TRANSCRIPT: How Smartphones & Social Media Impact Mental Health & the Realistic Solutions: Dr. Jonathan Haidt

It’s really especially social media, which has changed things.

And so, if we, if we look at a kid, let’s take a teenager in 2010, and let’s say January 2010. At that point, there’s no Instagram. There’s no front-facing camera. They all have, mostly they have flip phones. The iPhone came out in 2007, but they don’t mostly have them.

And so, in 2010, most teenagers are using the flip phone as a tool to call each other, text each other, meet up. So, when technology helps us achieve our goals, that’s good. By 2015, everything’s different. By 2015, the great majority of Americans, certainly teens, have a smartphone with a front-facing camera. The girls are mostly on Instagram, which was the first social media platform that you had to be on a smartphone for. Everything else was web-based. They have high-speed internet, unlimited texting, and now it’s possible to spend 10-15 hours a day on your phone. Nobody could do that with a flip phone.

So, I point to that, it’s that five-year period, 2010 to 2015, which I’ve called the great rewiring of childhood, because it affects everything, everything about what children and teenagers are doing.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I can recall in 2010, I was actually in New York City visiting friends. I got my first smartphone, and I recall I was up at 1.30 in the morning scrolling on this thing and thinking, this is unbelievably addicting. Nowadays, I think of it less as addicting, but almost like an OCD of sorts.

Here, I’m not talking about clinically diagnosed OCD, but the interesting thing about OCD is that the compulsions, the behaviors, don’t serve to reduce the obsessions. Rather, they exacerbate them or reinforce them. In many ways, I feel like smartphone use and social media use in particular is an OCD of sorts. It’s not just a habit. It’s not just an addiction. It’s an obsessive-compulsive loop.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: So, it’s already a struggle to pay attention. Ancient traditions have taught techniques to improve your focus, your attention. We’re easily distracted. I don’t work on my phone very much, because I hate to type on the phone, and I’m always at a computer. But even for me, sitting at my computer, as soon as the thinking gets hard, as soon as I’m writing, I’m doing something that requires concentration, some little part of my brain says, I wonder what the weather is going to be, and I go check the weather. Or, you know, oh, did I get any email?

I go check. I might check my email, you know, probably 40, 50 times a day, and I know that’s terrible. So, the question is, is it a compulsion where I feel pulled? I have to check it, or something bad will happen? No. It’s more like, imagine trying to do your work. Imagine trying to be a kid in school, and you have, on your desk in front of you, you have your television set, your record player, a walkie-talkie to talk to your friends, a guitar, a painting set, all arrayed in front of you, and your teacher is telling you about, you know, geometry. What are you going to do?

Probably one of these things. And so, I think the smartphone, where the flip phone, it’s a tool. You pull it out if you want to talk to someone, then you put it away. But the smartphone, there’s no reason to ever put it away.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Talk to us about the scary statistics. There’s just no way around this.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And we will talk about solutions. You offer some incredible solutions in the book. Actually, solutions that everyone listening and watching can participate in, not just by restriction. We’ll talk about what that means going forward. But, where are we at now, and when did we start to see the trend toward diminished mental health, in particular in girls?

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So, feel free to hit us with the scary truth.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Okay, sure. So, let’s imagine. So, in the U.S., we have really good statistics based on annual or biannual surveys. There’s three or four big ones that allow us to see what’s happened since the 70s.

And so, what I’d like listeners to imagine is, imagine a bunch of lines, maybe a line for boys, maybe a line for boys, line for girls, showing the percentage that suffer from anxiety, depression, or that have self-harm. Those three really go together. And imagine these lines. They move around a little bit, but they’re actually pretty stable from the 1990s all the way through 2010, even 2011. There’s no sign of a problem. On some measures, they get actually a little bit better.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Because stable and low?

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, low, you know, if they’re around, say, 12, 15 percent of girls qualify as having had a major depression, you know, that’s much higher than we would like. That’s a problem. But it’s nothing compared to what it is today.

So, the lines are pretty flat until around 2012. And then, all of a sudden, the lines for girls go up like a hockey stick. It’s not a subtle thing. It really is. There’s an elbow. It’s like somebody turned on the light switch in 2012. Now, that’s for the American data. Internationally, you see very similar things. It’s not necessarily 2012 in other countries. But the girls’ graphs are very sharp.

The boys are also up on depression, anxiety. They’re also way up. Depending on the measure, it’s usually… Everything is in the ballpark of 50 to 150 percent. Almost all the numbers are in that range. We’re not talking 10 or 20 percent increases here. For most things, we’re talking close to a doubling, especially for the younger girls.

The boys’ curves, interestingly, are smoother. That is, the boys are more depressed and anxious. But it’s not 2012. It actually often begins more like 2009, 2010. And then it just keeps going up gradually. So, that’s a real clue. Which we’ll come back to when we talk about the boys’ story. A lot of people say, oh, it’s just self-report. Gen Z, they’re really positive about mental health and they’re willing to talk about it.

That’s a good thing. But the fact that we see the exact same curves, the very sharp uptick for girls in hospital admissions for self-harm, psychiatric emergency department visits, and we see this in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the Scandinavian countries. So, something happened across the developed world around 2012. And I keep, you know, Jean Twenge was the first to really raise the alarm.

She and I keep saying, well, you know, we can’t find another candidate. Nothing else fits the pattern. Oh, and there’s actually not just correlational data. There’s experimental data, too. So, we think, of course, look, everything’s complicated. Mental health is complicated. If you want to understand why one person is depressed, there are going to be many stories.

But if you want to understand why depression rates rose for girls faster than boys all over the developed world, unless someone can find, like, some hormone-disrupting chemical that was suddenly sprayed over Northern Europe and the South Pacific and the US and Canada around 2012, there is no alternative explanation.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So, we break down smartphone use in these young girls that correlates with and maybe is causal for this diminishment in mental health. There are a number of different variables, right? There’s the time spent on the phone. There’s the specific content that they’re viewing.

And that’s a vast discussion that we’ll get into. There are the social dynamics associated with being on a phone as opposed to in-person interactions. And then there’s, and I can’t help myself, but as a neuroscientist who trained in the biology of the visual system, there’s the effect of looking at something at about 8 inches to 12 inches away from you for much of the day as opposed to navigating an environment the way that we had for hundreds of thousands of years prior.

So, there are a lot of features within this thing that we call smartphone use. There’s also the disruption in sleep. There’s additional blue light exposure. There’s just so much to it.

So, if we pool all that together for the time being and put in a basket of smartphone use, and maybe we’ll pull out each of those variables one by one as we go forward. What are the numbers in 2012 in terms of how much time girls, maybe you can give us an age range, are spending with the smartphone? Was it they got the smartphone and immediately were spending six to eight hours a day on the thing? Or has it been gradual? So, let’s start with the time variable.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Okay. So, first, the way you put it is actually very helpful. What I want listeners to imagine, let’s imagine on the left side of the slide. I haven’t made this slide.

I’m formulating in my head. Imagine on the left side of the slide a whole bunch of harmful changes. If you’re getting less sleep, that’s bad. If you’re having blue light at night, that’s bad. If you’re not going out in nature, that’s bad. If you are sedentary, if you… So, imagine about, you know, 15 different things. Or if you’re being contacted by strange men around the world who want to have sex with you, like that’s not good for 11, 12-year-old girls.

There’s all these different potential harms. And then imagine all these different potential effects. One of which is depression, and another is anxiety, another is self-harm. But there’s doing worse in school. There’s becoming more shallow. There’s conflicts with your… So, there’s a whole bunch. And then we want to look at the causal connections.

And what I’m trying to draw out is, suppose we could quantify the degree to which sheer time, just spending five hours a day, does that make you more anxious automatically? Well, maybe a little. But that’s probably not the main effect. So, there’s a gigantic multi-causal network of effects.

Now, I have good numbers for how much teens are using these devices and these platforms today. Pew, in particular, has done a great job of tracking changes in this since the 2000s. What we know today from both Pew and Gallup is that young people in America are now spending about five hours a day just on social media. Just social media.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Mostly Instagram?

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: So, the huge time suck is the videos. So, it’s actually TikTok and YouTube are counted in this analysis. They’re counted as social media.

YouTube is marginally social media. It’s more of an information source. But the point is, especially the short videos, the short videos are really, really addictive. Because the time between action and reinforcement is so quick that that, as you know, in behaviorism, that’s the key. It’s the quick reinforcement. So, five hours a day. It’s a little bit more than that for girls, a little less for boys. Just on social media.

35 hours a week of strange stuff coming in from random weirdos on the internet. Imagine letting your kid import 35 hours. Then you add in everything else. Video games. Everything else you do on a smartphone. So, now we’re up to seven to ten hours in that range a day. And this is not counting school. Now, of course, in school, six hours a day for a lot of kids, two or three hours of that is screen time as well.

So, that’s why I say kids used to have a play-based childhood. Play is the basic thing mammals do. And since 2010 or 2012, our kids have a phone-based childhood. And I don’t think that is, it’s just incompatible with healthy human development.

The Loss of Play-Based Childhood

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Maybe we can back up even before 2010 and talk a bit more about the play-based childhood. I heard you say last night at a terrific lecture that you gave that when we don’t trust our neighbors, we are far less likely to let our kids out to play without observation or oversight. And that leads to a whole host of negative consequences.

So, if we were to dial back to the history clock even further, and talk about, let’s say, the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. I was born in 75. I basically was kicked out of the house every day to go play. My mom would say, get out of the house. I now realize she wanted space. But we would go down the end of the street to the cul-de-sac and we would just play and do all sorts of things. Get into a little trouble, adventure. Some of which were good. And there were a lot of dynamics that got worked out in that process.

My sister would go hang out with basically the older sisters of those boys. That’s kind of how our neighborhood happened. The arrangement of that was fortunate. And they would do their thing. So, 1950s and 60s, what did social dynamics look like among kids?

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: So, I think what we need to do is tell this story of what happened as a tragedy in three acts. And the first act is the loss of community, the loss of trust in each other.

So, if we go back to the 50s and 60s, but we can even go back, my parents grew up in New York City in the 30s and 40s. People spontaneously organized themselves into villages. Village life is a, it seems to be sort of a default way of living that humans have preferred for tens, you know, for several thousand years. And it’s where you know your neighbors, the kids run around, all the adults take part in supervising all the kids. But nobody has to helicopter because the kids are playing, they’re doing their thing.

If there’s a real threat, if there’s a lion or invaders, then they all come running home or whatever. But kids need to be out playing with each other, especially outdoors. We evolved in savannas, we evolved in different parts of the world. We’re attracted to nature. So, that’s the way it always was.

Now, especially if we, in the 1950s and 60s, America had just been through a world war. And the greatest way to make people trust each other, the greatest way to boost social capital is a foreign attack. And of course, Pearl Harbor did more for American coherence than anything else in history, in modern history. 9-11 did that too, but only for a little while and then we lost it. So, for a lot of reasons, people trusted their neighbors, kids were out playing, you know, my parents grew up in the depression in New York City, the kids are all out playing stickball on the street or in a parking lot.

In the 1970s, there is a real crime wave. Crime goes through the roof, actually. And it goes through the 80s, that goes all the way to the early 90s. Even still, you were kicked out of the house to go play. Even in New York City, all kids went out to play. That’s just the way it was.

But we began to lose trust in each other for a lot of reasons. Robert Putnam wrote about this in Bowling Alone, the loss of social capital. Many reasons for that, the changing media environment, air conditioning and television, people are not hanging out on their porch in the summertime to get away from the heat. They close the door and they put on the AC and they watch TV.

Family sizes are shrinking. There are not that many kids around. So, for a lot of reasons, the 90s is the key decade where Act II of the tragedy happens. And that’s the loss of the play-based childhood. So, in America and Britain, we freaked out about child abduction and child sexual abuse. Some of the scandals were real. The Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church, there were cases where trusted organizations were covering up abuse.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And I recall the abduction thing, the milk carton thing. And there was a show, I think my name is Brian, you know, about the kid who was abducted and then all he remembered. I think it’s a true story. It was that his name was Brian. He would just remind himself every night about his real name, you know.

I think they found him eventually in Berkeley. Not calling out Berkeley. I lived in Berkeley for a long time. But seemed to be the discovery of abducted kids, excuse me, in Berkeley. There are a few other cases there. I don’t know what that’s about. In any event, I grew up thinking that you could get kidnapped.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Right. Yeah. Which, yeah, which is, so it’s, I mean, it’s the most terrifying possibility for any parent. But when I was doing the research for the Coddling of the American Mind, I found, according to FBI statistics, there’s only about 100 to 150 true kidnappings a year in our whole country.

Because if a child, like who would take a child, like it’s a really difficult crime and you’re going to, you know, who would steal a child from a store? You know, parents are afraid if your kid goes to the next aisle in the grocery store, how are you going to take a kicking and screaming kid out of the store?

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And yet, sorry to interrupt, but the show America’s Most Wanted, I believe, was hosted by a guy who was abducted and eventually found dead. Adam Walsh, that’s right.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Right.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So, so there was this propagation of this fear. One of the deepest fears of any parent, I can imagine, is that.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. But the point is that these crimes are extraordinarily rare. It’s almost always the non-custodial parent who takes a kid. It’s a family member because there’s a fight within the family.

So we fear the wrong things. We’re terrified of kidnapping. But locking our kids up, overprotecting them has spiked the suicide rate so much that the death toll is vastly higher from the extra suicides than it would be if we could completely wipe out kidnapping, which, again, doesn’t.

But, you know, you know, the availability heuristic, we say in psychology, if it’s visible, if it comes to mind easily, then people will freak out about that. And that’s why people sometimes are afraid to fly in a plane. They think a car is safer. So for a lot of reasons, we freak out in the 90s. We stop letting our kids out. We think they must always be supervised. So that’s act two of the tragedy.

And as that act is happening, we’re keeping our kids inside. And guess what? These computer things that we started getting in the 80s, they’re getting interesting because now we hook them up to the Internet.

In the 80s, what we can do, WordStar and some primitive video games, like, but in the 90s, you get the Internet. And now the kids, especially the boys, the early Internet was much more of interest to boys. Boys would take computers apart. They could build computers. They would learn to program.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the boys in particular, they’re OK with losing out on the outdoor play because the Internet is so amazing. And nerddom started to become cool.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Revenge of the Nerd, Steve Jobs and Steve kind of. And I know because I grew up in Palo Alto, see Steve downtown. He had this wasn’t really like rock star persona, but he kind of, you know, we back and forth. So he was — it was an icon. Yeah. Kind of like, you know, counterculture guy. But then he was into design and computers.

Right. But it was still really geeky. Like the fonts were lame. He brought beautiful fonts to it. He started bringing the aesthetic forward. And then, of course, girls and women got involved in computers more.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. Although that really it only really evens out once you get social media. Boys are more interested in things and mechanics and systems. Girls have a more evolved and elaborate mental map of social space. They’re more interested in social relationships. So once you get social media that attracts the girls more and then it becomes pretty even that all boys and girls, they’re just incredibly attracted to the Internet and things on the Internet.

But that sets us up for Act three, which is the great rewiring. That’s the arrival of the phone based childhood that we just talked about between 2010 and 2015. That’s when everything changes.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Okay, so we’ve got three acts, all of which are tragedies.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes, loss of community.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. So community and trust is down.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. Which then makes us not… Then act two is we take away the play-based childhood because we’re so afraid because we no longer trust our neighbors. And then act three is as long as the kids are inside and on computers already, oh, well, now just a smartphone and a tablet. These are just cooler computers.

Nothing wrong with that, right? And that’s what we thought early on. In the early 2010s, we thought these things were miraculous. Oh, you know, if my kids use them, maybe they’ll be the next Steve Jobs. Maybe they’ll be really technically sophisticated, we thought. And it’s not true.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And now we’re in this third act of the tragedy.

Sex Differences in Internet Use

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You touched on some of the male-female differences. Maybe you could talk about those a little bit more. So you said girls tend to focus more on social dynamics, boys more on systems. I’ve heard you say that the boys in general veer toward more, for lack of a better way to put it, more on the spectrum type behaviors.

Could you elaborate on that and how it impacts online use and the particular sites that they tend to gravitate towards? And then on the other side for girls.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. One of the psychological traits that is the biggest differentiator between boys and girls and between men and women, let me say clearly, that sex differences in ability are generally pretty small and they’re few and far between. Sex differences in interest are all over the place, and they’re often very large, and they’re true across cultures and some are true across species.

It’s what you enjoy. And here I’m drawing on the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, who’s the cousin of Sasha Baron-Cohen in the UK. And Baron-Cohen’s work on autism shows that because of prenatal effects, prenatal testosterone changing the body, changing the brain, we all start off as girls in utero after conception.

But then the 10th week of gestation, if there’s a Y chromosome, it triggers a little bit of testosterone, which then makes the testes develop and then that creates testosterone. And all of the effect on the brain appears to be a shift away, a little bit away from empathizing in Baron-Cohen’s terms. You can either be a high empathizer or you can be a high systemizer.

Systemizers are people who love subway maps and they pick them up quickly and they like programming and they like to see how systems are related. It’s possible to be high on both, but most people are more one way than the other. So once you see that, now you can understand why this amazing new internet drew everybody, but it drew the boys and the girls to different parts of it. And so, a metaphor that I’ve started using these days, actually I did get this from Yasha Monk has a great book called The Identity Trap. And Yasha points out that a trap has to have bait in it that’s attractive. There has to be something that makes the creature want to go into the trap.

And then once they get the bait, there has to be something that prevents them from leaving. That’s what a trap is. And in this case, if you want to catch a girl, don’t show her like the operating system of a computer, don’t show her war games, show her what Maria just said about Julia or what Julie just said about her. Do you want to know?

Of course you want to know. And everybody does, but girls more than boys, they want to understand social dynamics. So the girls go rushing into Instagram where everyone’s posting photos of themselves, of other people, of the party they were at. The girls go rushing into social media in general, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr were the three big ones that girls went into in the early 2010s.

And then once they take the bait, they can’t escape because now that everyone is talking on Instagram, let’s say, if you leave, you’re alone, you’re not going to talk to anyone. So that’s how you trap girls. And that’s what happened to girls.

How do you trap boys? What are the things that boys most want to do? If you let them do whatever they want, what are the two things that really attract them? One is war and the other is sex. So if you say, do you want to watch a movie that has violence in it? Or do you want to watch sports, which is play war? Boys are more likely to say yes.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Or play a first-person shooter game.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Exactly. That’s right. So it’s hunting and it’s war. And if you can simulate that, when I was a kid, there was the beginning, I mean, I remember playing Seawolf, like you shoot missiles, you shoot torpedoes at a boat in the distance. It was very primitive technology.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Even a battleship.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. Oh, that’s right. Even a battleship. That’s right. That’s right. These little plastic boats. That’s right.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yes. Sinking somebody else’s battleship by intuiting where the location of their ships were behind a wall. It was so satisfying to sink somebody’s battleship.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: So boys really want to play at war. And I really learned this when I was 30. And my group of buddies from college, and we get together once a year. And one year I hosted in Charlottesville and we played paintball. We went to a paintball place. And there were about five or seven other guys. And we divided up into teams.

And we were divided among ourselves on the teams. And it was unbelievably thrilling to work with other guys to hunt and shoot my friends. And we came out afterwards, all of us. And it hurts when you get hit with a paintball.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It hurts. Your wealth.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, that’s right. Which is important. It’s actually very important. Because then you really take it seriously. You really don’t want to get shot.

But it was absolutely thrilling. It really felt like there was a room in my heart. As a man, there’s a room in my heart for war that had never been opened. So boys want to play at that. And then the multiplayer video games, the first person shooter games, all these things, let them do that.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: The other thing, of course, that boys want to do is look at naked women. And so it used to be Playboy magazine. Now it’s super hardcore sex with anal sex and gang bangs and choking and all sorts of things. So the boys really get, that’s the trap of boy. Let them play war games and give them sex. And once they do that, they can’t escape.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So interesting. We did an episode long ago on sexual development, meaning how hormones influence brain development, which I spent a little bit of time on for my master’s. And by the way, you got the biology exactly right. And it’s fascinating the way that these hormones organize the brain. And some people enjoy learning that it’s testosterone from the testes. It’s the Y chromosome, then the testes, and then testosterone that’s converted to estrogen that then actually has the organizing effect of masculinizing the brain.

They’re all these flips in biology, counterintuitive flips. But I like to mention the flips because they normalize the idea that testosterone creates maleness and estrogen creates femaleness. That’s actually not true. But you got the biology exactly right.

But I was going to add one more thing besides war, violence, and sex. There seems to be an interest by boys in remote control.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Oh, absolutely. Action at a distance.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Action at a distance. So remote control cars. I never had a remote control helicopter. I would have died to get one.

But remote control car that we built, my dad and I built together, that was thrilling. And then when we talk about girls and some of the preferences for certain activities, maybe we’ll get into some others. But yeah, something about remote control, vehicles, and vehicles generally.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. So there’s an important psychological word called effectance made up by White in the 1950s. Effectance is the desire to be a cause. I had this effect on the world. And a nine-month-old infant in the crib, when he discovers, if I pull this, if I hit this, a sound happens. It’s thrilling. You did that. And this stays with us for life. You want to see that the things you do have an effect.

And especially boys are more in the physical world, mechanical world. And so shooting a gun. I remember when I was a kid, I had a BB gun that I bought at a church bazaar. I hid it from my mother, kept it in the closet. But my best friend and I, we’d set up cans on a row and you shoot them and boom, you knock it. It’s amazing. It’s thrilling. That does seem to be a sex difference.

Now girls, I think, now here I’m speculating, but girls seem to be more interested in having an effect in the social world. So everybody wants to have an effect, but boys are more focused on mechanics, girls a bit more on relationships in the social world.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And I’m sure Freud had a field day with this, but what is the apparent, I don’t have the numbers on this, obsession of girls and horses and caretaking of animals. And yet there’s also a lot of wonderful stories about boys taking care of dogs.

Like I read Where the Red Fern Grows maybe 50 times, and I love dogs. I love taking care of raising my dog. But there seems to be something about the stereotype is girls and horses.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, the simple part is girls on average are a little bit more compassionate. They feel the pain of creatures more. Boys are more into animal cruelty as a fun thing to do, an interesting thing to do. So girls are more compassionate. Girls tend more to want to be a veterinarian than boys do because girls love animals.

My daughter was desperate for a pet and we got her a leopard gecko when she was about eight or nine. They’re really cool. But she was crying one day because she could tell it, it’s never going to love me. You don’t know, maybe it’s a reptile. No, they’re not mammals. They don’t have the bond. And she was desperate for a dog. And she begged for years for a puppy. We finally got one. She needed an animal with a forebrain. She needed a mammal.

Now the horse thing, that’s different. I’m not going to speculate on that. I have heard some speculation that it’s because the musculature is something about, it has a feeling of masculinity, but I don’t know. That’s very Freudian.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I was wondering whether or not it would be… I don’t even get near that.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I was wondering whether or not it was something about the healthy requirement for caretaking, the brushing, the cleaning, the caretaking of the animal. It’s pretty elaborate when it comes to a horse.

My first girlfriend had a horse. She spent more time with that horse than with me. And the amount of care, like if the horse was colicking, she would literally go sleep with it in the barn. And it seemed like she loved the amount of love that was available to give to the animal.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. I would put that in a giant bucket called biophilia, a term that I love from E. O. Wilson, just that our species, we evolved in nature, we evolved with relationships with animals. And we crave it, we seek it out, we can fall in love with animals, we have relationships. So I think that’s a healthy part of life. And again, it’s not another area where a phone-based childhood just takes you away from all of that.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It’s interesting, this difference between systems and relationships. I was obsessed with aquaria, the land. I love aquaria. I love freshwater tanks, aquascaping is something I plan to get back into at some point soon.

But the most interesting part about it was which fish could go with which, who would eat who, how many plants, what the density of fish needed to be in order to maintain the ecosystem and how to not get a system crash. It wasn’t so much about the relationship between the fish or to the fish.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. So it’d be interesting to see if there’s a sex difference on aquariums, whether it’s more a boy thing because of interesting complex systems.

The Effects of Pornography on Sexual Development

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: But you know what I’d really like to do with you now, as long as we’re talking about sort of these developmental pathways, I’m hoping that we can talk about, let’s stay on sexual development because this is something I just have a little section in the book.

In the chapter on boys, I have a section where I review the research on pornography and huge amounts of study of pornography over the years. But the hardcore pornography, high resolution video, boys watching it for, you know, many boys, well, a large number of boys go every day to pornography sites, often more than once a day.

So I’d love to hear your thoughts on how that would, you know, how is that going to change sexual development during puberty? A boy who starts, let’s say, at age 12, 13, and does it for 10 years, could we expect that that boy will be different when he’s 22? His dating life will be different? Tell me what you think is happening there in the brain and socially and hormonally.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Sure, absolutely. And I’m not going to demonize pornography, nor am I going to celebrate it. All I’ll say is that my understanding of the dopamine reinforcement system, and I like to call it a reinforcement system as opposed to a reward system because people generally think that dopamine and dopamine hits relate to pleasure, but dopamine is more of a motivator.

As a neuromodulator, it creates a kind of an agitation state that puts us in a state of focus and foraging to resolve some gap between how we feel and how we’d like to feel by seeking things like sex, like food when we’re hungry, like warmth when we’re cold, like cool when we’re too warm. It’s a universal currency of pursuit, of craving and wanting as opposed to having.

Dopamine does a lot more than that and other neuromodulators are involved in wanting and craving, but dopamine is central to that. So I think it’s not just fair to say, but it’s a ground truth that whether or not it’s a drug like methamphetamine, cocaine, crack cocaine in particular, or some other drug that hits the system fast and creates a big, big inflection in dopamine, that the more rapid the rise in dopamine, the bigger the crash in dopamine afterwards and the more miserable you feel afterwards. And the more repeat of the behavior that initiated the peak will occur, aka addiction or at least extreme habit formation, depending how one defines those.

When it comes to dopamine, the other key thing to know is that dopamine, in particular, high inflections in dopamine, big peaks in dopamine that occur without much effort, in particular, the kinds of efforts that evolved to bring about the dopamine release, such as courting, dating, learning your preferences, learning the other person’s preferences, working out issues of discussion, consent, negotiation, et cetera.

When dopamine arrives quickly without effort, such as with amphetamine, crack cocaine, or pornography, the whole reinforcement loop becomes wired to these short time scales. You want something, you want it now, and you get it. But over time, you get less and less of the dopamine peak and you get more of the dopamine trough that occurs, you drop below baseline afterwards.

So all of that is a bunch of neurobiological-ish, nerd-speak for absolutely the ready availability of pornography at a few taps on the phone. No doubt, triggers big dopamine. The first time requires more and more investment in that behavior to get less and less of the dopamine. You never get back to the initial value and you’re driven further and further down the pathway of addiction.

And there’s the loss of all the learning that the brain has evolved to learn how to evoke dopamine from, I don’t want to say just mate pursuit, but it’s courtship and eventually sex. And we know that after ejaculation, after orgasm, there’s a dramatic decrease in dopamine and a huge increase in prolactin.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: What does that do?

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Prolactin and dopamine are essentially antagonistic to one another. It creates states of quiescence, calm. It’s thought to facilitate pair bonding by keeping mates near one another, smelling one another, sharing pheromones. In fact, there’s something called the Coolidge effect. We can talk about the sort of classic Coolidge effect. There are these effects that have to do with the inverse relationship between dopamine and prolactin.

But with pornography, assuming that boys are masturbating to the pornography and they are doing that to the point of ejaculation, then they’re getting this kind of quiescence of the system. They’re feeling lethargic, relaxed. Maybe depending on their age or their motivation, they’re doing it again and again. But neither the dopamine nor the prolactin are being devoted to anything about courtship and pursuit, nor is it in the case of prolactin related to anything related to pair bonding.

They’re just sitting there with their computer in their room. And of course, this occurred with pornography, as you mentioned before, classic pornography. But when I was growing up, if somebody had a penthouse or a Playboy magazine, they would often stash it for whatever reason behind a business or something so no one would get caught with it. And then you’d go there like a library.

And it was in places where, this is getting a little weird, but where people didn’t use the pornography there, I think they remembered it perhaps. But they weren’t spending a ton of time with it. In fact, there was an unspoken rule. You didn’t take it with you.

And this is kind of most kids’ first exposure to pornography or their dad had a Playboy magazine or something like that. So I hope I described the landscape of the biology well enough. But the short answer is absolutely creates major problems in the dopamine reinforcement system. It’s training the dopamine reinforcement system for fast reinforcement and diminished reinforcement over time.

And none of it translates to the real world. It’s not just the content. So I guess what we’re getting at here is it’s not just what they’re seeing as so extreme, and that’s an issue, clearly. It’s also that the whole process takes minutes. And it can be repeated over and over, depending on the refractory period as opposed to real world dating and relationships, which takes effort. And it takes learning. There’s hardly any learning in the use of a drug like methamphetamine or cocaine about how your dopamine system works, unconscious learning. And there’s hardly any, if any, learning about sex and courtship in pornography.

And it’s also training the dopamine system, the whole motivational system around sex, to be observational as opposed to participatory. And I hear a lot, because I’m in the wellness health space and I’m a man, guys reach out by direct message, hey, listen, they’ll reach out that they’re having real issues with erectile dysfunction, with anxiety.

And these things always existed, but there was a kind of a learning, a communication, you know, slow your breathing down and communicate and kind of get back to a place where you’re more comfortable. They’re not able to translate anything about their experience of sex and pleasure to the real world.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And as a consequence, they’re retreating into a world where they view, if they’re heterosexual, the opposite sex, or if they’re homosexual, the same potential partners as like these distant foreign objects that they don’t understand.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Wow, Andrew, thank you. That was a really powerful and clear description of what I was trying to say in the book coming just from the psychological side, which is to turn from a boy into a man, there’s a certain amount of toughening and skill building, the skills that have to be developed. And I’m so glad to use the word courtship.

I use that word a lot with my students. I hear almost nobody else using that word. It’s such an important word, because we did evolve the ability to pair bond, at least temporarily. And we do have courtship, and it has to start slowly. If you jump into bed and have sex right away, there’s no chance of courtship. That part is over. And so, as you were talking, I was really trying to, I was thinking, and I want the listeners to imagine, imagine one 13-year-old boy who, you know, really wants sex, would like to have a girlfriend, but he has a laptop, he has a phone, he has a porn hub. He masturbates two or three times a day.

He’d still like to have a girlfriend, but he’s sexually satisfied because he has all this amazing pornography. And he does this every day for 10 years, until he’s 23, let’s say. And then we have another boy who, you know, maybe he has a Playboy magazine, or maybe he has nothing. Maybe he just has his imagination. He masturbates occasionally, as boys do. But he doesn’t have the hardcore porn. He doesn’t have the fast dopamine. And then this second boy, he puts more effort to actually having a girlfriend.

And he learns how to talk to girls. And he’s flirting, and one is interested in him. And then they have their first kiss. And, you know, because I’m remembering back when I was, you know, a teenager in my 20s, the most beautiful golden days, I mean, the most memorable days of my life, it was those days when you have that first kiss, and you know, like, oh, this is going to turn into something.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Everything sparkles.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Everything sparkles. Yeah. But the point is, it’s slow, and it’s hard work.

And then when you finally do have sex, you know, it’s not like, oh, dopamine crash, you know, get out of here. It’s as you said, it’s like, you know, prolactin rise, you know, you hug, you hold the girl. And, you know, at some point, you start thinking about marriage, like you start thinking like, is this the one? I mean, you know, crazy thoughts like that. You can’t help but think that when you’re falling in love. And at NYU, I teach an undergrad course, and I also teach an MBA course. Now, the MBAs are all on the dating app. They’re in their late 20s.

They’re all on the dating apps. The undergrads, some of them are on dating apps, but you know, they’re 19. They’re mostly dating in their circles. And for the MBAs, I really have to work with them to see that these dating apps are cutting off courtship in a lot of ways. I mean, yes, you’re texting, but it’s not the same. So I’m so glad you explained a lot about that. One is the fast. It’s the fast satisfaction that prevents you from learning, where slow hard work towards a biological goal, like sex or dating or marriage or love, is what builds you up into a competent man.

Who would want to hire or who would want to date? Let’s put it that way. Who would want to date the kid who’d been masturbating three times a day to porn since he was 13?

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there’s all sorts of things. I mean, my father’s Argentine, moved to the States in the late 60s. And so I was raised in a fairly traditional home from the perspective of masculine, feminine roles. And there were all these things around chivalry. I remember going to my first junior high school dance. My dad gave me this whole tutorial about holding the door and how to, you know, it’s interesting that nowadays guys are often judged in terms of their latency to respond to text messages, you know, something I’m terrible at.

And it’s interesting that that sort of replaced chivalry, like how responsive somebody is. So there’s a kind of a bleeding for it, as long as we’re just being very open about the past, present, and perhaps future of this stuff. I remember growing up and hearing stories. This wasn’t how my childhood went, but I remember my dad telling me, you know, in Argentina, the young boys, when they would hit puberty used to be taken to prostitutes. So they would learn how to have sex. I mean, that’s how, I mean, that wasn’t that long ago. Okay. That wasn’t my childhood.

And I remember thinking like, well, you know, is this, is this what’s going to happen next? And, but he was explaining, that’s kind of how it went. That doesn’t tend to happen anymore, as I understand. I haven’t heard of it happening.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Right.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: But in terms of learning courtship, learning chivalry, learning, you know, who pays, and a lot of that’s changed with the, you know, the changing milieu of sex and gender dynamics, but it’s all iterative. It’s slow and iterative. And everything about online use, as you mentioned, is it’s fast. You can find anything with a keyword search. No work.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. The technology makes everything easier. And if we, if we end up talking about AI at all, which every conversation goes to at some point, that’s my big fear, that AI is, makes everything easy. Now that’s great for us adults. When we have 50 things we want to do, if I can give 30 of them to AI, that would be great. But, you know, how many servants do I want my, you know, my son is now 17.

When he was 10, 11, 12, how many servants would I want him to have to take care of his needs? Like probably zero, like zero is probably the best number. But, you know, with, with porn for sexual drive, with multiplayer video games for sports or, or competition.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. Our kids are, they’re not, they’re not learning or developing. And this is why, you know, I work in a business school. I talk to a lot of people in the corporate world and I always ask them, how, how’s it going with your Gen Z employees? I’ve never heard a good word. I’ve never heard, Oh, they’re great. It’s, they’re often people just surprised at how they don’t take initiative. If, if, you know, if something is broken, they don’t fix it. They want to be told what to do.

They don’t have the confidence. They’re very anxious. So, you know, I’m not, I’m not ragging on Gen Z. I’m saying we blocked their development. We prevented them from having a thousand, millions of experiences of social interaction, of challenge, of failure, of fear, of thrill. And then when they reached their early twenties and they’re employed, employers find there’s something lacking.

Lack of Conflict Resolution Skills

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So it sounds to me like boys on smartphones or, so from the 2010 period forward, are getting this kind of hyper stereotypical male experience. First-person shooter games, pornography, girls are getting this hyper stereotypical female experience, relational, highly relational.

But there are certain dynamics that are missing or certain components that are missing. Yesterday I heard you mention something very, very interesting to me, which is that in both groups, it seems conflict and any kind of friction is not being resolved among the participants, but there’s this sort of looking outward for some rule or policy, law or oversight to come in and intervene.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Could you talk a little bit about this? This relates in an interesting way to cancel culture. I would love to learn more about this.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Sure. So aggression is a part of human nature, as is cooperation. And they kind of have to go together. You know, to make it in this world, you have to be able to play politics. You have to have friends and allies. You have to stand up for yourself. You have to push back sometimes, but you have to learn to bury the hatchet. And, you know, if you grew up with siblings, you’re fighting every day and you’re cooperating every day. And it’s a very important practice.

And if you’re playing sports outside with a bunch of kids in the neighborhood, you’re making the rules every day. And then part of what’s important when kids are playing is the infractions. The play stops, people come together. You know, that was out of bounds. No, it wasn’t. You pushed me. No, I didn’t. And then, you know, everybody gets practice playing judge and jury because everyone wants the game to go on.

So they’re very motivated to work it out. You have to accept the judgment. What are you going to do, storm off and go home to protest? Then you look like a loser and you don’t get to play anymore. So natural play with no adult forces the kids to learn social skills that are essential for democracy. How do we make rules together? Just us. How do we decide how we’re going to govern ourselves?

What do we do when it looks like someone violated a rule? Well, we’re not just going to kill them. We’re not going to expel them. We have to have a way of going on with the play. So these are such crucial skills for social development for boys and for girls. And kids always learn to work that out. But what happens when the boys are growing up on video games? There are no disputes.

There can’t be a dispute because the game, the software basically manages everything. There’s no out of bounds or anything. So the play is missing a lot of the key skills.

Now, how are conflicts resolved? Well, on social media, instead of like a conflict that two girls might have had just the two of them or with like a group before, which could get worked out very, very quickly. If somebody posts something indirect, maybe it’s an indirect criticism and someone takes it in a way, maybe it was intended that way, maybe it wasn’t. But before you know it, it’s accelerated. People are taking sides. It could blow up. You don’t know how big it could get. It could be the whole school now gets drawn in. This is terrifying.

So a really important idea about play is what’s called low stakes mistakes. So if you make a mistake while playing soccer with your friends, no big deal. It’s a foul, redo, whatever it is. But if you make a mistake on social media, it could blow up to the point where you are now a laughing stock.

And when a kid, especially in middle school, when a kid is a laughing stock, when everyone’s laughing at them, that is likely to trigger thoughts even of suicide. Shame makes us want to disappear. And we’re putting our kids, our kids need to be immersed in small groups, small groups of other kids that are stable, somewhat stable over years. That’s the healthiest environment.

But instead, we’re mixing them in with possibly potentially gigantic groups, including strangers and people who are not engaging their normal empathy skills, but are being performative, judgmental, judging in order to be liked by others. So it’s just an inhumane, it’s an inhuman world in which to raise kids. And this is part of my point about the great rewiring. In 2010, American kids still had a recognizable human childhood with a lot of time together with other friends.

But that plunges in the 2010s to the point where now childhood is largely happening alone on a screen.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I’ll never forget in middle school being at some assembly and a kid had got down on all fours behind me and someone pushed me in that game. I stood up and Kevin Gassman was just sitting there just cackling with his face right in front of me. So I hit him. It turns out it wasn’t Kevin that did it. And he hit me back and it was a disaster. And I don’t remember how it panned out, but we ended up being friends. It was kind of how things got worked out.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, that’s right. Conflict and cooperation. You need the two together.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Incredibly embarrassing, both for getting pushed over and for hitting the wrong kid. But credit for hitting somebody because that’s how boys work. Things I’m not suggesting people do this, not suggesting violence. And then both of us feeling silly. And then ultimately.

Well, I don’t know. I made it say the eighth grade somehow. And the hierarchy among I mostly had male friends, but the hierarchy was something that was very dynamic. Yeah. I have a good friend who was a he was a CEO, a commanding officer in one of the East Coast field team squadrons, tier one squadron. He said the reason they’re so effective in those those groups is because they embrace dynamic subordination, where people take over as different skill sets are required and they are relentlessly hard on each other.

This is something they are like relentlessly hard at the level of humor. But also, I mean, because it’s so high, high risk and high consequence, they’re just extremely hard on one another. But it’s all about this dynamic subordination that sure, they’re leaders by virtue of who’s appointed leader in certain amount of authority. But there’s this constant dynamic subordination and exists in every group of males I’ve ever been a part of.

And it’s wonderful and very reassuring to me because it means that you both get to potentially step up, but you also get to rest when you and trust somebody else’s skills. I don’t know how it operates with with girls. I’ve only been, you know, one of the white chromosome. This is all I know.

But I imagine it exists there, too, in different but in different ways.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So if online, everything is fear based, where one is fearing a dogpile, like you say the wrong thing, you’re going to get dogpiled. You kind of wonder why anyone participates at all. But it seems like people are in there. Are they — are they in there and timid or are is boldness rewarded? Is it only boldness of, I guess, you know, slamming down to what they call dunking on other people? I mean, and here is I’m describing kids. I want to acknowledge if you look on Twitter X, we now call it in the academic, tech and finance community in particular. This is how the men behave. This is how the women behave. But it’s especially apparent that the adults are kind of acting like kids and the kids are kind of acting like adults. So what’s going on?

Are we — are we drawn into this as well as adults? And are we modeling this? Or is this just social media pulling on these strings of, you know, deep, evolutionarily conserved wiring?

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. Well, so first, you know, let’s not be too monochromatic about social media. There is a lot of humor. There’s a lot of jokes. There are a lot of funny cartoons and videos.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: And so there is good stuff mixed in. And even the bad stuff is entertaining in the way that looking at a car crash or a dead body is entertaining people. It draws the eye. So young people are very interested in us adults who are very interested. It, you know, it draws us in. But then, yes, it certainly changes our behavior. Now, actually, there’s some research on trolls.

Is it that whenever you go on Twitter, you become a jerk? And actually, no, it seems more that what happens is there’s a small number of men, always men, who have a personality disorder. They like to be jerks. They like to get a reaction from people. They get blocked a lot. They get kicked off platforms. And this small number, you know, in a real community, probably when you were growing up, there were one or two kids who were like this. And they got in trouble a lot.

And they probably ended up dead or in jail. But online, this, you know, suppose it’s one percent one percent of men are psychopaths. So suppose this is two percent of men, let’s say, who are jerks like this. Well, online, that’s who we all see. So in part, it’s that the online world super empowers extremists and jerks. It’s also that in the online world, everyone is feeling performative. Everyone is, you know, you might — even if you’re making a joke, you have to think three steps ahead. How will it be misinterpreted?

So the metaphor that I have in my head, whenever I’m online, is it’s really just like being on thin ice, like you can have fun on thin ice. It’s not all bad, but you’re kind of always aware that you’re in danger. Whereas when you’re hanging out with your buddies, you know, your good friends, you feel totally safe. And if you accidentally insult one of them, you know, it’s like, oh, you know, sorry, you know, you’re right. I’m sorry.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And as followership increases, the ice gets thinner.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. The higher they go, the harder they fall. And then a lot of people want to see, want to see your fall. I just want to make one point. That’s an interesting concept that was something in subordination.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Dynamic subordination. Kind of like a flock of birds, but is how it was described to me. But, you know, I always thought in the tier one special operations community that, you know, people would spend more years there, further and further. And that’s true, too. But this idea that it’s just understood that the hierarchy evolves in real time. And the more people embrace that, the better performing the group is as a pack.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. Now, the word hierarchy certainly takes on a bad name, especially like in our academic circles, hierarchy, you know, is bad and power is bad. And subordination is all these things are bad power, you know, inequality.

But I think part of what’s going on there. So, you know, I teach in a business school and there’s a huge amount of writing on leadership. And I haven’t read much of it. But a key idea that I got, I remember the author, is that the key puzzle is not why people want to be leaders is why do they want to be followers? We really need to study followership. And so people are willing to follow because part of our amazing human ability is to work together in groups to overcome obstacles. We don’t have sharp teeth. We’re not very well, we’re fast and long distance, but not in sprints.

But we’re able to work together. And when we face a common threat, we very willingly cede leadership to a leader, but we have to trust them. And if the leader shows that he’s a narcissist, that he’s putting himself first, that he’s benefiting at our expense, we don’t trust him.

So what you need to do, and I think this is more clear, males are more hierarchical. This is true in chimpanzees as well. Males are, they take to hierarchy more readily. Males benefit from having practice. I don’t think of it as dominance and submission. I think what you said is actually more effective. It’s like, then you practice like being the leader of this project, and then being a follower because you grant like, yeah, you lead us on this, you take the lead on this, and then something else will reverse. And if you have a young man who has a lot of that experience, that’s going to be a young man that you will want to employ when he’s in his mid 20s. Whereas one who never had that, it’s just going to be much more difficult to work with in a business setting.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: The groups of boys I grew up with, and men that I’ve worked with and been friends with, it’s always been understood like, this guy’s really terrific for finding stuff, and this guy’s great with vehicles, and this guy’s great with girls, and this guy’s great, that people have different skill sets, and that the group together can really mesh. But there isn’t an attempt to be something that you’re not. And you quickly find out who you are by who you’re not.

And you find your unique skill set. And you evolve in that way by not trying to be everything to everybody. Whereas, I noticed with my sister and her groups of friends, it’s changed over time, of course, but that there tended to be one girl that was really dominant in the play session, like the whole time. The bossy one.

And even though some stories, kids books that mainly feature boys have that, I don’t recall that being such a big part of my reading experience or childhood experience, like in the Encyclopedia Brown books, there was like the mean kid. But people would slot in where they were most adept. So it’s sort of like natural tendencies to excel were complimentary. And I don’t know what it is for girls.

But online, it seems, all of that’s erased. So you’ve got these social dynamics that are very heightened, being played out on social media with girls. But boys and men are on there as well. And most of what’s on social media is social, it’s relational. So are boys and men being drawn more toward those sorts of interactions and how well are they navigating those interactions? Is it common for boys to make big mistakes online and then be shunned as a consequence? Or is this more common in females?

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s a good question. Life online is performative. For girls, a much bigger element of performance is perfectionism about the image. So girls spend a lot more time choosing a photograph, editing a photograph, making sure everything’s perfect. Whereas guys, you know, like I literally don’t notice if my socks don’t match. My wife has to tell me your socks don’t match. You know, guys just don’t notice those things as much.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You’re a professor after all.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, we are. But my point is that life online, it does affect all kids. So fear of missing out is something that affects everybody. You know, on Snapchat you see all your friends are over there and you didn’t even know that there was something going on. So, you know, boys and girls, again, boys and girls, they’ll have similar insecurities.

It’s more a question of degree. So the perfectionism, the playing out the social dynamics to three steps, like girls are playing three-dimensional chess about social relationships. Well, but why did he say that if he also wanted this when she, he knows that, she knows that, you know, and guys are like, what? What do you say? I don’t even know what you’re saying.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: They’re barely playing checkers.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. That’s right. And again, it’s that, you know, it’s the early organizing effects of prenatal hormones. This is not culturally taught. This is what kids enjoy doing based on, I believe, and Simon Baron Cohen, I believe, believes is the organizing, the prenatal organizing effects of hormones on the developing brain.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: But on YouTube where it’s, my understanding, primarily male, there’s a lot of clap back type comments. I know this because I have a YouTube channel. And in the old days, it wasn’t that long ago, when Rogan was, had full-length episodes on YouTube, then he didn’t, now he does again. The jokes, the comment section on YouTube were like their own show. It was outrageous.

It was so good. And some of that’s coming back now.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Was it men showing off their cleverness?

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I mean, like, for instance, you might be familiar with Jocko Willink, the, right, you know, this, if you had to draw a Navy SEAL, you draw Jocko, kind of looks like modern general, general patent, modern-day general patent, right? And there’s this whole category of jokes based on Jocko, who I think actually has risen to prominence in the online culture because he’s sort of like the football coach that most young males never had. So the guy that’s going to tell you what to do, when to do it, do it, even though you don’t want to, just do it. And he, and you trust him.

He’s a very trustworthy guy, as it were, and he’s a warrior, and he has all the credentials, etc. But there’s this whole category of jokes, like, you know, when Jocko was born, the doctor looked at his mother and said, it’s a man. You know, or when Jocko left for college, he looked at his father and said, you’re the man of the house now. You know, jokes like that, you know, there are tons and tons of these, right?

So there’s this whole, so that’s very YouTubish male-type humor. It’s one hit, it’s done, it gets a ton of likes, and it propagates.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: None of this two or three chess moves down the road. So it’s very clap-back sometimes, or in that case, building up Jocko, who doesn’t need any more building up, but people do it anyway. So things of that sort. So I’m interested in the nuance here, because you’re telling me that girls are killing themselves more. They’re depressed.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, their increase in suicide is larger. Boys have a much higher suicide rate. So many more boys die from suicide, because they commit more violence. That’s one of the major reasons, and that’s especially true in America, where we have so many guns. Boys tend to use a gun or a tall building or a bridge, whereas girls tend to use pills or cutting their wrists, and the great majority of girls’ suicide attempts don’t lead to death.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So are most of the issues with girls and online use, social media, it’s sort of, it’s despair. It’s at home, anxious, sad about self, self-critiquing, this kind of thing. I mean, you’re telling me there’s a huge, and I believe you, that there’s a tremendous increase.

I mean, it’s a hockey stick-like function. When we’re looking at essentially capturing the tip of the pyramid in terms of, like, extreme social interactions. So take, let me, I’m not being very, very clear here. We have these neural circuits that evolved for social interactions that are more heightened in girls. They’re getting much more of it, faster, and the consequences are no less and probably even more severe than they used to be, but it’s still shunning, shaming, self-attack, and anxiety, depression, etc. In boys, the neural circuits that we’re talking about are related to sex and violence. Those evolved over hundreds of thousands, millions of years, and those are heightened. So we’re sort of capturing the extremes of these neural circuit functions.

I’m looking at this through the lens of a neurobiologist, and this is where it seems we’re running into trouble, because the iceberg below all of that, the portion of the iceberg below those peaks of behavior and interactions, like, none of that’s happening. There isn’t the, it’s all happening faster, it’s more potent, and the consequences are more severe.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. That’s right. I think there’s a good analogy here to junk food, where I’ve heard junk food or, you know, a cheeseburger described as a super stimulus, and, you know, ice cream is a super-duper stimulus, you know, it’s got fat, it’s got sugar.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right, and a cheeseburger with a milkshake, and the milkshake has candy in it.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, ice cream. And then you get a toy.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, yeah. And they’re playing music. I mean, that’s a dopamine bath.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. Yeah. So if we think about, if we think about life in the presence of junk food, if you raise your kids with junk food, you’re gonna have all kinds of, you know, metabolic problems, developmental problems, obesity, all sorts, diabetes, all sorts of terrible things.

Now, if you have a normal development, and then as an adult, you indulge in more junk food, you know, it’s, you know, it’s probably, it’s not good for you, but it’s very different than being raised on it. The developing brain, the developing body are much more sensitive.

And so, the way you just put it before, it’s like the, it’s like these evolved motives, you super satisfy them with these, these overwhelming quick, easy hits. It may not be so bad for an adult. We can choose to have, you know, we can choose to, you know, pay for sex. We can choose to, you know, eat it, you know, eat a cheeseburger and a, and a milkshake.

But it’s very important for kids. We have to see, the genes don’t have that much information in them, but they start the brain developing, and then the brain has to sort of find its way. The neurons have to find their way, guided by local signals, how to develop. And then the child has to kind of find its way through its culture, getting a sense of how do I behave here, and, and who am I, and how do I relate to people.

And it’s all a very delicate process that has to be drawn out over many, many years. We, everything about us develops slowly, especially compared to other animals. And if you intervene in the developmental process and say, hey kid, you want the endpoint? Without the journey? Here you go, take it. You’re cutting off development. And that’s, I think, what life, that’s what the phone-based childhood is doing.

Critical and Sensitive Periods of Development

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well, here’s my concern. There is a reality to these things we call critical or sensitive periods.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes, let’s talk about that.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Critical periods implies that it’s open and shut, and they’re actually sensitive periods for language learning, for brain plasticity, and that the general contour of this is passive experience up until about age 25 dramatically shapes the maps in the brain that we have of social relationships, of the visual world, the auditory world. I mean, there’s just so much data to support this in animals and humans.

Then after about age 25, you can pry open the underlying neurobiological mechanisms for neuroplasticity, and you can rewire your brain, but it takes a hell of a lot of effort and or pharmacology to assist, which is part of what the excitement about some of the psychedelic therapies are about. Because, and I’m not suggesting people just run out and take psychedelics, but…

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: But they can foster change.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: They can foster change, and they’re either neuromodulators or they stimulate the massive release of neuromodulators like dopamine, serotonin, mostly serotonin and dopamine, and when we talk about psilocybin and MDMA, LSD, etc.

But that plasticity needs to be directed, so just taking the drug doesn’t do it on its own. Okay, so leaving that aside, what do we know for sure? We know that as the brain progresses from age 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, there are milestones that have to be met. And in general, if a kid makes it to high school age or college age, regardless of whether or not they go to, hopefully they do in graduate high school or college, there’s a set of milestones that they have to reach.

The circuits are going to develop one way or another. The question is, what are the — what are the thresholds under which dopamine is released? Well, I would argue, and I’ll go on record saying that if a kid watches a lot of intense, high-potency, violent porn, and that becomes his dopamine stimulus, well then other stuff probably won’t do it for him. Whereas if there’s a variety of experience or more, let’s just say subtle, dare I even say healthier, right, stimuli, then the system is, the dopamine system around courting and sex is more varied.

It’s more of a, at least more of a buffet, and hopefully a healthier buffet, right? Again, no judgment here of different proclivities, but here we’re talking about the wiring of neural circuits. Same thing with food. If one grows up on highly processed, very, very tasty food, for a while fruits and vegetables in their pure form, meat and fish in their plain form, are boring.

It does not evoke the same reinforcing property. And earlier I forgot to mention why I prefer the word reinforcing as opposed to reward, because reward evokes this idea of the thing being the reward. But the reinforcement is, reinforcement is a verb, and so as a verb, it brings the mind to the fact that these circuits are, like they’re churning in the background there. It’s not just about getting the thing, it’s the underlying biology that gets you there.

And so I think that where I’m very concerned is that we’ve now got, what, millions and millions of kids, boys and girls, whose neural circuits were wired up wrong. And now there needs to be, it seems, a very active process in unwiring that, or at least shifting those neural circuits towards something that’s more adaptive.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, so before we talk about what to do if you’re older, because I have the great good fortune to be sitting here with you right now, I’d like to ask you to help me expand what I say in the book. So you gave a description of critical periods where there’s a hard beginning and end, and of sensitive periods are periods in which it’s just a lot easier to learn something.

And if you don’t learn, so for example, phonology is one of the clearest cases. You accent, you know, if you, you know, when a family moves to America from somewhere else, if you’ve got two kids in the family, one of my advisors at Penn in grad school, Henry Gleitman, he had a very, very heavy German accent. And his younger brother, two years younger, had no accent whatsoever, because Henry was 14 and his brother was 12 when they came to America from fleeing Nazi Germany. And so there’s a sensitive period that kind of closes at puberty for language.

So I talk about that in the book, and then I talk about more speculative sensitive period. That I’ve read about, you know, a few people think this exists, and I cite a Japanese — study of Japanese businessmen who moved to California in the 70s as Japanese business were thriving. It looked at when did the kids come to feel American? And the answer was, if they came and left before age nine, nothing. They went back to Japan, they were totally Japanese. If they came when the kid was 15, nothing. The kid was already Japanese but wasn’t going to ever feel American. If they came and spent a few years between about nine and 15, then they go back to Japan. Now especially if the kid’s now 15 or 16, the kid now feels American and has trouble fitting back in.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Puberty.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, that’s right. There’s a period, it’s early puberty, you know, just before puberty to sort of midway through puberty. Seems to be a sensitive period for culture learning and for identity. Your very deep sense of who you are and how you relate to people. So this is speculative, but it does seem to fit a lot of interesting data. And the reason why I focus on this in the book, I decided like late in the process, you know, I knew I had to talk about puberty.

I was going to have like a section on it. I was like, oh my god, this is so important. I need a whole chapter on puberty. And I talk about initiation rights. All over the world, adults think kids don’t just turn into men and women. They need help. They need to be given a special knowledge. For boys, there’s usually ordeals, more so than for girls. And so I think what’s going on is we do have this sensitive period for culture learning. How do you learn to become a person in your culture? And you know, I was in the Boy Scouts. And Boy Scouts was created around World War One as like paramilitary training.

Like learn virtues of, you know, self-denial and, you know, brave, clean, loyal, trustworthy, reverent. I’ve got the order on that stuff. But it was a set of virtues. So would you agree or what would you say about sensitive periods for this really high-level stuff? We’re not talking vision or phenology, which are fairly low-level cognitive things. We’re talking like your sense of who you are. What would you think about a sensitive period for that?

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: First of all, puberty is just fascinating and under-discussed, in my opinion, as a critical developmental milestone. It’s also the fastest rate of aging that we ever undergo.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Aging meaning?

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: In our lifespan, you know, in terms of change of the brain, in terms of rate of, I mean, there are some theories that the rate of puberty and the timing of onset of puberty actually might predict something about longevity.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Oh, which way?

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Early puberty might be bad, but I want to be very careful in saying that some people, including myself, have a very protracted puberty. So I hit puberty around 14, but I didn’t get facial hair until I was out of college.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Wow.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So some people develop the so-called secondary sexual characteristics slowly, but I always had this voice since I was a little kid. So five years old, they called me Froggy. Now, that’s me and everyone goes through these things differently, but puberty is the most profound brain change that one can undergo.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Tell me more about it, because I just keep saying like, well, it starts in the back of the brain and then, be specific, what is happening to the brain during puberty that would be relevant here to a sensitive period?

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Okay, so this goes back to the biology that you accurately described earlier, which is that while we’re in utero, if there’s a Y chromosome, then a bunch of genes are made, like mullerian inhibiting hormone. The mullerian ducts become inhibited, the testes grow, then testosterone is secreted, and testosterone and some of its derivatives, like dihydrotestosterone, organize the brain, quote-unquote, male. It’s a dangerous language nowadays.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: It’s less dangerous now than it was two years ago.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Okay, well, we’re not talking about gender. We’re talking about biological sex here, and we’re not talking about the verb sex. We were talking about that earlier. We’re talking about biological sex. So what I’m describing here is not disputed.

So there’s these organizing effects of hormones early on, and then there’s the activating effects of hormones that happen during puberty. So then puberty hits, the testes start secreting testosterone. If there are fat stores on the body, they secrete estrogen. Again, testosterone and estrogen working in parallel, and in males, a number of different brain areas, in particular the hypothalamus, but also the forebrain and associated areas, undergo massive plasticity and growth, relating the…

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Wait, the forebrain, the frontal lobe?

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right, the frontal lobe. Oh, so one of the most profound changes in puberty that happens, especially in males, but also in females, is that, well, we can describe the major function of the prefrontal cortex, this neural real estate right behind the forebrain. It has many different subdomains involved in things, but one of its main functions, this was beautifully described by the guy who’s now the head neurosurgeon at Neuralink, Matt MacDougall, is to say, shh, to the impulse driving actions of the hypothalamus in particular.

Hypothalamus houses neurons for temperature regulation, sexual drive, hunger, aggression, I mean, so much so that you can go in and stimulate certain neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus with an electrode, and you would go into a rage.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Wow.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Stimulate neurons also within the ventromedial hypothalamus, just nearby, and you’d want to go spend some time with your wife alone. Let’s just put it that way.

I mean, a remarkable specificity of the neuronal outputs to behavioral change and state change. So all of that gets set up essentially during puberty because the neurons of the hypothalamus are responsive to these hormones that are coming from the gonads. And in females, it’s, yes, mainly secretion of estrogen, but also testosterone. Okay, so the brain is changing in dramatic ways, not the least of which is the forebrain is learning how to suppress impulse.

Okay, and some of that gets feedback from behaviors, from parenting, learning how to suppress from social reward or punishment.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: It doesn’t get daily practice in suppressing if you’re able to give in to all your urges. Because like, I’m finding, like, when I sit at my computer, my rule now, I have to say to myself out loud, finish what you start. Finish what you start. No, don’t go check until you’ve done. You only have two more pages to read. Read those two pages, but I can’t do it.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right, well, this is the gradual creep of sort of a, we don’t want to make it clinical, but an adult like ADHD-like symptoms that we all are suffering from, right? There’s just, it’s just, we’re at a buffet, right?

That’s a good example. So that’s one of the main things, this forebrain to hypothalamic wiring. The other is, and this is not trivial, and you mentioned the context of language learning, and Dr. Eddie Chang, who’s a neurosurgeon, actually chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, knows a lot about this, and critical periods, is that there are hormone effects on, say, like, thickening of the vocal cords, which is why, on average, boys have deeper voices than girls and so forth. And there’s a lot of feedback from those signals in terms of the social world, because now a young boy whose voice deepens, who’s also acquiring more knowledge, is talking to other people about that knowledge, and he’s being treated differently, and there’s feedback in terms of his self-concept. And that’s where it gets kind of high-level abstract.

In girls, there’s feedback of, sometimes it’s bodily changes, positive or negative feedback from peers, other girls, and or boys, but also knowledge. She’s out there talking about, well, you know, what, she’s brilliant in math, or, you know, brilliant in literature, and getting the feedback, and then self-knowledge starts to accumulate, and the location of identity in the brain is unclear. It’s probably a distributed network. There’s probably an emergent property of a lot of different things.

So we can’t really point to one area, but it’s learning impulse control, reinforcement contingencies. On what timescale can I get what I want to meet certain drives, and to what extent should I suppress those drives? And, you know, traditionally, it was, I think, through religion, and parenting, and social cues that you learn, well, if I want something, is it okay to do it, that there are consequences to eating more or less, consequences to be, okay, so it’s super complex.

But that all happens sometimes in a summer. This is what’s so amazing about puberty, to me, you know, or the acquisition of facial hair in a boy, you know, suddenly he’s looked at differently. People start projecting all sorts of futures on him, you know, but we do this, I notice, I’m not a child psychologist, obviously, but as soon as my niece started drawing, she’s going to be an artist. As soon as a boy starts building, or a girl starts, you know, gets a math problem right, she’s going to be a mathematician. I mean, we project all this stuff, and there’s no question that that feeds back on identity.

But in terms of online use, I can’t even imagine how much of this is diminished by only showing a specific part of ourselves, and I can’t even imagine how much of it is exacerbated in terms of what we are rewarded for during puberty.

So here’s what we know in both animals and humans, which is that neuroplasticity, while it responds to punishment, is exquisitely sensitive, becomes sort of a runaway train for more plasticity under conditions of dopamine reinforcement and reward. So you can imagine that the girl using the filter, the Instagram filter for who gets rewarded for looking a certain way, maybe excessively thin or something, or what leads to excessively thin, there’s no question that rewards drive neuroplasticity faster than punishment.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Let me make sure I understand this. You’re saying, suppose a girl gets, a girl gets onto Instagram, and she’s now consuming stuff about being thin, and for some reason she finds this rewarding. Are you saying that the quick dopamine circuits, where she posts something and she gets likes for it, are you saying that that actually will extend neuroplasticity? The fact that she’s getting more dopamine, rapid dopamine, that will make her more neuroplastic and her brain will change more?

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yes, it will accelerate learning for the, whatever contingency led to that, whatever led to that. So we know this in animals and humans, even though they’re exquisitely sensitive, plasticity is exquisitely sensitive to punishment. You know, it only takes one shock learning in one corner of a cage. We’re getting sick at one particular restaurant that you don’t want to go back again.

But when it comes to social dynamics, we know that reward leads to almost what I would call runaway plasticity in the circuits that generated the behaviors that led to that particular reward. I mean, it’s, and there are a number of experiments that explain this, the work of Mike Merzenich at UCSF, who largely worked on adult plasticity, but showed that when you activate dopamine release in the brain, fortunately both during development but also in adulthood, you essentially create a window of superplasticity.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Okay, that’s amazing.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So dopamine reward, that neuromodulator is a window for superplasticity, and evolutionarily it makes sense. Like, oh my goodness, there’s abundance here of something. Oh, time to learn something new.

We’ve overemphasized the extent to which plasticity is driven by punishment, but the neuromodulators that allow for plasticity, in particular in puberty and as adults, are largely dopamine dependent and acetylcholine dependent. The acetylcholine generally increases focus, broadly speaking. I mean, it does a bunch of other things, controls muscular contraction, etc.

But, so what we’re basically saying here is that if a kid gets a strongly reinforcing experience, I’d be willing to bet both arms that the neural circuits that help generate whatever behaviors led to that experience are going to be strengthened in one trial, to the extent that it will be very easy to generate those behaviors again.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Okay, thank you. That’s exactly what I wanted to know, to deepen the theorizing that I do in the book. So now, this is actually the perfect time for us to switch over to the four recommendations, the four main recommendations, because they build exactly on what you just said, and they helped me explain why this is so important.

Four Recommendations

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: So, I think one reason why the book seems to be doing very well, and people seem to like it and pass it on, is that it’s not just doom and gloom. It’s not just, oh, we’ve messed up our kids, oh, these terrible devices. Rather, it’s about a vision of childhood, which is actually beautiful. It’s the one that most of us older people had, with play outdoors and all.

And so, my analysis in the book is that the reason why it got this far is because it’s a set of collective action traps. Every 10-year-old needs a smartphone now, because every other 10-year-old has one, and you don’t want to make your kid be alone. So, the four recommendations I have are four ways of breaking out on the trap, but the first two are really about delaying and getting past this period of plasticity, and you really helped me see why it’s so urgent to delay until late puberty, at least.

So, here are the four norms that I think can break us out of this trap. Norm number one, no smartphone before high school. You can give your kid a flip phone, but the Millennials had flip phones, they came out fine. No access or no smartphone of their own. You can’t have your own, and that would even go for an iPad.

If you give your kid an iPad and say, here Billy, this is your iPad. You can keep it in your room and use it anywhere in the house, and you can take it outside even, although maybe no Wi-Fi, whatever. The point is, the internet is an amazing thing, and you can have a computer in your living room or kitchen when you have young kids, and they can do things on the computer, but you do not want to give your child the entire internet in his or her pocket, and you do not want the entire world to be able to reach your child whenever they want to.

So, it’s just insane that we’re giving children, even before puberty, a smartphone. Let them have a flip phone or a simple phone, something like that. That’s rule number one.

Rule number two is the most relevant for what we’re just talking about, and that is no social media until 16. There is, I believe, no way to make social media safe for children. That is, if they’re going to be entering a domain in which prestige is gained by having posts that get the most likes and followers, you’re making them be brand managers. You’re making them be performative. This is not playful. They’re going to be exposed to horrible, horrible things.

I now ask young people, is there something that you saw when you were young that you really regret seeing? And a lot of them have an answer. My 21-year-old doorman just told me about The Gauntlet, running The Gauntlet. It’s a series of 20 videos. It’s a challenge. Can you watch these 20 videos, which end with, you know, a Mexican drug gang dismembering a person who’s alive? Things like that. Like, yes, I’m tough enough. I can do that. Really? At what age should you, do you want your kids watching people being dismembered? 10? 11? And those images are forever.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: They’re forever.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. That’s right. I didn’t even watch the video. You know what? I’m sorry I said that.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We won’t provide a link. No, I’ll say that, you know, trauma is defined as an adverse event that forever changes the way the brain responds in ways that make people less effective in life. So don’t do it to yourself. Like, I wouldn’t watch the Dahmer movie. Everyone’s talking about the Dahmer movie. All I had to see was 10 seconds of the trailer to know, I’ll pay money not to see that.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Not because I couldn’t get through it. I’m sure I could force myself to, but I don’t want that in my neural real estate.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. It’s just, they’re, for obvious reasons. So, so let’s go back to what you said about neuroplasticity.

So, because if it’s true that puberty is a sensitive period for many higher level aspects of our humanity, such as identity, relationship skills, all that stuff, then you should be extra careful. When your kids are 9 to 15 years old, you should be extra careful about what’s going into their eyes and ears. And instead, that’s when we give up all control. You know, when our kids are little, they pay attention to us.

We read to them. We have a lot of control about what our kids consume when they’re toddlers and when they’re very young. But as they reach middle school and high school, they’re moving away. They’re seeking out other stuff. And that’s exactly when we say, here, here’s your own device. You want to go down a rabbit hole of eating disorder stuff? You want to go down a rabbit hole of, you know, of, you know, Tourette’s syndrome? You’re going to copy people who have these symptoms?

So, the last thing we should be doing is exposing our children in this sensitive period to socializing information from random weirdos on the internet who are selected by an algorithm for the extremity of their behavior and the degree to which that extremity earned them likes, which makes them extra prestigious. So, yeah, laws that raise the age to 16 or 18, I think that’s what we need. This is just not appropriate for minors. Even if there’s some good stuff on it, I think it’s vastly outweighed by the bad.

And that’s the second norm. No smartphone, no social media until 16. The third norm is phone free schools. And again, you know, if we expect kids to learn, and learning is brain change. If you’re learning something, you’re developing a skill, something about your brain has changed. How about instead of learning math or reading or litter or anything else, how about if you just do more phone stuff? You just spend more time in school on TikTok. There’s just an article in the Washington, in the Wall Street Journal about a teacher who fought against the phones and finally gave up and quit.

And one of the students in his class is quoted that she used to, she’d come into class and she would just go on TikTok and that’s what she would do all class long, is just watch TikTok in her desk. You know, and like, no, you should be learning, not doing more TikTok in school. So it’s just insane that we let kids take the greatest distraction devices ever invented into the classroom with them.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And I would argue that they are learning, but what they’re learning are these rapidly reinforced dopamine loops that lead to diminished amounts of dopamine, not just in short periods of time, but very quickly, and that inhibit other forms of learning.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, that’s right. And the ability to pay attention, right, to a teacher, which is not as stimulating as what you’re seeing on TikTok.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, there’s tons of learning, but it’s learning of all the wrong things.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right, that’s right. So that’s the third norm, is phone-free schools. You have to lock up the phone in the morning, either in a phone lock or a yonder pouch. If the policy is you keep in your pocket, that’s not a policy. That’s just a recipe for constant conflict with the kids because they can’t help it.

They have to text. If anyone’s texting, they have to be texting. And the fourth norm is the hardest. The fourth norm is far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world because what we need to do is not just roll back the phone-based childhood and make them just sit and do nothing.

What we have to do is restore a really fun, adventurous childhood, like, you know, what you were saying, you know, you go out on your bicycle, you’re hanging out with your friends, sometimes something happens, and boy, you have memories. I mean, exciting things happen, scary things happen, you have memories. And, you know, I worry about, like, what, you know, what boys today, you know, I have a group of buddies, my group of friends that I, you know, we still talk about things that happened, you know, things that are amazing, things that happened when we were in college or after college.

And I wonder what boys, young boys today are going to say, you know, you remember Fortnite game 27,363 where you were trapped in that elevator shaft and I had to shoot you out? No, I don’t remember that one. You know, like, you know, the virtual adventures are just not going to cut it. Our kids need adventure, they need independence and adventure where they work out the conflicts themselves. So if we do those four things, I think we can restore childhood in the real world.

No smartphone before high school, no social media till 16, phone-free schools, more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world, those four things. And these are things that we can all do if we work together, if we do them at the same time. If you’re the only family that’s keeping your kid off a smartphone till high school and off of social media till 16, you’re imposing a cost on your child and she may be lonely and she’ll say, mom, I’m left out. Now, she might still thank you as we saw last night.

So one of the women said her daughter thanked her for keeping her off. But at the time, it was painful for her. And so my hope is by spreading these norms, no parent will ever be in that position again where their kid is the only one in the class who doesn’t have a smartphone at age 10.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have this fantastic list. I say fantastic because it jives with all of the neurobiology that I’m aware of. And because it offers solutions that it’s really based on knowing what’s happened and it’s happening with smartphone use. There are a bunch of don’ts, but then there’s some do’s, which I, you know, I’m not, again, I’m not an expert in behavioral change, but I spend a fair amount of my time talking to people about what they can do for their health and well being and not just the don’ts. And I think it’s important, as I understand, to have replacement behaviors.

And also, I think people of all ages want to do something that feels good the first time and every time and that’s good for them. And then you create that reinforcement loop in a different direction. You’re offering all of that in the book in here. And it’s fabulous.

What I wonder about and would love to help in any way that I can with is, you know, if you recall, years ago, there was this understanding about the first six years of life being critical. It was the first six years. And so parents kind of overstepped it a bit and were playing their kids Mozart all the time and things like that. But what was interesting is that they were thinking about critical periods and brain plasticity.

And so as a neurobiologist who studied brain development, I was delighted. It seems to me that if there was an understanding that the biology and psychology and sociology points to the fact that there is a critical period, maybe not even a sensitive period, but a critical period in which excessive smartphone use of a particular type is actually leading to more suicides, depression, anxiety, and less learning and adaptive behavior in life, seems to me that it should be almost like a law. It should be implemented at the level, certainly at the national level. What sorts of barriers do you think exist to that?

You know, obviously, I’m enthusiastic in joining your effort. And I know many people listening will be as well to try and implement these four things. But what do you think it would really take to get people to take their children’s brains and lives seriously? Because children can’t be left to their own self-care to that degree. This is unfair, right? I mean, it’s like telling a kid in a candy shop, like, hey, listen, you know, figure it out, you know, there’s nutritious food down the street. Like, it’s unfair, right? It’s like a puppy trying to do the, you know, Westminster Championship.

It’s like, it’s not going to happen. You know, but this is serious stuff. I mean, we’re talking about the future not just of the United States, but of the entire species. So what about laws? What about legislature? How does that work? I don’t know anything about that.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Sure. Well, first, so, you know, let’s note, you know, I could be wrong about this. It might be that the phones aren’t doing this. Now, I think the evidence is pretty good that it is. But let’s suppose there’s a 70% chance that I’m right.

Let’s suppose there was only a 30% chance I was right. The consequences are so severe, we should be taking action. Now, what action to take? I was over in the UK for the book about three weeks ago. And in the UK, you know, and the rest of Europe, the first thought of everyone is ban it, ban it, ban it, government law, ban. And there are times when we need that, you know, cigarette smoking underage, just ban it. Like, you should not have kids smoking. Now, in Britain, there was a lot of consideration of should we ban the sale of smartphones to kids under 14?

And I met with the policy unit at number 10 Downing Street. And I said, now, wait a second, guys, you know, as an American, it never even occurred to me to suggest that you need to get norms. First, if you pass laws that are out of phase with people’s norms, they’re going to really hate you and they’re going to resent it. So let’s start with a norm change first.

And so, so I think, I think that’s really happening. So in Britain, parents are up in arms, they really are changing rapidly over there, there are a couple months ahead of us. In America, I think it’s happening right now. And so if we just develop a consensus, we need to see smartphones in the hands of kids as being like cigarettes in the hands of kids, like, you know, you just don’t do that, you don’t do that.

Of course, they can be on a laptop, they can be on a computer, they can do some things on your iPhone, sometimes it’s not poison. But you don’t want that to be habit forming. So, so I think that for keeping smartphones out of the hands of kids, there’s no law, I don’t want a law banning that. But we just need a norm.

Now, for, for raising the age to 16, we can struggle to do that. I’m doing that with my kids. I’m saying no for my daughter, no Snapchat till you’re 16. And she’s the only one who doesn’t have it, it’s painful for her. And she’s 14. But my hope is that no parent again, will be in that situation that in every school, a lot of the parents are going to say, no, no social media till 16.

Now, of course, the laws currently state that you have to be 13, in order to sign a contract, give away your data, and make a deal with a company without your parents knowledge or permission. But Congress passed this terrible law in 1998. The COPPA, Child Online Privacy Protection Act, it was supposed to set the age to 16, which is not which is, I think, pretty reasonable, but it got pushed down to 13. With no enforcement, if the law is written such that as long as the company doesn’t absolutely know that you’re under age, they’re fine, they’re not responsible. They’re motivated. The companies are now the law motivates the company to not know how old children are —

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Barely any forebrain at 13.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. That’s right. And since all you have to do, you just have to be old enough to lie about your age. If you’re old enough to live at your age, you can go anywhere on the internet, because there’s no enforcement.

So I’m saying let’s take the age of 13, which is not enforced. Let’s require age verification, which is complicated, but they’re working on that in Britain, they’ve they’re mandating that it’s going to happen in Britain will work out the technical details. So mandate age verification and raise the age to 16. That’s the one place where I think we really do need law, because social media is a social trap.

And if half the kids are on it, there’s gonna be a lot of pressure on the other half to join. So we need to get that down to like only a 5% sneak around, they find a way on that’s fine. So that’s where we definitely need law. And then the play stuff, there we could use some laws.

So I co founded an organization called let grow if you go to let grow.org. With Lenore Skenazy, we advocate for returning play to children. And one of the things we’ve done is we’ve gotten laws passed in eight states that say that if you let your child out to play, that cannot be taken as evidence of child neglect, was a present laws are ambiguous.

So if you send your eight year old out to a store, and and this has happened to friends of mine, and some nosy neighbor says, Where’s your mother? Does she know you’re out here? And then to call 911. And the police, the police come because no one has seen an eight year old unaccompanied since the 90s.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: So the police come. And once the police come, they’re very likely to refer to Child Protective Services. And once your family is in the grip of Child Protective Services, you’ve got custody battles, you’ve got supervision, you’re not allowed alone, but I mean, it’s crazy what happens. So eight states have now said no, no more of that.

This is insane. So we saw — law could help to put to stop incentivizing helicopter parenting, to provide more spaces that are safe for kids to play in not car zones. So the book has the next generation that the whole fourth part of it is suggestions for governments for tech companies for schools and for parents. There’s a lot we can do to restore a play based childhood in the real world.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I realized that some of this is dependent on income for a household, etc. But is there any protective effect of, say, summer camp? Or protective effect of even just after school sport, where both the kids and the parents agree, no phones on the field. You know, we’re not — we’re not taping for every goal.

I mean, I love seeing my friends, kids, you know, getting a three pointer at a game or something like that. You know, I delight in that on Instagram. And it’s wild that my friends given who I know them to be growing up have these kids and the stories I could tell. But but in all seriousness, it’s wonderful.

And yet, I’m thinking they’re taking a video of their kid playing the game. You know, wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were no phones at after school sports events? So it’s a couple of hours, three times a week or once a week, even where at least these young brains are exposed to a different kind of reinforcement learning.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s right. That’s right. The British have a saying, don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington, which is a line from an old Noel Coward song. And it acknowledges that especially for girls, for girls to grow up being looked at, admired and commented on about their looks, it’s just really, really bad for them.

But to grow up always being photographed, everything you do and posted online is really bad for them. So yes, in response to your question, first, summer camps are magic. Never send your child to a summer camp that doesn’t ban phones, because this is the best chance you have for a detox. And I hear the story over and over again. You know, I get my, my girl got a an iPhone when she was 11. She suddenly became surly, no longer the sweet, funny child she was. I sent her to summer camp the next summer. And lo and behold, the girl that comes back is my wonderful, sweet 11 year old, you know, her personality is back.

And then she gets back on her phone, and she becomes surly again. So summer camps are the most powerful technique known for a detox, because the kid isn’t being deprived. They are in a bunk with other kids with no phones. And they’re joking and talking and laughing and fighting and doing all those healthy things.

So summer camp is amazing. The other thing that the evidence shows is that team sports and religion, those two things are very, very protective. So I would strongly urge people to encourage their kids to play team sports. My kids run track, which is great. But team sports force more cooperation. So there’s some evidence that team sports are even better for their mental health than individual sports. You don’t want super duper oversupervised, you know, high pressure sports leagues. I mean, it’s better than nothing.

But ideally, the more they play games that are, you know, more intramural, informal, the kids are enforcing the rules, you know, all of that would be better. Our kids are not rooted in communities anymore. But sports and religion are two things that do that.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: What about music? I did an episode on music in the brain. And one of the more thrilling and interesting parts to me was, and I have no musical talent whatsoever, singing or instrumental or otherwise, I love listening to music, however, was that kids that grow up playing an instrument, especially cooperatively with other people in a band, you know, duet or, you know, a quartet, you know, a band, or orchestra, or marching band, there’s some very impressive data in terms of potential for additional neuroplasticity. In fact, the brain wide networks, those are patterns of connectivity are much more broad in kids that learned an instrument and played it cooperatively than those that try and learn an instrument later in life, although there’s still advantages that so I wonder if that’s an could be added to the list.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes, playing in a band or singing in a choir, I think definitely should be. For a while, I was really interested in synchrony and synchrony has all these really powerful effects. There’s a wonderful book called Keeping Together in Time by William McNeill. He was either he signed up or he was drafted into World War Two, training at a camp in Texas, they’re marching up and down with wooden guns, because they don’t have real guns. And at first, it seems stupid to him, but after a few days, his unit gets it.

And when they can, they’re like, they’re like a unit, they’re like a centipede, they’re imperfect, you know, and it was, it was like a loss of self, it was ecstatic. And so he goes off to World War Two, he writes, comes back and writes about, you know, men in battle, he writes, so that’s a different book, different book type, but, but these, those sorts of being in sync, those experiences, they, we are an ultra social species, much more, much more social than dogs or chimpanzees. We have this ability to keep together in time and do things synchronously. And all around the world, that’s what rituals used to do.

It’s thrilling. And so the self transcendent experiences that you get from singing in a choir, from playing in a band, I don’t have much talent either. But I did play in a informal rock band when I was at UVA, we called ourselves Pavlov’s dogs, we were all in the psych department. But the first time we got it, and we were all really in sync, it was totally thrilling.

So yeah, the more you give your kids, I have a whole section actually, in Chapter Two of the book on synchrony and attunement, we, you know, we need to be in sync. And that’s why face to face interaction is so important. Whereas when you’re communicating on Instagram, or any social media, it’s asynchronous, you don’t have the automatic attunement.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I get a little new agey speculative?

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: All right, let’s go.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have a question. So I’ve heard you and others say that, you know, kids and probably adults nowadays are not familiar with what it is to be bored. There’s always an input movie on social media, YouTube, there’s always words streaming at us in audio or written.

There’s this concept that I love from the world of mindfulness, which used to be considered new agey. But now I think every academic campus has at least a few grants focused on meditation and its benefits and respiration, breathwork and its benefits. So we’ve come a long way. But there’s this concept of wordlessness, of the importance of being in states of wordlessness, where we’re not reading, we’re not thinking in complete sentences, we’re not taking in sensory information.

And we, under those conditions are able to actually register how we feel about things. So we become better tuned to sense our environment and input when it comes. And I wonder, because my experience of social media has been whether or not kids are on Instagram, Snapchat, etc. And they’re doing it out of whatever compulsion, habit, addiction, whatever you want to call it. But I’m not sure it feels good to them. I’m not sure it does. I’m not sure it’s like the ice cream that tastes delicious. I think it might start that way.

And occasionally, you know, they’re jackpots, right? But that in large part, adults, but since we’re talking about kids, let’s talk about kids very critical, sensitive period of life, are not feeling good. And they might not even know they’re not feeling good. They’re just compulsively there. I’m using the term loosely, not clinically compulsively engaging. And so I wonder whether or not there’s some benefit to kids not just being bored for experiencing boredom sake, but learning to actually be a better sensor of what they like and don’t like. Because when I talk to my niece, or I talk to other young people now, they seem to be like, becoming increasingly aware of how much some of the online stuff sucks. That’s the language they’re not like, oh, it’s awesome.

Don’t take it away from me. Like, I don’t want to miss out. But it’s also painful to them. It’s I mean, it’s like they’re drinking from a fire hose of nails. And then every once in a while, there’s something that tastes good. It’s not like they’re like, this is so cool. And that’s so cool. But of course, if you give them a really cool video of an animal thing, or a social dynamics thing, or a war game, or whatever, they’ll get excited.

But I don’t get the impression that they’re like, this is awesome. It’s more like, this has me by the short hairs, it’s got me scruffed, and I’m just doing it. And I don’t know how to stop. And that’s certainly the way sorry, that’s certainly the way that boys reach out guys, young guys typically reach out about their porn addictions. I hear about this 1000s of messages, help me get over this. So I refer them to our episode on addiction by Dr. Anna Lembke from Stanford.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, she’s amazing.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, she’s spectacular. Or it’s just they’re desperate. They’re desperate. So I don’t see it as all pleasure. I see it as mostly pain.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: There’s a lot going on going on here. For some for some of them, they are addicted. And they feel bad for the reasons you were talking about dopamine overshoot, or they feel bad when they’re not doing addictive activities.

So they are compulsively using it. And just like a gambler, if you’re addicted to slot machines, your life sucks, you’ve spent all your family’s money, you’re ashamed of what happened, you feel terrible. Oh, but if I just get back into the zone on the slot machine, I feel good for that two or three hours.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That’s the most dangerous addiction, because as it’s been described to me, I’m fortunately not a gambling addict, addict, excuse me, the gambler really does believe that the next one could change everything, right?

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: It’s going to it’s going to cause motivated reasoning, it’s going to cause hopefulness that is dashed. So for some of them, it is a kind of self medication. As soon as the boys move their social lives onto video games and porn, and the girls move their social lives onto social media, both sexes got really lonely. It’s, you know, they’re getting lots of cheap and easy stimulation, but it’s not satisfying.

So what do they do now that they’re lonely and anxious? Well, sometimes they do more of it. So some of it is driven by that feedback cycle that they’re now uncomfortable, so they need more of it. But the other part is the compulsion to consume because everyone else’s may have to keep up.

And so my students at NYU, I asked them, you know, okay, you know, some of you are spending four or five, six hours a day on social media, why don’t you quit? Oh, I can’t because, you know, I have to know what everyone’s talking about, I have to see the latest video, I have to keep up with it. And since, you know, like, I can’t deal with my email and my text, like those two combined, that’s more than I can handle in a day, I can’t stand it. I can’t imagine having five platforms in addition.

And most, I don’t know the exact number, but very few of my students are on a single platform, most of them are on two or three regularly, plus email and texting and Snapchat. So it is kind of like, imagine, you know, food is great, but imagine always having to eat, you have to always be eating, like our system can’t handle that. You know, imagine a plant always in a shower, like, you know, it’s always like, no, you need times of taking in and times of digesting or processing. One of the most valuable, I’ll tell you two of the most valuable exercises that we do in my flourishing class at NYU.

The Benefits of Boredom and Wordlessness

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: The first is a prerequisite to everything else that they have to regain control of their attention. And once they understand that they’ve given away almost all of their attention, any moment that isn’t taken up by, you know, a teacher or something, it’s the phone for a lot of them, because there’s so much to process. They have so many direct messages, so many group texts, they have to always be processing or they feel like they, you know, they’re being left behind, they’re not participating.

So I make them see you’ve got to regain control of your attention, you’ve got to shut off almost all notifications, you leave on Uber, because you want Uber to interrupt you to say the car is three minutes away, that’s good. But how many of the companies, is it that important that they interrupt you? Very, very few. So shut off almost all your notifications, get social media off your phone, if you need to use it, you can use it on your computer. But don’t always have it set in, you know, at NYU in any elevator, as soon as students get on the elevator, the phone comes up, because that’s like 30 seconds, and it’s awkward, take the phone out, scroll.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I would argue the professors do.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, that’s true, we do.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Not you, I’ve never spent time with you in an elevator yet.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: But yeah, no, we do, we do, but it’s less. Is that right?

And then the other one that I did, that is really memorable, I talked about this in the book, is an awe walk. And I got this idea, my friend, Dacher Keltner, he and I did research on awe long ago, and he really continued it, he wrote this amazing book called awe.

And there was a great episode, if you just Google Keltner and Tippett, so with Krista Tippett, he did this great discussion, he talks about how he used awe walks to help him process his brother’s early death from cancer. And just walking in a beautiful environment, walk a little more slowly than usual, don’t have anything in your ears, don’t be listening to music, don’t even bring your phone, and just notice. And it’s magical. It’s amazing what happens when you do that.

And for a lot of my students, they’ve never done that, because they have to take in so much stuff. If I’m going from point A to point B, of course, I’m going to be listening to a podcast or, you know, scrolling on my phone while I’m walking. And a lot of them, they really had these transformative experiences. You know, we’re right on Washington Square Park at NYU, we’re built around Washington Square Park, which is a gorgeous, gorgeous park.

It’s really one of the most beautiful in America, certainly one of the most beautiful urban parks, I’d say. And the students who did their awe walk through the park, a lot of them have these just amazing experiences. It’s almost like their heart is opening, they feel more love for people, their anxiety goes down. And so ever since they, and so I did that myself.

When I signed it, I did it too. And I had that sort of experience. So now, you know, I love my AirPods, they’re amazingly convenient. But I listen to them a lot less now. Like when I’m walking in New York City, I often just nothing, just nothing, just look, process, think. So yes, I think young people are taking in way too much stuff. Total quantity of bytes is just, you know, 10 times what it should be. And they don’t have time to process, they don’t have time to develop an interior life, to think things through.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So we just got to cut it, cut it way back. If I step back from everything that you’ve said, thus far in this in your book, it seems as if until 2012 or so, what was rewarded in youth, set us up for a more adaptive adulthood. But now everything that’s being rewarded in youth, except from schools and teachers and parents, but what’s, you know, being rewarded on a moment to moment basis for the majority of the waking life of these young people is maladaptive.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes, that’s right. I mean, it’s so stark. That’s right. Think about it this way. Imagine that your children are having a life out in the real world, they’re having adventures, they’re doing things, they’re building forts in the forest, doing all sorts of things.

And then one day, you know, a casino opens up nearby, and it welcomes all the kids. And that’s what they spend all the time is in a casino. And they’re in the care of a company that is trying to extract as much money as it can from them. And that’s what they do eight or 10 hours a day. It’s an abomination to think that a casino could own our children’s childhood. What if it wasn’t a casino? What if it was a brothel for the boys would be more of interest, let’s say, like, again, inconceivable that we would let that happen. But we’ve done is we’ve said, well, what if it’s Snapchat? What if it’s Instagram? What if it’s Facebook? Well, not so much Facebook. What if it’s TikTok?

These companies, these are the some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. They essentially own our children’s childhood. This is where childhood is taking place on a few giant for profit platforms that use an advertising based business model. So they are motivated, like the casino to keep them in. Don’t have a clock. Don’t let them see what time it is. Keep them in. Don’t let them click over to a link to another site.

Keep them in. We somehow have seeded our children’s childhood to giant companies that have shown that they don’t really care about our kids welfare. They care much more about profitability, and they care about their customers who are the advertisers. And these companies have been granted a special writ from the king.

Congress said in Section 230, the Communications Decency Act in 1996, I think it was, Congress said, oh, and nobody can sue you. Nobody can sue you for what you show to their kids. There was a reason for that, that you don’t want AOL to be responsible for everything anyone posts. But it’s been so broadly interpreted that so far, any attempt to regulate social media or any attempt to sue them is seen as like, no, no. So, you know, it’s just we somehow slipped into this. And once you see it that way, that it’s as though our kids are being raised in Harrah’s Casino, you know, like, like, no, we’ve got to stop this.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Last year, I had the opportunity to speak to some of the groups at these companies that are assigned to controlling the well-being of the young people that use their platforms. And the major emphasis was on the type of content.

So protecting them against child predators, protecting them against pornography. But as you recall, at the beginning of the conversation, we broke things down into variables of time, specific content dynamics, and maybe the visual interface itself. I think for sake of today’s discussion, the visual interface is probably the least interesting, but I can just tell you, looking at things up close, a lot not good, the eyeball lengthens, you become nearsighted, which is why spending two hours outside, even if on a tablet has been shown to offset myopia and thousands of evil children. Anyway, there’s that piece.

But the time piece is interesting, right? Maybe limiting the total amount of time on social media. Obviously, the content issue is, it only takes one exposure to a video of the sort that you described, the gauntlet, I never want to see it, whatever has to be done to my phone so that I never see it, please let me know. But it just seems as if this has been allowed to, it’s like, it’s almost like an IV drip of glucose or something happening in the background. We’re saying, okay, just stay rigged up to the glucose drip. And then we wonder why we’re end up with, let’s just say, cognitively obese children.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, that’s right. Whenever there’s new media, the public’s emphasis is always on the content. And so with television, the emphasis was, well, violence on TV, is this going to make them violent? And it turns out, not really, watching violence on TV doesn’t really make you violent. And video games, these violent video games, these first person shooting games, are these going to make our kids into killers? And there was a lot of research on that. It looks like, no, it doesn’t really do that. And so many researchers then say, see, it’s just a moral panic. It’s okay. But that’s focusing on the content.

And this was the great lesson from Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and all these great media theorists in the 20th century. McLuhan said, the medium is the message. Don’t focus so much on the content of television. Focus on the transformation of human life. When the television becomes the family hearth, and people sit around watching it. Now, from our vantage point today, that’s pretty darn social. They’re sitting with their family members together, having an experience. But McLuhan’s point was, that’s the transformative thing, what the technology does.

It’s not the content. And so in the same way, the life on social media, in some ways, it’s like television, you’re watching stuff, but it’s much more behaviorist. With television, you didn’t have the constant, I do something, I’m rewarded. I do something, I’m rewarded. So social media is much, much more addictive than television ever was. That’s one aspect of it.

Television is not performative. It doesn’t make you live your life in front of a camera. You’re not in front of a camera, you’re a passive recipient, whereas social media puts our kids in front of a camera. So in all these ways, we get distracted. And this is the way, in those Senate hearings, it was all focused on content. Can’t we reduce the number of beheading videos and the child pornography? Can’t we reduce that by 90%? Wouldn’t that be great? Senator, we have the world-leading technology in doing this. Yes, that would be nice for our kids to see less hardcore porn and less violent videos.

That’d be nice. But if we could make Instagram just the happy girls living beautiful lives, and our daughters were to watch eight hours a day of this, is that good for them? Hell, no. So it is important to clean up the content. But for kids going through puberty, I think the only real answer is just delay. Just don’t let them do that.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: How much of the issue here is modeling of what adults are doing and how terrible or good are adults at modulating their behavior? I say modulating because I see a lot of parents videotaping everything that they’re doing on the phone all the time, in line at the store, while their kids are around. One of the reasons I think parents like devices so much is that it’s a terrific, low-cost, zero-cost babysitter. It allows them to then go beyond their phones or do other things.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. So young children are sometimes copying their parents. Young children are looking for things to copy. I’ve got some slides in my regular book lecture of toy iPhones that we give to toddlers so that they can be just like mommy and daddy. For little kids, I think it might matter. For teenagers, I’m very often asked that question.

And I think it’s because parents, they feel a little guilty. They know that they’re modeling bad behavior, and they’re worried, like, is this setting up my kid for doing that? And I can’t say for sure, but my intuition as a social psychologist is not really, not very much. And the reason is because while your kids once looked up to you and they once copied you, by the time they’re 12, 13, 14, if I pick up, if I start reading The Economist magazine, or if I start knitting or whatever, that’s not going to make my 14-year-old daughter want to do those things because I’m doing them.

She is completely focused on what her peer group thinks of her. Of course, she is. That’s the nature of teenage, where they’re moving away from the family and they’re trying to make their way on their own in a peer group. Lisa DeMora is great on these issues. So I don’t, you know, it would be nice if parents could improve their phone habits. And boy, phones at the table, that’s an important place. That is a very, very important place. Get across the idea that when we’re eating, we’re with each other, we’re looking at each other, and we’re tasting our food, we’re experiencing the food.

So actually there, modeling collective behaviors like a meal, I think that is actually very, very valuable. But if it’s just that, you know, you’re often multitasking, you’re often on your phone, yeah, you know, be nice if you didn’t, but that’s not going to push your kid over into phone addiction.

Creating a Rebellion Against Smartphones

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the list of four things that you provided are terrific. They are somewhat enforcement focused. As I recall, maybe this is not true, but as I recall, one of the ways that media was effective in getting kids to stop smoking was to pit them against these wealthy old white men who were in rooms filled with smoke, writhing their hands together, tackling about the amount of money they were making, stealing the health of young people, whereas telling teenagers that smoking was bad for them did very little.

So is there a way to create a rebellion of sorts against the smartphone? Because kids love to rebel. Teens love to rebel.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: First of all, they don’t anymore.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Oh, no. Really?

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, they’re just much more passive. I don’t think they’re authority focused. They’re not as rebellious as they used to be. Now, of course, now we’d have to pit them against a group of, you know, young white men who are owning the social media companies, I suppose. But, you know, this addiction is very different from tobacco or anything else.

Tobacco is biologically addictive. And you can’t get an entire high school addicted biologically, at least it didn’t happen. In the peak year of smoking was 1997, 37% of American high school students smoked. Two thirds didn’t. But with social media, you couldn’t have that. You couldn’t have just a third. It’s either none or everybody. And it’s everybody.

And it happens in middle school. So the dynamics of a social media addiction are so it’s a social addiction more than a more than a biochemical like nicotine or cocaine type addiction. So I think the way to break out isn’t, hey, these people are exploiting you. That might be helpful. We should definitely study that. I think the way to break out is, okay, look, you guys actually you can see what this is doing to you. You mostly agree that this is wasting your time. It’s garbage.

You want a way out, but you just feel like you can’t. There’s such resignation. But look, the cool kids over there, they have flip phones. And they’re out like every day after school. They’re like, you know, they’re doing stuff. They’re down at, you know, they’re in the mall, they’re getting pizza, they’re, you know, building a fort, you know, whatever, depending on the age. So I think the way out is to give kids an exciting childhood. Kids are so lonely now.

And they don’t have much in the way of adventure. They don’t have much in the way of thrills. You know, I live in New York City. You know, I would start — I would like bring my kids out to Coney Island when they were, you know, nine, 10 years old, bring them out. And I would just say, I’m just gonna sit here, you guys run around, you guys go have fun. Like, I’m not going to be with you. You know, you know, yeah, there’s a chance you’ll get kidnapped or struck by lightning, although lightning is more likely. So and then, you know, and then it got once they were in, you know, in more, you know, like, I remember like 13.

Now they can actually take the subway out to Coney Island with a friend. So that’s cool. I think that’s the way to do it. Don’t make it like we’re going to take away all this stuff from you. Ha ha ha. Now you have nothing to do. Make it more like, I’m not trying to hurt you here. I want you to have fun the way I did and the way your grandparents did. We all had human file childhoods full of adventure. I want that for you. And I think most Gen Z will embrace that. They just don’t want to do it alone.

Collective Action for Change

So the key is, if you’re listening to this podcast, and if you have kids that are in elementary or middle school, be sure to talk with the parents of your kids friends. So if you want to make some changes in your phone policies, if four families do it together, now your kids not going to feel left out or deprived. And be sure to give them something. Give them, say, here, you know what?

How about every Friday, let’s call it Free Play Friday. No piano lessons on Friday, no nothing on Friday. Fridays, you all get together. You can start at anyone’s house, go out, do what you want. We’ll give you more allowance. We’ll give you money to spend. But go have experiences. Then it’s fun. It’s not deprivation.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I love the trust in kids to sort things out and to be safe enough, at least the statistics say that they’re more likely to thrive under those conditions than to be kidnapped or have something terrible happen. I like it also because it merges your previous book, Coddling of the American Mind, with the current book, The Anxious Generation. I have a bunch of other questions.

But I think the most important one at this stage is, how optimistic or pessimistic are you about the changes that you’re hoping for? And then the second question is, how can we all help? I mean, you mentioned these four action items, no smartphone before high school, no social media until 16, phone-free schools, and to foster this exploration and independence. And we will propagate those four things as far and wide as we can.

But I think everybody, parents and kids, I’m sure as well, want to know, what can we do? So, optimism scale, zero being like, you’re doing this as a last-ditch effort, but it’s hopeless. Well, you wouldn’t be here if you thought it was hopeless. So, one to 10, one being just a sliver of hope, 10 being, you know, we got this, same way we got other stuff.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, I’m a 10. You’re a 10. Awesome, I love it. Yeah, and the reason is because I’ve never seen a situation like this.

I’ve been involved in a lot of efforts to change attitudes. I ran a gun control group in college when I was, you know, 20, and that was impossible. And I’ve been involved in non-political campaigns. You’re trying to persuade people, and you can’t get their attention, and how do you message them? And it’s really hard. That’s the way anybody involved in social change has experienced that. That’s most things. This is like, you drop a spark, and everything goes, everything, it just goes everywhere.

So, all over the world, all over the developed world, family life has become a fight over screen time. Almost every parent of a kid over two recognizes this. We all hate it. We’re sick of it, and we’ve just been confused. The only real pushback I’ve gotten, I’ve gotten two guys. One is, I am in a normal academic debate with about seven or eight researchers who say there’s not evidence of causality. I believe there is. We’re marshalling evidence against each other.

But by and large, almost everyone seems persuaded because they already knew this. They already thought it. They already saw it. And what I’ve done with the book is just given them some psychological concepts and some clear labels and a way out. And I’m so confident, in part, because the revolution started in Britain in February. Yes, they drew on some of my older articles, but this is before my book came out. Parents are self-organizing. In Britain, the government is acting.

They actually have a functioning legislature in Britain, and the government has led efforts to pass laws as well. So, I know it’s working in Britain, and I see it happening here now at a massive scale. The point of the book is collective action, and parents all over the country are heeding that. They’re forming reading groups.

They’re going in in a group to talk with the principal. The principals and teachers, they all hate the phones. It makes their lives impossible. They want a phone-free school, but they were afraid of the few parents who freak out if they can’t text their child during class. If the school’s overwhelmed by parents saying, please lock up the phones. Please let my child have six hours a day when she can listen to the teacher instead of do more TikTok.

So, I’m very, very confident that childhood is going to look very different within two years. I don’t mean that it won’t be seven-year-olds on phones, but in the same way that we flipped on smoking, we used to think it was okay to smoke in an airplane. We used to think it was okay to smoke in restaurants. It was okay to smoke everywhere, we thought, and now we don’t. We don’t think that anymore. That took a long time to change, but it did change.

I think because of the public disgust with seeing children just spending their childhood looking at a screen and because the public disgust with what we’ve heard about Meta and TikTok and a few of the other companies, I think within two years, it’s going to be widespread. It’ll be a norm that you just don’t give kids social media in particular. I mean, iPads are complicated because you want kids to watch movies is okay. Stories are good.

I’m not saying the iPad is a terrible thing, but our attitudes about this are going to change radically. I think the great majority of schools are going to be phone-free within two years. We’re going to see, we’re already seeing more kids outside. Every day, I get emails from grateful parents saying, because of your book, my six-year-old, he wanted to ride his bicycle down to the end of our cul-de-sac. He wanted to ride down, circle, and come back. I never would let him because I was afraid that what would the neighbors say, but once I read your book, I decided to let him. He was so ecstatic. He kept doing it and doing it, and now he’s going further and he rides to his friend’s houses.

People in her neighborhood, now they’re seeing a kid on a bicycle. Suppose there were 10 kids doing it. Well, now it’s normal. We can renormalize human childhood in the real world where our kids get the chance to have independent adventures and learn how to be self-supervising adults ultimately. We can do this.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Okay, so you’re at 10 out of 10 on the optimism scale. What can we do to facilitate and accelerate this whole process?

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Once we understand that this is a collective action problem, that we’re all stuck in this because everyone else is stuck and we can’t leave if we’re the only ones, once we understand that, now you see the key is collective action.

Talk to your friends about this. Talk about the book with them. You don’t have to buy the book. Just go to anxiousgeneration.com. We have all kinds of resources. I have talks where I’ve summarized the book in videos. Talk about it with your friends. Talk about it with your family. Talk about with other parents at the school. If you’re on social media, social media is great for adults who want to pursue projects. I just don’t think it’s good for kids to be pursued by the social media companies.

But if you’re on Instagram in particular, that’s where a lot of parents are, especially mothers. Talk about these issues. Say, you’re going to let your kid have some free-range childhood. You’re going to try to do these four norms. Then if you’re able, I hope that you’ll support the projects. If you go to anxiousgeneration.com, there’s a donate button. NYU has it set up so that people can donate into a research account for me.

That’s what I use to pay my small staff. I have about four or five people working for me. I hope to grow that to 10. I hope people donate to me at anxiousgeneration.com or to Let Grow, this wonderful organization that advocates for giving playback and independence back to kids, letgrow.org. If you know influential people, if you know state legislators, in Congress, there is a very important bill, COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act. Contact your legislators about that.

Say, you support COSA. It could be coming up for a vote very, very soon. This is the one piece that really could get through the US Congress. Beyond the Congress, a lot of states are acting, which is very, very exciting. So make your views known to your state legislators if you know them, or the mayor or governor if you know them. This is a collective action trap. The only way out is together. So if we act together, we can break this.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Terrific. We’ll put links to all of those things you just mentioned in the show note captions. Jonathan, you’re bringing the humanity back. It’s remarkable.

As a fellow academic, I have to say, your depth of scholarship in terms of developing and researching these ideas, but also the vigor and the mission that you have around doing good and making sure that it happens soon as opposed to waiting another 10 years and seeing just how bad this can get, is really inspiring. I feel it. I know for sure that people listening and watching feel it.

So I want to thank you for doing this work. Again, I loved Coddling in the American Mind because it just woke me up to how much things had changed and were changing. It’s such an important book. The Anxious Generation is truly an important book, and I don’t say that lightly. It’s mission-driven, goal-driven, and it has actionable items that I’m certain many people listening to this are going to partake in.

So on behalf of the listeners and viewers and also myself, but also the positive change to come, I just want to say thank you for taking the time out of your very busy schedule. You’re still a professor. You’re also a public-facing health science educator. Yeah. So I feel a kinship there for coming here and speaking with us today, and we’ll provide links to the books and to these other resources in the show note captions, and we’d love to have you back again hopefully in the not-too-distant future so that we can review all the progress that you’ve stimulated. So thank you so much.

DR. JONATHAN HAIDT: Thanks so much, Andrew, and thanks for all the work that you do to make science cool and interesting. So I really appreciate your work, and I’m very grateful to you for having me on.

DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

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