The Ledger, every show

“I think that American democracy is likely to fail catastrophically at some point in the next decade or two decades. It's very hard to predict the future, but I think we are, the way we're headed is a very, very bad direction.”

“The changes that are coming to us because of tech are so earth-shattering and so fast that they are changing the basic conditions of America's liberal democracy in ways that I think it may not survive.”

“Progressive revolutions have an almost perfect record of disaster. I mean, it always descends into, Chaos and economic chaos and cruelty.”

“The hidden tribe study and others find that majorities of everybody hate wokeness, black, white, male, female, even majority of Democrats don't like wokeness.”

“But the Democrats aren't, are likely to get wiped out because Most people really hate what the cultural left is doing in their schools, their companies and their country.”

“There are about a hundred people, a hundred kids abducted a year in the United States by strangers. At present rates of abduction, you'd have to leave your kid alone in a car in a parking lot for 700,000 years before they would probably be abducted.”

“How many of you use TikTok or one of those programs at least once a week? The great, not everybody, but the great majority of hands go up. How many of you wish that it was never invented? The great majority of hands go up.”

“You take away the video games, you take away the phones, and for, you know, Anna Lemke says it's, you know, two or three weeks to overcome, ah, withdrawal symptoms for, especially for more serious drugs, but in my experience, it's more like, it's like a few da…”

“And these are boys who are spending You know, three, 4:05 hours a day on video games for years and years and years. They don't develop social skills. They don't develop dating skills.”

“College admissions and hiring is not just gonna go for the high GPA and the full resume of extracurricular activities. They're gonna go for signs of being a free range kid. They're going to go for signs that you traveled alone, you traveled on your own for thr…”

“Kids born after 1995 have really high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide.”

“What they show is a big rise in depression and anxiety only. There's no change in bipolar disorder, schizophrenia no other category. It's just mood disorder, so depression and anxiety. It begins going up around 20 11. It goes up steadily and sharply. It goes, …”

“There's an amazing statistic we found, that if you look at the total number of hours that women spent doing childcare in the 19 fifties, when very few of them worked outside the home, and you compare that to the total number of hours of childcare that they do …”

“There are now a number of experiments in which they randomly assign people to get off social media for a few weeks and lo and behold, you see very direct improvements in mental health.”

“They're having exactly the same gigantic increase in girls' depression, anxiety, and self-harm and suicide in the US and UK and Canada. We're all at record high levels for teenage, for female teenage suicide. So this is throughout the Anglosphere.”

“When the millennials got social media in college or later, they weren't damaged by it. There's no sign that millennials had a crisis of mental health, because their social nature was largely, their brains were mostly developed.”

“And this means we have, we might have a generation that's afraid of, afraid to take risks, afraid to Play with ideas afraid to challenge dominant ideas. it's gonna lead to a lot more conformity and a lot more, a lot less creativity.”

“Where I speak to young people, they come to ask me for advice on how to be successful, and some of them have not even thought about what they can do that would be of worth to anyone. All they're focused on is how to get more followers.”

“Businesses have to actually make money, and so by 20, 22, a lot of businesses were rolling it back. They're saying, whoa, this stuff is terrible. This is not making life better for members of minorities. This is actually just turning everyone against everyone.…”

“Almost everything about our personality is partly heritable, and if you have an identical twin separated at birth, you never met, but if you're very much on the left, your twin probably is too. Something about our brains make us predisposed to the right or the…”

“And I guarantee you, the great majority are gonna pick option one, because they do want to grow.”

“The rates of self-harm, that is kids who are hospitalized because they cut themselves, that, that's for girls only. Boys are not changing on that. That goes way up in the same pattern, and then it's also suicide. The boys' suicide rate in the United States is …”

“And people who were born before 1982, the answer is always six plus or minus a year. We used to always let kids out outside with other kids at the age of six or seven, and then I ask just kids born after 1995, and the answer is usually between 10 and 14.”

“And that's why I'm actually optimistic that this is going to change, because as I said, two years ago, we didn't know the suicide stats. We didn't know the terrible things that are happening. It's only in the last year or two that it's really become public kno…”

“About five, depending on how you measure it, about five to 12% of the boys do get, do become problematic users of video games.”

“Major, major kudos to Coinbase. They were the first one, Armstrong, he was the first one to really put that out there.”

“Americans are getting smarter over the decades. IQ is rising in our country and around the world. It's not that Americans are getting stupid.”

“There is no government agency that has jurisdiction over social media. It doesn't go out over the airwaves. So it's not FCC.”

“Just as the crime was plummeting in the nineties, we totally freaked out about child abduction, and we literally stopped letting kids out of our sight.”

“Girls have more of what are called internalizing disorders. That is disorders, emotional disorders where they make themselves miserable. They ruminate more than boys do. Boys have higher rates of what are known as externalizing disorders which is they make oth…”

“In Silicon Valley, the norm has been, you know, we, they don't let their kids use social media and that's been going on a long time.”

“But it's especially early puberty, the early teens, the mid-teens, that is the period where your brain is literally rewiring. It is literally from back to front, changing over from the child form to the adult form, which is much more competent, but much less f…”

“Literally half of American teenagers say that they are online almost constantly.”

“Rates of depression and anxiety before puberty are fairly similar. But at puberty there's a big divergence and depression and anxiety generally go up for girls.”