Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2121 - Jonathan Haidt
Uploaded: 2024-03-19T17:00:28.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2121 - Jonathan Haidt' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-03-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2121 - Jonathan Haidt' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-03-19. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2121 - Jonathan Haidt

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Hello Jonathan, good to see you sir.
Good to see you again Joe.
The same problems that you talked about when you were here last, that I've
referenced many
times since on the podcast, have only exacerbated, unfortunately.
And that's why you wrote this, the anxious generation.
And it could not be more true how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an
epidemic
of mental illness.
I don't think anybody can dispute that.
Yeah, when I was on last time, there was a dispute.
There were some psychologists who said, oh, this is just a moral panic.
They said this about video games and comic books and, you know, no, I think,
you know, this
is not a real thing, they said.
Now they don't.
Yeah, I think it was pretty obvious.
I think it was only their preconceived notions that were keeping them from
admitting it before
or at least looking at it before.
Or maybe they don't have children.
You know, it could be that.
I think a lot of older people, particularly boomers, they're a little bit
disconnected from
them because they're not, unless they're addicted to Twitter, you know, they're
not engaging
in this stuff.
Yeah.
And they're often thinking, you know, when I was a kid, we watched too much TV
and we
turned out okay.
But part of the message of the book is that social media and the things kids
are doing
on screens are not really like TV.
They're much, much worse for development.
Yeah.
And even watching too much TV, I don't agree that they turned out okay.
I think it had a pervasive effect.
It did.
But nothing like this.
Yeah.
Well, that's right.
Because, you know, look, when we were watching TV, I'm a little older than you.
I was born in 1963.
So I grew up watching a lot of TV, you know, maybe, you know, an hour or two a
day, weekdays,
and then two or three hours on the weekends.
But it was a bigger screen.
You're watching with your sisters or with your friends.
You're arguing about things.
You're eating.
So it's actually pretty social.
Right.
But now kids are spending, the latest survey Gallup finds that it's about, what's
five hours
a day just on social media, just social media, including TikTok and Instagram.
And when you add in all the other screen-based stuff, it's like nine hours a
day.
And that's not social.
It's private on your little screen.
You're not communicating with others.
So, you know, in all these ways, the new way that kids are digital is really
not like
what we had when we were watching TV.
It's also an extraordinary amount of wasted resources.
I'm always embarrassed when I look at my phone, when I see my screen time, like
four hours.
Like, that's four hours I could have done so many different things with.
That's right.
And so that's the concept of opportunity cost is this great term that
economists have, which
is the cost of, you know, if you buy something, you know, if you invest, you
know, an hour
of your time and $100 to do something, how much does it cost?
Well, you know, $100.
But you could use that $100 and that hour for something else.
So what are the things you gave up?
And when screen time goes up to, now it's about nine hours a day in the United
States,
nine hours a day, not counting, you know, school.
Average?
Average.
Average.
Is that for a certain age group?
We're talking teenagers, yeah, not little kids.
But, you know, in the, you know, 13 to 15, 17, that range, that's when it's
heaviest.
It's around nine hours a day.
And so the opportunity cost is everything else.
Like, imagine if somebody said to you, Joe, you know, you've got a full life.
Here, you have to do this thing, this additional thing for nine hours.
Like, that's insane.
That would push out everything else, including sleep.
Yeah.
When you are now talking to people that agree that this is an issue, what
changed?
So, you mean, what changed?
Like, why is there now more agreement?
Yes.
Yeah.
So in 2019, when I was last here with you, my book, The Coddling of the
American Mind,
had just come out.
And back then, people were beginning to sense that, you know, this internet,
the phones,
the social media that we were all so amazed by, you know, there was a very
positive feeling
about all this stuff in the early part, you know, like in the 2000s.
It was beginning, sentiment was beginning to turn, but there was a big academic
debate
because when you look at studies that look at how, you know, do kids who spend
a lot of
time on screens, do they come out more depressed?
The answer is yes, but the correlation is not very big.
So there was a big argument among researchers.
And that's when I got into this around 2019, really getting into that debate.
And I think that Gene Twenge and I really had good data showing, you know,
there is an
issue here.
And then COVID came.
And that confused everything.
Because, you know, basically when I was on with you last time, 2019, I was
saying, you
know, what kids most need is less time on their devices and more time outside
playing unsupervised.
Let them be out unsupervised.
That's what we needed.
2019.
COVID comes in, boom, exactly the opposite.
What do kids get?
No more time unsupervised.
You can't even go out.
I mean, in New York City, they locked up the playgrounds.
They locked up the tennis courts.
It was insane.
No time outside with your friends.
Oh, spend your whole day on screens.
So that made everything worse.
But people thought, oh, yeah, the kids are really messed up now from COVID.
But they were wrong.
COVID was terrible for a lot of kids.
When you look at the mental health trends over the last 20 years, COVID was a
blip.
Actually, you know what, I've actually got some charts.
You know what, if you don't mind, I'd like to actually show these.
Did you send the data to Jamie so he could pull it up?
I haven't sent it yet, but I'll, oh, right, because you want to stop and do
that?
Yeah, let's pause real quick so you can give out, Jamie will give you the email
address.
Okay, we're back.
All right.
What are those things?
Oh, so these, these are stickers for your kids.
So as part of the book, I'm trying to launch a movement called Free the Anxious
Generation.
Here you go.
You have two younger kids.
And so I've teamed up with the artist who did the book cover, Dave Cicerelli,
who's created these incredible artworks.
There's going to be billboards.
He's putting together a 12-foot tall milk carton, which is going to be
traveling around different cities with this.
Hmm.
Missing childhood.
Do they do that anymore?
The milk carton thing?
No, I don't think so.
Hmm.
Yeah.
So I don't know if you're, I don't know what your kids think about social media
and whether they think it's a good thing or a bad thing,
but we are hopeful that members of Gen Z are going to start, and they are
starting to advocate that, you know what, this is messing us up.
Hmm.
Okay, so here's the graph.
Okay.
So this is the graph that I showed last time I was on, and what it shows,
because I know most of your listeners are probably just listening to the audio,
it shows that from 2005 to 2010, the rates of depression in girls was about 12%
of American girls had a major depressive episode in the last year,
and for boys it was about 4% to 5%.
And it's flat.
There's no change.
And then all of a sudden, around 2011, 2012, 2013, the numbers start rising,
especially for girls, and it goes all the way up to 20% for girls.
So that was a huge rise, and that's what I showed you last time.
What is the difference between boys and girls?
So girls suffer from more internalizing disorders.
That is, when girls have difficulties, they turn it inwards, they make
themselves miserable.
So girls suffer from higher rates of anxiety and depression.
That's always been the case, especially once they hit puberty.
Boys, when they have psychological problems, they tend to turn it outwards.
They engage in more violent behavior, deviant behavior, substance use.
So boys, it's called externalizing disorders.
But, you know, you can see both boys and girls are getting more depressed.
It's just that the effect is bigger for girls.
So boys have gone up to about 7%, and girls are way up to 20%.
That's right.
And that was 2019.
So one out of five girls.
That's what it was.
That's right.
It was.
It was.
That's right.
And then COVID comes in.
So if we can have the next slide.
So then COVID comes in.
Whoa.
And now this is the exact same data set.
This is federal data.
I just got a few extra years of data.
And what you can see is that it goes way the hell up.
And if you look at the 2021 data point, you can see that little peak at the
very top there.
That's because of COVID.
That is, COVID did increase things.
It did make kids more depressed.
But as you can see, it's a blip.
COVID was just a tiny effect compared to this gigantic increase.
And so, you know, on the last slide, it was 20% of girls.
Now it's almost 30, almost 30% of girls who had a major depressive episode in
the last year.
And for boys, it's up to 12%, which is still quite a lot.
It's more than a doubling, although much less than for the girls.
It's still, even if you look at boys, or excuse me, if you look at girls from
2018 pre-COVID, that ramp is very steep, the upward ramp.
That's right.
And that might be TikTok.
That is the, you know, so what happens is a lot of things change around 2011,
2012.
2010 is when you get the front-facing iPhone.
It's when Instagram is founded.
It's when kids, around when kids are getting high-speed data plans.
So, you know, my argument in the book is that we had a complete rewiring of
childhood between 2010 and 2015.
In 2010, most of the kids had flip phones.
They didn't have Instagram.
They didn't have high-speed data.
So they would use their flip phones to get together with each other.
They communicate with each other.
By 2015, about 80%, 70%, 80% have a smartphone.
Most of them have high-speed data, unlimited plan, Instagram accounts.
And this really messes up the girls.
So that's what I think happened between 2010 and 2015.
TikTok becomes popular only really more, you know, 18, 19, 20.
And it's so new, we don't have good data on just TikTok.
But I suspect that that sort of extra acceleration might be due to TikTok.
What specifically about TikTok?
So this is something I'm just really beginning to learn.
I don't even have much on it in the book.
So kids love stories.
And the stories are great.
All around the world, people tell children stories.
There are myths.
You know, we see plays.
We see television shows.
And so I asked my undergrads at NYU, I said, how many of you use Netflix?
Almost everybody says yes.
How many of you wish Netflix was never invented?
Nobody.
Nobody.
Watching stories is not a bad thing.
TikTok is not stories.
It's little tiny, tiny bits of something.
And they're short.
They don't add up to anything.
They're incoherent.
They're often disturbing and disgusting.
I mean, people, you know, people being hit by cars, people being punched in the
face.
And it's much more addictive and with no nutritive value.
They're not really stories.
And so it seems to be much more addictive.
Kids really get hooked on it, much more so than Netflix or anything else.
And it depends on what you're watching.
But I suspect that so many of them are consuming stuff about mental illness.
It has a variety of effects that we don't even understand yet.
Now, I know that there's some push right now currently to ban TikTok.
And there's a lot of people that are very torn on this because they don't want
to give the government the ability to ban social media.
What is the argument about banning TikTok?
What specifically are they talking about?
The main thing they want to do, separate them from the company, ByteDance that
owns them, and just make them an American company.
Yeah.
They can still operate, I suppose.
So it's a data issue?
Well, it's a national security issue.
So, yeah, right.
So thank you.
Let's separate the national security issue from the menta