Jonathan Haidt

So we have some pretty hard data.

I also came at it because as a college professor, around 2014, 2015, a lot of us noticed

wait, something is really strange here.

We thought we understood college students.

We thought we understood the millennials.

They enjoy jokes about sex.

They wanna have fun in class.

They wanna go out drinking.

But all of a sudden, the students that were coming in around 2014, 2015, much more anxious, much more easily offended.

Words like microaggressions and bias response teams, trigger warnings, they weren't there in 2012 and they were everywhere by 2015.

So it was direct observation.

It was federal surveys.

It's the reports of people in business who are hiring Gen Z. And when I saw that the same trends were happening in the UK and Canada and Australia at the same time,

That's when I knew something big is happening here.

You know, if it's just the US, oh, maybe, you know, Obama did something or said something.

Like, you know, you can make up a hundred theories if it's just the US.

But if all the English-speaking countries go through the same mental health collapse

At the same time, in the same way that is much sharper for girls, there has to be some factor working that is cross-national.

And that's what led me, and I should also give credit to Jean Twenge, the professor who first really identified those graphs, those changes.

That's when Jean and I started thinking technology is the most likely cause.