Hello and welcome to Why's This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

So we got a special edition of WithPod today. I'm very excited about. As I've said, my book, The Sirens Call, how attention became the world's most endangered resource. It came out in hardcover last year. It was a number one New York Times bestseller, which was cool. I'm very grateful for that. And now it's out in paperback, so I've been doing some events around that. And this is a really special event hosted by the Strand that we did in New York last week.

And that was an event with me and Jonathan Haidt.

Jonathan Haidt, of course, the social psychologist at NYU, author of a bunch of books, but most recently the Anxious Generation, which is about teenagers and attention and screens.

And he's been incredibly outspoken voice about the harms that come to

adolescents, particularly from the kind of commodification of their attention, what it's done to

their social, emotional health, their psyches. And his book was this enormous, like, huge

blockbuster bestseller that was on the bestseller list for a year, which basically never happens.

He's been working with policymakers, both Republicans and Democrats.

It's like basically the one issue in America right now that there's not huge partisan

polarization on.

If you look across the country, governors and school boards to try to get phones out of schools

as just sort of the first line of policy

is getting phones out of schools.

And I think it's just obviously the case that it's better for kids not to have phones in classes,

particularly, not to have basically a distraction device sitting there as they're trying to pay attention and learn.

And I'd actually met Jonathan a few

times, but this is the first time that we ever did an event together. So we got together for this

conversation that happened at the Stram and we really, really amazing and wonderful for me to be here at Strand because one of the

most important intellectual events of my life actually happened here in the store.

I'd forgotten all about it, although what it was was in 2004, I was about to teach a course

on political psychology at the University of Virginia,

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