This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
In March of last year, Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, published a book called “The Anxious Generation,” which caused, let’s call it, a stir.
I always found the conversation over this book to be a little annoying because it got at one of the difficulties we’re having in parenting and in society: a tendency to instrumentalize everything into social science. Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it’s bad.
This phenomenon is, to me, a collapse in our sense of what a good life is and what it means to flourish as a human being.
So I stayed out of that debate, because, on the one hand, I couldn’t settle it, and on the other hand, I didn’t think I should come in and say it wasn’t important.
But a year later, two things have happened. One: Haidt’s book has never left the best-seller list. That is rare. It has struck a chord.
Two: Policy is moving in Haidt’s direction. We are seeing a genuine policy revolution, happening in places governed by both Republicans and Democrats, in how we treat children in this era of social media. And I feel a lot more confident, as a parent, that we’re going to figure this out by the time my kids are old enough for it to matter.
But then, of course, the truck of artificial intelligence is about to T-bone whatever consensus we come to socially — which, to be quite honest, scares the hell out of me.
So I wanted to have Haidt on the show to talk about it. He’s a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He’s also the author of “The Righteous Mind,” which I think is one of the best books on political psychology, as well as a bunch of other books. And in his Substack, After Babel, which is free, he and some co-authors are continuing to prosecute the case and think through the research around social media.
Ezra Klein: Jon Haidt, welcome to the show.
Jonathan Haidt: Ezra, it’s great to be back with you.
I want to begin with the big question: What is childhood for?
Childhood is evolution’s answer to: How do you have a big-brained cultural creature?
You have to play a lot. You have to practice all sorts of things — all sorts of maneuvers and social skills — in order to tell your brain how to wire up to have the adult form.
If you focus on brain development, especially for a big-brained cultural species like ours, there’s a plastic period where stuff comes in and shapes who you are. And once you’ve got that, you’re ready to convert to the adult form — be reproductive, have a baby.
But if you don’t have play in childhood, you’re not going to reach adulthood properly.
You had one statistic in the book that I think I’ve actually read before, but every time I read it, it shocks me anew, maybe now because I have a 5-year-old who just turned 6: At 5 years old, the human brain is 90 percent of its adult size, and it has more neurons than it will when you’re an adult.
That’s right. We’re used to thinking of bodily growth as just: Time equals bigger. But the brain is this amazing thing that has all these neurons, which have the potential to connect in all kinds of ways. And as neuroscientists say, neurons that fire together wire together.
So if you repeatedly climb trees or do archery, systems will form in your brain that make you really good at that. Whereas if you repeatedly swipe and tap, swipe and tap, and just respond to emotional stimuli, your brain is going to wire to do that.
I guess you’re an older millennial. How did you grow up?
I am among the eldest of millennials.
The millennial elders. Tell me: At what age could you go out on your bicycle with your friends and go around the neighborhood?
I don’t remember exactly, but I lived on a cul-de-sac in a suburb, and I do remember I spent a lot of time as part of a roaming pack of kids who lived on my street. We would be playing kickball on somebody’s garage door. The other thing I remember about it that I feel like I see less of now is that it was highly age diverse.
Exactly. So this is what human childhood has always been. There are periods, like the Industrial Revolution, where maybe kids didn’t have a childhood. But Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist who co-founded Let Grow with me, has some writing on hunter-gatherers. And hunter-gatherers raise their kids in that way. There’s no thought that the mother has to be supervising the 4-, 5-, 6-, 7-, 9-year-olds. They’re all off playing with the other kids.
And there are 9- and 10-year-olds there. So they learn to look out for each other. The older kids learn to care for the younger kids. And remember, the younger kids are trying to wire up their brain to: What is a functional member of this society? And the best role models for them are not kids their age — it’s kids a few years older.
In America, in the West, we’ve got these factory kinds of schools where we put all the 8-year-olds together and then all the 9-year-olds together. But the healthiest is what you just said.
So my point is: Everyone before the millennials had this childhood. Millennials are the transitional generation. So you were on the elder side — you got it. Even though the rates are microscopic in this country, and even though crime was plummeting in this country in the ’90s — you can see it in the charts — that’s the decade when we really pulled our kids in.
We thought: They’ll get abducted. We can’t let them go in a different aisle of a supermarket. Or a man with a white van — all this crazy stuff comes in in the ’90s.
Something you mentioned about the ’90s in the book: I am familiar with this statistic that, despite working two jobs much more often than they did in the past, despite fathers being more involved, both parents spend much more time with their kids than they did before.
But I hadn’t realized that was not a steady increase over the decades. It sharply increased in the ’90s.
That’s right. There’s this weird graph that I have in the book that shows the number of hours that women spend parenting — what you would consider time with your kid doing something.
And the astonishing thing is that in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, women were not spending five hours a day parenting because the kids were raised the way that you just said.
It’s not the parent’s job to socialize the child all along. It’s the parent’s job to provide the right environment to provide certain kinds of moral frameworks.
But the real work of brain development doesn’t happen when you’re with your parents. Your parents are home base — they’re your attachment figure. When you feel securely attached, then you go off and explore. That’s what other mammals do. You go off progressively farther from your home base, and that’s where the learning happens.
It’s playing kickball. It’s trying to decide: What do we do today? Or: Oh, he broke the rules. No, he didn’t.
I want to get at a tension in there, at least with the culture of modern parenting. I think a lot of parents believe that the simplest way to ask whether you were a good parent this week is how much time you spent with your children.
Yes. Quality time.
Quality time. I feel that. And you’re saying here that’s not true?
It’s definitely not true. You want to give your kids a quality childhood. You want to be a quality parent. But that doesn’t mean that you have to spend a lot of quality time with your kid.
You need a warm, trusting, loving relationship. You need to provide structure and order and discipline. But this is what changed in the ’90s, and it’s in part because we stopped trusting our neighbors.
If you think of all the Robert Putnam stuff about “Bowling Alone” and the loss of social capital, we used to at least trust that if our kids were out playing without us, other adults would look out for them. If something really went wrong, they could knock on a door, and someone would help. But we begin losing that trust.
This is really bad for the kids because they don’t grow as much if their attachment figure is there. And it’s really bad for the adults — especially women. Mothers pick up a lot of this, even though they’re working outside the home.
So yes, modern parenting is not good for the kids — and certainly not good for the adults.
If you’re tracking dynamics here: In the ’90s, we’re getting more afraid of danger. You’re having this deterioration in social trust, this deterioration of the idea that the whole is community parenting your kid.
And it’s right about now that you begin having an explosion in screen possibilities. When I was younger, I remember Nickelodeon emerging. Before then, there wasn’t a TV channel that was programming for children at all times. There were kids’ shows, but not all the time. And obviously from there, you get an explosion of cable channels. And then, eventually, the internet, iPads, iPhones and video game consoles and all the rest of it. So talk about the handoff.
It’s the conversion over to this smartphone-based, tablet-based childhood. That’s when all the indicators of mental illness start rising, around 2012, 2013.
Now, I focused on the 2010 to 2015 period. But I think your question points out something I hadn’t really thought much about, which is cable TV.
I was born in 1963, so I grew up in the late ’60s and early ’70s on “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Gilligan’s Island.” And I showed those shows to my kids, and I said: This is so stupid. They were really simple plots. But that’s all we had.
Whereas you had cable, which was more engaging.
And console video games. I got a Nintendo Entertainment System. Not the Super Nintendo, but the first mass-available, mass-adopted console. I guess you could argue about the Atari or whatever. But the Nintendo Entertainment System.
What year was that?
I don’t remember now, but I was young.
You’re talking late ’80s?
Yes. To me that’s a big dividing point, because Nickelodeon and the N.E.S. make it possible to put something on the television at any second of the day that will entertain a child intensely.
Yes, that’s a good point. I’ve been more focused on the arrival of the internet. But the Nintendo didn’t require the internet, right?
No.
Right. OK.
You were not a gamer, Jon. [Laughs.]
Well, I was. When I was a kid, the game was Pong.
This is 8-bit Mario, man. This is the early stuff.
The early stuff was great fun. But it was not multiplayer. Your friend had to sit next to you to play.
I hope this will be a theme I’m thinking a lot more about: Don’t just think about screen time. Think about: What is it that makes it good or bad?
Because I remember, just as video games were coming in, my friends and I would get together and we’d say: What do you want to do? Play video games?
We’d do that for a little bit. And then we’d go off and do something else. Nothing harmful about that.
In the 2000s, you begin to get the multiplayer games — which require not just the internet but high-speed internet in order to have these amazing graphics shared in multiple screens at the same time without a lag.
In 2008, 2009, multiplayer games begin to get popular. But then this great rewiring period, 2010 to 2015, is when everyone is trading in their flip phones for smartphones. This is when high-speed internet is increasing greatly.
So by 2015, boys are all on these multiplayer games. My son played Fortnite. I didn’t let him on until he was 13. But they would laugh their heads off. The boys at least had that synchronous laughter. They’re not in the same room, so it’s not as good. But they at least had that.
Whereas the girls are each alone on their own Instagram account. They might laugh at a meme or something, but they’re not having shared laughter.
One of the reasons I felt a little put off by the debate that emerged around your book — with the endless back and forth of: Was this really the cause of anxiety? Or a correlate of anxiety? And what’s going on in South Korea? — is that it got at this feeling I keep having, which is that we have lost any kind of independent and, I would positively say, paternalistic idea of what we want human beings to be. And we have allowed it all to be dominated by metrics.
So on the one hand, there is the viewpoint: If you’re getting good grades, then you’re fine.
Which is not really true. We definitely see it’s not true now, because we’re watching kids — partially through grade inflation — get plenty of good grades, not get pregnant as teenagers, not do a bunch of drugs. But they’re doing terribly.
The other side of it, though, is that then there’s what I would call the logic of capitalism, the logic of the consumer economy, which is that if you enjoy doing it, if you want to do it, then we need to have a very high bar to stop you.
Our view is that kids should not freebase crack all the time. We’ve decided that’s not something we should let them do. But if they’re playing massive multiplayer online games all the time and they enjoy it and their grades are fine, what are you really going to say?
And somewhere in this, some texture is lost that I associate more with classical education — the idea that we are trying to develop certain facilities that are part of being a human being.
I always think about attention as one of them. We hear all this concern now that kids are graduating high school, going to good colleges — but can’t read a full book.
Can’t read a book. Can’t watch a movie.
But there’s more than that. We care about whether our children are nice and kind. But there’s a lot about all kinds of virtues that we’ve just lost the way to talk about and that we’re not comfortable saying.
I see it with parents all the time. You need some great reason to say the kid shouldn’t be on the iPad. And maybe it’s that you think their grades will be bad or their anxiety will be high. But nobody feels that comfortable saying: It’s just bad. I just don’t want you looking at the screen all the time. I think it’s not the way to be a human being.
So, that’s what I’d like you to talk a bit about. You have one shorter chapter on this in the book. It’s about spirituality. But your first book is all about moral frameworks. Connect these for me. Because we lost paternalism. I do think parenting lost an idea that it is confident about what we are trying to raise people toward.
While I want to stay away from politics in our talk in general, what you’re bringing up is one of the divisions that I talked about in my book “The Righteous Mind” between left and right. In general, the right is focused on conservatism — conserve what we have, there’s a wisdom to our ancestors. This is Edmund Burke. So the right tends to have what’s called a constrained view of human nature: If kids don’t have structure and order and punishment for bad deeds, they’ll come out badly.
Whereas the left tends to habitually question existing arrangements and pull things down if they seem unjust. The left is much more afraid to make value judgments and to impose a moral order on kids. That’s why it’s always the right that’s concerned about the garbage being placed on TV — because the right is very concerned about the moral diet coming in.
In the modern era, I think parents should be more like the conservatives in that respect. Here’s why: We already talked about the way, in childhood, the neurons are growing and wiring up. You learn to run, climb trees, do all sorts of things.
But a big thing you’re doing, especially in later childhood, is you’re learning the moral order. Humans evolved within a moral order.
I’m secular, Jewish. I was always on the left. Now I’m nothing — I’m not on any team. But when I was writing that book, I was really exploring ancient wisdom and discovering: Wow, every other society had this rich moral framework. They had a conception of the gods. There are reasons you have to do things. And when you raise kids within a moral order, they have a sense of their place in the world and a sense of meaning.
And when you take all that out and you say that all that matters is what feels good or all that matters is rights or all that matters is some measure of material success, basically what you have is what Émile Durkheim called anomie, or normlessness.
And on the Monitoring the Future study, since the ’70s, we’ve asked high school seniors the question: My life feels useless. Do you agree or disagree with that on a five-point scale?
Until 2010, around 9 percent would say yes. And then all of a sudden, in 2012 it shoots up and doubles within five or 10 years.
So I think part of this is, if you’re immersed in stories that have a moral order to them — which is what I was immersed in when I was a kid. All the stories had some sort of moral. Even in “I Dream of Jeannie,” there was a moral framework that was put in by the adults who made the show.
But what you see on TikTok and Instagram are not really stories. They’re really amoral or immoral. A lot of them are just horrible things. The boys are seeing lots of videos of people getting into accidents or violence.
So the long way to answer your question is that kids need moral formation. They need a structure, a shared moral framework. Morality works like language. You can’t have your own language, and you can’t have your own morality. It only works as a shared system and order. And once kids move on to social media, it’s just a million little fragments of nonsense. There’s no moral order.
I was listening to a conversation with you some years ago, where you said something like: It is just bad for teenage girls to be endlessly posting pictures of themselves on the internet for other people to rate.
Yes. I stand by that bold assertion.
I remember thinking that’s so unbelievably [expletive] obvious — and also not how we actually talk about it.
Because what you were making there was, fundamentally, a moral judgment. I know that, behind it, there’s evidence. But I do find that within the conversation about social media and the way we’re constructing childhood, there is this demand to bring the studies.
And I’ve said this before: I think if you could prove to me that it doesn’t matter at all for anxiety at 16 or earnings at 23 whether or not kids spend 2.5 to 3 hours a day on TikTok, I think it would change my view of whether they should do that by 0 percent. Because I just think it’s a bad way to live.
And it’s a bad way to live for other reasons, too. By nature, it creates self-obsession. By nature, it creates this management of the personal brand. And even if I couldn’t find correlates of bad outcomes, I have a view on what it means to be a flourishing human being that should not include too much of that and that wants to keep that boxed up a little bit in the human psyche.
And this is where things feel like they ran aground in a lot of the debates. I feel like parenting and the culture parents come from now — unless you are in some form of church, basically — is incredibly insecure about making these judgments.
I don’t fully understand why. I don’t think it is just a loss-of-trust thing. I think it is some set of forces that I don’t really understand. But I don’t feel like it was like that as much when I was young. And it definitely wasn’t like that as much in the past.
Sort of separate almost from everything else, I think this is a huge failure in parenting culture — this inability to say: We have views on what is good or bad. And they don’t require 16 years of randomized, controlled trials. They’re just actually our views on virtue.
That’s right. And there I see this generational change.
When you look at old movies from the ’30s and ’40s, there was a really tight moral order. It would be dramatic whether a woman could go into a man’s apartment. So there was a really intense moral order around gender, around all sorts of things.
And that, of course, begins to loosen up in the ’60s. And there are many good things that happened because of that. But one of the concerns about modern secular society has been that you gradually lose this moral framework within which to raise children.
I’m really aware now of how we’re all influenced by our parents and just maybe a little bit by our grandparents. Culture has always come down vertically through generations. But that link is getting weakened.
So I think there is a progressive weakening of a sense of a moral order, which affects how you parent. And then we end up with an amoral focus on grades and, I guess, be nice and a few other things. But it’s a very thin moral gruel, I’d say.
And you can see this spreading throughout society. The idea that this is just about the kids is wrong. I know you don’t want to be political, and I know that the Jon Haidt agenda is being adopted in red and blue states alike.
But you were saying earlier: Look, liberals and conservatives have these different moral foundations, and conservatives care a lot more about the moral inputs.
Maybe that was true. But I look around, and I don’t see it. I’m not asking you to say whether Donald Trump is a moral or immoral person, but what I will say is that the Republican Party, under him, has become unconcerned with what was traditionally understood as vice in a very different way.
Some of that is politeness and etiquette. But some of it is: What should the policies be about sports gambling? There is a massive deregulation of sports gambling, which is consuming young men.
It’s horrible. So bad for boys.
Crypto is an adjacency of that.
It’s a gambling casino.
There are perfectly fine things about crypto, but what we are specifically permitting is crypto as a casino.
I was somebody who was very supportive of marijuana legalization, and I think it’s gone terribly.
Yes, I agree.
And it’s gone terribly because, among other things, we have allowed capitalism to get its hooks into it and create more and more potent products that are advertised everywhere.
I don’t know if either side is particularly concerned with vice right now. The right has embraced a lot of this, too.
And I think part of that is just a collapse — there is no one left who has political power in this society who feels confident making judgments that go against the market. There was a market for sports gambling, so we’re going to allow it. There’s a market for crypto.
I think about a lot of things in modernity as capitalism is itself a kind of moral logic. And it is a moral logic built on individual expression of wants in the moment. And it was counterbalanced by much more potent religious logic. These two forces held each other at a rough equilibrium for much of 20th-century America. And at some point the religious counterforces weakened so much that the system fell out of equilibrium. And now, the religious forces are just not very powerful at all.
I’m not, myself, highly religious. But I do think that these were countervailing players, and we just don’t have them anymore. And the evidence of that being a problem is actually all around us.
I think that’s exactly right. I’ll just bring a couple points to bear.
One is: There’s an incredible book called “The Age of Addiction” by David Courtwright. He chronicles how people have always wanted sugar. First they foraged for fruit, but then they learned to refine sugar. And now you get sugar-based products, and then you get candy. So once we get a market-based economy in the Industrial Revolution, we find more and more ways to make these products that our brains evolved to crave — but now you can have limitless quantities effortlessly.
And the same is true for opiates. You get opium to heroin to fentanyl.
The best definition of a free-market society I’ve heard was from a philosopher who said: A good free-market society is one in which you can only get rich by making other people better off.
And for the most part, in our economy, that is still true. But now let’s look at the products we’re talking about. If you’re a sports-betting company, if you are a crypto company, if you’re a video game company, if you’re a social media company, are you making your money by making people better off? Or are you playing on addiction, manipulating social forces and spreading enormous negative externalities around society?
I would argue that’s what’s happening. And partly it is due, I think, to the deregulatory impulse — to the fact that we have lost the ability to regulate things in a smart way.
So one principle I really want to make clear in all of this is we have to distinguish between children and adults. We are a generally libertarian country compared to Europe, where they’re happy to ban anything. When we’re talking about adults, I think we’re generally right: Generally, we should let adults do what they want, unless there’s compelling evidence for some reason.
But when we’re talking about kids, it’s entirely different. And when you have entire trillion-dollar industries, where do they make their money from? I didn’t pay them a penny. You didn’t pay them a penny. Our kids didn’t pay them a penny. That entire value is created by breaking up the day into tiny little bits and sucking out the attention and selling it to advertisers and selling the data.
I want to think about this. And I’m going to make this next point to be a little provocative. I’m not sure how much I believe it.
I understand argumentatively and politically why you want to just say: Look, it’s fine for adults to do basically anything they want, but the children are our future. We’ve got to do something very different there.
Fine. But I think, in practice, it doesn’t work.
Why is that?
Because if you are going to allow something to be both highly morally and legally permissible the moment somebody is 18 or, frankly, in a lot of your framework, 16 — I’m not saying it is literally impossible to implement such a hard-core age-verification system but it’s probably going to be pretty hard. Now I think there are places where it works. But typically you want friction that is both moral and structural. It’s a little bit more of a gradation throughout society.
Now, what we have lost in a lot of places is friction. And there are things that you want to have some access to, but there would be friction. We had access to things like sports gambling. But you had to drive to Vegas — at least, on the West Coast, where I grew up.
Taking away all the friction, making it available virtually everywhere and online has just then made it very dangerous to people. Because some percentage of people are going to develop a gambling problem. And we know that pretty well.
And this is the genius of capitalism: It seeks out how to make the thing more interesting, more potent, more seductive, more alluring. And that’s really great. Until a certain point. At which point the friction between you and the thing becomes too low, and then it’s very hard for the limited software of the human mind to regulate the wants — at least in some people.
So there’s something about the loss of friction. Again, this is partially moral frameworks. I suspect that if we’re going to be completely fine with it at 19, it’s going to be very hard for it to not be present at 17, too.
OK, all right. Hold on a second here. In general, I agree with you that the technology makes everything easy, and for adults that actually is often good — not always but often good.
But for kids, it’s disastrous. Because kids need to learn to do hard things. And the technology makes it easy for them to not do hard things.
If I could just add on: You started this off by saying that you don’t think we’re going to get an actual age-verification system.
The one real obstacle I have faced, once I put the book out — parents have loved it and are embracing it. Teachers are embracing it. The main objection I’ve gotten is resignation.
It’s just people saying: Ugh, what are you going to do? The technology is here to stay. Kids are going to have to use it when they’re adults — might as well learn when they’re kids. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
But actually, we can. And we’re doing it. So I really want to make the point that we don’t have easy age verification now, but if we incentivize it, we’ll have it within a year.
Scott Galloway, my colleague at New York University, gives the example of how the social media companies, this industry, have put a lot of research and money into advertising. And so they figured out a way that, when you click a link anywhere on the internet and then the page loads — in between that time, there has been an auction among thousands of companies for the right to show you this particular ad. This is a miracle of technical innovation. And they did that because there was money in it.
And now the question is: Do you think maybe they could figure out if somebody is under 16 or over 16?
Also, that auction knows how old it thinks you are.
Yes, that’s right. Exactly. They know everything about us.
But they’re saying: The kids are going to lie. What are we supposed to do?
So we’re going to get age verification. Australia is pushing it. It’s going to work. It doesn’t have to be perfect at first, but within a few years it will be very good.
One reason I wanted to have you on right now is it feels like the world is tipping in this. So run me through. Let’s stay not in Australia but in the U.S.
I feel like every day I turn on the news and I see some other governor or mayor announcing no phones in schools. Tell me the scope of this at the moment.
The way to understand why it’s changing so quickly is to go back before Covid. Jean Twenge comes out with her famous article in 2017, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”
Now, at the time, the empirical evidence was not clear at all, and she was savagely attacked by other researchers, who said: No, this is just a correlation. No, you have no evidence. It’s not causal. So that’s 2017.
By 2019, we’re beginning to see: Actually, wait. There is some evidence. And everybody is now seeing something is creepy about this, and we are seeing our kids drift away.
And then Covid comes in. What happens? What kids desperately need, Jean and I were saying, was more time outside playing, less time on screens.
What happens? We freak out. We put in way too strict restrictions. In New York, they closed the playgrounds. They closed down the ball fields. No playing outside — you might catch Covid.
Things get far worse over the next couple years. But the kids have to be on screens. So it’s only as Covid began to clear away that people were coming back to their senses about this. That’s why everybody is ready to act. And that’s why when my book came out a year ago — it came out in late March of 2024 — I didn’t have to persuade anyone. Almost everybody saw: Something is going terribly wrong here.
So what’s happening around the world is that legislators have seen it, and they’re uncomfortable with it. It doesn’t matter if they’re Democrat or Republican. Heads of state mostly are parents.
The way the Australia bill got started was in South Australia, one of the states, the wife of the premier was reading “The Anxious Generation” in bed. And she turns to him and says: Peter, you’ve got to read this book, and then you’ve got to effing do something about it.
That’s the way that he described it, at least. I think mothers have felt it more keenly than fathers. Mothers are just more emotionally connected in ways where they could feel the kids being pulled away.
So that’s why it’s happening everywhere. Because it’s obvious. It’s common sense. Most people see it.
What, exactly, is happening everywhere?
I would say it’s a parent’s revolution saying: We’re sick and tired. We’re not going to take this anymore. All over the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time. We’re all fed up, we want to do something about it. OK, what do we actually do?
I wrote the book, as an American, assuming that we’ll never get help from Congress. Now, I hope I’m wrong. There are some bills that could get through. But I was just assuming we have a dysfunctional Congress, so let’s try to do this the way de Tocqueville said that we do it: Let’s get together and figure out how to do this. So that means action among families and at schools and at the state level.
I am finding states are incredibly responsive. U.S. states are either mostly red or blue, but this is a bipartisan issue. So the No. 1 step that they’re all taking is so easy and so obvious, and it doesn’t cost anything — which is phone-free schools.
What are some of the states that are doing it?
Florida was one of the first, but they did it just during instructional time, which is worthless because then everyone rushes for their phone. They’re on their phone in between classes. They don’t talk to each other. So I’m not sure where they are now.
Arkansas, Utah —
Utah is interesting here because out of every state, it has still the strongest religious culture because of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And they have, by far, the strongest regulations on social media around children.
You sort of see the way those two things — that moral framework and that willingness to regulate what feels like a vice — is happening there.
That’s right. They also have a really excellent governor. Governor Spencer Cox has been just superb. He wants to make Utah the most family-friendly state — many states want to. And if we feel that we can’t let our kids out, and our kids are rotting away on screens, and there are screens all day in the school, that’s not a family-friendly place. So, yes, Utah has been great on this.
Here we are in New York. Governor Hochul has been great on this. We’re going to get phone-free bell-to-bell legislation here in New York. New Jersey is moving that way. So is Connecticut. So we’re seeing it all over the country.
In the book, I say that, with four norms, we can roll back the phone-based childhood. The first is no smartphone before high school. Do not give your kid a touch screen. This includes an iPad. Don’t give them their own touch screen before high school or age 14. And that’s not a law. That’s a norm that we’re trying to promote.
The second is no social media until 16. And that could be sort of a norm. I mean, if enough of us do it, it gets easier. But that’s where we really need law. And that’s why I’m so excited about Australia. Indonesia is, I believe, planning on it. A whole bunch of nations. If it works in Australia, it’s going to go global very quickly.
For clarification — and I actually don’t know — Australia’s policy is no smartphones or no social media before 16?
The key is the age of internet adulthood. At what age are you old enough to sign a contract with a giant corporation to give away your data and your rights and let them feed stuff to you — chosen by their algorithm?
Current American law says: As long as you’re old enough to lie, you’re old enough to do this. If you’re 10, just say you’re 13, and the companies can do whatever they want for you. Oh — and we can’t sue them. They’re freed from that by Section 230.
So that’s the current law. There is no age of internet anywhere in the world. You just lie. But what Australia is saying is the companies are going to have to figure out how to do some sort of age assurance. If you’re 16, you can sign this away without parental consent. Your parents don’t have to know.
Right now, 10-year-olds are getting on Instagram and TikTok. Even 8-year-olds. So this has to stop. In Australia, they finally put their foot down and said: This is going to stop here.
OK, so that was the second.
The third is phone-free schools. I think the majority of American kids are going to be in phone-free schools within two years — phone free, away for the day.
Many states have done it already, and I think a lot of the rest are going to implement it by next September. So that one has moved. That’s the main norm where there’s been spectacular change around the world.
And then the fourth is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. Because what I urge people to do is: Don’t just focus on taking away the screens — focus on restoring a fun childhood, as we were talking about before. A human childhood. A childhood spent not under your parents’ gaze doing homework or on a screen, but a childhood where you’re having fun with your friends in mixed age groups.
One of the things that I think is interesting and important about this, and is very present in your book, is how hard it is for parents to do this individually.
That’s why it’s such an interesting and important place for legislation. Because it really is hard to be a parent saying your kid can’t be on these messaging platforms that all the other kids have and use to plan things. You actually do, at a certain point, isolate your child, at a moment when you’re also trying to figure out a way to give them deeper social bonds.
So I find legislation here to be very encouraging.
It would be freeing. That’s right. What you’re describing is a collective action trap. The reason we have to give our kids phones and Instagram is not because we like it, but because they say: Mom, everyone else has it. I’m excluded. I’m being left out.
So the way you get out of a collective action trap is with collective action. That’s what I’m really urging in the book. It can be as simple as talking to the parents of your kid’s friends and agreeing that you’re all going to have these norms. Then your kid is not the only one. Especially if you get the kids together a lot, then they have a fun childhood.
There are two horrendous statistics that I can’t get out of my mind. The first is 50 percent, which is the percentage of American teens who say they’re online almost constantly. They might not necessarily be looking at the phone for 16 hours a day, but if they’re talking to you, they’re actually thinking about the drama going on that they can’t wait to check. So half of our kids’ consciousnesses, their lives, are owned by a few big social media companies.
Here’s the other stat that I just learned last week: 40 percent. That’s the percentage of 2-year-olds in America who have their own iPad. Because we’ve all discovered: Just give the kid an iPad or give them your old phone, and they’ll be quiet. You can do your email or cook dinner or whatever you want. So it’s become normal to give kids this little babysitter, which is really like giving them morphine or something like that.
I remember when I gave our kids an iPad to use. I remember what age it was — call it 3 or 4. Probably one of them was sick.
And I realized pretty quickly that YouTube is terrifying. I don’t just mean because it would end up playing weird computer-generated garbage that sometimes turned very creepy — although that happened, too. But the endlessness of YouTube — my kids would never even watch a full thing, because they were always hitting the next thing under it. Because there’s always something more interesting.
This was sort of when I began thinking a lot more about friction. Because you could really tell the difference between me putting on a Pixar movie and their having access to the algorithm — the difference in what it asked of them.
When I think about what it is I want to try to instill in my children: I want them to be kind, to be interested and curious about the world. And I want them to have healthy attentional faculties. I want them to have healthy bodies and healthy attention.
And I don’t really know how to do it. I have some theories. But this is one of these things that just terrifies me. When I read things about kids graduating who can’t read a book: It’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because we have raised them on technologies that have deranged their attention.
To develop the attention necessary to read “A Tale of Two Cities” — you are developing an attentional faculty that changes the literal shape of your brain. And I think the written word and creating the literate brain is a good thing. And we are uncreating it now.
Two things. The first is, in “The Anxious Generation,” I think I grossly underestimated the harm that’s happening. Because I focused on mental illness, but the bigger damage, I think, is the destruction of human attention in possibly tens or hundreds of millions of kids around the world. You can talk to pre-K teachers saying that kids are coming with language delays and social problems because they were raised on iPads.
So let me give a suggestion to parents like you, with young kids. I wish I’d understood this when my kids were young. Let’s distinguish between a pretty good use of screens and a really bad use of screens.
A pretty good use of screens is to put on a long movie — 90 minutes or more. They’re going to pay attention to a long movie about characters in a moral universe. There are issues of good and bad and norms and betrayal. It’s part of their moral training, their moral formation. And they’re watching it with another person. That can be you, ideally. But it’s OK if it’s a sibling or a friend because it’s social.
Here’s what’s really bad: iPad time by yourself. Because that’s exactly the opposite. It’s solitary. They’re not consuming stories — or, if they are, they are 15 seconds long and either amoral or really immoral — disgusting, degrading things, people doing terrible things to each other.
And then the other thing that I really want parents to understand is that the iPad is not like TV. TV is a good way of entertainment. TV puts out a story. But a touch screen is a behaviorist training device.
In a touch screen, you get a stimulus, you make a response and then you get a reward, which gives you a little bit of dopamine and makes you want to do it again and again and again.
So a touch screen can train your child the way a circus trainer can train an animal. TV isn’t like that. So iPad or iPhone time for your 3-, 4- or 5-year-old is just not a good thing.
Well, it trains us all. One reason I am skeptical of this very sharp cut between kids and adults is I think adults’ attentional faculties are being deranged.
Including, by the way, mine: I need to keep my attention healthy for professional reasons. And it is a day-to-day [expletive] struggle.
Also kids become adults. All these kids you’re talking about from this generation — the 24-year-olds were 16-year-olds not very long ago. They were growing up in this.
I worry about this for democracy — but I just worry about it in general. I think there are more and less healthy forms of attention. We tipped, at some point, into a societally less healthy form of attention. And we don’t really know what to do about that. We don’t want to scold people about it. We barely even have the language for it.
Yes. But I think we’re developing it because most people feel what you just said. I feel it. We all feel it.
I’ve focused on kids because, in terms of policy, the ability of our country or states to put limits on kids for their own protection is very high. But as soon as you turn 18, it’s an entirely different game.
So I don’t think we’re going to ask for a lot of legislation to protect us adults from the things on our phone. Johann Hari has this wonderful book “Stolen Focus,” and I believe he’s right when he says: If we adults clear it out and take a Shabbat — although Sabbath is one day. That’s not enough. You need a couple of weeks, actually, to get the dopamine circuits to readapt to normal levels. But Hari argues: If we adults clear it out, then we can regain our attention.
I think he’s right in saying that. Whereas if you go through puberty doing this, if we have 10-year-olds on TikTok, and they stay on it till they’re 18 — we don’t know, but there’s a possibility that it will cause permanent changes, and that they will be permanently less able to pay attention, to read a book.
This is a way in which I think we have trouble talking about it.
Take the fight we’ve been having about TikTok. We are willing to have this debate about whether something as attentionally important as TikTok — what I would argue is critical attentional infrastructure — should be owned by a Chinese company.
That’s right. It’s the greatest demolisher of attention in human history.
Well, whether you even want to go that far — which I would, too — it is something that is capturing an almost unfathomable amount of the attention of Americans every single day.
We can have this conversation about whether we think it should be owned by a Chinese company. But we are not willing to really have a conversation about whether it’s good that so many people are training themselves to have such fast attentional change for hours a day.
The stickiness of TikTok use is extraordinary. Just look at survey data on its user base. And it’s built to be that way. It is successful because it is sticky.
And we’ve unleashed this — or allowed this to be unleashed on the entire country.
I teach a course at N.Y.U. Stern called Flourishing. These are all business students. They’re mostly sophomores — 19 years old. And I say: Do you want to be successful? They all say yes. And I say: Well, if you give away all of your attention, I can almost promise you you’re not going to be successful. You’re not going to do anything. So step one in this course is you must regain control of your attention.
And the students who are heavy social media users, who cut down from four hours a day to less than one, get transformative results. They have so much time. They can do their homework. They’re not as distracted. They’re more open to other people.
Something you just said goes back to this question of what we are connecting our judgments to. Because you said: Well, look, these are business school students. You’re telling them you can’t be successful and not have control of your attention.
But I would say you absolutely can be successful and not have control of your attention.
How so? Lay out a path.
Elon Musk is highly successful and is a man who is clearly attentionally deranged.
But don’t you think that, when he was building these businesses, he sometimes went hours at a time focusing on a problem?
I think he probably did when he was building.
But this is what I mean: Everybody who is in these worlds can see people now who are, by any measure, successful in part by dominating the attentional sphere and posting constantly.
I don’t think Donald Trump has great attentional faculties. I do think you can be successful in the modern world — we are reshaping the modern world.
There’s a whole category of influencer. Part of being an influencer is almost, by nature, having truly adapted yourself to this attentional environment.
In part because these systems, these platforms, are building themselves to reward it. They are encouraging this. You have to post enough or you’re not going to get into the algorithm and get what you want out of it. I’m not sure it’s healthy.
I’m sure it’s not healthy.
But I think that part of how Elon Musk became the richest man in the world was harnessing all this attention — much of it negative.
Part of how Donald Trump became the president of the United States twice was by harnessing all this attention — really embodying the attentional ethic of these sites.
And even in a smaller way: There are fewer newspapers now. There are fewer stable jobs in institutional media. In many ways, it’s probably more likely that you can become an independent creator — certainly than it was 20 years ago.
Is there danger that the way you want us to raise children is actually suffused in nostalgia for an economy, for a politics, that no longer exists? That it’s not being deformed — it’s being adapted?
Right. In theory, yes. There is a danger of that. And history would suggest examples of it. Every generation is wary of the technology that the kids are using.
If it turned out that our kids were flourishing, then I would just be an old man shaking his head at the clouds. But our kids are the least flourishing generation we know of ever — certainly in modern times.
If it were the case that our kids love this stuff and they said: No, we love TikTok. Let us keep TikTok — then maybe I just don’t understand it.
But we did a survey with the Harris Poll, and 50 percent of Gen Z said they would prefer that TikTok were never invented. They feel trapped by it.
Although they don’t want to give it up, which is the paradox.
They don’t want to be the only one. If we could all give it up, then, actually, most of them would do it.
But the idea that TikTok would be banned was not greeted with flowers and chocolates.
No, but guess what? There also wasn’t much objection.
There were creators — people making money from it. But I was surprised there was not a youth rebellion saying: No, let us keep it.
I think you’re not on TikTok. And you’re not a legislator getting letters about this.
Well, right, because TikTok motivated a lot of them to write to their legislators.
But the point is that when you survey them, they feel trapped and they’re looking for an escape. They’re just terrified of being the only one.
So in theory, I could be wrong and we will adapt to this. But I think the way you described it — as: Well, no, they’ve adapted to it — I would say they’ve been deformed by it. So there’s a sense in which they fit. But they fit not as agents, not as full human beings who are making a future for themselves. They fit as human fodder that has been sucked into the machine and molded to what the machine wants out of them — which is their attention.
This is one of the tricky things about success right now. Because visible success is almost, definitionally, constantly present. And it’s very different than the kind of success of, say, a tremendous physics researcher — whose work you can’t read, because it’s very complicated and they’re not posting a lot of memes about it.
So what you’re describing is a path that opened up to prestige.
Teenagers are desperate for prestige. And what the social media companies did — and we know this from things that insiders have said — is they hacked that. Normally, throughout history, to become prestigious, you had to become a good archer or a good leader or a good basket weaver. You had to do something in the world. And then people would respect you, and you would gain social status. That’s the way it always used to be.
What social media is able to do is say: You don’t have to do anything. Just do whatever it takes to get people to follow you. And bingo — you’ve got prestige.
And where does it end? I’ll tell you where it ends. One of the most disgusting apps I’ve ever seen — well, there is lots of competition. But there’s a thing called Famefy. The idea is that lots of young people are lonely. They’re not able to get followers. They’re putting stuff out there, and nobody is watching.
Well, that’s really crushing. Imagine your 9-year-old not getting any followers.
But if you give her Famefy, Famefy will generate as many followers as you want. You want millions? You got it. And you can see them praising you, giving you hearts.
So Famefy is a way to take what you just said — that, oh, well, they are searching for a way to be successful without any attention. No need. Just give them Famefy.
And these are A.I. followers?
Yes, A.I. followers.
This is the most “Black Mirror” [expletive] I’ve ever heard.
Exactly. And this is why I’m so passionate about how we have to move quickly this year, 2025. This is really our last year before A.I. really has a big impact on life.
And we’re moving from the idea that A.I. enables you to know everything — to now, with A.I. agents — A.I. allows you to do everything.
The internet, in a sense, gave us omniscience. But now A.I. agents are going to give us omnipotence. And that would be horrible for children.
Let’s talk about A.I.
If you asked me whether I think that by the time my 3- and 6-year-olds are in middle school, we will have figured out the smartphones and social media in schools — I think we will.
[Sighs.] But A.I.
And for me, it goes back to friction. A.I. is functionally the collapse of all friction between you and any desire that can be fulfilled on a computer.
I actually think about relationships the most. I’ve said this many times before: I’m a believer in transformational artificial intelligence. I think it’s coming very fast. If you ask me whether I think A.I. will spur economic supergrowth anytime soon, I would say no. I think A.I. is going to be more evident in its upheaval of relationships.
Because our economy has all kinds of friction in it. It’s very hard to rebuild firms around A.I. But what about when you can have any kind of digital friend you want — or, for that matter, digital lover?
There’s a really good episode of “The Daily” on this about A.I. sex bots.
Yes. I listened to that. That was great.
The sound in that was frightening to me. Because you got why the A.I. was a good partner.
More responsive than any man probably would be.
More responsive than any man.
And it is so much worse at doing that right now than it will be in two years. It is going to be so good, and it’s going to endlessly adapt to what you want from that.
And I think the friction of relationships between human beings is really important. As a person, it’s good for me that my wife does not adapt herself into whatever I want her to say. It is part of being a healthy human being that other people exist with friction to you.
I was a very lonely kid. I did not have many friends. What if I had a lot of A.I. friends and that began to pattern my expectations of other human beings? And then when other people did not fulfill those expectations that was a frustration to me? And it made my A.I. community that much more alluring?
This scares the hell out of me. I’m not saying that on a 20-year time frame we won’t adapt. But on a 5- or 10-year time frame, we don’t even know how to think about it.
The way we adapt is by preventing kids from having these friendships.
I’ll draw on a really insightful analysis from a Christian writer, Andy Crouch. I did a session with him at N.Y.U. We had a conversation mostly on Chapter 8 of “The Anxious Generation,” which was about spirituality.
And Crouch said something so powerful that I always bring up, because it’s so helpful. He said: What is magic? Magic is an instant, effortless effect on the world.
You know: Snap your finger, something appears. It’s always been the human dream. And technology is essentially magic. Technology allows us to do things. You want a car to come pick you up, press a button — hey, here’s this car. So the technology is magic.
And he says: Now let’s look at how children are formed. How do you get an adult?
And again, he’s coming from a Christian perspective, so they care a lot about the moral formation, the religious formation of their children.
He says: The three areas of formation for children are home, school and church — or any religious organization. Those are the three areas. And all three of those areas are now colonized by tech.
Even in church. I’m hearing from pastors who say they ask kids to pull out their Bible. And kids will pull out their phone. They look at the pastor, but then they go on and do something else.
So I think we have to stop. This is not even about the content. We have to stop saying: Oh, we just need better content moderation. No, we don’t. We need to realize kids have to go through a childhood in the real world with other kids within a moral universe where they experience the consequences of their own actions. And they have to learn how to deal with real people who are frustrating.
And if we give them A.I. companions that they can order around, that will always flatter them, we are creating people who no one will want to employ or marry. So we’ve got to stop.
As I alluded to, I was a pretty friendless kid. I had a lot of trouble socially. I would often have one or two friends, but for a lot of my childhood, I alienated people.
This is kind of a sad story, but I remember at one point my mom saying she wanted to pay this nice older kid to watch me — but functionally to be my friend. I had the embarrassment or the presence of mind to say no to that.
But I try to imagine being that kid’s parent. How do you keep that kid from disappearing into the computer? Disappearing into this world where something will be his friend, his companion.
And of course what’s going to be the thin edge of the wedge are A.I. tutors, which are going to be very effective — and are going to be positive, too. It’s not that this technology will have no good adaptations.
I sometimes use ChatGPT with my kids, and we sit together and make up stories and it illustrates them — which is a really fun thing to do.
Great fun, yes.
It’s all easy to sit here and say: Well, I don’t want my 13-year-old having an array of sex bots in their pocket. But it’s not going to come in like that. Much in the way that the internet came in more benignly before it got jacked up to 11, it will come in for kids who are having a lot more trouble socially.
But now there’s somebody for them to talk to. For kids whose parents work multiple jobs. Neurodivergent kids. And a lot of it will be good for some kids. But the more adoption there is and the more these companies are already in the door and competing with each other for your kids’ attention, the more the darker side of A.I. will begin to flower.
And that’s what worries me here: It’s all so new, but it’s all so adaptable.
I was talking with somebody who works at one of the big A.I. companies about this, and he was saying to me: Oh, but the good thing about A.I. is that it’s really flexible. You can give it whatever value prompt you want to give it. If you want to tell it to not just do whatever your kid wants, you could do that.
And yes, it’s sort of always true that you could. But when I look at the way the markets actually work here, eventually what’s going to happen is we’re going to give people what they want — not what we think they should want.
I can imagine negotiating structures on this over a long period of time — as we have with social media. But we’re not going to understand it for a long period of time.
That’s right. We’ll never catch up with it.
And it’s going to be evolving very rapidly during this period of time. And it really frightens me as a parent.
As it should. A couple of concepts here. One is the concept of entanglement. Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology points out that social media has gotten so entangled in our world that it’s really hard to roll it back.
Many schools communicate on Instagram and require the kids to have smartphones, so it’s really hard to rip it out once it has already taken root.
Both of my kids’ schools communicate with me by app. It’s hard not to have a phone. It has to be on my phone.
That’s right. So social media is so entangled, it’s very hard to rip it out. It’s going to be very hard to get it out of our kids’ childhood, but that’s what we’re working on.
A.I. is not yet entangled. A.I. is just coming in. And in two or three years it will be entangled.
And as you say, there are many good applications. Khan Academy uses A.I. very well. And if we could have a device that just did Khan Academy and nothing else, I could see that having a positive impact on education. Maybe we don’t have to throw out all the iPads from the schools. Maybe we could use them if we can reduce them to one function.
The one thing I worry about with using the A.I. to draw everything my kid wants to draw is: Does it reduce the interest in actually drawing?
Oh, yes. It does. Kids are losing the ability to draw, to write. So far, Silicon Valley has a horrible track record at living up to its promises, especially for kids.
They claimed that social media is going to connect everyone. No, it actually disconnected everyone.
There clearly will be, and there already are, amazing uses for A.I. I’m finding that Claude and ChatGPT are just really helpful adjuncts to research. So I love A.I. as an adult. But we have to understand: Children are not adults. And given the track record so far, we have to assume that these A.I. companions will be very bad for our children.
That’s what the Silicon Valley people themselves say — in the sense that they have already voted to keep their kids away from social media and technology. They send their kids to the Waldorf School.
So we have to approach all of this with a really skeptical eye, especially for our children. Start by assuming it’s harming y tour kids, and then you can bring in some uses where it’s not.
Let me ask you about another dimension of this, which I’ve found myself obsessing over recently.
You’re a professor at a business school, and you’re a professor at an elite school. We were talking about instrumental education earlier. And I think it was a pretty reasonable expectation that parents would raise their kids and push them to study with the expectation that, if their kid could get to the N.Y.U. Stern School of Business, they’re probably going to be OK out there in the economy.
Then you mentioned how good A.I. is getting at being an adjunct to your research. I already see that, too. I’ve been playing around with Deep Research, and I can already see how good that is getting at research and how quick it is. It would change what I needed in terms of research.
It feels like an event horizon, to me, of: What should my children be educated toward?
In many ways, I would say it would be much safer to be educated toward being an electrician than to be educated toward being, say, a contract lawyer.
And I doubt there has been a moment when what society and the economy will want, value or reward in people in 15 or 20 years has been as liquid as it is now. How do you think about this?
The way I think about it is that I often hear the argument: Well, this is the world that kids are in. And for them to be successful, they need to master the technology. And it’s going to be in the workplace.
And my answer is very simple. I’m teaching these kids. If you want to send me someone who’s going to do well at N.Y.U. Stern, don’t send me someone who has mastered Instagram. Send me someone who is home-schooled and never had any of this garbage. They’re able to pay attention. They’re able to read a book.
Our brains are large language models, in a sense. Don’t send me kids whose L.L.M.s were filled in by TikTok. Send me a kid whose L.L.M. was figured within a stable moral community. And that kid is going to be adapted for the future, because he didn’t have the current technology when he was growing up.
The current technology is a giant obstacle to human development. So if you want to prepare your kid for the future, think very carefully about the technology you immerse them in.
I do feel like this is a connecting thread in a lot of your work, which is that human beings need to develop as human beings around other human beings in little human societies.
That’s what we evolved for.
And the more we, particularly in childhood, pull them away from that, the worse they will turn out in terms of mental health — but probably a lot of other things.
I would never say that as a blanket rule. We don’t have to raise our kids the way hunter-gatherers did. There are many aspects of modern life that are improvements. So I would not endorse the idea that, well, this is the way it used to be, so this is what we should do.
But when we begin to see evidence: What do you think? Do you think kids should be raised around other kids? Or around screens? It’s just kind of obvious.
So yes, I’ve always studied morality, but I’ve done it from multiple perspectives. I’ve always been a developmental psychologist, a social psychologist, an evolutionary psychologist. I read anthropology.
So you put all these together, and you get this view of this amazing species that developed culture. No other species has culture — I mean, chimps have a tiny bit — but the miracle of our ability to develop these skills and our ability to communicate. And then we come in, and we radically change childhood, and we think: Maybe it will be OK.
Well, it’s pretty clear it’s not OK.
We didn’t radically change childhood — a few companies did. And we’ve accepted it.
That’s right. And we feel we can’t stop them. They’re able to stop bills in Congress. They have giant public relations budgets, and they’re able to manipulate the narrative behind the scenes. So, yes, it’s a hell of a struggle.
But what we’re seeing is a parents’ revolution around the world. And if most parents rise up and say, “No more!” I think we’re going to win.
What is the syllabus for your course on flourishing?
I can tell you in just a few words. The course is organized around making you stronger emotionally — so stronger, smarter and more sociable. You have to cultivate new habits, make changes to your routine.
Because if you can become stronger, smarter and more sociable, then you are likely to be more successful in your relationships in love and in work. That’s the modern formula for happiness: success in love and work, as Freud originally said.
And if you are more successful in love and in work, then you will be happier. That’s almost guaranteed. So that’s what the course is about.
What have you assigned that connects the most for your students?
I know you’re going to ask me about the three books. So let’s just do the three books right now, because these are the three books.
The three books, for the undergrads, especially — and this is what I would recommend to any member of Gen Z, any young person in their 20s, anybody who feels their attention has been fried and they want to get it back. Here are the three books.
The first is “The Stoic Challenge” by William Irvine. It really makes Stoicism accessible. When you get setbacks — like, say, missing the subway — you just say: “Stoic challenge.” As though there are Stoic gods, and they’re testing you to make you strong.
So students learn to say: I missed my train, but am I going to also hurt myself by stewing for 20 minutes? Nope. I’m going to be calm about it.
And you develop a habit of more stoic reactions. The students get stronger. They’re not so anxious. They don’t get angry or irritated at other people so much.
The second book is by Cal Newport. It’s called “Deep Work.” This is why I’m so passionate about attention: Without your attention, you can’t do anything. And as Newport says, a deep life — where you do a lot of deep work — is a good life. It is a rich life.
So the students work on that to regain their attention. We work on turning off almost all notifications, on moving social media off your phone, onto your computer and then, for some, deleting it from the computer. So that’s a wonderful book.
Then the third book is Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” It is timeless. He’s writing in the ’30s, and he is such a great social psychologist. So if you have not read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” I urge you to read it. Ideally, the 1936 edition — it’s so charming. Don’t get the modern one for the digital age. It has been completely rewritten. The writing is not nearly as good.
But those are the three books. So the first one makes you stronger. If you do the Stoic challenge over a couple of months, you get stronger. You’re not as reactive to negative things.
If you read “Deep Work” and take it seriously, you’re going to spend a lot less time on social media. You’re going to take control of your time so that you have time for deep work.
And if you read Dale Carnegie, you’re going to be much more effective in conversation and maintaining relationships.
That’s it. Those three books.
Jonathan Haidt, thank you very much.
Thank you, Ezra.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our executive editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
The post ‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’ appeared first on New York Times.
