Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Anxious Generation and The Happiness Hypothesis, which has just been reissued in a twentieth-anniversary edition.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jonathan Haidt discuss what ancient wisdom and modern psychology teach us about how to live a happy life, how the movement to keep children off smartphones and social media is faring, and why artificial intelligence could threaten the very sources of human meaning.
This transcript has been condensed and slightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Well, I’m excited to talk to you about many things and the remarkable success that The Anxious Generation has continued to have since our last conversation. But I wanted to start the conversation with the book of yours that is perhaps the least well known because you wrote it early in your career, called The Happiness Hypothesis, which has just been re-released for a twentieth anniversary edition.
It’s a book I really loved. It is trying to speak in a way to the deepest question you tackled, which is how to be happy, how to have a meaningful life. What do you conclude?
Jonathan Haidt: Well, I wrote the book in 2006. It came out of my teaching Psych 101 at the University of Virginia. But actually it just occurs to me the real backstory here is that I had an existential depression when I was sixteen or seventeen years old after reading Waiting for Godot in my high school English class, and I was already an atheist by that time and just thinking, if there’s no God, there’s no meaning to life—if the whole earth is destroyed, it doesn’t matter.
So I decided to major in philosophy because I wanted to know what’s the meaning of life. So I went to Yale, studied philosophy, and it had almost nothing to do with the meaning of life. It was very analytical. But I took a psychology class, and I took English classes, and those were much more relevant. Those sort of help you think, like, what are we doing here? What is a good life? So that’s the long background. Then at UVA, when I was teaching Psych 101, I would put quotations up from the ancients, from Shakespeare, and it looked like, wow, there’s a bunch of insights that every literate society has passed down to us, and they’re really good.
So I decided if I don’t get tenure at UVA, rather than transferring to a lower-ranked university, I would try to just support myself by writing a trade book. So it turns out I did get tenure, just by a couple of votes. I happen to know my tenure vote because the secretary made a clerical error and revealed to me the vote. But I did get tenure. I decided to write the book anyway. It was really fun to write. I guess you might say it’s my last really, really positive book, because things get darker after 2006-2007. But the book is a collection of ten ancient ideas that you find east and west across the millennia.
So just for example, the first chapter is the divided self—one quote from Ovid is: “I see the right way and approve it. Alas, I follow the wrong.” So how can that be? If you approve something, why don’t you just do it? So there’s all kinds of stuff about the divided self, system one, system two, the faults of others. Chapter four is the one on moral psychology—we’re all hypocrites, why do you complain about the speck in your neighbor’s eye? So in each chapter I go into quotes from multiple cultures, then I go into the psychology. We always find that, yes, they’re correct, they’re true, but there are all kinds of interesting qualifications, nuances. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger in general, but there’s also PTSD and adverse childhood experiences. So it’s not quite that simple, but it is an incredibly important principle for young people especially—anti-fragility. What doesn’t kill you usually does make you stronger. So that’s what the book is about, and that’s where it came from.
Mounk: I think one of the pleasures of reading the book for me is that I can see the germs of your later work. One of the themes is about the ways in which we think we are totally in control of our actions, but actually in many ways it is our emotional reactions that drive us, and that becomes a big theme in The Righteous Mind. The anti-fragility stuff you’re talking about becomes a big theme in The Coddling of the American Mind.
Obviously I think that’s an interesting connection between all of this and your most recent work about social media. The way you present it at the moment, it feels like ten sort of slightly different topics, but it feels to me like there is a central debate that is going through the book and through these different traditions about how you lead a happy or meaningful life. Do you focus on achieving the things that you want to achieve—you want to accomplish something in the world, you want to acquire skills, you want to get the approbation of your fellow human beings, you want to find a spouse that you’re excited about, perhaps you want to build a family and so on? Or is it by working on yourself—by saying, for example, in the tradition of Buddha or the tradition of the Stoics, that you don’t care about the outside world, that even the philosopher on the rack, in the process of being tortured, can be happy irrespective of these external circumstances?
Haidt: Right—Boethius, yes. Now that’s a perfect way to set it up, because the original title of the book—the original title I proposed—was Twelve Great Truths: Insights into Mind and Heart from Ancient Cultures and Modern Psychology, because that’s exactly what the book was gonna be. Then I got a contract, I was writing the book, I was behind schedule, the deadline was approaching, so I changed the title to Ten Great Truths: Insights into Mind and Heart from Ancient Cultures. Then they changed the title from Ten Great Truths to The Happiness Hypothesis. I said, I don’t know what that is—there’s ten chapters here, there’s not like one hypothesis. But as I was revising the book, I realized, whoa, actually, the first two are exactly what you just said.
So the first happiness hypothesis is happiness comes from getting what you want. You set goals, you want a spouse, you want a degree, whatever you want—if you get them, you’re happy. That is easily shown to be false, because the psychology of goal pursuit is such that your focus—the left frontal cortex has circuits specialized for approach, hunting, tracking, achieving—and the progress is really pleasurable. Then when you get what you were going for, you don’t get spectacular pleasure. You actually get release. You get relief. It feels good for sure, but it doesn’t last that long. So just getting what you want, we quickly habituate. So that doesn’t work.
The ancients generally proposed the second one, what you just said, that no, no, no, you’ll never fix the world. Stop trying to do that. Work on yourself. This is the heart of Buddhism, of Stoicism, of a lot of pop psychology. So it’s a better hypothesis that happiness comes from within. You’ve got to work on yourself—CBT, change your appraisals. So all of this is very, very compatible. There’s a lot of truth to it. It’s much better. But the one sort of original thing I think that I contributed to this literature is to say there’s an even better hypothesis.
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The third one is that happiness comes from between. It’s not from getting what you want. It’s not from outside, it’s not from within, it’s from between. That is getting the right kind of embeddedness—this is the word I use a lot now, embeddedness—in three ways. Look, Freud said love and work. That’s the famous formulation, that’s the foundation of positive psychology. Love and work are the two domains where if you’re not doing well in those, you’re not doing well. Work doesn’t mean paid work. Work just means you’re doing something productive that matters to others, which will be a good segue when we talk about your book. So if you get the right kind of embeddedness in dense networks of trust with others, that’s love, broadly speaking. That’s essential for happiness. That’s probably the biggest factor in happiness, the modern research shows. The second factor is between yourself and your work.
You get deeper into it—lots of people have a job, they don’t really care about the work, it’s just for a paycheck, and they’re able to find meaning and purpose elsewhere in their life. Amy Wrzesniewski’s research is all on jobs versus careers versus calling. But for those of us who get a lot of pleasure from our work, it’s because we become so engaged in it, we’re fascinated by it. We read on the weekends and at night because we really want to figure this thing out, let’s say. So if you get the right relationship between yourself and your work, it’s really energizing and engaging, you have a sense of progress. If your work does useful things for others, you have a real sense that you matter. This is a lot of where a sense of meaning comes from, because you do matter.
Then the third factor is between yourself and something larger than yourself. Sometimes you get that through your work or through love, but it’s about being part of a moral community where you feel that we together are doing something important, whether that be in a religion, whether that be in an army, whether that be a team of doctors, whether that be anything where you feel that it’s not just all about you, that it’s one for all, all for one, or we’re all connected, things like that. So if you get those three betweens, then you’re gonna be as happy as you’re biologically capable of being, because happiness is to some extent genetic, as every trait is, but it’s not a point. It’s not like you’re destined by your genes to be at a point. There’s a whole range. Some people their range is shifted up and they’ll move around up. But for all of us, if you get those three betweens correct, you’re going to be at the top end of your range for happiness.
Mounk: I want to go back to this idea of a happiness point and how you’re sort of varying on it a little bit, but to take a step back to bring out sort of what these three in-betweens are really in conversation with, I want to sort of play out the original argument again and see how your in-between is distinguished from that.
So the first kind of insight that lots of different thinkers have had in lots of different forms is that a lot of us are naturally quite driven by external validation. Human beings crave external validation. We often crave material things. This is something that from Thomas Hobbes to Arthur Schopenhauer to many others—really important philosophers in our tradition—have put at the basic premise of our work. It is going to be very hard to get happy that way, because only one person can be at the top of the roost, only one person can be the richest man in the world, and he doesn’t appear to be particularly happy to me. Only one person can get the most beautiful girl in high school or whatever. So that’s just an element of competition, which means that many people are going to be failing to get the rewards. Secondly, as you pointed out, a lot of the time when you get that reward, it turns out that you’re disappointed with it.
You think, if only I could make the basketball team, the cheerleading squad, if only I could get this job, if only I could get this promotion, if only I could make six figures, then I’m gonna be happy. You manage to achieve that, and you have a brief fleeting moment of triumph, of satisfaction. After a few weeks you’ll realize it doesn’t actually solve your problems. So there’s a counter-tradition which says that’s why you have to learn to not go seek the world. That obviously has lots of different forms as well. My friend Shira Telushkin has a book coming out, which is all about the monastic tradition of people who just completely forsake the world—just go off and not engage in society at all. The very different tradition is the Stoic tradition, which has been very popular since your book was published 20 years ago. There’s a huge kind of boomlet in Stoic self-help books, which are saying you need to learn to be indifferent to everybody.
If you love somebody, then their love for you, their well-being, is going to determine your happiness. So the safest thing to do is not to love somebody too much, is to disengage from other people, because otherwise your well-being is bound up with theirs. So that seems like a really smart, deep response to the material striving that you also worry about today—a huge percentage of people in Europe, I recently read, wanting to be influencers as their life choice, because that’s what gives you admiration and adulation and money and free stays at fancy hotels. So it feels to me like this: no, no, search within, don’t be dependent on the outside world. Seems like really good advice as a response, but you think, no, that actually also is missing something, that’s also getting something wrong. So why do we need these in-betweens? Why shouldn’t we cast our lot in with Buddha and the Stoics?
Haidt: Sure. First let’s look at what is it that people want. You say they want prestige, they want material things. I would say once you get up above a certain level of material safety, you want material things because of the prestige. You want a high salary like on Wall Street—the competition for salaries—because that’s a marker of your success, of your prestige. As a social psychologist, I think this is completely legitimate, but our modern society exploits that desire for prestige in ways that leave us worse off and just extract a lot of money from us.
For example, money is correlated with happiness. This was debated a lot in the nineties and early 2000s. Rich people are happier, but it depends in part on how you got there. If you win the lottery, that often destroys your life. People don’t respect you for it. They think you owe them something. But as Arthur Brooks always points out, if you work hard and build something—you build a business or whatever it is you do—and then you achieve success by hard work, that is incredibly satisfying. That’s a beautiful kind of satisfaction. And if that is in part measured in money, I think that’s fine.
Now, of course, what social media has done is it said you can achieve prestige without actually having done anything excellent. It’s just a battle to get up on top, get more likes, get more followers. So we have this ancient psychology of prestige, and there are even quotes from—what’s his name, one of the founders of Facebook, not Zuckerberg, whoever it was—that says we hacked into this, we took the desire for prestige and we hacked it. So the need for respect from others within your community is very legitimate, very important for a good life, and I endorse it for modern Westerners.
Now, one thing I realized in writing the book is that, until a hundred or two hundred years ago, people lived in a world where they could all die tomorrow, or their children could die tomorrow, and nobody saved for retirement. They didn’t understand the world and they couldn’t control the threats. Something really changes when you have a very long time horizon. So that’s one thing. There’s less need for us to brace, because most of us are not going to experience the death of a child. Some people still do, and that’s perhaps even more painful for us nowadays than it used to be when they expected it. I don’t know. But we live in a very different world.
Mounk: The idea here is that the ancient advice of the Stoics, of Buddha, made sense in a world in which you had to expect unimaginable heartbreak. You had to expect not just that your parents die before you, but perhaps that your child dies before you. You had to expect that you might starve to death, you had to expect that you might end up in a terrible war. Perhaps learning to affect this attitude of “I’m not gonna care too much about the world” is a kind of sensible precaution to take when the likelihood of that kind of tragedy striking you is really high.
Haidt: Exactly. The conclusion I came to in the book—one of the few places where I disagreed with the ancients—was the Buddhist notion of making yourself indifferent to the ups and downs, to whatever happens. I was very positively disposed to that. I loved Buddhism. I took a course in college. I’ve always been interested in it. So when I started the book, I expected that Buddha would be the winner, in the sense of having the best psychology. I knew a little about Stoicism at the time, and over time I came to see that Stoicism was a little better, because Stoics are perfectly fine with you loving your children and being attached to them and your spouse and all of that. But you do have to do practices to prepare yourself that you might lose them. When you lose them—it’s not that you need to be indifferent to them so that it doesn’t hurt. It’s that you need to develop these practices to shut off the negative emotions. Stoics are much more okay with positive emotions, as I understand it.
So I do think that the Buddhist view is maybe a little less appropriate. Look, we’re gonna hear from a lot of angry Buddhists—although maybe there’s not really supposed to be any angry Buddhists, since if they’re angry, they’re not Buddhists. So just to be clear: Buddhism is a huge tradition, and there are some strands that are really monastic withdrawal, no emotions, and there are others that are much softer.
I don’t mean to in any way impugn the whole thing. I just mean that the view I came to is that for Americans, or for modern Westerners, I think the vision of a good life brings in a bit more of the ancient heroic ideas of a good life. That is, if my son is twenty years old, and if he were to become a Buddhist and meditate and develop equanimity, I’d be really disappointed, and I think that would not be a good life. I want him to commit to things, do hard things, try big things. I want him to fail sometimes. I want him to fall in love and have his heart broken and find love again. All those things that you need to do if you’re anti-fragile. So this is not a vision of just a person pursuing calm. This is a vision of a person pursuing experience.
That’s what the Buddha did before his enlightenment. He goes out, he has love, he experiences life. So that’s what I’ll just say—these ancient insights into flourishing are incredibly helpful, and we’re losing touch with them. Overall, they’re amazing, and we do well to listen to them. But that was one of the few places where I felt like, you know what, the way we live now, we really can throw ourselves in. Now, of course, we might actually be back to a time when we have no idea if we’ll all be dead in a year or two, according to the people who say that AI might well kill us very soon. So maybe we should go back to some of the older traditions.
Mounk: Well, part of the attraction of those ideas was that we might all be dead tomorrow, we might individually be dead tomorrow. But part of it was just a world that on the whole felt very unpredictable and chaotic. So there are good questions about whether artificial intelligence will make our world sufficiently chaotic and unpredictable that people are going to want similar forms of comfort, whether that’s in the form of Buddhism or Stoicism, or it’s just in the form of all kinds of traditional religions that also give you a sense of: if your life goes terribly on earth, well, as long as you live by these precepts, you go off to heaven and you’re rewarded for it in the afterlife, which is also, I think, a form of comfort that religion has historically offered to people who live through unpredictable times.
I want to come back to that, just one more thing on this. You evoked the idea of the happiness fixed point, or there are different terms for it, and this is interesting because I think it’s something that the ancients didn’t fully understand. According to the best empirical research we have today, people really do tend to get up in the morning and be on a particular kind of point of a one-to-ten scale. There are some people who get up and most mornings they’re an eight out of ten—they’re like, I love life, bring it on. There are other people who get up most mornings and they feel a two or three out of ten, and they feel life is really hard, and so on. Obviously, if you’re normally an eight out of ten but you’re living in a war zone, or you’re starving, you’re gonna be a lot less happy than your biology primes you to be. If you’re normally a two out of ten but you’ve just fallen in love or you’ve just gotten a huge promotion, you might be having an eight-out-of-ten day. But that is what usually happens.
That feels quite disempowering in a way. It suggests that if you’re lucky enough to be an eight out of ten, congratulations. If you’re unlucky enough to be a two out of ten, not much to be done. But as you implied, you think it’s not quite as straightforward as that. So how can we use the teachings from this whole tradition, the way that you’ve reflected on them in this book, in order to—I don’t know what the right term is—improve, optimize our happiness fixed point? That’s the language you’re not going to choose.
Haidt: To go just a little deeper into what we learned about heritability, I’d say possibly one of the biggest discoveries in all of psychology was when the behavior genetics studies started coming in the eighties. When you look at identical twins reared apart—it often used to be that twins were separated for adoption, so in America and in Sweden, or Scandinavia, there were large studies, or somewhat large studies, of twins who either were raised together or raised apart. When we’re talking about personality traits, it doesn’t seem to matter much.
Even politics—this is one of the amazing discoveries—politics and religiosity: your parents pick the religion that you’re going to be, but how religious you are is going to be similar to your identical twin, not to your parents. So our genes make the brain, the brain has all kinds of desires and wants and attractions, and almost everything is heritable between 0.4 and 0.7. But nothing is heritable at like 0.9. No psychological trait is at 0.9. There’s always variation. So that was an incredible discovery in the eighties and nineties, debated for a long time about what it means. Happiness seems to be at the higher end of the heritability scale.
Mounk: But Jon, help me understand the connection here, because heritability is a really interesting discussion—we could do a whole podcast episode about heritability. But the question of whether or not we have a happiness fixed point isn’t identical to the question of how heritable it is. It might be that—I think we all know that children have very different personalities from each other, and every person who’s a parent, or who is an uncle or aunt, or who has experience with little children, knows that.
There’s a question about what exactly governs that. Why is it that one sibling is like this and the other sibling is like that? I broadly agree with your summary of the heritability literature, but the fact that, say, this child is really outgoing, this child is really shy, can be baked in for whatever reason—whether that’s socialization, whether that’s the vitamins that the mother took when the baby was in the womb, whatever it is—that might still be there.
Haidt: I see what you’re saying. No, that’s right. It could be set by things in childhood. It could be set by chemicals or medicines that you’re exposed to. That’s all true. So let’s just go with that. It doesn’t matter where it’s from. We do tend to have a happiness set point, and this is sort of the average around which—and that word was used a lot in the nineties, I think, the “set point,” like a thermostat that will return. But over time it’s come to be understood more as a set range.
Some people—you know, one person I know, I said, I think you’d be really happy if you moved to this new city, and she said, no, I could be unhappy anywhere. She sort of understood that, of course, she varies, she fluctuates, but she was basically saying, I am set low. But with that, whatever the cause of that, all of us have better times and worse times. All of us can think back to times when we were especially happy. So the fact that there’s such variation within a single life means that we can do this inquiry: okay, when were you at your best? When were you at your happiest?
With young people it’ll often be, you know, I did this summer program with all these kids, and we just formed a gang, and it was so exciting—there’s a sense of both connection and also growth, exploration. Those things tend to create a time that glows, that feels like it glows, and they remember it. So there’s a lot of variation. What I tell my students—I teach a course at NYU called Flourishing—what we work on is getting your habits right: to make yourself smarter, which is getting your attention back, being able to focus; stronger, which is emotionally stronger—Stoicism, Buddhism, CBT; and more sociable—we read Dale Carnegie, we practice starting conversations with people.
If you can become smarter, stronger, and more sociable, then you will, on average, be more successful in love and in work. You’ll be better at dating, you’ll be better at getting married, at staying married, you’ll be a better employee. These are business students—I teach at NYU Stern, so these are ambitious business students. What I tell them is: work on your habits, work on your systems, get those right, and then you’ll become smarter, stronger, and more sociable. If you’re more successful in love and work, then you will be happier. That’s guaranteed. Whoever you are, whatever your set point is, if things are going really well in love and in work, you’re gonna be on the high end. If they’re not going well in both of those domains, or even one, you’re gonna be on the low end. As for how wide it is, I don’t know—we don’t know. But it’s certainly big enough to work on.
Mounk: All right, so that is excellent advice, derived from deep wisdom in the tradition and in your book summarizing it. You envisaged all kinds of threats to people’s ability to pursue and realize happiness 20 years ago, but the nature of those threats have changed, and obviously you think that one of the most important threats to it is social media. To bridge to some of your more recent concerns: it’s interesting that in new material for the book you argue that social media and the digital environment we live in today might impede the transmission of some of that wisdom from generation to generation—that in a kind of systematic way, social media might lead us to disregard what our ancestors learned about how to end up at the top rather than the bottom range of their happiness set point.
Haidt: There’s so much that we can talk about regarding the way that social media is blocking the development of young people and harming people of all ages. But what you just mentioned is a really interesting one that I don’t talk enough about, but I think is really important, which is the transmission of knowledge and culture. I spent a lot of time in cultural psychology and anthropology, cross-cultural work, and I’m just really interested in the transmission of culture.
Culture is passed down from generation to generation with variation. People like Joe Henrich and many others look at cultural evolution as a twisting strand with biological evolution. These are some of the most interesting and important ideas in the social sciences, I think. So if we think about culture being passed down, it’s always been passed down from generation to generation, always, until around 2012. Then what happens is—it was one thing when kids were on a computer, you had early Facebook, you had to be sitting at a desk on your parents’ computer, and then you could log on to Facebook. But once the iPhone comes out—and the iPhone comes out literally the year after The Happiness Hypothesis comes out, my book is out in 2006, Steve Jobs stands on a stage in San Francisco in 2007—sometimes a new product comes along that changes everything, and boy was he right.
By 2012, most young people have traded in their flip phone for a smartphone with social media. Social media has just gotten more and more addictive ever since, especially the switch to short videos. Short videos are the worst of the worst. I think it’s really the biggest single driver of the declining ability to read books or pay attention. If you think about a young person’s brain, the whole middle to late childhood is a period of extended slow growth early on to allow for cultural learning. Kids are supposed to turn their attention away from their parents and towards the broader world, especially adults of their gender—boys are looking at older boys and men, girls are looking at older girls and women—and everyone is getting culture from the previous generation with variation. That’s always been the case. But once everyone plugs in, what they’re bringing in now is gigabytes of new stuff into their eyes and ears, hundreds of times more information than when you and I were young.
I’m 63, I’m older than you, but you also had an analog childhood where there were limits on the stuff coming in. When you and I were young, almost none of what we took in was made by other children. A lot of it was made not just by our parents’ generation, a lot was made by our grandparents’ generation, or even our great-grandparents. The TV shows that I watched as a kid were made by my grandparents’ generation. So there used to be a lot of transmission from generation to generation. Even TV changed things a lot, but it still transmitted culture. Social media doesn’t. It floods you with little bits—just little bits that can’t be assembled into anything. You scroll through them, and people say that at the end of three hours of scrolling, they don’t even remember what they saw.
So what’s gonna happen at the end of 15 years of scrolling? Kids are getting on TikTok by eight or nine, and by the time they graduate from college, they’ve seen millions and millions of short videos. They haven’t read very many books, and increasingly those short videos will be made by AI. So if we imagine humanity suddenly cut off from everything we’ve ever learned, that’s pretty scary. This is why I’m so firm on saying just set a minimum age. Don’t dicker around with well, what if we can do better filtering of content, what if we can cut out 99% of the suicide videos, what if we can cut out 99% of the sexual predators. No, it’s not enough. Social media is an intrinsically adult activity. Kids need to learn the basics, they need to learn their culture, they need to meet and follow and interact with people in their community. Social media has so many effects on human development, and they’re almost all bad.
Mounk: Let’s talk about social media. We had you on the podcast early on. We’ve talked privately as well as you were setting out to write The Anxious Generation, and I was sure that it was going to be a big success. I had trouble imagining that it was going to be as enormous a success as it has been. I don’t know whether it really is the best-selling book of the last three or four years, but I suspect it must be, if not the most best-selling nonfiction book of the last three or four years, been among the top three or top five. It’s been on the New York Times bestseller list in continuation for years since it came out. It’s obviously also had a huge impact, not just on public opinion, but on public policy as well. At the same time, it obviously feels like the social media wave is only continuing to build. On the one hand, you’ve had about as much success as a writer, and as a policymaker, or as a policy advocate, as you can have. At the same time, it’s probably a drop in the ocean relative to the underlying trends, which make young people even more addicted to TikTok and other short-form video content, that are continuing to erode the kind of analog, play-based childhood and pushing people towards the digital world. Stepping back and surveying the last few years, how do you assess where we are today relative to two or three years ago?
Haidt: I am so excited. The progress is extraordinary. It’s not a drop in the ocean, and here’s why. If we think about this as multiple battlefields, let’s start with the four norms that I suggested in The Anxious Generation. Once you understand that it’s a collective action problem, that every kid has to be on it, not because they want to, but because everyone else is on it, and you can’t get off, otherwise you’re alone, once you understand that, then I proposed four norms.
They are: no smartphone till high school. Before then, just give your kid a flip phone, or in elementary school a landline. No smartphone before high school, no social media before sixteen, just delay it till sixteen. There’s plenty they can do online, they can communicate in all kinds of ways before sixteen without an algorithm-driven social media platform extracting their attention. The third is phone-free schools, which is just a no-brainer. There’s no reason that kids should have their phones, could be looking at their phones, during school hours. The fourth is far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world, that’s the free-range kids idea. One of those is super duper easy to implement, because phone-free schools, you just do it at the district level, the school level, or the state level. It’s not federal, there’s no federal policy here, it can’t be, but because there’s a high level of difficulty with the others.
When I wrote the book, I assumed we’re gonna get no help from the government, because our Congress is broken and Meta is able to control the House with its very large donations to one party, which might well change after today. Here we are talking on election day. I thought we’d get no help from Congress, and that’s been true. Congress has never done a single thing ever to protect children online.
Not a single thing. But what I didn’t understand was that the governors are amazing, most of them, and almost all of them are parents. Something about what I found is that almost everybody in politics is a family person. They have children, they’re committed to making the world better. I’ve really just been impressed by the way the governors jumped into action, totally bipartisan, no red state, blue state difference. Same thing with international leaders, so many nations. Brazil got it done in 2024. Some mothers read the book, they organized, they got it through the Congress by the end of 2024. If you look at Battlefield Number One, phone-free schools, this was like Operation Desert Storm from 1991. We just rolled into Baghdad, as it were. Maybe I’m older than most people in the audience here.
Mounk: I’m not sure you want to liken your crusade to the Iraq War, but I guess it’s the first Iraq War you’re talking about.
Haidt: The first Iraq War, that’s right. The first Iraq War was a spectacular, quick success. That’s not a drop in the bucket. The fact that it’s working so well—effects on test scores are slow to materialize. Some studies show increases, some don’t. Test scores are a lagging indicator. But teachers love it, the students actually like it.
My kids go to New York City public schools. My daughter said, “Dad, lunchtime is so much better.” This is two weeks in, last September. “Lunchtime is so much better. We’re talking to each other, we’re making up games, we’re playing cards.” I hear this everywhere. Phone-free schools are working spectacularly well. That shows, wait a second, we can do something. That’s battle number one, we’re winning in a route. There’s no real opposition.
Battle number two is to get kids off social media, at least to delay it till 16. A number of states have done it. Florida actually did it even before my book came out. Of course, they’re all held up in the courts, so nothing’s been implemented. But Australia implemented their law. Implementation started very loose, very soft, because it wasn’t the government’s job, it was the platform’s job. Guess what—they didn’t do very much. That’s going to take a little time. Of course, Meta and others are pushing the story that it failed: see, you can’t do it, the kids are still on. Well, yeah, of course they’re still on.
Now they can say, okay, you platforms, you ten platforms, you did a terrible job, here’s a fine, do it better. The technology is increasing so quickly that it’s going to work. It’ll take a little time, and many other countries are in the process of following. That’s not a drop in the ocean. This is a major national-level change in a dozen countries. The EU recently committed to doing something. We’re debating whether they want a parental consent exemption, whether they want to go down to age fourteen. But this is gonna happen.
Battlefield number two, it’s gonna take a couple more years, but we’re gonna win. We are gonna win. It’s gonna be recognized. In ten years, people are gonna say, what the hell were they thinking back then, letting eight-year-olds talk with strangers on TikTok and Snapchat? It’s completely insane. Delaying smartphones is also very hard, and there’s no law, I don’t want Congress passing a law saying you can’t give your ten-year-old a smartphone. But I think norms are changing.
The iPad babies are coming out really damaged, the kids who are given an iPad very early. It’s very, very common, especially in less educated circles. There’s a big class difference here, unfortunately. The kids who had an iPad in their hands from the time they were one are showing up at preschool with language delays, behavioral problems. There seems to be a real change in neural development. That’s extremely serious, and we’ve got to get moving on that. In 2024, when my book came out, people said the train’s left the station, it’s too late, the technology’s here to stay, this is the world they’re going into, they have to learn it. There was a resignation, there was a sense of hopelessness, and now there isn’t. Now it’s clear, whoa, if we work together, especially when it’s a nonpartisan issue, and it has remained, thank God, a nonpartisan issue, it’s a parents’ issue, it’s a kids’ issue, I’m actually optimistic. Now, AI is a whole new set of problems that are much bigger. But I do think we’re gonna win on social media. I think we’re gonna win on ed tech, we’re gonna get computers out of school. College professors are banning laptops right and left all over the country. Our students can’t learn if there’s a multifunction entertainment device on their desk. If college students can’t learn, how the hell do we expect first graders to learn with a computer on their desk? I think we’re gonna win on that too.
Mounk: I want to get to AI in a moment. Let me stick to social media for a second. There’s a whole empirical debate about exactly how strong the evidence is, and that differs from point to point. Perhaps some other time I can have you back on and go in depth on that debate, that would be really fascinating to do. I don’t want to do that today. I was teaching excerpts from The Anxious Generation just a couple days ago, and we had a great discussion on the basis of the book, and it was in the context of a policy school. One of the things that I wanted students to think about is, donning the hat of a policymaker, how do you figure out what policy to pass when the evidence is obviously in certain ways incomplete? That’s going to be something that’s always going to be the case for policymakers, you’re always going to be in a fog of decision-making. One of the things that I try to emphasize is that you certainly don’t want to require absolute proof before you do something.
If a recreational drug came out tomorrow, and there’s good reasons to suspect that it was gonna be really bad for people’s brains and other things, and perhaps there’s some doubt about it, and some smart people arguing that actually perhaps the worries are overstated, it would be a very strange approach to say, let people become totally addicted in the millions to this recreational drug, and in 20 years, we might have absolutely ironclad proof that it’s bad, and then we can ban it. That would be a really bad approach. But of course, whether or not we should ban it also depends on things on the other side of a moral ledger. In the case of a recreational drug, people can live fine without recreational drugs, so that’s not very much on that side.
Applying that framework to the different points you were talking about, it seems to me that phone-free schools, I don’t have any hesitation. As you’re pointing out, I don’t see what the potential harm is in making sure that kids don’t have their phones in their pockets from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Perhaps it turns out it’s not necessary because you’ve misread the evidence and other people are right about it. I’m not sure that’s the case, but whatever, no harm done. When it comes to things like banning social media for people under sixteen, I feel a little bit more torn about what’s on the other side of a ledger. I assume that you do too.
Haidt: Tell me what they are missing. If we keep them off till sixteen, what is it that they can’t do with the rest of the internet?
Mounk: Well, so for one, you’re somebody who cares about free speech, as do I. One of the impacts of that is that in those countries, in order to access all kinds of content, you then need to prove that you’re above the age of sixteen, which basically means that you’re closed off from huge swathes of the internet unless you give the government your identity.
Haidt: Just stop. Hold on. There’s a lot of problems with that. First, you’re not closed off from information. Australian kids are free to look up “how do I kill myself” on YouTube, and YouTube will show them how to kill themselves. The Australia bill does not ban content. It does not ban access to content. It says that before you can sign the terms of service and have a commercial relationship with a corporation that is telling you, we’re going to take all of your data, we own it, we own everything you make, your parents have no say here, we’re taking it from you, as long as you tell us you’re 13, even if you’re nine, we don’t care, we’re taking it, we’re saying, how about, given that kids can’t sign contracts, how about we at least raise that to 16? That’s the first thing. Kids in Australia can still get all the content they want on YouTube, but if a girl asks for dieting advice, there’s no algorithm that’s going to get to know her over the weeks and eventually feed her eating disorder stuff. That’s the first thing, there’s not a block on content.
On Snapchat or Instagram there are limits, but that’s the platform’s decision to do it. Secondly, this is a myth that you can’t get on without giving the government your identity. These laws are not about identity, you don’t need identity verification. In fact, the Australia law was specifically written, it says there that the platforms are responsible for enforcing their own age limits, and they can’t only do it by asking for a government ID. If you want to buy liquor online or drugs, you have to show your driver’s license. That’s one way of doing it, and there you are giving a lot of information. But Pornhub has said all along, we don’t want to know people’s names, we just want to know are they old enough, and if you give us device-based verification, we’d be happy. That’s what Apple and Google are now doing. Apple and Google know how old you are, and if you want proof, they’ve each made it so you can upload your driver’s license to Apple and Google. You have a relationship with them, it’s a relationship of trust. If a kid goes to Pornhub, Pornhub doesn’t say, what’s your address, what’s your birthday? They don’t say any of that. They just send a ping down, yes or no, that’s all I want to know, over this age limit. Age verification is not identity authentication. This is being pushed by critics of it, it’s just not true.
Mounk: I have my producer texting me here, and this is partially what I was basing this on. Maybe in part because platforms aren’t implementing this in the best possible way, or they’re not making the right kind of choices, but members of our team who are based in Britain, including the producer of this podcast, Leo, had to provide her ID. What she was telling me is that she was trying to access her DMs on Substack [Ed note: for work-related reasons!] where if you have a UK IP address, it now requires you to upload your ID in order to see the messages that people are trying to send to her there.
Haidt: Okay, I don’t support that. I’m opposed to that. You and I share a lot of free speech concerns. Of course we’re both friends with Greg Lukianoff, and I wrote a book with him. Britain is a particular case that has implemented things badly, in that they put people in jail for tweets. I definitely grant that a government could take this issue and they could use it to control the content and punish the content. All along, me and my team, we’ve said: do not focus on content. Content always raises free speech issues. Okay, yes, CSAM, child sexual—there’s a couple of very narrow kinds of content that we do already ban. But beyond that, content that promotes hate, my God, how do you interpret that? That is going to lead to censorship. I am opposed to content-based restrictions and regulations, and I am opposed to age verification methods, or mandating age verification methods that also give more about your identity, when all we need is age. There are increasing numbers of techniques that just give you age.
Mounk: I think it’s both true that obviously at the beginning the methods of age verification might be quite crude, and over time better ones are going to be implemented. And that if governments want excuses to regulate content, they’re going to find excuses, and the fact that we might latch on to this as an excuse, if you’re clearly opposing it, is not a good argument not to do that.
Haidt: Let me just add one other argument that I haven’t really made before. Look, Australia’s doing something big, we’re doing something new here. Yes, there are obstacles on the way, but I just want to put a stake on the ground and say the status quo is horrific. The status quo is the destruction of a generation, not just their mental health, but their education. The PISA test shows declining reading ability around the world. Nobody can say let’s keep it as it is. That’s just a non-starter. We have to do something. If someone has an idea other than age limits, if someone has an idea to take out the intrinsic problems of social media, which I think are inherent to the product, let’s talk about it. But we have to do something big.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Jonathan discuss whether artificial intelligence will worsen the impact of social media, how to live meaningful lives in an immersively digital age—and explore the recent revelations that Meta employees discussed how to damage Jonathan’s reputation. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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