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Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
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The Joe Rogan experience.
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Join my day Joe Rogan podcast by night or day.
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Good to see you, sir.
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Good to see you again, Joe.
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The same problems that you talked about when you were here last, that I ve referenced many times since on the podcast, have only exacerbated, unfortunately.
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And that s why you wrote this, The Anxious Generation.
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And it could not be more true, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
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I don t think anybody can dispute that.
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Yeah, when I was on last time, there was a dispute.
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There were some psychologists who said, oh, this is just a moral panic.
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They said this about video games and comic books.
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And this is not a real thing, they said.
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Now they don t.
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Yeah, I think it was pretty obvious.
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I think it was only their preconceived notions that were keeping them from admitting it before, or at least looking at it before.
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Or maybe they don t have children.
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You know, could be that.
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I think a lot of older people, particularly boomers, they re a little bit disconnected from it because they re not, unless they re addicted to Twitter, you know, they re not engaging in this stuff.
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Yeah.
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And they re often thinking, you know, when I was a kid, we watched too much TV and we turned out OK.
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Yeah.
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But part of the message of the book is that social media and the things kids are doing on screens are not really like TV.
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They re much, much worse for development.
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Yeah, and even watching too much TV, I don t agree that they turned out OK.
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I think it had a pervasive effect.
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It did, but nothing like this.
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Well, that s right.
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Because when we were watching TV, I m a little older than you.
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I was born in 1963.
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So I grew up watching a lot of TV, maybe an hour or two a day weekdays and then two or three hours on the weekends.
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But it was a bigger screen, you re watching with your sisters or with your friends, you re arguing about things, you re eating, so it s actually pretty social.
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But now, kids are spending, the latest survey Gallup finds that it s about, what s five hours a day just on social media.
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Just social media, including TikTok and Instagram.
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And when you add in all the other screen-based stuff, it s like nine hours a day.
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And that s not social.
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It s private on your little screen.
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You re not communicating with others.
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So in all these ways, the new way that kids are digital is really not like what we had when we were watching TV.
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It s also an extraordinary amount of wasted resources.
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I m always embarrassed when I look at my phone.
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I want to save my screen time, like four hours.
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That s four hours I could have done so many different things with.
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That s right.
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And so that s the concept of opportunity cost, is this great term that economists have, which is the cost of, if you buy something, if you invest an hour of your time and $100 to do something, how much does it cost?
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Well, $100, but you could use that $100 and that hour for something else.
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So what are the things you gave up?
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And when screen time goes up to, now it s about nine hours a day in the United States, nine hours a day, not counting school.
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Average?
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Average.
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Average.
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Is that for a certain age group?
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Teenagers, yeah, not little kids.
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But 13 to 15, 17, that range, that s when it s heaviest.
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It s around nine hours a day, and so the opportunity cost is everything else.
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Imagine if somebody said to you, Joe, you ve got a full life.
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Here, you have to do this additional thing for nine hours.
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That s insane.
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That would push out everything else, including sleep.
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Yeah.
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When you are now talking to people that agree that this is an issue, what changed?
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So, you mean, what changed?
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Like, why is there now more agreement?
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Yes.
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So in 2019, when I was last here with you, my book, The Coddling of the American Mind had just come out.
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And back then, people were beginning to sense that, you know, this internet, the phones, the social media that we are all so amazed by, you know, there was a very positive feeling about all this stuff in the early part, you know, like in the 2000s.
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Sentiment was beginning to turn, but there was a big academic debate, because when you look at studies that look at how do kids who spend a lot of time on screens, do they come out more depressed?
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The answer is yes, but the correlation is not very big.
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So there was a big argument among researchers, and that s when I got into this, around 2019, really getting into that debate.
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And I think that Gene Twenge and I really had good data showing, you know, there is an issue here.
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And then COVID came.
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And that confused everything.
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Because, you know, basically when I was on with you last time, 2019, I was saying, you know, what kids most need is less time on their devices and more time outside playing unsupervised.
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Let them be out unsupervised.
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That s what we needed, 2019.
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COVID comes in, boom, exactly the opposite.
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What do kids get?
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No more time unsupervised.
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You can t even go out.
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I mean, in New York City, they locked up the playgrounds.
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They locked up the tennis courts.
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It was insane.
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No time outside with your friends.
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Oh, spend your whole day on screens.
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So that made everything worse.
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But people thought, oh, yeah, the kids are really messed up now from COVID.
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But they were wrong.
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COVID was terrible for a lot of kids, but when you look at the mental health trends over the last 20 years, COVID was a blip.
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Actually, you know what, I ve got some charts.
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If you don t mind, I d like to actually show these.
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Did you send the data to Jamie so he could pull it up?
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I haven t sent it yet, but I ll... Oh, right, because you want... Do you want to stop and do that?
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Yeah, let s pause real quick so you can give out... Jamie will give you the email address.
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Okay, we re back.
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All right.
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What are those things?
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Oh, so these are stickers for your kids.
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So as part of the book, I m trying to launch a movement called Free the Anxious Generation.
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Here you go.
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You have two younger kids.
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And so I ve teamed up with the artist who did the book cover, Dave Cicerelli, who s created these incredible artworks.
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There s going to be billboards.
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He s putting together a 12-foot tall milk carton, which is going to be traveling around different cities with this.
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Missing childhood.
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Do they do that anymore?
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The milk carton thing?
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I don t think so.
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Yeah.
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So I don t know if you re I don t know what your kids think about social media and whether they think it s a good thing or bad thing.
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But we are hopeful that members of Gen Z are going to start and they are starting to advocate that you know what this is messing us up.
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OK, so here s the graph.
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OK.
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So this is the graph that I showed last time I was on.
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And what it shows, because I know most of your listeners have probably just listened to the audio, it shows that from 2005 to 2010, the rates of depression in girls was about 12% of American girls had a major depressive episode in the last year.
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And for boys, it was about 4% to 5%.
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And it s flat, there s no change.
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Then all of a sudden, around 2011, 2012, 2013, the numbers start rising, especially for girls.
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And it goes all the way up to 20% for girls.
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So that was a huge rise, and that s what I showed you last time.
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What is the difference between boys and girls?
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So girls suffer from more internalizing disorders.
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That is, when girls have difficulties, they turn it inwards, they make themselves miserable.
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So girls suffer from higher rates of anxiety and depression.
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That s always been the case, especially once they hit puberty.
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Boys, when they have psychological problems, they tend to turn it outwards.
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They engage in more violent behavior, deviant behavior, substance use.
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So boys, it s called externalizing disorders.
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But you can see, both boys and girls are getting more depressed.
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It s just that the effect is bigger for girls.
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So boys have gone up to about 7% and girls are way up to 20.
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That s right.
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And that was 2019.
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So one out of five girls.
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That s what it was.
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That s right.
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It was.
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It was.
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That s right.
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And then COVID comes in.
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So if we can have the next slide.
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So then COVID comes in.
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And now this is the exact same data set.
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This is federal data.
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I just got a few extra years of data.
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And what you can see is that it goes way the hell up.
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And if you look at the 2021 data point, you can see that little peak at the very top there.
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That s because of COVID.
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That is, COVID did increase things.
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It did make kids more depressed.
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But as you can see, it s a blip.
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COVID was just a tiny effect compared to this gigantic increase.
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And so on the last slide, it was 20% of girls.
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Now it s almost 30, almost 30% of girls who had a major depressive episode in the last year.
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And for boys, it s up to 12%, which is still quite a lot.
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It s more than a doubling, although much less than for the girls.
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It s still, even if you look at boys, or excuse me, if you look at girls from 2018 pre-COVID, that ramp is very steep, the upward ramp.
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That s right.
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And that might be TikTok.
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So what happens is a lot of things change around 2011, 2012.
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2010 is when you get the front-facing iPhone.
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It s when Instagram is founded.
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It s around when kids are getting high-speed data plans.
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So my argument in the book is that we had a complete rewiring of childhood between 2010 and 2015.
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In 2010, most of the kids had flip phones.
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They didn t have Instagram.
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They didn t have high-speed data.
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So they would use their flip phones to get together with each other.
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that they communicate with each other.
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By 2015, about 80%, 70 or 80% have a smartphone.
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Most of them have high-speed data, unlimited plan, Instagram accounts.
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And this really messes up the girls.
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So that s what I think happened between 2010 and 2015.
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TikTok becomes popular only really more, you know, 18, 19, 20.
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And it s so new, we don t have good data on just TikTok.
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But I suspect that that sort of extra acceleration might be due to TikTok.
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What specifically about TikTok?
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So this is something I m just really beginning to learn.
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I don t even have much on it in the book.
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So kids love stories and stories are great all around the world.
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People tell children stories, there are myths.
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We see plays, we see television shows.
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And so I asked my undergrads at NYU, I said, how many of you use Netflix?
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Almost everybody says yes.
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How many of you wish Netflix was never invented?
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Nobody.
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Nobody.
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Watching stories is not a bad thing.
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TikTok is not stories.
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It s little tiny, tiny bits of something.
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And they re short.
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They don t add up to anything.
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They re incoherent.
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They re often disturbing and disgusting.
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I mean, people are being hit by cars, people are being punched in the face.
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And it s much more addictive, and with no nutritive value.
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They re not really stories.
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And so it seems to be much more addictive.
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Kids really get hooked on it, much more so than Netflix or anything else.
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And it depends on what you re watching, but I suspect that so many of them are consuming stuff about mental illness.
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It has a variety of effects that we don t even understand yet.
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Now, I know that there s some push right now, currently, to ban TikTok.
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And there s a lot of people that are very torn on this because they don t want to give the government the ability to ban social media.
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What is the argument about banning TikTok?
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What specifically are they talking about?
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The main thing they want to do is separate them from the company ByteDance that owns them and just make them an American company.
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So they can still operate, I suppose.
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So it s a data issue?
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Well, it s a national security issue.
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So, yeah, right, so thank you.
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Let s separate the national security issue from the mental health issue.
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I have a lot of libertarian friends.
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I have a lot of libertarian sympathies.
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I would be uncomfortable about the government banning a company or a product because it s harmful to children.
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I personally think we should just have age verification.
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We should not have kids on certain things.
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But if it was just a question of, you know, this is really bad for children, let s ban it.
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Like, no, I don t think I would support that.
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But TikTok is different because it is a Chinese owned company.
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And as many of your listeners will know, China, it says in whatever, it doesn t have a constitution, I don t think.
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But by law, every Chinese company must do what the Chinese Communist Party tells it to do.
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And that s what s so scary.
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Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, they might have similar effects to TikTok.
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But the Chinese government can literally tell ByteDance to change what kids are seeing.
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And they do that in China.
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They tell them in China, you have to have this kind of content and not that kind of content.
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There was an incredible episode of, you had Tristan Harris on.
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Tristan Harris has this amazing podcast episode where they go into the national security risks, and they show that the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, TikTok in Russia changed radically.
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TikTok was on it, like, yep, we re going to do what Putin wants us to do.
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So the idea that the most influential platform on American children
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And the idea that that must do what the Communist Party tells it to do at a time when we have mounting tension with China and the possibility of a war.
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I mean, as Tristan says, imagine if in the 1960s, the Soviet Union owned and controlled, you know, PBS, ABC, NBC, and, you know, all the kids programs.
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You know, we would never have allowed that.
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So I hope, listeners, I really strongly support this bill.
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I think Rep.
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Mike Gallagher, I think, was one of the ones proposing it, or at least certainly advocating for this issue.
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I hope people will not see it as a TikTok ban, but they ll see it as an urgent national security move to force ByteDance to sell to a non-Chinese owner.
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And specifically, what are they pointing to when they say national security risk?
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What specifically have they seen?
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So a lot of it seems to have to do with the data question.
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Facebook pioneered this model in which the person using the product is not really the customer.
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They don t pay the money.
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They re the product.
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The user is the product, not the customer.
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And they give them data.
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And the data can be used for all sorts of purposes, especially marketing and advertising.
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And so TikTok has enormous amounts of data, and they can get all psychological on it because they know exactly how long you hesitate or how much you like certain kinds of videos.
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You know, many people have written articles on how TikTok seems to have known they were gay before they did that sort of thing.
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So TikTok has extraordinary amounts of data on most American, most Americans, certainly most young Americans.
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And they say, oh, but you know, we don t share like it s in a server over here in Singapore.
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I don t know where but it s you know, it s not in China, you know, come on, come on, you know, there s no way it could possibly be the case that the data is really separated and not available to the Chinese Communist Party.
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And what are they pointing to in terms of the danger of this data that makes them want to have it sold to an American company?
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I don t know whether the motivation behind the bill, I don t know whether it s that the Chinese would have some access to data on American citizens or whether what most alarmed me when I heard the Tristan Harris podcast was the ease of influencing American kids to be pro this or pro that on any political issue.
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Right, you re seeing that with Palestine and Gaza.
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Yeah, I think so.
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You re definitely seeing that now.
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It s very obvious.
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Well, it s very obvious with many things with TikTok.
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Trans stuff, and there s a lot of different things that they re encouraging.
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And, you know, people that are opposed to that are being banned, which is also very odd.
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And specifically like female athletes, we had Riley Gaines, who is the female athlete that competed against Leah Thomas.
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And she has said that male, biologically male athletes should not be able to compete with biologically female athletes because they have a significant advantage.
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And she was banned from TikTok just for saying that.
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Yeah, that s right.
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So this relates to the larger issue that we talked about last time and that I hope we ll continue to talk about today, which is that social media has brought us into an environment in which anyone has the ability to really harm anyone else.
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There s an extraordinary amount of intimidation available via social media.
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And so this has led the leaders of all kinds of organizations to run scared.
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Greg Lukianoff and I saw this in universities.
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Why don t the university president stand up to the protesters who are shouting down visiting speakers?
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Isn t there a grown-up in the room?
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And then we saw it in journalism, newspapers and editors who wouldn t stand up for journalistic principles.
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And so I think what has happened here is that social media allows whoever is angriest and can mobilize most force to threaten, to harass, to surround, to mob anyone.
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And when people are afraid to say something, that s when you get the crazy distortions that we saw on campus.
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or that Riley Gaines was seeing, too, just that people are afraid to speak up.
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And in a democracy, in a large, secular, diverse democracy, we have to be able to talk about things.
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And so that s part of why we re in such a mess now is, I have argued,
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that it s when social media became super viral after 2009, 2010.
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You get the like button, the retweet button.
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Social media wasn t really bad or harmful before.
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It wasn t terribly harmful before then.
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But by 2012, 2013, it had really become as though everyone had a dart gun.
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Everybody could shoot everyone.
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And that s when we began sort of like teaching on eggshells in universities because our students could really do a lot of damage if we said one word they didn t like.
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And it s not just the students, which is really disturbing.
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We ve talked about this before.
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There was an FBI security specialist who estimated that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of the Twitter accounts were bots, which is very strange, because that means that they re mobilizing specifically to try to push different narratives.
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That s right.
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So if you think of, you know, people say, well, now Twitter is the public square or things like that.
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You know, it s not a public square.
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It s more like the Roman Colosseum.
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It s more like, you know, a place where people say things and the fans in the stands are hoping to see blood.
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To move our discussions onto platforms like that, that can be manipulated, that anyone, it doesn t have to be a foreign intelligence service, it could be
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Anybody who wants to influence anything in this country or anywhere in the world?
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They can you know for very little money they can hire someone to create thousands millions of bots And so we re living in this sort of fun house world where everything is weird mirrors And it s very hard to figure out what the hell is going on Have you ever sat down and tried to figure out a solution to this other than trying to encourage people not to use Jimmy?
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Does something happen to the volume just drop lower?
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Okay so
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What was I just saying?
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We re talking about solutions other than asking kids to not use it, which is very hard to do.
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Yeah, that s right.
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So when we re talking about the democracy problems and the manipulation of politics or anything else, those are really, really hard.
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I have a few ideas of what would help, and we re not going to do them because all of them are like the left legs and the right doesn t or vice versa.
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What are those ideas, though?
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Oh, things like, you know, like identity authentication.
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If large platforms had something like know your customer laws, that is, you know, if you want to open an account on Facebook or on X, you have to at least prove that you re a person.
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And I think you should be able to have to prove that you re a person in a particular country.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think you should, over a certain age, you prove those to the platform, not directly, you go through a third party.
2
SPEAKER_01
So even if it s hacked, they wouldn t know anything about you.
2
SPEAKER_01
You establish that you re a real person, and then you re cleared to go ahead, you open your account, you don t have to use your real name.
2
SPEAKER_01
If we did that, that would eliminate most of the bots, that would make it much harder to influence, that would make us have much better platforms for democracy.
2
SPEAKER_00
Is that possible to do internationally?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, the platforms can certainly require whatever they want for membership.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right now, they are legally required to ask you if you re over 13.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you re 13 or over, they ask it, and then they accept whatever you say, and that s it.
2
SPEAKER_01
You re in.
2
SPEAKER_01
So those rules could be changed, and they could be required to do more.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they re based most in the United States, but their users are all around the world.
2
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, that could be done.
2
SPEAKER_00
So one of the things that people are nervous about when it comes to authentication is that if you could do that, then you could target individuals that wouldn t be allowed to be anonymous.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you eliminate the possibility of whistleblowers.
2
SPEAKER_01
No, no, no.
2
SPEAKER_01
The point is that...
2
SPEAKER_01
The point is that you just have to establish that you are a person.
2
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t mean that you have to post under your real name.
2
SPEAKER_01
And even if you want ultra-high security, you could just have dissidents in repressive countries.
2
SPEAKER_01
They could just communicate by secure channels with a journalist who posts for them.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, I understand the concern, and there are values to having anonymity, but I think what we re seeing now is that the craziness, the way it s affecting, it s making it harder for democracies to be good, vibrant democracies, and it s making it easier for authoritarian countries like China to be powerful and effective authoritarian countries.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, I think we have to start weighing the pluses and minuses, the costs and benefits here.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right, but how would you ramp that up?
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, how would you implement that internationally?
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, say, if you re talking about people in Poland, just pick a country.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, the platforms can do whatever they want.
2
SPEAKER_01
But then, yes, if a company starts in Poland, then the U.S.
2
SPEAKER_01
Congress would have no influence on that.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right, like China could pretend and they could falsify the data that shows that these are individuals.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I see.
2
SPEAKER_01
They wanted to empower a troll farm.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I see.
2
SPEAKER_01
You re saying even if American companies did this, the Chinese could still get around it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s true.
2
SPEAKER_01
You re never going to have a perfect system.
2
SPEAKER_01
But right now, it s just so easy and cheap and free to have massive influence on anything you want.
2
SPEAKER_01
But the larger question here was, you asked me, what can we do?
2
SPEAKER_01
And what I m saying is, there are some things like identity authentication that I think would help, but yes, there are implementation problems, there s all kinds of political questions.
2
SPEAKER_01
So my basic point is, man, those problems, I don t know that we can solve, but we can do better.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, and I should point out, a lot of these have to do with the basic architecture of the web.
2
SPEAKER_01
When we move from web one, which was put up information, it s amazing, you can see things from everywhere.
2
SPEAKER_01
To Web 2, which was directly interactive, now you can buy things, you can post stuff, and it s the Web 2 that gave us these business models that have led to the exploitation of children and everyone else.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I m part of a group, Project Liberty, if you go to projectliberty.io, that s trying to have a better Web 3, where people will own their own data more clearly.
2
SPEAKER_01
As the architecture changes, it opens us up to new possibilities and risks.
2
SPEAKER_01
So there are some hopes for a better internet coming down the pike.
2
SPEAKER_01
Actually, I just wanted to put all this stuff out there about democracy to say this is really hard, but when we talk about kids and mental health, this is actually amazingly doable.
2
SPEAKER_01
We could do this in a year or two, and the trick, the key to solving this whole problem with kids is to understand what s called a collective action problem.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, there are certain things where, you know, like if you have a bunch of fishermen and they realize, oh, we re overfishing the lake, let s reduce our catch.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if one person does that and no one else does, well, then he just loses money.
2
SPEAKER_01
But if everyone does it, well then actually you can solve the problem and everyone can do fine.
2
SPEAKER_01
With social media, what we see over and over again is kids are on it because everyone else is.
2
SPEAKER_01
And parents are giving their kids a phone in sixth grade because the kid says everyone else has one and I m left out.
2
SPEAKER_01
And over and over again, you see this.
2
SPEAKER_01
When you ask kids, you know, how would you feel if I took your Instagram or TikTok away?
2
SPEAKER_01
You re like, oh, I d hate that.
2
SPEAKER_01
I hate that.
2
SPEAKER_01
But then you say, well, what if it was taken away from everyone?
2
SPEAKER_01
What if no one had it?
2
SPEAKER_01
And they almost always say, that would be great.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s an academic article that showed this with college students.
2
SPEAKER_01
I did it as a test with my students at NYU and a review of the book of The Anxious Generation in the UK Times.
2
SPEAKER_01
The woman ended by asking her 16-year-old, would you have liked there to be a social media ban until you were 16?
2
SPEAKER_01
I think the daughter was like 18 at the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
This was last month.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the daughter says, would everyone else be off it too?
2
SPEAKER_01
And she says yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then the daughter says, yeah, I would have rather liked that.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so you have this consumer product that the people using it, they don t see value in it.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re using it because everyone else is.
2
SPEAKER_01
And there s evidence suggesting it s messing up their mental health.
2
SPEAKER_01
So anyway, this is a solvable problem if we act together.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s really what the book is about.
2
SPEAKER_00
How would you do that, though?
2
SPEAKER_00
Would you get all the parents to do it?
2
SPEAKER_00
Would you get the social media companies to do it?
2
SPEAKER_00
How would you do that?
2
SPEAKER_01
I m not counting on the social media companies or Congress.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m assuming we ll never get help from either one.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now, I hope I m wrong about Congress.
2
SPEAKER_01
But as a social psychologist, I m trying to point out, we can actually solve this ourselves.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so the simplest one is this.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I propose four norms.
2
SPEAKER_01
If we can enact these four norms ourselves as parents and working with schools, we can largely solve the problem.
2
SPEAKER_01
We can certainly reduce rates of mental illness a lot.
2
SPEAKER_01
The first norm is the simplest, no smartphone before high school.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now people say, oh my God, but my kid needs a phone.
2
SPEAKER_01
Sure, give him a flip phone.
2
SPEAKER_01
The millennials had flip phones, and they were fine.
2
SPEAKER_01
Flip phones did not harm millennials  mental health.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re good for communication.
2
SPEAKER_01
You text, you call, that s it.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the first rule is no smartphones before high school.
2
SPEAKER_01
And as long as a third of the parents do this, well then, the rest of the parents are free to say when their kid says, Mom, you know, I need a smartphone.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, some other kids have one.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then you can say, well, no, here s a flip phone.
2
SPEAKER_01
You ll be with the kids who don t have one.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, and by the way, you re also going to get a lot more freedom to hang out with the other kids.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we don t need everybody, but we need to break the feeling that everyone has to have one because everyone else has one.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that sounds great on paper.
2
SPEAKER_00
I just can t imagine that most parents would agree to it.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s just so many parents that don t pay attention.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s true.
2
SPEAKER_00
Especially two families where two people are working.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
No, you re right.
2
SPEAKER_01
You re right.
2
SPEAKER_01
Just when we look right now, kids with married parents are trying harder to keep the kids off.
2
SPEAKER_01
These things are good babysitting devices in the sense that the kids are off doing their thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
You don t have to think about them.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it is true that this would not be adopted universally at first.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I think we could still develop a norm that it s just not appropriate for children to have a smartphone, they should have flip phones.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think that any community that wants to do this, because what I find over and over again is that most parents are really concerned about this.
2
SPEAKER_01
And this is across social classes.
2
SPEAKER_01
Most parents are seeing the problems.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I don t have to convince parents to change their minds about something.
2
SPEAKER_01
What I m trying to do with the book is show them here are four norms that are pretty easy to do if others are doing them, and these are going to make your kids happier, less mentally ill.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, like I said, it sounds like a good suggestion.
2
SPEAKER_00
I just don t imagine that with the momentum that social media has today and the ubiquitous use that kids are going to give it up.
3
SPEAKER_01
of want to give it up.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think there s a lot of kids that have had problems that if you talk to them alone and you say, wouldn t it be better if social media didn t exist, if they d been bullied or what have you, they d say yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
But the idea of getting a massive group of people to adopt this is highly unlikely.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, you may be right, but I m encouraged because whenever I speak to Gen Z audiences, and I ve spoken to middle schools, high schools, college audiences, I always ask, do you think I got this wrong or do you think this is a correct description of what s happening?
3
SPEAKER_00
They agree.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re not in denial.
3
SPEAKER_00
They see the phones are messing them up.
3
SPEAKER_00
They see that social media is messing up the girls especially.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, even in middle school, certainly high school, the kids actually agree that this is a problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so if it was offered to them, you know what, let s do the other three norms.
3
SPEAKER_00
Let s get them all for all the children.
3
SPEAKER_00
All right, so the first is no smartphone before high school.
3
SPEAKER_00
Second is no social media until 16.
3
SPEAKER_00
That one s going to be a little harder to do.
3
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, the big platforms like Instagram, where you re posting and the whole world is seeing and strangers are contacting you, you know, I think the age is currently 13 and it s not enforced.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think that needs to go up to 16.
3
SPEAKER_00
Here, it would be nice if Congress would raise the age to 16 and make the companies enforce it.
3
SPEAKER_00
But even if they don t,
3
SPEAKER_00
as long as many other parents are doing it, me, I as a parent, you know, my kids are 14 and 17, as long as many other parents are saying 16 is the age, then it s very easy for me to say that also.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s the second norm.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, if you, again, if you could get them to say it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think the kids would push back so hard because so many other kids are on it and that s how they interact with each other.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right, but Joe, you re just reiterating the collective action problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re just saying they react because all the other kids are on it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it does require a big push.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I think we re ready.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t think we were ready in 2019.
3
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t as clear.
3
SPEAKER_00
But now that we re through COVID, now that the numbers are through the roof,
3
SPEAKER_00
I think we re ready.
3
SPEAKER_00
And if it starts in some places and not others, that s okay with me.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s the way it s gonna be.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then we ll see whether it spreads.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then we ll see the data.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, because look at smoking.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, smoking is highly addictive.
3
SPEAKER_00
It was very common up through the 1990s.
3
SPEAKER_00
And now it s very rare in high school.
3
SPEAKER_00
Very few high school kids smoke.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s possible to change norms.
3
SPEAKER_00
And what was the third?
3
SPEAKER_00
The third is phone-free schools.
3
SPEAKER_00
And this one is happening.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is already happening.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, I ve published articles in the Atlantic and on my substack, afterbabble.com, bringing together the research.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
They don t want to be the one who doesn t know.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, when kids started bringing smartphones into school instead of flip phones, academic achievement actually went down.
3
SPEAKER_00
Kids are stupider today than they were 15 years ago.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, stupider meaning measuring their academic progress.
3
SPEAKER_00
After 50 years of improvement, it turns around after 2012.
3
SPEAKER_00
And this is true in the U.S.
3
SPEAKER_00
and internationally.
3
SPEAKER_00
So there s just no reason why kids should have the phone on them.
3
SPEAKER_00
They should come in the morning, put it in a phone locker or a yonder pouch, go about their day, and guess what?
3
SPEAKER_00
The schools that have tried it, after a week or two, everyone loves it.
3
SPEAKER_00
The kids are like, oh wow, we actually talk in between classes.
3
SPEAKER_00
We have five minutes in the hallway, we actually talk.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the assumption is that from 2012 kids are just much more distracted.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh my god.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean look
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
My fucking phone runs my goddamn life.
3
SPEAKER_00
Does that sound like you?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it sounds like me.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, as adults, you know, we have a fully formed prefrontal cortex.
3
SPEAKER_00
You and I had a normal childhood, our brains developed, we have the ability to stay on task, and man, it is hard.
3
SPEAKER_00
With notifications coming in, there s always so many interesting things you could do instead of what you need to do.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, it s hard enough for us as adults.
3
SPEAKER_00
Imagine if you didn t have a normal childhood where you developed executive function, where you developed that ability as a teenager.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because puberty is when the prefrontal cortex, the front part of the brain, that s when it rewires into the adult configuration.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
Where do you think this is going?
3
SPEAKER_01
This is my concern, is that this is just the beginning of this integration that we have with devices, and that the social media model, and it s been immensely profitable, and incredibly addictive, and there s a massive, massive amount of capital that s invested in keeping us locked into these things.
3
SPEAKER_01
Where do you think this goes from here?
3
SPEAKER_01
Have you paid attention to the technology?
3
SPEAKER_01
Like AI?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_00
So let me just draw a very, very sharp, bright line between adults and children.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m very reluctant to tell adults what to do.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, when we re talking about adults, I think where this is going is, well, where it s gone so far is everything that you might want becomes available instantly and for free with no effort.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so, in some ways, that s a life of convenience, but in other ways, it s messing us up and it s making us weaker.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, you want sexual satisfaction?
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, here you go, free porn.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it gets better and better and more and more intense.
3
SPEAKER_00
You want a girlfriend or boyfriend who you can customize?
3
SPEAKER_00
You have that already.
3
SPEAKER_00
Advances in robotics are such that it s just a matter of time before AI girlfriends are put into these incredible female bodies that you can customize.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, I think the adult world, for young adults especially, is going to get really, really messed up.
3
SPEAKER_00
And again, I m not saying we need to ban it now.
3
SPEAKER_00
But what I m saying is, for God s sakes, don t let this be 11-year-old children s lives.
3
SPEAKER_00
Let s at least keep children separate from all this craziness until their brains develop.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then they can jump into the whirlpool and the tornado.
3
SPEAKER_00
But the fact that our 11-year-old girls are now shopping at Sephora for anti-wrinkle cream or all sorts of expensive skin treatments, this is complete insanity.
3
SPEAKER_00
So let s at least protect the kids until they re through puberty.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, that would be nice.
3
SPEAKER_01
That would be nice.
3
SPEAKER_01
Kind of essential, I think.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just the way I see adults being so hooked on these things.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it just doesn t give you enough time to develop your own thoughts and opinions on things.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_01
So many people are dependent upon other people s approval.
3
SPEAKER_01
And there s just so many people that are addicted to interacting with people online and not interacting with exceptional people in the real world.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s right.
3
SPEAKER_00
One way to think about this is, let s look at junk food, which became very popular after the Second World War.
3
SPEAKER_00
The manufacturing of food became very good.
3
SPEAKER_00
There were science labs.
3
SPEAKER_00
At Frito-Lay, they studied the exact degree of tensile strength that a chip should have before it snaps and, you know, how do you make this—what s the perfect crunch?
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that kept going on for a few decades.
3
SPEAKER_00
As I understand it, obesity has finally turned around a little bit.
3
SPEAKER_00
And many people are still eating huge amounts of junk food, but at least some people are beginning to say, you know what, I m going to resist that deep evolutionary programming for fat and sugar.
3
SPEAKER_00
The companies played to that, they hijacked those desires, and they got us hooked on junk food.
3
SPEAKER_00
But after 50 years, we re making some progress in pushing back and having healthier snacks and eating less.
3
SPEAKER_00
What s the root of that progress?
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t actually know the numbers.
3
SPEAKER_00
I just know a few years ago, I saw something that for the first time, obesity actually went down in the United States.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t know that that s still true today, but this was like three or four years ago, before COVID, I saw something.
3
SPEAKER_01
Do we know what caused it to go down?
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t.
3
SPEAKER_00
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 educate people and to develop healthier alternatives.
3
SPEAKER_00
So again, I should have looked at the data before I came here.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I m just using this as an analogy.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m sure Jamie can find something that points to it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, look it up online.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m surprised.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is obesity still rising in the United States, or is it actually lower than it was 10 years ago?
3
SPEAKER_00
That s the question.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I quickly found this study here, but I haven t even got a chance to look at it yet.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is the second time I ve done this.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, something about this is giving me anxiety.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m spilling it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Update on the obesity epidemic.
3
SPEAKER_01
The Anxious Podcaster.
3
SPEAKER_01
After the sudden rise, is the upward trajectory beginning to flatten?
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, yeah, so it s a question.
3
SPEAKER_00
And what year was this?
4
SPEAKER_01
Is people recognizing that they re developing health issues and they re taking steps to discipline themselves and mitigate some of these issues?
4
SPEAKER_01
Or is there some sort of information push that s leading them in that direction?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, 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 in people a desire to change it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then it s hard to change.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, I love chips, I love chocolate, I love ice cream.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s hard to change.
4
SPEAKER_00
But over time, a society adapts.
4
SPEAKER_00
And now the question is, will we adapt to social media?
4
SPEAKER_00
Because the desire for sugar and fat and salt is very deep.
4
SPEAKER_00
the desire for others to think well of us, to hold us in esteem, I would say is just as deep and much more pervasive.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s much stronger, I would say.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so, because as adults, we re very concerned.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like when I put out a tweet, I know all this stuff.
4
SPEAKER_00
I know how terrible this is for me to check.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m busy, I ve got things to do.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I ll go back and I ll check how the tweet is doing
4
SPEAKER_00
30 seconds later, and then I ll check again five minutes later.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s hard for me to resist that.
4
SPEAKER_00
What are people saying about the thing that I just said?
4
SPEAKER_00
But the question is, will we adapt to it in some way so that we begin, as with junk food, we re still gonna be consuming junk food, but maybe we ll keep a lid on it.
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t know, I don t know.
4
SPEAKER_00
But what I can say with not confidence, but what I think is the case, is as long as our kids
4
SPEAKER_00
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 handle on this as adults.
4
SPEAKER_01
I do not either.
4
SPEAKER_01
Again, as you re saying, we are adults, we grew up without the internet, and we grew up without all these problems, and it is hard.
4
SPEAKER_01
I try to tell all my friends to use my strategy, which I call post and ghost.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t read anything.
4
SPEAKER_01
I just post things.
4
SPEAKER_01
I post things and I don t read comments.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s made me immensely more happy.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s it s a massive difference.
4
SPEAKER_01
I very rarely use Twitter The only reason why 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 80% of it and I see it all the time.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s so many times where I ll see any any
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I ll look at it, it s like a couple of letters and a bunch of numbers, and I ll go, okay, is that a real person?
4
SPEAKER_01
And then I go to their page, nope, nope, not a real person.
4
SPEAKER_01
How many of them are there?
4
SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of them.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of them.
4
SPEAKER_01
Especially when it comes to things like Ukraine, Israel, Gaza.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right, because those are areas where various actors are,
4
SPEAKER_00
parties and actors and countries are trying to manipulate us.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re doing a great job of it.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re very focused.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s really incredible.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s incredible to see the impact that it has when you see 50 posts, 50 comments, and 35 of those seem to be not real people.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think your strategy is very wise, and for this reason.
4
SPEAKER_00
When social media began, you would put something up and then people could comment on it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, that goes until about 2013, 2014.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think it s 2013 when Facebook introduces threaded comments.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
And people can reply to that.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you get basically everyone fighting with each other in the comment thread.
4
SPEAKER_00
And what social media is good for is putting out information quickly.
4
SPEAKER_00
I 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.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the function of putting information out is great, but the function of putting something out and then watching everyone fight
4
SPEAKER_00
In the comments, that s why I use the analogy of the Roman Colosseum, like with the gladiators.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s just sick.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s nothing good comes from that.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right.
4
SPEAKER_01
My concern is that we are paddling upriver and that there s a raging waterfall.
4
SPEAKER_01
that s powering this whole thing that you cannot fight against and 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.
4
SPEAKER_01
And some people are going to opt out, but it s going to be like my 600-pound life.
4
SPEAKER_01
People that are realizing, oh my God, what have I done?
4
SPEAKER_01
I ve ruined my body.
4
SPEAKER_01
I ve ruined my life.
4
SPEAKER_01
How do I slowly get back to a normal state?
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s going to take a tremendous amount of effort.
4
SPEAKER_01
Think about the amount of effort.
4
SPEAKER_01
The amount of 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.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s people that I follow that I know they re tweeting 12 hours a day.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s sad, it s so sad.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, they re addicts.
4
SPEAKER_01
My fear is that this is only gonna get greater.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I share that fear.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if current trends continue,
4
SPEAKER_00
It s really not clear how we get out of this.
4
SPEAKER_00
Something might break in a big way.
4
SPEAKER_00
Humanity has faced many crises before.
4
SPEAKER_00
That doesn t mean, as they say, past performance is no guarantee of future success.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we ve faced many crises, and we ve always come out stronger.
4
SPEAKER_00
But... We ve never faced anything like this.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is a category... This is a rewiring.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
4
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we face many external threats, we face diseases, we face wars, those have come and gone.
4
SPEAKER_00
But this is a rewiring of the basic communication network of society in ways that link up with so many of our deepest motivations.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is a challenge unlike any we ve ever faced.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I think
4
SPEAKER_00
you know, what we really need, I m speaking as a university professor, is we really need great social sciences.
4
SPEAKER_00
We need great sociologists.
4
SPEAKER_00
We need people really studying this.
4
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, it s all happening so fast, and then the problems in universities of, you know, political concerns sweeping in.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I fear that we re sort of heading towards this.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, you said, like, going upstream to a waterfall.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think it was like going, like, downstream.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re about, you know, at the top of a waterfall going to go over the edge.
4
SPEAKER_01
That too, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, we re trying to paddle, but that s the direction that we re moving in.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s right.
4
SPEAKER_00
That might be the case.
4
SPEAKER_00
So, yeah, we live at a very interesting time in history when, in the 90s, the future looked so bright, and yeah, now it doesn t.
4
SPEAKER_01
My fear is that we are no longer going to become human.
4
SPEAKER_01
that we will no longer be human.
4
SPEAKER_01
We ll be a different thing.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think the implementation of technology is what s gonna facilitate that.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think we re how many years away from Neuralink and something similar to it that s going to change how we interact completely.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that it s not going to be a question of whether or not you opt out, but whether you pick up your device.
4
SPEAKER_01
Your device is going to be a part of you.
4
SPEAKER_01
And there ll be incentives
4
SPEAKER_01
that whether it s performance incentives, whether it s you re going to have more bandwidth, whatever it is.
4
SPEAKER_00
You have a competitive advantage.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s the real fear of something like Neuralink or whatever.
4
SPEAKER_01
If they can figure out a Neuralink that doesn t require surgery, if they could figure out something that does that without surgery, the advantage of having that in a competitive sense in terms of like business and
4
SPEAKER_01
and technology and industry.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s gonna be massive and it s gonna be so difficult to get people to not do that, that it s going to be like phones.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I remember when I moved to Los Angeles in 1994, I bought a Motorola StarTAC and I was like, look at me.
4
SPEAKER_01
I had a phone in 1989.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh wow, one of the big ones that went to a satellite?
4
SPEAKER_01
It was actually connected to my car in 1989.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it was very advantageous.
4
SPEAKER_01
My friend Bill Blumenreich, who owns the, he owned the Comedy Connection, he owns the Wilbur Theater now in Boston.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I got a lot of gigs from him because he could call me.
4
SPEAKER_01
When someone canceled, someone got sick, and they said, hey, can you get to Dartmouth at 10 p.m.?
4
SPEAKER_01
I m like, fuck yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so I got gigs from that.
4
SPEAKER_01
We joke about it to this day that I was the first guy that he knew that had a cell phone.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was a huge advantage.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I remember when I had one in 94, I was like, this is great.
4
SPEAKER_01
I can call my friends.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t even have to be home.
4
SPEAKER_01
There were so many positives to it.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it gave you an advantage.
4
SPEAKER_01
It gave you an advantage because you didn t have to be home.
4
SPEAKER_01
If there was a business thing that I had to deal with or something going on with my career, I could deal with it on the phone at Starbucks or wherever I was.
4
SPEAKER_01
My fear is that this is going to be that times a million.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s going to be you have to have it in order to compete.
4
SPEAKER_01
Just like you kind of have to have an email today.
4
SPEAKER_01
You kind of have to have a cell phone today.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s right, that s right.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes, we are certainly headed in that way.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I think the word human is a very good word to put on the table here.
5
SPEAKER_00
Some things seem human or inhuman.
5
SPEAKER_00
And when you simply connect people, you know, Mark Zuckerberg sometimes says, how could it be wrong to give more people more voice?
5
SPEAKER_00
If you re simply connecting people, making it easier for them to contact each other, you know, I think that s mostly gonna have good effects.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that happened with the telephone.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, we all got telephones and we could do all sorts of things.
5
SPEAKER_00
We could coordinate with our friends.
5
SPEAKER_00
Telephones are great.
5
SPEAKER_00
But when it became not technology making it easier for this guy to reach you or me to communicate with you, but rather it s a way to put things out to try to gain prestige for me in front of thousands or maybe millions of people, now it changes all of our incentives.
5
SPEAKER_00
It changes the game we re playing.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, what games are we playing as we go about our day?
5
SPEAKER_00
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 too, or they have an advantage over me.
5
SPEAKER_00
That is the way that things have been rewired.
5
SPEAKER_00
Already, already we re there.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now, you re raising the possibility that the next step is more hardware-based, that it s going into our bodies.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I think that is likely to happen.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so I hope what we ll do now, and I hope my book, The Anxious Generation, will sort of promote a pause.
5
SPEAKER_00
Let s think where we are.
5
SPEAKER_00
Let s think what we ve done.
5
SPEAKER_00
Let s look at what has happened.
5
SPEAKER_00
When our kids got on phones and social media, we thought, oh, this could be amazing.
5
SPEAKER_00
They can connect.
5
SPEAKER_00
They can form communities.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s going to be great.
5
SPEAKER_00
And now it s clear, no, it s been horrible.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s been really, really terrible.
5
SPEAKER_00
As soon as they got on, their mental health suffered.
5
SPEAKER_00
They might feel like they have a community, but it s much worse than what it replaces.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, I think what we re seeing is the sort of the techno-optimists, the sort of the futurists who say, oh, it s going to be amazing, you know, we ll have Neuralink, we ll have all this technology, we ll be able to do everything.
5
SPEAKER_00
Like, here s where we have to heed, 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.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, if we keep going without putting on some brakes, yeah, I think we re going to a horrible place.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, my fear is that it won t be horrible.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh, it ll feel good.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that it ll be amazing.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
In the short run.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and that we will decide that this is a better thing.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know just like look 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 bodies failing.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and having less having less sex.
5
SPEAKER_00
I read recently Yes, the SSRIs are suppressing sex driving.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes people.
5
SPEAKER_01
I
5
SPEAKER_01
So there s that, there s a lot of issues that come along with those and yet there s immense profit in making sure that people take those and stay on those.
5
SPEAKER_01
My 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.
5
SPEAKER_01
You would not want to just be natural and depressed if you could just put on this little headset and feel fantastic.
5
SPEAKER_01
And maybe it could be a solution to so many of our society issues.
5
SPEAKER_01
Maybe bullying would cease to exist if everyone had an increase in dopamine.
5
SPEAKER_01
It sounds silly, but if dopamine increased by, look, if you have an entire society that s essentially on a low dose of MDMA,
5
SPEAKER_01
You re not going to have nearly as much anger and frustration, and you also are not going to have as much blues.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re not going to have as many sad songs that people love.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re not going to have the kind of literature that people write when they feel like shit.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s unfortunate, but also as a whole, as a society, it probably would be an overall net positive.
5
SPEAKER_01
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, more benevolent.
5
SPEAKER_01
If you look at 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
5
SPEAKER_01
We didn t anticipate it.
5
SPEAKER_01
It has negative consequences.
5
SPEAKER_01
We thought about it in a positive way.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh, this is going to be great.
5
SPEAKER_01
We re all going to be connected.
5
SPEAKER_01
How would it be bad that people could have more voices, like Zuckerberg says?
5
SPEAKER_01
But my fear is that it s going to just change what it means to be a human being.
5
SPEAKER_01
And my genuine feels that this is inevitable.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that as technology scales upward,
5
SPEAKER_01
unavoidable.
5
SPEAKER_00
Right now, it certainly feels that way.
5
SPEAKER_00
And while I m not optimistic about the next 10 years, I share your vision of what s coming.
5
SPEAKER_00
But I m not resigned to it.
5
SPEAKER_00
People always say to me, I go around saying, we need to do these four norms.
5
SPEAKER_00
We can do them.
5
SPEAKER_00
And people say, oh, that ship has sailed.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh, the train s left the station.
5
SPEAKER_00
But if a ship has sailed, and we know that it s going to sink, we can actually call it back.
5
SPEAKER_00
I ve been on airplanes where it leaves the jetway, and then they call it back because they discover a safety issue.
5
SPEAKER_00
So we are headed that way, I agree.
5
SPEAKER_00
But I think we humans are an amazingly adaptable species.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think we can figure this out, and there are definitely pathways to a future that s much better.
5
SPEAKER_00
These technologies could, in theory, give us the best democracy ever, where people really do have the right kind of voice.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s not just the extremes who are super-empowered, as it is now.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, we re at a point in space and time, let s say, right now, and I can imagine a future that s really fantastic.
5
SPEAKER_00
But how do we get there?
5
SPEAKER_00
And are we able to get there?
5
SPEAKER_00
Is there a path?
5
SPEAKER_00
Or is it like, you know, there s no path from A to B?
5
SPEAKER_00
So I don t know, but I think we sure as hell have to try.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the first thing we have to do is not be resigned and just say, oh, well, the world s going to hell.
5
SPEAKER_00
What are you going to do about it?
5
SPEAKER_00
It s too big.
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s the most amazing thing.
5
SPEAKER_00
In Congress, you can t, you know, any issue, if the right likes it, the left won t and vice versa, except for this one.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is the only thing in Washington that s really bipartisan.
5
SPEAKER_00
The senators and congressmen have kids, they see it.
5
SPEAKER_00
So let s, you know, let s test the proposition that all is lost and we re helpless.
5
SPEAKER_00
Let s test that proposition.
5
SPEAKER_00
and let s test it in the place where we re most likely to succeed, which is rolling back the phone-based childhood and replacing it with a more play-based childhood.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh, so actually, I said there are four norms, we talked about three.
5
SPEAKER_00
So if you don t mind, I ll put in the fourth norm now.
5
SPEAKER_00
So the first three are about phones.
5
SPEAKER_00
No smartphone before high school, no social media till 16, phone-free schools.
5
SPEAKER_00
Okay, but if you take away the phones and you don t give kids back each other and playtime and independence, what are they going to do?
5
SPEAKER_00
You re going to keep them at home all day long without screens?
5
SPEAKER_00
So the fourth norm is more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.
5
SPEAKER_00
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 Skenazy, the woman who wrote Free Range Kids.
5
SPEAKER_00
She and I co-founded an organization called Let Grow.
5
SPEAKER_00
Parents, please go to letgrow.org.
5
SPEAKER_00
All kinds of ideas for how to help your kid have more independence, which makes them more mature, which makes them less fragile.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, this fourth norm, this is the harder one.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is the one that we have to really overcome our fears of letting our kids out.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so, actually, let me ask you.
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then you said, I think you said something like, no, I m not letting my kid go to sleepovers because I don t trust the other families.
5
SPEAKER_00
Does that sound familiar to you?
5
SPEAKER_01
I don t believe that s what I said.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think our concern was with people wandering around with kids being free to walk home in cities.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes, you had that also.
5
SPEAKER_00
We did talk about sleepovers.
5
SPEAKER_00
My kids have sleepovers.
5
SPEAKER_01
They ve always had sleepovers.
5
SPEAKER_01
If you know the parents and you trust the parents, it s a great way to give the kids independence and have them interact with other people.
5
SPEAKER_00
So tell me, what was your policy with your kids, with all three?
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
Do you remember what age or grade?
5
SPEAKER_01
No, I don t.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s fine if you live in a good neighborhood.
6
SPEAKER_00
The problem is if you re, you know, childhood predators are real.
6
SPEAKER_01
Not really, not anymore.
6
SPEAKER_01
What I mean is... What do you mean?
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, when you and I were growing up, there were childhood predators out there in the physical world approaching children.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think you said there, you told a story about one who approached you when you were doing magic tricks.
6
SPEAKER_01
So there were child predators out there.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s true.
6
SPEAKER_01
They re all on Instagram now.
6
SPEAKER_01
The kids aren t out.
6
SPEAKER_01
And Instagram, and especially Instagram, makes it super easy for them to get in touch with children.
6
SPEAKER_01
So this is my point.
6
SPEAKER_01
I can summarize the whole book with a single sentence.
6
SPEAKER_01
We have overprotected our kids in the real world and underprotected them online.
6
SPEAKER_01
I would agree to that.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yes, child predators are terrible, but guess what?
6
SPEAKER_01
We actually locked up most of them.
6
SPEAKER_01
When you and I were growing up, they weren t all locked up.
6
SPEAKER_01
They were just eccentrics who were exposing themselves.
6
SPEAKER_01
Remember flashing, flashers?
6
SPEAKER_01
That doesn t happen anymore, because if you do that now, you re going to jail for a long, long time.
6
SPEAKER_01
So we actually locked up most of the predators, and they know, don t approach kids on a playground, approach them on social media.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if we are doing that.
6
SPEAKER_01
And there s this new push.
6
SPEAKER_01
Oh, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
No, once you re identified as a sex offender, you are gone for a long time, and then they re a sex offender.
6
SPEAKER_01
No, we ve really done a lot since the 90s to make the real world safer.
6
SPEAKER_00
But there is push against that.
6
SPEAKER_00
You re aware of this term, minor attracted persons that s being pushed?
6
SPEAKER_00
Disgusting.
6
SPEAKER_00
Disgusting and freaky.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s such a bizarre term that I gotta imagine is only being done by people who don t have children.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
6
SPEAKER_00
What s the root of that?
6
SPEAKER_00
Have you investigated that?
6
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
6
SPEAKER_01
Not that specific issue, but I can.
6
SPEAKER_01
So look, I study moral psychology.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s my academic discipline.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I study the roots of it evolutionarily, historically, and child development.
6
SPEAKER_01
What is our moral sense?
6
SPEAKER_01
And there are different moralities, and in some ways that s good, and, you know, left and right push against each other.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I m very open to different moralities.
6
SPEAKER_01
But when a group makes something sacred, and they say, this is the most important thing, and nothing else matters other than this,
6
SPEAKER_01
then they can kind of go insane and they kind of lose touch with reality.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think, you know, again, I don t know the history of this particular movement, that horrible term, but there is a certain kind of morality which is all about, you know, oppression and victimhood.
6
SPEAKER_01
And once you, you know, someone, I guess somewhere said, oh, you know, men who are attracted to boys or, you know, little girls,
6
SPEAKER_01
are victims of, I don t know what, in some little eddy of weird morality, someone put that forward as a new victim class.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because we ve been trying to address victimhood all over the place.
6
SPEAKER_01
Once someone puts that up as a new victim class, and you have to change the terms, this is very Orwellian, you change the terms, and then some others who share this morality
6
SPEAKER_01
which is focused on not making anyone feel marginalized, not allowing any labels that will slander someone or make them look bad.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think people who approach children for sexual goals, I m very happy to have them slandered and labeled and separated.
6
SPEAKER_01
But 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.
6
SPEAKER_01
And we don t think about
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What the hell we re actually saying.
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SPEAKER_00
It seems purely an academic thing.
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SPEAKER_00
It seems that this is something that with people that only exist in sort of an academic space where it s almost like
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an intellectual exercise in understanding oppression.
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You can t apply it in the real world.
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It s too fucked up.
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The consequences of it are horrific.
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Normalizing, victimizing children.
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SPEAKER_01
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,
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Somewhere in all of the academy and all the universities, some philosopher, let s say, proposed that term or raised an idea.
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So this has been going on for thousands of years.
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Someone in a conversation proposes a provocative idea.
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What if we think about this as a minor-attracted person?
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They put that idea out, and then other people say, no, that s really stupid.
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And it doesn t catch on, because this is not an idea that s going to catch on, even in the academy.
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But I think where we are now is, I m guessing, someone proposed this, somebody else got wind of it, posted it online, and now you re going to have a whole media ecosystem going crazy about this terrible idea.
6
SPEAKER_01
So maybe can you look up a minor attracted person?
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Is this just like a thing that was from one academic talk, or is this an actual movement?
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SPEAKER_00
Well, I ve seen politicians discuss it.
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SPEAKER_01
No way.
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SPEAKER_00
Yes.
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SPEAKER_01
Wait, wait, wait.
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SPEAKER_01
As like decriminalizing or de-stigmatizing?
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SPEAKER_00
De-stigmatizing.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh, God.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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There was a recent politician that went viral for this discussion.
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Oh, no.
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All right, then maybe I m wrong.
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It s more than one.
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There was two specific women that were doing that.
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And I didn t investigate whether these women had families or what it was, but this push to,
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to try to alleviate bullying or alleviate shame or alleviate the stigma that s attached to what they re calling an identity.
6
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Yeah, that s right.
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So actually, so that brings us to the issue of identitarianism, which I think is a useful term for us these days.
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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 the humanities, the studies departments.
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So putting identity first and then ranking identities and saying some identities are good, some are bad.
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This really activates our ancient tribalism.
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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 in which we can all get along.
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And so, you know, as I see it from inside the academy, we ve always been interested in identity.
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It s an important topic.
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There s a lot of research on it going back many decades.
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But something happened in 2015 on campus that really elevated identitarianism into the dominant paradigm.
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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.
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And that s what cancel culture is.
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That s what Greg Lukianoff and Ricky Schlott, their new book, The Canceling of the American Mind, is about.
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So yes, it s the people who are putting identity first and that s sort of their religion and their morality You know, I mean they re welcome to live in the United States But when they get when they get influence in universities or in school boards, yeah bad stuff will happen
6
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It s just bizarre the effect that it does have when people push back against identity politics.
6
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It s a small, very vocal minority that pushes this agenda.
6
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And it s not the majority of people.
6
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The majority of people mostly disagree with these ideas.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, absolutely.
6
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This is, again, a really important point about how our society has changed.
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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?
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And most people are sane.
6
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Most people are not at all crazy.
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Most people are pretty reasonable.
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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.
6
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So on the right, sort of the center-right, what I call true conservatives, or like Berkey and Edmund Burke conservatives,
6
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You know, they get shot, and they get excluded, and there s not many of them in Congress anymore.
6
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And on the left, you have the far left, the identitarian left, you know, shooting darts into, you know, people like me, into, you know, anybody who is, you know, anybody who questions.
6
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So they shoot their moderates.
6
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And what you have is, even though most people are still moderate and reasonable, our public discourse is dominated by the far right, 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.
6
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So, don t lose faith in humanity.
6
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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.
6
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And so, we get warped ideas rising to dominance, even though very few people believe them.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I think this is where bots come into play.
6
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Because I really do believe that this is being amplified, whether it s by foreign governments or by special interest groups or by whoever it is, is trying to push these specific narratives.
6
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
6
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And this can bring us right back to TikTok and the national security threat.
6
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So Vladimir
7
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Putin was a KGB agent in the 20th century.
7
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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.
7
SPEAKER_01
They were going to try to mess up American democracy.
7
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And they d spray paint racial slurs.
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They d put swastikas on synagogues.
7
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They saw that we re a multi-ethnic democracy.
7
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We re making a lot of progress towards tolerance.
7
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And the Soviets were trying to put a stop to that and make us hate each other.
7
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So they were doing that back since the 1950s.
7
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And it was expensive.
7
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They had to fly people over, or they had to try to win people over.
7
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You couldn t scale the operation.
7
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But that s the tradition that Vladimir Putin comes from.
7
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Now, the Soviet Union falls in 1991.
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I think he s like in Berlin.
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I can t remember where he was, but he was very influenced by this and the humiliation of the Soviet Union.
7
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And so, you know, he rises to power again in the 21st century.
7
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Do you think he suddenly no longer wants to mess with American democracy?
7
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Like, did he suddenly drop that desire?
7
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You know, we basically handed him the tools.
7
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We said, okay, you know, you can open as many Facebook accounts as you want, Twitter accounts, open as many as you want.
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There s no identity authentication.
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There s no age verification.
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create bots all you want, and have them mess with us.
7
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And Renee Diresta has a book coming out soon.
7
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She really did amazing work to get to the bottom of this.
7
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They started running tests in 2013.
7
SPEAKER_01
They d created accounts on all these platforms long before.
7
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But they started running tests.
7
SPEAKER_01
Could they get Americans to believe that an explosion had occurred at a refinery plant in Louisiana?
7
SPEAKER_01
Yes, they made it all up, and people believed it.
7
SPEAKER_01
Could they get Americans to believe some, you know, extreme BLM post that was completely outrageous?
7
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
7
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, same thing, you know, to enrage, you know, to enrage people on the left.
7
SPEAKER_01
So we know that the Russians are messing with us.
7
SPEAKER_01
We know that the Russians know our weak point.
7
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And by Russians, again, I don t mean the Russian people.
7
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I mean Vladimir Putin.
7
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The government.
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The government.
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So, you know, we re handing them the tools and the instruction book
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for how to divide us, how to weaken us, how to make us lose our resolve and our will.
7
SPEAKER_00
Have you seen Yuri Bezmenov give a speech?
7
SPEAKER_00
Oh, is that, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes, I ve seen that.
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Conversation about the ideological subversion.
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That s incredible, yes.
7
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And he did this in the 1980s, I think it was 84, and he was talking about how the work is already done.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
7
SPEAKER_00
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.
7
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That s right.
7
SPEAKER_01
That could be right.
7
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I mean, it is chilling to watch and it is prophetic.
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But, you know, they were playing a long game.
7
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I mean, the communists planning the communist revolution, they were patient and they were playing the long game.
7
SPEAKER_00
As is China.
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Yeah, they re very smart.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s there s so much more but because they re dictatorships they have complete control over What they choose to do they don t have to?
7
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Meet with subcommittees.
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SPEAKER_00
They don t have to have congressional hearings.
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SPEAKER_00
They just can just do it.
7
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Oh And that s okay.
7
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That s a good point because that is
7
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That brings us to the big difference between democracies and autocracies.
7
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Back 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.
7
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They were making rapid economic progress.
7
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And the criticism of democracy has always been, it s chaotic.
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There s no good leadership.
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They can t plan ahead.
7
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And that s all true.
7
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But why did we triumph in the 20th century over all these other models?
7
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Because democracy gives us a degree of dynamism.
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where we can do things in a distributed way.
7
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We have people just figuring stuff out.
7
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We have an incredibly creative economy and business sector.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so democracies have this incredible ability to be generative, creative, regenerative.
7
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unless you mess with their basic operating system and say, let s take this environment in 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.
7
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This, I think, really saps the dynamism.
7
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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.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I would agree with that.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I think it s also being influenced, again, by these foreign governments that have a vested interest in us being at each other s throats.
7
SPEAKER_00
Why wouldn t they?
7
SPEAKER_00
Why wouldn t they?
7
SPEAKER_00
It s so cheap.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s so cheap.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s so effective.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it seems to be the predominant way that people interact with each other.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
7
SPEAKER_00
When you say that you ve been attacked, what have you specifically been attacked about?
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
SPEAKER_01
I was always on the left.
7
SPEAKER_01
I was always a Democrat.
7
SPEAKER_01
Now I m nothing.
7
SPEAKER_01
I m an extremely alarmed patriotic American citizen who sees my country going to hell.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m in that camp.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, a lot of us are.
7
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A lot of us are politically homeless now.
7
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But I sort of started my career in political psychology.
7
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So my original work was on how morality varies across cultures.
7
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I did my dissertation research in Brazil, and then I did some work in India.
7
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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.
7
SPEAKER_01
We had different economics textbooks, different American history, different U.S.
7
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Constitution.
7
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It was like different worlds.
7
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And I began actually trying to help the left stop losing elections, like in 2000, 2004.
7
SPEAKER_01
You know, 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.
7
SPEAKER_01
You know, Al Gore and John Kerry, I thought, did a very bad job.
7
SPEAKER_01
So I ve all along been sort of critical of the left, originally from within the left,
7
SPEAKER_01
And that s a pretty good way to get a bunch of darts shot at you.
7
SPEAKER_01
Nothing terrible ever really happened to me.
7
SPEAKER_01
Lots of people have been truly canceled, shamed, lost their jobs, considered suicide.
7
SPEAKER_01
So nothing like that has ever happened to me.
7
SPEAKER_01
But when there s some minor thing on, 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.
7
SPEAKER_01
Thousands of people comment on it or like it or retweet it.
7
SPEAKER_01
It hurts.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s frightening in a way like nothing else I ve ever known.
7
SPEAKER_00
And how many of those people were even real people?
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s right.
7
SPEAKER_00
This is the real question.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
7
SPEAKER_00
Because it really is in dispute.
7
SPEAKER_00
It was one of the major disputes when Elon bought Twitter.
7
SPEAKER_00
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.
7
SPEAKER_00
I ve seen it.
7
SPEAKER_00
openly discussed, which is very disturbing.
7
SPEAKER_00
But what we did find out is that the government was involved in this, that the federal government was interfering with people s ability to use these platforms for speech.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, because of COVID, yes, that s right.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
7
SPEAKER_00
But I feel like that s just a test run.
7
SPEAKER_00
Being able to implement that for that,
7
SPEAKER_00
then you can implement it for so many different things, dissent about foreign policy issues, dissent about social issues.
7
SPEAKER_00
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, better for the overall good of America.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
7
SPEAKER_01
So that s why I never talk about content moderation.
7
SPEAKER_01
I m not interested in it.
7
SPEAKER_01
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, you know, in those Senate hearings we saw a couple months ago.
7
SPEAKER_01
If we can reduce the amount of suicide-promoting or self-harm-promoting content that our kids are seeing, then all will be well.
7
SPEAKER_01
No, it s not primarily about the content.
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
SPEAKER_01
I m a big fan of my friend Greg Lukianoff, who runs the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
7
SPEAKER_01
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?
7
SPEAKER_01
I think almost only about architecture.
7
SPEAKER_01
How is this platform designed?
7
SPEAKER_01
And can we improve it in ways that are content neutral?
7
SPEAKER_01
Can we improve it in ways that aren t going to advantage the left or the right, but are going to make it more truth-seeking?
7
SPEAKER_01
And so Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, when she came out, she had all kinds of ideas
8
SPEAKER_01
about how, you know, settings, things that Facebook could have done to reduce the incredible power of the extremes.
8
SPEAKER_01
The farthest right 3%, the farthest left 3%, and then a bunch of just like random weirdos who just post a lot.
8
SPEAKER_01
They have extraordinary influence.
8
SPEAKER_01
And that s not about a left-right thing.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s about, do we want an information ecosystem that super-duper empowers the extremes and silences the middle 80%?
8
SPEAKER_01
Hell no.
8
SPEAKER_01
So that s the kind of regulation that I favor, focusing on making these platforms less explosive and more useful.
8
SPEAKER_00
And there s also this discussion that comes up a lot about algorithms.
8
SPEAKER_00
Algorithms have essentially changed the entire game because it s not just what s online, it s what do you interact with more frequently, and that s accentuated.
8
SPEAKER_00
And the problem with that is most people interact with things that rile them up.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so you re developing these platforms that are immensely profitable that ramp up dissent and ramp up anger and ramp up arguments.
8
SPEAKER_00
And like in the case of yourself, instead of just debating you on these issues and doing it in a good faith manner, Jonathan Haidt believes this.
8
SPEAKER_00
This is why I disagree.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think of this or that.
8
SPEAKER_00
Instead, they ll label you as
8
SPEAKER_00
Whatever.
8
SPEAKER_00
Racist, sexist, 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.
8
SPEAKER_00
And then you ll get bots that interact with that, that push that.
8
SPEAKER_01
So, Twitter only went to algorithms, I think, in 2017.
8
SPEAKER_01
So, before then, people would tweet a lot.
8
SPEAKER_01
People talk a lot about algorithms, as though that s the cause of the whole problem.
8
SPEAKER_01
And they re not the cause of the problem, but man, are they amplifiers, and I think that s what you re saying.
8
SPEAKER_01
They re just super-duper amplifiers on whatever craziness would be there even without them.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so that certainly is shaping what we receive, what our children receive.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so this is some of the stuff that I think, again, we have to really protect our children from.
8
SPEAKER_01
To have a company able to micro-target their exact desires, even when they don t know what their desires are.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s a degree of control and influence over children in particular that I think they should just be be protected from Do you think that if you looked at algorithms?
8
SPEAKER_00
Do you think that it s an overall net negative and could the argument be made that algorithms should be banned?
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
No, I don t think I mean algorithms are there for a reason You know, we all know on Amazon
8
SPEAKER_01
You know, if you look up a book, it s going to suggest some other books you might be interested in.
8
SPEAKER_01
And it s pretty darn good.
8
SPEAKER_01
Like, yeah, you re right.
8
SPEAKER_01
I would be interested in that.
8
SPEAKER_01
So no, I would never say, oh, we can t have algorithms.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that would just be a Luddite sort of move to make.
8
SPEAKER_01
You know, I think, again, as a social psychologist who studies morality, I just see everything going up in flames.
8
SPEAKER_01
So here s a metaphor that I sometimes use.
8
SPEAKER_01
Suppose you re the California Department of Parks, and you have 100 years of experience fighting forest fires.
8
SPEAKER_01
You know everything about the wind, the humidity, you know what season.
8
SPEAKER_01
You ve got it down to a science, and you re doing the best you can to keep forest fires under control.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then one day, God decides to just mess with the world and changes the atmosphere from 20% oxygen to 80% oxygen.
8
SPEAKER_01
And if we suddenly were in a world where 80% of the atmosphere was oxygen, everything would go up in flames.
8
SPEAKER_01
Every electronic device would be burning right now.
8
SPEAKER_01
So that s kind of what happened after 2009, 2010.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s kind of what happened once we switched over to be about—so I would say the retweet button
8
SPEAKER_01
that move to virality, that, I think, is even more guilty of causing the problems, even than algorithms.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t know that it s necessarily one versus the other, but that s the way I see it, that we re in a world where the technology is so quick to ramp up whatever will most engage us, and that s mostly emotions, such as anger.
8
SPEAKER_01
So, yeah, that s why it feels like everything s burning.
8
SPEAKER_00
And this doesn t seem like it s slowing down.
8
SPEAKER_00
It seems like it s ramping up and it seems like they ve gotten 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 riled up about.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I think it is accelerating, and for two reasons.
8
SPEAKER_01
One is that it s just the nature of exponential growth.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s the nature of progress.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think in the 19th century, a guy named Adams gave us the Adams curve.
8
SPEAKER_01
He was noticing, like, wow, the amount of work we re able to do now that we re harnessing steam and coal keeps growing and growing and growing.
8
SPEAKER_01
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.
8
SPEAKER_01
You reach an asymptote.
8
SPEAKER_01
You reach a point at which it s insane.
8
SPEAKER_01
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.
8
SPEAKER_01
And we haven t yet mentioned the word AI.
8
SPEAKER_01
Now you bring in AI, and of course AI could unlock extraordinary material progress.
8
SPEAKER_01
Mark Andreessen has been arguing that.
8
SPEAKER_01
But as a social scientist, I fear it s going to give us material progress in sociological chaos.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s going to be used in ways that make our already unstable social structures and systems even less stable.
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_01
That was so horrible.
8
SPEAKER_01
And that was so irresponsible of Google to do.
8
SPEAKER_01
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.
8
SPEAKER_01
And just to give a little background here, so I m sure 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.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so, you know, if you ask for a picture of the founding fathers, they re multiracial or all black.
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Or Nazi soldiers.
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Even Nazis had to be multiracial or black.
8
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So there s two things to say about this.
8
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The first is that Google must be an unbelievably stupid company.
8
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Like, did nobody test this before they released it to the public?
8
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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, so disgraced its product that it s banking so much on, I mean, it depends a lot on the success of Gemini,
8
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And now they ve alienated half the country right away on the first day practically alienated them.
8
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They couldn t be that stupid.
8
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I think what s happening to them is what happened to us in universities, which is what I ve called structural stupidity.
8
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So you have very smart people, but if anyone
8
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questions a DEI-related policy on campus, they would get attacked.
8
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And that s what most of the early blowups were.
8
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I think you probably had Brett Weinstein on here.
8
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That s what, you know, Erica Christakis at Yale and Nicholas Christakis at Yale.
8
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You know, if people wrote these thoughtful, caring memos about opposing a policy,
8
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There would be a conflagration, they d be attacked, and they would sometimes lose their jobs.
8
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So that s what happened to us in universities in 2015 to usher in our now nine years of insanity, which I think might be ending.
8
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I think last fall was so humiliating for higher ed that I think we might be at a turning point.
8
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But my point is for Google.
8
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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.
8
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This is a massive violation of the truth and part of Google s brand is truth and trust.
8
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So I suspect they were just afraid to say anything.
8
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And that s why Google made this colossal blunder of introducing woke AI at a time when we desperately need to trust our institutions that are related to knowledge.
8
SPEAKER_01
And Google was trusted, and now they ve lost a lot of it.
8
SPEAKER_00
And it s not just Google.
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SPEAKER_00
It s Chat GPT.
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SPEAKER_01
But Chat GPT is not as explicit.
8
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It s not as explicit, but it does do certain things.
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Like if you ask it to say something positive about Donald Trump, it refuses.
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SPEAKER_00
You ask it to say something positive about Joe Biden, it ll gaslight you.
8
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No, that s right, and there was recently, was it David Rosato, or who was it, who put out some listing of how far left each of the different AI products are.
8
SPEAKER_01
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 OpenAI are stupid.
8
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You would not look at this product and say, how could they be so dumb as to have it be left-leaning?
8
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But with Google, you have to say, how could they be so dumb as to produce black Nazis for us?
8
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Right.
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I just don t think they played it all out.
8
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I think this ideological subversion, this thing that they ve done with DEI and with universities and the education system, it just seems
9
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And like, you had to apply that to artificial intelligence, because you re essentially, you re giving artificial intelligence, these protocols, you re giving it these parameters in which it can address things.
9
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And if you re doing it through that lens, this is the inevitable result of that you re going to get black Nazis.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, no, I don t know about the black Nazi.
9
SPEAKER_01
I don t think it goes that extreme.
9
SPEAKER_02
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.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
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Again, I m not an expert in AI, but large language models are basically just consuming everything written and then spitting stuff back out.
9
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And so it might be that most stuff is written.
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The people on the left are dominant universities.
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They probably publish more books, whatever.
9
SPEAKER_01
But there s nothing written about black Nazis.
9
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
9
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That s right.
9
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So what I think is going on here
9
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is that I could see AI seeming to lean left, even if it wasn t programmed to lean left.
9
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That might just be the data input that it takes.
9
SPEAKER_01
But to get black Nazis, you need somebody had a program in those commands.
9
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Somebody had to consciously say, you know, anything about representation is going to, everything s going to look like a Benetton.
9
SPEAKER_01
No, it s not even like a Benetton.
9
SPEAKER_01
Benetton ads had much more diversity in the 1980s and 90s.
9
SPEAKER_01
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.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, how do they come back from that?
9
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
9
SPEAKER_01
That s a good question.
9
SPEAKER_01
I don t know how deep the rot runs.
9
SPEAKER_01
I don t know how bad things are.
9
SPEAKER_01
You know, Google used to have an amazing corporate culture.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh boy, look at this.
9
SPEAKER_02
Apple is in talks to let Google Gemini power iPhone AI features.
9
SPEAKER_02
Oh my god.
9
SPEAKER_02
Go back.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, go back.
9
SPEAKER_02
Companies considering AI deal that would build on search pact.
9
SPEAKER_02
Apple also recently held discussions with open AI about deal.
9
SPEAKER_01
On this news then, a bunch of big investment happened too.
9
SPEAKER_02
Magnificent 7 adds $350 billion on Gemini s reported iPhone deal.
9
SPEAKER_02
So because Google has implemented AI into their phone, specifically Samsung.
9
SPEAKER_02
Samsung s new Galaxy S24 Ultra.
9
SPEAKER_02
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.
9
SPEAKER_02
So because of that, another one is your ability to circle any image, and it automatically will search that image for you.
9
SPEAKER_02
Like, what is that?
9
SPEAKER_02
Circle it, boom.
9
SPEAKER_02
The Samsung phone will immediately give you a result and tell you what it is.
9
SPEAKER_02
So very, very helpful.
9
SPEAKER_02
But now there becomes, this is something that Apple has to compete with.
9
SPEAKER_02
So Apple s decided to try to implement AI, but it has to outsource.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
No, it is alarming.
9
SPEAKER_01
I guess 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.
9
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And I don t mean base-level employees.
9
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I mean the leadership.
9
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Institutions have important roles to play.
9
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Companies have missions.
9
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Universities must be completely committed to the truth, research, discovery.
9
SPEAKER_01
Journalists must be committed also to the truth and methods to find the truth.
9
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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.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so I think this is what we re seeing.
9
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And if we re going to make it through this difficult period, we need some way to find the truth.
9
SPEAKER_01
And the more we ve gone into the internet age, the harder it is to find the truth.
9
SPEAKER_01
We just look like something s incredible.
9
SPEAKER_01
We just say, hey, look this up, and we got it.
9
SPEAKER_01
But on anything contested, it s just very hard to find the truth.
9
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And so that s why I m especially disappointed in Google.
9
SPEAKER_01
I always loved Google.
9
SPEAKER_01
I thought it was an incredible company.
9
SPEAKER_01
And for them to so explicitly say, our mission is political.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s not to help you find the truth.
9
SPEAKER_01
That, I thought, was so disappointing.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it is disturbing when a large company decides their mission is political.
9
SPEAKER_02
Like, to which side?
9
SPEAKER_02
To who?
9
SPEAKER_02
Is it the truth?
9
SPEAKER_02
Is that your main politics?
9
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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?
9
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so that s a mindset in which the ends justify the means.
9
SPEAKER_01
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.
9
SPEAKER_01
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.
9
SPEAKER_01
And that s a very powerful image.
9
SPEAKER_01
And that s an image that helped Donald Trump win.
9
SPEAKER_01
There was an essay by Michael Anton, I think, called The Flight 93 Election.
9
SPEAKER_01
You know, if you re on Flight 93 being hijacked to crash into Congress, and, you know, if you do nothing, you re going to crash into Congress, you ll do anything.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so he framed it as a sort of a Hail Mary pass that, you know, patriotic Americans were supposed to vote for Donald Trump.
9
SPEAKER_01
That mindset of the ends justify the means, the situation is so dire that even violence is justified, that is really frightening.
9
SPEAKER_01
And that s my concern is that we could be headed that way.
9
SPEAKER_01
We have not had much political violence.
9
SPEAKER_01
There s been an uptick, but very little compared to, say, 1968 to 73.
9
SPEAKER_01
That period was much more violent.
9
SPEAKER_01
So I m hopeful we ll avoid that.
9
SPEAKER_01
But this, you know, 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.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, the other side s gonna do the same thing.
9
SPEAKER_01
And before you know it, your culture war becomes a real war.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_02
And you re seeing that in the news, how it s implemented in the news.
9
SPEAKER_02
I mean, I m sure you re aware of this recent Donald Trump speech where he talked about a bloodbath.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, God.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
9
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What the actual phrase was.
9
SPEAKER_02
See if you can find that, Jamie, because it s actually important to highlight how
9
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not just inaccurate, but it s 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.
9
SPEAKER_02
See, pull it up.
9
SPEAKER_02
Because it s so disturbing that they would, first of all, they would think that they could get away with it in this day and age with all the 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 demise of corporate media, the demise in trust.
9
SPEAKER_02
Trust in corporate media is at an all time low.
9
SPEAKER_02
And so this has led to a rise in true independent journalists.
9
SPEAKER_02
The real ones out there, the Matt Taibbi s, the Glenn Greenwald 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?
9
SPEAKER_02
But this one was bizarre.
9
SPEAKER_02
When I saw it, then I saw the actual speech.
9
SPEAKER_02
Let s play the actual speech.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I have the actual speech.
9
SPEAKER_01
The headlines are different, but I ll just play this.
9
SPEAKER_02
Let s play the actual speech.
9
SPEAKER_00
If you re listening, President Xi, and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal.
9
SPEAKER_00
Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you re building in Mexico right now
9
SPEAKER_00
And you think you re gonna get that, you re gonna not hire Americans, and you re gonna sell the cars to us?
9
SPEAKER_00
No.
9
SPEAKER_00
We re gonna put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line.
9
SPEAKER_00
And you re not gonna be able to sell those cars.
9
SPEAKER_00
If I get elected...
9
SPEAKER_00
Now, if I don t get elected, it s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that s going to be the least of it.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s going to be a bloodbath for the country.
9
SPEAKER_00
That ll be the least of it.
9
SPEAKER_00
If this election — if this election isn t won, I m not sure that you ll ever have another election in this country.
9
SPEAKER_00
Does that make sense?
9
SPEAKER_00
I don t think you re going to have another election in this country.
9
SPEAKER_00
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.
9
SPEAKER_00
And we better get out or we better.
9
SPEAKER_00
I 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.
9
SPEAKER_00
I believe that.
9
SPEAKER_00
So that s what he said.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, that sounds pretty bad.
9
SPEAKER_01
That sounds like the Flight 93 election argument, that if I don t win, the country s over.
9
SPEAKER_02
But what he was saying, 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.
9
SPEAKER_02
I don t think he s saying that it ll be a bloodbath in terms of a civil war.
9
SPEAKER_02
He s saying the economy s going to be destroyed.
9
SPEAKER_01
I was listening for that.
9
SPEAKER_01
I was thinking maybe he meant it as a metaphor.
9
SPEAKER_02
It s a long speech.
10
SPEAKER_02
I didn t hear any, I mean, the bloodbath is- It s an unfortunate term, but he s not, I don t think he s saying it s a civil war.
10
SPEAKER_03
It sounded to me like he was.
10
SPEAKER_03
It sounded to me like, you know, if he doesn t win, there will be violence.
10
SPEAKER_02
Right.
10
SPEAKER_02
You have to really give him a hell of a lot of benefit of the doubt.
10
SPEAKER_02
But he s talking about the economy.
10
SPEAKER_02
He s talking about- He was talking about the economy.
10
SPEAKER_02
No, it wasn t- He s talking about China building plants.
10
SPEAKER_02
He was talking- He s talking about all these things and saying that if he doesn t get elected,
10
SPEAKER_02
It s going to be a bloodbath.
10
SPEAKER_02
It s going to be a mess.
10
SPEAKER_02
I don t think he s specific.
10
SPEAKER_02
I mean, I think he would elaborate on that if he was saying there ll be violence.
10
SPEAKER_02
I don t think that s what he s saying.
10
SPEAKER_02
I think he s saying destruction of our economy, the destruction of our... You know, he makes a lot of asides.
10
SPEAKER_03
So he was talking about the economy.
10
SPEAKER_03
That s true.
10
SPEAKER_03
And then he said, if I m not elected, and then he makes an aside about what would happen to the country if he... So look, we might disagree on this.
10
SPEAKER_03
We might disagree.
10
SPEAKER_03
We surely disagree on our priors.
10
SPEAKER_02
It s surely the wrong way to say it.
10
SPEAKER_02
Surely, we both agree on that.
10
SPEAKER_02
It s an unfortunate term to use.
10
SPEAKER_03
For him to, yes, that s right.
10
SPEAKER_03
But it doesn t sound to me as though the media took that one out of context.
10
SPEAKER_01
I just re-watched a longer video on closed captioning.
10
SPEAKER_01
The video we watched cuts it off right after he says bloodbath.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, oh, ah, let s see.
10
SPEAKER_00
If I don t get elected, it s going to be a bloodbath for the whole, that s going to be the least of it.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s going to be a bloodbath for the country.
10
SPEAKER_00
That ll be the least of it.
10
SPEAKER_00
But they re not going to sell those cars.
10
SPEAKER_00
They re building massive factories.
10
SPEAKER_00
A friend of mine
10
SPEAKER_00
All he does is build car manufacturing.
10
SPEAKER_03
Okay, so he s back on the economy.
10
SPEAKER_03
But the aside was not about the economy.
10
SPEAKER_03
The aside was him making one of these typical asides about how, you know, how important he is.
10
SPEAKER_03
All right.
10
SPEAKER_03
Joe, I think we re not going to settle this.
10
SPEAKER_03
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.
10
SPEAKER_03
Most of the people who work in these industries, I think, are wonderful and are trying to do a good job.
10
SPEAKER_03
But the net effect, and this is my point about structural stupidity,
10
SPEAKER_03
During our culture war, institutions that have had very little viewpoint diversity have been subject to hijacking by those with a political agenda.
10
SPEAKER_03
So I agree with you about that, although I disagree with you about what that comment from Donald Trump meant.
10
SPEAKER_03
It sounded to me like it was not taken out of context.
10
SPEAKER_02
Trevor Burrus Well, he was talking about the economy, though, specifically.
10
SPEAKER_02
Aaron Ross Powell Before, yeah, I know, but in the aside, he wasn t.
10
SPEAKER_02
Trevor Burrus But even in the aside, he elaborates in the aside about the economy.
10
SPEAKER_03
No, he just makes this aside about the bloodbath, but that s the least of our problems now back to what I was saying about the economy All right.
10
SPEAKER_03
Look, we re not gonna say this one.
10
SPEAKER_02
It s a terrible term It s a very unfortunate term if he said it would be a disaster instead of a bloodbath.
10
SPEAKER_02
That would have been the better term Yes, would it be a reasonable thing, but he s filled with hyperbole.
10
SPEAKER_02
I mean he s talking about he s trying to excite people You re right words matter when your presidential campaign
10
SPEAKER_02
They do.
10
SPEAKER_02
You re right.
10
SPEAKER_02
But no, no argument there.
10
SPEAKER_02
And no, I mean, I m in no way saying that that was the correct thing to say.
10
SPEAKER_02
But the way they phrased it, the way they just they just tried to make it seem like that was the only thing that he was talking about.
10
SPEAKER_03
Okay, I m just not getting anything else.
10
SPEAKER_02
I get it.
10
SPEAKER_03
Um, but What you re saying is that these people are good people, but that they are Ideologically captured is that we were saying what I m saying is that most people are reasonable wherever you go But in the social media age, it s no longer about what most people are like it s about how much power to the extremists have because anyone now has the power to hijack threaten intimidate and
10
SPEAKER_03
So yeah, that s that s that s my concern and that means it s actually more easily fixable because if it would be one thing if you know if 90% of Journalists were rabid left-wingers who didn t give a damn about journalistic integrity and that s just not true, right?
10
SPEAKER_03
In most of the journalists I ve met I ve met are really good journalists like they really care about sourcing and accuracy and
10
SPEAKER_03
And it s the same with professors.
10
SPEAKER_03
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.
10
SPEAKER_03
That s just not true.
10
SPEAKER_03
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.
10
SPEAKER_02
Is the issue that the reasonable people are afraid of pushing back against the radical people?
10
SPEAKER_02
Exactly.
10
SPEAKER_03
That s it.
10
SPEAKER_03
That s the issue.
10
SPEAKER_02
Because there really are consequences in terms of that.
10
SPEAKER_03
That s right.
10
SPEAKER_03
And people say, well, you ve got tenure.
10
SPEAKER_03
What are you worried about?
10
SPEAKER_03
And the answer is, yeah, we ve got incredible security, but everybody is afraid of being publicly shamed, humiliated, attacked, and mocked.
10
SPEAKER_03
Right and the people who go through it.
10
SPEAKER_03
I mean, it s it s really it s incredibly painful They they have to take take sleeping pills at night.
10
SPEAKER_03
They 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?
10
SPEAKER_03
But of the hyper viral ones that we got in the 2010s
10
SPEAKER_02
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.
10
SPEAKER_02
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, which is just…
10
SPEAKER_02
Insane right?
10
SPEAKER_02
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?
10
SPEAKER_02
Especially from somewhere like Harvard.
10
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I could just yeah, so so yes, I m a professor at NYU I was at UVA for 16 years.
10
SPEAKER_03
I love being a professor.
10
SPEAKER_03
I love universities I m also Jewish and I can understand the argument that those that those presidents were making the argument was a very narrow technical argument and
10
SPEAKER_03
about whether students should be allowed to say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
10
SPEAKER_03
And so I understand why it would have been reasonable for them to say, well, we re not going to punish students for saying that.
10
SPEAKER_03
That is political speech that s protected under the First Amendment.
10
SPEAKER_03
So I understand the point that they were making.
10
SPEAKER_03
But they were such screaming hypocrites in making that point.
10
SPEAKER_03
And this is what the Kotlin American Man was all about.
10
SPEAKER_03
How did it happen that if a professor or administrator writes a single word that a student objects to and calls racist, suddenly this person is now out of a job.
10
SPEAKER_03
Really?
10
SPEAKER_03
You re going to fire someone or let someone be tormented and fired because they said something?
10
SPEAKER_03
that someone interpreted in a certain way.
10
SPEAKER_03
And that led us to be super hyper crazy sensitive about every word we say because you never know when it ll explode and cause a scandal.
10
SPEAKER_03
And so for the presidents to say, oh yeah, anything anyone ever said between 2015 and yesterday would be punished if anyone was bothered by it.
10
SPEAKER_03
But, from the river to the sea, oh yeah, sure, that s constitutionally protected.
10
SPEAKER_02
But it wasn t just from the river to the sea, it was the literal expression, death to Jews.
10
SPEAKER_03
Yes, that s right.
10
SPEAKER_02
And that s what they were specifically defending, saying, unless it s actionable, which is insane, unless you commit actual genocide?
10
SPEAKER_02
Is that what you re saying?
10
SPEAKER_03
No, I m sorry, Joe, you re right.
10
SPEAKER_03
The deeper question is about political speech, but you re right that, as Stefanik, I believe, was asking them, it was about calls for genocide.
10
SPEAKER_03
Yes, and so so yes calls for genocide.
10
SPEAKER_03
It seems to me, you know again, I m not a First Amendment lawyer Maybe from 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 on
10
SPEAKER_03
not just about the calls for genocide, but about the actual events on October 7th.
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So that, I think, is what really brought higher ed to really a nadir, a low point in public esteem, like literally a low point in public esteem.
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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.
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Because these are the same people that call for you being kicked out of the university if you deadname someone.
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Yeah, that s right.
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These are the same people that if you use the wrong pronouns.
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Yeah, that s right.
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And so I m actually, you know, so last semester was the worst one ever for higher education.
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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.
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And 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.
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And then since 2015, it s dropped, not just among people on the right, but among centrists and moderates as well.
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So higher ed really lost the trust of most of the country.
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And I was running an organization called Heterodox Academies.
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I started it with some other social scientists that advocates for viewpoint diversity.
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And that s why I was kind of a target sometimes, because here I am saying, we need viewpoint diversity.
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We need some conservatives, some libertarians.
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We need to not all be on the same side politically.
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Which is an amazing thing to fight against.
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Yeah, that s right.
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That s right.
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We re the experts in why diversity is beneficial, and the most important kind of diversity turns out to be viewpoint diversity.
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Well, it s also the most important aspect of an open and free society is the ability to debate things.
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Yeah, that s right.
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Democracy is based on it.
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And find out who s right or whose ideas resonate the most, who makes the most sense, who has thought about this.
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further and who has the more enlightened and educated perspective?
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Who has more information?
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Who has more balance?
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That s right.
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That s right.
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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 change, because I ve been concerned about these issues in universities, the culture issues, since 2014, 2015, when Greg Lukianoff and I wrote our first Atlantic article titled The Coddling of the American Mind.
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And every year it s gotten worse and worse and worse.
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There s never been a turnaround until last year.
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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.
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But then when somebody does, then everybody can speak.
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And I m feeling, finally, for the first time since 2015, I m feeling that people sort of understand, you know what, wait, that was crazy what happened to us.
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That was crazy.
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People were saying crazy stuff.
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Let s put our head above the parapet.
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Let s start sometimes saying, maybe that is not right.
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So I think that things are actually going to turn around.
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Maybe not at the Ivies, although there are movements of faculty there saying, no, let s return to academic values, the pursuit of truth.
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So I think what I m hoping, what I think is likely to happen, is we re going to see a split in the academic world.
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That 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.
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And I think we re going to see more students going that way.
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The University of Chicago is another model.
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So I think there were a few schools that departed while almost all the other schools went in the same direction.
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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.
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I ve spoken to many of them.
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All the crazy politics, the activist students, it made their job very difficult.
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So, I m actually hopeful that we re going to start, and we are starting to see some university presidents standing up and saying, you know, it s not okay to shout down every conservative speaker.
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Like, no, we re not going to allow that.
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So, you know, we ll see, you know, a year from now, if I come back on in a year or two, we ll see.
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But I think things are actually beginning to get better for the first time since 2015.
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Well, I hope you re correct, and I do agree that the pushback was so extreme that some action is likely to take place.
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I think the first step of that has got to be to allow people with differing perspectives to debate and not shout them down.
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And also to show that that shouting people down and setting off fire alarms is shameful.
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It s disgraceful.
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That s right.
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That s where we have to get to.
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In higher education institutions.
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That s right.
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If there was any punishment, the students would change very quickly.
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The students were very concerned about getting a job, about their futures, and 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.
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You can bang on the glass and frighten speakers, nothing will happen to you.
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You can throw rocks through windows, nothing will happen to you.
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And of course that just brought us more obnoxious behavior on campus and shame to higher ed in the eyes of the country.
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So we had a brand that was based on extreme excellence and truth.
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I think we damaged our brand very severely.
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I think finally now there s a reckoning and a realization of what we ve done.
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And I think we re going to see a recovery, an uneven recovery.
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But I do think that a year or two from now, the mood, well, who knows what s going to happen with the election and whether there ll be a bloodbath.
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No, don t take that out of context.
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I just was referring to the early part of our conversation that you re not quoting when you quote this.
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Yeah, let s say disaster.
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Yeah, disaster.
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It could be a disaster.
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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.
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I wasn t optimistic a year or two ago.
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Well, that s great because you re on the ground.
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So you would really understand more than most.
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And do you sense that with students, there s also a recognition that this is a gigantic issue?
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Like, what was the reaction to students?
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I mean, not specifically Jewish students, but the Jewish students must have been the most horrified by this.
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Yes.
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Oh, my God.
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Yes.
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Stabbed in the back is the way many of us feel.
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What I ve found all along, as I say, most people are reasonable.
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When all this stuff was breaking out in 2015, 2016, most students just wanted to get an education.
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They don t want to take part in this.
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And now I find out, of course I teach in a business school.
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I teach at NYU Stern.
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Our students are pretty pragmatic.
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They want to get a job.
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Most of them are from immigrant backgrounds.
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They re not here to protest the latest political.
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They re here to succeed, that s right.
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So, you know, so that is an aspect of Gen Z that gives me hope, is that they, you know, they see the problems.
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They see the problems with social media.
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They see the problems with extreme activists.
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So what we have to change is not the average student.
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We have to change the dynamics so that the average student feels freer to speak up.
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And how can that be done?
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Well, so I founded two organizations to do that.
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One is Heterodox Academy.
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We need more viewpoint diversity among the professors, or at least we need more toleration of people who are centrist or libertarian.
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So that s one on the faculty side, what we need to do, and also the culture on campus.
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But I also co-founded another organization called the Constructive Dialogue Institute with a woman named Caroline Mill.
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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 evolved.
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It s now six 30-minute modules that teach you about moral psychology, why are we divided, what do liberals believe, what do conservatives believe.
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Why do conversations go wrong?
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How can you start more skillfully?
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How do you need to listen first?
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So there s a lot of like Dale Carnegie sort of wisdom in there, and it s really effective.
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So if people go to constructivedialogue.org, the program is called Perspectives.
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It s being used in, you know, I think more than 50 universities now.
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So there are things that we can do, but it s going to take leadership and good psychology.
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That s so important what you just said.
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And I think that if those programs gain momentum and that people recognize that it s really beneficial to all to have these ideas debated.
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If you truly believe that opposing ideas to your ideology are evil, you should be able to debate those.
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And the only way to do that is to have someone to have the ability to express themselves.
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and for you to counter those points that they make.
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Exactly.
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And this is what many commentators on the left have been pointing out since 2015.
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Van Jones has an amazing talk.
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He s a progressive, democratic, well-connected, smart person.
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And he s been pointing out, there s a great talk he gave at the University of Chicago, I have a quote on this in the Coddling the American Mind, where he talks about the move to protect students from bad feelings, the move to protect them for emotional safety, is really bad for the students.
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But then his talk goes on and he says, this is actually really bad for the Democrats.
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It s really bad for young activists to drown out opposition, to not listen to the arguments, to not get stronger.
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And so, you know, a lot of these, a lot of what s happened on campus, I think, is what you might call a Pyrrhic victory.
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A Pyrrhic victory is one where you won the battle, but that made you lose the war.
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And so, you know, I think when institutions, you know, when your side is able to wipe out opposition, it might feel like a victory at first,
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But it s ultimately going to weaken you.
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And the same thing is going on in the far right.
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I mean, there s a lot more fear and really bad consequences for people who dissent on the right, too.
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But if we re talking about universities, that s more an issue of what s been happening on the left.
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Yeah, are there any universities that don t have a left-leaning perspective?
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Oh, sure, sure.
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Like what universities?
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Yeah, not in the top 20 or 50, I would say.
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Right.
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Isn t that a problem?
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Well, that is a problem.
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That s right.
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Yeah, it is.
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Well, actually, no, but let s put it this way.
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First of all, I mean, there are lots of religious universities, Christian universities that don t have this problem.
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There are, let s see, there are large state schools tend to have much less of it, because again, most people are reasonable.
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The great majority of faculty want to do their research, teach their classes.
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They don t want to get involved in this stuff.
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The problem is especially severe, for some reason, the Ivy League schools, that s what s really surprising.
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I thought it was just like, well, the elite schools.
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No, it s actually the Ivies are 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.
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Something about the Ivies makes them more extreme.
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What do you think that is?
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Well, I think it s in part the region.
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So most of the shout downs, most, you know, Greg Lukianoff and FIRE, they ve really been tracking this for a long time.
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Most of the shout downs happen in the Northeast and along the West Coast and then around Chicago.
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That s where most of the really nasty stuff happens.
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This is not happening at the great majority of American universities.
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It s not happening in the top schools in the South.
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It s not happening at top schools in the Southwest.
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So, it is important.
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part where it is, and then I think also the Ivy League is full of really rich kids.
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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%.
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So there s a real concentration, especially in the Ivies, of 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.
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Hmm.
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It s just, I just fear for the children that come out of that to 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.
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almost like a 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 tik-tok not from your parents or your friends or your teachers So again, this is back to the problem.
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That s right.
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So again back to the question of the tik-tok ban and
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The issue here is not, should we ban TikTok?
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The issue is, should American law require a divestiture of TikTok from a Chinese corporation that is beholden to the CCP?
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That s the question.
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Trevor Burrus Which seems logical.
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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.
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And so there s all this pushback about whether or not they should be able to require age verification.
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You have to be 18 to use porn websites, which I think is very reasonable.
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Yes.
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It s insane that we re even debating it.
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Yeah, we re running a mass psychology experiment on children by having smartphones with large screens and having instantaneous access to porn.
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That s right.
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That s right.
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I mean, I forget the exact number, but a very large number of boys are on PornHub or porn sites daily, every day.
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And, again, as we were talking about before, in puberty, the prefrontal cortex, the brain s really rewiring itself.
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This is when you re supposed to be developing the ability for a boy to talk to a girl, you know, for straight kids.
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And it s hard, because boys and girls, they think a little differently.
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It s awkward.
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There are always mistakes.
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They need to be practicing.
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But instead, they re exposed to this diet of just horrible, horrible stuff.
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And the girls see it too.
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The girls are not on as much, but they re all exposed to it.
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And so we now see that many more members of Gen Z, they don t want to get married.
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They don t want to have children.
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They re not having as much sex.
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I kind of understand it.
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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.
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It s also so distorted, the relationships in these porn videos.
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It s bizarre fantasy.
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And if bizarre fantasy... And about step-siblings, like why is so much about step-sisters?
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I mean... It s a lot of step-moms, too.
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Right.
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So the whole thing is sick.
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And once again, I m not going to tell adults what they should do with their spare time.
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But for God s sakes, I am going to try to tell companies that they can t just have access to my kids from the age of 9 or 10 and do what they want with them.
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So, you know, I don t know the details of the Texas law.
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But I think we ve got to do something to age-gate pornography.
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Like, I just can t see, I mean, yes, there s a libertarian argument on the other side that, oh, we should never, you know, require identification from anyone for anything.
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Well, if that s the way you re going to go, no restrictions, no, no, no, you know, then either we have to keep kids off the internet, which is insane.
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We can t keep them off of the entire internet.
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Or we have to say, you know what?
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Maybe some companies should be held liable.
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Maybe Congress was wrong to grant them blanket immunity from lawsuits for what they re doing to our kids.
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I think we should change that.
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Do you think, at a certain point in time, all this is going to become more obvious?
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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... Yes.
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Over time, the negative effects of it are just so obvious.
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Yes, and I think that is happening right now.
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We re right at the beginning of the tipping point.
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And I m confident about this because the tipping point began in Britain last month.
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So parents everywhere are fed up.
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They all see it.
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They don t know what to do, but they re all frustrated.
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In Britain, some parents put up a website to lay smartphones.
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People rush to it.
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They had a WhatsApp group for parents to come together.
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Thousands and thousands joined right away.
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In Britain, the government actually has mandated phone-free schools, which is one of my four norms.
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So whenever you have a situation where most people hate it, but they re either afraid or confused, that can change really, really quickly.
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And that s like the fall of the Berlin Wall, fall of the Iron Curtain.
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We thought it was going to be there forever.
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But since most people hated it, I traveled behind the Iron Curtain in 1987.
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Everybody hated it.
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And so once the Berlin Wall fell, it fell everywhere very quickly.
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I think the same is going to be true for social media and the digital environment for children.
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I think that 2024 is going to be, for the digital environment, what 1989 was for Soviet communism.
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Parents 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.
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So I m actually again, you know, I think universities are Going to get are actually now they are now actually getting better now that they ve been through through that and I think that the situation around kids and digital media is
12
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is going to change radically this year.
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That s my goal in writing the book, in writing The Anxious Generation.
12
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And I have this amazing collaborator, the artist Dave Cicerelli.
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So these stickers here that I gave you, I don t know if we can hold them up.
12
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I ll just hold them up for my camera.
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It s a milk carton with a child on it, and it says, Missing Childhood.
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So my friend Dave Cicerelli is a great artist in New York City.
12
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He designed the cover for the book, and he and I had a plan for some like guerrilla art campaign with posters, you know, linking, you know, Instagram to cigarettes, that sort of thing, a couple years ago.
12
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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.
12
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It s going to be on the National Mall in Washington this Friday.
12
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If you re in D.C., check it out.
12
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It s coming to New York City, the northeast corner of Union Square.
12
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I ll be there on March 26th, 25th rather, 25th and 26th.
12
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I ll be there on the 25th.
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We re starting a national movement.
12
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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.
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Because as I said, we can escape this if we work together.
12
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It doesn t have to be all of us.
12
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But if a lot of us say, we re not going to give our kids smartphones until 14, we re not going to let them open an Instagram or TikTok account until they re 16, we 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.
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If we do those four norms, we really can turn that around, and I m confident we are at the tipping point right now.
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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.
12
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Well, I hope you re right, Jonathan.
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And I really appreciate you.
12
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And I really appreciate you writing this and spending so much time on this and thinking about it so thoroughly.
12
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The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
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It s available right now.
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Go get it, folks.
12
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Listen to it.
12
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Read it.
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Absorb it.
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Take it in.
12
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Thank you very much.
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Really appreciate you.
12
SPEAKER_00
Thank you, Joe.
12
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It s always fun to talk with you.
12
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Fun to talk to you, too.
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Thank you.
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Bye, everybody.