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Fareed Zakaria GPS

U.S. Moves More Military Assets into Middle East; Supreme Court Rules Trump's Sweeping Emergency Tariffs Illegal. Interview With UCLA Law School Tax Law And Policy Chair Kimberly Clausing; Interview With New York University Professor Jonathan Haidt. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired February 22, 2026 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:00]

PHIL NOBLE, REUTERS PHOTOGRAPHER: -- police from around the world, sending me clippings of various sporting pictures, royal pictures, all various from pages. But to get the same picture used everywhere, I mean, I've never had it before in my career, and it's, yes, it's beyond overwhelming to be honest. But you know, the best wishes of my colleagues and the clippings dropping in, it's, yes, it's not something I'm used to.

DAMA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: Well, it's really quite a photo. Thank you so much for coming and telling the story of what happened behind the scenes to capture it. Congratulations and thanks again.

NOBLE: Thank you, Dana.

BASH: Thank you for spending your Sunday morning us. The news continues next.

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you live from New York.

Today on the program. Massive amounts of American firepower sit in the waters around Iran. This flotilla, as Donald Trump calls it, awaits the president's order to strike the Islamic republic. I'll examine what such attacks might accomplish and what the pitfalls would be.

Then President Trump has said that tariff is the most beautiful word, but now his signature program has suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Supreme Court. What happens now? I'll talk to the experts.

Also Facebook co-founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went to court this week as a witness in a trial centered on claims that social media platforms like his are detrimental to kids. I will talk to Jonathan Haidt about what is at stake.

But first, here's "My Take."

Zohran Mamdani ran on a promise to make New York affordable.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR ZOHRAN MAMDANI (D), NEW YORK: A mandate for a city we can afford.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Last week, he unveiled a budget that is, in a word, unaffordable. New York has been fiscally profligate for so long that the headline number, $127 billion, produces little shock. But for perspective these are similar to the annual expenditures of a mid- sized nation with all the expenses a country requires like Greece or Thailand, devoted to governing one city.

New York City's budget has ballooned in recent years. Michael Bloomberg's last budget adopted for fiscal year 2014 totaled about $70 billion. So in little more than a decade, the budget has nearly doubled, growing faster than inflation and faster than the city's economic growth. And much of it has happened as the city has been losing the one thing that makes big government easier to finance -- people.

New York City's population fell sharply amid the pandemic, with a 5 percent decline from April 2020 to July 2022. More recent city reports show a rebound, but the city remained below its 2020 baseline as of 2024.

The arithmetic is brutal. A larger bill is divided among fewer payers. Per person the imbalance is stark. Using the Lincoln Institute's fiscally standardized numbers, New York's general spending in 2023 was more than 30 percent higher per capita than Los Angeles, and more than double Houston.

And what do New Yorkers get for this? Look at New York City schools, the largest school district in the country. The city's education budget has climbed while enrollment has shrunk. The DOE budget has risen from roughly $34 billion in 2019 to over $40 billion, while the DOE says per student spending is projected to reach nearly $35,000 in fiscal year 2026, among the highest in the nation.

The outputs, graduation numbers, test scores and reading levels, are at best middling, often comparable to places that spend a fraction of what New York does.

Now come the taxes because every political argument in New York eventually ends up at the same curbside. Who will pay? New York already sits at the extreme end of the American tax spectrum. For high earners the combined state plus city income tax reaches 14.776 percent. Add federal taxes and the combined marginal rate can exceed 50 percent, reaching roughly 55 percent on certain investment income.

New Yorkers pay tax rates comparable to European countries that provide, in return, universal health care, free college education, and amazing infrastructure. New Yorkers get some 300 miles of sidewalk sheds.

On business taxation, the city is also off the charts. [10:05:03]

The Citizens Budget Commission reports that New York City business activity faces the country's highest combined corporate tax rate, 17.44 percent, once state, city and regional layers are stacked.

Mamdani wants to hike income and corporate rates even further, or else he says he will raise property taxes by almost 10 percent. Property taxes already made up more than 27 percent of the costs of home ownership in the city as of 2022, above the national average.

New York is really a prime example of a problem Democrats seem unwilling to confront. Blue cities are out of control. Promising more, spending more, delivering less and pushing off the fiscal problems to some future day.

Take Los Angeles, another one party metropolis wrestling with affordability and disorder. The city's homelessness budget for fiscal year 2025-'26 totals about $950 million. The L.A. Homelessness Services Authority reported that in 2023, homelessness was up 9 percent countywide and 10 percent in the city. And a 2024 AP account noted that homelessness has surged 70 percent countywide since 2015, and 80 percent in the city.

All this amid public frustration despite billions spent. An audit reviewed 2.4 billion in city homelessness funding and found that officials could not reliably track where it went or what it achieved, or take Chicago with a mayor whose approval rating is deep underwater where the pension promises are so large that they will surely bankrupt the city at some point.

What is the theory of good government here? If the answer is keep adding programs, the city will keep producing unaffordability because unaffordability is what happens when government becomes a machine that grows faster than the society it governs.

Zohran Mamdani's basic instinct is correct. Focus on affordability, especially housing, but not by providing government subsidies. These only seem to have driven up the cost of rent, as subsidies naturally do. The city's rental assistance spending rose from $263 million in fiscal year 2020 to $1.34 billion in the most recently reported fiscal year. That is a five times increase in a handful of years, and housing costs only got worse.

Matt Iglesias persuasively argues that the city should make it easy and routine to just build abundant market rate housing. That will bring in more people, expand the tax base, fill the schools and increase local GDP. And that will make the budget affordable.

For Democrats in city halls there is a choice. Stop governing as if the goal is to announce new entitlements and instead make government work, safer streets, functioning, schools, predictable sanitation and above all, enough housing that the middle class can find places to live.

New York City does not need more soaring rhetoric. It needs more homes.

Go to FareedZakaria.com for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week, and let's get started.

The Middle East is in the midst of the largest buildup of American forces in 22 years as President Trump tries to get Iran to submit to his nuclear demands. Trump said this week he is considering a limited military strike on Iran to exert additional pressure.

Richard Haass and Karim Sadjadpour join me now. Richard is, of course, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "Home and Away" on Substack. Karim is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment.

Richard Haass, you were present for the last two big wars in the Middle East, the Iraq war one and Iraq war two. The question I have for you is how on earth did we get to this point where we are casually talking about another war in the Middle East, when President Trump assured us just months ago that Iran's nuclear program had been, quote, "obliterated," unquote? What's going on?

RICHARD HAASS, PRESIDENT EMERITUS, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: Good question. This is a crisis of choice. This is one that we've brought to a head and why? There's nothing new on the nuclear, nothing new on ballistic missiles, nothing new with what proxies are doing. The one area there's been something new over the last two months is the regime repression and killing of its own people.

The administration made some big talk and then didn't act. It was like the United States in '56 in Hungary or Obama's red lines in Syria. So why now?

[10:10:01]

I've got a theory. I can't prove it, Fareed. But after Venezuela, my sense is this administration thought of themselves as masters of the universe. All they need to do is threaten, put together an armada, and the Iranians would back down. It didn't work. And now they're kind of stuck.

This administration is very forward on its skis. So the question we'll talk about is, you know, will limited uses of force work? If not, do you want to ratchet it up? Do you really want a large encounter on this? I literally don't see the signs that this administration has thought this through rigorously or carefully in any way.

ZAKARIA: You know, in your book on the subject, you pointed out that the Iraq war happened in large part because Afghanistan went so well for the Bush administration, that they got, you know, easy success and so emboldened a lot of people like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney who said, we can do this in Iraq again.

It does feel like this Venezuela example has made Trump think, hey, I've got this extraordinary military, I can do these amazing operations. Why not do more in Iran? HAASS: And also like the second Bush administration you never had an

NSC meeting, a National Security Council meeting that looked at everything systematically before we did Iraq in 2003. My sense is this administration, shall we say, does not do careful deliberations. Again, I think my sense is they thought they were invincible. They thought essentially the pieces would fall their way. And again, we're not prepared for step two, step three. We got to start playing chess here. Checkers is not enough. And I think the administration is stuck in some ways by its own rhetoric.

ZAKARIA: Karim, can you explain to us, you know, how the Iranians are looking at this? Because what's striking is, based on the reporting we've seen and you tell us more, the Iranian -- the Islamic Republic does not seem to be thinking as carefully about like, major concessions to get to a deal. What it's doing is preparing for strikes. Khamenei, the senior leader, seems to have organized a series of plans of succession. What happens if he dies? What happens if military commanders die? What's going on in their head?

KAREIM SADJADPOUR, SENIOR FELLOW, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE: Fareed, I do think this is essentially a game of chicken between two men, President Trump and Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. As Richard said, I think President Trump's strategy, his hope was the Venezuela model, which is that we subject Iran to such significant economic and military pressure that they will either capitulate or it will force a political decapitation.

I think what they didn't calculate is the mindset of Iran's supreme leader, who has really had only one big idea over the last four decades, and that's been resistance against the United States. And in this case, I think Khamenei believes that resistance is the key to his survival because in the past Trump has gambled on Iran and pulled out of the nuclear deal. He assassinated Qasem Soleimani, he bombed Iran last summer and Iran didn't exact much cost from President Trump and so this time, their calculations appear to be different.

And final word here, Fareed, is that it appears that Ayatollah Khamenei, at age 86, appears to be more prepared to die a martyr than a capitulator.

ZAKARIA: And Karim, do you think -- it seems that their calculation is that at this point, despite all the repression they engaged in a few months ago, being bombed by the Americans might actually bolster the regime in the sense that there will be some rally around the flag feeling. Do you think that's right? I know it's hard to predict, but, I mean, it's a very unpopular regime, but yet nobody likes being bombed by foreigners.

SADJADPOUR: I don't think that will be the case, Fareed. I think the gap between this regime and Iranian society is irreconcilable. But what's key to the survival of this regime is the cohesion of its security forces, the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij. So any U.S. military option, any U.S. military action, what will be key is not only to try to degrade Iran militarily, but also to divide the regimes security forces, because if military action serves to further unite the security forces, this is a regime despite its profound unpopularity, it can continue to stay in power.

ZAKARIA: All right. Stay with us. When we come back I'm going to ask Richard and Karim, what are Iran's options to respond? What would happen if we were to be in a war? What would that chess game look like? When we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:19:11]

ZAKARIA: Richard Haass and Karim Sadjadpour are with me to discuss the largest American buildup since the Iraq war.

What do you think, Richard, actually happens if you were to, you know just your gut?

HAASS: Very little. I don't think this administration wants a large war in the Middle East. Its base certainly doesn't want it. Americans care about affordability, not about someplace they have trouble finding on a map. And if there is a large war price of oil, among other things, would go up significantly.

I think there's a real chance. Remember Senator Moynihan talked about defining deviancy down. I think we could see a situation where the administration defines success down, and we get some version of a nuclear deal. People will compare it to the one the Obama administration negotiated. The administration will claim it was better, maybe at most, a limited exchange of force. But my guess is this massive armada is not going to engage in a large, prolonged conflict. Neither side wants it.

[10:20:07]

So my sense is, Fareed, they find a way through negotiations and at most a limited exchange, to basically declare victory.

ZAKARIA: And it feels like this, you know, the president is enjoying these diplomatic, these military diplomatic plays, but they're incredibly expensive. I mean, I was asking somebody at the Pentagon what it cost us to arrest Nicolas Maduro. And he said, oh, I mean this is in the billions and billions and billions of dollars. He used 150 aircraft at 10 percent of the U.S. Navy. In this case, it's an even larger deployment.

HAASS: Yes. We've got 40 percent to 50 percent of U.S. strike power out there. Every day that goes by, you're burning up a lot of money, it goes up astronomically if you're in war. So again, this is a president, think about it. He likes to brag about peace so I can imagine a situation where the United States and Iran reached some kind of an agreement. And this becomes then -- peace number nine on his list. I wouldn't rule it out.

ZAKARIA: Karim, if there is a deal, I mean, doesn't it look like it has in some ways rehabilitated the Iranian regime or in some way? Will the Iranian regime take that as a sign that even the Trump administration had to deal with them? SADJADPOUR: Fareed, I'm skeptical that we're going to be able to reach

a deal here. And I agree with Richard that it's in President Trump's interest. He wants to see a deal and obviously Iran's leadership doesn't want to go to war against the United States either. But I don't see yet a Venn diagram in which U.S. demands and Iranian concessions intersect, because the demands are not only for Iran to agree to zero enrichment, but also to significantly limit its missile program, stop supporting regional proxies and treat its population better.

And there's no indication that Iran is prepared to do that, and this is obviously something that is enormously worrisome for U.S. partners in the Persian Gulf because they are worried about a conflict which could get out of hand, could be what they describe as a hit and run operation where the United States takes military action but ultimately the president's attention is diverted elsewhere, and they're left with the blowback.

ZAKARIA: So talk a little bit about that point you made, which is very significant. Both the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the rulers of the UAE have apparently cautioned the administration not to do this. They want stability. They're building their economies. That's a significant shift, right, from where they were. What's happened? Why are the Gulf states now very wary of an American attack on Iran?

SADJADPOUR: Those countries in particular, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are profoundly ambivalent because on one hand they fear the Iranian regime. Iran has been a major threat to them if they could push a button and see this regime go away or see it significantly degraded, they would do that. But at the same time, Iran has threatened to, quote-unquote, "regionalize this war," to go after U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf, to potentially go after oil installations or, you know, there's been figures within the regime of threatened to destroy places like Dubai.

And so for that reason, they don't want to appear complicit because they know that they don't have the luxury of being thousands of miles away from Iran and that this U.S. military force in the Middle East cannot remain indefinitely in the region to protect them.

ZAKARIA: Richard, doesn't it strike you as odd that we're having -- I mean, this is a major, major foreign policy decision, and it feels like we're sort of sleepwalking into this.

HAASS: That's exactly right. Where's the congressional hearings? Where's the public debate? This is one of the few conversations about it given the stakes. Totally absent.

Karim is right that if the United States insists on everything, nuclear, ballistic missile, no proxy activity, and treating the opposition with respect, no way you're getting an agreement. To me, the big question, Fareed, is whether the administration dials down and essentially narrows its demands. Then I think if it's nuclear only, a little bit of a face-saving thing, then I actually think you do get a deal. The real question is --

ZAKARIA: All they need is to be able to say it's better than Obama's.

HAASS: Better than that. The real question is the more ambitious, more likely a conflict, the less ambitious, the more narrow, more likely both countries avoid one.

ZAKARIA: Thank you both. Really important discussion.

Next on GPS, we will take a look at the seismic Supreme Court ruling on Trump's tariffs. What does it mean for the economy, for business? I'll ask an expert.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:29:07]

ZAKARIA: On Friday, the Supreme Court dealt President Trump the biggest blow of his second term by striking down many of his sweeping global tariffs. Trump had been imposing these tariffs under a 1977 law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. Since the ruling, the president has now announced a new 15 percent global levy under a different trade law.

Joining me now is Kimberly Clausing, who is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and served in the Biden administration's Treasury Department as the lead economist in the Office of Tax Policy.

Kimberly, to me, this seems one of the most important Supreme Court decisions of my lifetime. You would have to go back to 1952, to the Youngstown Steel decision, when the court held that Harry Truman could not essentially nationalize steel mills, even though it was during the Korean War, and he was claiming national emergency and foreign policy powers, because fundamentally that was a legislative function, not an executive function. To you, you know, what is the significance of this ruling?

KIMBERLY CLAUSING, TAX LAW AND POLICY CHAIR, UCLA LAW SCHOOL: I think this is a hugely significant ruling. And I think everyone took a sigh of relief at how the court came out on Friday. It's a defense of rule of law. It's a sign of institutional strength. And it's a clear, you know, statement that we have separation of powers in the United States.

The president, he managed to generate the largest tax increase in a generation without ever going to Congress. But Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution makes it very clear that that power lies with Congress, not with the president.

ZAKARIA: So Trump now says he is going to impose these tariffs using different powers. What does that mean and where does this go?

CLAUSING: Yes. So, he's right now leaning on Section 122. And what that section specifies is if the United States is facing a balance of payments deficit, that there can be temporary tariffs. He has levied them at the maximum amount which is 15 percent. Those can last for up to 150 days, after which it would require an act of Congress to extend them. So we might question, is there a balance of payments problem in the United States? There's really no evidence of that. That concept is distinct from current account deficits which, in fact, the president's own lawyers have asserted.

But what it does mean is that the tariffs will be across the board. They will no longer vary with each and every trading partner. And so, that will provide, you know, some reassurance to foreign governments that they will not be picked off one by one for special treatment, particularly high tariffs.

ZAKARIA: Yes. To me it's very striking that even if these were to last, and we'll get into that in a second, what has gone away is the president's completely arbitrary, whimsical, idiosyncratic power to say, by his own admission, I didn't like the way the Swiss president talked to me so I raised the tariffs to 39 percent. Then they came to me with a gold bar and a Rolex watch, and I brought them down, right.

Well, that it seems like the court is saying, you just can't do that stuff. So, what he's now doing is a blanket. It's like a consumption tax on all imported goods from around the world which is, frankly, much less distorting than the previous set of tariffs.

CLAUSING: Yes. I think it's a big improvement particularly with respect to foreign countries who can expect that their tariffs will not exceed a certain amount. Whether it's distortionary or not, I would still say that there are substantial distortions here.

For instance, at the business level, some companies get exemptions from the tariffs, others don't. It looks like that trend will probably continue under these tariffs. So we will not have a level playing field among businesses in the United States. And the tariffs still distort U.S. production towards goods were less, good at making and hurts our export sector because other countries have less appetite for U.S. goods in this kind of environment.

So, the distortions are still there. But I think with respect to the country by country variation, this is a huge improvement relative to the prior regime. And certainly we will not have this day by day variation based on the moods of a mercurial leader. And I think that's also a step in the right direction.

ZAKARIA: So to me, the most surprising thing about this issue is that -- pleasantly surprising from my point of view, is that the tariffs are wildly unpopular. In fact, if you look at the, you know, most of the polling they may be the most unpopular thing that Donald Trump is doing. Sixty-five percent in many of the polls I've seen of Americans disagree with the tariffs presumably because they know that it raises the price of the goods they consume.

In that circumstance, it seems highly unlikely that Congress will actually pass a law that ratifies these tariffs. So what we seem to have in place is 15 percent tariffs for 150 days after which what happens in your opinion?

CLAUSING: Yes, I think there's absolutely zero chance that Congress will legislate these tariffs. They're deeply unpopular. It's a year with midterm elections. They've already indicated with both House and Senate votes that they have support for declaring that this wasn't an emergency.

So, both in the Senate there's been votes on the AIFA tariffs. And in the House there's been a vote. And in both cases, Republicans, some Republicans joined Democrats to oppose the tariffs.

So, it strikes me as quite unlikely that Congress will support these. And then we're left with the president pivoting to other trade authorities in the time ahead. And there are others that the administration can use.

[10:35:00]

They would have to invoke national security concerns or concerns about foreign countries' fair trading practices. And so, you can expect that over this 150 days, they're going to be launching investigations into particular countries and into particular industries to support this long run tariff agenda.

So things may look quite different again in five months. But I don't think we'll see these particular tariffs extended.

ZAKARIA: I mean, to me part of the fascinating thing here is, you know, businesses always talk about not liking uncertainty. And I remember, you know, during the Obama administration there would be this huge complaint about, you know -- now, I mean, you don't have uncertainty. You have kind of chaos.

What is going to happen even in this next 150 days? When these things are launched are they going to be other lawsuits? I mean, are there are they arguments to be made that the president is improperly using these authorities? For example, if he raises the issue of foreign national security? Yes, courts are deferential.

But I mean, again, in Youngstown steel, the court said, no, that's not -- you know, you can't just use national security and nationalize the steel industry. Are there going to be court challenges to even this set of new powers the president is claiming?

CLAUSING: Yes I would expect, you know, a never ending series of court challenges as long as the president is using these tariff authorities so broadly. It's quite clear that the Supreme Court views the power to tax as lying with the Congress.

So, if the president takes this really broad set of tariffs that he levied under IEEPA and tries to replicate them with other authorities, it's sort of a transparent attempt to just continue, you know, usurping what should be Congress' job. And Congress should do their job and rule and -- sorry and legislate on the tariffs. But, you know, absent that, we've got the president trying to take more and more leeway here.

And so, I suspect they will be challenged. Part of it depends on how much overreach the president does. If he uses these tools more narrowly, as they're intended, you know, then I think they could escape challenge. But so far there's no indication that he's planning on this narrow use. On the contrary, it seems to be, again, overreach relative to what the statutes had in mind.

ZAKARIA: So if you look at, you know, where we are now, it's a little unclear, right? Because we had -- because there's so many exceptions. But I think the average tariff rate in the U.S. went from about two percent to about 15 percent.

Are we still in that range? I just need a one word answer.

CLAUSING: Yes, very much. So -- yes. Yes, I would say we're about 7/8 of where we were before the ruling.

ZAKARIA: All right. Thank you so much, Kimberly. Pleasure to talk to you. Next up, Jonathan Haidt.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:42:32]

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: This week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in a highly anticipated trial, accusing his company and YouTube of harming children's mental health. The landmark case hinges on whether social media companies have deliberately designed their platforms to be addictive. The trial is a bellwether for hundreds of similar cases, and the outcomes could have broad implications for how social media platforms operate.

Joining me now is Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU, and the author, of course, of the bestselling book, "The Anxious Generation." Jonathan, it is your research that is in many ways at the center of this entire storm. So first, tell us what do we know about what Meta itself knew about the nature of these problems? Because there's a whole treasure trove of data, internal Meta studies that have come out.

JONATHAN HAIDT, PROFESSOR, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY: Yes, that's right. So I've had two conversations with Mark Zuckerberg, one in 2019, one in 2020. In both of them I said, Mark, there's a lot of emerging evidence of harm. And he argued with me and he said, no, it's just correlational.

Well, now we know because of all -- thousands of parents are suing Meta because their kids are dead or severely damaged. And so much information has come out in the lawsuits. My team -- at "Anxious Generation," my team gathered reports of 31 studies conducted within Meta because they want to understand children and adolescents and what makes them keep attention, what makes them stay engaged is the word.

And now we know that beginning in 2018, they themselves found correlational evidence that the kids who are on a lot, are in bad shape. They ran their own experiment where they had people get off for a week and their mental health improved. They did deep research into brain development.

So my point is, if you go to Metasinternalresearch.org you'll find 31 studies that we organized. And these are all internal Meta studies. So they knew damn well that they were addicting kids. The program was designed to be addictive. Originally, Instagram was designed to be addictive.

They know that they're addicting kids. They reward their engineers for increasing engagement, but some of them actually literally use the word addiction. And so we know that they did this on purpose. And now finally for the first time in all of their history they are facing a jury and they are going to be held accountable.

[10:45:02]

They have -- I believe, thousands of kids are dead that would not be dead if they had not used Meta's products. And for the first time, some of those parents are going to get justice.

ZAKARIA: And now Mark Zuckerberg, at least publicly so far, has said, this is all correlation. There is no causation. And there are some social scientists who even said this. So what's your best argument against that thesis?

HAIDT: Yes. So, this is a Meta talking point that the data is all correlational and it's just not true. It's just completely not true.

And so, if people search for mountains of evidence social media my team has done -- we created -- put together a review paper it'll come out in the World Happiness Report next month. Where we go through seven lines of evidence.

And so, there's correlational studies. Sure. But there are also experimental studies. There are longitudinal studies where you check over time. There are natural experiments where you look at when social -- when high speed internet came into an area. All of these are the tools that social scientists use to establish causality not just correlation. And we've done it.

There are four lines of academic evidence. But even more damning is that the kids themselves about 30 percent of girls, say this has damaged my mental health. This has harmed my mental health. That's not a correlation.

Millions -- literally millions of kids are sextorted every year. That's not a correlation. That is direct harm from being -- especially on Snapchat. But also Instagram is a major site of sextortion. So, we've organized seven lines of research. And to claim that, oh, it's just correlation. He could have said that 10 years ago but now it's just absurd. It's incorrect. There are so many different kinds of evidence showing causality.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, I asked Jonathan Haidt given all this new evidence. What more could be done to protect young people from social media.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:51:28]

ZAKARIA: Late last year, a law in Australia went into effect banning children under the age of 16 from all major social media platforms. Other countries are already at work on similar legislation. Here's more of my conversation with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: You've talked about bans in schools. You've talked about age limits. Should there be more? Is this -- I mean, is the problem so severe that you actually need a more dramatic remedy?

HAIDT: I think so. What I've come to realize since "The Anxious Generation" came out in March of 2024 is that I vastly underestimated the severity of what's happening to young people. Because when I was writing it, I focused on the data on mental health and that's where we have very good data. So it has -- I think it has now been established that it has caused increase in depression, anxiety, and self-harm, for sure, and that there are hundreds and possibly thousands of cases of suicide that have happened because of this.

But that's all the mental health stuff. What I didn't realize is that I think the larger damage is actually the destruction of the human capacity to pay attention. And this affects not a third of the kids like the mental health problem. This affects, I think, the great majority of people born after 1995 in the developed world.

And now we're beginning to feel like it's clear -- it affects all of us. It affects all. It's hard for us to read books. It's hard for people to focus.

So I think the world is waking up to the fact that addictive short form videos are just really bad for your attention span. They are very habit forming. They waste huge amounts of time. They have transformed childhood. The world is waking up to this and saying, you know what? Time is up. Enough is enough.

We can all see the damage. So that's why the world, I believe, is acting so quickly. Countries around the world are raising the age to 16 for social media. And I think we're going to have to look more generally at the digital childhood which turns out to be not a childhood fit for human beings.

ZAKARIA: Australia's ban is going to affect -- I think, it's about a half million Facebook accounts have been shut down. Instagram, Facebook, I think, a combination. Do you think that what you know from, you know, school bans on cellphones, do you think the positive effects will be pretty immediate?

HAIDT: So with school bans, they were immediate. With school bands, once you say you have to put your phone in a locker or a locked pouch in the morning you get it back in the evening, schools were expecting a lot of pushback. They were expecting the kids to riot. It didn't happen because the kids aren't desperate to be on social media. They're just desperate to not be left out.

So when everyone is off for the whole school day you get dramatic results within a week or two -- within a week or two, you get teachers and administrators saying, we hear laughter in the hallways again. We haven't heard that in 10 years.

So the school bans have been magic. The school bans have been incredibly effective. All around the world that's happen.

Now, raising the age to 16 is harder because this is -- it's harder to enforce because, obviously, there are lots of ways of getting around it for now. Kids can use a VPN. They can't just lie anymore. That's what it used to be. You could just say you're 13 and you're in. Now they have to do a little bit of work to get around it.

But here's the brilliant thing about the Australian bill. It's not up to the government to enforce it. The law says, you companies are making money off these kids. You companies are harming them. You companies are supposed to not have -- you're supposed to have a minimum age. It's up to you. And there are dozens and dozens of companies -- of other companies that do age authentication.

[10:55:00]

There are lots of ways to do it other than showing a driver's license or government I.D. So, the Australia bill is world changing. No one had the guts to actually try it. And we will not know yet whether -- we will not know yet whether the rate of kids spending time is going to drop way down, or just drop somewhat.

But as the as their eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, the woman in charge of the whole thing, as she said, we're trying to change norms in Australia and this will take years. And in fact, we will not know the full benefits of this policy for a decade or two. We'll see how kids go through puberty.

But it is a godsend for all the parents who want to keep their kids off. It's a lot easier now that you can say, well, the law says you have to be 16. And the technology is improving very rapidly. So, I think that -- I think that the many countries that are now passing laws, I think, they're going to find pretty high levels of success this year. And then increasingly over the years.

ZAKARIA: Well, it's a big week for all the stuff you've been pushing for, Jonathan. And I wish you well and we hope we'll be able to have you back to talk about more of this as it develops.

HAIDT: Thank you, Fareed. I appreciate your attention to this issue over the last few years. You've been great at really spelling out the larger situation. I appreciate that so much.

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ZAKARIA: Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

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