138. The Anxious Generation: How Silicon Valley Has Rewired Our Brains (Jonathan Haidt)

27:37Well, you used the key word decency. I got a contract to write a book in 2014 titled Three Stories About Capitalism, The Moral Psychology of Economic Life. And it was going to be a follow-up to The Righteous Mind, which focused on social left, right? I was going to look at economic left, right? Why does the left and right in the economy, they have different economics textbooks, different values, different beliefs about what you do when there's a recession? And so I started working on that book. I ended up stopping because universities blew up. America blew up. I went in different directions. And this all went insane around 2015, 2016.

28:13But in any case, the key idea of that book on capitalism is going to be that a good free market society is one that's able to maximize or raise both dynamism and decency. Now, dynamism and decency are not opposites, but they tend to be inversely correlated. And each society decides. And so, you know, in Japan and France and Europe in general, they have gone all in for decency. And we look at them and, oh, look how humane it is. But then they don't get economic growth. In America, we've gone all in for dynamism. And we figure, you know, a lot of people are going to have miserable lives and not have enough money to retire.

28:51But look, we get much more rising GDP. And in the long run, rising GDP does help people. And I think the reason why so many people look to Scandinavia is that my book was going to come to this conclusion that while they're not quite as dynamic as the US, they're actually kind of close. In Europe, they're actually pretty dynamic and they're very high decency. So it's possible. Now, those are small countries. They used to have homogeneous populations. They don't as much anymore. They had a lot going for them that allowed them to do this. So that's the background. I'll just also say that, yes, those people you talked about, those used to be the core constituency of the Democrats, the working man.

29:29It was the working man's party. And this is just one of the shocking things and one of the reasons why the left is in such disarray. If the working class now votes Republican, if the Democrats are just picking up the coastal elites, among people with a four-year college degree, the Democrats are cleaning up. Among everyone else, the Republicans are cleaning up. This is a very sad state of affairs for the Democrats. when you talk about decency and and dynamism there so let's let's flip forward to your latest book the anxious generation which i don't know about the anxious generation but i'm not gen z but it made me quite anxious as well reading i must tell you um but it's interesting that context of dynamism and decency because what you're arguing for is decency in our approach to the consequences of this tech revolution.

30:19And I think we're seeing very little decency from the people who are driving that revolution because it is making them phenomenally wealthy and powerful. And that is something that feels to me is kind of a bit of a genie out of the bottle. I'm not sure how we get it back in. Yes, I fully agree. Technology is wonderful. Technology is amazing. The internet was amazing. In the 90s, I think you and I are old enough to remember when the internet first came in. I guess we all are. I mean, it was miraculous. It was as if God came down and said, do you want to know everything instantly? Do you remember the first time you used a browser, you type in a question and the answer comes back in one second?

30:58Like, it was magic. And so we were all techno-optimists. And the early internet had a lot of promise. But then things got darker. In the beginning, in the early 21st century, you get a few massive companies that come to dominate. Now, Google, I think, has been not despotic. Google, I think, overall, has been a huge boon to humanity. No company is perfect. But I don't get the sense that we're not hearing whistleblowers coming out of Google saying, oh, my God, all the terrible things going on. Whereas with Meta, we are. Over and over again, people know the company, say they've been warned. We have whistleblowers, Arturo Behar, Francis Haugen, people who worked in the trust and safety teams who say, look, Look, Behar found that I think one in eight teenagers on Instagram were being approached inappropriately sexually.

31:47They were getting inappropriate sexual approaches, one in eight. Not per year, per week, per week. And Behar pointed out, you know, we could end this if we just gave this reporting mechanism. I mean, there are ways to greatly reduce the predation. I mean, platforms that introduce strangers to children, this is insane. The companies ought to be very, very careful about this, but they're not. so yes I do think that the three giant companies that own our children's childhood and those are meta snap and tick-tock those three companies dominate their attention take up most of their free time and we know that from insight from memos that get brought out in lawsuits we know that they are designed for addiction where's you know the early internet was not and so yes I'm in the business and society program of NYU Stern.

32:37And this is, I think, the biggest business and society issue out there. There are many others. But the idea that a few companies developed a business model, the advertising-based business model, which requires them or pushes them, I should say, to maximize time, not maximize the well-being of the kids that they are addicting and of whose childhood they are taking. John, we can keep developing this because I think it's incredibly interesting to all of us and just just to remind our listeners meta is of course uh facebook and instagram and on whatsapp i guess um and we can move on a little bit to x and twitter as well a little bit later but before we get deeper into that just just talk us through the way in which this connects to politics because i guess there's a coincidence isn't it what seems to be The moment at which these platforms are really getting going in the kind of mid-2000s then creates the Facebook revolution, the Arab Spring, and then we're into Modi, Putin, Trump pretty soon afterwards.

33:42And it's difficult not to feel that this is an incredibly important causative explanation. But over to you on that. Sure. Let's just trace through the history of how the internet changed, and then we'll understand why democracy and mental health plunge at the same time around 2012. So the early internet, as we said, was open, there were people were utopian, oh, you know, it's gonna be the best thing ever for democracy. And then we get modern social media. In 2003, 2004, we get Facebook and MySpace and Friendster. And at first, these are very benign. It's like, here's my page, I can link to your page.

34:19There was no newsfeed. There was no algorithms. There was no like button. It was just a way to connect people. And that was pretty benign. And this connects people in ways that do seem likely to help democracy. But the big innovations were as follows. In 2007, the iPhone comes out. It's not until a few years later that you can have social media on your iPhone. So the iPhone is also very benign at first. in 2009 the like button and the retweet button come out and this is these are the transformative innovations they're small but they completely change the nature of online life the retweet button of course is the definition of virality uh it's not just that i'm calling you up and telling you something it's that i can put it out to my thousand followers and if a tenth of them put it out to their thousand follower whatever it is you know you can reach millions in a day also the like button allows me to show facebook what i really like and that allows them to customize a feed to me so the internet over the next few years 2009 2012 it becomes super viral and super addictive it wasn't like that in 2008 so now we have a much more addictive super viral internet and now the possibility of shared knowledge collapses the possibility of getting a story out or rebutting a story because now we have fragmented attention.

35:38You know, in California, they have 100 years of more of experience fighting wildfires. They know everything about the wind conditions, the humidity, they know everything. They've got it all mapped out. And still, they get overwhelmed as we saw. Now, what if one day God said, you know, that Earth planet that I made with 20 % oxygen, let's just bump it up to 80%. Let's just see what happens. Let's make it 80 % oxygen on earth, what would happen? Any spark would turn into a conflagration. And that's essentially what happened. When we all got hyperconnected at first, there was the possibility of some virality.

36:15But once you get the like button, the retweet button, addictive social media, everyone glued to their phone on Twitter, on Facebook, political life has changed. And in democracy, as Noah Yuval Harari says, democracy is a conversation. It's always been a conversation. And when that conversation suddenly moves from talking to people that you know to fighting in the Roman Coliseum where everybody wants to see blood, that is equivalent to changing the Earth's atmosphere from 20 % oxygen to 80 % oxygen. So what happened? Fires raged politically around the world. Donald Trump could never have gotten elected if it wasn't for the dynamics of Twitter and his ability to offend and be aggressive on Twitter.

36:56And at the same time, teen mental health collapses because the phone in their hand is no longer like a flip phone or a cell phone that they use to call or text. It now becomes basically the thing that sits in front of their face most of the time. half of our teenagers in the us and i think it's the same in the uk half say that they're online almost constantly the phone is always in their hand it's always they're never fully present this is a transformation of human sociality and human consciousness beyond anything that has ever happened in the history of our species this is equivalent to going from 20 oxygen to 80 oxygen and our democracy and our next generation are really hurting because of it quick break and then back for more.

37:37This episode is sponsored by HP. Now, Rory, I hear that Windows 10 is finally being put out to pasture this year. It is, and something pretty relevant for you, Alistair, given what I've seen as some of your technology. It's going on October the 14th, to be exact. And after that, Microsoft is going to stop supporting some of those old laptops of yours. No updates, no security patches. So if you were still using it or a business was still using Windows 10, it would be really exposed to cyber threats, for example. It would be like locking the door but leaving the key in the lock. So it's time to move on and HP are making that refreshingly straightforward.

38:11Yes, they are. HP's latest business PCs comes with Windows 11 Pro as standard. They're faster, more secure, built for the AI tools which are already reshaping the way we work. And you don't have to figure out all on your own. HP's business advisors help you pick the right kit. So no baffling jargon, just practical advice. And here's the bonus. Restless politics listeners get 10 % off business PCs at hp.com using the code trip10termsupply. So unlock efficiency and innovation, upgrade to Windows 11 Pro PCs with HP and get 10 % discount. Visit hp.com slash politics to find out more. Hello, I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.

38:55And I'm David McCloskey, CIA analyst turned spy novelist. Together we're the co-hosts of another goal hanger show called The Rest is Classified, where we bring you the best stories from the world of secrets and spas. We have just released a series on the decades-long battle between the CIA and Osama bin Laden, and this week we are stepping into the devastation of the 9-11 terror attacks to understand how Osama bin Laden was able to carry out such a plot right under the nose of the CIA. It was a moment that change global politics forever, shifting the focus of spy agencies away from nation states towards hunting for terrorists and understanding the extremist ideology that drove them.

39:36We will then go into the decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden, which culminated in a dramatic raid at his compound in Pakistan in 2011, which killed the world's most wanted terrorist. So if all of this sounds good, we've got a clip waiting for you at the end of the episode.

39:58Listen, I've read your book and I agree with it. I'm just going to put the opposite point of view. Please. Yes, hit me with the hardest criticisms you've read. So Candice Hodges, psychology professor, University of California, says she's reviewed 40 studies, which came out in the same year, and found no cause-effect relationship between smartphone ownership, social media, and adolescence mental health. And I think people like her point to things like guns, drugs, exposure to violence, sexual abuse, opioids, economic inequality, social isolation, etc. We interviewed, Rory and I interviewed, one of your predecessors in our interview is Nick Clegg, former British Deputy Prime Minister who went on to be Zuckerberg's right-hand man.

40:40And he was absolutely adamant there is no evidence of the link. So tell me the evidence of the link. Sure. So first, the idea that crime and racism and other things are what caused this spike. So they're saying that things got so terrible in Obama's second term, and they were fine in Obama's first term. What the hell changed? So it can't explain why it all happens around 2012 and why it happens around the world. It's not just the U.S. I don't think that in Iceland and Australia, crime and racism suddenly spiked in 2012. That's the first thing. second thing is this repeated claim that there's no evidence this is a bizarre claim first of all we have signed confessions practically by the perpetrators we have their own words they say that they are destroying the ability to attend they are causing it so they say what they are doing and they prove this with their own actions a lot of them most of them don't let their kids on the stuff they send their kids to the waldorf school where they don't have these devices so that's not evidence.

41:43A confession by the perpetrators is not evidence. And then there's eyewitness testimony. What do the kids say? The kids point to, now maybe not the younger kids, they're excited to get on these things. But we interviewed Gen Z in the 20s. We have surveys. Gen Z in the 20s. They regret what happened. Half of them in one of our surveys said they wish TikTok had never been invented. There's a lot of regret. So there are many different kinds of evidence of harm. Now, let's turn to why is it that the researchers can't agree? And here's the reason. When Candice Rogers says, look at all these studies, she says, sometimes there's a positive, sometimes a negative effect.

42:16All of those studies are what we call blender studies. Okay, so a blender study, if you want your kids to eat spinach, they don't like spinach, but you put it in a blender with a lot of other stuff, and then they don't notice it, and it goes down. The same thing happens with social media research. So Instagram, whenever you zoom in on, first of all, when you zoom in from screen time to social media for girls, the correlations increase. So this is not random noise. There is a repeated pattern in the data. Instagram in particular is closely associated with depression, anxiety, and eating disorders in girls.

42:50So that's the spinach, let's say. That's like the thing that you want to... I'm not saying they're trying to hide. I'm just saying it ends up getting hidden. So Instagram has that connection. Snapchat isn't making kids anxious and depressed. Snapchat is making it easy for them to buy drugs that contain fentanyl. Snapchat is making it easy for sextortionists to get to them and then extort them after they get a naked photo of them. And those kids who are sextorted, and we're talking literally in the ballpark of a million a year based on something we learned from internal communications, all of these kids are now traumatized.

43:24They're horrified by what happened to them. I think this counts as harm. But the hours you spend on Snapchat aren't going to show up as depression, anxiety. Oh, and then TikTok is especially destructive to the human capacity for attention. TikTok is making the whole planet stupider. We can come back to that because it's hugely important for democracy. So you take these three platforms that have different harmful effects. Let's blend them all together. And our only independent variable is the hours per day that you spend on these platforms. Some kids spend six hours, some kids spend three hours.

43:58So we're going to blend it all together. We're going to blend boys and girls together. And we're going to blend all the well-being outcomes together. And even still, you do get correlations. The more time you spend, people who are heavy users always turn out to be doing less well. It's just that the correlation is around 0.1, R equals 0.1. And Candice, Audgers, and others say, oh, it's only 0.1. You know, therefore, it's not big enough. We can ignore it. But wait a second. When you zoom in, when you, you know, the harm is there. A million kids are getting sextorted. Dozens are committing suicide.

44:27So I think the evidence of harm is coming from multiple sources. And the claim that there is no evidence, they're free to debate it with me, but the claim there is no evidence is just not tenable in 2025. John, final thing on this. Presumably, one of the challenges is that it's not that easy to get into the back of these algorithms and work out exactly what X is now doing, what Facebook is now doing. And there was a general optimistic idea that what we would try to do, particularly in these more political Twitter, Facebook platforms, is bring in content moderation, adapt the algorithms to make it less likely for harmful social and political effects to follow.

45:07Yeah. And those things seem to have been dismantled relatively recently. So just what's been going on in the last few months in terms of our ability to actually penetrate the back end of these things and their willingness to actually moderate the content and deal with these problems? That's a red herring. That's a path that's not very fruitful. So the great media theorists of the 20th century, like Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, they kept telling us over and over again, the medium is the message. Don't focus on the content of what's on television. Focus on the fact that television has now changed the way we live so that we're not outside seeing our neighbors, we're sitting in the sofa.

45:46So the medium is the message. and what zuckerberg and the others want to focus on is the content because then they can say oh but senator we remove uh you know a billion pieces of harmful information a year we have best in class you know they want to keep the focus on content not on design the reason why these companies are culpable is not because someone posts a video on why you should kill yourself the reason that these companies are culpable i believe is because their algorithms will send that to a kid who expresses any sort of interest in something vaguely related. They're culpable because they have designed the platform for addiction.

46:24They're culpable because they are connecting strangers with children. So they want to keep the focus on content moderation, but that is a red herring. Think of it this way. You want to send your kid to a summer camp, let's say. In the United States, we send our kids to summer camps. Florida and Australia are the major places on Earth where there are shark attacks. Okay, so suppose there are three different summer camps along the coast of Florida. And one of them says, we pull 50 sharks a week out of the water. And the next, oh, we pull 100 sharks a week. We're doing such a good job on content moderation.

47:00The next, oh, we pull 1 ,000 sharks out of the water every week. Now, which one do you want to send your kid to? And I think the answer is none of them. But now suppose there's a fourth camp down the road where they say, we put up a shark net. We have a bay. We have an area. We put up a shark net. There are no sharks in our waters. And that's a design choice. And what the platforms keep doing is saying, oh, but we've spent, look, Senator, we spend more than anyone else on pulling sharks out of the water. No, this is a design choice. And Pinterest is a nice example of a company that they have a lot of teenagers on it.

47:31They put up a shark fence. They said, you know what? If you're under 16, you can't talk to strangers. There's just none of those social features if you're under 16. So these are design choices. I don't want to even talk about content moderation. Yes, we have to have it, but it's a red herring. The other thing you do in The Anxious Generation is you link it to the previous book you wrote about coddling of the mind. And you say, we're overprotecting our children in the real world whilst underprotecting them online. And I don't know if you're aware, because I know it was a Netflix thing, this series about adolescents.

48:01Oh, I watched it. It was so powerful. And that sparked an extraordinary debate in the UK and I think in other parts of the world. I think it's been Netflix's biggest hit for a long time. So I wanted your take on it. And I just wanted, because they feel, I guess what you're saying is parents are now so scared about their children being harmed that they don't want them to do the old things that we did growing up, sort of just wandering around, getting into trouble or not getting into trouble, but just sort of being out there free and playing. Now to being utterly addicted and obsessed with our phones and kids thinking that all of their lives are in there, But as adolescents showed, we have no idea about what they're looking at, the extent to which they're looking at it, and the impact that might have.

48:46That's right. I think adolescence was so powerful. Now, keeping in mind the critics, the critics say this is just another moral panic, and pieces like adolescence or my book, they're just stoking a groundless moral panic. There's no problem. There's nothing to fear. These poor parents, they shouldn't have to worry, but we're making them worry unnecessarily. That's the counterargument. the reason why my book did so well and the reason why the netflix series is is going around the english-speaking world is because we all saw it almost everyone who's a parent saw it i mean the first time you give your kid a touch screen and you realize they're just so drawn to it and then when you take it away they get irritable after you know so um we've seen it from the time they were little through the time they were adolescents and if we haven't seen it in our own kids we've seen it in our sister's kids or our friend's kids.

49:32So something weird is happening. And the data in chapter one of the anxious generation, the data is stunning. I mean, these hockey stick curves, there was no trend in mental illness from the late 90s through 2010, 2011. And all of a sudden, in so many countries, it goes through the roof. Recently, we've learned that the human ability to pay attention is doing the same thing. We're losing the ability to pay attention. It started around 2012. So, everyone sees it. And that's why I think the Netflix documentary touched a nerve. Also, because as you said, we're very careful about what our kids do outside.

50:06And we always think instantly, what's the worst thing that could happen? Yes, my child wants to, you know, and I have a 15-year-old daughter in New York City and an 18-year-old son who's in college. And, you know, it took us a while to accept, okay, my daughter wants to ride a city bike around the city. That's great independence. But we had to get over, like, yes, she could get hit by a car. Well, that's true. She could. She could. But we have to balance those fears. And we all rode bicycles around when we were kids. We haven't been doing that online. Online, we had the idea, and this comes across very clearly in adolescence.

50:38I thought they were safe. I thought he was safe. He was up in his room. What could happen to him? We don't know what's happening. And if you try to find out, I mean, yes, you could have your child's password. You could look at what's being posted. But they can have 10 other accounts that they make that parents can't get to. As long as kids can get to a browser, they can be talking with strangers around the world, and you'll never know. And so a beautiful thing about the Netflix series was that it wasn't so heavy-handed. It wasn't like, this is the evil thing that caused the murder. I mean, this is all complicated.

51:10Adolescence is always complicated. but it's hard enough as it was especially those the around 11 12 13 that's when bullying peaks it's hard enough as it was um and now you put it all online where it's super fast super viral the cruelty of humans when they are separated and they don't have the face-to-face the cruelty that comes out so the idea of putting our children in this cruelty factory and saying you guys work it out it's not working well john and this has been wonderful and we could we could obviously keep going for a very long time but my my final question is to um encourage you to try to push maybe five ten years into where you think societies like the u.s and and the uk are going because my if i'm going to be gloomy let's take the worst case scenario and i think it's relatively plausible, these companies will manage for a whole series of reasons to avoid being regulated.

52:16And despite your best wishes over the next five, six years, the likelihood is a new generation will come on and not just our kids will be spending a lot of time. A lot of us, as we get more anxious, will think, geez, I'm pretty depressed today. I don't have to look at my TikTok screen. It'll cheer me up. It'll distract me, right? So let's try to put this stuff together, accelerate it, and think about where you think our societies and our politics might go over the next five, 10 years in the worst case scenario. Well, the politics, it's very hard to see us getting off this path and the worst case scenario is really frightening.

52:50So, I'm not even going to talk about it. That's the subject of my next book, which will be called Life After Babel, adapting to a world we may never again share. And it's, I don't want to even talk about it. John, can I just say, Rory and I are inveterate book pluggers, but I admire the way you plugged your current book, your past books, your next book, and a book that you never wrote. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. John, we would love to have you back for that next book, the After Babble book. Okay. All right. It's a deal. So, but even though I'm gloomy about the future of American democracy, at least, and possibly democracy around the world in the social media age and the AI age, which is going to supercharge it, I'm actually very optimistic that we're going to make huge changes to protect children.

53:35And here's why. So, in the book I propose, in The Anxious Generation, I propose four norms. I wrote the book as an American, assuming that we will never get help from Congress, that our Congress has never done a single thing to protect children ever on the internet. And I'm assuming it never will. Okay, but we can still do a lot of things ourselves. And so here are the four norms. No smartphone before high school before age 14, let's say this is not a law. I'm not saying ban them. I'm just saying we should have a norm. You don't give your kid a smartphone or an iPad when they're two, three, four or five, wait until high school to give them a touchscreen device.

54:08no social media until 16 now this we can i'm doing it as a norm with my kids it's hard because my daughter says she's the only one who doesn't have snapchat in her school but you can do it and my daughter is going to be much better off for it um that's the one where we do need law and australia has come to our rescue australia has passed a law they're going to raise the age to 16 and require the companies to enforce it so i think many countries are going to are going to be following australia on that so and the uk i think is likely to so no smartphone before 14 no social media before 16, phone-free schools.

54:39And this is happening at lightning speed around the United States and around the world. This one we're winning on. Very soon, most students will not be able to text or watch videos during class or even between classes. They're going to actually talk and laugh and play with other kids. And the fourth is far more free play, responsibility, and independence. And this one is harder because parents have to overcome their fears, But there's a clear movement. This is happening. So I think the four norms are actually advancing. But here's the problem. You asked me to prognosticate. Here's the problem.

55:11The people who are really driving it and are going to live this are primarily the educated married families where you've got two parents, you've got some resources, you can hire a babysitter, you can do things other than just give them a phone. Whereas what we know is that parents who are from lower social class or single parent or black and Hispanic, all of those groups, their kids are spending a lot more time, more like 10 to 12 hours a day, several hours more than other groups. So they're already spending huge amounts of time. And that's in part because if you're a single mother with three kids and you're working, just give them each a device and they sit quietly.

55:51It's okay. It seems okay. So I think we're going to see a huge social class divergence, and we're going to see a lot more wealthy kids with college-educated parents having a more analog childhood, delaying addiction, letting their brains develop, developing the ability to concentrate, restoring the ability to read a book. A lot of kids, a lot of teenagers and college students now can't read a book because they get distracted too easily. So I think we're going to see some social bifurcation, as we saw with junk food. You know, junk food and obesity. You know, for a long time, obesity has been inversely correlated with income and with social class and education, I should say.

56:25So I think we will see that. But I think the evidence is coming in. We're bringing a lot of evidence to bear on this. All parents want the best for the children. All parents can see what's happening to kids. So I think we're actually going to make a huge amount of progress. If we start now, if we do a lot in 2025, within two years, AI is going to be so entangled with our society. It's not yet. but in two years it will be. And AI is going to make everything super addictive, super powerful. Tech is going to be much more of a master, but we have to get back to the point where tech is a servant, not a master.

56:59Well, this is my last question, John, and thank you very much for all your time. And this is, again, I'm afraid, sorry to the listener that this is all so heavy, but it's fascinating. You also say in your book, and this goes back to the point you made about TikTok making us stupider, you talk about this whole ecosystem threatening the stability of democracy. I know it's a big subject, but can we maybe just close off on that? What do you mean by that? Yeah. Well, so as Tristan Harris has pointed out, he's the head of the Center for Humane Technology. As he has pointed out, these digital technologies are making authoritarians better authoritarians.

57:36That is, China, with its social credit system and its instant face recognition, China is able to control its population in ways that Mao and Hitler and Stalin could never even have dreamed of. So the technology is a huge boon to authoritarians. And since democracy is a conversation, and that conversation is easily disrupted, you know, the Russians have been messing with America since the 50s, trying to make us think we hate each other, race wars, religious wars, vandalizing synagogues, doing all sorts of things to make us distrust each other. Now they don't have to come here. They are extremely good at sitting in their headquarters in St.

58:14Petersburg and planting false stories and making us hate each other. So in so many ways, these digital technologies and unregulated social media is the best friend of authoritarians both to maintain their populations and to destabilize democracies and interfere with elections. This is one of the reasons why I am pessimistic. I think the future of democracy looks dark. We need to rise up now and start fighting for it. We need to recognize the threat, the way that these platforms are pursuing their advertising-based business models, which are bringing down not just our children and grandchildren, but our democracies.

58:51As long as we're fighting each other so much in the US, we're not in a good position to do that. But that's what we have to do if we want our grandchildren to live in democracies, not authoritarian countries. Yeah, because my big worry about Trump is rather than challenging the way that Russia and China and others have used all this, that he's thinking this could be very, very, very helpful to me as I make America authoritarian again. It's an absolutely terrifying prospect. It was unthinkable 10 years ago. Yeah. Well, John, it's been great to talk to you. Thank you very much indeed. And good luck with all the next books that you're going to write.

59:24Well, thank you so much, Alistair and Brory. And if anyone wants more information, go to anxiousgeneration.com or my sub stack after babble.com. There, we plugged everything. Oh, this is great. Great to see you. Thanks, you too. Take care. Bye-bye.

59:43so alistair i'm i was um really excited to do that and actually quite unusually in terms of interview i was actually taking down notes desperately in certain little bits that that he was saying because um you know i do really believe this i i i think that of course there are profound economic and social problems in our society but the way that i think about it is that we're getting some of the features of fascism from the 20s and 30s but actually our economic conditions are not like that you know we don't have people pushing around wheelbarrows full of you know billion dollar reichsmark notes we don't have the fry core in the streets and all that kind of horror and yet it feels like that and why does it feel like that partly i guess because of social media and what i loved is the way that he he explained how it works and how each platform is doing a slightly different thing and if we'd had more time maybe you know if we get him back someday you know we tend to focus on facebook and x because they're the political platforms they're the ones that people campaign on their web political message is going he's of course explaining that there's a whole background world of things which aren't primarily political but which are reinforcing many of the things that contribute to these problems when the book arrived you know and as you've got this ability to read 12 27 books at the same time i very much you start at page what did you go through to the end that i and i liked it if i'm into a book now and i actually quite like it when i get a book and i sort of get the gist of it very quick then i feel i can skim read and just plow through it and what have you i found with this that i had to read it sort of very quite intently and he sets it out very very well i mean he there's one bit He talks about the four foundational harms, sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.

1:01:37Now, they're all in their own ways. Very, very big subjects. He then goes through them. He does put in a lot of research. He's obviously coming from a perspective. He has a perspective on this. But I tell you what it made me think. So my kids are now all in their 30s. He's not even talking about that generation. He's talking about the next generation, a younger generation. And so the point I'm making is that then there will be other technologies which will then hook in the next generation in even more sophisticated ways. So it just made me worry about the state that the kids are growing up today.

1:02:15But it also made me worry about this point about democracy. It made me worry that, and you see it with Musk. You know, we talk a lot about Musk, as you say, because he's political. But you see it now with Zuckerberg. You see it with Bezos. Because these are people who have landed themselves in these incredible positions of unimaginable wealth, which is now translated into a sense of power, both of which they want to protect. And when you have that level of wealth and power, it is easier for you to protect something for longer, even if it is wrong. And that's why I think the stuff that he says about morality is interesting as well.

1:02:50And that's how it's interesting. He didn't go for Google, did he? No, no, that was interesting. My final thought is that just how good he was. And in a world in which we're often obviously bashing the United States and terrified, it was a reminder of one of the things that's always made me so impressed and proud of America and American universities. I mean, that really is a public intellectual and not of a sort of kind of traditional kind of French philosopher sort. It's somebody who is a serious tenured academic, but who's able to communicate and use that kind of very analytical, precise mind, you know, there's division into four things, the research to make a really important political point and make us think.

1:03:39And finally, I just, I love it. And I also think, you know, one of the nice things in leading is that we can sometimes balance active politicians, the Bill Clintons, the world, with these figures like Jonathan Haidt, who are able to frame things so clearly and help us think and who, as I say, make me take notes while I'm listening to them. Yeah, but also he does it from a position of not disrespecting politics per se. I thought it was interesting what he said about Clinton. His first reference to him was about his morality, but then actually he talked about how he saw him as a great president who'd inspired him and got him interested in this stuff and what have you.

1:04:17And the TED talk I mentioned, he's also very funny. He can be very, very funny. And this is what's so tragic about what Trump is trying to do to the universities, to undermine people like that who have original thinkers, interested in research, interested in fact, interested in big arguments about the state of the world. But unless you think Donald Trump is a great guy and the best president who ever lived, then there is no place for you in America. and what it reminded me it reminded me i remember i told you when we did when i was in paris and we did the live stream on the pattern of the tariffs and i told you about the american couple i met who apologized for for being american that you've got to remember through all of this because trump is so dominant in the global media debate trump is not america trump is a part of america and he's brilliantly strategically in a genius kind of way co-opted all of the people who might be part of his america but that is not the whole of america so more more height less trump i say let me try this more height less hate oh rory he almost as good as his plugging very good see you soon thank you bye-bye

1:05:43I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McClaskey. Together, we're the co-hosts of another gold hanger show called The Rest is Classified. Here's that clip we mentioned earlier on. When I look back on it now, you still see that, you know, there's plans, there's memoranda, there's notifications, there's all these things, but they're never actually executed. They never actually kind of pull the trigger on anything, do they? I'm a little bit of two minds on this because I agree with you that the theme of this episode really is a series of missed opportunities to get Osama bin Laden prior to 9-11. Yeah.

1:06:21But we should also note that once Tenet and the CIA understand that Osama bin Laden is coming for us, in particular after the East Africa bombings, there is a push to improve our collection and our understanding of al-Qaeda pretty significantly. I mean, there's a bunch of human sources who get recruited in this period. There's a lot more technical collection. Alex Station is beefed up to more than 40 people. There's a bunch of connections with foreign partners and al-Qaeda that hadn't existed before. I mean, interestingly, there's a PDB, President's Daily Brief, in December, December the 4th of 1998, which is titled, quote, Bin Laden preparing to hijack U.S.

1:07:04aircraft and other attacks. And so there's a lot of strategic warning, I think you could say, about what Al-Qaeda is up to. And yet there's an inability, I think, to translate that into practical efforts and operations to stop these attacks and to stop Al-Qaeda from ultimately carrying out 9-11. If you want to hear the full episode, listen to The Rest is Classified wherever you get your podcasts.