Jonathan Haidt on How to Free the Anxious Generation (Part Two)
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Right now, get two 16-pound bags of Kingsford charcoal for only $17.88. Was $19.98. Don't miss spring deals under $20 now through May 7th at The Home Depot. Subject to availability, valid on select items only. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Leila Ismail. Our guest on the podcast today is renowned social psychologist and best-selling author Jonathan Haidt.

He joined us live on stage at the Emanuel Center in London on April 24th, 2025 to discuss his book, The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. In conversation with broadcaster and journalist Johnny Diamond, Haidt explored how smartphones, social media, and overprotection have transformed childhood and what we can do to reverse the damage. Now let's join our host, Johnny Diamond, live on stage with Jonathan Haidt.

You write, "We need to take back control of our lives." Take back control is a phrase that many people in Britain will remember. The slogan of the Leave campaign and the Brexit referendum. I think you mean it slightly differently from that. Yeah, it's "Leave smartphones, leave the phone-based childhood, let's have a vote on it." Can I speak you up on a couple of points? One is that

that presumes that people have agency and a fair number of people would challenge that on various different grounds, whether it's capitalism or free will or whatever. And the second one is how you reconcile that with what you also talk about as the God-shaped hole in people's lives. Because again, God and taking back control or religion and taking back control sit somewhat unhappily with each other in some people's eyes.

So in terms of do we have agency, I'll go back to the central metaphor of my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis. Because in every society, people have noticed, there's a quote from Virgil, I think it is, I see the right way and approve it. Alas, I follow the wrong. We can know what's the right thing, but yet we find ourselves pulled in a different direction.

And so the metaphor that I use there is our minds are divided into parts that sometimes conflict, like a small rider, which is conscious reasoning, on a large elephant, which is intuition. It's very smart. I didn't want a horse. I wanted an elephant. It's big. It's smart. And you've got this little guy on top who's conscious reasoning. And that's why we can say the spirit is willing, but the flesh are-- you have all these quotations about divided selves.

But here's the thing. In the moment of temptation, the elephant is a lot stronger than the rider. But when there's not temptation, the rider can make decisions. Your conscious reasoning can make decisions that will then change the path of the elephant or that will set you up so that you're not in this situation in which the elephant makes you do stupid things over and over again. So we do have agency once we understand that that's how we work.

And in my class at NYU, I teach this course called Flourishing. I have one undergraduate version, mostly 19-year-olds, and one MBA version I teach in the business school, so they're mostly 26 to 33 or so. And we work on it for the semester. Pick a way to improve yourself. We're going to try to make you smarter, stronger, and more sociable. And smarter is mostly regaining control of your attention. That's most of what it is. That will raise your function IQ 10, 15 points.

Stronger is reading Stoicism. We read this great book called The Stoic Challenge by William Irvine. They love it. It teaches you how to just use everyday Stoicism to not be pulled into craziness so often. And more sociable, we read Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. These three books are short, easy, interesting, and they're so powerful for helping you do self-change. But the point of this is that they learn that they can't just resolve to spend less time on their phone.

But if they say, I'm going to consciously go out and buy an alarm clock,

and put it by my bed, and then I will put my phone in the other room. Or I will buy-- it's called brick in America. There's a little-- like a hockey puck. You touch your phone to it, and then that neutral-- it blocks everything you want to block. And you can-- so there are self-control devices. The rider can say, I'm going to impose a self-control device so that I cannot access Instagram, or I can only access it three times or something. So you can impose self-control devices.

And the students who regain their intention, so these are successful students. They don't mostly have huge addictions, but a lot of them do. A lot of the undergrads especially are spending three to six hours a day just on social media. I had one student, she was spending six hours a day just on TikTok, which means there's no time for anything else. She was going to go through college, going to class and watching TikTok. That was basically it.

And when she got it down to an hour a day and then she quit TikTok,

She said it was the most extraordinary thing. She could do her homework easily. She could focus. She could concentrate. It only took her an hour or two, and she could go out with her friends. And when you're going out with your friends, you're having more fun. And so the people who take, so the rider can set the course to take back control of your attention. And once you do that, then you change the complex dynamical system that is your mind, and suddenly you can focus again. You can think. You're more open. You're not rushed.

So, yeah, people have agency if they understand the psychology. And the seeming contradiction between taking back control but having a God-shaped hole in your life? I don't see the contradiction. We're talking about taking back control from several companies whose business model is entirely to extract your attention and data and sell it. And they've made trillions of dollars on this and you haven't paid them a penny.

they have control and I'm saying let's take it back. Now how does that in any way contradict the God-shaped hole? - Oh, I suppose if, you know, the implication of a God-shaped hole is that somehow

faith will assist you as you go through life. Now, faith suggests giving up agency to some people. Okay. So I wasn't thinking about it in those terms. When I said, when I use the phrase God shaped whole, it's a paraphrase from Pascal. So the French philosopher Pascal, he has, it's like a paragraph that,

So he doesn't literally say there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, but you might have, have you heard that before, that phrase? There's a God-shaped hole in every human heart. It's a kind of a, it's an accurate paraphrase of a paragraph, but he did say something like that.

And that always resonated with me because as an atheist, but I have spiritual experiences, especially in nature. And nowadays we can admit it on psychedelic drugs. Like, you know, I've had really experiences of the divine and transcending this universe and all that, all the sort of things you read about in religious texts and in William James. So I've had a spiritual life in that sense. And so the way I experience it is, yeah, there is, you know, there's,

there's a kind of an opening or an incompleteness or this something which in my life only occasionally gets filled.

Now, you know, I'm very happy, I have a fulfilling life, but there's a sort of like a, oh, like something has, you know, there's something more. And so that's all I meant. And for young people, as they're becoming teenagers, their spiritual life is beginning to develop, if everyone has a God-shaped whole and they're looking for meaning, connection, higher purpose, and they are. Young people, Gen Z is, they're a really idealistic generation. They want to make a difference.

But if what's coming in is your feed from TikTok and Snapchat and Instagram, and you're watching YouTube Shorts, and you're putting garbage in the hole, you're going to come out differently. And I think this helps us understand why. So the saddest graph in the book is, I think it's in this chapter, it's the graph of students' agreement with this statement. "My life feels useless."

We've asked that question of 18-year-olds since the 1970s or '80s. And in the book, there's a graph. About 9% of kids agreed with that in the '70s, '80s, '90s, all the way to 2010, even 2011. Nine percent, plus or minus one. And all of a sudden, you get the hockey stick. 2012, 2013, it shoots up, it doubles. It goes to 18%. In a few years, our kids suddenly felt

You know, they've got this whole they want meaning and suddenly there's no chance of meaning It's just stuff coming in like stuff coming in in a quantity We cannot imagine with levels of disgust and violence and porn beyond anything we can imagine for some of the kids And so yeah, they feel spiritually empty. Can we talk about solutions? It was very interesting. Um

We had some research here in Britain earlier in the week about, again, the challenges of regulating social media. And the response that the BBC got from Meta was the app stores should be...

Regulating this it's up the app stores to stop people Dodging through the age restrictions and things like that You've suggested the age restrictions should be a robust and be much higher or significantly higher anyway What do you make of what they say about app stores? And do you think what you suggest is realistic? Yeah, so of course

Right now, they are deeply incentivized by American law to not know how old people are. Of course, they know everything about us, they know how old we are. But American law was written in the 90s such that in order to take someone's data and sign a contract with them, you have to, without your parents' knowledge or permission, you have to be 13, they decided. It was going to be 16, but the lobbyist got pushed under 13.

And then Congress, I presume the tech lobbyists got this in, they said the companies cannot do this if they have affirmative knowledge that the person is under 13. Which means as long as they don't know, they can do anything they want to your children. And so if you sign up for an account at Snapchat, at some point you have to put in your birthday. And the default is that you were born 18 years ago. Just click and you're 18.

And so they really don't want to know. They want to push this off on someone else. And the easiest thing is to push it off on the App Store. But all of these platforms you can get to from the web. If your kids can get to a web browser, they can go everywhere. So the App Store, sure, I suppose that would be helpful, but it wouldn't be a game changer.

What would be a game changer is device-based verification, and this is actually what Pornhub wants, and I actually think that it's not unreasonable. Pornhub says our business model is not children. You know, we're happy to keep kids off if we know who they are. And so if the devices could be set either by hardware or software so that parents could set like this is, you know, my child is this old or this category, and then Pornhub could send down a ping to the phone and it would just say yes or no, yes or no, old enough or not.

And then we won't let you on if you're coming from a phone or a computer that is age-marked.

So that would at least be a step in the right direction, is device-based. And Meta should be fine with that because that's no skin off their teeth. That's easy for them to do. But what we really need to reach most children is what Australia is trying to do, which is to say, for certain things to register for an account and sign a contract with a company, you have to prove that you're 16. They say, let's raise the age. 13 is too young. Make it 16. And for the first time, make the companies-- there's a principle, make the polluter pay.

And for the first time, we're making the companies that are causing these problems make them do the age check. Lots of industries do age checking. There are many ways to do it. There are so many that they have a trade association, like lots of members with different technologies.

So what Australia is going to do is say, they said in law that you have to check age, but you can't require a government ID. You have to offer other solutions, which is great. What I'm imagining is you put in, you know, you get to the point where it says, how old are you? What's your birthday? You put in your birthday, then it,

gives you a page. You say, here are four ways you can verify your age. You can show us a driver's license or send it out to another company that will verify. It's probably better. There's a facial recognition way, which people are talking about. It's not terribly accurate, but it's something. There are various databases. In France, they have all students. Everyone has a record. You could just send it

So there are multiple ways already that can do this. So that's what Australia is doing for us. And if Australia is joined by a couple of other countries, then the tech companies can't stop them.

So, that's what I'm hoping Britain will do. I've had discussions in France. I know Denmark, Indonesia, a bunch of countries are talking about following Australia. And if a few countries do it, it will become a global norm and the companies will have to do it. Very briefly, before we come to the Q&A, the British technology secretary today, with an interview with, I think it was the Daily Telegraph, suggested social media curfews. Do you think it's a good idea?

And do you think it is a sign at least that the argument is moving your way? Yeah, I don't know anything about how that would work. China does it. The fact that China, which controls TikTok, has all kinds of curfews on when their kids can use it and what it can show. The fact that the worst things tend to happen late at night when a kid has a screen in their bedroom, whether it's a phone or a computer, that's especially when a lot of the sextortion happens, when a lot of the really horrible stuff happens.

So everybody should have the policy of no screens in the bedroom after, you know, 9 or 10. The policy I wish to God I had had when I was, when my kids were little, was no screens in the bedroom ever. We just don't do that in this family. There's a computer out here, there's a TV out here, but you never bring any screens in the bedroom ever. And then, you know, by the time they're 13, 14, we'd have to relax and say, okay, you can take your laptop in to do homework for two hours. I wish we had done that.

So I think there's all sorts of things that would help. So in that sense, if a curfew is going to prevent them from doing a couple of different social media sites, and they're going to have to spend 2:00 AM to 4:00 AM on YouTube, I suppose that's a little better.

I don't know. Yeah, right. We're gonna get a questions enough from me I'm told the audience lights will take one to two minutes to warm up So I'm gonna take a question that we've had online Please keep them coming in online and then I'm gonna come to people who have made the efforts come here This is from Emily. You've spoken eloquently about the problem You might have slightly touched on this one just now But what can parents actually do when there is so much pressure to give kids a smartphone? Yeah

So that question gets right to the central point of the book, which is that we're stuck in a collective action trap, and if you do the right thing, you are imposing a cost on your child, a short-term cost.

And a lot of us have done that, and because of what I now know about these platforms, my daughter can honestly come to me and say, "Dad, I'm the only one in my high school who doesn't have Snapchat. Everyone else is on Snapchat." That's hard, and that's hard for me, and it's hard for my daughter. And she accepts it, and she sees the problems. So it's actually, it's okay. But because everyone had it, there was pressure on me to do it, and we've all been in that situation.

with giving the first phone, with giving access to social media. But what if it was only 60% of the kids who had Snapchat? Well, then it would be a lot easier for parents to say no. And so the key idea is let's break the collective action trap by acting collectively. And so the four norms... So briefly, she's asking about more than that, but the four norms...

that I propose in the book that we could have as norms. That doesn't mean that this is a good age, just can we at least agree on this as a floor? No smartphone or iPad before 14, that is you don't get your own before 14. No social media before 16. That would help to have law, but we can do it as a norm. Phone-free schools, and that doesn't mean during class. That means the whole day. You get miraculous results when you do that.

and far more independence, free play, and responsibility. If we do that, if we start sending our kids out in controlled ways, agreements with neighbors, a few families work together, then the kids can begin having fun again. Because this isn't a book about social media, it's a book about childhood. We have to give kids back a fun childhood. Okay, so that's the general big picture about what we should do. I'll give one specific piece of advice that I think parents will find helpful.

Which is, you know, the idea is developing that screens are bad, keep your child away from screens. But that's not quite right. Screens are not intrinsically bad. What I've come to realize, I didn't know this in the book, but I'm now putting it in these terms, distinguish between story time and fragmenting time.

Stories are good things. Humans are a storytelling animal. For as long as we've had language, we have told our children stories, lots of stories, and that's how morality is passed down. We have our kids read books. Good literature takes them imaginative places. You can have far more experience in literature tuning up your brain than you can have in real life because it's so rich and so frequent. So stories are good things.

And so a television screen is actually a good way of presenting a story. And so I would say, let your kids watch movies, especially if you have two kids or they had to do it with a friend. So if they're with another person watching a story, which is at least 30 minutes long and ideally more than an hour, ideally a movie,

on a screen that they can't interact with, there's no stimulus response, and the story is about people in a moral world. There's good, there's bad, there's decisions, there's dilemmas. That's great! Story time is great! Not in the first three years of screens, they say, but by five or six. You know, watching with your kid, that's great. I think it's wonderful to let them pay attention to a story for an hour. Here's what's bad.

iPad time, iPhone time, here, just take my phone. They learn their way around very, very quickly, but what they ultimately learn, because there's so much to do on the phone, and especially the short videos, a lot of it sort of ends up with short videos. What fragmenting time teaches your kid is, first of all, they're alone with a small screen in front of their face,

Going through stuff that has no morals, no story, doesn't go on a long time. What it teaches them is to be exquisite judges of, "Is this the most interesting thing I could possibly see right now?" And they get very good at judging. "I've been on this video for seven, eight seconds. It's not looking very promising. Next. Oh, yeah, this one's good. This one's good. Wow, yeah."

And so if you give your child that kind of training in maximizing every moment of interest for hours a day, every day, from the time they're two in America, and here too, I suppose, from the time they're two to the time they're 18, their brain is going to find it extremely painful to do something that isn't super interesting, like sit in class or talk to a person.

And so this is my main advice to parents about this. It's not screens per se. Stories are good. It's fragmenting time. Don't give your kids any fragmenting time, at least until they're 14. Then you can throw them into the pit of vipers. But no. Let's try to protect early puberty is what I'm saying.

Right, let's get questions from people here. We'll start with you, madam. Hi, good evening. I'm an addiction psychologist and I'm a parent of two. I've got a seven-year-old and a 14-year-old. So my question is, you know, you talk about agency and I think, and we talk about addiction and what you've said is ultimately all these kids already are, they're pretty much addicted.

Now, when I'm working with people that are addicted, they need to want to stop themselves. And I think this is key here because I actually, you know, if I was to say to my child, okay, I want you off, I don't think they actually want to stop. So, you know, I'm listening to you talking about this collective, you know,

opportunity to change things, but I'm thinking, for my seven-year-old, I might have more influence. But for all those children that have already been exposed to this, we're talking a generation of addicts who don't want to stop. And it's impossible, I think, personally. - And the other thing is... - You need a question as well. I've got a question to him as well. So the question is, how do we get our children

You know, it's all one thing top down, but how do we actually get them to want to stop without losing the social connection with other people? Thank you very much. And there's a lady at the back. I hope you have a microphone now. Yes, thank you. So you mentioned at the beginning about the fact that we became much more protective of our children in the 90s. And that was down to the failure of the social contract between adults. And I was just interested if you had any thoughts on what caused that breakdown of the contract between adults.

And then the gentleman here. Thank you, sir. Hello. I wanted to ask specifically about 20-year-olds. So

So I'm 25 and I've seen my whole generation, anyone who's 20, they're not well socialized. They don't know how to find friends, they don't know how to find a partner, they don't know how to build relationships or maintain them. What do we do with them? I'm asking this as somebody who wants to help myself and other people.

And I asked this question last year, actually. I don't know if you remember this. - No answers yet. Okay, thank you very much. We'll come back to you. The first question about needing to want to stop. - Yeah, no, I mean, that's right. And you're a specialist in this. What I can tell you is that older Gen Z, the people in their 20s, they have enormous regrets. A lot of them want to stop. But seven and eight-year-olds don't. They're super excited by this stuff. They desperately want Snapchat and video games. They want everything.

And that's why we have to act as their frontal cortex for a little while. And that's why we don't look. There are four reasons why we don't let kids do things. There are four reasons why I have age limits, graphic sexuality, graphic violence, addiction, things that are addictive or things that are physically harmful. And when you let your kids on social media, they get all four of those.

So that's why we need much stronger controls in the young years. But what I can tell you, so this is both for the first and third question, what I can tell you is that, and as you know, the brain is very plastic, very malleable in childhood and through puberty, and the frontal cortex, it's said to kind of lock down, finish around 25.

So my undergraduate students, 19, 20 years old, they make amazing progress if they get back control of their attention. So, you know, the addiction changes your dopamine circuits. When you don't have the device, you're in withdrawal. But it takes just a couple weeks to get over that. You can get your brain back.

So what I would say to both is it starts with regaining control of your attention. Read the book How to Break Up with Your Phone by Katherine Price. She's actually working with me on a children's version of The Anxious Generation.

So we'll have a book for 9-12 year olds coming. So there are great books and there are self-control devices, but you can make extraordinary progress if you start by regaining control of your attention. And then also, my other main piece of advice to them is start taking more chances, put yourself in situations, grab opportunities, accept that you'll sometimes be embarrassed and feel awkward. Because Gen Z has in a sense grown up in a minefield. If you literally grew up in a minefield, you'd be afraid to walk.

And because the consequence can be so great, that has happened. But I'm sorry, I should give shorter answers. So now back to the question of why did this happen.

So why did we lose all this social capital? So Robert Putnam is the expert on this, and if I remember what he says, the biggest single piece is that nothing builds social capital like being attacked by the Nazis or the Japanese. That really, really created generations in Britain and America and much of the world with incredible social trust and cohesion and ability to work together.

And as the greatest generation began to die out in the 60s, that's part of why we lost the trust. That's one thing. That's something we can't repair. But the second biggest part, if I remember correctly, he says is television. Because technology always changes society. And it's a combination. It's actually television, air conditioning, and the automobile. So if you go back to the 30s and 40s, nobody had television.

Nobody had air conditioning or television. But in the 50s and 60s, everyone is getting these things. What that means is that people aren't outside anymore. They're not on their front steps. They're not seeing their neighbors. Family life moves inside on the sofa. Everyone watches, but they're watching together. It's not asocial. So that has huge changes. And when we no longer know our neighbors or see our neighbors, then we're afraid to let our kids walk down the street.

So I think that's why it's actually technological change actually drove Act One of the tragedy, which is the loss of trust.

I want to come back to the audience here, but there's a great question just come in online and it goes to the heart of a big part of your book. Simple question: Why can't children interact with each other online? Why does it have to be in real life? Yeah, so in theory they could. And I remember 2008 or 9, whenever Twitter came out and people were just tweeting, it was like 128 characters back, people were tweeting, "Just had a great hamburger!" You know, and it seemed stupid and trivial.

But as a social psychologist, I thought, you know, what if, what if this new generation is having all this social interaction, like a hundred times more than we had when I was young? That could be amazing. Like, they might be super social. That was a possibility. But that didn't come to pass.

Interactions online are missing some of the ingredients of what we evolved social skills for. So we have a huge amount of evolution and then childhood development to interact in ways that are synchronous, like back and forth, like even just as you and I are on stage, like we intimately know like when to move our eyes from each other. It'd be weird if we just stared into each other's eyes the entire time. It'd be a lot of fun, but...

So human interaction is embodied, but online there's no body. In fact, online, increasingly, it's not even going to be a person. It's already a lot of AIs, and they're getting smarter and sexier. So it's going to be mostly AIs going forward, unless we do something. So real communication is embodied and synchronous, and there's a high bar to entry and exit. You don't have a million relationships to pick from, so you've got to make them work. Whereas online, everything's disposable and cheap.

So for all these reasons, so look, obviously, you know, FaceTime is amazing when you're not with your family. I mean, so, but that is synchronous. So video calls, I think, are great. Telephone calls are great. But it's especially the asynchronous, the I post this, you comment on it.

The girls are doing so much of that, and yes, they know what's going on in their friends' lives, but it doesn't connect them because the loneliness epidemic began as soon as relationships moved online.

The cheap interaction, the easy, cheap interaction pushes out the harder but more satisfying human interactions. Let's go back here, if we could. We've got more microphones. Right, I'm going to make the microphone people move. Right, let's start with you, if we could. Thank you. Madam.

Thank you for today and thank you for, I suppose, bringing community together of like-minded people because that's quite rare these days. The question I actually had was I saw a headline today about screen use. This is slightly off topic but I think Hugh Grant was backing it and about

project with yourself along screen use in schools because that's certainly come up in our school where the concern is moving not just from what parents in primary schools may have control over but what schools see as appropriate use of screens within class and stuff that's seen as mandatory or as useful or as useful for teachers

So just kind of gauging the direction that you may be going with that. I'd rather do that than do the three things. Feel free. We'll just keep our microphone holders waiting. That's fine. This is a really important question. I'm so glad that you asked this. The question is about educational technology.

And so what happened was, because I'm friends with Sophie Winkleman, who's been campaigning here against ed tech and computers in school. And then she introduced me to, so Hugh and Anna Grant and Sophie, they all have kids in schools and they're all not giving the kids phones, but then the kids go to school and it's, you know, it's all the stuff that they don't want. And it's very hard to find a school anywhere that

that isn't giving kids iPads and Chromebooks. And in theory, these things could be helpful, but it turns out they're not. It turns out that as soon as we put computers on kids' desks, education scores started going down. These things are distraction devices. UNESCO has said we should reverse. Sweden was one of the first to digitize. They're reversed, and they're going back to pen and paper. Think about it. The people who made this technology

They send their kids to the Waldorf School in the Bay Area, which is a school that prides itself on having no screens, no technology in the classroom. There's a separate room they can go to learn to program computers, but the people who made this technology do not let their kids be exposed to it in school or at home. They make their nannies sign contracts that they will not let their children use the nanny's phone.

So the people who made this stuff know that it doesn't help education. The distraction effect swamps everything else. I've learned teaching at NYU, teaching even MBA students, if they're using their computer, the TA sits in the back of the room, even though I made them swear they're only going to use the computer for class, they're checking their LinkedIn profile, they're investing, they're online shopping. The distraction effect is so enormous from having a computer on your desk.

So it's really urgent that you get rid of these it's gonna be a lot harder getting phones out of schools is easy Everyone wants to do what it's happening, but getting Getting the devices off the desks There can be roles for educational technology just not on a kid

kids desk. That's the important thing. And one final point about which I think is very important for everyone to understand. In the 1990s and early 2000s, we thought this was an equity issue. Rich kids have computers. We've got to get computers for the poor kids. And so philanthropists lined up to donate huge amounts of money. Bill Gates, I think, gave a lot of money to get computers in every classroom. It's an equity issue. It's going to bring up students who are from poor families.

Well, it turns out that test scores are dropping across the United States, but not at the top. The top performing students who are also in general higher social class, they're not really dropping. But the bottom half is dropping, not since COVID, since 2012.

As soon as we put the devices on, it has a counter-equity effect and it exaggerates differences. So this is the next struggle. It's much harder than getting the phones out of school, but we've got to start thinking about it and at least get it out of primary school. Kids have to learn to read and write on paper. It's much better than doing everything in a gamified way.

Thank you very much. Lady here. Thank you, madam. Hi. My question was also actually about ed tech. I was wondering if you could explain, Jonathan, how all these programs got into all the schools. Are the schools being incentivized to get all of our kids on screens? Is this just being seen as like the future is bright, the future is on screen? I think all of us here who are parents are baffled at what's happened in the schools. Yeah, that's right. So, you know, I haven't studied this, so I don't know historically exactly how it happened.

But what I think I can say is that, as I said before, like the story, we were all techno-optimists once. We thought this was going to be great. And because the millennials had this and then they started companies and they're a bold generation and they travel around the world, we thought this was going to be great.

And, of course, there's a gigantic financial incentive. So American companies in particular, every company, you know, they're very good at creating a market or inciting fears and really playing the game of, oh, you're going to fall behind. And they got schools competing. Oh, in our school, every kid has, you know, oh, in our, you know. So they got schools competing to give complete coverage. But

But I'm told that some teachers told me the instructions from on high in their school was you have to work the technology into every lesson. No matter what you do, find a way to use the technology. I don't know why this is. I'm beginning to make inquiries. Is there a kickback scheme as there is with doctors where they get paid off in a sense or indirectly for prescribing this drug? I don't know. I hope there will be an investigative journalist because it is a mystery.

But I think it began as a combination of just salesmanship and naive optimism. But now that we're recognizing the damage being done by educational technology, there's a great book called The EdTech Tragedy, which is about how bad it was when we put everybody on devices during COVID. So we've got to undo it, but it's going to be hard. Thank you. And I think it was gentleman up at the top.

Yes, Jonathan, earlier on this evening, you made reference to the series Adolescence, and I felt you kind of paused and hesitated and something was going through your head at that moment. If it's not too personal, are you able to elaborate on that? And in particular, the whole idea of bullying

Was that something that you explored with your empirical evidence? Yeah. So, no, the reason I paused before is that earlier today I was talking about it and I got choked up because, you know, I think the adolescence is especially about the father. I think he's the central character and he's the one that a lot of us, you know, I think a lot of us men really identified with.

And so I think I paused in part because I didn't want to get choked up again. And so I'm just, I'm in control. I'm okay. But my thought, to share a couple thoughts about it, is of course it's taking a case which is extreme. You know, it's not the case that if you let your kids on social media they're going to kill someone. This is a very rare crime. But...

It has happened a bunch of times in Britain. It's not like this was just a one-off. It's happened a number of times in Britain. And the central lesson that I think is absolutely correct is they thought he was okay. He was just up in his room on his computer. He's safe. He's home. What could go wrong? That's what a lot of us thought, especially back when we were techno-optimists. But in fact, turning your child's brain off

in the peak years of receptivity to outside information, the age of initiation around the world, kids are making the jump from child to adult, around 11 to 14, right in there, to turn your kids' brains over to influencers who are chosen not for the quality but for their emotional extremity. And so the way it shows that a good family, a kid was probably a good kid, if he gets sucked into it enough,

then yeah, they can get very disoriented, they don't have a, they get a distorted sense of right and wrong. And so even though, you know, I've been saying, you know, it's a very rare event, but in the Times last week, when I got here on Saturday, or a couple days ago, there was an article, apparently there's a report, I don't know if the Times commissioned it or something, but it's like the juvenile crime something report, it's supposed to be coming out very soon,

And there was a little preview of it, and one of the people who wrote this, they interviewed hundreds of police and all kinds of people who work with juvenile delinquents and crime. And they said the big surprise was that wherever we went, whoever we talked to, social media was always involved. Or at least it was much more involved than we expected.

And so, you know, moral development is already fraught and difficult and kind of hard to make it happen. And if you suddenly have all these incredibly immoral forces pulling and pushing and distracting, yeah, it goes awry. And it's implicated in a lot of violence. In American schools, it's associated with violence because kids will attack someone. They'll, you know, plan something, come to the bathroom, we're going to do this thing. And then they jump the kid and beat the hell out of them in order to get the video.

And then they post the video. And so it just incentivizes performativity and aggression as opposed to in real life. Of course, there are still fights, but not nearly as many. So, yeah, this is another example of how life online just dehumanizes our kids and us. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Hannah Kay and myself, Leila Ismail.