Chapter 1: What is the main theme of Jonathan Haidt's book 'The Anxious Generation'?
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Good to see you, sir. Good to see you again, Joe.
The same problems that you talked about when you were here last that I've referenced many times since on the podcast have only exacerbated, unfortunately. And that's why you wrote this, The Anxious Generation. And it could not be more true how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. I don't think anybody can dispute that.
Yeah. When I was on last time, there was a dispute. There were some psychologists who said, oh, this is just a moral panic. They said this about video games and comic books and, you know, this is not a real thing, they said. Now they don't.
Yeah. I think it was pretty obvious. I think it was only their preconceived notions that were keeping them from admitting it before or at least looking at it before. Or maybe they don't have children. Could be that.
I think a lot of older people, particularly boomers, they're a little bit disconnected from it because they're not, unless they're addicted to Twitter, they're not engaging in this stuff.
And they're often thinking, you know, when I was a kid, we watched too much TV and we turned out okay. But part of the message of the book is that social media and the things kids are doing on screens are not really like TV. They're much, much worse for development.
Yeah, and even watching too much TV, I don't agree that they turned out okay. I think it had a pervasive effect. It did, but nothing like this.
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Chapter 2: How has the perception of social media's impact on mental health changed?
It's also an extraordinary amount of wasted resources. I'm always embarrassed when I look at my phone. When I see my screen time, like four hours, like that's four hours I could have done so many different things with.
That's right. And so that's the concept of opportunity cost is this great term that economists have, which is the cost of, you know, if you buy something, if you invest an hour of your time and $100 to do something, how much does it cost? Well, you know, $100, but you could use that $100 and that hour for something else. So what are the things you gave up? Yeah.
And when screen time goes up to, now it's about nine hours a day in the United States, nine hours a day, not counting school. Average? Average, average. Is that for a certain age group? We're talking teenagers, yeah, not little kids. But, you know, 13 to 15, 17, that range, that's when it's heaviest. It's around nine hours a day. And so the opportunity cost is everything else.
Like imagine if somebody said to you, Joe, you know, you've got a full life here. You have to do this thing, this additional thing for nine hours. Like that's insane. That would push out everything else, including sleep.
Yeah. When you are now talking to people that agree that this is an issue, what what changed?
So you mean what changed? Like why is there now more agreement? Yes. Yeah. So in 2019, when I was last here with you, my book, The Coddling of the American Mind, had just come out.
And back then, people were beginning to sense that, you know, this Internet, the phones, the social media that we are all so amazed by, you know, there was a very positive feeling about all this stuff in the early part, you know, like in the 2000s.
Sentiment was beginning to turn, but there was a big academic debate because when you look at studies that look at how, do kids who spend a lot of time on screens, do they come out more depressed? The answer is yes, but the correlation is not very big. So there was a big argument among researchers, and that's when I got into this around 2019, really getting into that debate.
And I think that Gene Twenge and I really had good data showing, you know, there is an issue here. And then COVID came. And that confused everything. Because, you know, basically when I was on with you last time, 2019, I was saying, you know, what kids most need is less time on their devices and more time outside playing unsupervised. Let them be out unsupervised. That's what we need at 2019.
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Chapter 3: What are the key statistics regarding screen time among children?
And it's flat. There's no change. Then all of a sudden, around 2011, 2012, 2013, the numbers start rising, especially for girls. And it goes all the way up to 20% for girls. So that was a huge rise, and that's what I showed you last time.
What is the difference between boys and girls?
So girls suffer from more internalizing disorders. That is, when girls have difficulties, they turn it inwards. They make themselves miserable. So girls suffer from higher rates of anxiety and depression. That's always been the case, especially once they hit puberty. Boys, when they have psychological problems, they tend to turn it outwards.
They engage in more violent behavior, deviant behavior, substance use. So boys, it's called externalizing disorders. But you can see both boys and girls are getting more depressed. It's just that the effect is bigger for girls.
So boys have gone up to about 7% and girls are way up to 20.
That's right. And that was 2019.
So one out of five girls.
That's what it was. That's right. Was. Was. That's right. And then COVID comes in. So we can have the next slide. So then COVID comes in. And now this is the exact same data set, just this federal data. I just got a few extra years of data. And what you can see is that it goes way the hell up. And if you look at the 2021 data point, you can see that little peak at the very top there.
That's because of COVID. That is, COVID did increase things.
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Chapter 4: What solutions does Jonathan Haidt propose for improving children's mental health?
It did make kids more depressed. But as you can see, it's a blip. COVID was just a tiny effect compared to this gigantic increase. And so on the last slide, it was 20% of girls. Now it's almost 30, almost 30% of girls who had a major depressive episode in the last year. And for boys, it's up to 12%, which is still quite a lot. It's more than a doubling, although much less than for the girls.
It's still, even if you look at boys, or excuse me, if you look at girls from 2018 pre-COVID, that ramp is very steep, the upward ramp.
That's right. And that might be TikTok. So what happens is a lot of things change around 2011, 2012. 2010 is when you get the front-facing iPhone. It's when Instagram is founded. It's around when kids are getting high-speed data plans. So my argument in the book is that we had a complete rewiring of childhood between 2010 and 2015. In 2010, most of the kids had flip phones.
They didn't have Instagram. They didn't have high-speed data. So they would use their flip phones to get together with each other. They'd communicate with each other. By 2015, about 80%, 70%, 80% have a smartphone. Most of them have high-speed data, unlimited plan, Instagram accounts. And this really messes up the girls. So that's what I think happened between 2010 and 2015.
TikTok becomes popular only really more, you know, 18, 19, 20. And it's so new, we don't have good data on just TikTok. But I suspect that that sort of extra acceleration might be due to TikTok.
What specifically about TikTok?
So this is something I'm just really beginning to learn. I don't even have much on it in the book. So kids love stories, and stories are great all around the world. People tell children stories. There are myths. We see plays. We see television shows. And so I asked my undergrads at NYU, I said, how many of you use Netflix? Almost everybody says yes.
How many of you wish Netflix was never invented? Nobody. Nobody. Watching stories is not a bad thing. TikTok is not stories. It's little tiny, tiny bits of something. And they're short. They don't add up to anything. They're incoherent. They're often disturbing and disgusting. I mean, people, you know, people being hit by cars, people being punched in the face.
And it's much more addictive and with no nutritive value. They're not really stories. And so it seems to be much more addictive. Kids really get hooked on it, much more so than Netflix or anything else. And it depends on what you're watching, but I suspect that so many of them are consuming stuff about mental illness. It has a variety of effects that we don't even understand yet.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of labeling minor attracted persons?
Because if you do that now, you're going to jail for a long, long time. So we actually locked up most of the predators, and they know don't approach kids on a playground. Approach them on social media. I don't know if we are doing that. And there's this new push. Oh, yeah. Once you're identified as a sex offender, you are gone for a long time, and then they're a sex offender.
No, we've really done a lot since the 90s to make the real world safer.
But there is push against that. You're aware of this term minor attracted persons that's being pushed?
Chapter 6: How has social media influenced public discourse?
Disgusting. Disgusting and freaky. Yeah. It's such a bizarre term that I got to imagine is only being done by people who don't have children. And they're pushing this thing that it's an identity and that it's not the fault of the person who has this issue. What's the root of that? Have you investigated that?
Yes. Not that specific issue, but I can... So look, I study moral psychology. That's my academic discipline.
Chapter 7: What role do algorithms play in shaping online interactions?
And I study the roots of it evolutionarily, historically, in child development. What is our moral sense? And there are different moralities. And in some ways, that's good. And left and right push against each other. So I'm very open to different moralities. But when a group makes something sacred and they say, this is the most important thing and nothing else matters other than this,
then they can kind of go insane and they kind of lose touch with reality. And I think, you know, again, I don't know the history of this particular movement, that horrible term, but there is a certain kind of morality which is all about, you know, oppression and victimhood.
And once you, you know, someone I guess somewhere said, oh, you know, men who are attracted to boys or, you know, little girls,
Chapter 8: How can we protect children from harmful online content?
are victims of I don't know what. In some little eddy of weird morality, someone put that forward as a new victim class because we've been trying to address victimhood all over the place. Once someone puts that up as a new victim class, and you have to do that, you have to change the terms. This is very Orwellian. You change the terms, and then some others who share this morality
which is focused on not making anyone feel marginalized, not allowing any labels that will slander someone or make them look bad, I think people who approach children for sexual goals, I'm very happy to have them slandered and labeled and separated.
But I suspect that some people, once they lock this in as a group that's being marginalized, they say, well, we have to defend them and we don't think about what the hell we're actually saying.
It seems purely an academic thing. It seems that this is something that with people that only exist in sort of an academic space where it's almost like an intellectual exercise in understanding oppression. You can't apply it in the real world. It's just it's too fucked up. The consequences of it are horrific.
Yeah, that's right.
Normalizing, victimizing children.
That's right. Now, the one thing... So before we go any further with this particular topic, I would want to point out one of the problems that our social media world has given us, which is... Somewhere in all of the academy and all the universities, some philosopher, let's say, proposed that term or raised an idea. So this has been going on for thousands of years.
Someone in a conversation proposes a provocative idea. What if we think about this as a minor attracted person? They put that idea out and then other people say, no, that's really stupid. And it doesn't catch on because this is not an idea that's going to catch on, even in the academy.
But I think where we are now is I'm guessing someone proposed this, somebody else got wind of it, posted it online, and now you're going to have a whole media ecosystem going crazy about this terrible idea. So maybe can you look up minor attracted person. Is this just like a thing that was from one academic talk or is this an actual movement?
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