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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Disconnected: Life in a Disruptive Digital Age. Interview With Harvard Professor Emeritus Of Public Policy Robert D. Putnam; Interview With San Diego State University Psychology Professor Jean M. Twenge; Interview With King's College London Senior Lecturer In The Social Science Of Development Alice Evans. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired August 24, 2025 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:49]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST: Welcome to DISCONNECTED: LIFE IN A DISRUPTIVE DIGITAL AGE. I'm Fareed Zakaria, and this is a GPS Special.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA (voice-over): Social connection is one of the most important human needs. It starts immediately after birth. It's when babies go skin to skin with a parent, later, when we make our first friend, and later still, when we find our tribe.

That is connection. People make love connections and declare their love in front of family and friends. But in today's world, much of what I've just described is unraveling.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Many are finding themselves lonelier than ever.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Far greater sense of isolation.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: More people are missing that connection.

JOE BIDEN, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: Loneliness and isolation.

DR. VIVEK MURTHY, FORMER U.S. SURGEON GENERAL: Concerns that we have to prioritize.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Loneliness is on the rise.

ZAKARIA: Marriage rates are near all-time lows in America. One in five people report feeling lonely every day. And the number of Americans who say they have no close friends has quadrupled in the last three decades.

Why is this happening?

It is a tumultuous time in the world. We did, after all, just lived through a dangerous and disruptive pandemic.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All 50 states now have COVID cases.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The West has country is the United States.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The world surpassing one million deaths from the coronavirus.

ZAKARIA: One strife in deep political division glare from the headlines every day.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Israeli government plan to occupy the whole of Gaza.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Famine thresholds have been reached.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Russia has pummeled Kyiv with drones.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Republicans issuing civil arrest warrants.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I hate them, too, you know that?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The deadline for a government shutdown now just days away.

ZAKARIA: And then there are those supercomputers in our pockets, which may just be more interesting than any kind of face-to-face human relationship.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA (on-camera): We'll explore our disconnectedness and how to get reconnected in this next hour.

I want to start this hour where life begins and where increasingly both the ever present screens and the isolation begin as well. Childhood. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is a professor of ethical leadership at NYU. He has written the defining book on the generation that grew up with technology in the palms of their hands. "The Anxious Generation" has been on "The New York Times" bestseller list for over a year.

Jonathan Haidt, welcome.

JONATHAN HAIDT, AUTHOR, "THE ANXIOUS GENERATION": Fareed, pleasure to be with you.

ZAKARIA: So you talk in your book about this very big shift that takes place where we move away from play-based childhood at one point, and then we move toward a kind of technology based childhood. Explain those two shifts.

HAIDT: Sure. So my book isn't really about social media. It's really about childhood. And children need to play and take risks and run around and practice adult skills and childhood is an evolutionary product. It's part of -- part of the path from childhood to adulthood. We have to go through it. But we did a weird and tragic thing in America, and it turns out in much of the West, in which first we kind of stopped letting our kids out. We lose the play-based childhood in the 1990s for a variety of

reasons. We've become overprotective. We don't let kids out to play. We think they'll get abducted. We think they'll be hit by a car.

ZAKARIA: Is that even true in Europe, where there was much less of a fear of crime?

HAIDT: It's much less true. And in Scandinavia and Northern Europe, they still let their kids out at age eight. But as one Finnish journalist told me, yes, we let our kids out early and they walk around looking down at their phones. So --

ZAKARIA: So that gets us to part two.

HAIDT: That's right. So part two, so the technology is coming in since the '80s. Video games are getting more enticing. But you have to sit, you know, in your basement to play the video games.

[10:05:02]

You can't be playing the video games when you're walking around or on the school bus. And so it's really once we get the -- everyone gets a personal device, a touch screen, and that really happens between 2010 and 2015 is when kids change from basic phones or flip phones. So I called this the arrival of the phone-based childhood.

And at first we all thought, well, you know, they're connecting to each other. It's going to be good. But it turns out that we're biological creatures. We're humans. We have to be with people physically, as you and I are right now. Zoom is better than nothing? But kids have to touch each other, and they have to share laughter and share food. And if they're just swiping, it does -- it doesn't substitute.

And so when kids went through puberty, this is the real thing. The key thing. When kids began going through puberty, when the brain is changing very rapidly on a touch screen, on social media, rather than in the lunchroom arguing and playing and flirting and all those things that kids have always done, that seems to be what created Gen Z. Kids born after 1996 have much more, much higher levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide.

ZAKARIA: Particularly among women.

HAIDT: Yes, those numbers go up more for girls and women. Yes.

ZAKARIA: Explain to me why the technology does what it what it does, in your opinion, because I noticed this. The smartphone, which is essentially really a supercomputer, allows you to stay connected to people all the time. But the result of it, I find, is that I have stopped talking on the phone with some of my friends who don't live in New York. And paradoxically, the effect is I feel less in contact with them that the phone, actually the physical human voice, the long conversation that I would have 20 years ago, connected me much more than just a constant little texting that, you know, you feel like you're in touch, but actually you don't know the person as well. HAIDT: That's right. Because our relationships require synchronous

communication. So talking on the phone is really good. It's, you know, it's, you know, I say something, you say something. We laugh. So synchronous is good. One-on-one is good, whereas one to many is bad. When kids are -- if we're talking on the phone to a friend, that's great. And Facetime or Zoom is very good, too, if it's one-on-one.

But now so many kids are spending a lot of time on these group chats. It's one to many. It's not -- you're worried about what you say. You're worried if --

ZAKARIA: You're performing.

HAIDT: It's performative. Exactly. And then there's also the question of depth. You know, like when you meet a friend and you have a meal together and you're talking for an hour, you just go much deeper than if it's just passing on the street. And a lot of electronic communication is the equivalent of passing on the street. So for all these reasons, you know, we didn't know this in 2010 and 2012. We didn't know what we were doing to kids.

But we basically allowed the tech companies to rewire childhood, take control of it. They own our children's attention. Half of our kids say that they are online almost constantly. Five hours a day is the average for social media if you include TikTok and YouTube. So these companies now own our children's childhood. Our children are not developing well. If you're born after 1995 or '96 and on is Gen Z. If you're born in that cohort, you had most of your human experience taken away from you.

So you asked, how does the technology do this? The simplest method is just by pushing everything else out. And so if the average kid is spending eight hours a day on touch screen devices, not counting schoolwork, that has to come from somewhere. And where does it come from? Time with friends. Kids are spending a lot less time with their friends than they used to. Time outside. Sleep, exercise.

So you push all these healthy things out, you're going to have a lot less health. Then there are so many other ways that being on social media, growing up, in a sense, in the center of the Roman coliseum with fans cheering for conflict and bloodshed or whatever.

ZAKARIA: You buy the sort of the dopamine that we're constantly getting these little dopamine hits.

HAIDT: Yes, I mean, I buy it because that's literally what the people who made it say, like they literally say that that's what they were trying to do. A lot of them took a course, some of the founders of these companies took a course at Stanford on persuasive technology, and they learned about behaviorist methods. They learned about how do you train an animal? Quick little rewards. Each of which the animal does a behavior, they get a reward.

Then they get the hit of dopamine just anticipating opportunity to make. And so that's why you get this feedback cycle with the touch screen, which you don't get with television. This is a very important point. I'm not telling parents out there no screens. Don't ever let your child see a screen. I'm not saying that. I'm saying the touch screen device creates a behavior, a stimulus response, reward feedback loop very, very quickly.

[10:10:01]

It can train your child very, very quickly the way a circus trainer can train an animal. Whereas stories on TV or long shows like this, whatever it is, the point is, if you're paying attention to something for a long period of time on a screen, that's good. There's nothing wrong with that.

ZAKARIA: Next, on this GPS special, how do family background, gender, political and religious affiliations impact social media's effects on children?

Jonathan Haidt explains, when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: More now with NYU professor and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

[10:15:01]

You have an interesting finding that conservative religious kids actually are affected much less than kind of all others. Why?

HAIDT: That's right. So Jean Twenge was the first to really dig into the stats. She's a master of these giant data sets that we have in the U.S. that have been running for decades. And she's the one who first showed that things were pretty stable until around 2012. And then they go up like a hockey stick. And as she showed, it's bigger for girls than boys. And it's happening for all races, all demographic groups.

When I really got deeply into this in 2019, me and my lead researcher, Zach Roush, we parse the data in all kinds of different ways, and we looked internationally, and we found some interesting patterns. One is this hockey stick shape that you get. When we look for kids who say that they are religious or the question is religion is important in my family. And if you agree with that, then yours is not quite a hockey stick.

Everybody is up. Nobody has escaped. But the religious kids are only up -- it's not as much. Same thing for left-right. If you're in a conservative family, it's up, but not as much. So it's really secular liberals are like the sharpest, they are up the most and especially secular liberal girls. There's a lot -- we don't know why exactly. There's a lot of speculation, a lot of reasons why it could be.

But part of this is just, if you are bound into a real community of adults who expect you to be at church every Sunday, they expect you to do your chores. They expect you to say your prayers. OK, you might be on social media, but you're not on as much. That Jean Twenge has shown. Liberal girls used to not be much different. But once you get the iPhone and social media and Instagram, liberal girls actually use it the most. And so you're sort of -- you're washed away the most.

ZAKARIA: So we understand the problem that this produces for girls, but for boys it has its own effect, right?

HAIDT: Yes. That's right. And I didn't see that at first. The data, the evidence was just much clearer about social media. Girls and depression anxieties is the outcome. That has been clear for a long time. I wasn't sure what the story was for boys, but what we discovered, my team discovered in drawing in part on the work of Richard Reeves, his book "Of Boys and Men," is that boys have been being pulled out of the real world really since the '70s and '80s.

As the technology got better and better, as the video games got better and better, as school became more hostile to boys, no more recess. No more shop class, no more, you know, auto mechanics boys have been withdrawing from the real world and putting a lot more of their time and effort into video games and other online pursuits. And boys also are seem to be a bit more responsive to dopamine loops.

So there are now all these companies whose business model is to addict boys. Starts with video games, goes on to porn. I mean, vaping, marijuana pens, all of these things are dopamine. All of these things are addictive. All of these things are hitting boys. And gambling within video games, many video games set you up for gambling, or they have actual gambling with variable ratio reward schedules like a slot machine.

And as Anna Lembke says, she's one of the nation's experts on addiction, she says any addiction you develop at one point sets your brain to be more susceptible to future addictions. Are boys once they reach 18 or around then they now everything else is gamified. Investing has become gamified. Crypto investing is gamified. Sports, boys love sports. Now it's all about betting. And so I think we're really destroying the boys.

And I think what we're going to see over time is that actually the boys are doing worse than the girls. The girls are much more likely to have finished high school, gone to college, finished college, gotten a job, moved out of home. Boys are less likely to do those things now. So I think this is going to affect everything. Demography. It's going to be hard for young women to find a young man worth marrying.

Employment, it's going to be harder for companies to find workers who are able to focus and stick with a job. So we're changing humanity at exactly the moment when our machines are getting so much smarter than us. This is not a good trend.

ZAKARIA: A.I. The question we have to ask about nowadays about everything is how does A.I. make this worse or better?

HAIDT: Yes. So there's a couple of things to keep our eyes on. The first is let's take all the bad things about social media, that it's addictive, that it lures us in with amazing content, beautiful content, exciting content. Until now, all of that content is being created by people, and A.I. is now able to create much better, more beautiful, more gripping content than people can. And it can create a billion times as much every day.

So, all of the addictive features of video games and we should bring video games in here, too. That's especially important for the boys. So the online world is going to suck our kids in much harder. Everything is going to be much more personalized, so much more addictive.

[10:20:00]

ZAKARIA: We're getting dumber and the machines are getting smarter.

HAIDT: Exactly.

ZAKARIA: Jonathan Haidt, this is such important work you're doing. Thank you.

HAIDT: Thank you, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Jon Haidt just mentioned Jean Twenge. She and Robert Putnam have done seminal work studying social isolation. I talked to both of them next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: My next two guests are giants in their respective fields who have been studying social isolation for years. The political scientist Robert Putnam was one of the first to identify this problem in America with his landmark 1995 study, "Bowling Alone," which later became a best-selling book.

[10:25:02]

In 2020, he looked to solutions with the book, "The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago, and How We Can Do It Again."

Jean Twenge is a social psychologist who looks deeply at the data on social isolation within generations. She also focuses on technology. She has a new book out next month, "10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High Tech World."

I sat down with both scholars to get their insights.

Robert Putnam, Jean Twenge, welcome.

ROBERT D. PUTNAM, AUTHOR, "BOWLING ALONE": Thank you, Fareed.

JEAN M. TWENGE, PSYCHOLOGY PROFESSOR, SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: So, Bob, you are in some ways the origins of all of this in scholarship because in the middle of the 1990s, you write this essay, "Bowling Alone," and you noticed something that Americans are losing what you call social capital. They're not doing things together the way they used to. They're increasingly alone. What did you see and why did you embark on this project?

PUTNAM: I had earlier, Fareed, as you well know discovered the idea of social connection or what I came to call social capital in a research that I'd done in Italy over many years, in which it seemed to say that the quality of democracy was affected by the degree to which people were connected with one another.

So I came home from Italy and I was worried about -- just about America as a citizen. I thought, you know, American democracy wasn't working very well. And so I began to explore whether what I'd been studying as a scholar, namely social capital, social connections, might be related to American -- the failures of American democracy. And to my shock, that turned out to be true.

When I began capturing different flavors, different examples of it, beginning with the PTA but eventually stumbled on to the -- to the fact that people were bowling more than ever before. People were -- more people bowl than vote in America. But they were bowling alone. They were not bowling in teams. That's where the title comes from.

ZAKARIA: And you then go on to do years of research, pathbreaking research on this. And one of the things you point out is that there's a historical pattern here that the kind of things that we associate with this degree of isolationism, the rise in economic inequality, loss of social cohesion. All these things used to be pretty bad, actually almost as bad as they are now. Then they get better. What you call the upswing in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, really. And they've started to go down again.

PUTNAM: Right.

ZAKARIA: Talk about what you think -- what does that tell us? What was going on? You know, why did it go up and then down again?

PUTNAM: Well, the first thing to say, Fareed, is that it's -- it shows that doesn't have to be the way it is today. Indeed, once before we were in this situation, we were trapped in great inequality, great social isolation, great polarization. And we got out of it. So how did they do that? That was the question that in this book on "The Upswing," we turned to, could we figure out what in the world they did because maybe we know it worked for them.

These Americans, at around the turn of the century, roughly, let's say, 1910, they got out of it. So maybe we can learn some lessons from them. That was the purpose of the book.

ZAKARIA: All right. I'm going to make people sit in suspense for a moment before I get to your solutions.

Jean, you have also done extraordinary research, which is cited by so many people now. And what you found that -- you know, there's a generational aspect to this. And teenagers and young people in particular seem to be spending less time together. Describe what it is you found.

TWENGE: Yes. So I work with big national surveys of teens, and sometimes adults, and I first noticed this among teens that especially around the early 2010s, teens started to say that they weren't hanging out with their friends as much. They weren't going to the mall or drive around in cars or going out. The graphs are stunning. You know, there's a little bit of a decline starting in about 2000 with the growth of the internet and instant messaging, but then it just falls off a cliff after about 2012, just across the board.

Anything having to do with people getting together with each other in person, all the things that are traditional for teens to do and hanging out with their friends, and then found that extended to young adults as well, with a very, very similar pattern. They were spending a lot less time with each other in person.

ZAKARIA: And when I look at your graphs, the one that strikes me the most is when you ask people in eighth, 10th and 12th graders, do they often feel lonely and often feel left out? The chart, you know, basically from about 2005, looks dreadful. And then, you know, at 2017, '18, it starts to go vertical. I mean, it seems like you're getting to half of almost half of all people that you ask feel left out, feel lonely.

TWENGE: Yes. So, it's a really interesting pattern because teen loneliness is actually declining between the early 90s, when they first started measuring it, and

about 2010, 2011 or so, and then it just shoots upward that, you're right, more and more teens started to say they feel left out, more and more start to say that they feel lonely. And it coincides not surprisingly with that huge decline in teens getting together with their friends in person. Probably because they're instead in their bedrooms alone, texting, and on social media.

ZAKARIA: And you have another one, which just strikes me, this chart where you asked the question of, again, eighth, 10th and 12th graders, do you think your life is useful? And the answer, my life is not useful, we're now, at levels that are, again, 45 percent, 42 percent.

If you think that part of the key to happiness and the sense of successful life is a sense of purpose, again, these numbers are frightening. And what do you think? You know what explains that? It feels like it's more than just cell phones.

TWENGE: Well, there's obviously a number of factors. But yes, that's one of the symptoms of depression, that feeling of not feeling useful increases at the same time as saying you don't enjoy life, that, you don't feel that sense of purpose. It also goes hand in hand with pessimism, of not having hope for the world. We see all of those things in monitoring the future of this very large survey of teens that's done across the U.S. that I analyzed for my book "Generations."

So, the cause, of course, is harder to determine, but nothing else really fits as much as the growth of smartphones and social media that happened in the early 2010s. Because it wasn't just that, it was -- it's downstream effects. It had this huge effect on teens' day to day lives that they started spending a lot more time online, a lot less time with each other in person, and less time sleeping. And you put those three things together, that is a terrible formula for mental health.

(END VIDEOTAPE) ZAKARIA: Next, on this special, we have laid out the problems that social isolation poses to young people. But what are the solutions? I'll ask my guests that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:37:23]

ZAKARIA: And we are back with Robert Putnam and Jean Twenge.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Bob, when you looked at your original research in "Bowling Alone" and all that, you pointed to -- you talked about a number of things, and I want you to talk about them. But I want you to talk about one piece, which was technology at the time, which was you noticed the more people watched television, the less they seem to engage in social activism and social -- and build social capital.

PUTNAM: Yes, that's right. In that study, I looked basically at the period from about 1975 until about 2000, when the book was published. And in that period, as you looked across different generations, the more people had been exposed to television, the more they hunkered down and they were socially isolated, and for that matter, the less they were involved in community activities of various sorts.

I do think that it's important -- Jean's focus -- I would say, relatively close focus on what's happened in the last 25 or 30 years is extremely valuable. But in the book, "The Upswing" in which we look at the last 125 years, we can see the ways in which what happened at the beginning of the 20th century is now being mirrored by what's happening in the beginning of the 21st century.

Social media are important, but you can see that the downturn in youthful isolation began, you know, before any of the big names in social media were even born. So, it's not just social media, it's -- it's social media as well as these longer-term generational differences.

ZAKARIA: So, Bob, tell us then, what are the things you think at a fundamental level were driving the downturn, you know, in earlier periods and then produced the upswing? So, what's the cause and what's the solution?

PUTNAM: Well, there are, of course, many causes. Part of it was that we had just in -- at the beginning of the 20th century, we had just been through dramatic industrial revolution. So, lots of people had just moved from the farms, whether the farms were in Iowa or the farms were in, you know, Russia or Sicily. And they left their family and friends and community institutions behind in the old country and they -- it took us some time to build up new ones.

If -- when you look -- I guess, I'm going to summarize this sort of quickly, and I'm going to turn to the question of, what we might do about it? Based on what they -- what they did that worked. And so, I would say, first of all, go local. Go local, of course, means working with your local neighbors.

[10:40:02]

Go young means hope that -- it's young people who come up with the new ideas. And we need to go moral. I'm talking about very simple things like, I am my brother's keeper. I've got to worry about my neighbors as much as I worry about myself.

This is -- this is not peculiarly religion. It's just the core -- it's the core moral philosophy of almost every single moral system that I know of. So, that's what I think -- where I think we have to begin.

ZAKARIA: Jean, you have a wonderful set of 10 rules, I think, when you -- when you go through what it is people can do, "10 Rules For Raising Kids In A High-Tech World." It's a wonderful book. And I like the first one because I think it says so much which is, to parents, you're in charge.

What you really -- very fundamental level, all the other rules follow from that, which is don't forget, you are the authority figures. You are in charge. Shape them. Shape your children morally in a sense, right?

TWENGE: Yes. And you know, I always want to be clear. That rule does not mean we're going to go back to the days of the ultimate parental authority, but still that the buck stops with you and that you can make the rules.

And if your 12-year-old wants a smartphone, and because everybody else has one, that doesn't mean that you have to say yes. Delay giving them that smartphone for as long as you can.

They need a phone. Give them a flip phone. Get them a phone designed for kids like Gabb or Troomi or Pinwheel. And keep them off social media. Not giving them a smartphone is one of the best ways to do that, because they need to have a childhood and they need to connect with their friends in real time, and they need to spend time with family, relatives on vacation and at dinner with their grandparents, and to learn how to talk to people face to face in real time so they are not scared of that when they get older and they develop those social skills.

I'm not going to tell you this is easy. I have three teen kids myself, so there's lots of challenges and I've seen a lot of them with my own kids. But we really do have to take the reins back when it comes to these technologies in our children.

ZAKARIA: You know, I feel like both of you have -- there's an element of hopefulness in what you say. Because, Bob, of course, you say that this has happened before and we've seen these upswings before. And, Jean, you talk about how, at the end of the day, the most important thing you want to tell parents is your final conclusion is, you've got this, you can do this. So, on that hopeful note, I'm going to thank both of you for a fascinating conversation.

TWENGE: Thanks very much. PUTNAM: Thanks, Fareed. Thanks, Jean.

(END VIDEOTAPE)'

ZAKARIA: Next on this GPS special, an unusual consequence of being disconnected. Across the world, women and men are increasingly growing apart. Whether it is politically or romantically. Studies show they're voting differently, marrying less, and having fewer children. I'll ask my next guest what is driving what she calls a coupling crisis and what we can do about it.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:47:59]

ZAKARIA: Hunters versus gatherers. People from Mars or from Venus. Men and women have long been depicted as different creatures. But in recent decades, my next guest says a vast rift has been emerging between the sexes.

Studies show that young women have become more and more liberal, while young men are turning increasingly to the right. We've also seen a constant decline in the number of people getting married or living together around the world in recent decades. So, why exactly are men and women becoming so, well, disconnected?

Alice Evans is a senior lecturer in the Social Science of Development at King's College London, and one of the leading voices tracking the major gender realignment. Her fieldwork has taken her to dozens of countries, from Mexico to Zambia to Indonesia. She writes about all of this in her Substack newsletter, "The Great Gender Divergence."

Alice, welcome. So, let's talk about why technology now is producing this gender divide. You write a lot about how one of the first things that technology like smartphones does is it has, for the first time ever, really allowed people to completely personalize their content, their -- what they take in from the world.

ALICE EVANS, SOCIAL SCIENTIST, KING'S COLLEGE LONDON: Absolutely. So, we're no longer trapped in top-down homogenization, no longer forced to consume their own shows or share media, or come to a common denominator. Instead, each person is free to pursue whatever their preferences are. So, this enables ever greater personalization.

Moreover, once we become immersed in these echo chambers of groupthink, where everyone is preaching to the choir, reaffirming that sense of righteous resistance, we're not necessarily aware of dissent or any kind of policing and threats of ostracism comes from within that own ideological tribe. So, that can lead to runaway polarization.

[10:50:00]

You know, when I was younger and, you know, forgive me, but the technology -- the entertainment technology was not that great. So, my friends had nothing better to do than hang out with me. And so as young guys and girls, you know, hang out in my garage, we're all sharing our ideas, our experiences. And there was no real difference between us because we had -- we consumed the same content. We shared our stories. We built that community together.

But if people socialize less because humans are being outcompeted by entertainment technology, you don't necessarily hear what a man's perspective is like or how he might feel that he was being discriminated in the workplace or things that he didn't like. So, we don't build up that sense of empathy and understanding, that sense of social glue that was so inherent to your and my childhood is now weakening.

ZAKARIA: And why is it that men and women seem to hang out online separately, you know, with each other? They -- what -- is that telling us something about, you know, men and women in general?

EVANS: Well, to be honest, I think we've always seen waves of this ever since Jane Austen was writing her romantic fiction, that romantic fiction has always been written and read by women. Or move into the late 20th century, when women preferred certain shows. Technology merely enables us to realize some of our preferences.

And as women might seek, you know, maybe more environmental concerns or left-wing concerns, we're catering to those preferences. If women seek greater status and freedoms, and being emboldened and feeling empowered, someone affirming their sense of importance, they readily lap it up.

ZAKARIA: And is it fair to say that, in general, women use smartphones more for certain kinds of things? Or put it in another way, I always read about how men use this technology for online gaming, for, you know, video games, for things like that. Women use it more for things like Instagram and social. That kind of social media.

EVANS: Certainly, men may be more likely to use games. Women may be more likely to use social media, but I think the real difference is coming -- not so much from that, but maybe two separate things. One, if people spend more time in digital solitude, less time hanging out, then we're less likely to see men and women expressing critique and dissent or empathizing.

You know, how was your day? Oh, I encountered these kinds of problems. So, you're less likely to see sort of people adjusting and altering and learning about the other side's perspectives, building empathy and understanding.

ZAKARIA: And this is happening at a time when, in any case, there is a kind of fertility crisis, right? You have the reality that for, you know, basically, ever since women have been educated and moving up, fertility has been plunging all over the world.

EVANS: Absolutely. So, I think that all these things are connected, that young women seem to be changing their aspirations, no longer so concerned about marriage and motherhood, because that's competing in this dynamic trade off where you're thinking, you know, what's the most fun, exciting, fulfilling thing I can do? Is it being a woman in, say, a patriarchal society where I'm expected to be subservient and obeying men and taking the lion's share of care work and adopting a more subservient role? Or could I pursue greater freedoms by staying single and not necessarily having kids? So, people are in that tussle, and babies seem to be losing, which has, you know, major economic implications.

ZAKARIA: And when you look at, you know, the future going forward, when you look at a world in which men and women, you know, spend less time together, does it worry you? I mean, it seems to me that that's only going to sharpen this kind of polarization, because men and women do have different ways of looking at the world, and therefore sometimes different political ideas and things like that.

EVANS: Absolutely. By just understanding different perspectives can help us live in, you know -- you know, build a social glue. But if all that withers and weakens, then we get these massive distortions and we can't correct it by in-person, real experiences. And the most important -- you know, some of the most central experiences of building empathy have, you know, been marriage and family. Again, that also seems to be weakening.

ZAKARIA: Alice, pleasure to have you on. Really fascinating thoughts.

EVANS: Thank you so much.

ZAKARIA: I want to close with one brief personal thought. We're entering the age of artificial intelligence. All the forces we have discussed here will be ramped up exponentially. More personalization, better entertainment, more excitement online. As we reap the benefits of the next great technological revolution in A.I. let's learn from the last one. There's no one solution to the problems produced by digital technology, but we could still embrace one general approach, more human contact.

[10:55:00]

Let's try to spend more time with more human beings. Friends, colleagues, acquaintances, everyone who, like us, is an imperfect, emotional, social, that is to say, human being.

We can use the machines and the software to make us all smarter, more talented, richer, and more resourceful. But we can only use each other to gain deep happiness, contentment, and satisfaction that comes from being in the company of other human beings. So, let's try that approach.

And thanks to all of you for watching this GPS special. I'll see you all next week.

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