Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation reveals how smartphones, given to kids aged 11–13 since 2012, doubled depression and anxiety rates in Gen Z, with teen girls’ suicide attempts surging 120% due to hypersexualization, bullying, and sextortion—linked to 20+ documented cases—while boys’ dopamine systems atrophy from excessive gaming. Haidt dismisses techno-optimism like Pinker’s, arguing unchecked digital exposure replaces evolutionarily critical play and socialization, leaving modern youth ill-equipped for moral reasoning or emotional resilience in a world where liberal democracy’s guardrails against tribalism are eroding faster than ever. [Automatically generated summary]
Smartphones And The Technological Environment00:13:20
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Jonathan Heid.
I'm really happy to do this interview because when I read Jonathan's work, I frequently find myself discussing it with him in my head.
So it's kind of nice to have the things in my head actually appear in reality, which may be cause for medication.
I'm not sure.
But books like The Righteous Mind, The Coddling of the American Mind are books of high-level intelligence, but also books of tremendous goodwill.
They show a sort of anti-dogmatic flexibility of thinking that I just don't see very much in modern works of intelligence.
He's got a new book out called The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
I want to talk to him about that and about more on his outlook on life.
Jonathan, thanks so much for coming on.
It's nice to meet you.
My pleasure, Andrew.
Very nice to meet you.
So let's begin with the new book.
You're talking about a troubling trend in the psychological outlook of young people.
Can you describe what's going on?
Yes.
We first noticed something was very strange in 2014, 2015.
The students who were arriving on college campuses were suddenly much more fragile, much more easily offended.
They claimed that speech was violence.
They were harmed by speech.
And my friend Greg Lukianov, who was the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, noticed this and we talked about it.
And so we wrote a whole book, The Coddling of the American Mind, about what was going on.
But after we published that book, it became clear this isn't just about college students.
Actually, people who were born after 1995, if you're born in 1996 or later, you got a smartphone and possibly Instagram or social media in middle school, and you went through puberty on a smartphone and social media.
That means you're Gen Z. Gen Z is defined by the fact that they got smartphones and social media way too early, often in middle school, and they became very depressed and anxious, especially the girls.
Rates of depression and anxiety have more than doubled.
Rates of suicide are up 50%.
For younger teen girls, they're up over 120%.
So the mental health of our kids fell off a cliff around 2012, 2013, and there was no sign of a problem in 2010.
So what is it that a phone does that you think is causing this?
So a phone does many, many things.
The way to understand what happened, it's not just the phones.
It's the loss of the play-based childhood.
Kids need to play.
They were always out playing.
You and I grew up at a time when there was actually a lot of crime outside and drunk drivers and all sorts of things, but everybody went outside to play.
That was just what kids do.
But in the 90s, we began to lock up our kids.
We're afraid that they'll be abducted.
We don't let them out to play.
So we're taking away the play-based childhood, but their mental health doesn't actually collapse in the 90s or the 2000s.
It's not till you get to the second feature, which is let's give them a smartphone or a tablet.
And when you give a kid a smartphone or tablet, it moves to the center of their life.
It's the most interesting thing they have.
It's incredibly addictive.
It's beautiful.
It's fun.
So once you give your child a device and you let them have it without a lot of limits, it will take over their attention.
And at that point, they'll start spending far less time with other kids.
They will look at you far less.
They will laugh less in general.
They won't touch other people.
They won't go outside and experience nature as much.
They develop what I called a phone-based childhood.
And a human being cannot grow up healthy if they have a phone-based childhood.
It's just our evolution requires us to be out playing and having face-to-face experiences and getting into conflicts and getting out of conflicts.
So all of that needs to happen.
And we basically ended childhood.
I call it the great rewiring of childhood between 2010 and 2015.
You know, Steven Pinker was always producing a kind of happy, optimistic view of where things are going.
He says in one of his books, Enlightenment Now, I think it is, he says that, no, kids are not reporting that they're less lonely.
They have all their friends on Facebook.
They have friends here.
They have friends there.
Certainly, there's a lot of social interaction on smartphones and on the internet.
Why isn't that a replacement for real life?
So I love Steve Pinker, and I used to be an optimist about the future in general.
You know, because he and Matt Ridley make the same point that humans are an ingenious species and it often seems we have problems, but we always figure out a way.
And there are setbacks, but prosperity keeps rising, rights keep increasing.
So that's been true up until now.
You know, but like as with the guy jumps off the Empire State building, he's falling down.
A guy on the 20th floor says, how's it going?
And the guy says, oh, so far, fine.
I'm sorry.
I don't want to be too grim and too dark here, but at least with our kids, with our kids, I think the technological environment is really arming them.
Now, it seemed at the time, you have to understand, in 2010, most of us are techno-optimists.
The internet, you know, you and I, we remember the dawn of the internet in the 90s.
It was miraculous.
That's great.
Yeah.
Like, I mean, like, you're going to give me omniscience?
Like, I can just type in my question and I get an answer.
Like, you'll map things.
I mean, it was unbelievable.
And the millennials took to it.
You know, they loved it.
They spent time on it.
Their mental health didn't suffer.
They were very creative.
They started tech companies.
They started changing the world.
We all thought, wow, the internet's going to be amazing for democracy.
How could any dictator stand up to the people connected?
Yeah, good luck, China, keeping out the internet.
You'll never do it, right?
That's what we thought.
So all the way up through 2011, the Arab Spring, most of us are thinking the technology is amazing.
And these kids, they're digital natives, we said.
We call them digital natives.
And we assume they'd be super smart and super social because they're connecting to 500 people a day.
Whereas you and I, we talk to maybe 10, 15 people a day.
That was it.
So that's how we got suckered into this, is that we thought it was okay.
But it turns out there's a big difference between a millennial kid in 1998 dialing up on a modem to reach AOL and some messaging with friends.
That's fine.
There's no problem there.
They're connecting.
And that kid can't be on the internet nine hours a day.
It wasn't possible with a dial-up modem.
Your mother needed the phone line.
You had to get off, right?
But once you give your kid, so in 2010, everyone's got flip phones.
They don't have high-speed internet generally, no front-facing camera.
In 2010, kids are still using their phones as a device to connect.
They talk to each other, they text each other one-on-one, and they say, let's meet up at four o'clock at so-and-so.
So it's still a recognizably human child in 2010.
Then everything changes.
You get the front-facing camera is introduced in 2010.
Instagram comes out in 2010, but it's not until Facebook buys it in 2012 that it becomes super popular with teenagers.
You get high speed, everyone's got high-speed internet, unlimited texting.
And so by 2015, many, many kids are now spending most of their available time on their phone and even their unavailable time.
So even if they're in school, they're on their phone.
Even if they're in bed and they've got the lights out, they're on their phone.
So it becomes possible to spend more than 10 hours a day on your phone.
And that blocks out everything else.
Time with friends, time with your parents, reading, hobbies.
Everything else decreases.
And that I think is kind of bad for you.
Aside from what you're losing, aside from the actual touchgrass, face-to-face contact with people, is there something about social life on a phone that is inherently bad?
Oh my God, yes.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
No, because so there are two things that we do.
And as adults, we're very comfortable in both.
One is connect, the other is perform.
So, you know, right now, you and I, we're kind of connecting, but we also know this is for our podcast.
You know, this is where, you know, we're being, we know that we're going to be viewed by lots of people.
There's something about living on a stage.
It's just, it's just different.
And so we don't, I mean, it's fun if your child performs in a play and they're on a stage for 20 minutes.
That's great.
But what if your child lived on the stage all the time and there's always an audience and your daughter is beginning to enter puberty and her body's beginning to change and there's always an audience and the audience is always commenting on her body and they're commenting on her clothing and they reinforce her for doing things that make her look like a porn star.
You know, she has to pose in a certain sexy way and she's 11.
But our kids are being shaped by the expectations online with hypersexualization, a lot of materialism.
You've got nine, 10, 11 year old girls going to Sephora now buying face creams to preserve their skin.
You know, it's just, it's a sick world.
It's not an appropriate world for children.
And the nature of online life is performative.
So we just, I have a sub stack, After Babel.
I hope your listeners will come to it.
It's free.
Nothing's behind a paywall.
We have a post today from Kristen Bride, a woman whose son committed suicide.
He seemed perfectly happy, seemed like things were going fine, but he was being bullied online.
And at a certain point, he was so humiliated that when he went up to bed, well, he went up to bed, they thought he was fine, but he was so humiliated by events that night that he killed himself that night.
Boys have actually higher rates of much higher rates of suicide than girls do.
They don't always kill themselves because they're depressed.
It's often because they're shamed.
Sextortion rings are going on.
Boys are being tricked into sending a nude photo.
And then the sextortion ring, they say, ah, we got you now.
We're going to send this photo to all your contacts.
Send us, you know, send us a lot of money.
A lot of those boys kill themselves.
20 cases are already known, identified.
There's probably hundreds and hundreds of boys who are dead now because we, you know, think about, think about a platform where strangers can get to your child and trick them.
Like, why would we ever allow this?
So the way you're describing this, the only answer has got to be some kind of restriction on the phones, right?
Well, so I think for, so in general, I wrote my book, The Anxious Generation, I wrote it assuming that there would not be much legislation, at least not in this country.
In Britain, they are actually moving.
There is legislation to change social media and to raise the age.
But I kind of assume that in America, we're not going to do much because we haven't done anything since 1998.
And I've mostly focused on social norms.
So, you know, in Britain, they're talking about banning the sale of smartphones to anyone under 14.
I don't think we should do that in America.
I think this, you know, the choice of getting a smartphone should be up to the parent.
But I want to create a norm in which we parents, we all say, you know what, we're all going to wait till high school.
Let's just let kids get through early puberty.
Let them get through middle school.
It's the hardest part of life.
Let them get through that on flip phones or phone watches.
They can text us on a flip phone or phone watch.
We're not going to give them a smartphone until high school.
That I think is a norm, not a law.
Now, where we do need a law, I think, is the law, a terrible law, thoughtless law created before we knew what the internet was, said, how old does a child have to be to make a contract with a company that wants data from the child without the parents' knowledge or permission?
At what age can we let a kid go on AOL, create an account, give away their data, and the parents don't even know?
And the original age was 16 in this bill, but it got pushed down in lobbying to 13 with zero enforcement.
So right now, the age is set to 13.
Any child who's old enough to lie and say that she's 13 can go on pornhub, they can watch beheading videos, they can watch cat in a blender, they can see any horrible thing on the internet.
That's crazy that we have no guardrails of any kind on the internet.
You know, they can be on groups with perverted men who are tricking them to sending photos of themselves naked.
Like anything can happen.
There's no restriction, no guards.
I think we need to raise the age from 13 to 16 and then actually require the companies to enforce it.
Right now, it all falls on the parents.
It's as if we said, you know, kids can go into bars, they can go into strip clubs, they can go into brothels.
The companies don't, you know, they shouldn't have to check IDs.
It's up to the parents to keep their children out of strip clubs and brothels and bars and casinos.
That's absurd.
That would never ever work.
But that's the situation that all parents are in.
We're all facing this.
Like, you know, unless we're like looking over our kids' shoulder, unless we put on like crazy monitoring software and we're reading their text, like we don't want to do that.
So we do need help from Congress, I believe, to just set the age to something reasonable and require the companies to have some responsibility for what they're doing to our kids.
Right now they have none.
You mentioned the sexual angle of this, which just seems huge to me.
I mean, it seems it can't be a good thing to have this kind of pornography proliferating the way it is.
I mean, I hear stories of teenage boys having to take Viagra, which is like a bad joke.
I mean, I think when I was a teenage boy, the last thing I needed to do.
That's right.
Right.
Give me anti-Viagra.
Exactly.
And then the girls, I understand something like 30% of Gen Z girls identify as LGBTQ, which can't possibly be anything but a psychological phenomenon.
Differences in Dopamine Response00:04:43
Can you outline the effects on boys and girls?
What the differences are.
Sure.
So the girl story was much more obvious.
When I started writing the book in 2021, I thought it was going to be a book, especially about what social media is doing to girls, because the evidence there is very clear.
The correlational studies, you know, girls who use a lot of social media are three times as depressed as girls who use a little, whereas for boys, it's not as clear.
It's maybe twice as much.
The experiments with girls, you do experimental manipulations, get kids off social media.
When girls go off, effects are often larger.
So the link between social media and girls is kind of clear in the data.
And it's also clear in common sense.
Boys, when you let boys and girls do whatever they want, what happens?
The boys are going to choose to get together, divide up into teams to compete in some way or another.
That's fun for boys.
Girls don't do the team competition as much.
Girls, if you give them freedom, they're largely going to talk.
They're going to talk about other girls.
They're going to talk about who is dating who, who is angry at who.
Girls have a really, really evolved mental map.
Any husband knows this.
Like you actually need your wife to tell you what's going on with your own friends because you kind of forgot, like you're not really paying attention.
So women are just much more socially oriented.
Men are more entered towards competition.
All right.
So the internet comes in.
It's amazing early on.
Boys are mostly interested in it early on.
But once you get the smartphones and social media, now the girls will go rushing in.
They're drawn to the social platforms, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr.
Photographs, personal stuff, confessions, emotions, storytelling.
They're really drawn to that.
The boys, on the other hand, are drawn to video games.
And then when the multiplayer video games, I mean, these amaze, you know, you've seen them, I'm sure.
They're amazing visually.
They're incredible.
I don't know.
I'm 60 years old.
I remember when Pong came out.
Do you remember Pong?
No, I remember Pong.
But I love video games.
I think they're amazing.
Some of them are almost art.
Yeah.
Oh, no, they absolutely are.
They absolutely are.
But, you know, so Pong, it was this primitive game, but it was great fun.
It was on your TV.
And they've gotten better and better since.
But getting better and better actually has a downside, which is they're so amazing that the boys will play all day long.
And one thing we know about the brain is that when you work and then you get a reinforcement, it's great.
That's how you grow.
That's progress.
You work hard at something, you succeed, it feels really good.
Great.
You just keep doing that.
But when you can get reinforcement just by pressing a button, when you're a rat in a cage, you press a button and the electrical line goes into your brain, releases, triggers the dopamine neurons.
That's really, really bad because the rat will keep pressing, pressing, pressing.
And what the brain does when you flood the dopamine system frequently, it has to re-regulate itself to restore homeostasis.
So the sensitivity of those neurons actually decreases because you're getting so much dopamine, so much stimulation of those neurons.
Okay, so now you've got a boy who's been playing six hours a day for months.
When he's not playing, what happens?
His brain now has less responsive dopamine neurons.
So if he's just going out with his friends, if he's just talking with you at the dinner table, it's like really boring.
It's like painfully boring.
His brain is like, oh, I can't stand this.
I need stimulation.
I need more dopamine.
So it's a really, really bad idea to let your boys play a lot of video games.
Now, look, I don't want to say take them off entirely.
Letting your kid play two hours a day on the weekends, I think is fine.
That's great.
But three hours a day every day, it's not going to hurt everyone, but it's going to hurt a lot of them.
And it's going to addict between 5% and 10% are going to get addicted.
And if they get addicted, if it's painful for them to not be on it, this is going to interfere with their development.
So anyway, social media is really drawing in the girls, but then it actually isolates them and separates them.
It doesn't really connect them.
It's fake connections.
And video games are attracting the boys to do competition, but it's fake.
It's not like a sporting event where the boys have to work out the rules.
There are no conflicts on video games.
There's no foul, no out of bounds.
That has to be judged.
The program makes all the decisions.
So the boys are having easy, fun competition.
They're not really having to work at it.
They don't grow.
They don't develop.
They're not developing skills that will turn them into men.
Sorry, I went on for a long time.
The point is, boys and girls are choosing different activities.
They're both really enticing, but yet when they do them, they don't develop the real skills they need in the real world.
And they almost instantly, like they go on in 2012, especially social media.
And in 2013, they're depressed, anxious, and lonely.
It's a really sharp transition.
Moral Evolution00:13:53
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As you take them, you can think I am doing this exactly like K-L-A-V-A-N.
I'd like to ask you a more general question about something that really interests me.
I've read a number of books by evolutionary psychologists, I guess I call them.
You don't actually describe yourself that way, really.
I kind of would.
I mean, I do a lot of different kinds of psychology, but I love evolutionary thinking, anthropological thinking, cultural thinking, developmental, moral, social.
So I love psychology and I do a lot of it.
Okay, great.
And I love psychology as well.
But I'm a religious person, and I know you're not.
And so you're the perfect person for me to ask this question.
Okay.
Because you told a story in the righteous mind.
Well, let's begin with this.
In the righteous mind, you put forward this idea that we feel something, we experience something, and then we supply the logic afterwards.
Yes.
Does that in your mind render the feeling itself illegitimate?
In other words, if I can't come up with the logic of that feeling, does that negate the feeling?
Oh, no, not at all.
Not at all.
Because we have two different systems in our brain.
One is called system one, which is the automatic or intuitive system.
That's what all animals have.
And it's very, very smart.
We have a sense of when someone is lying to us or when someone is hiding something.
We have a vague memory or sense that the way to go is that way.
I think we're trying to, you know, so our intuitive mind is brilliant and it's not necessarily verbal.
And then we have this other kind of cognition, which is very new.
It's less than a million years old.
It's only whenever we develop language, in which we can reason things through.
But that system, system two, is really bad.
You know, we make a lot of mistakes.
It's hard for people to solve simple logic problems.
We're basically intuitive animals and our ability to live in the world is largely because of our intuitions and then also our sociality.
We share each other's intuitions.
Now, when it comes to like science, you know, or any community of people, we're trying to influence each other with language.
So then we have to come up with reasons.
But the key to raising a smart child is not filling them full of knowledge, facts that they can recite.
The key is training them to the point where their automatic intuitions and actions are sociable, are virtuous.
The ancients, East, and West all said this.
Virtue is not something that you learn by reading about facts.
Virtue is a habit.
You learn to be generous or courageous as you learn to play the violin with practice.
So does that create a problem?
I mean, for instance, when police officers are told that they shouldn't racial profile, I know a lot of police officers and they don't really racial profile, but that may feed into what they see.
They just learn to see things after a while.
Are we crippling people by telling them that they shouldn't immediately react to people?
Yeah, that's a difficult question.
Because you can't stop, you know, our brains are pattern matchers, and you can't stop the brain from noticing patterns in the world.
Now, obviously, we have to treat people equally regardless of their race or gender in almost all circumstances.
And so, of course, it makes sense to work with police to not act on those, to be careful.
So it's a complicated psychological and moral question when it comes to policing.
For the rest of us, our minds are pattern matchers.
And we're going to form stereotypes.
We're going to form beliefs about the world.
And those are very hard.
It's very hard to eliminate them.
Now, you can control your behavior and you can still treat everyone well regardless.
I think it is worth striving for that and teaching our children to do that.
Now, the biggest question that always occurs to me when I'm reading evolutionary psychology, especially when it deals with moral questions, I think was Paul Bloom subtitled one of his books, The Origin of Good and Evil.
Every other sense we have evolves, but it evolves in reaction to an outer reality.
So we wouldn't see if there were nothing to see.
We wouldn't hear if there were nothing to hear.
And I understand the sound is not, it's something we create, but it's created out of something.
So in an atheist mind, what is our moral sense created out of?
Okay, no, these are good questions.
So a key idea in the righteous mind is that morality binds and blinds.
And I spend a lot of time in part three of the book talking about the moral matrix and how, you know, there's a lot of interesting research that even chimpanzees who are really smart as individuals, they can't cooperate.
They can't work together.
They can't carry a log and put it up against the wall and climb out of the zoo pen.
They can't do that.
And I described the research of a really great psychologist who showed that with people, we develop, what did he call it?
It's more than shared reality.
It's we jointly construct a reality and then we live in it.
And you can see this, you know, if you've ever traveled in another country where you don't speak the language, you can actually kind of get around.
And you can kind of like, you know, if there's a difficult situation on the street and you have to sort of get past somebody on a bicycle, like we can all work it out because we all understand what we're doing.
So humans have this amazing ability to co-create a shared reality and then live in it.
And, you know, in some groups, it's all about respect for the father and it's very patriarchal.
In other groups, it's more matriarchal.
I mean, the range is so variable.
So I would say that our moral sense is about a reality, but it's not a physical reality.
It's the same reality as, say, the prices in a market.
So gold is more valuable than silver.
That is not just my opinion.
That is a fact, but it's a fact that emerges out of a market in which people are trading.
And then prices emerge.
So prices are real.
And in the same way, I would say moral truths are real, but they're not like the truths of physics.
They're not like, you know, Earth is the third planet from the sun.
Doesn't matter if you believe that or not.
It was true before humans arrived and it'll be true after we're long gone.
That's a fact about the natural world.
Moral truths, I think, do exist, but not quite in that way.
Does that make sense?
Or does that sound too close to relativism to you?
No, it's a little close to relativism only because what I wanted to ask was, I actually agree that there's something that there is a truth in that.
My question would be then, if you're on a planet of Nazis, would they be right?
Which I just don't think they would, right?
Well, no, but look at it this way.
Suppose we find intelligent life on another planet, but rather than reproducing sexually, they are like bees.
So everyone is exactly, or let's say everyone's a clone of everyone else.
And there's only one individual queen who lays all the eggs and makes.
If we found intelligent life on another planet and it was like that, I would bet you that if one of those people was defective or harming, everyone else would just kill them, just kill them.
Because they wouldn't have a sense of individual rights.
There'd be no idea of individual rights if that was their genetics.
Bees could never evolve.
No matter how big a bee's brain gets, it could never care about individual rights because their evolution is that they're a cell in the body.
They're there to be part of the whole.
So in a sense, bees are the ultimate fascists, you might say.
And so I guess I'll take your point that if they really, if it really was, if they really were clones of each other and they had kind of fascist or Nazi ideas, I think it'd be hard for us to say on planet Earth that they're wrong on planet Zimpo or whatever you want to call it.
Right.
What do you think about that?
Well, a little too far-fetched?
Little bit, because it actually.
It actually poses an entirely different set of moral values yeah, inherent in the, in the bees.
Nobody nobody, not even a religious person, thinks that the moral values of bees would be the same as people.
But if you walked in to Nazi Germany at its height, in fact, the vast majority of people there would have been on board and and would have been wrong, so that the moral web that they had created would be a false one.
What would it be false in relation to?
Yeah.
So that's okay.
Good.
This is good that you're pushing me on this.
So as long as you tell me that these are our fellow human beings and that these are Germans in the 20th century, Germany was the most advanced civilization in the 19th century.
I mean, the arts, the music, the sciences.
Germany was incredible in the 19th century into the 20th.
So they don't have any excuse.
They don't have an excuse like, well, you know, where with our ancient tribal customs from 5,000 years ago.
So what happened to Germany is astonishing.
And that's why in social psychology, we're so interested in it.
How could the height of civilization, how could they have descended into the depths of barbarism?
And I guess what I would say is humanity has this amazing ability to be tribal, which means we can come together to fight someone else.
We're very good at that.
We do that automatically.
Me against my brother.
There's a Bedouin proverb.
Me against my brother.
Me and my brother against our cousin.
Me, my brother, and cousin against the stranger.
The genius of liberal democracy in the 20th century, I think, is we found ways of living together that kind of push down the tribalism.
They allow us to welcome the stranger.
They allow us to have diversity.
Now, I'm probably with you, and I'm Jewish.
The Jewish experience in America was of assimilation.
And boy, did that work well.
We got to still be Jewish, but yet be American, major contributions to American society.
There was no real division.
It was great.
The assimilationist approach to immigration in the 20th century did wonders for America.
It worked really well.
So if we can push down the tribalism, we can have a very decent life and we can live with difference and get the benefits of it as well.
What happened in Germany was somehow the tribalism got cranked up to the top.
Now, a lot of that was Adolf Hitler's specific messaging.
It's right there in Mein Kampf.
It's all the stuff he said.
But I'm sure historians would guide us through the process of losing World War I and the humiliation and the poverty and the inflation and the depression.
So, you know, there's a complex historical and psychological story as to how Germans ended up following Hitler.
And it's a tragedy and it's a horror.
It's still wrong, though, right?
Yes, it is still wrong.
Okay, but I would say it's wrong, not in a universalist sense that any intelligent life that came here from other planets, even bees, would see it.
In fact, our ancestors from 10,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago would have seen it as, you know, might makes right.
You know, Genghis Khan, if he was able to kill all the men and rape all the women, he did it.
So 5,000 years ago or even 2,000 years ago, what Hitler did probably would not have been obviously wrong.
He just failed.
He just, you know, he failed at it, but he gave it a good try, they might say.
But in civilized societies, as we had in the 20th century, we're so far past that.
We've evolved so far beyond it that killing people just because of their group membership is pretty much the worst thing you can do.
And Germany went for it and did it anyway.
All right.
I would love to talk more about this, but I'm out of time.
Really wonderful.
When you write a new book, I hope you'll come back and we can continue the conversation.
Oh, my pleasure, Andrew.
I hope listeners will go to anxiousgeneration.com.
That's the website for the book.
We've got lots of ideas for parents, for teachers, for legislators, all kinds of things you can do to give your kids a play-based childhood, a childhood rooted in the real world, in fun, in social interactions, and to delay, delay, delay the phone-based childhood.
Give the website again.
Anxiousgeneration.com.
Great.
Jonathan Haidt, thank you very much for coming on.
It's a real pleasure to meet you.
Oh, my pleasure, Ed.
What an interesting conversation.
Thanks for those questions.
Thanks.
Great talking to him.
Always wanted to ask some of those questions and would have loved to have asked more, but we're out of time.
Come to the Andrew Clavin Show on Friday, and I will be there.