How Smartphones Changed Childhood: Jonathan Haidt on The Anxious Generation
Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People
Guy Kawasaki
4.5 • 679 Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2026
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What happens when childhood is rewired by smartphones and social media? Jonathan Haidt joins Guy to break down how a single decade transformed attention, resilience, and the emotional lives of millions of kids. Drawing from his bestselling book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan explains why Gen Z’s spike in anxiety wasn’t random — and what we can do to make sure Gen Alpha doesn’t suffer the same fate.
Jonathan shares the research, the red flags, and the practical reforms that families, schools, and communities can act on today. If you’re a parent, educator, grandparent, or anyone who cares about young people, this conversation will change the way you think about childhood in the digital age.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you are going to have children on your site, if you are going to have millions of children |
| 0:05.3 | on your site, you can't be connecting them to strange men who have a history of sex distortion |
| 0:09.6 | on your site. You have to have ways to block contact with strangers, perhaps in one setting. |
| 0:15.6 | You have to have features that protect kids. You have to set defaults to private. |
| 0:19.9 | If government were to say, here's some minimum safety standards, that would have no political ramifications, doesn't help the left or the right, it would work everyone in the world, doesn't depend on content moderation. Content moderation is bad news, hard to make it work, always gonna overcorrect, the left or the right's gonna hate it. So I never talk or think about content moderation. I'm totally focused on design. |
| 0:38.8 | We designed cars dangerously before the 60s. Now we designed them safe and they're so much safer. |
| 0:43.9 | We need to do the same for social media platforms, which are the companies that own our kids' lives. |
| 0:49.3 | Good morning, everybody. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast, and we're coming from our |
| 0:57.1 | far west studio in Waikiki, on Oahu, in Hawaii. And I'm particularly relaxed today, and I have a great |
| 1:09.0 | guest, but honestly, this topic is not that relaxing. His name is |
| 1:13.9 | Jonathan Haidt, and he is a social psychologist. He's a best-selling author. And he explores things like |
| 1:22.0 | morality and culture and social media, psychology of division. His latest book is called, of all things in |
| 1:30.3 | Hawaii, the anxious generation, how the great rewiring of children is causing an epidemic |
| 1:37.5 | of mental illness. It's quite the subtitle, Jonathan. And let us just say that his book and what we're going to discuss today is |
| 1:45.9 | going to help you understand the impact of social media and other things on society. Did I get |
| 1:53.0 | all that right, Jonathan? Yep, that is all correct. And are you suggesting that in Hawaii people |
| 1:59.5 | don't even know what anxiety is because life is so lovely and wonderful? |
| 2:03.6 | Hawaii is supposed to be the happiest state, I think. I read that someplace. |
| 2:08.6 | Yeah. First of all, I got to tell you, I saw a video of you on Neil deGrasse Tyson's podcast, and he started off by saying that he was really offended and |
| 2:20.3 | hurt that you didn't ask for his blurb for your second book. I thought that was the funniest damn thing. |
| 2:27.8 | Yeah. Well, yeah, because he blurbed the previous book. We smoothed it all out in the course. |
| 2:37.7 | I'm glad you did. I'm glad you did. First of all, |
... |
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