He went after social media. AI is next. (with Jonathan Haidt)

**Dasha Burns** (0:00)
Presented by AHIP.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
Health plans work every day to shield Americans from high and rising costs by negotiating lower prices from providers and drug makers and protecting consumers against unexpected medical bills. Learn more at ahip.org.

**Jonathan Haidt** (0:15)
AI is scaring the hell out of people, as it rightfully should. The existential threats are extraordinary. We should be talking about them every day. The threats to children are far beyond those of social media.

**Dasha Burns** (0:27)
Hello, hello, and welcome to The Conversation. I'm Dasha Burns, and every week on this show, I talk to some of the most compelling and sometimes unexpected power players in Washington and beyond. And if you're a parent, you are probably familiar with my guest this week, Jonathan Haidt.
He's a social psychologist at NYU and his book, The Anxious Generation, has made him a household name and turned his argument that smartphones and social media are harming kids' mental health into a global political movement.

**Jonathan Haidt** (0:58)
The technology is here to stay, people said. You can't put the genie back in the bottle.
But in the last few years, humanity has mobilized, and we are putting the genie back in the bottle.

**Dasha Burns** (1:10)
His prescription is pretty simple. No smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more independence and real-world play for kids. And governments around the world are increasingly moving in that direction, even as researchers debate just how much social media is to blame for the youth mental health crisis. With kids heading back to school, and with AI raising a whole new set of concerns, I wanted to ask Haidt about where he thinks the movement that he launched is headed next. Here's my conversation with Jonathan Haidt.
Jonathan Haidt, thank you so much for joining The Conversation.

**Jonathan Haidt** (1:49)
Dasha, my pleasure.

**Dasha Burns** (1:51)
I do not have children yet, but every parent I know has been very interested in this particular episode of The Conversation because you have started really a worldwide discussion, debate about smartphones, social media, the use of technology, especially for kids.
The Anxious Generation, the book that really propelled this conversation forward, started as an argument about what smartphones and social media were doing to our children. Two years later, you're now meeting with presidents and governors. Countries are testing age restrictions, states are passing laws. When did you realize that this had gone from a book to an actual political movement?

**Jonathan Haidt** (2:38)
Yeah, I would say I knew that the book would do well because every time I told anyone that I was writing it, if they had kids, they'd say, we need the manuscript, give me the manuscript tomorrow. But it's when I was contacted both by red state governors and blue state governors, they wanted to do something about this already, a lot of them. So when I saw that it was bipartisan and I had been expecting no help from government. My view when writing the book is Congress is broken, they never do anything, Meta can buy them. So we have to do this all ourselves.
It was once I realized, wait, the states are really active and they've done amazing work.
So that was part of it. The way to understand why it took off the way it did, I think, is this. Imagine if in 2012, all of our kids started smoking and cigarettes were handed out in schools, and it was just something everybody did. And the parents were like, wait, what's going on here? And then all of a sudden, it's like, it's everywhere and we didn't approve this. People would be interested, like, how did this happen? And what can we do to change it? And so the fact that families all over the world, if there are parents and children and smartphones and social media, we all have the same family dynamic. We all hate it, and that's why this movement is so global.

**Dasha Burns** (3:54)
Was there a moment when you thought, okay, wait, policymakers might actually run with this? Was there like a meeting or an interaction that got that light bulb to go off of what this could really be?

**Jonathan Haidt** (4:07)
Well, there were a bunch of them, so I was very focused on the US and the UK when I was writing the book, because we have really good stats from both countries, and so I was focused on those two countries originally.
One of the surprises, as I said, was so many governors getting in. The next surprise was the number of countries that began to take action. The most dramatic, of course, was Australia. The Australians did the whole world of favor by just... They just said, damn the torpedoes, we're just going to go for it, we're just going to do it. And so when they committed to do it, when it passed and it was embraced at all levels in the government, and then...