Jonathan Haidt: My War on Smartphones & the Dangers of TikTok for Our Children (E323)
The High Performance Podcast
High Performance
4.8 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jonathan Haidt is a renowned social psychologist, bestselling author, and professor, widely known for his groundbreaking work on morality, culture, and human flourishing. His insights into how society shapes us and how we, in turn, shape society, make him a leading voice in discussions about our rapidly evolving world.
In this episode, Jonathan chats with Jake and Damian about the profound effects of social media on the younger generation. He dives into the alarming rise in depression and anxiety among teenagers, explaining how the presence of mobile phones and platforms like TikTok is reshaping childhood and distorting attention spans.
Drawing from his book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan unpacks what’s happening to kids growing up online, from the dangers of fragmented focus to the way social media alters how they perceive the world. He also discusses why it's critical for parents and society to confront these challenges and work towards solutions.
This conversation is a wake-up call and a guide for anyone seeking to understand and navigate the digital age's impact on young people.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Inspired by world-class habits from the world's highest performers, we have built a way to create |
| 0:05.1 | personalized habit reminders on a high-performance app. You're going to love this. Just open the app, |
| 0:10.7 | watch through some clips, and then create your new, purposeful, repeatable habit reminders. Try it now. |
| 0:17.3 | Habit reminders on the high-performance app. |
| 0:20.8 | Take everything important out of childhood and replace it with millions and millions of 15-second |
| 0:26.7 | TikTok videos and Instagram posts. |
| 0:28.6 | That's what we've done. |
| 0:29.4 | Social media is the worst of the worst. |
| 0:30.9 | It's the thing, especially for girls, that is really damaging them. |
| 0:33.7 | Boys are getting ever more addicted to video games, to porn. |
| 0:39.1 | We can change this if we act together. The phone-based childhood is only 12 years old. It started in 2012, 2013. We can realize |
| 0:44.7 | we made a huge, huge mistake, and we can undo it, and we're going to. That powerful voice you just |
| 0:51.0 | heard belongs to Jonathan Haidt, one of the world's leading and most important social psychologists, |
| 0:57.0 | the bestselling author and a true authority on human behaviour and the complex challenges of our modern world. |
| 1:03.5 | I'm Jay Cunfrey and alongside our expert co-host, Damian Hughes. |
| 1:07.4 | We're on a mission to uncover the mindsets, ideas and experiences behind the world's |
| 1:11.6 | greatest high performers. But this conversation with Jonathan, it's different. Myself and |
| 1:17.1 | Damien are both parents. Like many of you listening to this, we're in that difficult world |
| 1:21.3 | of trying to navigate the use of mobile phones, the use of social media, and keeping our children |
| 1:26.2 | safe online. |
| 1:32.4 | You're about to hear from Jonathan that he believes we're over-protecting children in the real world where we need to give them even more freedom and we're under-protecting them in the |
| 1:37.2 | online world where we need to take control. |
... |
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