You’re understandably, and I think appropriately, very critical of the tech executives here. But I’d also note that parents gave kids these phones, and schools allowed them, and regulators did nothing for a decade. So if we’re assigning blame for this situation, how much falls on everyone else involved? I would say close to zero, for this reason: The whole, the whole key to solving this problem, the reason we didn’t solve it for so long, is that it’s a series of collective action traps. – Hm. – And as a social — I’m a social psychologist. What we do for a living is we look at the ways that we influence each other, and there are certain situations where you know, Yeah, I don’t, I don’t want to give my, my 10-year-old a phone, but, you know, everyone else has one. She’s being left out. So, so, so the phones and the — and social media all these things, they put us in a trap, and so we feel we have to give in. And so since that’s the situation, I can’t blame the people. My rule as a social psychologist: If one person does something really bad, that might be a bad person. If everybody in a situation is doing something bad, that’s guaranteed to be a bad situation. So no, I don’t — I mean, look, of course, parents should stand up and — but, look, so many of us are trying, and it’s really, really hard. – Yeah. – It’s really, really — everybody’s fighting all the time with their kids over this tech. We didn’t ask for these fights. So I don’t blame the parents. I don’t blame the teachers. I blame the companies.
