How to Protect Your Child’s Mental Health from the Dangers of Social Media with Dr. Jonathan Haidt

Mark Hyman, MD

Full Transcript

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Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy.

Jonathan Haidt
Even if we never get any help from our legislators, which is quite possible at the national level, you can actually give your kid a childhood in which technology is is sort of put back in its place as a feature of life, not as the dominant factor in life. And you can do that with summer camp, schools, and, oh, encourage your kids to play sports, team sports.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at this scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out function health for real time lab insights. If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your routine, visit my website, supplement store, for a summary of my favorite and tested products.

Welcome to Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm doctor Mark Hyman, and that's pharmacy with an f, a place for conversations that matter. And if you've been concerned about the increasing levels of depression, anxiety in our kids about the role of social media in their lives and how it's affecting them, and the greater effect on our society, democracy, and so many of the challenges we're facing because we can't seem to have a civil conversation. You're gonna be very interested in this conversation with Jonathan Haidt, who's a social psychologist at NYU Stern Business School. He has PhD from University of Pennsylvania, 1992.

He's basically been on a rampage to wake up America to the harms that are resulting from our overuse of social media, particularly in our children, and also the lack of ability to have a constructive dialogue, to have a civil discourse in society. And he's just a prolific writer, author, researcher, and it's we delve deep into the conversation about why we have an anxious generation. He's written a new book called The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, published in March of 24. He's been basically listed by Prospect Magazine as one of the world's 50 top thinkers. He's given 4 TED Talks.

His work is really consequential today. He's probably been everywhere you've heard him, seen him, I hope. If not, you need to pay attention. But today, we get into a deep conversation about what happened with the advent of Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and what that did to our kids, what it's doing to our kids, how it's affecting their levels of anxiety and depression, which are going up in an absolute way that's verifiable, not just correlation. He also talks about the ways in which it's disrupting our society at large and talks about some of the ways we can start to change our behaviors, our policies, our childbearing practices, and it's actually happening.

It's actually happening. So I think you're gonna love this conversation with Jonathan Haidt. Let's jump right into it and get started because it's a good one. Well, John, welcome to the Doctor. Sarsi podcast.

I've been following work for a long time and been very moved by your efforts to change our thinking around the way in which we need to deal with our childhood in America and increasingly around the globe because it's driving increasing rates of anxiety, depression, and that there's real connections to social media that have been evident from your research. And also that this isn't just a correlation, that there may be causal factors that are identified and that the prevalence of anxiety, depression and suicide among adolescents and children is dramatically increasing, doubling, tripling often. And it's it's not just an artifact. So I'd love to sort of have you share how you kind of got into this, why this is such an important conversation now. And then and then we'll sort of dive deep into some other factors that I think are also driving increasing rates of anxiety and depression, including our ultra processed diets, which Oh, yes.

I talked about a lot on the podcast.

Jonathan Haidt
Yes. Oh, great. Well, thanks, Mark. Thanks so much for having me on. I've been so caught up for the last year in debates with other researchers about the mental health effects.

Does heavy social media use cause declines in mental health, especially for girls? But there are so many other effects. First of all, it's not just social media. It's the whole phone based childhood, and it's not just mental health. There's also their educational outcomes, their cognitive developmental outcomes, and their physical health outcomes, and I have not been part of any conversation about the physical health outcomes.

I'm especially looking forward to talking about that with you. As for how I got into this, so this began as a side project. I'm a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business, and my main research is on moral psychology and how that helps us to understand, political our political life, left versus right, polarization, incivility, all the craziness that America is going through now. But along the way, something strange began happening to college students in 2014. It wasn't there in 2012.

College students in 2012 were all millennials, and mental health stats had been pretty steady for about 10 or 15 years. And college students did what we think college students do. You know, they wanted to go out, you know, drinking and have fun and but the students coming in 2014, 2015 were different, and it showed up with very high rates of fragility, fear, concerns about words and books and speakers, as though ideas were going to be were going to hurt them, ideas would be violence, and so my friend, Greg Lukianoff, first diagnosed this problem. He runs the Foundation For Individual Rights and Expression, and together, we wrote up an article, in the Atlantic originally called The Coddling of the American Mind about how overprotection, we we'd overprotect the kids. We weren't exposing them to normal toughening experiences, and as a result, it's as though they have no skin.

Some of them seem to be just so easily hurt. We're not helping them by protecting them. And in that article, we just noted in passing, well, you know, the timing kind of works out for Facebook. Like, you know, social media, this generation, they're the 1st to kind of hit puberty in the social media era, but we left it at that because we didn't know in 2015. So then Greg and I wrote it up into a book because the problem kept getting worse and worse and worse, And now we begin to have more information.

Jean Twenge had published a a book called, iGen, and she pointed out, at least the correlations, that, heavy social media use is associated with depression and anxiety, whereas any activity that puts you in in in a in a group, in a real world group, as she pointed out, sports and religion. Teens who were doing sports, team sports, or religion

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Jonathan Haidt
Were protected from this. But the ones who were spending a lot of time on their phones and not with other people, they are the ones who were getting most depressed. Now, again, that's a correlation. And also she had these amazing graphs about the timing, showing, you know, mental health is steady, steady, steady, and then all of a sudden, right around 2012, 2013, you get a hockey stick. You get numbers going up.

Now Jean, in her book, she only had, like, 2 or 3 years of data showing these numbers going up because it takes a couple years before before the data comes out. So I thought, wow, this looks really scary, but, you know, if these numbers go down next year, gene's gonna look awfully silly, and they didn't go down. They went up, and the next year they went up, and the next year they went up, and they've just been going up. I mean, sometimes it'll level off for a year too, but it's been going up and up since 2013. So we have a major, and it's not just America.

It's all the English speaking countries for sure. It's most it seems to be most of the developed world. Across the developed world, we're seeing suddenly in the early 2010s, teens are getting more depressed and anxious, and so this was a side project for me. But as I began to dig into it and to realize that it's international, to realize that more and more studies are coming out showing not just a correlation, but we're beginning to get experiments. Experiments where you randomly assign 1 group of college students to reduce their social media for a month.

Another group doesn't. You see what happens. So once you have correlational studies and experimental studies, and you have massive eyewitness testimony from Gen Z, it's go go find me. I cannot find find me an essay on online. Find me an essay anywhere by a member Gen Z who defends the phones, who says, Oh no, it's been great for us.

Oh no, the phone based life has been great. Don't take it away from us. You can't find that, but you find thousands of essays about how it destroyed me. It destroyed my net generation. It destroyed my childhood, and we have massive eyewitness testimony from the teachers.

The teachers all hate the phones. I mean, but, you know, 90% in surveys say this is a problem. 80, 90%. Same thing for school principals. So we have all these different kinds of evidence converging on the fact that this really rapid movement of childhood from normal sort of play and social interaction onto the phones is not just a correlate of the collapse of mental health around the world, teen mental health, but a cause.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, you know, I think there was a sort of an attempt to rebut this by, Candace Hodgers in Nature, and you, on x, basically reply to that, kind of rebutting a lot of what she said, which was that there was no cause of evidence. And you talked about a lot of the data that you cite, which is, you know, both experimental and observational data that kind of lay out the reality that this is not just some correlation.

Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. That's right. So a few pieces to the argument. The first, as I said, there is experimental evidence, and, a meta analysis came out, 6 or 8 months ago showing, yeah, some experiments show a big effect or effect in effect, some experiments don't. It's kind of up in the air, but my research partner and I, Zach Rausch, were reanalyzing all the experiments, and actually when you remove the short term experiments, this is the key, some of the experiments ask people to get off social media for a day or 2 days, and if you're addicted to something, you know, do you think quitting heroin or cocaine is a good idea?

Well, you know, yeah, but if you quit it for a day or 2, it's gonna be pretty bad. You have to wait. It takes, you know, 2, you know, Anna Lembke says 3 or 4 weeks, but, you know, I think we're seeing effects by, you know, by a week or 2. You're getting over the the roughest part. So the trick is when you remove the one day studies and you just look at those that went longer than a week, overwhelmingly they find that there are benefit there are mental health benefits to getting off social media.

So Audger said that I have only correlational evidence, which is false. I keep saying, no. Look. Here's the experimental evidence. And the other thing that I think is very powerful, is that this happened around the world at the same time.

And, you know, most people say, oh, Hyatt is trying to make us bark up the wrong tree. We're gonna be looking into phones and banning phones for little kids, when what we should be looking at is, you know, x, y, and z. And x, y, and z is usually inequality and climate change and racism and Donald Trump and things like that. There's usually something about America.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Probably all of it adds to the soup for sure. But

Jonathan Haidt
Well, fine. But but but why what changed in Obama's second term? Why was it that during Obama's 1st term with the financial crisis, things were fine for teenagers? Mental health was normal. It didn't change in his 1st term.

Then all of a sudden, in his 2nd term, what? Suddenly, like, racism and or, school shootings. That's the other thing that people say. 2012 was the Newtown massacre, so that does fit the timing because after that, kids had lockdown drills. Fine.

If it was just the US, if if 2012 was the turning point in the US but not anywhere else, then I'd say, yeah. You know what? You could be right about that, but the fact that teenage girls start checking into psychiatric emergency wards at much higher rates, not just in the US, but in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, that's just not compatible with any other theory. No one can come up with another explanation that happened that fits internationally other than the great rewiring of childhood that happened between 2010 and 2015.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And that rewiring that you're talking about essentially is the advent of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram that then drove

Jonathan Haidt
Not well, we have to be more more specific because Facebook comes out in 2004, and or 2003. That's

Dr. Mark Hyman
when they put the like and the share buttons. Right?

Jonathan Haidt
That's right. So so we have let's just trace it out. And, actually, this is very, very important for people understanding why this time is different. So the Internet comes out. The public gets access to it in the mid 19 nineties.

You know? I remember the first time I saw a web browser, it was AltaVista, and I almost dropped to the floor in shock and awe. Like, you mean I can just, like, ask for something and it comes to me instantly? I don't have to get my car and go to the library, like, anything, like, omniscient?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Crazy.

Jonathan Haidt
You know? Yeah. It's it was totally crazy. It was magical. And in the nineties, the teenagers who were Gen z, I mean, who were millennials, they took to the Internet.

They were on AOL and, you know, AIM and and their mental health was fine. It the early Internet was decentralized. It was fun. It was exploratory. It was amazing, And so we all think, well, this is good, and our kids are spending time on it, and that's good, we think.

And then you get into the 2000s. Now remember, everything's dial up, so there's no video, slow connection speeds. It's just like text. You didn't have photographs early on. Now you get into the 2000s.

Now you get fiber optic cable laid everywhere in the world, and things speeds are speeding up, and you get social media. Now we're beginning to get a more centralized Internet. People can't many young people won't know that the Internet was not dominated by 3 or 4 companies, for the 1st decade or so. It was a wide open space. Now, you know, 3 or 4 companies basically control our kids' consciousness.

You know, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, a few others account for, yeah, I I think the majority of what they're doing with their day, for for a lot of

Dr. Mark Hyman
people. It's it's basically basically TikTok, Google, Meta, and,

Jonathan Haidt
That's right. That's right. And especially the short videos. That's yeah. X is not so important for for adolescents.

It it's there, and it's important for democracy, but it's not x does not seem to be playing a role in the mental health issues. It's the short videos, and it is, video content especially. Anyway, so, so 2003, you get Facebook, but it's only for college students at first, and it's not particularly toxic. In the late 2000, you begin to get so you get the iPhone in 2007, which is an amazing digital Swiss army knife. It's not harmful.

There are apps, but there's no app store. No push notifications. So all the way up to 28 2008, 2009, the the situation is not particularly toxic. It's getting interesting. It's getting more engaging, but it's not it's not like what we know now.

And teen mental health is fine up until 2011. There's no sign of a problem before 2011. In 2009, you get the like and the retweet buttons, and now Facebook and, and Twitter are able to algorithmize everything because you get share buttons as well. So, retweet, share. So so now social media becomes much more about the news feed.

Before then, it was called they were called social networking systems. You just connect with people. You see their page. They see yours. Connecting people is generally a good thing, but now it's about the news feed, which is algorithmicized to fit you and keep you on.

Facebook literally rewarded its engineers for increasing engagement time. That was the metric. If you can keep people on longer

Dr. Mark Hyman
You get paid for.

Jonathan Haidt
You get a bonus. You get a bonus. Yeah. And so, you know, very smart people, they did it. They found ways to keep young people especially on longer, and that was the news feed and the algorithms.

Much more emotionally engaging content is selected. So in twin in the beginning of 2010, very few teens have a smartphone. They're mostly flip phones. They're using Facebook on their dad's computer. They don't have high speed Internet.

They're, it's not dial up at that point, but it's not it's not very fast. They don't have Instagram. It doesn't exist on January 1, 2010. There's no front facing camera on January 1, 2010. In 2010, you get the front facing camera and Instagram.

Takes a couple years before everyone has it. In 2012, face Facebook buys Instagram. Doesn't change it at first, but that's when it gets huge publicity. That's when girls social life, teen girls social life moves on to Instagram. It wasn't on it.

It wasn't there before. The point is that by 2015, the great majority of teens in developed countries have a smartphone with a front facing camera and an Internet, in, Instagram account and high speed Internet with an unlimited data plan, in 2010, you could not spend 10 hours a day on your flip phone. I mean, that would just be hell. But in 2015, you can spend 10 hours a day on your smartphone, and now that's about the average. 8 to 10 hours a day is what teens now spend on on their phones.

That includes video games, but, but it's mostly phone, and it's mostly consuming videos. So that's why I call it the great rewiring of childhood. In 2010, kids use flip phones to connect and see each other in person. In 2015, that's largely what's not gone, but it it reduces greatly. And life is now, you sit on your bed scrolling, and then your mom calls you down for dinner.

That's now that's a lot of teen life now.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's it's pretty depressing just to talk about this because it's, you know, it's happening almost invisibly in a way that's sort of at a subtext in our culture and the consequences haven't fully been realized in downstream effects on the physical and mental health of the kids who are now growing up in this generation and the consequences of that for their behavior. And I I think the data is pretty striking. I mean, the, the data basically showed that that this is JAMA Pediatrics. From 2,005 to 2,017, the rate of adolescents reporting symptoms of major depression increased by 52%.

Those 12 to 17 who experienced a major depression in that same period went from 8.7% to 15.7% from 2,005 to 2019. And the heavy use of social media also has been correlated in Lancet papers and others, and then to be really correlated or or even potentially causal with this. And so the cost of this are staggering. I mean, just just economically, the cost of depression and mental health is the major driver of, the total cost of care to society. Not not actually hospitalization and certain medication, but just when you count disability and loss of quality of life years, it it's a single biggest driver of of cost to society.

And and and it's just beginning. It feels like we're just at the beginning of this. And what's what's coming around the corner is even worse because we haven't fully realized the consequences of what's just happened over the last, I mean, 10 years. Right? 10, 15 years.

It's it's very quick. And your, you know, your work really sort of underscores that this is an issue, but you also talk about, you know, what needs to be done to kind of solve it. And and some of the things you talk about, are are seem easy, but they also seem ambitious. In other words, getting phones out of schools, no phones for teenagers, until they're 16, no smartphones. You know, making sure kids get out and play.

I mean, all the stuff that we didn't, we were kids. I mean, you, you and I are about the same age. And I mean, I, you know, I, I was like 7 years old and had my bicycle and left after school and my parents didn't see me till dinner and run around the neighborhood. I mean, and and yet, you know, they seem very simple in terms of these these solutions, but I I can't imagine how you how you imagine they're going to get implemented because of their resistance and and the change in behavior.

Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. No. Not no. It's actually amazingly easy. I'm shocked at how easy this is.

I've been involved

Dr. Mark Hyman
in a

Jonathan Haidt
lot of efforts at social change. I ran a gun control group in college, a hand gun control group in in college, and that was completely hopeless. We made made no progress. It's very difficult to persuade people of things. But here, the reason why we're gonna be successful where we're being successful is that we don't have to persuade people.

They already know. Almost everyone who's a parent sees this. Almost all the principals and teachers see it. The child's psych everyone sees it, so I don't have to persuade anyone. What I had to do in my book is give a clear diagnosis.

Here is exactly what happened, when it happened, and why. Here are the psychological mechanisms. Here are the developmental pathways get that get blocked. Here's the way puberty works. Here's the way the brain changes during puberty.

So people needed a kind of a more complete understanding of what's happening. They needed to understand the history, how the Internet was amazing in the nineties, but the Internet we have now is nothing like the Internet we had in the nineties. And then people the key thing that I think I did in the book that's really bringing about collective action is I analyzed this all in terms of collective action problems. Why is it that 10 year olds now have phones, have their own smartphone? And the answer is because that your 10 year old comes home and said in 5th grade and says, mom, everyone else has a phone.

I I need I need this I need an iPhone. And you say, well, no. But I I gave you a phone watch or I gave you a a flip phone. You know, you can call me if you need. No.

No. No. Everyone has an iPhone. They're making fun of me. And then so you then you give in, and you give your kid an iPhone.

Well, once 90% of the kids have an iPhone, then everyone has to have 1 or they will be left out. So we got into this so deeply because it's a collective action problem. And this is the the the key to why it's so painful for kids because social media is socially addicted. Now it is biologically addictive to some heavy users. It their, you know, dopamine circuits get rewired.

So for some, we can say it's biologically addictive. But for the great majority of teens, they're on it not because their brain says they must be on it to feel normal, but because everyone else is on it. They can't quit. I talk to my students at NYU. They waste huge amounts of time.

They don't wanna waste all this time. I say, why don't you just delete it? I can't because everyone else is on it. I have to know what's going on. So these things are socially addictive, and so what I did in the book is I said, once we understand the nature of collective action problems where if everyone is on it and you step off alone, you bear a cost and you don't make anything better for anyone else.

But what if 10% of people get off? Well, now they have each other. Now they're not alone. They have each other. And then now it becomes possible to imagine not having a phone in 5th grade.

And now some parents will say, no. You're not you know, there's a pledge called the wait until 8th pledge, which is actually wait until after 8th, wait until 9th, really, because my argument has been we have to get kids through middle school. Middle school is early puberty, really important period of brain development, the worst possible period to hook kids up to TikTok and have weirdos around the world being their source of cultural information. We've got to keep this out of kids' lives, at least until high school. So, you know, the wait until 8th pledge is a way to solve the collective action problem.

Parents, sign up when their kid is in elementary school. They say I'm not gonna get my kid a phone until 9th grade. Smartphone. You can give them a phone watch. You can give them a flip phone.

And then once 10 people, I think it's or 50 people in each school sign up, something like that, then the pledge goes into effect. And so this is why we are being successful, and I, you know, I used to say we're going to be successful, but that was back in March April. Now it's clear. We are being successful, and the reason That's remarkable. Is because is because schools all over the country, everyone hated the phones.

I mean, it's impossible to teach when I mean, imagine when you and I were kids, if they said, you know, you can bring in your TV set. You can bring in your VCR. You can bring in your painting, your paint by numbers kit. You can bring the you bring in anything, everything. Have it right with you in your pocket on your desk while I'm trying to teach you.

Go ahead. Like, insanity. Yeah. So so phone free schools is happening very, very fast. Los Angeles school districts is, are going phone free.

New York City is gonna announce in a couple of weeks. The state of Virginia, I forget which other states have done truly phone free. Some states just say, oh, you can't use your phone in class, which is nonsense because then you you have to use it between classes, so that's terrible. But some states are going truly phone free from bell to bell. You turn in your phone in the morning.

This is happening at lightning pace. I have never seen social change happen this fast. So on schools, we already are successful. Every day, I'm getting notes from parents saying, thank you. My I I you your book gave me the courage to let my 7 year old ride his bicycle to his friend's house or ride it up and down our street, and now other kids are riding their bicycles.

So it's a collective action problem, and parents are ready for change. Not all, but a lot are ready for change, and once they start and their kids are out having fun together, more parents are gonna say, oh, it's kinda creepy for you to just be sitting here all day long scrolling. Why don't you go out and play? And I think that's gonna happen over the next year or 2.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's incredible, John. I mean, I think I think, it's hard to imagine something happening that fast, but it seems like there's a sort of global awareness, but that there's a problem. And you point a path to a solution that people are jumping on. And the interesting thing is what's going to happen, you know, between when they leave school and they go home and they go to bed. That's it.

Because that doesn't stop the problem. They have a smartphone when they get home. So do you think that

Jonathan Haidt
No. But it does. It kinda does. It kinda does because the the issue with the smartphone is that you have it with you always. And so, because anything you can do on a smartphone, you can do on a computer.

If you have a laptop at home, and, you know, most nowadays, you know, middle school kids, they need a computer access to a computer. So if you have you know, ideally, you know, if parents have, like, one desktop computer in the living room or the kitchen or someplace, I think that's great. That's very safe. The kid's not gonna get into porn. They're not gonna get seduced by sextortionist rings.

So having access to a computer is great, but that's just gonna be for, you know, an hour or 2 a day at most. When you have the phone, you can get 16 hours a day, and that's what some of the kids are getting. 16 hours a day. How is that possible? Because when they're on the bus, they're doing this.

When they're in class, they're doing this. When they're on the bathroom, they're doing this. One teenager told me now that iPhones are waterproof, kids are taking them into the shower so you can keep scrolling or doing things while you're taking a shower. Okay? So so can't we just delay that till high school?

Can't we just let kids get through early puberty without having that?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's it's it's quite it's quite striking. You know, I think you you talk a lot about kids, but I would also sort of point out that there's been a significant increase in depression and anxiety among adults as well. It's not just kids.

Jonathan Haidt
And I'm wondering talk about that. Wait. Wait. Just let let's just tell me what you've seen because what what Zach, Rausch, and I do is we have all these graphs of all the datasets we can find, all the longitudinal studies. Some of them allow us to break it up by age, and what we generally find is that when you track levels of at least I've only done depression anxiety.

I haven't done everything. When you look at depression anxiety, for people over 40 or 50, there's no change. They are Of course, we're all We all feel frazzled. We feel there's too much stuff coming in. We've We're all hooked on our phones.

But levels of depression and anxiety are not really rising for older people. For Gen z, it's a hockey stick. Gen z is born 1996 and later. Hockey stick, huge. For the millennials, it's in between, and I I I need to try to break it up by early millennial versus late millennial.

It might just be that those born in millennial generation is usually 1981 through 1995, And it might just be that it's the millennials who were born in the early nineties. They had this stuff when they were, you know, late teenagers. It might just be them. But as far as I can see, for depression anxiety, it's really a Gen z and a little bit millennial thing. It's not a Gen x and older thing.

But you tell me, do you know do you know specific I

Dr. Mark Hyman
mean, the WHO basically says between 20, 2005 and 2015, there was about an 18% increase in depression. In kids, it was more. Right? In youth, it was 52% between 22,005 and 2017. So it's certainly more in kids.

I agree.

Jonathan Haidt
And and it's much more in girls. Wait. So so the the who you can say, if you look at a nation, you'll see an increase. But if you oh, you must always break this stuff up by gender always because you sometimes the effect is entirely limited to girls. Sometimes it's just bigger in girls.

So, if you take so the the increase for younger females is gigantic. The increase for other groups is not nearly so large.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And and how how do you sort of see this playing out in the future of our country and society and as kids sort of are hooked on social media, on the Internet that's affecting them? And I hopefully, your efforts will will actually lead to sort of a reduction of this because of the prohibitions in school. But, you know, where do you see this going? I mean, it just it just seems like we're heading kinda a slow motion disaster.

Jonathan Haidt
We were heading in a slow motion disaster. And by 2019, you know, when I was really beginning to get into this, and Jean Twenge was writing about this, we were beginning to point out, like, wait. We we just did this gigantic uncontrolled experiment, and now the the results are in. Look. Things are going really, really badly, 2019, and then COVID hits, And every you know?

In 2019, I was saying what kids really, really need is a lot less time on screens and a lot more time outside playing. That's what we need to do. When COVID comes, what do we do? How about a lot more time on screens and no time outside playing because we thought you could get COVID outdoors and you can't touch people. You know?

You we got it all wrong with kids. We really made COVID so much worse for kids than it than it had to be, but that confused us all. And, of course, the kids were on screens all day long. You know? They had to be on Zoom, and it was really discouraging and dispiriting, but that's what they had to do.

And so now that COVID has receded, now we can see the wreckage. We see the gigantic rates. And, you know, while numbers have come some numbers come down a little bit from the peak in COVID, but in a sense, they're really just returning to the trend line that would have been if COVID never happened. So, so now it's become becoming obvious. So I don't think it's gonna be a slow motion disaster from here on in.

I think we're at a cultural turning point, and we're now seeing this is not light playful stuff that lets kids be creative. This is not that. That's what Facebook and others have sold us on. Sure. They can do that.

That is part of the experience. That is true. But, you know, a lot of it is talking with strange men who are trying to get photos of you in a bikini or who are trying to sick start you or trying you know, people trying to sell you things. Like, it's complete insanity that we let you know, we're as I say in the book, we have overprotected our children in the real world. We have under protected them online.

Both were mistakes. We have to reverse both, and we're going to. So I think we're at a cultural turning point where we're seeing this is not this light playful thing. This is not the early Internet that I remember from my twenties. This is we need to think of this much more like alcohol or tobacco or automobiles or gambling or strip clubs or whatever.

There are all sorts of things that we let adults do, but we don't let children do. And in general, the reason why we put age gates on, the reason why we block children from doing things is either sex, violence, addiction, or physical harm, or other kinds of illness. Those are five reasons. If something's dangerous for kids or it's sex and violence or addiction, We we tend to say, no. You know, 12 year olds can't do this.

Even 16 year olds can't do this. You have to be 18 or 21 to do this. Social media hits all 5. You get addiction. You get extraordinary I mean, the amount of hardcore pornography that some kids are watching is unbelievable.

So, you know, you get you you get addiction, sex, violence, you know, beheading videos, these YouTube there's one called the gauntlet. Are you tough enough to watch 20 videos that get increasingly horrific? People being dismembered while still alive? I mean, it's horrible, horrible stuff. Anyway, so I think we're at a cultural turning point where we're gonna see, this is just wildly inappropriate for 10 year olds.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and and Thena speaks to a sort of a bigger disconnect in society. And I think, you know, the the whole social cohesion that we had felt like we were all Americans that, you know, that we have some differences of opinions, but they were all sort of rowing in the same direction has now been completely assembled. And, and it, it seemed as though we're in this polarized divisive society where people aren't able to have civil discourse. They're not able to have difference of opinion, you know, non John Stuart Mills basic thesis on Liberty that we should basically be able to have dissent and have different opinions and controversy. Yeah.

Are are gone out the window. And we canceled for saying something. We get, you know, ripped apart on social media. We get, shamed and blamed. And it's it's it's, it's it's a little bit terrifying to navigate.

I mean, I I I feel this myself when I when I'm thinking about do I wanna post my opinion on my social media platform about x y topic? I think twice about it because I don't wanna, you know, make make myself a target of attacks. I don't wanna offend people. I also don't wanna, you know, be able to sort of, create conflict where I do the need to be. But I also feel like it's a, you know, it's almost impossible to have a conversation and be curious.

Jonathan Haidt
You know? That's right. Yeah. So let's understand. So we can put this 2 ways.

I'll start by by looking at different kinds of connection, and then we'll talk about historically what happened. So in general, in the course of human history, connecting people has been a good thing. So building roads, you know, generally has been a good thing. You know, trade has has helped bring, you know, brings up civilization. The postal service was a great innovation.

You know, it can be abused. You know, there can be scams through the mail, but the postal service connecting people is really good. That, you know, telephones, telegraph, all these things, they had downsides. But in general, the world has gotten smarter and more prosperous when we've stepped up a level in connectivity. I think you could say the same about email for all that it kinda dominates our lives now and there's too much of it.

You know, this is like, I can connect to you for free, and I can send you information for free. Like, this is all good. And and and from the point of a democratic theory, like, so much of of of in the social sciences about what does it take to have a good democracy and what are some of the processes. And so connecting people generally is good, but what if you connect them in this way? You can whatever you say, when as you say it, you're saying it from the center of the Roman Colosseum, and the fans the stands are full of people who wanna see blood.

And so you say something, and then 50 people come out to fight you over it. And they're hacking away at you, and they're trying to stab you and throw nets over you and burn you. And, you know, and and, you know, maybe you survive, but and then next. And and that lasts for 15 seconds, And then someone else says something, and then people kind of different set come out to try to kill him, and that lasts for 15 seconds. You know, and every day there's a few big ones that everyone is tuning into.

Is this good for democracy or bad for democracy? Well, obviously, this is nothing like the kind of connectivity we need to have the wisdom of crowds, to have the the the sort of the John Stuart Mill wisdom. He, of course, was an 18th century British philosopher who said, he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that, that we have to hear our critic. We have to hear our opponents in order to know even know what we think, in order to know what's right. We have to be challenged.

So all that goes out the window. So that is one of the reasons why I'm extremely alarmed about the future of American democracy in particular, and in fact I was writing a book on that. That's what I set out to do was write a book called Life After Babble, Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share. And I got a contract to write that book in 2021, and I started working on it 2022. And I thought, okay.

Let me start this off. You know, I have all this data on what happened to teenagers when they moved their social life onto social media. Let me write chapter 1. Like, let's trace that. What happened to them?

And so I I wrote up this chapter, and it was so shocking. And with all these graphs, and then I found it wasn't just America. It was all over the you know, it was many, many countries in the world. Then I said, okay. Well, I can't just leave it at that.

I can't just say, here's chapter 1. Gigantic youth mental health crisis all over the world. Now let's move on to democracy. You know, what happened when we moved our so, you know no. I I I need to explain, like, how how does this change?

How does it affect childhood? What what what did kids have to do in childhood? So I wrote chapter 2. And then I said, I I I need a whole chapter for the girl story because girls are really suffering here, and and it's different from boys. So I need a chapter on the girls, and I knew a lot about that.

I had a lot of research on that, and I wrote that. And then I said, oh, I can't you know, I have to figure out the story for boys because they're also in big trouble, not quite in the same way, and we can come back to that. So once I had 4 chapters in this democracy book, I realized, wait. This is completely insane. I can't I can't do, like, a, you know, a 500 page book that comes out in 3 years.

I have to get I have to split the book in 2. I have to write one book on on what's hap what social media and and the phone based life is doing to young people, And then the anxious generation. Democracy book. Yeah. Exactly.

So that became those four chapters, that became the core of the anxious generation, and I was gonna return to writing Life After Babble this fall after the anxious generation came out, but things are going so well and change is happening so fast and so much research is needed to guide that change and to respond to the critics who say, oh, it's just correlation. Oh, you know, there's nothing to see here. Oh, the kids are alright. That I've decided to spend the next 3 years just doing this. I'm gonna really focus on this.

I think, we can change childhood around the world in 3 years. Not completely. I just mean change our expectations. 3 years from now, it'll be as absurd to give a a 10 year old, Instagram and TikTok as it is to give them, you know, a cigar or a marijuana joint or a, you know, a day in a casino. It's just obviously not a thing that you do.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. The executives of Coca Cola don't feed their kids Coca Cola.

Jonathan Haidt
Exactly. That's right. And the and the people in Silicon Valley don't let their kids use the products, and a lot of them send their kids to the Waldorf School where there is zero technology in the classroom. It's all analog. They have a computer room, so you can learn how to program.

But, yeah, the fact that, you know, drug dealers don't give the drugs to their kids is, I think, pretty good evidence that the drugs are bad for kids.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. My kids went to Waldorf. We didn't have television

Jonathan Haidt
Oh, wow.

Dr. Mark Hyman
At all.

Jonathan Haidt
Tell me so tell me about it. Tell me so is it really true that there was no technology in the classroom? It was all analog.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, my kids are older, so they're in their thirties. But the yes. It's all it's still it's still is yeah. Still, it's totally analog. I mean, it's it's it's a little bit, I would say, not Luddite, but there's elements where it's a little bit slow.

And I think they're focused too much on our music and not enough on the intellectual development of the kids and reading and writing

Jonathan Haidt
Okay. Math.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so we're but I but I but it depends on the kid. Some kids flourish in that. Other kids don't. You know, my daughter was kind of bored, and so she would bring books. She wouldn't have her smartphone, but she would literally bring books and read them under the desk.

Jonathan Haidt
So she was she

Dr. Mark Hyman
was a war. But but I think the whole idea of not having technology, making kids play, making them be in nature, that was a huge value for me, for my children. And I think,

Jonathan Haidt
you

Dr. Mark Hyman
know, it was something that that I think, you know, impacted them. So they're they're not in that world. But I think, you know, what I'm kind of really concerned about is, is, you know, the the other piece of this that we really haven't touched on, which is, you know, what are potential other causes of this social sort of disruption we're seeing now and the fragmentation. And, you know, I spent a lot of my my life work looking at food and the food system and its impact on our health and not just physical health, mental health. And then I think when you look at the data on this, it's it's quite striking that that there is evidence that that because about 67% of children's diet is ultra processed food.

Jonathan Haidt
Oh, my God. Is that you're talking calorie wise or weight?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Calorie wise. Calorie wise.

Jonathan Haidt
Calorie wise. 60 2 thirds.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Sixty 7

Jonathan Haidt
percent of adults.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Incredible. And ultra processed foods are really too new in the last, you know, 50 years. They're basically deconstructed science projects that don't have the same ability to influence the body as real food, and they actually cause dysregulation of neurochemistry. They create brain inflammation. They're they they lead to massive nutritional deficiencies like omega threes and b vitamins, which are essential for mood and cognitive function.

They drive inflammation, which creates brain inflammation. And we now know that the inflammation of the brain is actually what underlies a lot of anxiety and depression. It causes metabolic dysfunction and blood sugar, which affects the health of gut microbiome is affected by it, all but just linked to mental health issues. So it seems to me that there's these two forces, you know, our food system and the and the sort of advent of social media that have really kind of collided in this moment in time to drive massive disruption. And I think it's just anxiety, depression in kids.

I think it's just the greater the greater social disconnection we're seeing and the inability to have civil discourse, inability to actually talk to people and neighbors, talk to neighbors. It's just it's it's something that's deeply concerning to me. And and I I think, you know, I don't know how we deal with the the the part around the the sort of divisiveness in the way that we have this sort of digital persuasion economy that that engages people based on their worst based instincts and and, you know, tax our limbic system all day long. And I don't know how I mean, what you're doing seems to be like a first step around children, but it seems like a bigger bigger problem in society. So and a bigger threat to democracy.

So I'm wondering how you think about, 1, this this sort of how food intersects with what you're talking about and also how as a society we begin to think differently about, what we need to do both on a policy level and an individual level to sort of combat this and start to create bridges and connections. Because for longevity, you know, I think we talked about a little bit before the podcast. You know, one of the key things for longevity and for health is your social relationships and connections, that that that that you're more likely to, for example, have a heart attack, BOBs, have some serious illness, or die if you're lonely than almost anything else. It's like it's worse than smoking cigarettes. Right.

So and and our society just sort of fosters that level of disconnection. So maybe you could sort of chat a little bit about your thoughts.

Jonathan Haidt
Oh, I'd love to. My god. This is what I've been thinking about for 20 years now. So first, let me say, for all you know, this is an incredibly exciting time to be a social scientist. Of course, it's exciting to be in robotics or AI.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Society is a disaster.

Jonathan Haidt
Going to hell. No. I mean, it's we have complicated problems that intersect in the ways that you were just saying. Like, they this is not just a one factor story. There are all these things going on.

So let me just say a few things. One is, so Zach, Rausch, and I, we maintain a document. So we have all these Google documents that lay out all the studies we can find, and if listeners go to anxious generation.com/reviews, we have all kinds of documents. One of them is the alternate hypotheses document, because for 5 years now, people have been saying, oh, no. It's not that.

It's, you know, it's it's SSRIs. It's the fact that suddenly kids are getting SSRIs. That's what's causing this. Or they say or it's, you know, electromagnetic radiation or it's you know, there's all these ideas people have. And in that, there are 2, I think, that really stand out, the the 2 that you mentioned.

1 is the ultra processed food. That does I'm hearing more and more about that. Sapien Labs just had they put out a report, I think, last year showing a huge, you know, huge correlational study, but around the world. And and and you just laid out all these mechanisms, especially inflammation, so that we can see a clear causal pathway by which that could happen. The question there would be, was it a gradual increase in ultra processed foods from the fifties all the way through today?

Were were there any periods of inflection points when, like, suddenly, the total calories increased, like, not linearly, or when some new substance came in, you know, whether, you know, corn corn sugar or what or, you know, whatever. So first, let's just start with that, and then we'll move on to the social one. What do you how has the American diet changed that might be compatible with this finding on mental health that things were really unchanged from the late nineties through 2011. No change really in adolescent mental health. And then boom, 2013 2012, 2013, everything goes to hell, especially for the girls.

How did our food system change over those 50 years?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, I mean, I think, you know, what happened is sort of in the seventies, we started you know, we and we started back in the fifties with sort of processing of food and, you know, Betty Crocker being an imagine. And Tang

Jonathan Haidt
and Sam, and well, Sam was back earlier.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Fleishman's margarine. You and I grew up in the era of Tang and Fleishman's margarine.

Jonathan Haidt
Oh my God.

Dr. Mark Hyman
All those shit.

Jonathan Haidt
Those margarine's even like, can't get if you think it's butter, but it's not.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's not. Right. Right.

Jonathan Haidt
Exactly. What is what

Dr. Mark Hyman
is Mark? No. It's Chiffon.

Jonathan Haidt
If you think

Dr. Mark Hyman
it's Chiffon,

Jonathan Haidt
it's Chiffon. But, yeah, they all

Dr. Mark Hyman
have it.

Jonathan Haidt
Where our kids are full of car salesman and margarine commercials.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, in the in the seventies, the government started getting involved in food policy under McGovern and starting to set dietary guidelines. And there was just a lot of food pyramid industry. And then we got the food pyramid in in 92. And that food pyramid essentially said we should be eating a very low fat diet with the base of our diet being refined starches and sugars and carbohydrates.

Jonathan Haidt
Yes. It's pasta. Carbs.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. 6 to 11 servings of rice, bread, cereal, and pasta a day. And that led to this hockey stick rise in obesity and diabetes and some resistance. And so now we're seeing, you know, when I was a kid, there was that one chubby kid in the class. You know?

Now it's 20% of the kids are obese. Not overweight. Obese, 40 plus, almost 45% are overweight. Nearly half our kids in this country are overweight. And that that's not just a physical sort of appearance problem.

It's a physiological problem that drives inflammation throughout the body, including the brain, and it's been linked to to sort of mood disorder. So I think it's all related. And of course, you know, kids are on their phones. They're not exercising. They're not moving.

They're not playing. They're not running around on their bike like we were. And it just sort of all compounds of problems. So I think, you know, there's also been interventional studies using diet. For example, in a book I wrote called Food Fix, I talk about how, for example, in juvenile detention centers where there's a lot of violence, when they change the diet from a traditional and processed diet, they're feeding these kids to a whole foods diet, then violence went down by 97% in in 75 97%.

The recent recent restraints went down by 75%. Suicide went down by a percent.

Jonathan Haidt
Changing the food. Just from changing

Dr. Mark Hyman
the food

Jonathan Haidt
to whole foods. Amazing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
A 100 percent a 100% reduction in suicides, which is the third leading cause of death in in that age group of adolescent boys. So there's there's interventional data that's quite compelling around this. There's also a lot of, you know, population data around it. So I I think that these two trends are are key. I'm I'm working in Washington on food policy to try to shift this.

But it, you know, it's it's it's a monstrous problem because you've got the Goliath of industry, both on the Internet. Right? Google, Meta, and x and all those all those sort of company, TikTok, that are driving this. And then you've got, on the other hand, all the the giant food companies. So there's really only kind of probably a handful of CEOs that are driving so much of the problem, and they're not incented to do the right thing.

They're incented to do the wrong thing. And so I I are you are you seeing that that policy shift has to drive this as well? Because it seems like you're working on a grassroots level with parents and schools and local communities. And

Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. So that's in that's so interesting because we we don't usually put food in the same categories like tobacco, alcohol, gambling. It

Dr. Mark Hyman
is. It is. It's very You know, right By the way, 14% of kids and adults are by the definition of food addiction, this is the Yale Food Addiction Scale, developed by Kelly Bernal, are addicted to food, biologically addicted to food, and affects the same limiting

Jonathan Haidt
factors. I mean, we're I mean, we're all addicted in the sense. Well, I mean, I love food. I'm

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, no. No. No. No. I'm talking about I'm talking I'm talking about the physiological responses that drive behavior that that are defined in a very strict way that Compulsive use.

The compulsive use is a whole series of scientifically validated metrics that are looking at food addiction as not just people who like like ice cream like I do, but people who just can't stop eating or who are truly biologically addicted because it affects the nucleus accumbens in the brain, which is the addiction center to the same. Yeah. The reward centers. Just like the the doping hits you get from social media, you're getting those from sugar and processed food.

Jonathan Haidt
I see. I see. Okay. So so let's so, right, very close parallels. You've got giant companies driving this effect.

It's a mass effect. It's a massive alteration of the ecosystem within which kids are growing up. It occurred more slowly. As you said, it's it kind of begins in the fifties, And I guess if you have, you know, if you have, you know, 1 hostess cupcake a day, but your mom is cooking, you know, baked chicken at night, one hostess cupcake is fine. But at a certain point, it goes from 10% of your calories to hit 50, 70.

You know what? You said 77 now.

Dr. Mark Hyman
6 67. Yeah.

Jonathan Haidt
So you said for 2 thirds. That's right. So 2 thirds. So, but do you have any data could we find any data on whether it was sort of straight linear? Whether did something happen in the in the 20 tens or the late 2000 that increased kids' consumption?

Dr. Mark Hyman
I think it was just just increase in products, increase in marketing, increase in targeting kids, increase in, very subversive social media advertising. I mean, the the the the I read about this in the book, but the social media companies, allowed the food industry to embed within games and other things advertising for processed food. So the kids would see, you know, 5,000,000,000 impressions a year of crap for for it wasn't even on a regular TV commercial or it wasn't in traditional marketing. It was all this subversive marketing through social media that was done.

Jonathan Haidt
So that would be fascinating to look into because often researchers don't know to break it down that way. Like, maybe something did change in the early twenties because especially for boys. The boys' story is a little bit different. I'll just say it briefly here. The girls, it's really clear.

Social media is really harmful to them. They go on it. They can't get off because all the other girls are on. Constant social comparison. It's much harder for them to give it up.

Boys are on social media, and a lot of bad things happen to them, but they're not as addicted to it as the girls are. For boys, the story is that the video games and the porn has gotten so good and so available, and you couldn't have that in the year 2000. There wasn't the high speed. You couldn't do that. But it's only in early 20 tens that Remember

Dr. Mark Hyman
my dad used to have Playboy Magazine. I'd sneak away and check it out. Exactly. That's right. That's right.

Jonathan Haidt
And it left something for imagination, and it didn't show, you know, 5 guys, you know, putting their whatever in into women's offices. So, so so the boys' story is they're sort of gradually disengaging from the real world beginning in the seventies eighties. They're withdrawing from school. School gets increasingly feminized. Like, it's it's for girls' virtues.

You know, girls are just better at school. They get better grades. They're more likely to go to college, more likely to graduate from college. Richard Reeves has written about this. So boys are kind of gradually withdrawing, and then the video once you get video over the Internet, you know, high speed, now the video game is the point.

It's so good that the boys are really spending a lot of time there, and they're having fun. They're enjoying it, but they're they're changing their their dopamine systems. They're they're getting hooked. They're not doing much of anything else. They're not developing skills that would turn them into adults.

So if we check-in on kids when they're 14, we're gonna find the the girls are more miserable than the boys. But if we check-in on them when they're 28, which is what the oldest Gen z are, what we're gonna find I think what we do find is that the girls are much more likely to have gone to college, much more likely to have graduated from college and gotten a job. The boys are substantially more likely to have not gone to college and to be living at home with their parents. So at 28, I don't know for sure, but it might be a reversal where the girls are doing better than the boys, even though they're gonna be still more anxious than the boys. Well, not necessarily because now the boys are kind of losers.

They've kind of stepped out of life. They know they're losers, and so that actually causes anxiety. So I don't actually know. We need to be looking more at at what's happening to kids in their to young people in their twenties.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, no. This has to get fixed because we're heading down a pretty bad direction. I wanted to sort of wrap up with with the conversation around, you know, society and democracy as a whole because the consequences of what's happened to our children and and even to our society as a whole is threatening our our future, our democracy. And you write a lot about that.

And and, in fact, you wrote an article in, Atlantic that was quite, compelling that everybody should definitely check out, which was in, around this topic. And it was it was, I'm trying to remember what was that.

Jonathan Haidt
The title was why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Right. That's right. And and and that's a very kind of, depressing title. But but the the thing I wanna end on is why is that true?

And then why why is there hope? And is are we just or or is there not hope? Yeah.

Jonathan Haidt
Sure. Sure. So, so so this is, right, a good way to to look at this and sort of hearkening back to the beginning of our conversation, about democracy. When, I forget who was the first person to use the word the American experiment. I know George Washington used the term, that America is an experiment, and the and we talk about the American experiment.

And what that mean the experiment is, can people govern themselves? And if you go back to Europe in the 18th century, the Europeans all had kings, and they thought, at least the nobles, they thought you can't govern yourselves. The people are a rebel. The people will just vote themselves more money. You can't do that.

You have to have a wise leader. You know? And our founding fathers said, no. We're gonna try. Now we know that every previous democracy has gone up in smoke.

We know the problems. You know, they the the the you know, you get you get demagogues rousing the passion of the people, but we're gonna design a complex system that will regulate that. And they wrote a lot about the virtues needed for democracy, for a republic, for a liberal democracy or republic. And the the virtues, include the ability to have civil dialogue and some degree of openness and moderation and some, you know, respect for the rules of this of the game. And so they knew, as Ben Franklin said, when asked what kind of government the the constitutional convention gave us, he said, a republic if you can keep it.

And so that's the question, can we keep it? Yeah. And if you think about it as an experiment in self governance, and now you look at childhood, when you and I were out on our bicycles with friends, and sometimes there'd be arguments or fights, sometimes there were even conflicts between one group of kids and another group of kids, we had to work that all out. And that's those are the skills of democracy, being self governing. So with a free range childhood where kids are out without adult supervision, that's how you become self governing, and until the 19 nineties, American children learned how to be self governing before they turned 18.

Now they can vote at 18, and they've learned how to be self governing as individuals, and now they can function in larger groups in their town. They can vote national elections, but what began to happen in the nineties was we really cracked down on childhood freedom. We got afraid partly because of the media ecosystem and 24 hour news cycles about, you know, kidnapped kids, and partly because we were losing trust in our neighbors. That's the big big other piece to this. We stopped letting kids out in the nineties, and by the early 2000, we got the phenomena of if you send your 8 year old to the store, some neighbor might call the police because no one had seen an unaccompanied 8 year old in 20 years.

So, so we basically said by the by the early 2000, we said, how about if we don't give you any experience in being self governing until you're 18? Then we'll send you off to college where you'll pressure the college to be your parental unit and to protect you from everything, including books, words, speakers, and ideas. So how about now you don't really become self governing until you're 21, and then you go off to industry where some of them will pressure the companies to take care of them in that way? In other words, if the American experiment of self governance is to succeed, we must give children 100 of 1,000, millions of opportunities for each child, 100 of 1,000, to practice self governance from the time they're 6 or 7 all the way through young adulthood, and that's and that's my 4th norm. So just to repeat, the 4 norms that can break this cycle, and you said, am I is there hope?

Yes. There's hope. With 4 norms, we can break the cycle. We can we can make major improvements to to youth mental health. We can have self governing young people, and so the four norms are no smartphone before 14, no social media before 16, phone free schools, and far more independence, free play, and respond and responsibility in the real world.

If we do those four things, we're gonna find that our kids are gonna be much more competent, comfortable, capable, happy. They'll be better democratic citizens. I don't mean to blame them for any of this mess. Gen z bears no responsibility for the mess we're in. That was all done by older people in technologies and companies.

But, but we have to stop doing what we're doing to childhood. We have to give kids a human childhood with a huge amount of face to face experience and very little, of their time spent governed by a few major companies that control their attention all day long.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I would say probably the biggest thing that influenced me as a child was going to camp. Yes.

Jonathan Haidt
I

Dr. Mark Hyman
had the privilege of going to camp.

Jonathan Haidt
Like a month? Like, how you're like I would go for we would go for

Dr. Mark Hyman
2 2 months starting at life. That's great. Yeah. 7 years old. Okay.

And that was tremendous because I got away from my parents. I got to navigate the world on my own. I got to be with other kids. I got to be in the condensate of play. It led to a sense of, you know, independence and also, you know, self agency where I became competent at many things and learned many things.

And kids today don't have that. And and I think, what what you're what you're calling for is a sort of a a reengagement with with childhood.

Jonathan Haidt
That's right. With the world. With the childhood has to happen in the real world, not not online. So let's put a few things together for parents.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Or as they say, IRL. Yeah. That's it. In real life. IRL.

Jonathan Haidt
That's right. That's right. So let's put a couple of things together. That's a very important point about summer camps. And it's something that so Leonor Skenazy wrote the book Free Range Kids.

She cofounded a group with me called Let Grow. I I urge everyone to go to letgrow.org. You'll find all kinds of ideas to do at home, to do in schools. But, yeah, Leonor and I wrote about, summer camps in the book. Don't send your kids to a summer camp that lets them keep their phones on them.

That's you get this chance to have them be phone free for a month, and that breaks the addiction. That detoxes even the most addicted kids. So let's put a few things together. Suppose you push for phone free schools in your town, and there are other parents who are doing this too. Suppose you get phone free schools in your town and you send your kids away for at least a month, every summer to a completely phone free environment, and you have very clear rules about phones.

You don't give a kid a smartphone until they're in high school to begin with, and even in high school, there's no phone use. No phones are allowed at the table. No phones are allowed in the bedroom. They can do things on their computer sometimes, but, you know, but you but they don't get to take their smartphone into the bedroom and sleep with it. So even if we never get any help from our legislators, which is quite possible at the national level, even if we don't get any legal changes, you can actually give your kid a childhood in which technology is is sort of put back in its place as a feature of life, not as the dominant factor in life.

And you can do that with summer camp, schools, and, oh, encourage your kids to play sports team sports, especially. So if they're doing team sports in the app if there's no phones during school and then there are team sports in the afternoon and then there's no phones at dinner, now, basically, you've got the entire day covered up until 7 o'clock. And that, you know Yeah. Okay. You know?

Maybe, like, people have an hour to yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So there's so so, Mark, there there is a lot of hope.

The democracy problems are very serious, and I don't really know the way out, But on the childhood problems and the teen mental health problems, I've never been more hopeful about any social change question than I am about this one.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's exciting. Well, hopefully, you can figure out the bigger problem of of our sole disruption and how we get to be actually having civil discourse again and, and allow for dissent and allow for different opinions and allow for learning from others. I mean, to me, I, I, I don't want to just talk to people who think what I think, because it's just an echo chamber that not going to help me grow or learn. I actually learn the most when I talk to people who are quite different than I am and who think differently and have different opinions and different life experiences. And and it helps me understand their the context of their values and what matters to them.

And, and it creates a bridge of humanity that I think has been lost. So I I hope we can recreate that bridge to humanity that

Jonathan Haidt
lost to society. I'm smiling from ear to ear because what you're saying is music in my ears. Yes. This is this is what I've been trying to do. So I can just put in just just mention a couple of of sites and things that I've created to work on this problem because that is the problem that's animated my research.

So, so anybody who is a professor or administrator at university, if you have an associate with the university, please go to heterodoxacademy.org. It's a group I cofounded with another with other professors to encourage viewpoint diversity and just the kind of just exactly what you just said about the need for civil discourse in order for us to get smarter, that's the John Stuart Millpoint. As part of Heterodox Academy originally, but it branched off into its own thing, we created a program called perspectives, and if you go to constructivedialogue.org, constructive dialogue, gue@theend.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And we'll put this all in the show notes, so don't worry, guys. We're gonna put all this in the show notes.

Jonathan Haidt
So that yeah. So constructive dialogue, the perspectives program is a program. It's it it designed to be used when you're coming into, say, freshman year of college. Everyone does it. We're doing it at NYU this year.

Harvard has has adopted it. A lot of schools are adopting it. You teach incoming students about confirmation bias, about why it's why we disagree, about why left and right disagree, and how to handle these disagreements that are part of being a citizen in America's liberal democracy. So so I cofounded Heterodox Academy for Universities, Constructive Dialogue Institute, to to help any sort of group get along. It can be high schools.

It can be corporations. Any group you can get along better with this. I co founded Let Grow with Leonor Skenazy to give kids more, more free range childhoods. And finally, for this book, I hope everyone will go to anxious generation.com. We have all kinds of resources there for parents, for teachers, for young people about how to address this, how to how to bring back an in an IRL childhood and how to, restore improve mental health for young people.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, John, thank you so much for all the work you've done, and we'll put all of this and all links to many other articles that we've talked about and your work in the show notes for the podcast. But, I just wanna say that, you know, you're you're one of those lightning rods in society that's people have catalyzed around that is changing thinking, which is not easy to do with all the noise that we have today. And I I'm I'm just very honored that you've come on the podcast. I'm honored we had the chance to unpack some of these issues, and, I think, there's more work to be done for sure. I think looking at all some of the other variables like food and its impact on mental health, and getting crap out of schools is important too, not just phones.

But I I think we're we're finally waking up these issues. I think both, parents, citizens, legislators are all coming to understand that that this is sort of a critical issue for us to address as a society. So thanks for, all the work you do and all you're doing and being such a vigorous advocate for the right thing.

Jonathan Haidt
Oh, well, thanks so much, Mark, and thanks for all the work you do. I'm gonna be even more conscientious about my junk food consumption. Yes. I love the taste, and I I have weaknesses. No.

Hostess cupcakes. You're absolutely right. Yeah. But what's that cream filling anyway?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. We we grew up on that same thing. I went to a little corner store and got my little hostess cupcake with the alright. Well, thanks so much, and we'll we'll talk to you soon. And, hope you all enjoyed the podcast, and check out, what we're doing next week.

But, we're we're gonna we're gonna put everything in the show notes for you to review everything we talked about, which I think is a lot. So thanks for listening.

Jonathan Haidt
Thanks so much, Mark.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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