divine. They raise the divine above the hierarchical. So the hierarchy extends up to the divine. So there’d be. So imagine there’s you, family, community, town, state, nation, king, God right now. But God is even more complex than that because there’d be king, there’d be explorer, there’d be hero, there’d be father, there’d be God. So that’s the heavenly hierarchy, okay? And God is the thing that’s at the top of that. And it’s ineffable. It’s the good as such. You see that in Jacob’s Ladder.

So what happens in Jacob’s Ladder is that Jacob’s a very bad man and he leaves home. He leaves the domination of his interfering and corrupt mother, and he leaves. And then he swears to change, and he builds an altar. So that’s the vertical axis, and it’s a representation of Mount Sinai. He builds an altar. He swears that he’ll make the appropriate sacrifices, which is what you do when you say you’ll change. Then he has a dream of the Ladder reaching up to infinity with the angels coming down. Right? And the angels that come down are, you could call them, avatars of conscience and calling that descend from the divine right.

And so that’s Jacob’s Ladder. And so it is a. It’s the establishment of the knowledge of that hierarchy of value in Jacob’s life as a consequence of his vow to change. And so the intuition that we have of depth in the literary realm is an intuition that different fictional representations portray different levels of that hierarchy. So there’s shallow entertainment, which is what we’ve been talking about with regards to. Right. And there’s deep entertainment.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, that’s good.

The Nature of Depth and Spiritual Leadership

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And depth has a nature. That’s the thing. Depth has a nature. And so your intuition with regards to this dimensional structure is… See, it’s also the case that… Well, I’ll leave it at that. I’ll leave it at that for the time being.

But it’s very useful to know that Mount Sinai has this. Mount Sinai is the symbolic representation of the vertical and the horizontal axis. I’ll give you a cool example of that. So in the story of the Golden Calf, this is dead accurate. Dead, dead on to what we’re discussing.

So Moses is allied with Aaron, right? Moses is slow of speech. He’s not charismatic exactly. Can’t communicate that well with ordinary people. And God tells him when he encounters God in the burning bush, which is something that calls to him, God says to him, Moses says, “I can’t be a leader because I can’t speak.” And God basically says, “That’s your problem. That’s for you to sort out. You still have to do it.” And then he gives him a hint. “You could ally yourself with Aaron.” That’s like the separation of church and state. That’s a good way of thinking about it.

So now Moses has a political element, that’s Aaron. And they collaborate. Okay. Now later, as the Israelites make their way through the desert, when they’re lost, Moses leaves to get the ten commandments. So that means that the spiritual departs and the Israelites who were lost and slavish, right, and fractious and resentful, they don’t have the habits of civilized self governing people. They immediately collapse into a self serving drunken hedonism. That’s the worship of the golden calf. And Aaron offers that to them.

So the idea is that if the political becomes divorced from the divine hierarchy, the system collapses into an orgiastic hedonism, which of course it obviously that’s the case. Right, right. So this is as old, this idea is as old as time.

The Degradation of Digital Content

JONATHAN HAIDT: And I like this idea. You bring the dimension of depth, we feel lifted up by great literature, great…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Art, or move to the foundations a…

JONATHAN HAIDT: Story that draws us in and we contemplate, we experience what archetypal human patterns and emotions over time we can feel lifted up. What happens, you know, what little time I’ve spent on TikTok or YouTube shorts, it’s just such degrading trash.

And many of the boys feeds end up with a lot of violence in them that is like, you know, people being punched in the face or kicked in the balls and because you know the algorithm is going to pick up not just what you click on, but it’ll pick up how long you watch something. So my sense is that the girls don’t end up with a lot of violence in their feeds, but a lot of boys do.

And so if you grow up, not with literature, not with stories that draw you in for a while, but just with little bits of, you know, sex and violence and people getting hurt. And you do that for almost every day. Anger.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Anger is half positive emotion.

JONATHAN HAIDT: It’s an approach emotion.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes, yeah, exactly. Well, it’s got both. It’s got both. So it’s a high arousal emotion, but it’s got that approach element. So of course it’s going to degenerate in the absence of anything higher or deeper. That’s going to be the degenerative capacity.

The question is like what constitutes a valid hierarchy of depth. And I actually think that, I actually think that question has been answered. We know what a valid hierarchy of depth is. We talked about it a little bit. It’s longer term. It includes more players in the game. It sacrifices the intense pleasure of the present for the future, for the abundance of the future. It’s basically what constitutes civilization and the spirit of civilization. And it’s painstaking and difficult and requires responsibility and sacrifice. And it has that deeper meaning.

Deeper because it… Here’s a definition of deep. This is worth thinking about. Technically, the deeper an idea, the more other ideas depend on it for the maintenance of their validity. It’s like a hierarchy of games. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so this is also why people don’t like to have their axioms questioned. Right. Because it’s disrupts big sections of their prison. That’s what happens in trauma.

Traditional Initiation and Modern Media

JONATHAN HAIDT: Right. Okay, so let me bring in another chapter that nobody ever asks about, which is chapter four on puberty. And I spend a lot of time in that chapter talking about initiation rights. Because most societies, traditional societies, have, you know, a girl has to be turned into a woman.

Now girls will, without any socialization, girls will begin to menstruate, they will become fertile. And so societies almost usually mark that point. But for girls, there’s a sense that this will happen. And then they have to be inducted into the secrets about sex and parenthood and all those things.

Boys, what I learned from my time in cultural psychology, boys is much harder because boys don’t turn into men just by getting older. Little boys are kind of like girls and they’re with their mothers. But especially in a warrior society, you have to get them from the world of girls and women to become a man. How do you do that? Well, a lot of toughening. They need a lot of toughening. And it’s a long, drawn out initiation. And we still see this in fraternities and sororities. Sorority initiations, I believe, are universally more mild at any university than the fraternity. The boys go through much harsher, much harsher rituals.

But where I’m going with this is how do you turn a boy into a man or a girl into a woman? How do you turn a child into an adult of their sex? You have to have some guidance from elders, from someone a little older who is imparting knowledge to them, who is choosing what they consume in the sense of what stories, what inputs.

And while we didn’t do a great job of that, I mean, when you and I were growing up, a lot of the messages came from television, but at least those messages were made. None of the TV we watched was by other children. None of it was created by their children. It was all created by people in our parents or our grandparents generation. And it often had a moral. And it was, you know, for me it was very American. It was like this is part of… So television and movies used to play a huge role in putting in the patterns, the knowledge that you need to be a member of your culture.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And books.

JONATHAN HAIDT: And books. Thank you. Yes, of course. And books. So that’s why people have cared so much about education literature, because it’s not just the facts you’re learning. It’s back to our point earlier about the reinforcement learning. If our minds are like an LLM, what are you putting in? Are you putting in movies and books and good television or are you putting in little 10 second clips of people getting kicked in the balls? So if you’re consuming just millions of little short videos, you’re putting garbage in and your neural network is not going to be very effective.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And not integrated and not integrated with other people.

JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right, yeah. And no, and no depth. And to get to bring it back to your point that the depth of an idea is the degree to which other ideas depend on it. What if you don’t have any such ideas? What if all you consumed was little 10 second videos? Nothing is foundational. It’s just a whirlwind of dust. There’s no foundation.

The Chaos of High Entropy

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s high entropy. There’s no difference between high entropy and anxiety. And there’s no union of motivation. So there’s no compelling reason to act, to move forward. That’s chaos. That’s the disintegration into chaos.

JONATHAN HAIDT: And that’s where a lot of our…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s anxiety and demoralization.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. A lot of our kids are stuck there.

Solutions at Multiple Levels

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, let’s close this off by… While the end of your book, you talk about what people can do and you talk about what people can do at different levels of social organization. Parents, governments, industry. Now a huge part of the problem is technological rate of transformation and the race to the bottom. And that’s something that’s almost independent of the actors. Unfortunately. It’s implicit in the technology.

But anyways, and I’d also like, I think this is what we’ll do on the Daily Wire side. I would like to talk to you about what has happened in consequence of your book and what effective steps people have taken. So let’s do that. But give people an overview of what you think the institutions, broadly speaking, must and should do about this, about this fragmentation and race to the bottom.

The Four Norms to Restore Childhood

JONATHAN HAIDT: So the key to understanding how this problem got so big so fast and why it’s so hard to get out of is the concept of a collective action problem. And so any parent who says, “No, sweetheart, I’m not giving you a phone, you’re 10 years old.” “But mom, all my friends have one, I’m being left out.” That’s a collective action problem. If it was only half of the kids had it, it would be very easy to resist when your child’s the only one. Same with social media.

And so these things with cigarettes. At the peak of teen smoking in the 90s, it was, I think, 37% of American high school students smoked. You didn’t have to smoke because a third of your classmates were smoking. With social media, you do. If half your classmates are on and they’re talking about you, you have to be on. Everybody ends up on. So it’s a collective action problem. How do you solve collective action problems collectively?

And so what I propose are four norms that if we can do these four norms, we roll back the phone-based childhood. And there’s a role for different actors. But here are the four main norms.

The first is no smartphone before high school. Let kids have a flip phone, a basic phone. Let them communicate, let them call each other, let them text, but do not let these companies get to them and take up every moment of their day. Now, I don’t think this should be a law in Europe. When I’m there, sometimes they say, “Oh, we should pass a law banning smartphones for those under 14.” You know, as an American, I don’t think we should say, “No, you parents, you cannot give your child…” I mean, so this is a norm. And as long as a bunch of parents start adhering to it, it becomes easier for everyone in the community to do it. So that’s the first norm. No smartphone before high school or 14 if it’s not in your country, high school.

The second norm is no social media till 16. Now this, some of us are doing as a norm. I laid this down for my kids, but it’s hard because I’m imposing a cost on my daughter. She says she’s the only one who doesn’t have Snapchat. That might be an exaggeration, but it feels all her friends have it and they communicate with it.

Here is where we really, really need help from legislators. We have minimum ages on things that involve graphic sex, horrific violence, addiction and physical harm. If your kids on Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, they’re getting all that. So these are inherently adult activities. Talking with adult strangers. It’s just we need a minimum age and Australia has done it. Australia passed a law, it’s going to take effect in November that the minimum age is 16 and the companies have to enforce it. There are a lot of ways to do that. There’s so many companies do age verification. So that’s the second norm.

Phone-Free Schools and Real-World Independence

The third norm is phone-free schools. This is just a no-brainer. When you and I were in school, I mean imagine if we could take our television set into school and watch TV during class and use our walkie talkies and talk to our friends during class. I mean it’s insane. We never could have done that. But everyone with a smartphone has a lot more, they have 50 different things to do during class. So it’s crazy that we ever let it get this far. But many states, about 11 or 12 states and a bunch of countries have now gone phone-free. It has to be from the beginning of the day to the end. That’s the main area where the world has changed in the last year is phone-free schools.

Then the fourth norm is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. Because the book isn’t about technology or social media, it’s about childhood and a childhood spent. A phone-based childhood is not a human childhood. Kids are going to miss out on most of the things they need. So we can’t just take away the devices and say, “Okay, you’re an only child, sit at home, read books, play guitar.” They could do that a little bit. But we have to give them back each other. We have to give them back fun, we have to give them back thrilling adventure, hanging out, riding bicycles, going down and getting in, going down to the 7-Eleven, buying things you shouldn’t buy, whatever.

So if we do those four things, then we restore childhood in the real world. I believe that rates of anxiety and depression will go down. I believe kids will have more slow dopamine. It won’t be all quick dopamine all day long. Test scores I believe will stop dropping. This is important. Test scores in the United States actually rose. Academic ability actually rose from the 70s through 2012. And then it began to drop. It dropped more during COVID but the drop didn’t start in 2020, it started in 2012.

So our young people are less happy, more anxious and depressed. They know less, their attention is fragmented, they’re lonely and they feel that their life is pointless. We’ve got to stop what we’re doing. And the book lays out those last chapters, lay out what role governments can and should play, what role parents can and should play, what role schools can and should play, and to some extent, what the tech companies can do. But they have so much money at stake here that I don’t expect them. There are a few, like Pinterest, that are not harming kids. They’ve done some things to really protect kids, but the main ones are only going to respond to either legislation or litigation. So I’m hopeful that their behavior will change. But that’s what the last part of the book is about. How do we solve this? And I actually think we can solve this in the next few years.

Continuing the Discussion and Resources

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So what we’ll do on the Daily Wire side, for those of you who are watching and listening and who are prone to continue the discussion there is I want to find out more from Dr. Haidt, from Jonathan, from John, what steps have been taken, because I know there has been movements in many states, many provinces in Canada on the phone-free school front, for example. But I would like to know how widespread that is, who’s spearheading it, what’s been effective, how this can be moved ahead in the future, the potential pitfalls of intervention of this sort, et cetera. So you can all join us on the Daily Wire side for that discussion to continue.

In the meantime, it’s always great talking to you. I appreciate it a lot. It’s a very useful book as far as I’m concerned. It’s a crucial problem. It’s nice to see that there’s investigation into the sociological genesis of psychopathology, but also some attempt to facilitate actual improvement. And so, you know, your work has for decades been right on the money as far as I’m concerned. And this is another example of exactly the same thing. The book we were discussing is “The Anxious Generation.” When did it come out?

JONATHAN HAIDT: It came out in March of 2024. And viewers and listeners can go to anxiousgeneration.com we have a lot of advice resources for parents, for teachers, for legislators, and also please go to afterbabel.com that’s my substack. It’s free. That’s where we put our research out. We have posts from all kinds of great writers, members of Gen Z, teachers, researchers. So we have a lot of resources for you at anxiousgeneration.com and afterbabel.com.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, you know, it’s after Babel that the Abrahamic adventure takes place.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Let’s hope we have another Abrahamic adventure coming up for us.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s the proper solution. Yep. Yep. Okay, great. Well, everybody, you can join us on the daily wire side. Thanks, Jonathan and John, it was great to see you. And great to see you. Thank you to all for your time and attention.

JONATHAN HAIDT: My pleasure. Thank you, Jordan.

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