#2121 - Jonathan Haidt

34:38No see the data yeah but look at smoking you know smoking is highly addictive it was very common up through the 1990s and now it's very rare in high school very few high school kids smoke so it's possible to change norms. And what was the third? The third is phone free schools and this one is happening this is already happening so I published articles in the Atlantic and on my on my sub stack after Babble .com She bring together the research when kids have a phone in their pocket in school they're going to be texting because if anyone is texting during the day during the school day they all have to check because they don't want to be out of the loop they don't want to be the one who doesn't know.

35:16So when kids started bringing smartphones into school instead of flip phones academic achievement actually went down kids are stupider today than they were 15 years ago I mean stupid meaning measuring their academic progress after 50 years of improvement it turns around after 2012 and this is true in the US and internationally. So there's just no reason why kids should have the phone on them they should come in the morning put in a phone locker or a yonder pouch go about their day and guess what the schools that have tried it after a week or two everyone loves it. The kids are like oh wow we actually talk in between classes you know we have five minutes in the hallway we actually talk and you hear laughter whereas right now in a lot of schools it's just zombies looking at their phones in between as they're walking from class to class.

35:58Yeah. So the assumption is that from 2012 kids are just much more distracted. Oh my god. I mean look Joe I think I heard you say in one of yeah it was a conversation you had a few weeks ago with a comedian friend of yours. And I think this was a direct quote from you my fucking phone runs my goddamn life does that sound like you yeah sounds like me okay so. So you know as adults you know we have a fully formed prefrontal cortex you and I had a normal childhood our brains developed we have the ability to stay on task and man it is hard with notifications coming in there's always so many interesting things you could do instead of what you need to do.

36:38So it's hard enough for us as adults imagine if you didn't have a normal childhood where you developed executive function where you develop that ability as a teenager because it puberty is when the prefrontal cortex the front part of the brain that's when it rewires into the adult configuration. So the fact that we're scrambling kids attention at the time when they're supposed to be learning how to pay attention I think is terrible. Where do you think this is going this is my concern is that this is just the beginning of this integration that we have with devices yeah and that the the social media model and it's been immensely profitable.

37:20Yes. Oh my god incredibly addictive yeah and there's a massive massive amount of capital that's invested in keeping us locked into these things. Where do you think this goes from here have you paid attention to the technology like AI yeah yeah yes so let me just a very very sharp bright line between adults and children I'm very reluctant to tell adults what to do if adults want to spend their time on an addictive substance or device or gambling I'm reluctant to tell them that they can't so when we're talking about adults I think where this is going is well where it's where it's gone. So far is everything that you might want becomes available instantly and for free with no effort and so in some ways that's a life of convenience but in other ways it's it's messing us up and it's making us weaker so you know you want you want sexual satisfaction okay here you go free porn and it gets better and better and more and more intense.

38:21You want a girlfriend or boyfriend who you can customize you know that you have that already advances in robotics are such that I'm you know it's just a matter of time before AI girlfriends are put into these incredible female bodies that you can customize so I think the adult world for young adults especially is going to get really really messed up and again I'm not saying we've need to ban it now but what I'm saying is for God's sakes don't let this be 11 year old children's lives. Let's at least keep children separate from all this craziness until their brains develop and then they can jump into the world pool in the tornado but the fact that our 11 year old girls are now shopping at Sephora for anti wrinkle cream or you know all sorts of expensive skin treatments this is complete insanity yeah so let's at least protect the kids until they're through puberty.

39:14Well that would be nice that would be nice I just kind of essential I think it's just the way I see adults being so hooked on these things I there's so many adults that I know that are engrossed in this world of other people's opinions of everything they think and say and it just doesn't give you enough time to develop your own thoughts and opinions on things that's right so many people are dependent upon other people's approval and there's no way I can do that. There's just so many people that are addicted to interacting with people online and not interacting with exceptional people in the real world.

39:52That's right. One way to think about this is let's look at let's look at junk food which became very popular after the Second World War you know the manufacturing of food became very good there were science labs. They said Frito lay they studied the exact degree of tensile strength for that a chip should have before it snaps and you know how do you make this what's the perfect crunch so they designed the foods to be as addictive as possible and in the 70s and 80s Americans switched over to a lot of junk food and we became obese like a huge increase in obesity and that kept going on for a few decades as I understand it obesity is finally turned around a little bit and many people are still eating huge amounts of junk food but at least some people are are beginning to to begin to say you know what I'm going to resist that deep evolutionary programming for for fat and sugar the companies played to that they hijacked those desires and they got us hooked on junk food but we're fine after you know 50 years we're making some progress in in pushing back and having healthier snacks and eating eating less.

40:56What's the root of that progress. I don't actually know the numbers I just know a few years ago I saw something that for the first time obesity actually went down in the United States. I don't know that that's still true today but this was like three or four years ago before COVID I saw something. Do we know what caused it to go down. I don't I'm just assuming that this is an issue that we dealt with as a society and we didn't know what we were doing at first and we got hooked and the efforts to you know efforts to educate people and to develop healthier alternatives. So again I don't know I have it you know I I should have looked at the data before I came here but I'm just using this as an analogy where sure Jamie can find something.

41:35Okay yeah yeah look it up online is it is obesity still rising the United States or is it actually the lower than it was 10 years ago that's the question. I mean I quickly found this study here but I haven't even got you in so look at it. This is the second time I've done this something about this is giving me anxiety I'm still updating on the obesity. After the sudden rise is the upward trajectory beginning to flatten. Okay so it's a question and what year was this. So do you think it's 2023 recognizing that they're developing health issues and they're taking steps to discipline themselves and mitigate some of these issues or is there is there some sort of information push that's leading that direction.

42:15Yeah that I don't know because it's not my field but I would say that that is a probably necessary precondition like understanding the problem and developing a people a desire to to change it and then it's hard to change you know I love I love chips I love chocolate I love ice cream. It's hard to change but you know over time a society adapts and now the question is will we adapt to social media because the desire for sugar and fat and salt is very deep. The desire for others to think well of us to the other to hold us in a steam I would say is just as deep and much more pervasive it's much stronger I would say.

42:55And so because you know as adults we're very concerned you know when I like when I put out a tweet. You know I know all this stuff I know how terrible this is for me to check I'm busy I've got things to do but I'll go back and I'll check how the tweet is doing 30 seconds later like I'll go you know and then I'll check again five minutes later. So it's hard for me to meet a resist that like what are people saying about the thing that I just said. Yeah but the question is will we will we adapt to it in some way so that we begin you know as with junk food we're still going to be consuming junk food but maybe we'll keep a lid on it.

43:27I don't know I don't know but what I can say with not confidence but I think is the case as long as our kids are going through puberty on social media and video games and they're not developing executive control I do not think they will be able to keep a hand in the back. So I think I can handle on this as adults. I do not either again as you're saying we are adults we grew up without the internet and we've heard out all these problems and it is hard. I try to tell my friends to use my strategy which is post and ghost. Okay I don't read anything. You post things. I post things and I don't read comments.

44:00No that's really smart. It's made me immensely more happy. It's a massive difference. I very rarely use Twitter. The only reason why I or X whatever I don't the only reason why I use it is to see information to see things. I don't read anything about myself and I certainly don't I very rarely post at all and if I do post I certainly don't read what because first of all I'm aware of this number this FBI security specialist. The 80 % of it and I see it all the time. There's so many times where I'll see any any social issue any political issue anything that's in the zeitgeist. When you see someone post about it you'll see these people posting and I'll look at it.

44:42It's like a couple of letters and a bunch of numbers and I'll go okay is that a real person. Then I go to their page nope nope not a real person. How many have done that? There's a lot of them. There's a lot of them especially when it comes to things like Ukraine, Israel, Gaza. Right because those are areas where where various actors are or various parties and actors and countries are trying to manipulate us. Yes and they're doing it. They're doing a great job of it. They're very focused. It's really incredible. It's incredible to see the impact that it has when you see 50 posts on us, 50 comments and 35 of those seem to be not real people.

45:18That's right. I think your strategy is very wise and for this reason when social media began you would put something up and then people could comment on it. Okay. That was that goes until about 2013 -2014. I think it's 2013 when Facebook introduces threaded comments. So now you put something up. Someone says some horrific nasty racist whatever thing in your comment thread and now everyone can reply to that comment. Right. And people can reply to that reply to that. So you get basically everyone fighting with each other in the comment thread. Yes. And what social media is good for is putting out information quickly.

45:55I'm a professor, I'm a researcher, I am engaged in various academic disputes and debates. And Twitter is amazing for finding current articles, for finding what people are talking about. Yeah. So the function of putting information out is great. But the function of putting something out and then watching everyone fight in the comments, that's why he was the analogy of the Roman Colosseum, like with the gladiators. That's just sick. That's just - there's nothing good comes from that. Right. My concern is that we are paddling upriver. Yeah. And that there's a raging waterfall that's powering this whole thing that you cannot fight against.

46:35And that we are moving in a direction as a society with the implementation of new, more sophisticated technology that's going to make it even more difficult, unless you completely opt out. And some people are going to opt out, but it's going to be like my 600 pound life. People that are realizing, oh my god, what have I done? I've ruined my body, I've ruined my life. How do I slowly get back to a normal state? And it's going to take a tremendous amount of effort. Think about the amount of effort. Malout focus that people have on comments and things, if you're addicted, if you're currently deep into it right now, where you're tweeting constantly, I mean, there's people that I follow that I know they're tweeting 12 hours a day.

47:24It's their - It's their - Yeah, they're addicts. Like how, where my fear is that this is only going to get greater? Yeah. I share that fear. And if current trends continue, it's really not clear how we get out of this. Something might break in a big way. Humanity has faced many crises before. That doesn't mean, as they say, past performance is no guarantee of future success. So we've faced many crises and we've always come out stronger. But we've never faced anything like this. That's right. This is a kind of a rarer thing. Exactly. That's right. So we've faced many external threats. We've faced diseases.

48:03We've faced wars. Those have come and gone. But this is a rewiring of the basic communication network of society in ways that link up with so many of our deepest motivations. This is a challenge unlike any we've ever faced. And - And, you know, so I think, you know, what we really need, I'm speaking as a university professor, is we really need great social sciences. We need great sociologists. We need people really studying this. But, you know, it's all happening so fast. And then the problems in universities of, you know, political concerns sweeping in. So I feel - I feel we're sort of heading towards this.

48:43Well, you said, like going upstream to a waterfall. I think it was that going downstream, we're about at the top of waterfall going to go over the edge. That too, yeah. Well, we're trying to paddle, but that's a direction we're moving in. Yeah. That might be the case. That, you know, so, yeah, we live at a very interesting time in history when the, you know, in the 90s the future looked so bright. And, yeah, now it doesn't. My fear is that we are no longer going to become human. That we will no longer be human. We'll be a different thing. And I think the implementation of technology is what's going to facilitate that.

49:17That we're - I think we're, you know, how many years away from Neuralink and something's similar to it. That's going to change how we interact completely. And that it's not going to be a salute. It's not going to be a question of whether or not you opt out, whether you pick up your device. Your device is going to be a part of you. And there'll be incentives that, whether it's performance incentives, whether it's, you're going to have more bandwidth, whether, whatever it is. Is competitive advantage? Yeah, that's the real fear of something like Neuralink or whatever. If they can figure out a Neuralink that doesn't require surgery.

49:53If they can figure out something that does that without surgery, the advantage of having that in a competitive sense, in terms of like business and technology and industry. It's going to be massive and it's going to be so difficult to get people to not do that. That it's going to be like phones. I mean, I remember when I moved to Los Angeles in 1994, I bought a Motorola StarTac. And I was like, look at me. I had a phone in 1989. Oh wow, one of the big ones that went to a satellite? It was actually connected to my car in 1989. And it was very advantageous. My friend Bill Blumenreich, who owns the, he owned the comedy connection.

50:33He owns the Wilbur Theatre now in Boston. And I got a lot of gigs from him because he could call me when someone came. That's advantageous. Someone got sick and they said, hey, can you get the Dartmouth at, you know, 10 p .m. I'm like, fuck yeah. And so I got gigs from that. We joke about it to this day that I was like the first guy that he knew that had a cell phone. It was a very, it was a huge advantage. And I remember when I had one in 94, I was like, this is great. I can call my friends. I don't even have to be home. There was so many positives to it. And it gave you an advantage. It gave you an advantage is you didn't have to be home.

51:09If there was a business thing that I had to deal with. There was something going on with my career. I could deal with it on the phone at Starbucks or wherever I was. My fear is that this is going to be that time's a million. It's going to be you have to have it in order to compete. Just like you kind of have to have an email today. You kind of have to have a cell phone today. That's right. That's right. Yes, we are certainly headed headed in that way. And I think the word human is a very good word to put on the table here. Some things seem human or inhuman. And when you simply connect people, you know, Mark Zuckerberg sometimes says, how could it be wrong to give more people more voice?

51:47If you're simply connecting people, making it easier from the to contact each other. You know, I think that's mostly going to have good effects. And that happened with the telephone. You know, we all got telephones and we could do all sorts of things. We could coordinate with our friends. Telephones are great. But when it became not technology making it easier for this guy to reach you or meet and communicate with you. But rather, it's a way to put things out to try to gain prestige from me in front of thousands or maybe millions of people. Now it changes all of our incentives. It changes the game we're playing.

52:21You know, what games are we playing as we go about our day? And the more people are playing the game of, I'm struggling to get influence in an influence economy where everyone else is on these seven platforms. So I have to be two or they have an advantage over me. That is the way that things have been rewrite already. Already we're there. Now you're raising the possibility that the next step is more hardware based. That it's going into our bodies. And I think that is likely to happen. And so I hope what we'll do now. And I hope my book, The Actually Generation, will sort of promote a pause. Let's think where we are.

52:57Let's think what we've done. Let's look at what has happened. When our kids got on phones in social media, we thought, oh, this could be amazing. They can connect. They can form communities. It's going to be great. And now it's clear, no, it's been horrible. It's been really, really terrible. As soon as they got on, they're meant to help suffer. They might feel like they have a community, but it's much worse than what it replaces. So I think what we're seeing is the sort of the techno optimist, the sort of the futurist, to say, oh, it's going to be amazing. We'll have Nurelink. We'll have all this technology.

53:28We'll be able to do everything. Here's where we have to heat. I think the warnings of the ancients, of religious authorities, of those who warn us that we are leaving our humanity, and we're stepping into an unknown zone where so far the initial verdict is horrible. So if we keep going without putting on some breaks, yeah, I think we're going to a horrible place. Yeah, my fear is that it won't be horrible. It'll feel good. Yeah, that'll be amazing. So my fear, my genuine fear, is the rewiring of the mind in a way that can enhance dopamine, enhance serotonin, and do things that can genuinely make you feel better.

54:18Yeah. And the short run? Yes. And that we will decide that this is a better thing. Regardless of how you feel about SSRIs, most people think that they're being dispensed too readily, and that too many people that get on antidepressants could have solved that issue with exercise and diet. Because this is a big part of the reason why people are feeling shitty in the first place is their body is failing. Yeah, and having less sex, I read recently, because the SSRIs are suppressing sex driving many people. So there's that. There's a lot of issues that come along with those. And yet there's a immense profit in making sure that people take those and stay on those.

55:01My fear is that if you can do something that allows people to have their mind function, have their brain, their endocrine system, have all these things function at a higher level, then everyone is going to do it. You would not want to just be natural and depressed if you could just put on this little headset and feel fantastic. And maybe it could be a solution to so many of our society issues. Maybe bullying would cease to exist if everyone had an increase in dopamine, it just, it sounds silly. But if dopamine increased by, look, if you have an entire society that's essentially on a low dose of MDMA, you're not going to have nearly as much anger in frustration.

55:47And you also are not going to have as much blues. You're not going to have as many sad songs that are, that people will love. You're not going to have the kind of literature that people write when they feel like shit. You know, it's unfortunate. But also as a whole, as a society, it probably would be an overall net positive. If people did not want to engage in bullying, did not want to engage in violence, did not want to engage in theft, were more charitable, you know, if you, if more benevolent, if you look at it, things in that direction, that's my concern is that the rewiring of the mind, what we're essentially seeing right now is a rewiring of a mind that if we didn't anticipate it, it has negative consequences, we thought about it in a positive way, oh, this is going to be great, we're all going to be connected.

56:36You know, what, how would it be bad that people could have more voices? Like Zuckerberg says. But my fear is that it's going to just change what it means to be a human being and my genuine feels that this is inevitable, and that as technology scales upward, this is unavoidable. Right now it certainly feels that way. And while I'm not optimistic about the next 10 years, I share your vision of what's coming, but I'm not resigned to it. People always say to me, I go around saying, we need to do these four norms, we can do them, and people say, oh, that ship has sailed, like, you know, the train's left the station.

57:16You know, but if a ship has sailed, and we know that, you know, it's going to sink, we can actually call it back. I've been on airplanes where they leave the, you know, it leaves the jet way, and then they call it back because they discover a safety issue. So we are ahead of that way, I agree. But I think we can, I mean, we humans are an amazingly adaptable species. I think we can figure this out, and there are definitely pathways to a future that's much better. These technologies could, in theory, give us the best democracy ever, where people really do have the right kind of voice. It's not just the extremes who are super empowered as it is now.

57:58So, you know, we're in a point in space and time, let's say right now, and I can imagine a future that's really fantastic, but how do we get there? And are we able to get there? Is there a path? Or is it like, you know, there's no path from A to B? So I don't know, but I think we sure as hell have to try. And the first thing we have to do is not be resigned and just say, oh, well, the world's going to hell, what are you going to do about it? It's too big. So let's start, I have a proposal, let's start with the one area that we can all agree on, which is our kids. It's the most amazing thing. In Congress, you can't, you know, any issue if the right likes if the left won't invite versa, except for this one.

58:40This is the only thing in Washington that's really bipartisan. The senators and congressmen have kids, they see it. So let's, you know, let's test the proposition that all is lost and we're helpless. Let's test that proposition. And let's test it in the place where we can, we're most likely to succeed, which is rolling back the phone -based childhood and replacing it with a more play -based childhood. Oh, so actually, I said there are four norms, we talked about three. So if you don't mind, I'll just put it in the fourth norm now. Yeah. So the first three are about phones. No, smart from before high school, no social media till 16 phone -free schools.

59:14Okay, but if you take away the phones and you don't give kids back each other and play time and independence, what are they going to do? You're going to keep them at home all day long without screens? So the fourth norm is more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. And this is a thing that you and I talked about last time. I think we actually had a small disagreement, where, you know, I'm a big fan of Lenore Skenezy, the woman who wrote free -range kids. She and I co -founded an organization called Let Grow. Parents, please go to letgrow .org. All kinds of ideas for how to help your kid have more independence, which makes them more mature, it makes them less fragile.

59:56So this fourth norm, this is the harder one. This is the one that we have to overcome our fears of letting our kids out. And so actually, let me ask you, I think our disagreement last time was, I talked about this and I said, like, letting kids go for sleepovers and spend more time with other kids and unsupervised. And then you said, I think you said, no, I'm not letting my kid go to sleepovers because I don't trust the other families. Does that sound familiar to you? I don't believe that's what I said. I think our concern was with people wandering around with kids being free to walk home in cities.

1:00:27Yes, you had that also. We did talk about sleepovers. My kids had sleepovers. My kids had sleepovers. They've always had sleepovers. If you know the parents, you trust the parents. It's a great way to give the kids independence and have them interact with other people. Good, good. So tell me that what was your policy with your kids, with your younger, with all three, on when you let them out, like they could go out the door, get on a bicycle, walk seven blocks to a friend's house without any adult with them. What age or grade? No, I don't. I mean, it's fine if you live in a good neighborhood. The problem is if your, you know, childhood predators are real.

1:01:00Not really, not anymore. What I mean is... What do you mean? Well, when you and I were growing up, there were childhood predators out there in the physical world approaching children. And I think you said there, you told the story about one who approached you when you were doing magic tricks. So there were childhood predators out there. That's true. They're all on Instagram now. The kids are in doubt. And Instagram, and especially Instagram, makes it super easy for them to get in touch with children. Yeah. So the visit... So this is my point. I can summarize the whole book with the single sentence.

1:01:34We have overprotected our kids in the real world and underprotected them online. How would you agree to that? So, you know, yes, childhood predators are terrible, but guess what? We actually locked up most of them. You know, when you and I were growing up, they weren't all locked up. They were just eccentric who were exposing themselves. Remember flashing, flashers? That doesn't happen anymore. Because if you do that now, you're going to jail for a long, long time. So we actually locked up most of the predators, and they know don't approach kids on a playground approach them on social media. I don't know if we are doing that.

1:02:04And there's this new push. Oh, nothing goes. Oh, yeah. Once you're identified as a sex offender, you'll never... You know, you are gone for a long time, and then there's sex offender. No, we've really done a lot since the 90s to change the real world safer. But there is push against that. You're aware of this term minor -attracted person since it's being pushed. Disgusting. Disgusting and really disgusting. It's such a bizarre term that I got to imagine as only being done by people who don't have children. And they're pushing this thing that it's an identity and that it's not the fault of the person who has this issue.

1:02:40Yeah. Wow. What's the root of that? Have you investigated that? Yes. Not that specific issue, but I can... You know, from... So look, I study moral psychology. That's my academic discipline. And I study the roots of it evolutionarily, historically, and child development. What is our moral sense? And there are different moralities. And in some ways, that's good. And, you know, left and right push against each other. So I'm very open to different moralities. But when a group makes something sacred, and they say, this is the most important thing, and nothing else matters other than this. Then they can kind of go insane, and they kind of lose touch with reality.

1:03:21And I think, you know, again, I don't know the history of this, particularly, moving that horrible term. But there is a certain kind of morality, which is all about oppression and victimhood. And once you, you know, someone, I guess somewhere said, oh, you know, men who are attracted to boys, or, you know, little girls, are being, you know, our victims, I don't know what. Some in some little eddy of weird morality, someone put that forward as a new victim class. Because, you know, we've been trying to address victimhood all over the place. Once someone puts that up as a new victim class, and you have to do, they have to change the terms.

1:03:59This is very orwellian. You change the terms. And then some others who share this morality, which is focused on not making anyone feel marginalized, you know, not allowing any labels that will slander someone or make them look bad. I think, you know, I think people who approach children for sexual goals, I am very happy to have them slandered and labeled and separated. But, you know, I suspect that some people, once they lock this in as a group that's being marginalized, they say, well, we have to defend them. And we don't think about what the hell we're actually saying. It seems purely an academic thing.

1:04:39It seems that this is something that, with people that only exist in sort of an academic space, where they, it's almost like an intellectual exercise in understanding a pressure. That's not, you can't apply it in the real world. It's just, it's too fucked up, the consequences of it are horrific. Normalizing children. Now, the one thing, before we go any further with this particular topic, I would want to point out one of the problems that our social media world has given us, which is, somewhere in all of the academy and all the universities, some philosopher, let's say, proposed that term or raised an idea.

1:05:25So this has been going on for thousands of years. Someone in a conversation proposes a provocative idea. What if we think about this as a minor -tracked person? They put that idea out, and then other people say, no, that's really stupid. And it doesn't catch on. Because this is not an idea that's going to catch on, even in the academy. So, but I think where we are now is, I'm guessing, someone proposed this. Somebody else got a wind of it, posted it online, and now you're going to have a whole media ecosystem going crazy about this terrible idea. So maybe can you look up a minor -tracked person?

1:06:01Is this just like a thing that was from one academic talk? Or is this an actual movement? Well, I've seen politicians discuss this. No way. Wait, wait, wait. It's like decriminalizing or destigmatizing. Stigmatizing, yeah. There was a recent politician that went viral for this discussion. All right, maybe more. More than one. There was two specific women that were doing that. And I didn't investigate what these women had families or what it was. But this push to try to alleviate bullying or alleviate shame or alleviate the stigma that's attached to what they're calling an identity. Yeah, that's right.

1:06:46So actually, so that brings us to the issue of Identitarianism, which I think is a useful term for us these days. So I think a lot of what's happened on campus is the move to focus on identity as the primary analytical lens in a number of disciplines, not in most disciplines, but in a lot of humanities, the studies departments. So putting identity first and then ranking identities and saying some identities are good, some are bad. This really activates our ancient tribalism. And I think that the liberal tradition going back hundreds of years is really an attempt to push back against that and to create an environment which we can all get along.

1:07:28And so, as I see it from inside the academy, we've always been interested in identity. It's an important topic. There's a lot of research on it going back many decades. But something happened in 2015 on campus that really elevated identity to tyrannism into the dominant paradigm, not dominant in that most people believed it. But dominant in the sense that if you go against it, you're going to be destroyed socially. And that's what cancel culture is. That's what Greg Luke -Yanoff and Ricky Schlatt their new book, The Canceling of the American Mind is about. So yes, it's the people who are putting identity first and that's sort of their religion and their morality.

1:08:06You know, I mean, they're welcome to live in the United States, but when they get influenced in universities or into school boards, yeah, bad stuff will happen. It's just bizarre the effect that it does have when people push back against identity politics. It's a small, very vocal minority that pushes this agenda. And it's not the majority of people. The majority of people mostly disagree with these ideas. Yeah, absolutely. So this is again, a really important point about how our society is changed. Those of us from the 20th century still think in terms of public opinion, like do most people believe this or do most people not believe it?

1:08:46And most people are saying, most people are not at all crazy. Most people are pretty reasonable. And I think what's happened since social media became much more viral in 2009 -2010 is that the extremes are now much more powerful and they're able to intimidate the moderates on their side. So on the right, the center right, what I call true conservatives are like Burkey and Edmund Burke conservatives. They get shot and they get excluded and there's not many of them in Congress anymore. And on the left, you have the far left, the identitarian left, shooting darts into people like me and to anybody who is, anybody who questions.

1:09:23So they shoot their moderates. And what you have is even though most people are still moderate and reasonable, our public discourse is dominated by the far left and all these crazy fringe, you know, I mean, it can be, you know, neo -nazis on one side and then these, you know, identitarians defending minor -attracted people on the other side. So don't lose faith in humanity. Well, don't lose faith in humanity. Recognize that we've moved into this weird, weird world because of social media in which it's hard to see reality and in which people are afraid to speak up. And so we get warped ideas rising to dominance, even though very few people believe them.

1:10:02And I think this is where bots come into play. Yeah, because I think I really do believe that this is being amplified whether it's by foreign governments or by special interest groups or by whatever, whoever it is is trying to push these specific narratives. Absolutely. And this can bring us right back to TikTok and the national security threat. So Vladimir Putin was a KGB agent in the 20th century. And the KGB going back, I think it was in the 50s. They had some sort of a meeting or something where they decided that they were going to take, I think it's called active measures. They were going to try to mess up American democracy.

1:10:37And they would, you know, they'd spray paint racial slurs. They'd put swastikas on synagogues. They saw that we're a multi -ethnic democracy. We're making a lot of progress towards tolerance. And the Russians were trying to, the Soviets were trying to put a stop to that and make us hate each other. So they were doing that back since the 1950s. And it was expensive. They had to fly people over or they had to try to win people over. You couldn't scale the operation. But that's the tradition that Vladimir Putin comes from. Now the Soviet Union falls in 1991. I think he's like in Berlin or so. I can't remember where he was.

1:11:09But he was very influenced by this and the humiliation of the Soviet Union. And so, you know, he rises to power again in the 21st century. Do you think he suddenly no longer wants to mess with American democracy? Like did he suddenly drop that desire? You know, we basically handed in the tools. We said, okay, you know, you can open as many Facebook accounts as you want, Twitter accounts, open as many as you want. There's no identity authentication. There's no age verification. Create bots all you want and have them mess with us. And Renee Durest has a book coming out soon. She really did amazing work to get to the bottom of this.

1:11:47You know, they started running tests in 2013. They had created accounts on all these platforms long before. But they started running tests. Could they get Americans to believe that an explosion had occurred at a refinery plant in Louisiana? Yes, they made it all up and people believed it. Could they get Americans to believe some extreme BLM post that was completely outrageous? Yes. And you know, same thing to enrage people on the left. So we know that the Russians are messing with us. We know that the Russians know our weak point. And by Russians again, I don't mean the Russian people. I mean, Vladimir Putin.

1:12:24The government. The government. So, you know, we're handing them the tools in the instruction book for how to divide us, how to weaken us, how to make us lose our resolve in our will. Have you seen Yuri Besmanov give us a speech? Oh, is that the... Yes, a conversation about the ideological version. And he did this in the 1980s, I think it was 1984. And he was talking about how the work has already done. That's right. And that is just a matter of these generations now going into the workforce with Marxist ideas and with all this ideological subversion that the Soviet Union has injected into the universities.

1:12:59That's right. That could be right. I mean, that it is chilling to watch and it is prophetic. But, you know, they were playing a long game. I mean, the communists planning the communist revolution. They were patient and they were playing the long game. Yeah, it was China. Yeah, that's right. Very smart. I mean, there's so much more of what... Because they're dictatorships, they have complete control over what they choose to do. They don't have to meet with subcommittees, they don't have to have congressional hearings. They just can just do it. Oh, and that's... Okay, that's a good point because that brings us to the big difference between democracies and autocracies.

1:13:39Back in the 1930s, when the West was in economic collapse, and it was the Soviet Union and then the Italian fascists and then Hitler, the German fascists, they were making rapid economic progress. And the criticism of democracy has always been, it's chaotic. There's no good leadership. They can't plan ahead, and that's all true. But why did we try and... In the 20th century, over all these other models, because democracy gives us a degree of dynamism, where we can do things in a distributed way. We have people just figuring stuff out. We have an incredibly creative economy and business sector.

1:14:20And so, democracies have this incredible ability to be generative, creative, regenerative, unless you mess with their basic operating system and say, let's take this environment, which people talk to each other, share ideas, take each other's ideas, compete, try to get a better company. Let's take that. And let's change the way people talk so that it's not about sharing information. It's about making them spend all day long, nine hours a day, competing for prestige on social media platforms. And in a way that empowers everyone to complain all the time, this, I think, really saps the dynamism. I think this social media, what I'm suggesting, I haven't thought this through, what I'm suggesting is that whatever the magic ingredient that made democracy so triumphant in the 20th century, Western Liberal Democracy, American Style Democracy, whatever made it so triumphant, is being sapped and reduced by the rapid rewiring of our society onto social media.

1:15:18Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think it's also being influenced again by these foreign governments. Absolutely. Yes. Have a vested interest in us being at it to the road. I wouldn't say. Of course. Why wouldn't it so cheap? It's so cheap, but so effective, and it seems to be the predominant way that people interact with each other. That's right. When you say that you've been attacked, what have you specifically been attacked about? Oh, it's just, in the academic world, if you say anything about any DEI -related policy, you'll be called racist, or sexist, or homophobic or something.

1:15:55And if you... So I was always on the left. I was always a Democrat. Now I'm nothing. I'm an extremely alarmed patriotic American citizen who sees my country going to hell. I'm in that camp. A lot of us are. A lot of us are politically homeless now. Yeah. But I sort of started my career in political psychology. So my original work was on how morality varies across cultures. I did my dissertation research in Brazil, and then I did some work in India. And it was only in the 90s that our culture were heated up. And I began to see that left and right were like different countries with different, different economics textbook, different American history, different US constitution.

1:16:39It was like different worlds. And I began actually trying to help the left stop losing elections like in 2004. As a Democrat, I thought I could use my research in moral psychology to help the Democrats understand American morality, which they were not understanding. Al Gore and John Kerry, they all did a very bad job. So I've all along been sort of critical of the left originally from within the left. And that's a pretty good way to get a bunch of darts shot at you. Nothing terrible ever really happened. I don't want to, you know, lots of people have been truly canceled, you know, ashamed, lost their jobs, committed, considered suicide.

1:17:17So nothing like that has ever happened to me. But, you know, when there's some minor thing on, so, you know, people take a line out of one of your talks, they put it up online with a commentary about what an awful person you are, thousands of people comment on it or like it or retweet it. It hurts. It's frightening in a way like nothing else I've ever known. And how many of those people were even real people? Yeah, that's right. Who knows? That's right. Because it really is in dispute. And one, it was one of the major disputes when he went forward to it. I mean, one of the things that's come out of Elon buying Twitter and thank God he did, as much as people want to talk about the negative aspects, which are real, which I've seen racism and hate go up on Twitter.

1:17:57I've seen it be openly discussed, which is very disturbing. But what we did find out is that the government was involved in this. And that the federal government was interfering with people's ability to use these platforms for speech. I mean, because of COVID, yes, that's right. Yes, but I feel like that's just a test run. Being able to implement that for that, then you can implement it for so many different things, dissent about foreign policy issues, dissent about social issues. There's so many different ways they can do it if they can somehow or another frame it in a way that this is good, the overall, better for the overall good of America.

1:18:36That's right. So that's why I never talk about content moderation. I'm not interested in it. There has to be some, but most people focus on the content. And they think if we can clean up the content or change the content, or in those Senate hearings we saw a couple months ago, if we can reduce the amount of suicide promoting or self -harm promoting content that our kids are seeing, then all will be well. No, it's not primarily about the content. I agree with you that the government was influencing these platforms to suppress views that they thought were wrong and some of which turned out to be right.

1:19:18I'm a big fan of my friend, Greg Lukyanov, who runs the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. So I think we shouldn't be thinking about social media like, well, how do we keep the wrong stuff off and only have it have the right stuff? I think almost only about architecture. How is this platform designed? And can we improve in ways that are content neutral? Can we improve in ways that aren't going to advantage the left or the right but are going to make it more truth -seeking? And so Francis Hagen, the Facebook whistleblower, when she came out, she had all kinds of ideas about settings, things that Facebook could have done to reduce the incredible power of the extremes, the farthest right, 3%, the farthest left, 3%, and then a bunch of just like random weirdos who just post a lot, they have extraordinary influence.

1:20:04That's not about a left -right thing. That's about do we want an information ecosystem that super duper empowers the extremes and silences the middle 80 % hell no? So that's the kind of regulation that I favor focusing on making these platforms less explosive and more useful. And there's also this discussion that comes up a lot about algorithms. Algorithms essentially change the entire game because it's not just what's online. It's what do you interact with more frequently and that's accentuated. Yes. And the problem with that is most people interact with things that rile them up. Right. And so you're developing these platforms that are immensely profitable that ramp up descent and ramp up anger and ramp up arguments.

1:20:53And like in the case of yourself, instead of just debating you on these issues and doing it in a good faith manner, Jonathan hate believes this. This is why I disagree. I think of this and that. Instead they'll label you as whatever. That's right. Racist sex, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, whatever they can say, whatever pejoratives they can throw at you that essentially this reductionist view of your perspective that makes it incredibly negative. That's right. And then you'll get bots that interact with that that push that. That's right. So Twitter only went to algorithms, I think in 2017.

1:21:39So before then, you know, people who tweet a lot, you know, you, you, so I don't, people talk a lot about algorithms. That's the cause of the whole problem. And they're not the cause of the problem, but man, are they amplifiers? And I think that's what you're saying. Yeah. They're just super duper amplifiers on whatever craziness would be there even without them. And so that's certainly shaping what, you know, what is, what we receive, what our children receive. And so this is some of the stuff that I think again, we have to really protect our children from. To have a company able to micro target their exact desires, even when they don't know what their desires are.

1:22:20It's a degree of control and influence over children in particular that I think they should just be protected from. Do you think that if you looked at algorithms, do you think that it's an overall net negative? And could the argument be made that algorithms should be banned? Yeah, no, I don't think, I mean, algorithms are there for a reason. You know, we all know on Amazon, you know, if you look up a book, it's going to suggest some other books you might be interested in. And it's pretty darn good. Like, yeah, you're right. I would be interested in that. So no, I would never say, oh, we can't have algorithms.

1:22:53I mean, that's, that would just be a ledite sort of move to make. You know, I think again, as a social psychologist who studies morality, I, you know, I just see everything going up in flames. So here's a metaphor that I sometimes use. Suppose you're the California Department of Parks and you have a hundred years of experience fighting forest fires. You know, everything about the wind, the humility, you know, what season you've got it down to a science and you can do the best you can to keep forest fires under control. And then one day, God decides to just mess with the world and changes the atmosphere from 20 % oxygen to 80 % oxygen.

1:23:29And if we suddenly were in a world where 80 % of the atmosphere was oxygen, everything would go up in flames. Every electronic device would be burning right now. So that's kind of what happened after 2009, 2010. That's kind of what happened once, once we switched over to be about, as well as so, I would say the retweet button that, that move to virality, that I think is even more guilty of causing the problems even than algorithms. I don't know that it's necessarily one versus the other, but, but that's the way I see it. That, that we're in a world that is, the technology is so quick to ramp up whatever will most engage us.

1:24:05And that's mostly emotions such as anger. So yeah, that's what feels like everything's burning. And this doesn't seem like it's slowing down. It seems like it's ramping up. And it seems like they've got more efficient at the use of algorithms and all these different methods like retweeting and reposting and different things that sort of accentuate. What people are upset about and what people get where held up about. Yes, I think it is accelerating. And for two reasons, one is that it's just the nature of exponential growth. It's the nature of progress. I think in the 19th century, a guy named Adams gave us the, you know, the Adams curve.

1:24:43It was like, he was noticing like, wow, the amount of work able, we're able to do now that we're harnessing steam in coal, you know, keeps growing a growing growing. And at some point, it's going to be going up so fast that it'll go up an infinite amount every day or something. You reach and ask them to reach a point at which it's insane. And yeah, so many people think that we're now at the singularity. We're at the point at which things are changing so fast that we just can't even understand them. And we haven't yet mentioned the word AI. Now you bring an AI. And of course, AI could unlock extraordinary material progress.

1:25:18And Mark Andreessen has been arguing that. But as a social scientist, I fear it's going to give us material progress in sociological chaos. It's going to be used in ways that make our already unstable social structures and systems even less stable. Well, what's very bizarre that we're seeing with the initial implementation of it specifically with Google's version of it, is that it's ideologically captured. That was so horrible. And that was so irresponsible of Google to do. So no, I'm glad we have a chance to talk about this because I'm really horrified by what Google did in introducing Gemini.

1:25:53And I just give a little background here. So I'm sure you're listening. Many of your listeners know Google Gemini was programmed to answer in ways that basically, you know, the most extreme DEI officer would demand that people speak. And so, you know, if you asked for a picture of the founding fathers, they're multi -racial or all black. You know, this is just not even Nazis had had to be multi -racial or black. So this two things to say about this. The first is that Google must be an unbelievably stupid company. Like did nobody test this before they released it the public? And obviously Google is not a stupid company, which leads me to my next conclusion, which is if Google did such a stupid, stupid thing.

1:26:36So, so disgraced its product that it's banking so much on. I mean, it depends a lot on the success of Gemini. And now they've alienated half the country right away. I'm the first day, practically, the alienated them. They couldn't be that stupid. I think what's happening to them is what happened to us in universities, which is what I've called structural stupidity. So you have very smart people. But if anyone questions a DEI -related policy on campus, they would get attacked. And that's what most of the early blowups were. I think you probably had Brett Weinstein on here. That's what, you know, Erica Christakis at Yale and Nicholas Christakis at Yale.

1:27:14You know, it's, you know, if people wrote these thoughtful, caring memos about opposing a policy, they would be a conflagration, they'd be attacked. And they would sometimes lose their jobs. So that's what happened to us in universities in 2015 to usher in our now nine years of insanity, which I think are might be ending. I think, you know, the last fall was so humiliating for higher ed that I think we might be at a turning point. But my point is for Google, I suspect that Google was suffering from an extreme case of structural stupidity because surely a lot of those engineers could see that this is terrible.

1:27:48This is a massive violation of the truth and part of Google's brand is truth and trust. So I suspect they were just afraid to say anything. And that's why Google made this colossal blunder of introducing, you know, woke AI at a time when we desperately need to trust our institutions that are related to knowledge. And Google was trusted and now they've lost a lot of it. And it's not just Google. It's chat GPT. There's there's - It does do certain things like you've been asking to say something positive about Donald Trump. It refuses. You've been asking to say something positive about Joe Biden.

1:28:26It'll gaslight you. No, that's right. And there was recently - was it David Rosado or who was it put out some listing of how far left each of the different AI products are? So you can certainly say that chat GPT is not politically neutral. But you wouldn't say from that that the people at chat GPT or open AI are stupid. You would not look at this product and say, how could they be so dumb as to have it be left leaning? But with Google, you have to say, how could they be so dumb as to produce black Nazis for us? Right. I just don't think they played it all out. I think - This ideological subversion, this thing that they've done with DEI and with the universities and the education system, it just seemed like you had to apply that to artificial intelligence.

1:29:20Because you're essentially - you're giving artificial intelligence these protocols. You're giving it these parameters in which it can address things. And if you're doing it through that lens, this is the inevitable result of that. You're going to get black Nazis. Oh, no, I don't know about the black Nazis. I don't think it goes that extreme. So to the extent that - But if you say DEI, if you apply that to everything across the board and don't make exceptions in terms of historical accuracy, the founding fathers of America being all black. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, large, again, I don't - I'm not an expert in AI, but large language models are basically just consuming everything written and then spitting stuff back out.

1:30:02And so it might be that, you know, most stuff is written, you know, the people on the left are dominant universities. They're probably published more books, whatever. But there's nothing written about black Nazis. That's right. That's right. So what I think is going on here is that I could see AI seeming to lean left, even if it wasn't programmed to lean left. That might just be the data input that it takes. But to get black Nazis, you need somebody had a program in those commands. Somebody had to consciously say, you know, anything about representation is going to - Everything's going to look like a beneton - No, it's not even like a beneton.

1:30:35Beneton ads had much more diversity in the 1980s and 90s. Yeah. So no, I would agree that the Gemini case clearly someone deliberately programmed in all kinds of rules that, yeah, they seem to come from a DEI manual just without much thinking. Yeah, how did they come back from that? I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know how deep the rot runs. I don't know how bad things are. You know, Google used to have an amazing corporate culture. Oh, boy, look at this. What's the - Apple is in talks to let Google Gemini power iPhone AI features companies. Oh, my God. Go back. Oh, sorry. I mean, I was adding that too.

1:31:08Yeah, go back. Companies considering AI deal that would build on search packed. Apple also recently held discussions with open AI about deal on this news. Then a bunch of big investment happened to Magnificent 7 adds 350 billion on Gemini's reported iPhone deal. So because Google has implemented AI into their phone specifically Samsung. Samsung's new Galaxy S24 Ultra has a bunch of pretty fantastic AI features, one of them being real -time translation, your ability to summarize web pages instantaneously, summarizing notes, bullet points, very helpful features. So because of that, another one is your ability to circle any image and automatically will search that image for you.

1:31:59And you're like, what is that circle at boom? The Samsung phone will immediately give you a result and tell you what it is. So very, very helpful. But now there becomes this is something that Apple has to compete with. Yeah. So Apple has decided to try to implement AI, but it has to outsource. Yeah. Yeah. Now it is alarming. I guess, you know, the point that I'd like to add on, which I hope will be useful for people, is part of what we're seeing across our institutions is a loss of professional responsibility, a loss of people doing their jobs. And I don't mean, you know, base level employees.

1:32:39I mean the leadership. Institutions have important roles to play. Companies have missions. Universities must be completely committed to the truth, research, discovery. Journalists must be committed also to the truth and methods to find the truth. And what we've seen in the 2010s, especially, is many of these institutions being led away from their mission, their purpose, towards the political agenda of one side or another. And so I think this is what we're seeing. And we, you know, if we're going to make it through this difficult period, we need some way to find the truth. And the more we've gone into the internet age, the harder it is to find the truth.

1:33:21Like, we just look like, you know, something's incredible. Like we just say, you know, hey, look this up and we got it. But on anything contested, it's just very hard to find the truth. And so that's why I'm especially disappointed in Google. I was loved Google. I thought it was an incredible company. And for them to, you know, to so explicitly say, you know, our mission is political. It's not to help you find the truth. That I thought was so disappointing. Yeah, it is disturbing when a large company decides their mission is political. Like to which side to who? Is it the truth? Are you, is that your main politics?

1:33:58You know, or is it you decide that one side is good, overall net positive. The other side is net negative. And whatever you can do to subvert that other side is valuable. That's right. And so that's a mindset in which the ends justify the means. Yeah. And so part of the genius of American liberal democracy was to calm down those tribal sentiments to the point where we could live together, we could celebrate diversity in its real forms. We could get the benefits of diversity. And that was all possible when we didn't feel that the other side was an existential risk to the country. That if the other side gets in, it's going to be the end.

1:34:35And that's a very powerful image. And that's an image that helped Donald Trump win. There was an essay, what's it by Michael Anton, I think, called the Flight 93 election. If you are on Flight 93 being hijacked to crash into Congress, and if you do nothing, you're going to crash into Congress, you'll do anything. And so he framed it as a sort of a Hail Mary pass that patriotic Americans were supposed to vote for Donald Trump. That mindset of the ends justify the means, the situation is so dire that even violence, even violence is justified. That is really frightening. And that's my concern is that we could be headed that way.

1:35:15We have not had much political violence. There's been an uptick. But very little compared to say 1968 to 73, that period was much more violent. So I'm hopeful we'll avoid that. But once you say the ends justify the means, and we can cheat, we can lie, we can subvert the company's purpose, because the end we're fighting for is so noble. Well, the other side is going to do the same thing. And before you know it, your culture war becomes a real war. Yeah. And you're seeing that in the news. How it's implemented in the news. I mean, I'm sure you were aware of this recent Donald Trump speech where he talked about a bloodbath.

1:35:49Oh, God. Yeah. What the actual phrase was, but see if you can find that, Jamie, because it's actually important to highlight how not just inaccurate, but just deceptive the media was in their depiction of what he said. And that they are taking this quote out of context and trying to say that there's going to be a civil war if he doesn't get elected, which is not what he was talking about at all. See, pull it up, because it's so disturbing that they would, first of all, they would think that they could get away with it. And this day and age with all scrutiny and all the, with social media and all the independent journalists that exist now, which is one of the more interesting things about the devise of corporate media, the demise and trust.

1:36:39Trusting corporate media is at an all time low. And so this has led to arise in true independent journalists. There are real ones out there, the Matt TIEB's, the Glenn Greenwall's, the people that are actually just trying to say, what is really going on and what are the influences behind these things and why are these things happening? But this one was bizarre. When I saw it, then I saw the actual speech. Let's play the actual speech. Yeah, I have the actual speech. Headlines are different, but I'll just play the actual speech. I think to China, if you're listening, President Xi and your own high friends, but he understands the way I deal, those big monster car manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now, and you think you're going to get that, you're going to not hire Americans and you're going to sell the cars to us now, we're going to put a 100 % tariff on every single car that comes across the line.

1:37:31And you're not going to be able to sell those cars. If I get elected, now if I don't get elected, it's going to be a blood bath for the whole, that's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a blood bath for the country. That'll be the least of it. If this election, if this election is in one, I'm not sure that you'll ever have another election in this country. Does that make sense? I don't think you're going to have another election in this country. If we don't win this election, I don't think you're going to have another election or certainly not an election that's meaningful. And we better get out and we better.

1:38:02I actually say that the date, remember this, November 5th, I believe it's going to be the most important date in the history of our country. I believe that. So that's what he said. Well, that sounds pretty bad. That sounds like a flight 93 election argument that if I don't win, the country is over. But what he was, yeah, but what he's talking about is this subversion of our economy and the subversion of our democracy that we will never have an election again. I don't think he's saying that it'll be a blood bath in terms of a civil war. He's saying that the economy is going to be destroyed. There was no, I was listening for that.

1:38:41I was thinking maybe he meant it as a metaphor. I didn't hear it. I mean, the blood bath is... It's an unfortunate term, but he's not. I don't think he's saying it's a civil war. It sounded to me like he was. It sounded to me like, you know, if he doesn't win, there will be violence. Right. You have to really give him a hell of a benefit of the debt. He's talking about the economy. He was talking about the... No, it wasn't talking about China building plants. He was talking about all these things and saying that if he doesn't get elected, it's going to be a blood bath. It's going to be a mess.

1:39:11I don't think he's... I mean, I think he would elaborate on that. If he was saying, there'll be violence. I don't think that's what he's saying. I think he's saying destruction of our economy, the destruction of our... You know, he makes a lot of his sides. So he was talking about the economy. That's true. And then he said, if I'm not elected, and then he makes an aside about what would happen to the country. So look, we might disagree on this. We surely disagree on our people. It's surely the wrong way to say it. Surely we both agree on that. Yeah, it's an unfortunate term to use. For him to?

1:39:42Yes, that's right. But it doesn't sound to me as other media took that one out of context. Well, they saw... I just rewatched the longer video and closed captioning. Cut it out. The video we watch cuts it off. For Andrew says, blood bath. Oh, it's going to be a blood bath for the whole... That's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a blood bath for the country. That'll be the least of it. But they're not going to sell those cars. They're building massive factories. A friend of mine. All he does is build car manufacturing. Okay, so he's back on the economy. Yeah, he was talking about the economy.

1:40:12But the aside was not about the economy. The aside was him making one of these typical sides about how important he is. Alright, Joe, I think we're not going to settle this. I think... Look, I do agree that the media as a progressive left -leaning institution like universities has violated its duty many times to the truth and thereby lost the trust of much of the country. Most of the people who work in these industries, I think, are wonderful and are trying to do a good job. But the net effect, and this is my point about structural stupidity, during our culture war, institutions that have had very little viewpoint diversity have been subject to hijacking by those with a political agenda.

1:40:58So I agree with you about that. Although I disagree with you about what that comment from Donald Trump meant. It sounded to me like it was not taken out of context. Well, he was talking about the economy, though. Specifically. But even in the aside, he elaborates in the aside about the economy. No, he just makes this aside about the blood bath. But that's the least of our problems. Now back to what I was saying about the economy. All right, look, we're not going to settle this one. It's a terrible term. It's a very unfortunate term. If he said it will be a disaster instead of a blood bath. That would have been the better term.

1:41:34Yes. But he's filled with hyperbole. I mean, he's talking about... He's trying to excite people about the idea. Where it's matter when your presidential candidate is. They do. You're right. No argument there and no way saying that that was the correct thing to say. But the way they phrased it, the way they just tried to make it seem like that was the only thing that he was talking about. Okay. I'm just not going to say anything else on this. But what you're saying is that these people are good people, but that they are ideologically captured. Is that what you're saying? What I'm saying is that most people are reasonable wherever you go.

1:42:14But in the social media age, it's no longer about what most people are like. It's about how much power do the extremists have because anyone now has the power to hijack, threaten, intimidate. So that's my concern. And that means it's actually more easily fixable because if we... One thing, if 90 % of journalists were rabid left wingers who didn't give a damn about journalistic integrity. And that's just not true. Right. In most of the journalists I've met are really good journalists like they really care about sourcing and accuracy. So, you know, and it's the same with professors. Many people, especially those who listen to conservative sources, might think that professors are mostly tenured radicals who care more about Marxism than about educating their kids.

1:42:56That's just not true. What is true is that the minority that have extreme views now have a much bigger platform, they have more power. But most people are reasonable wherever you go. Is the issue that the reasonable people are afraid of pushing back against the radical people? Exactly. That's it. That's the issue. And because there really are consequences in terms of... That's right. And people say, well, you've got tenure. What are you worried about? And the answer is, yeah, we've got incredible security. But everybody is afraid of being publicly shamed, humiliated, attacked, and mocked. And the people that go through it.

1:43:29I mean, it's really... It's incredibly painful. They have to take sleeping pills at night. They sometimes contemplate suicide. And then one case committed suicide that I know of. So, yes, that's exactly the problem. That's what I think the effect of not the original social media platforms like MySpace or Early Facebook. Right. But of the hyperviral ones that we got in the 2010s, yes. And the result of that in terms of people terrified about people attacking them is what you get when you got those people from Penn, from Harvard. We're talking about this rampant anti -Semitism on campus where people were actively calling for the death of Jews, saying that this does not constitute harassment unless it's actionable.

1:44:16Yes, it's just stunning. Insane. Right. It's not wrong unless they act on it. What is that like as a person when you know you are an academic and you are a professor when you see that from these, especially from somewhere like Harvard, it could just... Yeah. So, yes, I'm a professor at NYU. I was at UVA for 16 years. I love being a professor. I love universities. I'm also Jewish. And I can understand the argument that those presidents were making. The argument was a very narrow technical argument about whether students should be allowed to say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

1:44:54And so, I understand why it would have been reasonable for them to say, well, we're not going to punish students for saying that. That is political speech that's protected under the First Amendment. So, I understand the point that they were making. But they were such screaming hypocrites in making that point because... And this is what the Kotlin -Miracman was all about. How did it happen that if an administrator writes a single word that a student objects to and calls races, suddenly this person out of a job, like, really, like, you're going to fire someone or let someone be tormented and fired because they said something that someone interpreted in a certain way.

1:45:34And that led us to be super -hyper -crazy -sensitive about every word we say because you never know when it looks bloated and causes a scandal. And so, for the presidents to say, oh yeah, you know, anything anyone ever said between 2015 and yesterday would be punished if anyone was bothered by it. But from the river to the sea, oh yeah, sure, that's constituted as an act of justice. And just from the river to the sea, it was the literal expression, death to Jews. Yes, that's right. That's what they were specifically defending saying, unless it's actionable, which is insane, unless you commit actual genocide, is that what you're saying?

1:46:11No, I'm sorry, Joe, you're right. The deeper question is about political speech, but you're right that, as Daphonic, I believe, was asking them, it was about calls for genocide. Yes. And so, yes, calls for genocide, it seems to me, again, I'm not a First Amendment lawyer, maybe on the First Amendment legally, like you can't be arrested for it, but for God's sakes, on a university campus, where you're trying to make everyone feel included, you can't even comment, not just about the calls for genocide, but about the actual events on October 7th. So that, I think, is what really brought higher ed to a really a native, a low point in public esteem, like literally a low point public esteem.

1:46:51Well, I think it was a wake up call for a lot of people that are kind of on the fence about how big the issue is, because these are the same people that call for you being kicked out of the university, if you dead name someone. Yeah, that's right. These are the same people that if you use the wrong pronouns. Yeah, that's right. And so, I'm actually, you know, so last semester was the worst one ever for higher education, data from Gallup and Pew show that the public higher ed used to have an incredible brand, global brand, we were the best, everyone wanted to come here, scientific innovation, all the top academics were here in the United States.

1:47:29And in 2015, people on the left had a very high opinion of higher ed, and actually people on the right had a moderately high opinion of it. And then since 2015, it's dropped not just among people on the right, but among centrists and moderates as well. So higher ed really lost the trust of most of the country. And I was running an organization called Header -Doxic Academy, as I started it with some other social scientists that advocates for viewpoint diversity. And that's why I was kind of a target sometimes, because here I am saying we need viewpoint diversity. We need, you know, some conservatives, some libertarians.

1:48:01We need to not all be on the same side politically. Which is an amazing thing to fight against. That's right. We know where the experts in why diversity is beneficial, and the most important kind of diversity turns out to be viewpoint diversity. Well, it's also the most important aspect of an open and free society is the ability to debate things. And to find out - And to find out - And to find out who's right or who's ideas resonate the most, who makes the most sense, who has thought about this further and who has the more enlightened and educated perspective, who has more information, who has more balance.

1:48:39That's right. That's right. So I think we hit a low point in the fall in such a way that I'm actually optimistic that things are going to be good. And I think we're going to change because I've been concerned about these issues and universities, the culture issues since 2014 -2015 when Greg Luke -Yanuff and I wrote our first Atlantic article titled The Codling in the American Mind. And every year it's gotten worse and worse and worse. There's never been a turnaround until last year. And as with the Emperor's new clothes, you know, people can see that something is stupid and crazy and wrong, but they won't say anything.

1:49:08But then when somebody does, then everybody can speak. And I'm feeling finally for the first time since 2015, I'm feeling that people - people sort of understand - you know what? That was crazy. What happened? That was crazy. People were saying crazy stuff. Let's put our head above the parapet. Let's start sometimes saying maybe that is not right. So I think that things are actually going to turn around. Maybe not at the IVs. Although there are movements of faculty, they're saying, no, let's return to academic values, the pursuit of truth. So I think what I'm hoping, when I think it's likely to happen, is we're going to see a split in the academic world.

1:49:43That is, there are already schools like Arizona State University, there are schools that already have basically said no to all the crazy stuff and they're focusing on educating their students. And I think we're going to see more students going that way. The University of Chicago is another model. So I think there are a few schools that departed while almost all the other schools went in the same direction. But I think now that's going to change and it can change actually pretty quickly. Because most of the University presidents don't like this stuff. They were, I've spoken to many of them. All the crazy politics, the activist students, it made their job very difficult.

1:50:16So I'm actually hopeful that we're going to start - we are starting to see some University presidents standing up and saying, you know, it's not okay to shout down every conservative speaker. Like, no, we're not going to allow that. So I, you know, we'll see - you know, a year from now if I come back on a year or two, we'll see. But I think things are actually beginning to get better for the first time since 2015. Well, I hope you're correct. And I do agree that the pushback was so extreme that some action is likely to take place. I think the first step of that is got to be to allow people with differing perspectives to debate and not shout them down.

1:50:53And also to show that that shouting people down and setting off fire alarms is shameful. It's disgraceful. That's right. That's where we have to get to. Education institution. That's right. If there was any punishment, the students would change very quickly. The students are very concerned about getting a job, about their futures. And, you know, what the early presidents who didn't do anything, what they conveyed was, you can yell and scream all you want, nothing will happen to. You can bang on the glass and frighten speakers, nothing will happen to you. You can throw rocks through windows, nothing will happen to you.

1:51:23And of course that just, you know, brought us more obnoxious behavior on campus and shame to higher ed in the eyes of the country. So we had a brand that was based on extreme excellence and truth. I think we damaged our brand very severely. I think finally now there's a reckoning and a realization of what we've done. And I think we're going to see a recovery, an uneven recovery. But I do think that a year or two from now, the mood, the, well, who knows what's going to happen with the election and whether there'll be a bloodbath. Don't take that into context. I was referring to the early part of our conversation that you're not quoting when you quote this.

1:52:03Yeah, let's say disaster. Yeah, disaster. Confused disaster. But I am actually, you know, about certain things I'm pretty pessimistic like you, but at least on the future of universities, I do think for the first time I'm actually optimistic. I wasn't optimistic a year or two ago. Well, that's great because you're on the ground. So you, you would really understand more than most. And do you sense that with students, there's also a recognition that this is a gigantic issue. Like what was the reaction to students? I mean, not specifically Jewish students, but the Jewish students must have been the most horrified by this.

1:52:36Yes. Oh my God. Yes. Stabbed in the back is the way, the way many of us feel. The, you know, what I found all along, as I say, most people are reasonable. When all this stuff was breaking out in 2015, 2016, most students just wanted to get an education. They don't want to take part in this. Right. And, you know, now I find out of course I teach in a business school. I teach at NYU Stern. Our students are pretty pragmatic. They're, you know, they want to get a job. Most of them are from the immigrant backgrounds. You know, they're not here to protest, you know, the latest political. They're here to succeed.

1:53:06That's right. So, you know, so that is an aspect of Gen Z. They give me hope is that they, you know, they, they see the problems. They see the problems with social media. They see the problems with extreme activists. So what we have to change is not the average student. We have to change the dynamics. So the average student feels freer to speak up. And how can that be done? Well, so, you know, so I found a two organizations to do that. One is heterodox academy. We need more viewpoint diversity among the professors or at least we need more toleration of people who are centrist or libertarian or you know, so that's one on the faculty side what we need to do.

1:53:40And also the culture on campus. But I also co -founded another organization called the Constructive Dialogue Institute with a woman named Caroline Mel. And what we did is we took some of the insights of moral psychology and some of the content from my book The Righteous Mind. And it's, it's, it's now, it evolved. It's now, it's six 30 minute modules that teach you about moral psychology. Why are we divided? What are liberals believe? What are conservatives believe? Why do conversations go wrong? How can you start more skillfully? How do you need to listen first? So there's a lot of like Dale Carnegie sort of wisdom in there.

1:54:11And it's really effective. So if people go to constructive dialogue .org, the program is called perspectives. It's being used in, you know, I think more than 50 universities now. So there are things that we can do, but it's going to, it's going to take leadership and good psychology. That's so important what you just said. And I think that if those programs gain momentum and that people recognize that it's really beneficial to all to have these ideas to debate. And if you truly believe that opposing ideas to your ideology are evil, you should be able to debate those. That's right. The only way to do that is to have someone to have the ability to express themselves.

1:54:52And for you to counter those, those points that they make. Exactly. And this is what many commentators on the left have been pointing out since 2015. Van Jones has an amazing talk. You know, he's a progressive, you know, democratic, you know, well connected smart person. And he's been pointing out, there's a great talk he gave the University of Chicago. I have a quote on this in the Codling of the American Mind. Where he talks about, you know, the move to protect students from, from bad feelings, the move to protect them from emotional safety is really bad for the students. But then his talk goes on and he says, this is actually really bad for the Democrats.

1:55:33It's really bad for young activists to drown out opposition, to not listen to the arguments, to not get stronger. And so, you know, a lot of these, a lot of what's happened on campus, I think, is what you might call a peric victory, peric victory is one where you won the battle, but that made you lose the war. And so, you know, I think when, when institutions, you know, when your side is able to wipe out opposition, it might feel like a victory at first, but it's ultimately going to weaken you. And, and, you know, look, the same thing is going on in the far right. I mean, it's, you know, there's a lot more fear and, and, you know, really bad consequences for people who dissent on the right to.

1:56:13But if you're talking about universities, that's more an issue of what's been happening on the left. Are there any universities that don't have a left -weening perspective? Sure, sure. Like what universities? Yeah, not in the top 20 or 50, as I said. Well, that is a problem. That's right. Yeah, it is. Well, actually, no, but, but let's put it this way. First of all, I mean, there are lots of religious universities, Christian universities that don't have this problem. There are, let's see, there are large state schools tend to have much less of it, because again, most people are reasonable. The great majority of faculty want to do their research, teach their classes, they don't want to get involved in this stuff.

1:56:50The problem is especially severe. For some reason, the Ivy League schools, that's what's really surprising. I thought it was just like all the elite schools. No, it's actually the ivies or the place where the worst anti -Semitic actual, you know, threats and intimidation and even some violence are happening or threats of violence are happening. Something about the ivies makes them more extreme. What do you think that is? Well, I think it's in part the region. So most of the shout -downs, most, you know, Greg looking on often fire, they've really been tracking this for a long time. Most of the shout -downs happen in the Northeast and along the West Coast and then around Chicago.

1:57:23That's where most of the really nasty stuff happens. This is not happening at the great majority of American universities. It's not happening in the top schools in the South. It's not happening at top schools in the Southwest. So it is, it is in part where it is. And then I think also, you know, the Ivy League is full of really rich kids, you know, the statistic a number of years ago that the top schools have more people from the top 1 % of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%. So there's a real concentration, especially in the ivies, in the ivies of, you know, rich kids who don't need to worry as much about getting a job and have the bandwidth to devote themselves to politics while they're students.

1:58:09Hmm, God. It's just, I just fear for the children that come out of that too, these young people that come out of that, that have these distorted perspectives that have to kind of rewire their view of the world once they get out. It's almost like, like, like taking someone from a cult and trying to just delete the indoctrination. That's right. And it's almost impossible to do that, especially if most of what's coming in is coming in from TikTok, not from your parents or your friends or your teachers. So again, this is back to the problem. That's right. So again, back to the question of the TikTok ban.

1:58:50It's not, you know, the issue here is not, should we ban TikTok? The issue is, should we, should American law require a divestiture of TikTok from a Chinese corporation that is beholden to the CCP? Which seems logical. Yes. Yes. You know, there's an issue that's happening in Texas currently where one of the porn sites has pulled out of Texas because they require age verification. And so there's all this pushback about whether or not they should be able to require age verification. You have to be 18 to use porn websites. Which I think is very reasonable. Yes. Yes. It seems. It's insane that we're even debating it.

1:59:30Yeah. We're running a mass psychology experiment on children by having smartphones with large screens and having instantaneous access to porn. That's right. That's right. I mean, I forget the exact number. But a very large number of boys are on porn hub or porn sites daily every day. And again, as we were talking about before, in puberty, the prefrontal cortex, the brain's really rewiring itself. This is when you're supposed to be developing the ability for a boy to talk to a girl, you know, for straight kids. Right. You know, it's hard. Like because boys and girls, they think a little differently.

2:00:03It's awkward. They're always mistakes. They need to be practicing. But instead, they're exposed to this diet of just horrible, horrible stuff. And the girls see it too. The girls are not as much, but they're all exposed to it. Right. And so, you know, we now see that many more members of Gen Z. They don't want to get married. They don't want to have children. They're not having as much sex. I kind of understand it. You know, if that's what you think this sex stuff is when you're an 11 -year -old and you see this stuff, you're not going to be like, oh, I want that to happen to me. It's also so distorted the relationships in these porn videos.

2:00:35It's not, it's bizarre fantasy. Yeah. And about step siblings. Like, why is so much about step sisters? I mean, it's a lot of step moms too. Right. So the whole thing is sick. And once again, I'm not going to tell adults what they should do with their spare time. But for God's sake, I am going to try to tell companies that they can't just have access to my kids from the age of nine or ten and do what they want with them. So, you know, I don't know the details of the Texas law. But I think we've got to do something to age -gate pornography. Like, I just can't see. I mean, yes, there's a libertarian argument on the other side.

2:01:08Oh, we should never, you know, require identification from anyone for anything. Well, if that's the way you're going to go, no restrictions, no, no, no, no. Then either we have to keep kids off the internet, which is insane. We can't keep them off of the entire internet. Or we have to say, you know what, maybe some companies should be held liable. Maybe Congress was wrong to grant them blanket immunity from lawsuits, what they're doing to our kids. I think we should change that. Do you think at a certain point in time, all this is going to become more obvious? And do you think the trend is that it's becoming more obvious to people, whether it's to politicians or to parents or to...

2:01:47Yes. Over time, the negative effects of it are just so obvious. Yes, and I think that is happening right now. We're right at the beginning of the tipping point. And I'm confident about this because the tipping point began in Britain last month. So parents everywhere are fed up. They all see it. They don't know what to do. But they're all frustrated. In Britain, you know, some parents put up a website, delay smartphones, people rush to it. They had a WhatsApp group for parents to come together, thousands and thousands joined right away. In Britain, the government actually has mandated phone free schools, which is one of my four norms.

2:02:25So whenever you have a situation where most people hate it, but they're either afraid or confused, that can change really, really quickly. And that's like the fall of the Berlin Wall, fall of the Iron Curtain. We thought it was going to be there forever. But since most people hated it, I traveled behind the Iron Curtain in 1987. Everybody hated it. And so once the Berlin Wall fell, it fell everywhere very quickly. I think the same is going to be true for social media and the digital environment for children. I think that 2024 is going to be for the digital environment what 1989 was for Soviet communism.

2:03:01Parents are fed up. The data is in. There's no doubt that there's no doubt that there's an epidemic now. The evidence that it's caused by social media is a lot stronger than it was a few years ago. People are ready to act. Congress is ready to act. So I'm actually, again, I think universities are going to get out. They are now actually getting better now that they've been through that. And I think that the situation around kids and digital media is going to change radically this year. That's my goal in writing the book and writing the anxious generation. And I have this amazing collaborator, the artist Dave Cicarelli.

2:03:37So these stickers here that I gave you, I don't know if we can hold them up. I'll just hold them with my camera. It's a milk carton with a child on it and it says missing childhood. So my friend Dave Cicarelli is a great artist in New York City. He designed the cover for the book. And he and I had a plan for some like Gorilla Art campaign with posters, you know, linking Instagram to cigarettes, that sort of thing a couple of years ago. So Dave had the idea to really go big. And so Dave has built a 12 -foot tall milk carton of the thing you just showed. A 12 -foot tall milk carton. It's going to be on the National Mall in Washington this Friday.

2:04:13If you're in DC, check it out. It's coming to New York City, the Northeast corner of Union Square. I'll be there on March 26th, 25th rather. 25th and 26th. I'll be there on the 25th. We're starting a national movement. Now there are lots of organizations that are joining us here. But we're starting a national movement to get parents, to encourage parents, to work together. Because as I said, we can escape this if we work together. It doesn't have to be all of us. But if a lot of us say, we're not going to give our kids smartphones till 14. We're not going to let them open an Instagram or TikTok account until they're 16.

2:04:48We're going to ask our schools to go phone free. And we're going to give our kids a lot more independence of the sort that we had in a much more dangerous world. If we do those four norms, we really can turn that around. And I'm confident we are at the tipping point right now. Even a few months, even by July and August, or let's say by September, when school starts again in the fall, I think there's going to be a different vibe about phones and the roles of technology in kids' lives. Well, I hope you're right, Jonathan. And I really appreciate you. And I really appreciate you writing this and spending so much time on this and thinking about it so thoroughly.

2:05:22The anxious generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness that's available right now. Go get it, folks. Listen to it. Read it. Absorb it. Take it in. Thank you very much. Thank you, Joe. It's always fun to talk to you. Fun to talk to you, too. Thank you. Bye, everybody.

2:05:47Thank you.