Hello. Welcome, everybody. I almost have to do a call to order here. It's a rowdy crowd. so welcome to tonight's sold out program
hosted by the newly merged Commonwealth Club
World Affairs of California. My name is Ken Broad
and I'm a longtime supporter, along with my wife, Jackie,
who will hopefully be here soon. We're delighted to sponsor tonight's
program. We're Jonathan Hight in conversation
with Tristan Harris. Before we get started,
just a few reminders. Another talk coming up. We hope you can join us for May 13th. We're going to welcome Batya Unger Sargon,
who is an opinion editor at Newsweek and author of the new book
that releases actually tomorrow. It's called Second Class How the Elites
Betrayed America's Working Men and Women. Additional information about this event can be found
on the Commonwealth Club's website. W WW dot Commonwealth Club talk. Tonight's program is being recorded
so the usual caveat please make sure your phones are off
so we don't interrupt the speakers. If you have any questions for either Tristan or Jonathan, please fill them out on the question cards
that were on your seats or if you're joining us via YouTube,
you can put it in the chat. And for those of you here in person,
which obviously you all are complimentary copies of John's book,
The Anxious Generation, are available to pick up. Many of you
probably already have them. He'll be signing books after the program,
which is actually going to run a little bit longer. Again,
there's a lot of material to get through, but we do have a wine tasting or wine
reception and book signing afterwards. That'll go for about an hour
from 630 to 730. And if you find this program valuable,
please share the replay link that will be available
in a few days afterwards. There are a lot of educators
I know in the audience and people with young children, and so this is super relevant
for a number of different audiences. So please share it now. It's
my pleasure to introduce tonight's guest. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist
and is a Thomas Cooley professor in Ethical Leadership
at New York University. He's personally one of my favorite public
intellectuals and authors. He was here back in September of 2018 for
a talk on how colleges are failing kids. So he's really further backed up into K-12 since 2018, he's been studying
the disastrous consequences of social media, both on teenage
mental health as well as the rise of political dysfunction, which I believe
is the topic of his next book. But we'll have to wait and confirm that the Anxious Generation. The subtitle is How the Great Rewiring of Childhood
is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness Directly related
not only explores the dangers facing teenagers,
but it's a call to action for what parents, teachers, schools, tech companies
and government must collectively do to end the crisis, and importantly,
has some very concrete suggestions that we can all take away. Starting the
conversation tonight is Tristan Harris. He's co-founder and executive director for the Center for Humane Technology,
a longtime critic of Silicon Valley's war. For our attention,
they're a co-sponsor tonight. And this is really a double header. This is going to be
an amazing conversation. So I'm glad you're all here. Please join me in welcoming
Tristan Harris first and then we'll have Jonathan Haidt come up. Thank you so much, Ken, for for hosting
all of us here in the Commonwealth Club. It's good to see all of you. We're really honored to have this event. John is someone I've admired
for a very long time, even before the social dilemma
which he and I were both in and how many people here
have seen the social dilemma. Wow, I guess this makes sense as the higher, higher
percentage than normal. How many people here are parents? I can look around the room. This is a lot of parents in the audience. How many people here are teachers
or educators? Quite a number of those. As well. Regulators or sort of digital policy, tech policy people. I've got some like very low hands. I know we have some somebody we I know because he invited our network here
of some of the EU policymakers that we are friends with and he tech company executives in the room
it's okay you can you can raise your hand. Okay good. So I say that because, you know,
we really care about how we change these issues. It's easy
to get caught admiring the problem and we
really care about how we change this. And the thing that I respect
so much about John's latest book, The Anxious Generation, is it's
all about what we can do about it. And we're going to get into that
by the end. So I promise we're going to focus
a bit on the problems. We're also can talk about
what we can do about it. And the stakes are high. The health of a civilization
depends on the health of the upbringing of its children. And if we have a problem
at the foundation of our society, we have to clean that up
to have have a future and I also wanted to say that much like,
you know, we at the Center for Humane Technology,
we focus on incentives. You know, in 2013, when I made this presentation
that went viral at Google about how technology was going to be
influencing the global climate change of culture, it was all about
focusing on the incentives. Charlie Munger, who is Warren
Buffett's business partner, said, If you show me the incentive,
I will show you the outcome. And I think the key thing
that John and C.H. here both sort of interested in
is how do perverse incentives and the lack of coordination
to change them create a more problematic outcome for society because a race for engagement
and the race to the bottom of the brain stem was predictably going
to create a more addicted, distracted, lonely, sexualized society because that's
where the incentive takes us. But what John is offering us with
his book is a crystal clear case of all of the research
that makes it clear where those harms are showing up to make it definitive
so we can hopefully make another choice. And before we start
supercharging every perverse incentive we have in the world with artificial
intelligence, we actually gave our A.I. dilemma talk here in this very room
about a year ago. It is so important that we are able
to spot those perverse incentives before we push double exponential power
through those perverse incentives. So without further ado,
I'd like to invite John Hight, a very deep hero of mine,
and friend up to the stage to give a presentation
on some of that research. Thank you. Yeah. But well, thank you so much, Tristan, and thank you
Can and Jacki brought us Jacki here first. There she is. Hello, Jacki. Ken and Jack, you've supported my
my work at NYU Stern and they've brought so many authors
here to San Francisco. They're just great patrons of ideas. And so we're very grateful to you. Thank you. So a question for you. Tristan asked a bunch of questions
about what we have in the audience. How many of you feel as though somehow
things are spiraling out of control? You have a vague sense that
things are getting weirder and weirder. Raise your hand. Okay. So you're right. They are. And and if we go back to like 2011, 2012,
when we were all such techno optimists, at least most of us, you know,
the Internet had been so amazing. You know, godlike powers of knowledge
in the nineties and the fall of the Berlin Wall was just before that. So the Internet was like,
you know, the new age of democracy. And it's going to knock down
all the dictators. It's going to be amazing. And and then all the way to 2011, the Arab Spring. So we were most of us
were techno optimists. I certainly was. The future looked incredibly bright
compared to millions of years of war and famine
and things like that. And that's part of the reason
why I think we missed what was happening to our kids,
because we kind of thought, this is amazing and the kids are immersing
themselves in it. What could go wrong? And I'm starting this way because one of the first people to see that
this wasn't what was going to happen was Tristan first when he was working at Google
and he gave this this power of this internal talk, this internal PowerPoint
talk about, hey, you know, we're sucking up
everybody's attention around the world and what's going to happen if no one has
any more attention to do anything, This is probably not a good thing. And that was 2013. And he's been he's been ahead of it. He can
because he understands the complexity, not just of the technology,
which a lot of people do. But Tristan is a really deep, abstract
thinker who is able to think about the complexity of society
as a social scientist. A sociologist would as well. So it's been I'm really grateful to him. It's been really amazing for me
to work with him on the social dilemma. We we met before then, so it's very excited to get this
invitation to speak with Tristan to you. What we're going to do first, though, is
I think it's very helpful to lay out what has happened to young people,
what has happened to people born after 1995, people born after people
born, let's say 1997 on average have a very different profile
from people born, say, in 1993. It changed very, very suddenly. So so I'm going to just go through a few
slides. Now. I'm aware that my slides and graphs
will be great for you here in the room, and they'll be great for those who are going to be watching the video
that would be made perhaps on YouTube and not so good
for the people listening on the podcast. So I'm just I'll try to sort of, you know,
explain the overview of each slide without going into
too much too much detail. But I want to start can tell me there's a bunch of educators and teachers
in the audience I want to start. I'll just lay out just the thesis
and then I'm going to start with what what has happened to education. So my argument in brief is
that humans had a play based childhood for millions of years
because that's what mammals do. All mammals play that
they have to play to wire up their brains. But that play based
childhood began to fade out in the 1980s in the United States,
and it was gone by 2010. And that's because right around 2010
is when the phone based childhood sweeps in our children are now raised largely
with a phone at the center of everything. And let's talk about what happened
when that when that when that change happened
another way I can summarize my book is by saying
we have overprotected our children in the real world
and we have under protected them online. And both of those are mistakes. So a month or two ago, Derek Thompson, a great data writer in that data analyst in The Atlantic, had an article
when the PISA scores came up. PISA is the one global assessment
of how students are doing around the world, 15 year olds,
how are they doing academically? And what what Derek pointed out,
which people were seeing in this new data, is that scores in math and reading
and those were all fairly steady. And then all of a sudden after 2012,
they they drop. So that's international around the world. Our young people are, I shouldn't quite say, getting stupider,
but they're not learning as much as they would have a few years
before. I wonder why. And then Derek didn't include this. But this is another data set we have. This is called the Nations Report Card, the National Assessment
of Educational Progress. And here you can track what happened in
United States from the seventies to 2012. It's slow,
I mean, to raise the intelligence or the academic progress of an entire
nation is really, really hard. But we were doing it. We were doing it
slow, steady progress in math and reading until 2012, and then it drops. Now everyone
says, COVID, COVID was so terrible. And it was. And you can see that
the drop with COVID is substantial. But the drop didn't begin with COVID. Our students
began learning less after 2012. This is when the change happens. So now I'll transition to what my book is more about,
which is the mental health. But my point is across
almost any assessment you want to make. Gen Z born 1996 and later is doing poorly and it's very sudden. It happened
very suddenly in the early 20 tens. So we can see that
I first saw this on college campuses. Greg Lukyanov
actually was one of the first to spot it. Something was changing about students
who arrived in 2014 compared to, say,
those who arrived in 2012 up through 2012. They were all millennials. But as we go on in the decade, you see
a number of things rise a little bit. ADHD is up a little bit,
learning disability up a tiny bit, but it's really this yellow line,
which is psychological disorders. That's what rises fast. That's the big difference between Gen Z
and the Millennials is that Gen Z has very high rates of mental mental illness,
especially depression and anxiety. Now this is data from collected from university
health systems and what we see. So these are US undergraduates
with a variety of conditions and all the graphs that I show. If you track the data up through 2010,
you see nothing. That is even in the nineties
and especially the 2000s, mental health was not getting worse and on some measures
it was getting a little better. The Millennials actually were a little more mentally healthy
than Gen X before them. Gen X is 1970s, 1965
through about through 1980. But what you see as we go on into the 20
tens is this everything goes up, but it's especially depression and anxiety
that they are now at such high levels is just a normal part
of being a teenager in the United States. These are college kids, but it's just
a normal part of being a young person. Now that you are depressed
and anxious, it's not that the majority is, but it's almost
I mean, it's about 30 or 40% are depressed and anxious. And this graph shows that it's it's
actually just for young people because as we go on to this period,
what you see is that the lines for older
people don't really change. But the youngest generation is really
where the where the increase is concentrated. The rise is also gendered
in a lot of ways. It's boys and girls are doing much worse
than they were before. But often the
the the rise is larger for girls now. No, in this case the percentage increase is actually slightly higher for boys,
but they started at a much lower level. So they go from about 5% to 12% are had a major depression
in the last year. A big increase percentagewise. But you wouldn't say, you know, boys,
it's just normal for them to be depressed. They're not. It's, you know, 12% was for girls. It went from 12% up to nearly 30%,
which is a very large portion of our girls have had a major
depressive episode in the last year. And I want you to notice the data for 2022 just came in about two months ago
and I was able to add it to the graph. You can kind of see
the COVID effect there. If you look closely,
see COVID made things a little bit worse, but it really just went right back
to the trend line. COVID is trivial compared
to whatever happened in the early 20 tens. And it's not just that they're saying
that they're depressed and anxious. When we look at measures of behavior,
this shows it's actually emergency room visits, psychiatric
emergency room visits. I'm sorry, not necessarily psychiatric. This is for self-harm,
emergency room visits for self-harm. Again, no trend before 2010
and then after 2010, girls go way, way up,
especially pre-teen girls. The CDC divides the data up into two age
groups. The younger age group is almost always where you see
the biggest percentage increase. Something really, really hit 10 to 14 year
old girls very hard in this country. In the early 20 tens. And it's not just self-harm, it's also suicide,
which boys commit more suicide than girls. They tend to use lethal
means such as a gun or a tall building. Girls make many more attempts, but when we look at actual deaths, what we
see is a very large and sudden increase. I mean, this is quite astonishing. Between 2012 and 13, 2013,
the suicide rate for young teen
girls went up 67% in a single year. And it wasn't a blip. It wasn't like an error that it went down
the next year. It was the first leg of
a rise up to 134% increase. And it's not just us. It's happening in very much the same way
in all of English speaking countries. This is Britain for self-harm. We see the same pattern and this is Australia
Psychiatric emergency department visits. Again, no trend before 2010 and then afterwards up
way up for for for boys and for girls. Same in New Zealand,
similar data from Scandinavia. It's not all over the world. It's not, we don't see this in East Asia
but it is all over Northern Europe and the English
speaking countries and North America. Now why why would this pattern
be happening in so many countries? At the same time, everyone has a theory. People hit me with all kinds of theories
to explain it, and I say, Fine,
that might work for the United States. But why did that Cause girls in Australia
to start cutting themselves? It doesn't make any sense. And I think there
is really only one theory on the table. I keep waiting for
someone to propose another. Nobody has, which is what I call
the great rewiring of childhood. It happened in two phases. As I said,
the end of the play base childhood and then the birth of the phone base
childhood. I'll just show you a few more slides and then I'll invite Tristan up
and we'll continue the conversation. Something I didn't realize until
I really got deep into writing the book. You finally find this graph
at our world in data. They graph out, you know, adoption
of various technologies and there's four communication technologies
because they're network issues. There's always a brief period
where everyone is getting it. You know what? Some people are getting a telephone.
You have a point. Everyone now is getting a telephone,
that sort of thing. And what we see is that the first wave, the personal computer,
so many older people like me, remember when you got your first IBM PC,
you're out here. I guess you would have gotten a mac. Whatever. So, you know, that was adopted and you could do Word star and,
you know, other things like that. But it's not until you get dial up
Internet that it really becomes useful. And then those that rises very fast
in the nineties and into the 2000 and that first wave was wonderful. It was magic call. It didn't do anything bad to mental
health. It corresponded with the period
of the greatest growth in democracy ever. So we were all techno optimists. This stuff is great, isn't it? But it's this second wave. This is what did in Gen
Z, at least in my telling in the book. It was the beginning of social media. Social media, which we used to call
social networking systems, because it was a way you would just
connect and you'd share your profile. Social networking systems are adopted
very, very rapidly, even before the smartphone,
but once the smartphone comes out as well, those two together are by far the fastest
technological adoption in history, although I think maybe chat
GPT might have been faster. I don't know. I don't have the data, but this this transformed things
just in the blink of an eye. And this is exactly
when teen mental health plummets and also democracy,
which may or may, you know, democracy reached a high point around 2011, 2012,
and now it's been drifting downward. The number of democracies
and their quality. So I'll just you know, just to illustrate, childhood used to be,
you know, all older people. I'm sure your fondest memories are not, you know, with your parents
and not sitting, watching TV. They're probably you're outside playing,
you're having adventures. It used to be just for younger people
in the audience. If you look at the bottom left picture, it used to just be a thing
that you could ride around town in a bicycle
with an extra terrestrial in your basket. It's just something.
It's just something that we did. Whereas now childhood is basically this. If you're a boy and you want to play
video games with your friends, you have to go home alone. You can't go over your friend's house. You need your headset,
your control, your screen. So childhood now is much more solitary
than it ever has been in human history. And the results, I think, are not good. So there are so many different
avenues of harm. In fact, in our brief time,
I barely had time to just read them. I'll just read them for the
you know, for the audience listening in. Normally, if I had the four hour hour,
I would like go through them. I'll just read them. The opportunity cost. Kids are on for 9 hours a day, 5 hours
a day of which is social media, social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention,
fragmentation, behavioral addiction. Those affect everyone, boys and girls. Then I have a whole chapter on
why social media harms girls. More girls are more sensitive. Boys and girls are just a little different
in their social needs. And so I'll just list them visual social comparison,
perfectionism, relational aggression. Girls share emotions more than boys,
including anxiety and sadness. Girls are more susceptible to socio genic
transmission, especially via tik-tok and girls are more subject
to sexual predation and harassment is just more part of your daily
life online. If you're a girl that you're approached
by older men with bad intent. But the
boys story is a little more complicated. Not quite as obvious, but but my research associate, Zach Roush and I,
I think we worked it out pretty well. Drawing on Richard Reeves
book of Boys and Men that boys have just been withdrawing from from effort in the real world
since the 1870s or eighties and getting lured ever more into the virtual world
where they can get their their desires for coalitional violence
that is war and sports pretend you know you can get your
your your desires for that sort of play satisfied in video games
and your desire for sex from pornography. So boys are just retreating
from the real world. So we get rising levels of porn addiction. Multi-Player video games
take up a huge amount of time. They're great fun. They're incredibly immersive. And so anyway, the point is, boys lives
have been upended, too. It doesn't show up as much in depression
anxiety. It shows up as just withdrawing
from effort. In the real world, boys are just
not really doing the things they do. They're not making the efforts
and experiencing the failures and setbacks that would strengthen them
to grow into men. So this the proposal, Chris and I will talk about this,
but this the there's actually a way out because almost all the parents hate
what's going on. All the teachers hate what's going on. All the principals
and heads of school hate what's going on. And guess what? Gen Z hates
what's going on. They see it. They're not in denial. They really see that they're trapped. And you say, well, you know,
why do you waste your life this way? Why don't you just get off? I can't because everyone else is on. So it's a social dilemma. It's it's a collective action problem. And so what I'm proposing
as the way out is if we all just agree to adopt for norms, even if Congress never comes to our aid,
even if Congress never does a damn thing to fix the mistakes it made
in the nineties that set us up for this, including
not just requiring no age verification but saying, and by the way,
you can't sue the companies either. They have blanket protection from lawsuits
for what they do to our kids. So even if Congress never fixes
the mistake, and I should say there is real hope for a bill costs of the Kids
Online Safety Act, That is the one thing that Congress
might do. State legislatures, including Florida
and Utah, are actually doing that. I think a great job
of trying out approaches that actually will make a difference. But if we just do these for norms,
if nobody gives their kid a smartphone before high school,
just give them a flip phone. That's what the millennials had
and they were fine. Okay, some of you may not think so,
but in terms of the mental health data, the millennials were fine. No social media before 16. That's going to be the hardest one to do. And that's where we really could use
legislative help. But we can do it
even without that phone free schools. This is an absolute this one is easy. This one is the biggest bang for the buck. This one can be done all over the country
by this September. You just by phone lockers
or yonder pouches and your kids, you need the phone
to get to and from school. That's I understand that. But if anything, that context
must be locked up because if they have anything,
including a Chromebook, if they have anything that can text
and some kids are texting, they all have to be texting
because nobody wants to be the only one who didn't know about the thing
that happened in third period. So we have to go phone free schools
and the kids love it. Once they once they detox,
after a couple of weeks, their brains
actually enjoy talking to other kids. And we need much more childhood
independence and free play if we're going to greatly reduce screen
time for for kids, we have to give them back something fun,
something normal, which is playing with each other, hanging out with each other,
having adventures with each other. So. and just a final note I teamed up with with Eric Schmidt,
who has a variety of concerns about A.I. as a technologist,
and then me as a social psychologist. We wrote an essay laying out how set aside
the risks of whether air is going to become sentient
and wipe us all out. Like, let's just put all that stuff aside. Let's just look at what social media is
currently doing to children and democracy. What's going to happen as now everybody
can use AI to fake everybody else. What's going to happen? It's going to get even worse for kids,
even worse for democracy. So that that's an argument
we made that that trust and I will I'm sure
we'll be talking about in just a moment. And so that's my my presentation to you. My argument is that the play based
childhood was replaced by the phone based childhood that we have overprotected
our kids in the real world and under protected them online. We have to reverse that and that's it. I, I welcome Tristan and then we'll talk for a while
and then we welcome your questions. Thank you. Just a quick personal question,
because it's something that I've actually wrestled with in
this is when you're with the scale of the stats that you just mentioned, like just curious on a personal level,
in your own nervous system, how do you hold some of the implications
of those graphs? Yeah, well,
sometimes there's a scene in Jurassic Park where they first they come to the island
and then they, they first see the dinosaurs and, and it's just,
you know, it's a little bit like that. It's like because I was supposed to write this book,
I had a contract to write a book on what social media is to in a democracy. I remember it to be called Life After Babble, adapted to a world
we may never again share. And I wrote the first chapter, which
which was the first chapter of this book. I wrote the first chapter
laying out all the graphs. It was like, what? Like Because once I realized
it was not just us, it was international. That's where I felt like, wait,
there's something really, really big going on here,
and how do I handle it personally? Well, you know, compared to the concerns
you and I have shared about the decline and possible collapse of democracy,
you know, the loss of a generation is just kind of,
you know, more of the same. And I think there is something
to just the scale. And I'm showing this because
I think for me, in looking at these issues just like you, I struggle with it like I, I struggle when I when I was at Google
and I saw that this was going to go
to billions of people, these incentives. And I felt my own nervous system. And in fact, my co-founder
is a of the Center for Humane Technology. We used to call it getting pretty bad
instead of post-traumatic stress disorder. it was like having posttraumatic stress. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it was just a personal question because it for me, I motor
it motivates me to say this has to stop. Yeah. Like this has to stop. Like what more evidence do we really need? And the next question I had for you is I know you've been getting
a bunch of critiques from academics and from other folks
who want to question the data, say we've had many moral panics. If you were just to briefly sort of Steelman
or sort of respond to any of the critiques that are meaning,
I can't imagine based on the clarity of what you've presented,
but what are what are people saying? Sure. Well, you know, there are there are
two main critiques from other researchers. The main one is
this is just another moral panic. The kids are okay.
The null hypothesis is true. This is correlation, not causation. That's the standard view.
That's what they've said. And you could defend that in 2019. I think when I really entered this debate. But since then it's become clear. Actually, no, the kids are not all right. And it's true internationally,
and most of them acknowledge that. And now there are a lot of experiments. It's not just correlation. It was mostly correlational before,
But now there are Zach Rosen. I've collected, I think, 25 experiments,
16 of which show significant effects. And the ones that don't, it's because the short time intervals,
not enough time to detox the brain. So I think now
there's a lot of experimental evidence. And then the other thing just occurred
to me recently, because, you know, I mean, they're right that we should be concerned
about a moral panic. And in many ways, like, you know,
I hear myself talking, I look at my writing
and I do sound just like the people that they point to from
and 100 years, 2000 years ago. So in a sense, yes, there is a moral panic
and I am fomenting it. But if it's actually happening, then you would say that
I'm an alarm ringer and not an alarmist. Right. Exactly. So and then then the final point
is, in every previous moral panic, one of the features is is lurid
stories about this thing that happened. A kid smoked marijuana and then he chopped
off his parents head or whatever. You know something. And, you know, I read it in a newspaper
and, my God, this is terrible. Okay. And so, you know, maybe,
you know, most that didn't happen. Maybe some did. This one is entirely different
as I go around. You know, almost every journalist
who interviews me, either before the interview
or during the interview, they say, you know, I've seen this in my own kids
or I've seen this in my kids friends. Everyone sees it. This is not lurid examples,
trumped up to make people afraid. Right. Everyone sees it now. Yeah. You know, one of the talking points
that often comes up in our work, very often, especially being friends
with people in the tech industry, is that the people who work at these companies don't
let their own children use their products that to me,
like if you were to imagine solutions and I love the simplicity
of the four solutions that you brought up, and I actually would love for them
to eventually bring that back because I think it's important
for people to dwell on those. But, you know, if you think about
if there is just the rule that you could only build products that your own children
would use for 8 hours a day, like imagine there's no regulation,
but there's no regulation. But just imagine
that you can only build products that your own children
would use for 8 hours a day. I just wonder what percentage of the harms
would that clean up? That is great because I believe,
if I remember correctly, Hammurabi in his original code, said something like a bridge, you know, a bridge, a person who builds a bridge, if it falls down, his own son will be put under a bridge
that something like that look like you are personally responsible
for what happens. You have an obligation and you're,
you know, let's put your children on the line,
right? Yeah, I love it. I love it. But mean, I can't imagine what you know,
what law or constitutional provision would allow it. But it's definitely fun to imagine that. One of the other things that comes up
when I think about your work and I think about the debate about it,
is sort of academically studying that there's this object called social media
and it's like an apple. And we look at the app and we study the app and we said,
Is the apple good or bad for people? Right? And then one of the things that, you know, I think brought some of our work together
and that's visible in the social dilemma is when the insiders are coming to you saying
that Apple isn't that shaped by accident. This thing called social media
isn't that shaped by accident? There is a bunch of incentives
and every day thousands of people go to work to shape that object. Yeah. In a particular form. In a way, there's a particular geometry
It's moving towards. Like we
I remember my friends from Instagram, you know,
when they were inventing Instagram and they were following this design
pattern, they learned at Twitter, which was if
everybody has a new thing called a profile and you get new followers every day,
then suddenly your email inbox is just getting,
you know, you got five new followers and you would click to go back
to see who they were. And that was a cool design pattern. It was good at getting people
to come back in and fill up this follower bank account. It was like a video game. And I'm saying this because I think
when we when we're trying to get to where a system is going
that could potentially prove harmful if we're using the post facto, let's let's study it for ten years
and see what the effects are. As we're about to move into AI,
we're going to we're going to do so much more faster. We have to get good at being able
to anticipate those consequences. That's right. And we are terrible at anticipating them. The AI was I gave a talk at a bunch of tech companies
in January of 2020, just before COVID and at Twitter, I was invited in to
give a talk by the one social psychologist that they had had only one psychologist
at Twitter. Here they are messing up the world and
its people, but they had one psychologist, Facebook had a lot of their Facebook behind,
a lot of social psychologists. But it seems, you know, as we now know
from Francis Hopkins revelations at all, they weren't there
to design safety for the kids. They were there to design engagement
for the kids. So I'll take your your very abstract
analogy of like a thing like an apple that is not really
it seems, and it was change. And I'll add in that the law of decay,
which is whenever you have
a system, is going to be taken over by viruses and worms and parasites
and things like that. And so most of these platforms,
they start off amazing and wonderful. You know, let's have a platform on which,
you know, 12 year old girls dance. Like what could possibly go wrong
with that? Yeah, you know, or let's have a platform
on which 12 year old kids can send each other disappearing messages mean who would possibly exploit
that for nefarious purposes. Yeah. So it all seems fun
and playful at first, But, you know, even if look, most people are good,
most people are honest. But what has happened is the digital
the digital transformation has meant that it doesn't matter what most people are
because they don't count. What matters is the dynamics. And what the dynamics has done is
super duper empowered. The extremist on the far left, the far
right, foreign intelligence agents and trolls. Those four groups now are super empowered
to do what they want and the rest of us are like,
What the hell is happening? Yeah, you're making me think you know a story from someone
I know who was involved in the. The thing that predated what Tik tok was. And they were saying, like,
what's the use case? You could get people to engage
and they noticed their users were young
and they were like, Well, what's the use case
that like young people would engage a lot? Well, if they're really young,
like the teenagers, they're going out in the world,
they're Instagramming, they're taking photos of their life. But if you're under like I don't even know
16, if you're not allowed to leave the house, what's something
that would get those kids to participate? Well, I know dancing in your bedroom,
that's something that everybody can do is dance in their bedroom. So let's build an app where dancing in your bedroom
is the thing that everyone's competing on. And then you get this whole new thing
called TikTok. Yeah. And anyway, it's just it's
these incentives are so pernicious. And I think there's this kind of obvious
point of at the end of the day, wouldn't we want this stuff to be designed
by people who are asking the question, what would be
in the best service of children? Right. And that's, of course, the
the difficulty here is that we don't live in a society in which everybody is supposed to do
what is best for society. I think history has shown
that a free market system ends up producing far more benefits,
far more vitality. But the key is
it has to be an efficient market where you don't have externalities
imposed on others, you don't have exploitation of public
goods. So, you know,
I teach in a business school. I used to teach the ethics
of the professional responsibility class. And we go through, you know, the four major kinds of market failures
and how when you have a market where you don't have any of those failures,
there are very few ethical problems. I mean, capitalism ends up, you know,
as one person, Jack Ma, I heard him say at a conference, he said and it was a
it was a it was a philosopher. It was a philosopher At Arizona State
University said a good capitalist society is one in which the only way you can get
rich is by making other people better off. And that's true.
If we can get the regulation. Right at the incentives. Right. You know, I'm
a huge fan of the free market, Right. But the companies we're talking about here
are operating brilliantly within a space where they get to do
all for market failures. Yeah. Yeah. You talk a lot in the book about, you know, it was kind of in Europe
when we were slides, the opportunity cost. There's certain things that make up healthy childhood development
which can sound normative, like you're telling people that there's this certain specific list of things
that are healthy. But you mentioned
kind of the opportunity cost and you call social media
inexperience blocker because it prevents some of the skills like turn
taking attunement to others empathy play anti fragility. Just want to talk about sort of that opportunity cost
because at the end of the day, if we're here in this room
because we care about getting to a world where technology is strengthening
those underlying characteristics of what make good, you know,
what makes healthy children's, what are those things that we need that the technology would be
need to be in service of? Yeah, well, let's start
by just looking at how it affects us. I mean, we adults use it. We use these tools, variety of things. You know, I use Twitter to get to get
the word out and to learn new things. It has has some great uses. And how many of you how many of you feel when you think about
what social media has done for your life? How many of you feel that it really has
made your life better versus on net it's made your life
worse? I'm just curious. I don't actually know the answer. I have to ask this before raise your hand
if you'd say overall social media, all the platforms are broadly construed,
are making your life better. Raise your hand. Hi. Okay. It's a number and raise your hand
if you'd say no. Overall, it makes your life worse. Okay. A larger number. Although many of you many didn't vote. But this is again,
it is a collective action situation. We all have to do it,
even though many of us on average feel that it makes life worse. College students, when asked,
Would you rather live in a world in which Tik-tok or Instagram
when ever invented the majority, say Yes, we'd just like to be liberated from it
just if we could get rid of it so nobody's on it,
then it would be better. So this is for adults we're talking about
now let's look at childhood. They don't have networking needs,
like they don't need these. Like we use these tools for our jobs,
for all, you know, for for all sorts of things. 11 year old kids don't need digital tools
for networking or getting the word out. And so if we take a child, you know,
they spend some time in school, they have some time with their family,
and and then playtime is the most is like the thing we need
most imagine into that child's day. And those of you who have a kid,
let's say, in middle or high school, imagine if someone came along and said,
I have this thing your kid has to do for 5 hours a day,
just however busy your kid is. Let's take 5 hours
out of the day to do this thing. Now, that's conservative, cause
that's just the social media part, not the video games,
not just social media. 5 hours a day. What's going to happen now? They still have to do a lot of the stuff. So they're going to do less sleep
than have to. They can't sleep as much.
It's just not time. You can't read a book. There are no books.
They don't read a book. Reading has plummeted. Yeah. Hobbies. No time for a hobby. talking with someone. No time for that. Because you have. So you have to service like you have. So you have to like this. And you know, you have so much you have to do to manage your digital brand and your
and your and your network connections. So you know, it
kind of pushes out everything else. Yeah. And imagine so all of you who are adults,
you know, go back to your childhood, think about all the stuff that you did
and now remove 70% of the good stuff like that. That's really sad. So yeah. Yeah. One of things
I really appreciate about your diagnosis and we think about this as well
in our work as Center for Human Technology,
which is these are coordination problems, you know, tweens, these smartphone,
because they'll feel they get left behind if they don't if everybody else has one. And I don't, then I'm just literally
not going to be able to operate at the same speed
other people are operating at. Parents feel like
they have to fall into that trap, too, if they can't be the one
to take their kid off of something, if it means that their kid's
socially excluded. If the other journalists
now as adults are using social media to gain influence
and public notoriety on Twitter and the other journalists know
that Twitter is bad, they're just going to lose the game and not have influence
if they don't do that thing. And so what
I so appreciate about your work and that that is the answer
is it's not about just individual things that I can do for myself. It's how do we solve the coordination
problem? Yeah. So do you want to talk about how you see
addressing this coordination problem? Certainly the solutions. Yeah, sure. So, yeah, first,
almost all the advice to parents is what you can do
to make things less toxic for your kid. And they're very hard to do. And most of us are struggling apps.
I'm curious. So if we raise your hand,
if you if you have a child between the ages of seven and 18, raise your hand. Hi. Okay. Just just those of you,
how many of you would say that conflict over technology
struggles, disagreements, all that is a is a fairly regular part
of your of your family life. Raise your hand. Hi. Okay. And parents would say, no,
we have no problem. Raise your hand. I'm sure there are some okay there are a few so it can happen. But we're all
we're all struggling with it. And so my argument is, you know, let's not
just accept that they're going to spend, you know, 10 hours a day, 9 hours
on their devices and make that health. You you can't do that. We have to we have to greatly reduce
the time so that they can do other things. And we can't do it unless we all do it
or at least unless most people do it. So let's just talk about that. we got it right there. Yeah,
we got them. Yeah. So no smartphones before high school. So the key the real transition is when kids get the Internet in their pocket
available 24 seven. And it's not just that they can reach
the Internet, it's that once you got the App Store
and push notification, it's now millions of companies can reach your child
without your knowledge or permission. If your child downloads an app,
that company now, by default, they can send notifications and kids don't
seem to know to turn off notifications. My students actually get a notification
every time they get an email. They get a notification
whenever any app wants to alert them that somebody is getting
a divorce. In Hollywood. And so so it's really that transition to having
the Internet with you in your pocket. That's what really seems to push
push kids over the edge. So delay that for as long as possible. Nobody before the age of 14
should have that. A flip phone is great
because all you do is text and call. That's it. It's for communication. And I'm hearing from a lot of parents
who say they're using Apple watches or a smartwatch,
because I understand the need. You need to be able to text your kid
like I'm 10 minutes late. Just, you know, I'll be there. So that's fine. But they don't need a smartphone. Or a flip phone. You mentioned also. The flip phone is sort of the
that's like the right. The paradigm is a flip phone,
which, you know, it's you know, because it's not very easy to type,
which is good. You don't want them. Exactly. You know, he did, you know,
see you at three like exactly at the mall. Like that's all you want. Yeah. So that's the first one is the first one
is actually pretty easy. My fear is that I think that this norm is going
to get adopted in sort of upscale communities where the parent you've got
two full time parents and they're like professional parents
and they're like reading all the. So I think, you know,
we have this huge digital divide. We used to think the digital divide was that all the rich kids
had computers in the poor kids didn't. We were wrong. Well, might have been some truth
to that back then. Now the digital divide
is that wealthy kids and wealthy families have two parents trying to put controls on
and they use this stuff a lot less, whereas kids in single,
single parent families, poor families, African-American and Latino, they have substantially higher rates
of use because there are fewer controls. It's just hard for that family
to really do that. So this first norm,
I think, will get adopted, but unevenly it schools evenly and yeah,
and that's why and actually that's why the third norm is so important
the phone free schools because that is an equity issue
that is if everyone has to go six or 7 hours a day without their
without these addictive devices, that's going to especially benefit
the lower US kids compared to the upper SC US kids
who are not quite as addicted. I think of what you're proposing here
is sort of as big as the introduction of the weekend or the Sabbath and society,
because if you think about like, you know, the problem, all the problems
we have, our coordination problems, multipolar traps, if I don't do it,
I lose to the guy that, well, I want to raise my GDP, but I don't
I want to put a carbon tax on my economy. So I don't do climate change. Right. But if China doesn't do the carbon tax
and I do and I just diminish my economy and there's keeps growing
that I'm just going to lose, you know, if I don't use social media
to get popular as a journalist, but all the other journalists
are using it, then I'm just going to lose and I won't have the influence
that I want to have as a journalist. And if you think about the Sabbath it's like people had an incentive
to marginally eke out more work and advantage over their fellow
human being in their society. But we would just all be way better off
if we all agreed to just take Saturday and Sunday off and this just calms down
or like a restaurant to use. Our new executive director,
Daniel Baquet, is sitting over there. You know, everyone starts
getting very loud in the restaurant and we would all just be better off
the bench just for a moment. So I think what you're doing here
is just sort of a soft. Shell. To sort of humanity. Yeah, we're. All overwhelmed and everybody feels
that they're overwhelmed. The kids feel they're overwhelmed. Yeah. So, yeah, we need to yeah,
we we need to turn it down and it doesn't. We can't do it alone. You have to. We have to do it together
at the same time. And I think we can. I really. That's, you know, you and I,
we talk a lot about. Well, I think we. Yeah, I think we can do it. We have to believe that
we can just really quick time. So how much time do we have?
So we want it. I don't see that. There seems to be a clock somewhere,
but I don't see. It because I. Was so 22, 20, 22 minutes. For 2 minutes left, 22 minutes, including
questions of the audience, more or less. Okay, great. So we've got 7 minutes or
so before we should probably switch to. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Okay. I just wanted to ask a quick question
about how A.I. is going to supercharge the harms before
we get to all the solutions that we want. We want to land on
and like a comprehensive, like, full of society approach
to how we would answer this. But just so we understand,
we're motivated by how will A.I. supercharge some of these times. So for one thing. So let's look
especially at the boys there. It's I think so the analysis that
that I offer in the book in chapter seven on Boys is that is that
they've been pushed out of the real world. There have been forces increasingly
pushing them out of the real world and pulling them into the virtual world. So school is really designed around girls
learning styles. It's not really very good for boys
that less and less boys need to run around more,
especially in earlier grades. So less and less recess, no rough
and tumble play, no pushing, no running. So for a lot of ways,
boys are kind of dropping out of school. They don't find it
as it's harder for them. They mature more slowly. Richard Reeves says we need to actually redshirt the boys
because they're just neurologically behind girls. So for a lot of reasons,
boys are just not finding that it makes sense for them
to exert themselves in school or in work. So that's the push out of the real world and then the pull into the virtual world
is that, you know, when I was a kid, I remember when Pong came out,
it was really amazing. You know, you put on your television,
you turn a knob in it, you know, you can move the paddle up and down, but,
you know what? My my son plays Fortnite. We delayed on that. But,
you know, he plays Fortnite. It's incredible. I mean, it's
amazing these immersive games. And you're, you know,
almost like most kids play video. Certainly most old boys play video games.
They're amazing. So the pool gets better and better. All right. Now imagine if instead of, you know,
now imagine if now everyone starts to walk around the goggles.
I mean, it's bad. We're all walk around with AirPods. We never talk to each other anymore. Just imagine when everyone's walking
with goggles so you can see your own. You're in your own world all the time. Even when you're out, out in public. For boys,
I think, you know, if we don't act soon, we're just going to basically
have to say goodbye to them because the, you know,
the games are going to be incredible. The sex is going to be incredible. They'll have girlfriends
and robotics is advancing so far that soon the girlfriends will be robots and they'll be given that boys and girls
are decreasingly having abilities to talk to each other
or flirt or seek each other out. Now that I know boyfriends and girlfriends
are going to be customizable and amazing, you know, it's like, how are we ever going to convince them
to try the real thing instead? So I think what you're doing here
is maximally scaring us about the sort of which is good,
because this is the point about A.I., is that I wear any there's wherever
there's a perverse incentive to give up what is right, it finds a any root. So if there's a there's a pathway
to a solution, a explodes the search space of finding every more and more efficient
route to that to that thing. So if the thing we're moving
towards is the thing, we don't want the AI just going to find
infinite paths to that thing. So if we want to fix
this, we need to change the incentives. Yeah, if, if. If you show me the incentive,
I'll show you the outcome. If we want to change a different outcome, it's also going
involve changing the incentives. And you mentioned the Kids
Online Safety Act and COPPA 2.0, the Children
Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. You want just talk about some of these things
that can basically create a binding for how we change
some of those incentives. Yeah, well, you know, I think the I'm most interested in things that would really just change the game,
not make the game a little less toxic. So the most important thing
I think we could do was find preschools. That's incredibly powerful. We can do that
this year. We got to do it this year. If your kid goes to a school
that they're all going to tell you, yeah, we ban phones. We don't let them use them
during instructional time. They have to hide it in a book
if they want to use a during class. That's that's literally the policy
at most schools in the country OR they have to go to the bathroom
that teachers tell me they go to the bathroom
a lot more than they used to when they once they once
they put in the phone, you know. Anyway, so it's free schools is huge. But the big even bigger,
I think, would be taking the bad law that set the age of Internet
adulthood to 13. That's COPPA was originally supposed to be 16. It was a senator. It was congressman at the time. One of my boss. Markey. Yeah. MARKEY
This ran Congressman Markey at the time, he you know, he was tasked
with the committee that drew up. You know,
if you're going to have all these tech companies taking data from children
at what age can they just take the data without their parents
knowledge or permission? At what age do we treat children
like adults? And he sort of thought, maybe 16. So he proposed to build a 16, but
various lobbies got it pushed down to 13, not for any health reason,
just let's get it down to 13. And then they gutted
any kind of enforcement. So the law is written
so that unless a company has positive knowledge that someone's under age,
they're not liable and not responsible. And so, you know, Mehra used when you say what year were you born, they would suggest 13 is the default
and you can adjust it from there. So the biggest thing that we could do
legislatively, I think, would be to raise the age
from 13 to 16 to open an account, because this isn't
like a free speech issue. This is like at what age
can you do something and give away data without you're not with your parents
knowledge or consent. So I think we focus on that. When can you open an account
without parental permission? That would be incredibly powerful. That's
why I'm so excited about the Florida law. Yeah, because it does
that. It raises the age of 16. Now, there was a carve out
and I'm willing to go with this. There was a carve out that, you know,
because like people say, parental rights, if I want my nine year
old to be on Instagram, I have that right. But the carve out so that if the kid is 14 or 15, they can still open an account,
but only with parent's permission. Okay, I can go for that because that'll
force the companies to figure out how do we get parents permission. They've never even thought about it.
They didn't want to. So that could be a real game. The Florida law, if that passes the legal scrutiny,
if that spreads around the country. And I know that, you know,
you and I have had private conversations with some of these tech companies,
and one of them would say to us, you know, we don't want to have 13 year old users
on our platform, but if the other platform doesn't do it, if they keep going
for the 13 year olds and we have two, too. So this is the kind of thing that when you bind the race for all of them,
then we can live in a healthier world. And, you know, regulation can't get us
all the way to that world where technology plus kids equals stronger, healthier kids,
which is what we really want to get to. But they are important. I also want to call out, you know, folks on our team, our policy team have been working
on these age appropriate design codes, which are worth mentioning,
that in Vermont, they just passed the state Senate
for this age appropriate design code, which creates a
duty of care. Yep. Thank you. Thank you to
all the people who worked so hard on that and the folks that testified
and flew into Vermont to make that happen, creating a duty of care to act in the best
interests of kids and teens, requiring all privacy
settings to fall to the highest level. Honoring kids and teens request to delete
accounts, stop unwanted notifications turn off recommendations systems
so that you know, when the young boys you're mentioning
when they click on some soft porn and then they go to their explore
tab on Instagram and that's just basically porn
all day, all day long because they clicked on
a couple of things. You can turn off
some of those recommendations. So just kind of in closing, kind of what
what do you want in this room to do as we think about answering this problem
comprehensively? If 2024 was the year that
in this sort of timeline of human history, we woke up to this complete and avoidable mess that we have created? Yeah, and we said,
we don't want this to happen anymore. We want to turn it around completely.
Yeah. What some the things that come to mind
that we could be doing right now. So, you know what I imagine
and I think 2024 will be that year when most people don't like the system,
but it's only kept in place by fear. Then the system can hope for very,
very quickly. And we saw that with communism. Everybody hated communism. The communists in the East
Bloc countries in the eighties. And but they thought, you know,
what can we do? Who will be, you know, put in prison? But once some people stood up
and they realized, wait, we actually can knock this down,
then everybody stood up. And in the same way, we're stuck
in a set of collective action problems and we're kept here by fear. But it's the fear of missing out.
We don't want to be the only one. We don't want to be, you know,
we want to make our kid be the only one. So since
since we're in the all these traps where we don't want to be here,
if we can just bust a hole and, you know, and get a bunch of people start going out,
I think everyone else will follow. And the reason
why I'm so excited and optimistic that this is going to happen
is that it started last month in the UK. In the UK, their kids actually use this stuff
even more than ours. Do they have terrible problems in the UK,
terrible mental health problems and parents are fed up and too two mothers sort of put a flag up. They started a WhatsApp group for parents. It's called smartphone free childhood
Echo dot UK, I think is the address,
but just look up smartphone free childhood and like tens of thousands of parents
flocking like yes, yes, let's you know, rally around rally around this
and they have a functioning legislature. So they actually passed laws. They have passed the original age
appropriate design code. Yeah. So
and they're going for phone free schools. So in Britain in this really
it all gelled in February. So it can happen very, very quickly. And I think that it's going to happen here
this year. And what if that sets off a race
to the top where the countries
that start to do this, their kids and their scores of others
kids start going way up and then it's a race
for who can actually pass the laws that actually get
the most enlightened population, which is really what this race is about
anyway. Right? Right. The race to roll out technology. But actually,
you know, that's a good point because a lot of these terrible policies
around recess and the loss of play, all those were motivated
in the 1980s by the report. A nation was a nation at risk with
we are falling behind, we're falling behind, you know, Asian countries and,
you know, European countries. We know we've got to crack down on kids
and make them study more in first grade. So a lot of those stupid and I'm saying say those policies
that ended up depriving kids of childhood, even in the eighties
and nineties, were motivated by the fear that we're falling behind educationally,
as I just showed you. Well, we're not falling behind education because everyone's getting stupid
all around the world. But the first country
to wake up from that and say, How about if we don't make our kids stupid
and would have something to gain? I think competition of the states would
actually be quicker and more intense. So a lot of parents are moving
because they find they just find the situation with
the kids is really toxic. And so if there are states
that are helping to to create a family friendly environment
with more outdoor play, I co-founded a group called Let Grow
with Lenore Skenazy. We haven't mentioned
we focus on the tech side. The other half of it is the decline
of the play based childhood. So if you go to let grow dot org. Lenore Skenazy
wrote this great book, Free Range Kids. She and I started this organization to try to encourage the fourth,
basically the fourth norm there. This is actually the hardest of the collective
action problems to solve. I think we can get parents to do numbers
one and two, we can get schools to do three, but four requires
all of us parents to overcome our fear. And if you let your eight or nine year
old walk three blocks to the store,
they're not going to get kidnaped, but you're going to think
that they're going to. And that's hard to do. And so the way out
of the collective action problem there, we offer this incredible program. So simple. It's a homework assignment. It's called electro experience. In a third grade class. Let's say you assign all the kids to go
home, talk to your parents, figure out something you can do
by yourself you've never done before. Maybe it's walk the dog. Maybe it's go shopping,
get some groceries, maybe make dinner, and the kids do it. And then they come back
and they talk about it and they put it on a little leaf and they put it on a little tree
on the wall in their classroom. And the brilliant thing about it
is that while many parents would not in America would not let their eight year
old walk three blocks to a store, even though they did it
when they were eight or seven six. If it's a homework assignment and everyone's doing it
well, then it's much less. Scary, socially validated.
It's socially validated. And before you know it,
you're seeing eight, nine, ten year
old kids outside unsupervised. And so there are ways out. But this is going to be the hardest one
because we're afraid. We're afraid to let go. So it's going to really require
just a lot more work. So, yeah,
talk to the parents of your kids friends. See if you're on the same page,
see if you can do these norms together. That makes it much easier. I just want to close
before we go to questions by saying, you know, compared to 2013
or even just a few years ago, it is it is never been more believable
that we could do something about this. I think we have had enough. You've seen the recent Senate hearings
where we had actually our own Julie Schauffele,
who's here from Moms Against Media Addiction,
was there with many parents of kids who've lost their kids
to teen suicides from social media. We had this incredibly compelling
Senate hearing, and we have full bipartisan agreement. Yeah, full bipartisan agreement. You say this is one of the few issues
that we actually agree on. We have 40 attorney generals have sued Facebook and Instagram
for the toxic of their products on kids. This is the beginning of the big tobacco
style sort of turn around. Right. And those 40 attorney generals did that
because they had seen the social dilemma and they said,
we've got to do something these things. And so if you sort of see
if this is the beginning of the timeline in which humanity turns this around,
this is that point when Cigarets goes from everybody doing it,
I can never imagine a different way to the huge lawsuits,
the beginning of regulation. There's $1,000,000,000 a year still to this day
going to funding the Truth campaign. Those ads that we saw about tobacco,
$1,000,000,000 a year going to inoculating the population
to the marketing of tobacco companies. Imagine if this issue was getting,
you know, social media more toxic than tobacco. Yes. So imagine a billion, $10 billion a year
going into inoculating the population on these effects. And if the social dilemma was curriculum in every high school in
your book was read everywhere, you could start to see
how a domino cascade of these things potentially turn this around. And you'd want people to anchor
into that possibility because I know
that this looks really impossible, but we have to do everything we can. Yeah, that's right. Let me just add the one you asked me
what was the pushback? And I said, you know, I'm in debate with some other researchers
and it's the moral panic argument. But the you know, by far the biggest
opponent that I have is resignation, because wherever I go, the people say
like, yeah, you know, we agree with you that this is really bad but, you know,
what are you going to do? Like, this is just the way of the future. You know, we can't change
the trains left the station, you know, to which I say if you know,
if the train really left the station. Well, kids and it's going someplace where
it's going to plunge off of a bridge, I think we'd try to call it back. I would. So thank you. Yeah. Totally agree. Yeah. Thank you. All right, so we're going to take some
some questions. What do you think about the distinction
between social networking and social media? What was the what does that say something
the ritual optimism for connecting people. Why was the initial original optimism
for connecting people the unite misplaced? Well, so, you know, in general,
I am a big fan of Robert Wright. He has this book Nonzero, and he looks
at the big history of humanity. And you know, you invent roads
and postal systems and anytime you connect people better, you get this big jump
up in information invention, productivity. It's great. And, you know, and so in
the telephone was an amazing thing. It connected people. But, you know, there was long
distance charges when I was a kid. It didn't connect. It was expensive to call faraway. And so the possibility
which came out in the year 2000, three, 2004 and little in the nineties but
especially, you know, MySpace and Facebook was wow you know talk to anyone for free
put up anything you want it's all free now even video you can now get video
all that stuff was so so amazing and that's just connecting people
But then you add in the algorithms,
the news feed, the performance. It's no longer about connecting people, it becomes about performing at people to get the most views and likes
because that's what raises your prestige. And so and as we know from some of
the things that the founders said, like that was actually their intent,
like they hacked that. Like we you know, we know how to keep you
on by giving you prestige. If you do the thing we want. You to exploiting a vulnerability
in human psychology. That's it. Yep. That's the phrase. Someone ask the question, how do we avoid the conversation Society
on this topic from getting politicized? These are very important topic
both on this and on A.I.. Because if I'm the tech companies
and I want this conversation to not be successful,
I'll turn it into a free speech versus censorship issue
or something like that, which is, by the way, how they played
all the other issues on social media. They turned it into a free speech
versus censorship issue. Well, actually, it's very interesting
because my sense is that there isn't really
a left right divide on this. The legislation is generally bipartisan. There are all kinds of initiatives
in red states and blue states, but it is it is becoming a sort of a left right versus libertarian debate. And, you know, I have a lot of sympathies,
libertarian ideas. We need dynamic economy. So, you know, in general,
I like a lot of libertarian ideas, but in this case, I've had you know, I've had very friendly debates
with libertarians, you know,
And what I find they had a debate. It's online versus Robby Suave,
a really great writer at reason. And my strategy was I'm going
to relentlessly focus on kids. Can you at least grant that the government
has a role to play in protecting kids? I'm not even going to touch the free
speech Questions for adults Twitter. I'm just going to focus on kids. And I actually won the debate in that
this audience, which was mostly libertarians, shifted
more towards me than away from me. So so if we if we try to focus it
in not like censorship on the Internet, but focus it down on, you know, let's just let's let's allow parents
to have the choice. Let's allow parents to to be able to have some control
of what's happening in their family. So I think there are ways to defuze it. It's so far it is a blessing that it is. It is, you know, the four norms
that I proposed, they're bipartisan. They cost nothing
and they're actually not hard to do. And even if I'm wrong,
and this isn't why our kids are depressed, they don't really do any harm. So I am actually optimistic
that these four norms will be adopted. I said, Where do people who want to
join the movement working on this show up, especially those interested in parents
and tech workers. Interested in parents and tech. Work, actually interested for parents
and for tech workers. I see. Yeah, people at work
from those categories. Yeah. Like, well, so the website for my book
is Anxious generation dot com and there we have a movement page,
we have a take action page where we list
there's like 30 organizations in the country and several in the UK. So there are lots of organizations
that are that are working on this. We also, I also urge everyone to support,
let grow or let grow dot org that supports the the place side of things. Mama is one of the organizations, Mothers
Against Mothers. Against Bee Addiction. Yeah. So but if you go to anxious generation dot
com you'll find we have a lot of resources
there for parents for teachers if you want the template of a letter to send to your
your kid's school requesting phone. that's great. So we're trying to make it you know the book just launched and we just got the website up
a couple of weeks ago. It's not complete. We have a lot of resources there already, including links
to organizations to support. I was thinking about that like if you can challenge a school,
how do you challenge a school to go phone free and give them this sort of
how do you exert some more power there? Or just at the bot
if you go to anxious generation dot com at the bottom of that main page,
you kind of walk narrates you through kind of emotionally
what's happening. And at the bottom
there's a place to give your email. I have not started
a nonprofit organization. I don't want to
I started too many already but. We are collecting names and will at least
notify people about events something in your state. So please go there and do it to give your email address
and we'll keep in touch with you. Thanks. Also want to add Center for Humane
Technology has something called a youth toolkit. And so for all the teachers and educators
out there, we have a little mini free curriculum for you to walk students
through persuasive the incentives, the business model
that also has been very helpful to thousands of teachers out there. Thoughts on the wait until eighth pledge. So that the original idea was brilliant. This is Brooke. Brooke Adams, I think is her name is you. Explain what the wait until it. yeah. So the idea is
this is something I think she started it when her kid was in first or second grade
and she saw what was coming and she had the insight
about the collective action problem and she had the insight
that it's hard to it's hard to if if nobody else is doing it,
but it's easy if others are. And so she created a website
where you sign up and once 50 families in your kid's school or school and grade,
I forget once 50 of them take the pledge, then it becomes active,
It's live, everyone's notified and we're all going to agree. The 50 of us in, this school, this grade,
we're going to wait until eighth grade. So it's a brilliant idea. Now, the only problem with it is that in
my my view is we have to think about this school
like elementary is its own community. Middle school is its own community. High school is its own community. So if you're going to flood phones
into eighth grade, which is middle school, that's going to devastate
the middle school. Right. So so I think should be wait
until ninth now. But but she is she. Has seventh grade that are almost there
to eighth are going to see it. And they're going. Yeah, no, you it you've got to clear
all of the stuff out of middle school. Early puberty is
when the greatest damage is done. There's some studies showing that the biggest correlations between social media
use and and mental health problems is between 11 and 13 for girls. And so we got to just
get this all out of out of middle school. and just to say and that's
and she even though she kept the name wait until eighth, she now has it's now
clear it's wait until the end of eighth. So that is at least four right? So that's at least the right idea. Wait until the end of eight weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's I think we got it. We got it. We're done. We got the questions.
Thank you all for coming. We're going to be around for book signing. Yes, it a be fine, thanks to everyone. Okay. All right. Okay. Okay. you.
