If Books Could Kill

The Anxious Generation

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Michael: Do you have a zinger, is your brain too addled from being on Instagram?


Peter: I like how we're going to be making jokes about that, like it's not true. [Michael laughs] Oh, I guess I'm stupid now because I can only think in dumb memes. Isn't that right, Jonathan Haidt?


Michael: I'm literally scrolling on TikTok right now. I'm not listening. 


Peter: I'm just responding to a picture of the Hawk Tuah Girl with the word [Michael laughs] mother as we speak. 


Michael: We did do a whole episode where you describe what you think my Internet activity is. I think that's what you think I do. 


[laughter]


Peter: You did have some burner account with the avi of some AI generated twink and you're just going around commenting slutty [Michael laughs] bullshit all over the place. 


Michael: We should have never taught you what twink means. [Peter laughs] What do you have? What do you have? 


Peter: All right.


Michael: Peter.


Peter: Michael.


Michael: What do you know about The Anxious Generation? 


Peter: All I know is that if you’re here to tell me that TikTok hasn’t ruined zoomers brains, we are going to be in a fight. 


[If Books Could Kill theme]


Michael: So, the full title of this book is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. 


Peter: Okay. 


Michael: This has been on the bestseller list for weeks. It was at one point the #1 New York Times bestselling book in the country. It's extremely popular. It started a huge amount of discourse about what are the teens doing on their phones? And I think this is a good distillation of the argument that the phones are ruining the teens.


Peter: Well, also, though boomers also fucked due to their phones.


Michael: Yes. Yes. 


Peter: With kids, it's resulting maybe in mental illness. With boomers, they're storming the Capitol. It's manifesting in different ways across generations.


Michael: Exactly. 


Peter: And maybe there's a particular concern when the brains are a little bit softer. 


Michael: This is why I want to do a tedious preamble to this episode, because I know this is one that people are clenched for. It's like, “Are we going to say that all of the phones are ruining all of the teens, which seems really one dimensional?” or are we going to say, “The phones are fine and there's nothing to worry about,” which also seems really one dimensional? 


Peter: No, we're going to hit the perfect balance, folks. [Michael laughs] You've never heard a take so nuanced. 


Michael: So, I'm going to start with a series of totally contradictory statements, all of which are true. 


Peter: Okay. 


Michael: I think it is important to acknowledge that the Internet and smartphones are a transformative technology that is changing society in all kinds of genuinely very profound ways. And it would be really fucking weird to act like that has no downsides. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: It's also true that every previous technological advancement has resulted in a moral panic about teenagers. 


Peter: Huh-huh. 


Michael: For our Disco Demolition episode, I looked into the moral panic around jukeboxes. There was this idea that kids were going to be dancing too much, and some of that will be interracial dancing, and the parents freaked out. There was a moral panic about cars. I read a lot of really interesting literature for this episode about the moral panic about radio plays. Then, of course, we got TV. Then, of course, we got video games. And it’s just nonstop, whenever something new comes out, it's like, “Oh, what's it going to do to the teens and adults lose their minds?” It is also true that some of these technologies were bad. [laughs]


Peter: Yeah, no, the jukebox thing was true. 


Michael: I read a really interesting article about these constant tech and teens moral panics. That said, “It's actually quite rare to circle back to the previous technology and understand what effect it had.” So, we had this decade long panic about kids watching too much TV, and TV was going to rot their brains. And then we moved into the video games are going to rot their brains. But no one ever really went back and was like, “Well, wait a minute. What was the effect of TV?” There's some argument that maybe TV did have effects on childhood and adults that weren't great. This shift from active entertainment to passive entertainment might have actually been bad. And a lot of the stuff on TV was garbage. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: I personally think that video games probably have had some negative effect on society. [laughs] I don't think it's ruined a generation, but I'm concerned about how much violence and how much misogyny there is in video games. I don't think that's a moral panic thing to talk about. 


Peter: Of course you don't. [Michael laughs] Of course you don't. 


Michael: Another true thing to say about this is that Jon Haidt is a reactionary centrist and a bad thinker. We talked about his previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind. We found that it wasn't just that we disagree with that book, although we do. It's that the book was bad. It had shoddy research. It had anecdotes that were wildly mischaracterized. It was based on this idea that the left has fallen for these four ideas that everybody believes, and then nobody actually believes them. And so, I went into this book without a lot of trust. 


Peter: Yeah. When the whole book is about brains being bad, you want the person who's writing it to have a good-- [crosstalk] 


Michael: To have a good brain. 


Peter: That should be one of the most important qualifiers. 


Michael: And then the last contradictory thing is that it really feels true that social media is fucking up our kids’ brains. However, a lot of the actual evidence for this is anecdotal. One of the articles that I read is by a researcher who's been looking into this for decades. And she said, this guy came up to her after a talk and was like, “How dare you say that the field and the evidence is nuanced on this. My daughter turned 13, I gave her a smartphone, and within a year, she had an eating disorder, she was depressed, and it basically ruined her life. And how dare you say that this isn't based on anything.”


Peter: Yeah, that is called being 14. 


Michael: This is the thing is, at the same time that it's very plausible to me that this is ruining teens brains. That period of life between 11 and 15 is a time when teens pull away from their parents. This happens to every single teenager. And parents oftentimes want something to blame. For this episode, I talked to six teenagers across a wide range of ages, and every single one of them said that, “My parents blame my phone for everything.” It's like, “You didn't clean your room because you're always on your phone. You didn't do your homework because you're always on your phone.”


And they're like, “Well, sometimes that's true, but sometimes I'm just a teenager who doesn't want to clean his room.” People are coming to this with either our experience, which is like, “Oh, my God, thank God I didn't have a phone in high school,” which is absolutely what I believe. But also, I didn't have a phone in high school, so I don't really know what it would have been like to have a phone in high school. 


Peter: But also, if an adult watched me in 1999, they would have been like, “Thank God I didn't have Age of Empires II in high school, because obviously this will ruin a human being.”


Michael: Exactly, TV or first-person shooters or whatever the thing was when were in high school that we spent way too much time doing when we should have been outside. A lot of this conversation is playing out based on anecdotes or things, like, “My daughter got her phone and now she's sad.” Something that is like, you can't really prove that's because of the phone. 


Peter: When you're talking about what's happening to teenagers. The inputs are so vast and complicated that even though it feels very intuitive that TikTok cannot be doing any good. 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: It's really hard to parse out exactly what it's doing. 


Michael: And so that doesn't mean phones are great for kids, but also it doesn't mean that phones are bad for kids. I think if we're going to have a conversation about this as a society, we need to get the evidence in front of us and actually talk to experts and talk to teens and teachers and psychologists and really understand what we're looking at. My purpose with this was to try to genuinely understand not just this book, but for myself. What do I think about the effect of the phones on the kids? So that is my purpose with this episode. 


Peter: Okay. And mine is to provide commentary. 


Michael: I'm glad that you know your role so well and [Peter laughs] my role is to ignore you and continue speaking. [Peter laughs] So, as we always do on the show, I want to start with the first few paragraphs of the book. We're going to dive in and we're going to hear Jon Haidt’s argument for why the kids are in danger from their telephones.


Peter: Suppose that when your first child turned 10, a visionary billionaire whom you've never met chose her to join the first permanent human settlement on Mars. Unbeknownst to you, she had signed herself up for the mission because she loves outer space. And besides, all of her friends have signed up. She begs you to let her go.


Michael: She's going to Mars. 


Peter: Before saying no, you agree to learn more. You learn that the reason they're recruiting children is that they adapt better to the unusual conditions of Mars than adults, particularly the low gravity. If children go through puberty and its associated growth spurt on Mars, their bodies will be permanently tailored to it, unlike settlers who come over as adults. At least that's theory. It's unknown whether Mars adapted children would be able to return to earth. Did the planners take this into account? Did they do any research on child safety at all? As far as you can tell, no. So, would you let her go? Of course not.” Couldn't agree more. 


[laughter]


I would not let my 10-year-old child go to Mars. And I'll say it on a podcast.


Michael: This is by far the best argument in the book. He's basically saying that, we're doing this society wide experiment where we're just giving teenagers this brand-new technology and we're just all assuming, “Oh, yeah, they'll probably be okay,” but there was no FDA process to see. Wait a minute, is this harmful? Before we give it to every single teenager in the country at an extremely vulnerable time in their life? 


Peter: The FDA comparison is apt, because what social media really needs is more aggressive regulation. 


Michael: Yes. 


Peter: If you just make a book called, like, “We should regulate social media,” everyone will get mad at you. But I do feel like that's probably the conclusion that I'm going to come away from some of this shit with. 


Michael: Haidt then talks about the overall,-- he lays out the history of social media a little bit and he's scoping the book. What he really wants to examine is there was a huge spike in mental disorders among teenagers between 2010 and 2015. 


Peter: Okay. 


Michael: He says in the introduction that he's really zeroing in on this period, because that's the period where you can essentially prove that social media is causing a spike in teen depression, anxiety, and suicidality. That is the argument in the book. And so, he says very clearly in this section that he's like, “We're not talking about the Internet in general.” Because that was roughly mid-2000s. We're not talking about video games. We're not talking about screen time and TV. These are all totally separate concerns. 


Peter: We're also not talking about what you might call the contemporary era of social media then. The rise of the short video. 


Michael: You're veering into spoiler territory. But no, according to this section of the book, he's not talking about the rise of these short video platforms like TikTok. He's also not talking about the effects of the pandemic. So, we're just limiting ourselves to this relatively short period of time. 


Peter: Because this is FarmVille era Facebook. 


Michael: Yeah, I mean, that's why he's saying, “We're not talking about that.” We're not going to talk about Friendster or Myspace or early Facebook. He's zeroing in on the innovations that tech companies used in the mid-2000s to the 2010s, which essentially culminated in social media being this uniquely harmful thing for kids. So, he lays out this timeline. 


We had the Internet starting in the early 2000s. We started to get universal broadband throughout the United States in late 2000s. We then have these little baby steps that all make social media much more harmful. So, in 2006, Facebook introduces the news feed. In 2007, we get the introduction of the iPhone. In 2009, we get the like and retweet buttons. We then pretty quickly start getting these increasingly algorithmic ways of showing you on your newsfeed. It's not just chronological anymore, that's around 2008 to 2010. He also mentions endless scrolling. You can just mindlessly scroll on these apps forever. We get push notifications from these apps starting in 2009. Most smartphones start to have self-facing cameras in 2010, so you can start taking selfies. We then get Instagram in 2010. In 2012, Facebook acquires Instagram. And between 2011 and 2013, Instagram goes from 10 million user to 90 million users.


Peter: Okay, where in this timeline is damn Daniel. [Michael laughs] I just need to situate myself relative to Damn Daniel. 


Michael: The culmination of this trend is that kids are now spending roughly 7 hours a day on various screens. A third of teens say that they use social media, “Almost constantly.”  [Peter laughs] There's various surveys of how many kids have a smartphone by the time they're 11, it's about 50-50. But then by the time they're 14, it's essentially every kid has one. 


Peter: Yeah, yeah. 


Michael: Of the kids that have smartphones, the vast majority also have various social media accounts.


Peter: Sure.


Michael: It has taken a while to get here, but we really are at almost universal penetration of smartphones for both adults and children. 


Peter: I'd probably use a phrase other than universal penetration, but I hear you. 


Michael: I know. As I said it, I was like, “Okay, fuck. This is Peter Bate.” [Peter laughs] So that's like the timeline of all the tech innovations that brought us to this place. What he's most concerned about is essentially kids who hit puberty right around this 2008 to 2012 period when the tech companies were getting more sophisticated. That's why you see rising rates of depression and anxiety among Generation Z, but you don't see them in millennials and other age groups. 


Peter: Yeah, that's why I'm doing great. 


Michael: [laughs] Yes, all of us are happy about our phones. We have a great relationship with our phones. 


Peter: I'm normal. 


Michael: So, here is where he draws the distinction between adult use of social media and teen use of social media. 


Peter: Social media companies are making products that are useful for adults, helping them to find information, jobs, friends, love, and sex. Making shopping and political organizing more efficient, and making life easier in a thousand ways. Most of us would be happy to live in a world with no tobacco. But social media is far more valuable, helpful, and even beloved by many adults.”


Michael: So, he does acknowledge that there are also drawbacks for adults. He says that everything we talk about with teenagers is also happening with adults. However, adults do derive real benefits from social media. Here is the section where he talks about the difference for kids. 


Peter: The same is not true for minors. While the reward seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, the frontal cortex, essential for self-control, delay of gratification and resistance to temptation, is not up to full capacity until the mid-20s. And preteens are at a particularly vulnerable point in development. As they begin puberty, they are often socially insecure, easily swayed by peer pressure, and easily lured by any activity that seems to offer social validation. We don’t let preteens buy tobacco or alcohol or enter casinos. The costs of using social media in particular are high for adolescents compared with adults although benefits are minimal. Let children grow up on earth first before sending them to Mars.” 


Michael: So, this is the core of the argument to the book, that for adults there are some benefits of using social media. For kids, there are none. It is only a harmful influence. 


Peter: Yeah, it feels a little reductive, although maybe gesturing in the correct direction. If the point is there are higher risks for children because of where their brains are, sure, I think that's pretty defensible. Acting like it's nothing but upside for adults and nothing but downside for kids just seems very reductive. 


Michael: This is the first glimpse of, I don't know, that he's the best guide through this debate. Because I think you think of any kid who's like a member of a minority group. Like a teenage gay kid somewhere with homophobic parents. Social media might be like their only lifeline. It's really easy to think that, there are some kids who derive some benefits from social media. It's just weird to compare it to tobacco or gambling. 


Peter: Some of it's just like interacting with your friends. 


Michael: Yeah. 


Peter: I want to be clear. When I was 14 years old, a thing you would do is be on the phone with your middle or high school girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever and just sit there silently. [Michael laughs] Because you were both in your rooms with nothing to do. And then every five minutes, someone's parent would pick up the phone to try to use it. And we'd be like, “We're on the phone.” [Michael laughs] And eventually someone would yell at you. 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: They'd be like, “I need to use the phone for a real purpose, not whatever the fuck this is.” That's what social interaction looked like. And I'm sorry if I look at Snapchat as perhaps an improvement in some ways at least. 


Michael: The first chapter of the book is where he walks us through the teen mental health crisis. 


Peter: Okay.


Michael: So, we're going to watch a video clip. Because this chapter is mostly charts, and I don't want to sit here and describe charts to you, [Peter laughs] so just sent you a link. 


Peter: All right, hold on. I'm getting a Kamala HQ ad here. 


Michael: We got to get you some ad blockers, buddy. 


Peter: Kamala asking me for even more money, even though I've already donated. [Michael shushes]


Michael: [laughs] You were on the white women for Kamala call last night, weren't you? 


Peter: Everyone was talking about the white women for Kamala call last night. 


Michael: We love those. 


Peter: They were like, 150,000 people were on the call. And then at the end, they were like, “It raised $2 million.” And I'm like, “All right, so $7 per white lady.” [Michael laughs] This is the redemption of white women that I was told about. 


Michael: We're re-cancelling white women. 


Peter: Folks, as a bit of a connoisseur. I'm here to tell you they are still no good. 


Michael: So, here is a talk that he gave where he's going over the evidence that teens are experiencing higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality. 


[Video clip starts]


Male Speaker: From the 90s through the 2000s. We're talking the Millennial Generation, which many of you in this room are. If you're born between 1981 and 1995, you're a millennial. Your mental health was actually fine, a little better than Gen X before you. So, all the numbers are going along. They go up, down, up, moving along. And then all of a sudden, those numbers all start rising right around 2012, 2013. And the level of the rise, especially for boys, it's a little slower. It's not such a sharp elbow. That's a different story. But for girls, it's a very sharp elbow. And when we look at the younger teen girls, ages 10 to 14, that's where we see the hugest rises. So, those younger girls, they didn't used to be hospitalized for self-harm. It was very, very rare. 


But after 2012, the numbers go way up. For the older teen girls, I think it's 70 or 80% increase. For the younger teen girls, it's more like 150. That's in America. In Britain, you have data that 10- to 12-year-old girls are up a 380% increase. It is more than a-- [crosstalk] 


Female Speaker: Self-harming. 


Male Speaker: For self-harm, that's right. So, something happened that especially well, when girls got super connected and began sharing the idea of self-harming and the idea of anxiety became just much more widespread. 


[Video clip ends]


Michael: Not a funny or dunk-able clip, but he's laying out the statistics. 


Peter: This is actually compelling because hospitalizations for self-harm are a useful metric in the same way that murder is a useful metric for crime, because it's always reported, as opposed to something that's self-reported and might be the result of people just having greater awareness of mental illness or anxiety or whatever. 


Michael: Peter, I feel like you're doing this on purpose. This transitions extremely well into the thing that I want to say, I mean, we're not going to go through the entire chapter of his book, but I do want to complicate the picture that he's painting of youth mental health. 


Peter: Okay. 


Michael: So, he points out that rates of various markers of teen mental health are flat, and then all of a sudden, they explode in 2010. And this is essentially the heart of the book, that there's a strong correlation between adoption of smartphones in roughly 2010 and this huge spike in suicidality, self-harm, all of these markers also in 2010. That's the core of the book, is just these two lines going up at the same time. But the adoption of smartphones was not the only thing that happened around 2010. The other big thing is the implementation of Obamacare.


So, the percentage of kids in America who didn't have access to health insurance had actually been steadily dropping from the 1990s. But the implementation of the Affordable Care Act extended Medicaid coverage to a huge number of children and also increased access to private insurance plans. So, what you find is that in 1997, around 14% of kids were uninsured, and by 2016, that's down to 5%. So, around the same time, for both adults and kids, you start to see much more Medicaid coverage of mental health admissions to the hospital. You see more diagnosis. You see more prescriptions. Just kind of overall access to mental health care treatment really did significantly expand as part of the implementation of Obamacare. 


Another thing that happened was there was guidance from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that recommended screening adolescent girls for depression starting in 2011. It also made it mandatory for insurance companies to cover it. 


Peter: Got it. 


Michael: There was also guidance around the same time that instructed doctors to add suicidal ideation as a cause of harm to medical records. I mean, this is another thing that he glosses over, that the numbers were actually rising of teen mental health problems before smartphones. So, he's a little bit off on the timeline and he's a little bit off on the age groups because 10- to 14-year-olds didn't actually have cell phones at that time. That was actually much later. So, they don't actually match up perfectly. And people in the medical system were already very concerned about these steady rises in suicidality and self-harm, especially for adolescent girls. And so, there's a really interesting study of medical records in New Jersey that notes throughout the entire state what looks like a huge increase in suicide attempts and hospitalizations for self-harm. 


There's no actual difference in the numbers, it's just they're writing down suicidal ideation as a sub cause of the injury. There is other things too. In 2008, there's something called the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which improves access to mental health care. For teens, there's also the update of the DSM in 2013, which loosens a lot of diagnostic criteria. This was just a period, totally independent of smartphones, where teens were just getting more access to the healthcare system in general, and there was a lot more focus on getting teens the mental health help that they needed. So, I don't want to say that this whole thing is fake. The fact that kids are feeling worse does appear to be real. And there's lots of statistics on this that do not depend on things like hospitalizations or diagnoses of depression. 


If you look at qualitative surveys of teens, they're much more likely now to say, I'm depressed or I'm anxious, or I don't have a lot of friends. 


Peter: Yeah. Although that's the stuff that I'm less persuaded by. 


Michael: Oh, really? 


Peter: Yeah. Simply because self-reports might be the result of a generation that's just much more aware of depression. 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: When I was a teenager, people didn't talk about being depressed so expressly. People didn't talk about anxiety. The idea that this stuff is now in the mainstream vernacular. And so, you see teenagers self-diagnosing. That's what seems noisier to me than something like hospitalizations, even if hospitalizations aren't a totally clean metric. 


Michael: Yeah. Well, the thing is, there's also surveys that don't ask teens, like, “Are you depressed?” But they'll say, “How many times a week do you feel lonely?” Or there's one, what was it? There's one where they ask kids a bunch of questions and if you answer 5/9 of them, then they say you've experienced a major depressive episode. And it's things like, how often have you lost interest and become bored with most of the things you usually enjoy? I don't think that's the thing that would necessarily depend on reducing stigma of depression, anxiety, and the discourse around it. So, there are also surveys that find how often are you anxious? But there's also things that ask about the component parts of depression, anxiety, which also show rising numbers. 


One of the really interesting things that they mentioned numerous times in this analysis of the suicidality data from New Jersey, all of these hospital records is they say, “Look, this doesn't mean that the kids aren't depressed. What it actually means is that they were under diagnosed for things like suicidal ideation before.” So, what we might be looking at is teens are very depressed and we're now better at catching it. It could also reflect an increase. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: Another thing that he doesn't mention is that kids are significantly less likely to kill themselves now than they were in 1988. If you look at teen suicide rates, like every other form of violent crime that we've talked about, murders and rapes and child abuse, it's rises steadily in the 60s and 70s, plateaus in the 80s, drops really quickly in the 90s, and then gradually starts rising again. 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: That doesn't mean that it's not smartphones. That doesn't mean that's not the Internet. You could say, “Well, when people started to get broadband Internet in the 2000s, we started to have higher rates of teen suicides.” This actually is congruent with his theory. And maybe something else was causing it in the 60s and 70s and cell phones are causing it now. Again, it's not really debunking his theory, but it does show that there are many factors that affect teen suicide. So anyway, I'm afraid that people are going to think, like, “Oh, like Mike thinks that teen suicides don't matter or something or like Mike thinks that teen mental health is not a problem in America.” That's not remotely what I'm saying. What I'm saying is it's more tricky to measure these things than it seems. 


Peter: I think you've been clear. And any haters are just anti-Hobbs. 


Michael: Thank you. 


Peter: That's their bias. 


Michael: This is the hateration and holleration that Mary J. Blige was talking about. So, okay, [Peter laughs] so that's just like a factual overview.


Peter: Michael, the references you drop in any given episode are so preposterous. 


Michael: [laughs] It's because my brain stopped developing in 1999. And so, I just look at my phone now and [Peter laughs] I watch RIP Vine videos. This is the most contemporary reference I have. It's all Harambe jokes. That's when my brain stopped. [Peter laughs] He then turns to the causes of why teens are sad. 


Peter: Okay. 


Michael: He says, “That a lot of the other proposed explanations for the teen mental health crisis don't really make sense.” And I agree with this. I feel like there's the counter narrative to, like, “The phones are making kids sad.” People will often say, like, “Climate change is making kids sad or school shootings are making kids sad.” Honestly, that's always felt as one dimensional to me as the smartphone's explanation. So, the first thing he talks about is the financial crisis that, like, “Well, maybe kids started getting sad in 2010 because their dads were unemployed.” 


Peter: Or their moms.


Michael: But that doesn't really make sense timeline wise, because you have this massive increase in unemployment and then it steadily goes downward. The country has been getting better on economic indicators ever since. And yet teens start getting sad in 2010 and they keep getting sadder. So, if this was meaningfully related to economic conditions, the teens would be doing better now than they were in 2010 and they're not. There's been other economic crashes. In 2001, we had this huge economic crash and we didn't see teen suicide spike.


Peter: Yeah, yeah. 


Michael: The relationship between economic conditions and teen mental health is just not an easy one to one thing. He also mentions climate change. This is another thing that you hear that kids are bummed out because the world is heating up around them, which it absolutely is, but there isn't actually any evidence for this explanation. There's a lot of evidence that kids who experience hurricanes or wildfires, have higher rates of PTSD and anxiety, depression, suicide, all that stuff is true. Those disasters are increasing due to climate change, but it's not enough to explain an entire generation that is showing these higher rates of depression, anxiety. It also can't explain why girls seem to be suffering so much more than boys. 


It can't really explain why we see these big spikes in 10- to 12-year-old kids who are just less aware of news events in general. And it's always seemed a little one dimensional to me just because we've had climate change as a really major political issue for 20 to 30 years now, and we haven't seen any spike in mental illness among teens recently, until 2010. 


Peter: I wonder whether maybe not climate change specifically, but one of my general layperson guessing at what might be driving this sort of things is that social media bombards you with things to be concerned about. 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: If you're 11 or 12, you might not process that on an analytical level very well. But you do get this impression that things are bad. Things are bad, the future is bad. 


Michael: This is also one of the weird things that people oftentimes bring this up as a counterpoint or a debunking of the social media as making kids sad narrative. But then it's “Okay, well, why are 12-year-olds sad about climate change?” Oh, they're watching videos on TikTok about climate change all the time, which then brings you back to social media making kids sad. 


Peter: I want to just throw another theory in the mix. What about the rise of the tea party? 


Michael: This is the thing you could say. You could say it's like the rise of kids watching anime or listening to K-pop. There is a million other things that happened between 2010 and 2020. 


Peter: I don't know why you're just throwing those out like it's a joke. [Michael laughs] Both of those reek of mental illness to me. 


Michael: The other thing that is a little bit tricky for this is the international comparisons. He said, "People oftentimes point to school shootings and America's insane culture of guns, but you also see increases in teen mental health problems in Canada and in some countries in Europe, some not. But it's like, this is relatively broadly an international phenomenon. If it was anything specific to America, you wouldn't be seeing these massive increases, especially in the English-speaking world. The fact that you see bigger increases in English-speaking countries than in parts of Western Europe, where fewer people speak English, is actually an argument for social media that like people in Australia are consuming a lot of American news, and so maybe they are getting sad about American stuff even though it doesn't necessarily affect them.” 


Peter: What a shitty country we have, that we're making Australians sad, you know? [Michael laughs]


Michael: So, after he goes over all of these things that don't explain teen mental health, the financial crisis, climate change, etc. He then basically says, “Well, it has to be social media because nothing else explains it. As like a methodology, I don't think that you've discarded two other explanations, therefore your explanation is true, is like, a very robust way to do it. You could easily say, “Well, it's not the financial crisis, it's not climate change, so it must be vaccines.” You have to actually offer evidence for your view. You can't just debunk other views. 


Peter: One of the problems that I'm starting to see with his argument is that he's reliant on your prior intuition that this is true when, yeah, he hasn't quite done the work. But again, I still agree, because [laughs] I do think this makes intuitive sense. 


Michael: But then what's so weird about this book is, the first chapter is this very detailed overview of the teen mental health crisis and a little bit about the causes, like, things that don't really explain it. I was expecting then, “Okay, we've established that teens are sad. What is the evidence that the cell phones are making kids sad?”


Peter: Right. 


Michael: He doesn't really do that. He then moves on to this sub argument in the book that kids are too protected in general. This is the thing that he mentioned, The Coddling of the American Mind. 


Peter: Wait, he's fucking sneaking in The Coddling of the American Mind argument. 


Michael: This is three chapters, but I'm going to merge them. Part two of the book is The Decline of Play-Based Childhood. 


Peter: God damn it. 


Michael: And he says, we've moved from a play-based to a phone-based childhood. 


Peter: I was just going to complain about generalists and the dangers of stepping out of your lane as an expert. And as quickly as I was about to say it, he just turns back into his lane where he's like, “All right, here's this thing I already wrote a stupid book about.”


Michael: Large sections of this are true. It's a huge bummer that American kids don't walk and bike to school anymore. People live in the suburbs where they're way too spread out. He's kind of correct about this. But then you also start to see his weird penchant for overstating harm and speaking about all of these trends in this weird black and white way. So, here is a little section from Chapter 4.


Peter: Smartphones and other digital devices bring so many interesting experiences to children and adolescents that they cause a serious problem. They reduce interest in all nonscreen-based forms of experience. The child will spend many hours each day sitting enthralled and motionless except for one finger, while ignoring everything beyond the screen.


Michael: And then this is from a little bit later. 


Peter: Are screen-based experiences less valuable than real life flesh and blood experiences? When we're talking about children whose brains evolve to expect certain kinds of experiences at certain ages? Yes. A resounding yes. Communicating by text, supplemented by emojis is not going to develop the parts of the brain that are expecting to get tuned up during conversations, supplemented by facial expressions, changing vocal tones, direct eye contact, and body language. We can't expect children and adolescents to develop adult level real world social skills when their social interactions are largely happening in the virtual world.” This doesn't sound totally wrong to me. Although this does feel a little more old man yelling at cloud than some of the prior arguments, where it's like, “Yes, the mode of communication is changing.”


If you imagine that it is replacing in full face to face interaction, then there are real downsides. But it's also just its own thing. And them being good at it has benefits for them and will continue to have benefits for them in the future when, for example, they're talking to their colleagues on slack or whatever the fuck. 


Michael: And also, whether it's replacing in-person interactions is an empirical question. 


Peter: Yes, yes. 


Michael: In here, he says their social interactions are largely happening in the virtual world. That is straightforwardly not true. There's these time use surveys where they survey thousands of people, and they're like, “What did you do today?” And, like, “Teens 15 to 18 spend more time with their friends than any other age group.” They are in school all day. By definition, they're spending 8 hours a day with their friends. [chuckles] That's in-person time. 


Peter: And again, when I got out of school, I would sometimes hang out with friends for a couple hours, and then I was just alone in my room for the remainder of the night. [Michael laughs] That is what childhood used to be like. 


Michael: There's also this thing. I think people say this about kids all the time, that, “Kids don't know how to socialize anymore. Kids are on their phones. They're not hanging out with their friends.” Again, this is an empirical question, and I found various attempts to actually measure this. There's a really interesting study where they looked at teacher assessments of kid’s social skills. How well are kids socializing over time? And they found no change. There just isn't evidence that kids are worse at making small talk, making friends. maybe it's true, but we don't have any evidence of it. And for this, I put out a call to just, like, people on blue sky. Like, “Hey, do you have kids between 12 and 19? Can I talk to them about their social media use?”


I also talked to a lot of parents. I mean, obviously it's not a remotely representative sample, but every single teenager that I talked to for this was like, “Yeah, if you're with your friend and he's on his phone the whole time, it's fucking rude.” And I'll be like, “Hey, get off your phone.” Just like adults do. 


Peter: If you want to tell me that cruising TikTok can fuck up your ability to think critically about politics and cruising Instagram can skew your perceptions of reality. That's very intuitive to me. But the idea that, this is messing up kid’s communication skills, it looks more to me like communication is evolving.


Michael: Yeah. 


Peter: I mean, when I was talking to my friends on AIM, sometimes my parents would be like, “Why aren't you talking to them in the real world?” And it's like, “Well, this is what people do now.” I don't know what to tell you. 


Michael: Also, if you're 14 years old, you don't have a car, you don't have any independent way to go see your friends. 


Peter: Again, you are stuck in the fucking house. 


Michael: Yeah. 


Peter: Honestly, I have an intuition that some of this stuff is an improvement. Because you get to socialize a little bit more than you were previously able to.


Michael: He also, in the section, talks about how the risk has been taken out of real-life play, and all of the risk has been moved online. So, we're going to watch a clip from one of my favorite podcasts. Here's this. 


Peter: This is from Maintenance Phase I swear to God. 


[video clip starts]


Speaker 3: So, tell me that. What was your policy with your kids, with all three on, when you let them out? Like, they could go out the door, get on a bicycle, walk seven blocks to a friend's house without any adult with them. Do you remember what age or grade? 


Speaker 4: No, I don't. I mean, it's fine if you live in a good neighborhood, but the problem is, childhood predators are real. 


Speaker 3: Not really. Not anymore. What I mean is. 


Speaker 4: What do you mean? 


Speaker 3: Well, when you and I were growing up, there were childhood predators out there in the physical world, approaching children. And I think you said there, you told the story about one who approached you when you were doing magic tricks. So, there were child predators out there. That's true. They're all on Instagram now. Instagram, and especially Instagram, makes it super easy for them to get in touch with children. 


Speaker 4: Yeah.


Speaker 3: So, this is my point. I can summarize the whole book with a single sentence. We have overprotected our kids in the real world and under protected them online. 


Speaker 4: I would agree to that. 


Speaker 3: So, yes, child predators are terrible, but guess what? We actually locked up most of them. When you and I were growing up, they weren't all locked up. They were just eccentrics who were exposing themselves. Remember flashing, flashers that doesn't happen anymore, because if you do that now, you're going to jail for a long, long time. 


Speaker 4: What's going on here? 


Speaker 3: So, we actually fucked up most of the predators and they know don't approach kids on a playground, [laughs] approach them on social media. 


Speaker 4: I don't know if we are doing that. 


[video clip ends]


Peter: Okay, I'm sorry. [laughs] Just hearing two morons who are [Michael laughs] wrong about these things but in opposite directions is insane to listen to. 


Michael: He has a whole chapter about this. He basically says like, “Yeah, we made this mistake in the 80s and 90s by saying they were child predators and kids were going to get kidnapped. And like that resulted in all this like extra safety-ism around kids. But now the strangers are online and the danger is real. Yeah, it's like, wait, so you're debunking the stranger danger panic and then just repeating the stranger danger panic but saying it's on the Internet? 


Peter: Joe Joe, you're invested in the wrong moral panic. 


Michael: [laughs] I know.


Peter: That's what it is. 


Michael: I was like pulling my fucking hair out this entire chapter. 


Peter: Also, minor point, but were flashers viewed as just like eccentrics? 


Michael: I don't know what the fuck he's talking about with flashers. I mean, this is clearly somebody who has not thought about the basic data behind a core argument of his book. It's not that we used to have a bunch of predators prowling the streets and now we don't have them anymore because we locked them all up. It's that there were never predators roaming the streets in the first place. 


Peter: But also, the idea that we locked up all the predators, conflicts with his other thesis that they all went online. I just don't get what he's saying. 


Michael: Right. Exactly. And also, anyone. This was where, I mean, I really was doing my best with this book, but this was where I lost any confidence. A person who talks about the threats to children as like strangers that they do not know, rather than their parents, their soccer coach, their fucking priest. Anyone who speaks like this is just not a serious person. 


Peter: Yep. 


Michael: The minute you look at actual data on child online exploitation, it is almost exclusively someone they fucking know. It is like your boyfriend posting revenge porn. It is your fucking soccer coach DM-ing you. There's a really interesting survey of 2500 law enforcement agencies. So, they get all of the records of all of the child exploitation cases, and in only 8.5% of cases was the perpetrator someone they met online. 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: The patterns of online exploitation match mirror perfectly the patterns offline exploitation. This thing of people meeting kids online and kidnapping them or whatever, this is a thing that happens just like kids do get kidnapped by strangers and murdered, it's extremely rare. And in the actual literature, there's a lot of really heartbreaking stuff in the literature that this whole thing of predators will pretend to be a 15-year-old boy and then trick you into getting nudes, whatever. This generally doesn't happen. Most of the kids who actually do get victimized by these online predators in the rare cases where it does happen, it's mostly kids in foster care or kids in traumatized situations, kids who've experienced abuse, whose parents aren't around. It's basically kids who get no positive attention at all. And all of a sudden there's somebody online who's like, “Wow, you look really pretty.” 


Peter: Right. Someone who's notably and uniquely vulnerable to that sort of situation. 


Michael: Exactly. It's the same vulnerabilities that we see in offline exploitation. Oftentimes, the kids know that this guy's 40 years old, they know that they're meeting for sex, but they think it's a relationship because the guy's fucking lying to them, being like, “Oh, I really love you, blah, blah, blah. That's the deception that's going on. And so, when you find this exploitation in the real world, it is almost always along the fault lines of existing vulnerabilities. And the way to solve it is to address those vulnerabilities. 


Peter: Right. God. Sorry, my brain got very scrambled by listening to those two. 


Michael: I know, I know. [laughs]


Peter: I don't think I've ever sat down and listened to or watched a full episode of Joe Reagan, but I've seen clips or whatever. And the idea that young people are listening to shit like this, being like, “This is intellectual.” [laughs] 


Michael: I know. I know.


Peter: That's my moral panic.


Michael: The other reason I wanted to watch this is because listening to Jon Haidt, it does just sound like a guy who's saying stuff. This book is not remotely rigorous. It's actually really shocking to me that it's had such an impact, I think mostly because it's telling people something that they want to believe. 


Peter: Yeah. And already believe. 


Michael: I interviewed more teenagers for this. I interviewed more experts for this. And I interviewed more teachers and researchers for this episode than he interviewed for his book. As far as I can tell, in the text of the book, he interviewed one actual teenager about what they do on their phone. He does not appear to have engaged with any researchers other than the one that he's already collaborated with. He hasn't spoken to any teachers about what it's like in their classrooms. He didn't speak to any psychologists. 


Peter: It is so annoying that I'm doing an approximately as rigorous episode about Eric Adams. [Michael laughs] Every evening I have two drinks, and then I watch Eric Adams clip and start outlining If Books Could Kill bonus episode. 


Michael: Again, I do think that there needs to be a societal conversation about this, but I do not think this is the person to be leading this conversation. 


Peter: This is the thing where I feel like the book got popular because it's just giving intellectual heft, or the appearance of intellectual heft to this intuition that we all have. 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: So, that you can say, “Hey, phones are fucking our kids up.” And then everyone's like, “Yeah, definitely.” And you get to be like, “There's a book about it.” 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: That's how I know this is real and serious. 


Michael: Yeah. 


Peter: I agree that the decline of outdoor play is bad. It's just that he's super reductive about what exactly is good and what exactly is bad and what we should be doing. It's just lazy, honestly. It's just like, “I don't mean to be fucking snooty,” but it's just someone who's not intellectually curious. It's someone who's just pushing a really simple narrative and isn't that interested in identifying a supporting set of evidence. 


Michael: Do you want to get snooty and talk about the evidence-


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: -and snooted up? 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: So, as I said, Haidt doesn't really have a dedicated chapter or anything of just the evidence on how kids are harmed by the smartphones. He just takes it for granted in the book that this is obvious and this is happening. So, the book is more about how smartphones harm kids and why smartphones harm kids. He's much clearer on his Substack. He has an entire Substack and a Google Doc of all existing literature on this subject. And he's very straightforward about the fact that he believes smartphones are the cause of the mental health crisis among teenagers. He's not like, “There's an association that we should look into.” 


Peter: Right, right. 


Michael: He has a blog post called, “Social media is a major cause of the mental illness epidemic in teen girls. here’s the evidence.” So, when I went into this episode, I thought it was just going to be really obvious that, if you look at the data, kids who use smartphones more are more depressed and kids who use smartphones less are less depressed, and it would be really clear. And then me and you would have this detailed conversation of correlation versus causation. And what does this mean? That's what I was expecting to get into in this episode, but it turns out that's not even true. So, this is from a 2020 summary of what have we learned about teens and Internet, social media, everything in the last 10 years. And I think it's a good summary. It's in academic ease, so I had to condense it a little bit, but this is a good overview.


Peter: Small associations still exist as adolescents who report more depressive symptoms also tend to report spending more time online. However, a review of meta-analyses, recent large scale preregistered studies, and daily assessments of digital technology usage showed that associations between time online and internalizing symptoms are often A, mixed between positive, negative, and null finding, B, when present, likely too small to translate into meaningful effects, and C, typically not distinguishable in terms of likely cause and effect. 


Michael: Essentially, the research is all over the place. At just the most basic level, are kids who are on their phones less happy than kids who are not on their phones? We can't even really say anything definitive. And to the extent that we do find associations, they're extremely small. And another thing that you find in the literature is, this turns out to be remarkably difficult to study. So, the first problem is, how much are kids on their phones? The vast majority of the data on this is from these huge surveys that they give to tens of thousands of kids every year. Do you remember these? You'd go to homeroom and then you'd have a questionnaire with 300 questions on it. And it would be like, “How much do you do drugs? How much do you drink? How much money do your parents earn?” It would just ask you a million things. 


Peter: I have absolutely no recollection of this. [laughs] 


Michael: Do you not? I used to lie on them because I thought it was funny. I would just fill out like, “Yes, coke, yes, I impregnated somebody last week.” 


Peter: Now I'm upset. Have I completely lost [Michael laughs] a memory of something that happened to me many times. They didn't even bother with my school. 


Michael: The way this works is you give these surveys to tens of thousands of kids a year, and then you make the data available and people can comb through it for all kinds of stuff. It's hundreds of questions, many of them. And so, you can correlate, like, kids with divorced parents are more likely to be left handed or whatever the fuck.


Peter: That's why they get divorced. Yeah. 


Michael: And so, in these data dumps, they ask kids about their social media usage, and they have all kinds of questions about their mental health. But the problem is that people of all ages are terrible at estimating how much time they spend online. 


Peter: Huh-huh. Yeah, yeah. 


Michael: So, if I asked you yesterday, how many hours did you spend looking at a screen not related to work?”


Peter: 24.


[laughter]


Michael: That's probably true. It might actually be easier with you because you're always online. 


Peter: Every week I get that screen time notification. Because I forget to shut it off. And every week I'm like, “Oh, my God.” 


Michael: [laughs] That's why I don't have mine on. Because I genuinely don't want to know. 


Peter: You know, I don't either, but I immediately forget about it as soon as it goes [Michael laughs] away because of the brain poisoning that the screen does. 


Michael: So, there are studies where they, put things on people's phones, and then later on they ask them, “How often are you on your phone?” And then they compare actual data versus what people say, and they're off by 30%, 40%, 50%. We just don't really know how much kids are on their phones and what they're doing. There's also one of the other problems is they now, because these studies are updated every year with new, they weren't asking kids about smartphones in 2002, obviously, because they didn't exist yet. So, they're always updating these things with new technology. Starting in 2013, they did start asking kids, “How often are you on social media?”


This is the rise of Facebook and Instagram is a big deal in teenager’s lives, but the frequency responses. So, kids were asked, “How often are you on social media?” The choices were a few times a year, once or twice a month, at least once a week, or almost every day. 


Peter: Okay, [laughs] so no data, no data is being collected. 


Michael: [laughs] Yeah. So, basically, every kid put almost every day. Because the kids were already, by that point on social media, of course, all the time. 


Peter: Dude, what 80-year-old was like, “How many times a year are you online?” [Michael laughs] My boomer parents were checking their email once a day in 2013 for sure. 


Michael: There is also the earliest studies on this. We start getting these, kids are on their phones on [unintelligible [00:48:45] studies in 2018, and a lot of them are using data from this time where they weren't even asking kids about social media use. They weren't differentiating between different types of Internet devices. So, they would just ask, “How many hours a day are you on a screen?” And then it would say, “This includes Xbox and Facebook and email.” 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: One of the main things that I learned from talking to researchers over the last month is that this whole concept of screen time is just such fucking garbage. Screen time includes reading, going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. And it also includes watching pornography. It just is not useful to talk about screen time as being harmful. But most of the data that we have about kids is just how much are you on your screens? 


Peter: I guess Wikipedia versus porn is the strongest dichotomy you can make. 


[laughter]


But if you're trying to figure out what's rotting the kid’s brains, you would need to separate out every app, every different use of every different app, etc. There's just so much going on. There are so many different variables that to call it screen time is just clearly not great. 


Michael: There's also something very funny. I felt really old when I was speaking to the teens for this, that all of them said that the text message app that we use, is what they use to communicate with old people. And actual kids always communicate on Snapchat or Instagram through DMs.


Peter: Whatever. Get a job. Get a job, kids. 


Michael: [laughs] But this is the thing. So, even if you're measuring how many hours a day are you on Instagram, a lot of that's just like texting with their friends. That's not actually looking at images of, for example, like women that are potentially going to give you an eating disorder. The kinds of things that we associate with social media harm, even if you're measuring how much time they're on Instagram, that doesn't necessarily account for that.


So, that's the first problem with these big quantitative data dump studies. The second problem is something that I've become so fucking radicalized on, it's very easy to design these studies to get the result that you want. You can pick different statistical controls. I saw so many fucking weird statistical controls in these things. You can determine what you're measuring. 


So, one thing is a lot of studies use these broad umbrella terms of well-being. How much does being on your phone affect your well-being? And they'll pick 10 or 15 questions from these big data sets, and they'll say, “Oh, this is well being.” Or sometimes they call it life satisfaction. But it's totally arbitrary what you put in those things. And with the kinds of statistical software that people use now, it's really easy to be like, “Okay, if I control for income, what does it say about cell phones? Oh, it says cell phones are fine. What if I control for income and education? Oh, it says cell phones are bad. Okay, I'll control for those two things.” And all of these statistical decisions look defensible in a vacuum. 


But when people publish papers on this, they don't publish. Okay, here's all of the other models that we ran. Here's all of the other statistical techniques that we used. For all we know, they're trying a thousand things and they're picking the one that gives the result that they want. 


Peter: So, big picture, the data sucks. And when you look at what we do have, there's no clear answer. 


Michael: There's no clear answer. And I think this whole exercise of combing through fucking data sets and looking for associations is such bullshit. The one that Jon Haidt really stakes his reputation on, he works with this researcher named Gene Twenge, who I reached out to, tried to have a phone call with. She didn't want to do that, but we did email back and forth about some methodology stuff. Jon Haidt is working with her. And they get into this big fight with these other two researchers named Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski, both of whom I also interviewed. And they had this big long methodology, years long methodology fight about how to measure these things. And it culminates in Orben and Przybylski running this huge meta-analysis where they basically ran a bunch of different scenarios. 


If you control for this, if you didn't control for this, they run something like 3 million different permutations. And they find that in essentially all of them except for a few, you don't find an association between social media and depressive symptoms. 


Peter: This is how Paul Atreides’ son finds the golden path. 


Michael: [laughs] I mean, basically or I was going to say Doctor Strange, who does 16 million scenarios and only two of them have beating Thanos. It's basically, they're like in a tiny minority of scenarios, statistical analyses, do you find any association? And when you do find an association, it's a really small effect. They said it's roughly the same as the effect of kids who eat potatoes, bold, oppressive symptoms and kids who are on their smartphones. 


Peter: You have to control for Britishness as well there. 


Michael: So, there's this one study that aims to end the debate. They're like, “Look, we barely fund association, when we do, it's so under power that it's like on par with eating potatoes, which is basically meaningless.” And then Jon Haidt and Jean Twenge then publish this paper. They're like, “No, we reran it with different controls. And we actually found a much larger effect.” In this, what they seem to think is the culminating work on this. Okay, we finally ended the debate. They have this table with all of these different effects. And it's like, “How much do various things affect teen depression?” And they have, social media is like way higher. It's a 0.2 correlation, which in any other study is considered very weak.


Peter: What if you combine that with the effect of eating potatoes, then where are we? 


Michael: This is the thing. So, they're trying to be transparent about like, “How big the effect of social media is.” But even in this allegedly argument ending study, the effect of social media is still smaller than kids who eat breakfast every day.


Peter: Okay. And when you circle back to these statistics that Haidt was referencing in terms of hospitalizations for self-harm. That's where in the UK, he was talking about a 400% increase nearly.


Michael: Yeah. 


Peter: I guess the point being, if that flows directly from social media use, then surely you can produce more than the tiniest sliver of a percentage change here. 


Michael: Yes, exactly. And something that is not on par with something like eating breakfast, where we know that's reflecting other things. It's probably people whose parents tend to be at home and have time. 


Peter: Yeah. A little more family stability, etc. 


Michael: Yeah. It's a reflection of other things. And then if we're then putting it on par with kids who eat breakfast, it also compares it to kids who eat fruit. It's like barely more important than kids who eat fruit every day. It's like, “Okay, well, if those, we can all acknowledge that eating breakfast, that's not what's causing the depression.” It's obviously a cluster of other things. Well, then maybe social media is a cluster of other things too. I'm so sick of these studies where they're just like, “Oh, we found this correlation between this thing and that thing.” I just don't think that you actually understand complex social phenomena this way, through these averages. 


So, I really was planning on going much deeper into the quantitative debate and the methodology fight. But in the end, you realize that the debate is between the academic consensus, which is that there's essentially no connection at all. And on the other side, Jon Haidt and Jean Twenge, who say that there's an extremely small effect which does not prove cause and is highly contingent on a very specific set of parameters. So, there really isn't that much of a debate. There's not that much to go into it. Everybody agrees that we're not really looking at something strong and obvious here.


Peter: Right. 


Michael: If the argument is that social media causes kids to feel depressed, we should be able to capture that in other ways. So, one of the things people start doing in the 2010s is they start doing longitudinal studies, which is like, you track the same people over time. If cellphones are causing kids to be depressed, then we would find kids who get cell phones at age 11 are going to be depressed earlier than kids who get cell phones at 13. And these don't really find anything. Most of the longitudinal studies don't actually find, “Kids are fine and then they start using their phones, and then they're depressed.” The majority of them actually find the opposite effect, that if you follow kids who are depressed, you find them overtime using smartphones more. That doesn't mean that it's irrelevant. 


I mean, if smartphones are something that makes depressed kids more depressed, that's something that we need to take seriously. That's not a null result. But we don't see this tobacco metaphor of, “I was fine, and then I got a phone, and now I'm sad.” That's not really something that shows up in the longitudinal data. We also have diary data where people write down every day, “How is your mood?” And then oftentimes they'll either have a tracker on their phone for how much are they using social media, or they'll also write down, how much was I on social media today? And you don't find associations between on days when I was on social media, I was more depressed. In the book, Jon Haidt attempts to show that social media is causing mental health. 


So, one of the studies that he mentions numerous times is an experiment at the University of Pennsylvania, where they got 143 undergraduates, and for half of them, they told them to only check Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram 10 minutes a day. They limited them to very little social media use. And after a month, the undergraduates were happier. They were less depressed and less lonely. 


Peter: Okay. 


Michael: And so, he's like, “All right, if you stop using social media, you're happier.” But, I mean, this is obviously a very small study. And, undergraduates are not a remotely represented sample. But the much bigger problem is that 80% of the participants in the study dropped out before a month. 


[laughter]


The researchers say, “Yeah, we probably shouldn't have given them extra credit at the beginning of the study. We probably should have waited-


Peter: Incredible.


Michael: -until the end of the study. [laughs]


Peter: Incredible. These are the people who believe that they know what's best for children. [laughs] 


Michael: And also, I think people who dropped out of the study, people who can't hack it, are probably the people who are less happy. 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: The only people who are going to stick with it are like, “Yeah, this is working really well to not be on social media.” I'm going to stay with this study. So, it's like, “Well, yeah, for some people, they're going to be happier, but if 80% of people drop out, you're basically removing all of the people for whom this did nothing.” 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: Another argument that he makes is that it's not that it's making individuals sad directly, but it's destroyed the social environment. So, a school where everybody has a smartphone is an environment where it's harder to make friends, it's easier to be lonely, etc. I actually find this relatively interesting as a hypothesis. However, there's also no real evidence for it either. 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: But this is one of theories that he gives for causality, and this is one of the studies that he uses as evidence for this. So, let me send you this. 


Peter: There is one small but important class of experiments that does measure group level effects by asking, how does a whole community change when social media suddenly becomes much more available in that community? For example, one study took advantage of the fact that Facebook was originally offered only to students at a small number of colleges. As the company expanded to new colleges, did mental health change in the following year or two at those institutions, compared with colleges where students did not yet have access to Facebook? Yes. It got worse with bigger effects on women. The authors found that the rollout of Facebook at a college increased symptoms of poor mental health, especially depression, and led to increased utilization of mental health care services. 


Michael: So, this is like a natural experiment. Remember how Facebook rolled out to different colleges? 


Peter: I do remember. And I was going to say, I was in college when this shit was happening. So, I have a vague recollection of the Facebook rollout. 


Michael: Are you sad? Is that why you're sad? 


Peter: I do feel like it made me sad. I don't know. Because it's hard to explain how minor of a cultural phenomenon it was at the time, [Michael laughs] it was popular, but it wasn't something that was a big part of anyone's life. 


Michael: So, this is another study that is a little bit implausible. It basically shows that as Facebook rolled out to different colleges, those colleges experienced almost a one standard deviation increase in mental health problems. So, a huge effect, they say, it's 22% as serious as big of a deal as losing your job, just getting Facebook at your college. 


Peter: When Facebook rolled out, it was literally just like, you have a profile and people can look at it. 


Michael: Yes. Thank you. So, there's a very good critique of this study written by an economist named David Stein, who's like, this does not hold up for two fucking seconds. So, remember, at the beginning of the book, Haidt says, “We're talking about Instagram. We're talking about social media likes, retweets, doom scrolling, algorithmic feeds.” Facebook rolled out to colleges in 2004. It was still called the Facebook at the time. 


Peter: Right.


Michael: There was no news feed. There were no smartphones. And when you got it, it wasn't even the second most popular social media. This was the time of Friendster and Myspace. If this structure is so harmful to mental health that you experience almost a one standard deviation increase in mental health problems at all these campuses, why didn't Friendster and Myspace have any effect? 


Peter: Doesn't this fuck with his timeline of, “This all really got kicked off in 2010?”


Michael: This is another thing that he does throughout the book, where he does this very responsible sounding scoping exercise. In the introduction, he's like, we're not talking about things before 2010 or the Internet. We're not talking about porn. We're not talking about video games. But then throughout the book, he cites studies that were done way before 2010. He talks about video games. He talks about pornography. He talks about broadband Internet. He has an entire chapter about boys, even though the mental health effects on boys are much more modest. And his own correlations don't show any link between social media and mental health for boys. He has a whole section where he talks about the pandemic. 


Peter: Are we going to talk about the boy’s thing? Because it it's wild to think that we're looking at massive, devastating impacts on young girls, and boys are just scrolling Snapchat, just doing great. 


Michael: Yeah. I mean, he does have a chapter about girls, and he has a chapter about boys, and he attempts to explain why it’s so bad for girls. I mean, one of the arguments that he uses is, they're more prone to predators, which we already established isn't true. He also says that a big part of it is cyberbullying for girls, the minute you dig into the literature is also, it's not as much of an urban legend as the sexual predator stuff, but it is much more overblown than it really is among kids. So, bullying has been going down both online and offline. Bullying has been going down steadily for the last 20 years. And so, if the Internet was a big driver of bullying, we would see huge increases as all these kids moved online. 


One of the most interesting conversations I had for this was with a researcher named Emily Weinstein, who wrote a very good book called Behind Their Screens, where she took the radical step of actually talking to teenagers about the way that they use their phones and whether or not that is helping or harming their mental health. And she said, “Yeah, when you talk to teenagers about their mental health, they don't cite cyberbullying all that much.” It does come up for some kids, but in general, it's a lot more social anxiety of specific things driven by the Internet. So, one thing she mentioned was that maybe you go on Venmo and you see that one friend Venmo'd another friend for movie tickets, and you're like, “Wait, are they seeing a movie without me?”


Or you'll go on Instagram and you'll see photos of a party that you weren't invited to, or somebody uploads a photo of you, but they don't tag you. Or the kids that I talked to mention this to that sometimes somebody will upload a really bad photo of you and you're like, “Did they do that on purpose to make fun of me or to make me look bad? or they don't think I look bad in the photo, or it's an honest mistake,” and then it's like, “Oh, well, should I write them and say something? But then that starts all this drama or should I just ignore it? Do I like it? Do I not like it?”


She said one of the things that really has changed qualitatively in the experience of teenagers is people are so concerned when you're that age of, “Where do I fit in the social hierarchy?” And now there's just so much more information. Who else is hanging out? What are the parties that I wasn't invited to? When I was in high school, there were thousands of parties I wasn't invited to, but I didn't know about most of them. 


Peter: No. You find out on Monday and you're like, “I'm a big fucking loser.” 


Michael: Yeah, exactly. [laughs] Exactly. And it's like the forms of social exclusion that people can use, whether it's deliberate or not, whether it's bullying or not, you can just watch people do things and have fun without you. And I do actually think that's worth reckoning with as an actual change. 


Peter: And again, I continue to be intuitively in agreement with the idea that all of this social media use, it just has to have some negative impact on children. There's just no way it doesn't. It's too much of a sea-change in how we engage with the world to not have a big impact on mental health in at least different areas. And to me that resonates as like a very simple, realistic way that it would impact the average person where I think everyone has had some experience where you're a teenager and you find out your friends hung out without you.


Michael: Yeah. 


Peter: And you're trying to figure out, was it intentional? Was it not? Do they just not care? Are they like very actively excluding me? And yeah, if they were just like posting pictures of it, maybe that intensifies those feelings. 


Michael: And I got to say, this issue really opened up for me and I feel like I came to a more productive way to think about it after I started reading the qualitative studies. So, Emily Weinstein has a really fascinating article where she just interviewed 30 kids who tried to kill themselves. These were kids who attempted suicide and survived. She speaks to them after this and talks to them about their relationship with social media. So, here is an excerpt from that study. She calls this kid P24 in the study, but we're going to call him Scott. This is a 15-year-old boy. 


Peter: Scott explained that there are challenges associated with social media, but “There are still so many pros.” Among key benefits for him, social media is an important source of connection and self-expression. He also values opportunities to digitally seek, receive, and offer social support. Scott appreciates that he can reach others fast when struggles arise. Being able to talk to multiple people means he can hear different perspectives and get better insight. Scott also values using social media to share his artwork, connect with other artists, and get feedback and inspiration. Yet he describes downsides too. “You can get ignored or you get less feedback than you hoped. It makes me insecure.” This feeling of insecurity intersects with metrics-related stress, for example, not getting enough likes on his posts and unmet friendship expectations when his friends are unresponsive or fail to offer the support he hoped for.


Self-expression can be helpful to “Clear my mind and reset my thoughts,” but can cause problems because “I get angry.” I say words that I don't really mean. 


Michael: And so, is social media good for kids? Yes. Is social media bad for kids? Yes. 


Peter: Yeah, yeah. That's the intuition I have, it just can't be untrue that there are downsides. It can't be untrue that there are upsides. The fundamental question is, can we suss these out? And is there anything to be done? 


Michael: Yes. 


Peter: And that's a much more complicated question than like, “Are phones destroying the children?”


Michael: Yeah. I just think that, are phones good or are phones bad is just an insipid way to look at this. The kind of conclusion that I came to from reading studies of various methodologies is just like, “There are some kids for whom being on their phone is deadly fucking poison, it's so bad.” There are also some kids that it's good for, they really benefit from the fact that they can keep in touch with old friends. I talked to one girl who just moved, and her new school is on Zoom or it's only one day in class, and social media is the only way that she keeps in touch with her old friends, three states away. And that's a really important lifeline for her. 


Peter: I once had a best friend who moved 20 minutes away, and we just straight up never talked again. 


Michael: [laughs] Exactly. It just depends on the kids. And it's interesting when there are some surveys of kids where kids actually say this. So, in the infamous leaked internal Facebook polls, where they talk to their users about how much is Facebook and Instagram harming you, about 20% of kids said, “I feel worse when I use Instagram.” And that appears to be the highwater mark. I mean, some kids feel worse when they use Instagram, and so they just don't use Instagram. And it doesn't really have a systematic effect on their mental health. Some kids do. Some kids can't stop themselves. There's also a Pew poll where they ask kids, “How has social media affected your mental health? about 9% of kids say that it's been really bad for their mental health.


And about 40% of kids say that it's been good for their mental health. And 40% say that it hasn't really had any effect at all. And I think that's a way to look at it, that there's some percentage of kids for whom this is really bad, and they probably shouldn't be on their phones or they should have them limited or something, but we don't know how big of a percentage that is. It's hard to identify those kids in advance. And another thing that Emily Weinstein told me, which I think is really important is that, “The harm of social media is very different for different kids.” So, she said, for some kids, it keeps them up late. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: It doesn't really matter what they're looking at, but it's like the adrenaline of social media just keeps them up and they don't get sleep. 


Peter: Kids, I'm right there with you.


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [laughs] 


Peter: This is why I love Bluesky, because at midnight, there just aren't any more posts. 


Michael: But then for other kids, the thing that is harming them is going to be like radicalizing content. For other kids, it's just going to be trance scrolling on TikTok, just mindlessly scrolling for compulsive use right there with their friends. But they can't stop themselves from reaching from their phones. For other kids, it's going to be eating disorders. Again, are phones bad or are phones good? It's just not a useful way to think about this. 


Peter: Yeah, I mean, you see some outputs of what must be social media, social contagion or whatever the fuck they want to call it, where it's like women in their 20s are getting Botox at crazy rates. And you're like, “This feels like the output of Instagram.”


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: That as a “harm” can be isolated. And separated out from, “This other person is getting radicalized by right wing YouTube and this other person is being kept up.” These are all very separate problems. Problems, yes. But are they a single problem? I think the answer to that is no. 


Michael: It's so much easier to talk about this and think about this with older technologies. So, in his chapter about boys, Haidt has a whole section on video games. And he's like, “You know, I was originally going to say that video games are just bad for boys, but when you look at the literature, it turns out for some people, it actually improves their hand-eye coordination, for some it's like a social lifeline.” 


Peter: Dudes rock, baby. 


Michael: It's true that if you think about it, most people play video games, and it just doesn't have that much of a role in their life. For some people, video games can be a real social thing, or they get into Esports or whatever. It can be really wholesome, and for some kids, it's really fucking bad for them. He says around 7% of kids who play video games have a really toxic relationship with them, and they get addicted, and its compulsive, and they do it too much. And it's well, yeah, that's probably the same with TV. If you look at previous technologies of, the automobile has also had great benefits for human society and huge drawbacks, and those just all exist at the same time. 


Michael: And it's like only with social media that people want this really one-dimensional explanation. And that just hasn't really been true with any previous technological advance. 


Peter: So, he looks at video games and basically gives them the nuanced treatment that he should be [Michael laughs] giving social media, which is what his whole fucking book is about. 


Michael: It's also very funny. He has a little debunker where he's like, “Well, what about the benefits of social media?” And then he's like, “Well, a lot of that's based on self-reported data, and a lot of the definitions aren't actually clear with what they're saying. And a lot of it's correlational. And it's like, Jon.”


Peter: That's the problem with all of the data and research.


Michael: All the fucking data for the benefits and the drawbacks. It's just really hard to say anything definitive. 


Peter: I'm probably speaking a little too broadly here, but it almost makes no sense that all of the benefits have data problems.


[laughter]


And none of the stuff about drawbacks has data problems. 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.


Peter: Those two things can't quite sit side by side. 


Michael: So, I do think this book is maybe a kind of airport book that we haven't really talked about before, where it's a book that is diagnosing a real problem and investigating a real social phenomenon, but that is written by a fundamentally unserious person. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: And so, the last section of the book, is the solutions. He's very clear about the fact that these will have large and major and rapid effects. So, he says, “If most of the parents and schools in a community were to enact all four of these recommendations, I believe they would see substantial improvements in adolescent mental health within two years.” 


Peter: Okay.


Michael: So, these are big, effective changes. They are one, no smartphones before high school. Two, no social media before 16. Three, phone-free schools. Four, far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. 


Peter: I have to say there's nothing too outlandish in there within the context of this book.


Michael: All four of these, honestly sound fine to me. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: It's interesting that in a book it is written by this reactionary centrist guy, he comes to, I think, pretty justified conclusions. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: But then one of the weird paradoxes of this book, in the same way that we started out, by saying all of these fundamentally contradictory statements, all of these solutions, I think, are basically fine. Although I would quibble with things like no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, I think parents are in a better position to-- 


Peter: Yeah, that's a little aggressive. 


Michael: Your kid might be in a position where it's appropriate for them earlier, but he admits this. He's like, “Yeah, whatever.” Also, parents can be flexible. It's not that big of a deal. But even though I agree roughly with all four of these recommendations, this is by far the worst section of the book. And so, once we get into the solutions section, this is the final third of the book, he separates the solutions into what companies can do, what governments can do, what schools can do, and what parents can do. So, we're going to start with what governments and tech companies can do to solve this problem. His core recommendation is to raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16. 


He points out that we now have this thing of, “You must be 13 to use Instagram or whatever, but you literally just tick a box.” You're like, “Yes, I'm 13.” Or if it's a porn site or whatever, you tick the I'm 18 box, but there's no actual verification. So, he says that we should basically bump this up to 16. He says that's not necessarily for using the Internet. It's fine for kids to be on the Internet if they're whatever using Wikipedia to write essays for school, that's all fine. But as far as setting up social media accounts, we should raise the age from 13 to 16. This basically would involve some way of verifying kids ages. If you raise it to 16, there's just going to be a box that says, “Are you 16? And you tick the box.” 


Peter: What if when you create an Instagram account, you get a message from someone asking you for a pic, and then you send [Michael laughs] the pic and they judge whether or not you look like you're under 16? 


Michael: That's the thing. I think this is actually interesting as a social problem where I think most people would agree that, Yeah, it would be really nice if we could verify that fucking 10-year-olds and 11-year-olds are not on Instagram. I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to be concerned about. But how do you get there? He proposes a couple solutions. He says one option is using a network of people to vouch for each other. So, some peer-to-peer thing like, “Yes this person is over 13.” He says, “Issuing a blockchain token to anyone who is verified once by a reliable method.” I don't know what that means. I stopped reading it blockchain. 


Peter: No, no. Let's drill down on that. What if, at birth, you are assigned a bitcoin? [laughs] 


Michael: Another option is using biometrics to establish identity. 


Peter: Yeah, no, this is great. We got blockchain, biometrics. 


Michael: Biometrics. 


Peter: I like how immediately his solutions are drastically more dangerous than the existing problem. 


Michael: He says he also has this weird cockamamie thing. He says clear, “A company known for rapid identity verification in airports, is now used as a quick way for its clients who previously verified their age to prove that they are old enough to buy alcohol at stadium events.” 


Peter: That's what you want, let's make clear the most powerful entity on earth.


[laughter]

 

Michael: I know. So, essentially, whether or not you think that this thing of raising the Internet age to 16 is a good idea or not, it feels almost a moot point to me. Just because the way of doing it would be more problematic than the system we have now. 


Peter: Yeah. Or at least introduce new variables that no one really understands or knows how to control. 


Michael: Yeah. He admits this. He just says there's not, at present, any perfect way of implementing a universal age check. There is no method that could be applied to everyone who comes to a site in a way that's perfectly reliable and raises no privacy or civil liberties objections. 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: The only other specific thing that he mentions is there's various legal efforts to do something along these lines. The closest thing we have in America is this thing called the Kids Online Safety Act or KOSA. I think one of the real problems with this book is because he's a reactionary centrist and a both sides guy. He can't look at a law like this and notice that it's just a very obvious republican moral panic law. 


Peter: Right. I was going to say, KOSA is the law that is-- Okay, I'm trying to-- Well, all right, yeah. I'm not going to remember accurately what it's about. I just remember that there's huge civil libertarian objections and concerns from the LGBTQ community. 


Michael: This is the actual text of the law. I've condensed this down from the legalese, but this is roughly the core of the law. It says, “Platforms shall take reasonable measures to prevent and mitigate the following harms to minors. 1, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors. 2, patterns of use that indicate or encourage addiction like behaviors. 3, online bullying and harassment. 4, sexual exploitation and abuse.” This is one of the clearest examples of moral panic legislation I've ever seen. It's basically saying it's illegal for tech companies to harm teenagers. But that's so broad that it can be interpreted in almost any way, and it leaves the sole authority for determining that up to state attorneys general. 


And so, if an attorney general just says, “Oh, yeah, it harms kids to come across things that, like, “Oh, you might be transgender,” well, that's harming kids. That's causing them to be depressed. They could then strip that from the Internet and essentially censor or ban it very easily. And the cosponsor of KOSA, Marsha Blackburn, has said the purpose of this law is to protect minor children from the transgender in our culture. 


Peter: The transgender in our culture?


Michael: Yes, the transgender. Her name is Rebecca. 


Peter: There's one lurking,-


[laughter]


Peter: -you see them in the distance like a fire golem in Elden ring. 


Michael: When you have a law this broad, when we don't have a clear definition of really what the problem is, and we have no evidence on this at all, you're essentially just handing a huge amount of power over to whoever defines the term harm. 


Peter: This is a major problem with many vague, bullshit laws that shouldn't be passed. But the essence of this law is, “What if we made it illegal to hurt people?” [Michael laughs] This is, I think, the output of moral panic media cycles, but also, it's just fundamentally stupid. You don't need to contextualize it that much to realize it. 


Michael: Okay, so that was what governments and tech companies can do. 


Peter: Pass the dumbest law in the world. Have we thought about this? 


Michael: [laughs] So, the next section is what schools can do. 


Peter: Hell, yeah. 


Michael: So, I'm going to send you his little vignette where he starts to say why schools should ban cell phones. 


Peter: Mountain Middle School in Durango, Colorado, went phone free back in 2012 at the start of the mental health crisis. The county around the school had among the highest teen suicide rates in Colorado when Shane Voss took over as head of school. Students were suffering from rampant cyberbullying, sleep deprivation, and constant social comparison. Voss implemented a cell phone ban, for the entire school day phones had to stay in backpacks, not in pockets or hands. There were clear policies and real consequences if phones were found out of the backpack during school hours. The effects were transformative. Students no longer sat silently next to each other, scrolling while waiting for homeroom or class to start. They talk to each other or the teacher.”


Michael: They’re talking.


Peter: Voss says that, “When he walks into a school without a phone ban “It's kind of like the zombie apocalypse,” and you have all these kids in the hallways not talking to each other. It's just a very different vibe.


Michael: It's like, we used to have phones, and everyone was silent and sad, and now you hear laughter in the hallways. He says [crosstalk] else in the book, he's like, “Wow. They're hearing the peeling of children's laughter because there's no phones.” 


Peter: I mean, you laugh when you're looking at social media too. You laugh because you see a great joke cyberbullying one of your classmates. 


[laughter]


Peter: Well, look, I don't know where exactly we're going, but I think that sounds like a good policy to me, and I'm ready to believe that it works at least in some regards, that it makes the school environment better. 


Michael: So, this is the thing, I actually like the idea of banning smartphones in schools. I think I've mentioned before that one of my best friends in Seattle is a public high school teacher, and phones are the fucking bane of his existence. It's like whenever you're doing a little lecture thing, and then you're like, “Okay, we're going to break up into groups.” Every kid pulls their phone out, and then you got to be like, “Okay, put your phones away. Do this.” One thing that Jon Haidt actually mentions in the book that I think is relatively insightful is that there's also this huge problem of fucking notifications that you're sitting there with your phone in your pocket, and it buzzes and you're like, “Okay, Is that my mom saying, hey, you need to get home right now or is that just a breaking news alert?” 


Peter: It's the worst Substack that you subscribe to, just publish a new post. 


Michael: I think that's a real thing of fracturing kid’s attention and having-- I'm like that. This is why I put my phone on “Do not disturb” most of the time is because if I feel it buzz in my pocket, there's a little part of my brain that is like, “What is that? What is that? What is that?” the whole time.


Peter: It’s never important. 


Michael: I like this idea of banning phones. However, one of the problems with this description that he gives this one dimensional, things were bad, and then we banned phones, and now things are good narrative that he's giving us is that most schools in America already banned phones. So, he notes that as of 2020, 77% of schools already banned phones. 


Peter: Oh, that's a massive number. Okay. [laughs] 


Michael: Its huge. Its three quarters, that was even pre-pandemic. And most of the problem is actually with enforcement. Most of the kids I talked to already went to schools where they banned phones, and they said that at the beginning of the school year, it's like, “We're banning phones. No phones out.” And they're really strict about it. But then over time, people kind of drift. And then you have your phone out for a second, you're like, “Oh, I'm just using the calculator.” And they're like, “Okay, okay, okay. And then before you know it, after a month, kids are basically on their phones most of the time. And one thing my friend, the public high school teacher, says is that, “It's really unfair to leave this enforcement up to the teachers.” 


Peter: I just thought of a solution. You know how phones have airplane mode? What if there was a school mode and there's an app where the teacher controls it, and school mode [Michael laughs] only allows 911 and a calculator and maybe text from one number. You get text from your mom or something. 


Michael: I was going to say EMP.


Peter: Blast it.


Michael: And just shut down all the phones. I would like to do that in movie theaters too, while we're at it. There is many places I would like all of the phones to die. 


Peter: Actually, cut my idea from the podcast. I'm going to call Google and I'm going to become so fucking rich, [Michael laughs] school mode. 


Michael: This is why I think it's a much better idea for schools to have these much more comprehensive policies where you just put your phone in a weird little locker at the beginning of the day and you get it back at the end of the day. This is what my friend wants in his school. Him and the other teachers have been pushing for this all year. It's mostly parental resistance, actually, because they're like, “I might need to contact my kid.” 


Peter: That's interesting. And I think that it's framed often as a problem with children. But parents who aren't used to having any separation from their children.


Michael: No. Exactly. 


Peter: All of a sudden, with the advent of smartphones, you don't really ever need to not be in contact with your kid. And some school being like, there's now going to be an eight-hour block where you're not every single day, probably feels pretty overwhelming to a lot of parents. 


Michael: I do support this policy. However, this thing of everyone was a zombie, and now there's laughter in the hallways thing. It's just not true because we've had these phone bans in place for so long, there's tons of studies on the effects of phone bans in school. So, there's a really interesting natural experiment in Spain, where two regions of Spain pass laws saying all schools have to ban smartphones. And so, you can compare them to the other regions of Spain, and they saw a 15% reduction in bullying and a pretty modest but noticeable increase in test scores. Okay, there's one in Denmark that shows that kids did more physical activity at recess because they took away their phones during recess. 


Peter: Sure. 


Michael: There's one in Norway that was reported as saying students had better mental health after a bunch of schools banned smartphones. But if you read the actual study, the schools didn't ban smartphones. They just made kids turn their phones on silent. And it's a little [Peter laughs] implausible that they would have such a large effect. And the study hasn't been in a peer-reviewed journal. So, in general, studies seem to find extremely modest effects. And most of those effects are measured by teacher perceptions.


Peter: Okay.


Michael: I do favor these bans, I mean, partly because I think if teachers perceive kids to be doing better, that's worth noting that's not nothing. But Haidt starts that anecdote by saying, “Ooh, before they ban phones, the school had a problem with bullying and sleep deprivation and social comparison, and now they don't have those problems anymore.” 


And smartphone bans just aren't going to affect that stuff. Kids can still bully each other after school. Kids can still overuse their phones. Haidt is quite explicitly proposing this as a silver bullet, and it just isn't one. 


Peter: Not without school mode. And for only $500,000 a year, [Michael laughs] you too can subscribe. 


Michael: You did read the four-hour workweek. [Peter laughs] You're already on the phone to India hiring people to do this for you. 


Peter: I want that New York Times magazine piece about me [Michael laughs] with the moody picture of me sitting in a chair like the man who changed school. 


Michael: So, that is his, I think, good suggestion for improving schools for the mental health of teens. Here is his slightly less convincing suggestion. He says that schools should become more playful. [Peter laughs] And here is his little vignette that he opens this with. 


Peter: One constant of these airport books is that whenever someone uses a cutesy little new term, you know they're about to say something very stupid, but you don't know exactly what it's going to be. All right. Kevin Steinhardt, a fourth-grade teacher at the Central Academy of the Arts, an elementary school in rural South Carolina realized he was having the same conversation over and over with teachers and parents. Students were struggling, and many seemed to have little resilience, perseverance, or ability to work with others. The adults were all talking about the student's fragility, but none had any idea what to do about it. It. Kevin was stumped too, until he attended a conference at the nearby Clemson University on the benefits of something pretty basic, free play. 


With his school's blessing, Kevin started to incorporate more free play into student’s lives by making three changes. 1, One, longer recess with little adult intervention. 


Michael: Longer recess. 


Peter: 2, opening the school playground for half an hour before school starts to give students time to play before class.


Michael: [unintelligible [01:28:17] playgrounds.


Peter: 3, offering a play club anywhere from one to five days a week. School stays open for mixed age free play from 02:30 PM to 04:30 PM. Instead of going home, children spend time together playing. It’s a no phone zone. The kids are given nearly complete autonomy. Like a lifeguard, adults intervene only in the case of an emergency. 


Michael: Autonomous kids. 


Peter: In the very first semester he made these changes, Kevin started noticing a shift in his students. “Our students are happier, kinder, have fewer behavior problems, have made more friends, feel more in control of their day and their life in general, and in some cases have dramatically changed course from bullying behaviors and frequent office referrals to no bullying behaviors and no office referrals.” Okay, so all three of these solutions are just recess. 


Michael: Yes, more recess. 


Peter: One is longer recess, two is recess before school, and three is recess after school. 


Michael: Yes. And also, Haidt mentions briefly in the next couple paragraphs that this play club thing of, “Kids can play after school.” He's describing this huge turnaround. The kids are happier and everybody's making more friends. This play club after school thing was only one day a week.


Peter: Oh. 


Michael: So, he's essentially saying that, longer recess and early playground being open and one day the playground is open late just completely transformed the school. [laughs]


Peter: Maybe my experience is not representative, but when I was a youth, there was recess before school. You arrived and you were dumped off onto the playground, unless it was raining or something. 


Michael: As we see so much in this book, it's like he doesn't really do any of the empirical work to be like, “Are kids not using the playgrounds?” 


Peter: Right or how are you stopping them from using phones in the recess?


Michael: So, [laughs] this is going to sound like “I'm like, cherry picking.” But he spends so much time in this book talking about playgrounds. 


Peter: Okay. 


Michael: He has this whole thing of like, “We've derisked the American childhood and kids should be falling off of the playground structures and skinning their elbows.” And that's part of childhood is learning how to deal with stuff. And we're not doing that anymore. And so, he goes on and on and on about just, like, “They have better playgrounds in Europe and they have junkyard playgrounds where you can play around on tires and ropes and stuff.”


Peter: Every playground should have rusty metal spikes. 


Michael: [laughs] He has a thing. I guess there's nature playgrounds with bales of hay and kids can work together to flip the bales of hay. 


Peter: That's just something that broke schools say [Michael laughs] where they're like, “Yeah, this is a nature playground.” 


Michael: So, another one of his major things with having playful schools is to do something called “No rules recess.” So here is his description of this.


Peter: I need to get my brain straight for no rules recess because it sounds like it's going to be fun as hell. [Michael laughs] Consider the no rules recess at Swanson Primary School in New Zealand. Before no rules recess, students had been forbidden to climb trees, ride bikes, or do anything with any risk. But then the school took part in a study in which researchers asked eight schools to reduce rules and increase opportunities for risk and challenge during a recess, while eight other schools were asked to make no changes to their recess policies. Swanson was in the freedom group--


Michael: Freedom group,


Peter: [laughs] The freedom group.


Michael: Freedom group.


Peter: Swanson was in the freedom group, and principal Bruce McLachlan decided to go all the way. He scrapped all rules and let kids make their own. 


Michael: No rules recess.


Peter: Fucking pay-per-view challenge recess, ECW. [Michael laughs] The result, more chaos, more activity, more pushing and shoving on the playground, and also more happiness and more physical safety. 


Michael: More safety. 


Peter: Rates of injury, vandalism, and bullying all declined.


Michael: Boom. 


Peter: What? 


Michael: Boom. 


Peter: I'm telling you this. You tell nine-year-old me no rules. Rates of injury around me are not declining. [Michael laughs] Kids are getting fucked up. 


Michael: The thing is, it's easy to not notice this because he's talking about this as part of a study. But this is essentially just an anecdote for one principle. There's only one of these schools went to no rules recess. And if you read the actual study, it appears that schools that tried this freer play at recess, had no more physical activity among the kids, and had slightly more bullying. [Peter laughs] And it even says in the study, it says, “Overall, schools liked the intervention and reported many benefits, including increased physical activity. However, these beliefs did not translate into significant differences in objectively measured physical activity, [Peter laughs] either as counts per minute or as minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity.”


Peter: All of that extra physical activity was the first two minutes after you said the words no rules to the children.


Michael: [laughs] Just immediately started punching each other. And you're like, “Ooh, the cardio.” 


Peter: They just get amped. They start charging around, punching each other, and then they tuck themselves out. 


Michael: And also, keep in mind this is not a mental health intervention. This is an intervention aimed at increasing physical activity among kids. And I personally think that, increasing physical activity among kids is a very worthwhile goal, that's awesome. 


Peter: Yeah, it's not one to one mental health. 


Michael: Yeah, it's like, maybe that will have some improvement, but it's like we're already two degrees of separation away from the alleged outcome that we want. And also, there's been a ton of these playground equipment studies, projects over the years because they're really fucking easy and people like it because you don't actually have to address the real challenges of the kid. You're like, “Oh, let's spend $100,000 on improved playing equipment.” And, they almost never work. There's analysis in the UK that said that the average kid in the UK gets 78 minutes throughout the course of the day and after school and everything of recess. Improving playground equipment results in three extra minutes of activity during those 78 minutes. It's like we just don't see effects. 


Peter: You need a control group with no-rule social media use. [Michael laughs] We've removed the porn blocker on the Wi Fi network, have at it. How are those kids doing? 


Michael: This actually goes into our one book theory, because what he's essentially proposing here, as we saw in fucking nudge, as we've seen over and over again, is that this need among centrist American elites to have these technical fixes without having to address any of the underlying drivers of the problem and without having to spend any real money. 


Peter: One thing these folks love is the implication that the people in charge of stuff are big, dumb assholes. 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: There are simple, easy interventions that these know-it-all libs are blocking for one reason or another. But if we just implemented them, society would be so much better.


Michael: So, the final set of solutions that he gives us is like, “What parents can do? What can parents do?” And I skipped this before, but large sections of the book are dedicated to his idea that we're in the midst of a spiritual crisis. We've created lives that don't have meaningful activities in them. Spiritual, like things that really feed our soul. 


Peter: This is subgenre of the final chapter of an airport book, where they've gone off the rails and the scope of their project has become too big.


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: And so, the final chapter is the massive metaphysical crisis facing America today. [Michael laughs] The solution recess before schools. [laughs] 


Michael: Okay, so here is one of his descriptions of the spiritual crisis that we're in.


Peter: Durkheim showed that nearly all societies have created rituals and communal practices for pulling people up temporarily into the realm of the sacred, where the self-recedes and the-- Jesus Christ. [laughs] What has happening? 


Michael: You read only Durkheim?


Peter: Oh, God.


Michael: Durkheim wanted better playgrounds.


Peter: Where the self-recedes and collective interests predominate. Think of Christians singing hymns together every Sunday in church. Think of Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca. Think of civil rights marchers singing as they walked. Durkheim called this state of energized communion collective effervescence. But what happens when social life becomes virtual and everyone interacts through screens? Everything collapses into an undifferentiated blur. There is no consensual space, at least not any kind that feels real to human minds that evolved to navigate the three dimensions of planet Earth. In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things. Nothing ever closes, so everyone acts on their own schedule. 


In short, there is no consensual structuring of time, space, or objects around which people can use their ancient programming for sacredness to create religious or quasi-religious communities. 


Michael: Sensual sacredness. 


Peter: Everything is available to every individual all the time with little or no effort. There is no sabbath, and there are no holy days. 


Michael: No holy days. 


Peter: Everything is profane. Okay, what the fuck is that. 


Michael: Watch your profanity. 


Peter: Living in a world of structureless anomie makes adolescents more vulnerable to online recruitment into radical political movements that offer moral clarity and a moral community, thereby pulling them further away from their in-person communities.


Michael: There's no effervescence. The problem with the kids, they're not effervescent. 


Peter: This is a message to all potential airport book authors. You don't have to talk like this. [Michael laughs] This isn't something you need to do. 


Michael: We're putting this on the loudspeaker at Davos, Peter. 


Peter: The problem, lack of collective effervescence, the solution, 30-minute recess before schools. 


Michael: Also, I can think of a lot of experiences online that I felt were examples of a collective effervescence. I don't think he was around when we bullied Iggy Azalea off of Tumblr. 


Peter: When Trump got COVID-


Michael: Yeah, dude.


Peter: -that night on Twitter, that was some of the most intense collective effervescence [Michael laughs] I've ever felt in my fucking life. Chappell Roan, that's collective effervescence, right? Whatever's happening there. 


Michael: The thing is, I also really want to point out that he is fucking wrong about this. 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: So, first of all, I don't know what the fuck he means with, “There's no time or sacredness on the Internet.” That's just not true. Secondly, this is the only place in the entire book that he talks about radicalization. Maybe because he knew he was going to go on fucking Joe Rogan and talk about it. This is clearly not an issue that he takes seriously at all. And third, yet another reason why he is the worst possible pundit to be leading this conversation is that he is a libertarian and he doesn't want any content specific moderation by social media companies. So, if you look at the actual literature on radicalization, there are specific beliefs that predict radicalization.


And a lot of them are things like in group dominance, thinking that you are part of a group that is superior to other groups, believing that you are experiencing relative deprivation, like, “Black people are getting all the jobs, but you can't even be a white person in America anymore.” Negative attitudes toward the government and the political system. They're all out to get you conspiratorial beliefs. But these are things that he cannot address because they require acknowledging that right wing radicalization is a much bigger problem in America than left wing radicalization. But he has dedicated his entire career to pointing out left wing radicalization. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: All he can do is make this incoherent argument that the virtual world is this desiccated black and white version of social interaction that is also so good that it's tempting kids out of their real-life relationships. 


Peter: What we need is more religious fervor is never [Michael laughs] an argument that's going to really sit well with me.


Michael: He seems to think that online interactions are qualitatively worse than in person interactions. And every interaction online is bad and every interaction that's in person is good. And I read a couple articles about the panic over TV. Kids are on their screens too much in the 1980s, and it was the same thing. It was like, “Everything on TV is bad,” and everything that's not on TV is good. And it's like, “Well, you can read radicalization literature and you can watch a fucking David Attenborough documentary on TV.” It's really silly to say that the medium is more important than the content. I like the idea of trying to get more spirituality and less self-centeredness and more reflection in our lives. I think that's really great. But it's not the case that isn't available online. 


And it's not the case that this lack of collective effervescence is what's causing political radicalization. 


Peter: Whenever conservatives, like, moderate conservatives, point to the decline in church attendance as a sign of the downfall of these in person communities, the question that pops up to me is, “Why are the communities where church attendance is very common and popular? Some of our most politically radicalized?”


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: I'm just not entirely seeing it, it feels like a lazy analysis that's only looking at half of the issue. 


Michael: His solution for this, what parents can do to foster this collective effervescence among their children is a much greater focus on in person activities. And his first recommendation is just more kids doing sports, which honestly seems great to me. I have no problem with that. But he says research consistently shows that teens who play teen sports are happier than those who don't. Humans are embodied, a phone-based life is not. Screens lead us to forget that our physical bodies matter. 


Peter: If you think that intramural sports would help, then just say that. Don't talk to me about collective effervescence. [Michael laughs] And then be like and the solution more soccer. 


Michael: And then if you go to the footnote, he acknowledges the fact that just because kids who play sports are happier does not mean the sports are causing them to be happier. It could be that happier kids play sports. Yeah, he does this a lot where he just says that, “You should get your kids to play sports because sports will make them happy.” And then you go to the footnote and he's like, “Oh, it might just be they play sports because they're already happy.” And you're like, “Sorry, that's not, like, a footnote.” 


Peter: That's the thing you got to figure out, Jonathan. 


Michael: He spends the rest of this section talking about how kids need to spend more time in nature, and he has this whole thing about awe. Kids need to be awestruck more. And when you're struck by this sense of awe, I'm small in the world, and you're looking at majestic mountains and a sunset, that it grounds you in the physical self. And he recommends his students at NYU to go on awe walks in New York City. 


Peter: What is an awe walk? [Michael laughs] It sounds like a rare bird. You all know what an awe walk is. 


Michael: Whoever knows what a fucking awe walk is? Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I have the text of the book in front of me. Hang on. 


Peter: Trying to learn what an awe walk is. Thank God I have my phone right next to me. 


Michael: He's talking about this guy that he listened to. He says, “After hearing Docker in a podcast conversation described the awe walks he took while grieving his brother's death from cancer. I decided to add a session on awe and beauty to the undergraduate flourishing class that I teach at New York University. 


Peter: Folks, no. When your professor starts talking about, he's like, “We're now entering the beauty portion. You have to get up and leave.” [Michael laughs] 


Michael: “I told my students to listen to the podcast and then take a walk slowly anywhere outside, during which they must not take out their phones. The written reflections they turned in for that week's homework were among the most beautiful I've seen in my 30 years as a professor. You'll love this, Peter. Some students simply walked slowly through the streets of Greenwich village around NYU, noticing for the first time the architectural flourishes on the 19th century buildings that they had passed many times. But the most powerful reports came from those who walked through parks. One student, Yi-Mei, began her awe walk in Washington Square Park, which is the green heart of the NYU campus. It was a perfect April day when the cherry trees were in full bloom. 


Peter: What the fuck? These kids have never walked in Washington Square Park. [Michael laughs] If you go to NYU and you're like, “I just walked through Washington Square Park for the first time,” I don't know what to tell you. You need to reevaluate the way that you exist. This is wild. 


Michael: [laughs] I wasn't planning on going into this, this much.


Peter: No, no, no, no, no. Here's why I can't go to Washington Square Park just to give you an understanding, because there are so many fucking NYU students there. 


Michael: [laughs] What if they're ruining the awe of everybody else by being there? My first Washington Square Park experience was my first trip to New York. I was like 13, and my mom bought us tickets to rent and I hated it, so I left at halftime and went to Washington Square Park and bought weed. 


Peter: What the fuck is--


Michael: But I was in awe, being stoned walking around New York City. [laughs] Do you go on awe walks in Astoria, Queens? [Peter laughs] Is that part of-- [crosstalk]. 


Peter: [laughs] No, I don't go on awe walks. I live a normal life. Where I just live at my desk and in my phone, and then I watch TV at night until I get a headache and I go to sleep. That's what life is about. [Michael laughs] You got to grab it by the horns. 


Michael: This is one of those things that you can't really disagree with. Because should people be more awestruck? Yeah. I mean, great, fine. But people react with awe to different things. 


Peter: I am making fun of this idea, but you should obviously go on walk. Yeah, I think what I'm really reacting to is when professors try to do holistic life shit. 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: And it's like, “Why don't you teach me what you're an expert at,” instead of telling me to go on a fucking walk? You're not my therapist. You were my professor. 


Michael: I also did a decent amount of reading on this because I think that the flipside of a moral panic is a moral bandwagon when all of the elites in a society decide that a specific thing is good. And I think that very similar to remember in the 90s, it was like, “Play your kid Mozart and their IQ will go up and they'll be able to speak French or whatever.” And everyone just decided that classical music was intellectually nourishing.


Peter: This is what they envisioned a smart person doing. It's just like listening to Mozart while doing math or whatever. 


Michael: There's this entire field called nature-based interventions where it's like, people will go on nature walks. There's a whole subfield of forest bathing interventions. I came across something called therapeutic gardening. There's surfing therapy. It's this whole idea that just being outside is intrinsically good for you.


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: All of the data on it is just fucking garbage. It's just like, people went on a 15-minute nature walk, and then we asked them afterwards, “Are you less depressed?” And they said, “Yes.” 


Peter: I’ll bet.


Michael: Yeah, people like taking breaks. [Peter laughs] One of the fucking forest bathing studies that I read was a day long forest bathing intervention. It was like a hot spring thing somewhere in Japan. And it's like, people felt better after a day, essentially, at a spa. You're basically taking a day away for free and just hanging out in nature. And then researchers ask you, “How do you feel?” And you're like, “Yeah, I'm pretty relaxed.” 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: Yeah, people like days off. You might have gotten the same effect from people playing video games all day. 


Peter: There's a lot of selection bias in a lot of these studies where it's like, “Wow, people who go on walks say that they like them.” It's like, really, people who enjoy going on walks are going on walks? 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: Wow, what an insight. You need to flesh it out a little bit. 


Michael: I want to talk a little bit about what I think is one of the harms of the book. I don't want to go overboard, because we've read way more harmful books than this, but I think when we find bad parenting and harmful parenting, it's often along the lines of, you must do this specific thing. You must become a doctor. You must do ballet. You have this very specific thing in mind. And Haidt is basically doing this with nature. He has this idea that being outside is intrinsically good for you, and being on your phone is intrinsically bad for you. This just doesn't show up in the literature at all. 


There are tons of studies on extracurricular activities, and I read this really interesting, almost, like, philosophical meta-analysis of this that you constantly see these econometric studies that are, kids who played baseball were 6% less likely to be depressed than kids who didn't play baseball or whatever. And what that actually means in practice is that kids who play baseball, some of them are more depressed, some of them nothing, and some of them are less depressed. You're talking about a normal distribution, a bell curve. And that bell curve moves back and forth depending on the activity. But for any activity, some kids are going to be more depressed after they do it, and some kids are going to be less depressed after they do it. It's not really about the specific activity. 


It's whether or not the kids like the activity, and they get an ingroup identity from that activity. And some kids really love nature, and I think every kid should be given the option of going out in nature. I think it's a great idea for parents to introduce their kids. Maybe you really like hiking and camping. Let's try that out. But some kids don't like fucking nature, and that's fine. And the most harmful thing that you can do to a kid is, you go on a camping trip, and your kids like, “Oh, this isn't really my thing.” And you're like, “No, we're going to go next weekend.” You're going to do something outside. Because it's good. 


Peter: Yeah, yeah. 


Michael: And that's awful. What is so important for kids is finding groups that give them meaning, and that's going to be different for every fucking kid. 


Peter: It took me so long to realize that I just hate running because so many people told me, if you just get out there after that first couple months--


Michael: Yeah, totally. 


Peter: You're going to feel incredible, and you're going to want to do it for the rest of your life. I tried to make myself a runner for so long before one day it just hit me when I heard someone talking about this, that I was like, “I fucking hate that.”


Michael: In this study, they do talk about how the specific activity matters way less than they say the micro level components of the participation or whatever, which is basically academic ease for what's the specific of the situation. So, as far as outdoor stuff goes, I was in a Boys Scout troop, which was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. [laughs] Our Boy Scout leader was an alcoholic who used to show up drunk and give us beer at 16. And then the two scout leader dudes were psychopaths that would make kids eat out of the dumpster as an initiation thing.


Peter: What are you talking about? 


Michael: Seriously? And even at age 9, I was like, “I don't think initiation is a part of being in Boy Scouts. [Peter laughs] I think this is bad.” [laughs] And that was my experience of the outdoors. 


Peter: That's what Teddy Roosevelt would've wanted. 


Michael: The main thing I took from this study was that the intrinsic structural components of any extracurricular activity are not going to be so powerful that they overwhelm the specific dynamics that you're thrown into. So, at your school, maybe the soccer coach is a complete fucking asshole, and the head of the chess club is a really good dude who creates a really wholesome, supportive environment for kids. The fact that soccer is outdoors and chess is indoors is just not that important ultimately. 


Peter: Right or maybe you just don't like chess, but there is something out there that will become a positive outlet for you. 


Michael: I don't want to make it sound like I'm making fun of the concept of therapeutic gardening or surfing therapy. If you like surfing, it's going to be therapeutic. If you like gardening, it's going to be therapeutic. And I spoke to kids for this who got a huge amount of meaning and community from their activities online. And it would be really weird to force those kids out into the wilderness in the same way that it would be really weird to take a kid who really loves hiking and camping and force them to go inside and write fan fiction. 


Peter: Now those kids need to be writing Twilight porn.


Michael: [laughs] All right, so before we get into my wrap up thoughts on the book and the main bigger reason, I think this solution section is bad. I just have a little section in my notes called what is this guy's fucking deal? And I just want to watch a clip because it brought me to a grand, unifying theory of Jonathan Haidt. 


Peter: Okay. 


[Video clip starts]


Speaker 5: What most alarmed me when I heard the Tristan Harris podcast was the ease of influencing American kids to be pro this or pro that on any political issue. 


Speaker 6: All right you're seeing that with Palestine and Gaza?


Speaker 5: Yeah, I think so. 


Speaker 6: Well, it's very obvious with many things with TikTok, trans stuff, and there's a lot of different things that they're encouraging. And people that are opposed to that are being banned, which is also very odd. Specifically, female athletes. We had Riley Gaines, who was the female athlete that competed against Leah Thomas, and she has said that biologically male athletes should not be able to compete with biologically female athletes because they have a significant advantage. And she was banned from TikTok just for saying that. 


Speaker 5: Yeah, that's right. This relates to the larger issue that we talked about last time and that I hope we'll continue to talk about today, which is that social media has brought us into an environment in which anyone has the ability to really harm anyone else. There's an extraordinary amount of intimidation available via social media. And so, this has led the leaders of all kinds of organizations to run scared. Greg Lukianoff and I saw this in universities. “Why don't the university president stand up to the protesters who are shouting down visiting speakers?” And then we saw it in journalism, newspapers, and editors who wouldn't stand up for journalistic principles. And so, I think what has happened here is that social media allows whoever is angriest and can mobilize the most force to threaten, to harass, to surround, to mob anyone. 


And when people are afraid to say something, that's when you get the crazy distortions that we saw on campus or that Riley Gaines was seeing too, just that people are afraid to speak up. And in a democracy, in a large, secular, diverse democracy, we have to be able to talk about things. 


Speaker 6: Yeah.


[Video clip ends]


Peter: Yeah, it's like you can't even say certain things anymore without everyone getting mad at you online. [Michael laughs] Riley Gaines is still on TikTok by the way. 


Michael: Yeah, of course. 


Peter: I don't know what the fuck he's talking about, whatever. 


Michael: When you listen to his interviews and when you really go through the book, you don't get the sense of somebody who truly cares about teen mental health. You get the sense of somebody who hates social media. Yeah, the experience of social media that he's describing here where everybody's walking on eggshells and you can get yelled at any time and it's bringing out the worst in people. That is not the experience of a 13-year-old girl on Instagram. That is the experience of a middle-aged center right political pundit on like Twitter and Substack. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: Throughout this book, he shows no interest in what kids are actually doing on their phones. You learn nothing about teenage social media use from reading this book. I think there's something more complicated to this than just a straightforward moral panic. But he speaks about social media the way that previous moral panickers talked about TV and video games. 


Peter: God damn it. 


Michael: He says in this awestruck section of the book, he says “Social media is a fountain of bedevilments. It trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world’s wisdom traditions.” 


Peter: Here we go. 


Michael: “Think about yourself first. Be materialistic, judgmental, boastful, and petty. Seek glory as quantified by likes and followers.” 


Peter: Yeah, here’s this dumb conservative bullshit. 


Michael: One thing that is easy to forget about all of his solutions is that none of them are about teen mental health. All of his solutions are about getting kids off their phones. 


Peter: You see it with the way they were talking about Gaza. They just believe that there is no way that young people could organically be left of center.


Michael: Totally, totally. 


Peter: That young people are just looking at the course of events in Palestine and siding with Palestinians. There's surely something off here. It's perhaps the Chinese trying to meddle or something similar. 


Michael: I also am fairly uncomfortable with this guy's out in front leading the societal conversation about this issue. And the way that he speaks about actual teenagers is really stigmatizing. And this analysis of just, they lack resiliency, they're too fragile, they've been coddled their whole lives is a terrible starting point for a useful conversation how to help treat mental illness among teenagers. And one thing that I found when I spoke to Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski for this is that both of them said that like a much more productive way to think about this is not like “Social media is harming teens. A better way is there's a teen access to treatment crisis in America.” Teens have some of the highest rates of mental health problems and some of the lowest rates of access to care. 


When I talked to Emily Weinstein, this researcher who's interviewed hundreds of kids, she said the most important thing that sticks out to her is that kids want recognition, kids want to feel real. They want to feel like adults. They want to feel like they're being listened to. And there's nothing in Jon Haidt's book. For all of his advice to parents, it's all about controlling the way that they use the Internet. There's nothing about, just make sure your kids know that you love and support them no matter what. That's a way bigger predictor of teen mental health problems than what they're doing on their phones. 


Peter: Well, it doesn't feel like that's Haidt's fundamental concern. When you listen to the Rogan clip, it feels like what he's talking about is like, “Are you losing control of your child's life in ways that are hard to pinpoint?” Your child's politics are drifting and they're becoming sexually active, for example. And you, the parent, are confused because not only are these normal things happening, but they're happening within the confines of a social world that you no longer completely understand.


Michael: Yes. This book is for all the parents who go, “You didn't clean your room because you're always on your phone.” That's who it is for and that's what it is for. If he took the issue of teen mental health remotely seriously, this book would contain some teen mental health interventions. There's actually a lot that we can be doing. There's a lot of stuff with screening and intervention. We know a lot of the precursors of very severe suicidal episodes and a lot of it is experiencing bullying. Oftentimes, kids who bully other kids are at very high risk of suicide. I read a really interesting article about the role of school nurses in just identifying, “Oh, this kid might actually be struggling, or there might be some things at home.” There's also some logistical things that he doesn't seem all that interested in. There's actually some evidence that states that pass anti-bullying laws, basically requiring schools to have anti-bullying plans and policies in place, have lower rates of suicide. There's also things like restrictions on firearms. 


Boys are four times more likely to kill themselves than girls, and they tend to use firearms. The greatest predictor of killing yourself is having a previous suicide attempt. So, those kids really need to be watched and understood. Kids that have other mental health conditions that they're struggling with. It's like, there's logistical, obvious things that we need to do to address the teen mental health crisis, but those require resources. I mean, it's something that he mentions offhand in the book, but doesn't really dig into is, “Poor kids are more likely to kill themselves than rich kids, and they're also more likely to use their phones than rich kids.” And whether or not you think that's causal, that's where the resources need to go. There are things that are directed at the people who are at the highest risk of mental health problems that he just is not interested in at all. 


Peter: And this is another manifestation of his general lack of interest in the nuance here. I think you can probably ascertain that social media has negative effects on certain kids in certain situations in certain regards. And you can either drill down on that or you can be like, well, then we got to get rid of phones. 


Michael: What about the awe walks? Are the kids walking in Washington Square Park? Are they looking at trees? 


Peter: Let those kids loose in Washington Square Park. 


[laughter]


Michael: I think like a busing plan, a nationwide busing plan, sending them to Washington Square Park. 


Peter: If you think kids are helped by walking freely around New York City, I want you to go speak to one young adult who grew up in New York City and tell me that that kid's okay. [Michael laughs]


[music]


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Michael Hobbes

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