The Megyn Kelly Show - A Culture of Fear, Social Media Toxicity, and America's Descent Into Stupidity, with Jonathan Haidt

00:00:00.500 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.700 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:15.140 Here's the question for you on a Monday morning.

00:00:17.460 Are we living through a uniquely stupid time in American history?

00:00:22.720 Have you woken up recently and said to yourself, how the hell did we get like this?

00:00:28.000 What happened to the America of 10 years ago?

00:00:32.080 What's going on? Why can't we talk to each other?

00:00:34.260 Why does everyone hate each other?

00:00:35.980 Why is there no more truth?

00:00:38.140 Well, we've got some answers for you today, and they're great.

00:00:40.980 They're so insightful. I've really enjoyed preparing for today's interview.

00:00:44.060 Here with us today to explain our societal lapse in intelligence, among other problems,

00:00:48.780 is social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business, Jonathan Haidt.

00:00:55.000 Jonathan is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Righteous Mind,

00:00:59.520 Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,

00:01:01.980 and the absolutely brilliant and just game-changing, The Coddling of the American Mind,

00:01:08.800 which he co-wrote with Greg Lukianoff, who's also been on the show earlier,

00:01:14.340 talking about what's happening on universities and his work to sort of document it and fight for free speech.

00:01:19.480 Now, Jonathan's latest Atlantic column from April is called

00:01:23.580 Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,

00:01:27.120 and man, did it get everyone talking because of its brilliant insights.

00:01:30.380 His mission is to use research on moral psychology to help people understand each other

00:01:35.180 and to help important social institutions work better so you can sense his frustration

00:01:40.580 because those things are not going so well right now.

00:01:47.880 Jonathan, welcome to the program.

00:01:49.480 Thanks so much, Megan. What a pleasure to be talking with you.

00:01:52.220 Oh, the pleasure is entirely mine.

00:01:54.520 Cannot wait to tap into your wealth of intellectual resources.

00:01:58.360 So let's start with, because I love The Coddling of the American Mind.

00:02:02.380 It just had such great insights, and it covered a lot of stuff that I'd been covering on the news

00:02:06.260 for the previous 10 years because I lived it.

00:02:08.980 And when I think about your latest round of research, I think about the birth of my children.

00:02:13.420 I had a son in 2009.

00:02:14.940 I had a daughter in 2011, and then I had a son in 2013.

00:02:19.500 And so that's the time frame during which we lost our collective ever-loving minds as a country, right?

00:02:25.960 So that's going to sort of the mark of their arrival corresponds with the time where our society just went nuts.

00:02:32.880 It went nuts.

00:02:33.660 And I know that we've felt it.

00:02:36.080 I know the listeners to this show and the viewers have felt it, but perhaps not diagnosed.

00:02:41.720 How did it happen?

00:02:43.280 How?

00:02:43.940 All the stuff that, you know, Greg's been working against on college campuses and that led you guys to write The Coddling,

00:02:49.020 all of that, it's so far beyond what it was when you looked at it.

00:02:56.180 It's out of the frying pan and into the fire.

00:02:58.380 Things have exploded.

00:02:59.360 It's gotten so much worse.

00:03:01.160 And I know we all know that, but why and how can it be stopped?

00:03:05.480 Because you can't arrest it unless you understand it.

00:03:07.500 That's where your latest round of research and writing and your next book come in.

00:03:12.420 So let's start there on, weirdly, the Tower of Babel.

00:03:17.640 Okay, explain that, what that is, and why that's your focus.

00:03:21.560 Sure.

00:03:22.600 So I've been a professor since 1995, and I love being a professor.

00:03:27.800 I love universities.

00:03:29.320 And it just seemed like all of a sudden, in 2014, something changed.

00:03:33.320 Something changed, like, in the fabric of space-time.

00:03:36.280 And weird stuff started happening.

00:03:38.720 And I saw some of that on campus here at NYU.

00:03:41.500 And then Greg Lukianoff came to talk to me.

00:03:43.820 We'd met through a mutual friend in May of 2014.

00:03:46.480 And he said, John, weird stuff is happening.

00:03:48.380 And he had a theory as to why.

00:03:50.140 Well, it turns out our theory was partially wrong.

00:03:53.400 We thought universities were causing this to happen.

00:03:56.700 And now we know, no, this was a much bigger thing happening that affected Gen Z.

00:04:01.100 It affected kids born after 1996.

00:04:03.460 So your kids, my kids, my daughter is 12, my son is 15.

00:04:07.560 So I've been trying since 2014 to figure out what on earth happened.

00:04:12.420 Why did so many things change in such weird and strange ways?

00:04:15.560 And I've always been looking for metaphors.

00:04:17.420 I think we need metaphors to understand anything complicated, anything that we don't, doesn't

00:04:21.560 sort of fit easily into our minds.

00:04:23.720 And it was when I went back and reread the Babel story.

00:04:26.860 It's, you know, it's a short little story in Genesis.

00:04:29.020 And it's that the descendants of Noah are spreading out across the plain of Shinar, and they decide

00:04:36.140 to build a city with a tower to reach onto heaven.

00:04:39.240 And God thinks this is hubristic.

00:04:41.460 Well, there are a variety of theories I've heard as to why God didn't like this.

00:04:46.720 But in any case, God, he doesn't actually physically destroy the tower.

00:04:50.220 What the text says, and this is the key line, he says, let us go down and confuse their language

00:04:56.020 so that they may not understand one another.

00:04:59.480 And so I reread that.

00:05:00.320 I found that story again a couple of years ago, and I thought, oh my God, that's it.

00:05:03.360 That's what happened to us.

00:05:04.660 Because it's not just a story about tribalism, like left versus right.

00:05:07.780 That's been getting worse since the 1990s.

00:05:09.900 It's a story about how everything has come apart.

00:05:12.740 And if you have a group of people that are entirely on the left or entirely on the right,

00:05:17.500 they're going to fight and find ways to fragment internally.

00:05:20.680 So something changed.

00:05:21.980 It feels like everything is crumbling since the early 2010s.

00:05:26.020 And in the metaphor, is the new God social media?

00:05:32.420 Or the devil or the whatever you want to call it.

00:05:35.900 It's not a force for good.

00:05:37.480 It's not a force for good.

00:05:39.340 And so what I, you know, I think, look, we've all seen dozens of articles about how

00:05:44.480 social media is destroying everything and destroying kids.

00:05:48.100 And I think why my article is a little different is that I'm a social psychologist.

00:05:52.120 And I wasn't just saying, you know, it's bad and here's why.

00:05:55.440 I was really trying to dig into what exactly is it that it did to social relations?

00:06:00.480 What did it do to communication?

00:06:02.880 And so the story, I think the best way in is to put it in a narrative form, where once

00:06:08.700 upon a time, we had this incredible time of optimism in the 1990s.

00:06:13.560 Those of us old enough to remember, the 1990s went to the end of the Cold War and, you know,

00:06:19.680 new technology.

00:06:21.940 And America even had a surplus in its debt for the first time in a long time.

00:06:26.440 It was this amazing time of techno-democratic optimism.

00:06:30.020 We thought that we defeated the Soviets.

00:06:31.960 We defeated all the authoritarians.

00:06:33.780 It's going to be liberal democracy from here on in.

00:06:35.840 And then when social media comes in, in the early days, 2004 or so, people think this is

00:06:43.080 going to be a great force for democracy.

00:06:44.680 This is going to democratize power and voice.

00:06:48.160 And in 2011, the Arab, that year, that amazing year, begins with the Arab Spring, where Facebook

00:06:54.240 and a few other platforms helped the people of Egypt and Tunisia.

00:06:57.820 It helped them to bring down those Arab dictators.

00:07:00.580 And we thought democracy is going to break out in the Arab world.

00:07:03.520 And that year ends with Occupy Wall Street.

00:07:05.420 And once again, populist movement, now this is more of a left-wing populist movement, but

00:07:08.880 the people have power.

00:07:10.620 So it was a time of enormous optimism about the power of this technology to help democracy.

00:07:17.180 But then after that, everything turns around.

00:07:19.300 And now democracy is on the back foot, as they say in Britain, and authoritarians, I know

00:07:25.140 you had Tristan Harris on your show.

00:07:26.880 Tristan points out that China is using this technology.

00:07:30.140 To make themselves better authoritarians, as it were.

00:07:33.520 And it's making us worse Democrats, worse at democracy.

00:07:37.720 So what I was trying to show is that the central problem with social media is that it doesn't

00:07:42.060 actually make us communicate.

00:07:43.480 It doesn't, you know, we can communicate with text and Zoom and phone calls.

00:07:46.900 There's all kinds of ways to really talk to someone authentically.

00:07:49.680 But when you put something out on social media, you're performing.

00:07:52.460 And then you wait to see what everyone says about it.

00:07:54.780 And so it's this incentive that makes us want to perform at others to impress still

00:08:00.640 others, often strangers.

00:08:02.240 That's what warps everything.

00:08:04.080 And that's what encourages us to just fight among ourselves constantly.

00:08:09.040 And we can't have a democracy if we're just fighting among ourselves all the time.

00:08:13.160 The founding fathers knew that.

00:08:14.260 I remember all the good press about social media back in 2011 during the Arab Spring,

00:08:19.760 which also had a different ending than the one that we were hoping for when that broke.

00:08:26.460 But to me, it's almost like, you know, you go out on the date with the person.

00:08:29.820 And on the first date, the person sweeps you off of your feet and they're utterly charming

00:08:34.840 and they're beautiful and they're smart.

00:08:36.780 And you're thinking, oh, my God, this is wonderful.

00:08:38.720 And then you flash forward a few years.

00:08:40.680 This is our relationship with social media as well.

00:08:42.620 And that the person's become a stalker.

00:08:45.180 The person's extremely controlling.

00:08:46.820 The person can't let go of you or your time.

00:08:49.120 The person's made you less happy.

00:08:51.040 Right.

00:08:51.220 Like this is this is the 30,000 foot zoom out on what's happened between us and social media.

00:08:57.220 And by us, I mean, our our society, our world that goes beyond America, as you do a good

00:09:02.140 job of pointing out every time you get get back to.

00:09:04.680 Is it just American girls that are deeply depressed?

00:09:07.700 It's not.

00:09:08.360 If you look at other societies, all these things are spiking in sort of the Western world

00:09:13.020 and the beginning, the onset of it is always linked back to right when social media, it's

00:09:19.940 not even just the creation of the iPhone in 2007.

00:09:21.940 It's the birth and explosion of social media, which was the game changer.

00:09:27.220 Um, I want to this is from your article.

00:09:30.100 You write something went terribly wrong.

00:09:31.520 Very suddenly we are disoriented, unable to speak the same language back to the Babel

00:09:36.020 comment or recognize the same truth.

00:09:38.680 We are cut off from one another and from the past.

00:09:41.780 So I was feeling this just last week or recognize the same truth, you know, in the wake of the

00:09:47.220 terrible Buffalo shooting.

00:09:48.560 Look what the country did.

00:09:49.880 Right.

00:09:50.320 You must have been watching this, John, like half the country went to this is all to be

00:09:55.120 blamed on the right, on the political right.

00:09:57.220 I mean, there was literally an article in Rolling Stone saying that the shooting was

00:10:00.240 a mainstream Republican type of ideology at work.

00:10:03.700 And then, you know, the right looking at it and seeing something very different and

00:10:07.680 and being, I think, outraged that anybody tried to blame it on a political party as

00:10:13.240 opposed to radicalization by a guy who was drawn to the Internet and wasn't doing well

00:10:16.440 emotionally, mentally and so on.

00:10:18.120 But it really is at the point where it's just two totally different truths.

00:10:21.380 You know, like if you watched MSNBC last week, you would have thought you are an evil person

00:10:25.480 if you are a registered Republican.

00:10:27.440 You are hashtag part of the problem of massive white supremacy and mass shootings in America.

00:10:31.980 And you would have felt something very different had you turned into Fox News or any other

00:10:36.860 more conservative digital media.

00:10:38.460 Right.

00:10:39.040 It's and you could do that on any given week of the year.

00:10:41.600 Yeah, that's right.

00:10:45.140 Well, so the first thing to keep in mind as we go through this is that most Americans

00:10:49.820 are actually pretty reasonable.

00:10:51.720 Most Americans don't want to attack anyone, destroy the reputation.

00:10:57.460 Most Americans are sick and tired of what's going on.

00:11:00.400 Part of what social media did is it changed who has voice, as it were, because it's always

00:11:06.540 the case.

00:11:07.660 It's always the case that the people on the far right and far left are going to be more

00:11:10.660 passionate.

00:11:11.160 Whoever's more passionate is going to talk more.

00:11:13.240 So they're always going to have more voice, more representation than the people in the

00:11:16.240 middle.

00:11:16.880 But when social media becomes very widely used, and this is really around 2011, 2012, is when

00:11:22.540 most people now have a smartphone and now they can be on it every day, 10, 20, 50 times

00:11:27.920 a day.

00:11:29.220 When it gives when social media becomes widely used and it becomes much more viralized,

00:11:34.420 which we'll talk about in a moment, I hope, the extremes are going to have much more

00:11:37.680 voice.

00:11:38.680 And the middle 80% of the country, we just keep our head down.

00:11:42.220 We don't want to be in the shooting war.

00:11:44.520 And so it looks as though we all hate each other.

00:11:47.440 It looks as though all there is out there is extremists.

00:11:49.400 That's not true.

00:11:50.560 That's part of the hall of mirrors that social media does to us.

00:11:53.920 Our minds, we evolved to have a really, we really care what public opinion is.

00:11:59.180 We want to size up.

00:12:00.240 What are people thinking?

00:12:00.980 And in a small community, you can actually tell what people are thinking, just try to

00:12:06.080 look on their face as people are talking.

00:12:08.360 But in the social media world, we have no idea what people are thinking.

00:12:11.120 All we know is what people are tweeting or posting on Instagram, whatever it is.

00:12:14.180 And that's never representative of public opinion.

00:12:16.620 It really is a big news.

00:12:17.700 That's part of what happened to us.

00:12:18.980 Yeah.

00:12:19.700 Yeah.

00:12:20.100 So let's go through it because you take on the three major forces that bind successful

00:12:24.560 democracies together.

00:12:25.560 And you make the case that social media has undermined all three in America and beyond.

00:12:31.320 Number one, social capital, which you describe as extensive social networks with high level

00:12:35.940 of trust.

00:12:36.680 Two is strong institutions.

00:12:38.020 Three is shared stories.

00:12:39.500 Those get much more interesting as we get into the details.

00:12:42.640 So the first one, social capital, extensive social networks with high levels of trust.

00:12:47.580 What does that mean?

00:12:49.020 So social capital is a it's one of the most common terms in the social sciences and refers

00:12:54.240 to the fact that if you have two companies and one has a lot of financial capital, you

00:12:59.440 know, money that they can invest, that if everything else is equal, that company is going to outperform

00:13:04.220 the one with less financial capital.

00:13:06.760 Similarly, if you have two companies or sports teams or towns or nations, identical in all

00:13:12.940 respects, except one, people really trust each other.

00:13:15.580 I don't have to monitor.

00:13:17.220 Like if we're having an election, I don't think that you're going to cheat and steal.

00:13:21.340 We trust each other.

00:13:22.360 That country is going to be much more successful than one with low trust.

00:13:26.340 And we've seen this throughout the 20th century.

00:13:28.300 That was part of the problem with communism.

00:13:29.660 The communist countries, everyone knows everyone is lying and there's no trust.

00:13:33.840 So America used to have very high trust up until the 60s or early 70s, equivalent to many

00:13:39.560 of the most successful European countries.

00:13:42.560 But we've been on a downward slide.

00:13:44.220 And so if you lose trust, if you lose social capital, now that brings us to the next issue,

00:13:50.580 which is strong or shared institutions, institutions that we trust.

00:13:55.700 A dictatorship is based on the strength of the ruler and the army and his ability to intimidate

00:14:00.740 everyone into obedience.

00:14:02.540 A democracy such as ours or a republic or whatever you want to call it.

00:14:05.660 But if the founding fathers didn't want a king or a monarch, they believed in government of

00:14:10.880 the people, by the people.

00:14:12.500 And so they create, they took, we were lucky to inherit good British institutions and then

00:14:18.300 we improved them.

00:14:19.500 And those have lasted us well.

00:14:21.120 Obviously, they've performed badly at certain points.

00:14:23.400 But on a world historical scale, American institutions work very, very well.

00:14:28.160 And now they're malfunctioning.

00:14:29.980 We trust them less, in part because they are less trustworthy, but also in part because we

00:14:34.360 are just saturated, saturated with stories about their failures.

00:14:38.340 Some of those stories are true, some are false.

00:14:40.840 So if we don't trust each other, if we don't trust our institutions, including even our courts,

00:14:46.720 our legislatures, our public schools, if we don't trust them, it's going to be very

00:14:51.860 hard to have a country we could actually fail as a country.

00:14:56.480 I know the third of the third is the shared stories.

00:14:59.820 Yeah, shared stories.

00:15:00.760 Go ahead.

00:15:01.620 Yeah, the third is shared stories.

00:15:02.860 So the secret to binding people together, you know, in my writing, I'm very interested

00:15:11.220 in evolution.

00:15:12.020 I look at how other species get cooperation, and it's almost always because they're siblings.

00:15:16.460 Bees are the quintessential example.

00:15:18.240 You can have, you know, millions of bees or ants cooperating because they're all sisters.

00:15:22.320 Um, humans can cooperate at the level of millions too, but we're not siblings.

00:15:27.400 We do it because we, we have shared stories.

00:15:30.480 We have a common understanding of what we're doing.

00:15:32.100 We make something sacred.

00:15:33.460 It can be a God.

00:15:34.460 It can be the declaration of independence.

00:15:36.560 It can be a physical place.

00:15:39.340 Um, we make something sacred.

00:15:40.700 Then we circle around and we worship something together, or we hold it as sacred together.

00:15:45.360 We can cooperate.

00:15:47.280 And America got a big boost from World War II and the Cold War.

00:15:50.420 We had a real story of who we were, why we were fighting for good.

00:15:53.780 We had really good, clear, evil enemies in the 20th century.

00:15:57.340 So that really bound us together.

00:15:59.600 Social media gives us all our own story.

00:16:02.420 Everyone has their own little fragment of a story.

00:16:04.780 It's almost impossible to knit it together into a common story.

00:16:07.720 And identity politics has given people a new thing to latch onto at the expense of, yeah,

00:16:14.740 the, the American story and our history and pride and country, which is problematic.

00:16:19.320 It is definitely problematic.

00:16:21.180 And I know you've been raising the flag on that for a long time.

00:16:23.420 So you write that, um, back to the performance issue, because I think it's important what

00:16:27.280 happens on social media and why, why it's been so pernicious that it's no longer about,

00:16:32.680 um, coming up through middle school and high school and making a verbal error that your

00:16:39.100 friends give you a little brush back on.

00:16:41.320 It's about complete fear about what's going to happen to you on social media or actually

00:16:46.400 making a misstep and being absolutely ruined at a young age.

00:16:49.200 And at the same time, it's about posting the perfect selfie on Instagram, as opposed to

00:16:56.800 just spending time with your friends and laughing and swimming in the pool and riding your bike

00:17:02.060 around the neighborhood and all that stuff that actually formed true human bonding.

00:17:06.180 That's right.

00:17:07.180 That's right.

00:17:07.760 And so I think what we have to do is think here about what is a, what is a normal, healthy

00:17:12.020 childhood?

00:17:13.120 And, um, in human, in, in human societies around the world, by the age of around seven,

00:17:19.200 kids are given responsibilities.

00:17:21.000 They're not being supervised closely by adults.

00:17:23.300 They can bring the cattle down to the river or whatever it is.

00:17:26.240 They can certainly walk to the store and buy a quart of milk.

00:17:28.980 Um, and that was true all the way up into the 1990s.

00:17:32.060 Kids had, uh, sort of normal human childhoods, but in the 1990s, America in particular, we freaked

00:17:38.420 out about child abduction.

00:17:40.200 Uh, and this, I think is partly the, the saturation of cable TV and full-time, you know, 24 hour news

00:17:45.040 stations and they focus on story for whatever reason, the 1990s, just as the

00:17:49.140 crime wave was ending, really.

00:17:51.000 I mean, crime rates were way down.

00:17:52.880 Drunk driving was way down.

00:17:54.100 There'd never been a safer time to raise kids or let them out outside.

00:17:58.060 Um, just at that time, we decided it's too dangerous and we say, no, you can't go outside

00:18:01.860 unsupervised.

00:18:02.760 Uh, we also say after school, no, don't go out and play with your friends.

00:18:06.600 You have soccer practice or guitar practice or whatever it is.

00:18:10.260 Um, we basically took away childhood.

00:18:12.240 And, um, when kids don't get to practice those skills, as you were saying, you, you, you,

00:18:16.480 you know, you say something, you make a mistake, you learn, um, kids have to make thousands

00:18:21.040 of mistakes and the consequences need to be very small so that they learn.

00:18:25.360 Imagine if you were trying to teach kids how to do the balance beam and they go out in the

00:18:29.580 balance beam, but every time they fall, they're going to fall 30 feet into a pit of alligators

00:18:33.740 or something.

00:18:34.100 Well, whatever, you know, they're going to get really, really hurt pretty quickly.

00:18:37.420 They just wouldn't go out on the balance beam.

00:18:38.780 They're not going to learn.

00:18:39.380 Um, so social media has made the consequences of a mistake so high, uh, you never know if

00:18:46.420 you could rise to even international infamy.

00:18:48.940 You know, we see clips of kids doing or saying stupid things.

00:18:52.480 So I think social media didn't take away childhood.

00:18:56.000 We sort of did that before social media came.

00:18:58.380 And then social media comes in when kids are heavily supervised.

00:19:01.600 The only place they can get away from adults is actually on, well, video games, which are not

00:19:05.480 as harmful, uh, but also social media platforms.

00:19:08.240 Um, and I think it completely distorts normal childhood learning and it deprives them of

00:19:12.700 the repeated experiences of trying something and failing or succeeding, but they need to

00:19:18.020 grow up.

00:19:19.060 Yeah, no, it's truly the, I mean, when, when, when I have play dates at my house with, with

00:19:23.380 kids, I don't let them go on their phones.

00:19:25.060 I'm like, put your phones down.

00:19:26.160 That's not, you're not here for that.

00:19:27.980 It's, and my kids aren't on social media and nor will they be until, you know, they're

00:19:32.320 old enough to overrule me.

00:19:33.620 Um, but I just find it so dangerous and I, and I, you know, I understand now it's not

00:19:38.220 it's not necessarily the phone.

00:19:39.540 It's the social media.

00:19:40.860 Um, that's, that's the problem.

00:19:42.260 And I think if more parents understood that they, they'd relax a little, you can still

00:19:46.760 get Johnny the phone.

00:19:48.240 Cause what I hear from all my friends is I need to pick them up.

00:19:51.380 I, you know, the other day he misses ride and he called me and I'm not willing to give

00:19:54.600 that up.

00:19:55.120 And, and you don't have to, you, Johnny can have the cell phone.

00:19:58.240 Johnny can play video games and he can text with his friends.

00:20:01.040 You know, there's just, there'll be limits, I think in terms of the time, the time that

00:20:04.280 that phone is open and available, but Johnny does not need to be on Facebook and Instagram

00:20:09.580 and Snapchat and Tik TOK and YouTube and all these other forums that are really potentially

00:20:15.300 dangerous.

00:20:15.840 A, but also B, um, have really pernicious societal effects and effects on him.

00:20:21.480 I mean, and we'll get to the suicide rates and the depression rates and so on.

00:20:24.920 So it's like, this is not in Johnny's best interest and not in society's best interest.

00:20:28.920 Um, okay.

00:20:29.580 So, but the performance aspect, can you speak to that?

00:20:31.820 Because that's something I think we see a lot as grownups or grownups.

00:20:35.680 You can tell I have kids whenever you've heard adults as grownups, it means you have

00:20:38.460 children.

00:20:38.700 Um, we see that as adults, but it's, it's very present and in the face of teens.

00:20:48.380 That's right.

00:20:49.180 So if you wanted to train a seal to balance a ball on its nose, you would not explain the

00:20:56.140 thing to the seal.

00:20:57.240 You would not wait until the seal does it to give the seal a fish.

00:21:01.040 You, you reward any progress towards the behavior you want.

00:21:04.280 Same thing with training a dog.

00:21:05.380 Um, and this is called operant conditioning in behaviorism and psychology.

00:21:10.000 Um, operant conditioning is incredibly powerful.

00:21:12.380 And if you could reinforce your kids within three seconds of them doing a behavior, you

00:21:17.920 could get your kids making their beds every morning within a week.

00:21:21.320 Um, so operant conditioning is very, very powerful.

00:21:23.860 Now, what happened all of a sudden when kids got phones with touchscreens, uh, around,

00:21:29.340 around 2009 to 2012, you know, the iPhone comes out 2007, but it's expensive.

00:21:33.020 Very few kids have one around 2012, 2013.

00:21:35.620 That's when, that's when kids' lives switched from mostly not being on social media every

00:21:40.800 day to having a phone and having most experience come through the phone.

00:21:45.680 Um, and that phone is the most powerful operant conditioning machine ever invented.

00:21:50.960 What's the first word you're saying before conditioning?

00:21:53.460 Oh, operant.

00:21:54.740 Uh, there are two kinds of, of conditioning.

00:21:57.060 Pavlovian conditioning, uh, which is like, gets your, your, um, uh, your autonomic immune

00:22:02.060 system going like Pavlov's dogs would salivate when they heard a bell, but the way you train

00:22:07.120 a circus animal is called operant condition.

00:22:08.980 You give them a small reward right away.

00:22:10.920 Very, very powerful.

00:22:12.280 Now, all of us who have kids, we try to get our kids to sit up at the table.

00:22:16.920 We try to get them to eat well.

00:22:18.100 We try to get them to write thank you notes.

00:22:19.480 We want to affect the influence.

00:22:21.220 We want to influence our kids very hard because we don't have a little shock box, like shock

00:22:26.520 necklace around their neck.

00:22:27.360 We can't do operant conditioning to like train them like a, like a circus animal, but Facebook

00:22:32.480 and Instagram and Twitter and all these other platforms do.

00:22:35.260 And so what we've essentially done is we've given our kids, uh, an incredibly powerful operant

00:22:40.340 conditioning machine and the people giving them rewards are total strangers, total strangers.

00:22:45.240 We've given over the training of our children to total strangers.

00:22:47.960 And this, I think is a big reason why Gen Z is in terrible shape.

00:22:53.260 It's not a gradual change from the millennials to Gen Z.

00:22:55.860 It's very, very sudden right around birth year, 1996, um, kids born in 19, let's say kids

00:23:00.920 born in 1998 are much worse off, much more fragile, much more depressed and anxious than

00:23:06.340 say kids born in 1993 to 94.

00:23:08.720 That's the end of the millennial generation.

00:23:11.040 Um, and so part of it is, um, we, we've taken away childhood in its place.

00:23:15.800 We've given them this training machine, which is sick, which is inhuman.

00:23:19.700 Oh my gosh.

00:23:21.400 And there's so much to delve into when it comes to the children and, and, and how they

00:23:24.800 use these, uh, platforms and what it does to them.

00:23:27.820 But just to take a quick step back, as you were talking about, um, tribalism really, because

00:23:33.960 you were talking about who really has the microphone.

00:23:36.300 If, when we go online, you know, and it affects our children and it affects us, who are we listening

00:23:40.760 to?

00:23:41.040 And we've heard, you know, our, I'm more center, right, but we talk about how, um, the

00:23:47.620 left wing controls media and the left wing certainly controls most social media.

00:23:51.140 Um, and we'll see what happens with Elon, but at Twitter right now, it's a very leftist

00:23:55.460 site and it's dominated for the most part by leftists, but really just by partisans, by

00:24:00.740 hard partisans.

00:24:02.080 And that's indicative of most of social media, which people fail to factor in.

00:24:05.840 I always get a great reminder of this, John, when I go to visit my two close friends in

00:24:09.420 the Midwest, one lives in Chicago, one lives outside of Detroit, um, two girlfriends I met

00:24:14.580 many years ago and you go to the Midwest and sometimes you just get reminded, even though

00:24:18.440 I know it's happening there too, of like normal people, not like crazy New York hard partisans

00:24:25.560 where I spend most of my time.

00:24:27.380 Um, and you, you write about, um, what's the name of the study?

00:24:31.540 Oh, the hit, the hidden tribes study that really actually proved this and proved who it

00:24:38.080 is we are listening to whether we realize it or not when we go on these platforms.

00:24:44.360 Yeah, that's right.

00:24:45.740 So the hidden tribe study, it was a, an outfit, uh, from the UK.

00:24:48.780 They do great research in Europe.

00:24:50.320 They did an amazing study here in America.

00:24:52.340 They, um, interviewed, I forget how many thousands of people in, in 2017.

00:24:56.780 Uh, and they, by doing various Americans, 8,000 Americans, 2017, this is from your article.

00:25:03.280 Um, and they, they found that seven, seven clusters of people who gave similar kinds of

00:25:08.160 answers to each other.

00:25:09.440 And it turns out that though the one on the far right, they called the devoted conservatives.

00:25:14.040 Um, that's where, that's where you'd find Trump's hardcore support.

00:25:18.940 And they're very different psychologically from, uh, I think the, the, the, the traditional

00:25:23.220 conservatives, I think it is, who are more like the, like the, like the conservative

00:25:27.260 intellectual tradition, like Edmund Burke, Thomas Sowell.

00:25:30.260 Uh, they're, they're cautious, they're prudent.

00:25:32.260 They believe in the importance of structures and the far right group is more radical.

00:25:35.540 They kind of want to burn things down.

00:25:37.160 So there's a kind of a, they're not conservative.

00:25:39.720 They're certainly not liberal.

00:25:40.580 Um, so there is a group on the far right.

00:25:43.640 Now there's a corresponding group on the far left, uh, which is also not liberal.

00:25:48.500 Um, they, there's, those are called the progressive activists.

00:25:51.520 Uh, and those are the ones who have taken, uh, equality as quality of outcome as their central

00:25:56.920 good.

00:25:57.340 That's what's sacred to them.

00:25:58.740 Um, and it's easier to achieve equality by, um, tearing down the top than it is by pulling

00:26:03.300 up the bottom.

00:26:03.800 So they tend to focus, and this is true across eras, um, radical egalitarian movements tend to

00:26:08.920 focus on, on pulling down the top.

00:26:10.880 So these two groups are in, in my opinion, of course, they, there are reasons for their,

00:26:15.660 for them having the views that they have, but the net effect on democracy, if they're

00:26:18.980 powerful is they want to pull things down.

00:26:21.800 They want to destroy.

00:26:22.720 They're not builders.

00:26:23.420 They're critics.

00:26:23.940 Now you need critics on each side.

00:26:25.640 You do need critics.

00:26:26.860 Uh, I'm all about viewpoint diversity, but what social media did was it took, let's say

00:26:30.800 the, the, the Republican coalition that Ronald Reagan had built, uh, which in which you

00:26:34.580 had the business conservatives, you have the Christian conservatives.

00:26:37.140 And there were always people who are more prone, well, psychologically more prone to

00:26:40.960 authoritarianism.

00:26:41.860 They were all part of a group, but the far right group didn't have as much influence.

00:26:45.740 And all of a sudden social media, they have much more influence and they're able to intimidate

00:26:49.740 and basically push out a lot of the moderates on the left.

00:26:52.780 As you say, it's, you know, the media on the left, what I argued in my paper in the

00:26:58.060 Atlantic essay is that the democratic party still has a healthy debate between the far

00:27:02.620 left and the more moderate left.

00:27:04.040 The party itself has not lost that ability to debate.

00:27:07.560 The problem on the left, I believe, um, is that the left largely controls the, the epistemic

00:27:13.140 institution.

00:27:13.880 That is the institution that generate knowledge.

00:27:16.120 So universities, uh, journalism, media, the museums and the arts, a lot of areas.

00:27:22.260 And when you get homogeneity and social media, something happens, which is the extremes now

00:27:27.540 have power to really intimidate the moderates.

00:27:29.280 And so they go quiet.

00:27:30.580 And so what we're left with is rather than just having a country where most of us are

00:27:34.340 fairly moderate, reasonable, and we have these extremes.

00:27:37.620 Now the extremes are so powerful that the rest of us just really go quiet.

00:27:41.460 And that's when you visit your friends in the Midwest, they're not out there tweeting

00:27:44.600 their outrage about this and that.

00:27:47.180 Exactly right.

00:27:47.720 Never.

00:27:48.200 I mean, there was an interesting David Brooks piece in the times.

00:27:50.380 I don't know if you saw this recently talking about how he thinks there really is still

00:27:54.980 room for liberals who aren't pro cancel culture and pro demonization of the other side.

00:28:01.620 And, you know, he often wonders whether there's still room, but he still thinks there's still

00:28:06.280 room, uh, for the, for said people.

00:28:08.520 But I mean, I know this firsthand from, from being somebody who's, you know, more right

00:28:12.920 leaning, but has immersed herself for the past 20, 30 years in very left leaning communities

00:28:18.040 only, you know, like I live with them.

00:28:20.420 I know them.

00:28:21.140 They're my friends or my neighbors, but you know, they're lovely.

00:28:23.180 They're not hard partisans for the most part, and they don't want to mess with anybody else's

00:28:27.460 life, you know, but you go online and you see a very different version and it leads to

00:28:32.200 hate and more tribalism and intolerance on your own part, you know, and you really, it's

00:28:37.760 a, it's something you have to actively work to fight against.

00:28:41.160 And I do think if I lived in a more red community, I'd be more subject to that narrative because

00:28:48.120 I wouldn't be surrounded all the time by people who are liberal and who are absolutely

00:28:53.080 lovely and don't subscribe to any of this nonsense.

00:28:56.860 Yeah, no, I think that's right.

00:28:58.780 I'm very cautious about using the word liberal because in America, we use the word liberal

00:29:02.800 to mean left and it shouldn't mean left.

00:29:04.680 We can talk about progressives and conservatives.

00:29:06.400 We can talk about the far left and the far right.

00:29:09.240 I reserve the word liberal to a person who believes in the liberal tradition.

00:29:12.300 That is freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, economic freedom.

00:29:17.360 We don't want to be telling people how to speak, how to dress, how to live their lives.

00:29:20.660 We want to make room for people.

00:29:22.360 That's the liberal tradition.

00:29:23.600 And in Europe, they speak about right liberals and left liberals.

00:29:26.600 So the problem, I think, our left is no longer liberal.

00:29:30.640 Our right is no longer liberal or conservative.

00:29:34.280 And, but to your point about, depending on where you are, if you're in a partisan community,

00:29:38.620 you are just deluged with evidence that the other side is horrible.

00:29:42.760 And you'll see videos of people saying horrible, horrible things.

00:29:46.320 And people on your side can list all the sins of the other side, but you tend to have no

00:29:51.120 idea that an equally strong case is being made on the other side where they are deluged

00:29:56.660 by horrible things that your co-partisans have said.

00:29:59.500 So, you know, it's, you know, why do you complain about the speck in your neighbor's

00:30:03.300 eye when you cannot see the plank in your own?

00:30:04.960 And it continues, Jesus says, first, take the plank out of your own eye.

00:30:08.940 First, look at yourself, look at your side.

00:30:10.960 Only once you understand that problem.

00:30:13.160 Now let's talk about the other team.

00:30:14.960 And that's one of the things Tristan Harris was talking about, about how the social media

00:30:20.000 companies have made it almost impossible.

00:30:21.780 If you're relying on them, on your Facebook feed, on your Twitter feed for actual information

00:30:27.240 about what's happening in America, good luck, because your feed has been totally manipulated

00:30:30.680 to feed you only the things that will outrage you.

00:30:33.400 For the most part, you write about this as well.

00:30:35.280 They want to make you upset.

00:30:36.400 They want to make you angry.

00:30:37.520 Cable news, same.

00:30:38.520 And they are not in the business of delivering to you the truth, what is actually happening,

00:30:45.560 a broader picture of America and the news.

00:30:47.800 They're trying to upset you.

00:30:50.160 All right.

00:30:50.320 Let me pause it there, John, and squeeze in a quick, quick break.

00:30:52.840 That's a good place to come back on.

00:30:54.560 John Haidt, the one and only right after this.

00:30:57.260 It's not news now that they're trying to upset us on social media.

00:31:05.960 I think most people have heard that at least once or twice.

00:31:09.440 But you sort of link it to you've got the development of the ability to like something

00:31:16.180 on Facebook and retweet something on Twitter and then share something on Facebook.

00:31:21.860 And all of this sort of builds to the place where you write the newly tweaked platforms

00:31:26.880 were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves.

00:31:35.700 And the volume of outrage is shocking.

00:31:38.920 It's been shocking.

00:31:40.200 Yes.

00:31:40.720 So if we go back to when these platforms were new, there was MySpace and Friendster and Facebook

00:31:47.100 around 2003, 2004.

00:31:48.940 They were just like, you know, bulletin boards.

00:31:51.640 I've got my bulletin board here.

00:31:53.200 Look at these photos.

00:31:54.100 Here's who I am.

00:31:54.880 And I can link to yours.

00:31:56.420 Totally not toxic.

00:31:58.440 The early technology was actually, and I hope people will remember this, like in the 90s,

00:32:02.840 the early internet, it was so exciting.

00:32:05.840 And, you know, there were pockets of toxicity, but there was a real positivity around a lot of

00:32:10.980 it.

00:32:11.120 We were exploring this new space.

00:32:13.460 So from 2003 or 2004 to about 2009, social media is not particularly toxic.

00:32:18.860 It's not particularly bad for democracy.

00:32:21.640 And then what happens in 2009 is Facebook innovates.

00:32:26.360 They say, you know, because they're all about finding out engagement.

00:32:29.540 They want to target advertisements to people.

00:32:31.660 So they give you a like button, a button you can click to say, I like this.

00:32:35.220 And that way you're generating a lot of data for them about what you like.

00:32:38.640 And then they develop algorithms that can maximize the degree to which you're going to

00:32:42.560 like something.

00:32:43.520 Now there's not necessarily anything nefarious about this.

00:32:46.600 What's wrong with giving you more of what you like?

00:32:48.260 But the net effect is that it's much more addictive because now you're getting reinforced

00:32:51.940 more often.

00:32:52.500 And you're strategically liking things, which is kind of you're performing.

00:32:57.360 You're doing a little performance.

00:32:58.720 Like you think, should I like this?

00:32:59.900 Should I not like this?

00:33:01.200 Even more damaging, I'd say, is the retweet button that Twitter develops.

00:33:06.540 And then Facebook copies it, the share button.

00:33:08.280 So Twitter develops the retweet button.

00:33:12.060 You click on something, not just to say, I like it, but you can now forward it to, let's

00:33:15.760 say you have 500 followers.

00:33:17.040 You forward it to your 500 followers.

00:33:19.000 And if it's really outrageous, they might forward it to each of their 500 followers.

00:33:23.220 And very quickly, you can get to millions and millions of people.

00:33:26.040 So 2009 is the year that social media changes radically.

00:33:30.220 Before 2009, you couldn't go viral very easily.

00:33:33.660 But by 2010, you can.

00:33:35.280 And now the game is on, who can win, who can go viral?

00:33:39.500 So now the platforms are shaping us.

00:33:41.680 We're all learning, what should I say?

00:33:44.460 How should I say it to maximally increase my clicks and my likes, my retweets, my follower

00:33:50.040 count?

00:33:51.260 So it's really then that it becomes much more hyper-viralized.

00:33:56.960 We all understand from COVID what happens when a virus is much more transmissible.

00:34:02.060 Boy, it can spread very quickly.

00:34:03.040 So that's what I argue in the piece, those small architectural changes.

00:34:07.660 That's why everything went haywire in the 2010s.

00:34:10.460 It wasn't like this.

00:34:11.560 It wasn't like this in 2008, 2009.

00:34:14.660 There were still much greater possibilities of co-partisanship, of people working together

00:34:19.260 in Washington.

00:34:20.420 We didn't feel like we were all attacking each other all the time.

00:34:22.740 Mm-hmm.

00:34:23.720 It's true.

00:34:24.900 So you say really between 2011 and 2015 was the apex of the problem.

00:34:30.700 And I think that's interesting because I think a lot of people, when they look at the collapse

00:34:33.520 of, or the, I don't want to say our society has collapsed, but it certainly isn't in good

00:34:37.180 health.

00:34:37.600 It's on the road.

00:34:38.520 Yeah.

00:34:38.760 Yeah.

00:34:39.100 It's on the road.

00:34:39.800 And I think a lot of people look back and especially on the left and they say, it was

00:34:43.960 Trump, Trump.

00:34:45.600 And I did a long documentary with PBS a couple of years ago where they actually took an open

00:34:51.380 minded look at Trump.

00:34:53.240 And I made the case that there were a lot of very divisive things that happened during

00:34:56.660 the Obama presidency that set us on the road to, you know, this divisiveness we're feeling

00:35:00.900 now and tribalism.

00:35:02.060 But it didn't look at social media.

00:35:03.740 It was just about politics.

00:35:05.800 This is a much more persuasive case.

00:35:07.460 It's society wide.

00:35:08.720 There are a lot of people in the country who are not political at all, who are on their

00:35:12.500 phones, as you point out, 50 to a hundred times a day.

00:35:15.020 So this is a much bigger elephant in the room.

00:35:18.560 And you make the case that it was between 2011 and 2015.

00:35:22.240 So pre-Trump, that things really reached the height of awfulness or the pernicious effects

00:35:29.120 really sort of reached, I don't know, it was their apex and then they kind of stayed

00:35:32.260 there.

00:35:33.020 But explain why you picked those dates and what you mean by those, by picking those four

00:35:37.320 years.

00:35:38.520 So on campus, it was 2014 when this stuff first started.

00:35:42.140 Anyone who graduated from college in 2012 didn't see the speech of violence, the cancel

00:35:46.040 culture, the fear of speaking up.

00:35:48.500 And in 2015, so Greg and I read our article, The Coddling in the American Mind, that comes

00:35:53.880 out in August of 2015.

00:35:55.000 And then at Halloween 2015, with the Christakis affair at Yale and the students protesting

00:36:00.120 about Halloween costume guidance.

00:36:01.440 So things blow up on campus in 2015, really, 2014, 2015.

00:36:05.840 And only recently have I discovered how many other things were happening around 2014, because

00:36:10.600 it's only then that we can get global cancellations.

00:36:13.300 So many listeners will remember the story of Justine Sacco, a woman who was flying to South

00:36:18.960 Africa.

00:36:19.500 She tweeted a joke in somewhat poor taste, but it wasn't racist.

00:36:22.220 It was actually a joke about white privilege.

00:36:23.520 So she tweets this joke, gets on her plane, lands in South Africa, and there's a global

00:36:28.480 outrage around her, and she's fired the next day.

00:36:30.880 So that happened in December of 2013.

00:36:33.160 That could not have happened in 2008.

00:36:35.180 There was no way to have a global mob around this woman in 2008.

00:36:41.440 So that's December 2013.

00:36:43.720 In early 2014, Brendan Eich is promoted to CEO of Netscape.

00:36:49.060 And someone discovers that he gave $1,000 to a group in California that was opposed to

00:36:53.840 a bill, a proposition about gay marriage.

00:36:57.060 And so he is fired or let go within two weeks.

00:37:00.820 This sort of global, the ability to create a Twitter mob wasn't there before the retweet

00:37:05.540 button.

00:37:06.340 And so we get a lot of things happening 2014, 2015.

00:37:10.800 There's a new culture of outrage.

00:37:12.400 And so the argument that I made in the paper, in the Atlantic essay, is that it's as though

00:37:17.720 with these hyper-viralized platforms, it's as though they gave out a billion dart guns.

00:37:22.860 Everyone in the world gets a dart gun with unlimited darts, and you get to shoot anyone

00:37:27.600 you want.

00:37:28.060 It's not going to kill them, but it'll shame them.

00:37:30.320 It'll hurt them emotionally, relation.

00:37:32.380 It'll hurt their reputation.

00:37:34.060 And the net effect of everyone having a dart gun is most people don't want to shoot anyone.

00:37:38.340 That's the middle 80% of the country.

00:37:39.660 They just put them down.

00:37:40.400 I don't want to attack anyone.

00:37:41.320 But the people on the extremes are psyched about being able to shoot not just their enemies

00:37:47.120 across the aisle, but the moderates on their own side.

00:37:50.960 And so we now have a communication environment, which is much more characterized by walking

00:37:56.740 on eggshells.

00:37:57.420 That's the phrase everyone uses.

00:37:58.740 I feel like I'm walking on eggshells.

00:38:00.980 And if you're walking on eggshells, you can't trust the people around you.

00:38:04.160 You have to self-censor.

00:38:05.680 You can't be creative.

00:38:06.820 You can't be funny.

00:38:07.940 There used to be a lot of humor in the academy.

00:38:09.680 And it was, you know, students love to laugh.

00:38:11.660 Professors love to tell jokes.

00:38:13.200 But all of that goes away when we're all afraid that if anyone takes offense, they've

00:38:17.580 got a dart gun.

00:38:18.300 They've got a website to report me.

00:38:20.640 So that's why I argue that this isn't just about polarization left, right.

00:38:25.680 This is about we're afraid of the person next to us or the person, the unknown person on a

00:38:30.080 social media platform.

00:38:30.800 And that is new.

00:38:31.620 That really comes to fruition in 2014.

00:38:35.040 My God.

00:38:35.500 And it's so very much still happening.

00:38:38.520 I mean, I saw you tweeted something on this.

00:38:42.460 I think you retweeted a Jonathan Turley article.

00:38:44.840 But I tweeted about this just recently today as well about what's happening to this Princeton

00:38:49.760 professor.

00:38:50.860 It's horrible.

00:38:52.620 It's horrible.

00:38:53.500 There's a Princeton professor who's now they're pushing to fire this professor, Joshua

00:38:58.580 Katz.

00:38:59.140 He's a classics professor, which you're already not allowed to be because you study a bunch

00:39:02.460 of old white guys.

00:39:03.760 And that's that's his first sin.

00:39:06.840 And now the president of Princeton is calling on the university to fire this tenured professor.

00:39:13.360 Why?

00:39:13.680 What did the guy do?

00:39:14.600 Is it what was his hideous sin?

00:39:16.340 You know what he did in 2006?

00:39:19.160 He had a consensual affair with a student for which he's already been punished.

00:39:24.000 They already turfed him off campus for a year where he was suspended for a year.

00:39:28.420 He paid the penalty.

00:39:31.060 You know, I mean, and now in a court of law, double jeopardy would have attached.

00:39:35.000 You can't go back and relitigate it.

00:39:37.160 But they are.

00:39:38.420 They're trying to get back into it and open back up the case.

00:39:41.580 Why?

00:39:42.240 Because he wrote an article critical of the reforms some of the black faculty members

00:39:48.160 are asking for at Princeton, like more sabbatical than their white colleagues.

00:39:54.720 And I think additional pay.

00:39:57.560 I'm trying to look for what they were.

00:39:58.940 But I mean, they were it was obviously like favoritism based on race.

00:40:02.920 He said he objected to faculty of color receiving special course relief and summer salary and

00:40:09.060 an extra semester of sabbatical and criticized, quote, extra perks for no reason other than

00:40:14.860 pigment pigmentation.

00:40:16.060 And he also criticized something called the Black Justice League, which was active for

00:40:21.900 two years on campus as he called it a local terrorist organization that made life miserable

00:40:26.700 for many, including many black students who didn't agree with its members demands.

00:40:30.560 And because it seems very clear because of that letter, they're now trying to meet to him

00:40:35.720 right out of Princeton.

00:40:37.000 We covered what happened to Roland Fryer, something very similar at Harvard, which is still ongoing.

00:40:43.040 These are professional assassinations.

00:40:45.400 So they have good reason to fear the dart.

00:40:48.260 Yeah, that's right.

00:40:49.480 So, I mean, you know, the case is complicated and I don't know the I don't know the details.

00:40:53.280 But I think what is clear is that whatever whatever behaviors he did on campus, he was

00:40:58.320 investigated for, he did have affairs with students over time.

00:41:02.440 So I can't comment on any of that.

00:41:04.060 I don't know.

00:41:05.100 But what was clear to me was that the investigation was restarted and pushed to the point of firing

00:41:13.420 him only because he wrote an article in Quillette that offended many on campus.

00:41:19.100 And I think we see the same dynamics here that we saw in the Dorian Abbott case.

00:41:23.420 So Dorian Abbott, a physicist at University of Chicago, he wrote an essay in Newsweek.

00:41:28.720 Criticizing race-based affirmative action, criticizing certain aspects of DEI, agreeing with certain

00:41:34.180 goals, but being critical of the main thrust of DEI programs.

00:41:39.780 Now, that's part of what a democracy is.

00:41:42.180 That's certainly something that a professor should be able to write about.

00:41:45.460 And he was invited to give a very prestigious lecture at MIT.

00:41:50.040 And some, I don't know if it was students or administrators, were upset that we're going

00:41:53.780 to give an honor to this guy who wrote this article that offends us.

00:41:58.460 And so they put pressure on the MIT administration to uninvite him because of an article he wrote

00:42:04.700 in Newsweek.

00:42:05.660 And so I think it's the same sort of thing here.

00:42:07.600 It's not that Princeton wants to do this, as far as I know.

00:42:09.680 Again, I don't know the details of a complicated case.

00:42:11.720 But I'm pretty confident that pressure is being put on the administration by students, I suppose,

00:42:18.720 primarily.

00:42:19.620 Pressure is being put on, and we've seen this over and over again, when pressure is put on

00:42:23.180 by pressure groups.

00:42:24.640 The administration almost always caves.

00:42:26.940 And they use the same kind of language.

00:42:28.880 So that's why I think the principle here is, if you say something that offends, if you say

00:42:34.920 something that violates the sacred values of a powerful group on campus, then if they can't

00:42:40.080 get you for what you said, they do what's called grievance archaeology.

00:42:43.980 That is, you dig up everything.

00:42:45.280 You go back through all their tweets.

00:42:46.640 You find something that you can get them for.

00:42:49.680 And that is illiberal.

00:42:51.760 That's part of due process is there's got to be a process to adjudicate bad behavior.

00:42:56.560 We follow the process.

00:42:57.580 If you're found guilty, you receive your punishment, and then that's it.

00:43:01.320 We're done.

00:43:02.280 And so, again, I don't know the details, but it seems as though Princeton is behaving this

00:43:08.840 way because of internal pressure groups rather than, I mean, I suppose if they could go back

00:43:13.500 and investigate every single professor, they would find a lot of malfeasance.

00:43:16.980 I hope somebody goes back right now and investigates the president of the university.

00:43:20.420 This is me speaking.

00:43:22.100 Christopher Eisgruber, who is the one calling on the university board to fire Professor Katz.

00:43:27.600 Go back.

00:43:28.060 I'm urging the online people to go back.

00:43:29.840 Go do an investigation on him.

00:43:31.460 I guarantee you he's had some affair with some student or he's crossed some ethical line.

00:43:35.480 These people are not pure.

00:43:37.000 These are judges.

00:43:38.440 None of us are.

00:43:38.880 They're not pure.

00:43:39.800 It's right.

00:43:40.200 No one is.

00:43:40.800 That's what you learn in Catholicism.

00:43:42.080 That's one benefit I had growing up.

00:43:43.800 You know, you have to be quick to forgive.

00:43:45.760 You know, who among us has a sin?

00:43:47.300 Slow to judge, quick to forgive.

00:43:48.540 That's right.

00:43:48.800 Yes.

00:43:49.360 And so this is you want to play this game.

00:43:51.940 Let's play.

00:43:53.380 Let's go.

00:43:54.380 Look, I'm in.

00:43:55.520 If these are the rules we have to play by, then let's play by them.

00:43:58.480 Because these people like woke CEOs and woke college presidents need to be taught a lesson

00:44:03.600 that you come for me and I will sick the anti woke mob on you.

00:44:08.500 You did not lead a perfect life.

00:44:10.400 It's the only terms they're going to understand.

00:44:12.140 I can certainly understand the need for counterforce.

00:44:16.840 I can certainly understand turning the tables, hoist on your own retard, all of that.

00:44:20.740 But I've been studying the culture war for a long time.

00:44:23.160 I study political polarization.

00:44:25.260 And, you know, in a military war, you can apply such force that you literally kill your

00:44:30.060 enemy and can take their territory.

00:44:32.320 But in a culture war, you can't do that.

00:44:34.320 In a culture war, the harder you attack your enemy, the stronger he gets.

00:44:37.740 It's the only thing you can do is you can either give them more ammunition by doing

00:44:42.280 giving more anecdotes, more terrible things that people on your side have said you can

00:44:47.560 give them more ammunition or less ammunition.

00:44:49.680 I'm not sure that this is a strategy with Disney and DeSantis, right?

00:44:52.920 Disney's lost billions of dollars in stock value.

00:44:56.000 All corporations are now they're not they're not coming and commenting on abortion suddenly.

00:45:00.120 And Disney's gone quiet on its woke agenda for the past few weeks.

00:45:04.540 Why?

00:45:05.180 Because they took a terrible hit.

00:45:07.740 For speaking out about this.

00:45:09.280 And they got in a war that didn't really serve them well down in Florida.

00:45:12.340 I don't I don't agree with you on this point.

00:45:14.500 I mean, I know you're brilliant.

00:45:15.400 You've studied this way more than I have, but I've lived it and I've been through it

00:45:17.820 personally.

00:45:18.160 And I can tell you fighting back works.

00:45:21.480 OK, let's talk about it, because I really am not sure I'm right here.

00:45:24.220 In fact, I think what I have here is just an insight, not an overall strategy.

00:45:30.660 And you're right that Disney was under Disney was under pressure, let's say, from left wing

00:45:35.260 groups.

00:45:35.540 And so they moved to the left and then it's only if there's counterpressure that they'll

00:45:39.220 move back.

00:45:39.760 So there is a need for counterforce.

00:45:41.380 I think it was a quote from Margaret Thatcher during the during the Balkan War.

00:45:44.580 I can't find it, but I remember hearing it when I was young.

00:45:46.960 The problem is not whether we should use force in in Bosnia.

00:45:50.560 The problem is that force is being used by one side overwhelmingly every day.

00:45:54.780 The question is, will there be counterforce?

00:45:56.820 That is the question of arming the Bosnians against the Serbs.

00:45:59.280 So by analogy here, I do understand the need for pushback.

00:46:01.720 But here's what really alarms me.

00:46:03.460 Each time we have an escalation in the culture war, a new strategy is brought in, which is

00:46:08.320 an escalation of weaponry.

00:46:09.900 And so what we're now seeing, which really alarms me, is things like the Texas abortion law.

00:46:13.960 And I think the Florida, you know, the law we're talking about here, I believe they have

00:46:18.860 provisions by which anyone can bring a lawsuit against a citizen, a teacher, a doctor.

00:46:25.120 This is a huge escalation in the culture war.

00:46:27.320 This means that now people doing their job have to worry that they could suddenly be sued

00:46:33.060 by a bunch of activists on the other side, even if they've done nothing wrong.

00:46:37.200 That's certainly true in the case of the Texas law.

00:46:40.440 I don't know about the Florida one.

00:46:41.440 I'm going to have to check.

00:46:42.080 I don't remember seeing personal liability.

00:46:44.340 Provision in that way.

00:46:45.060 But let me stand you by.

00:46:45.920 I'll do a quick break.

00:46:46.960 And then I want to talk to you about this.

00:46:48.180 This is an interesting strategy and what what serves the community and what doesn't.

00:46:52.780 And then we've got to talk about Trump, because I think your observations on how

00:46:55.880 he was the first one to understand the Tower of Babel had fallen and how to work that

00:47:01.040 is very, very fascinating.

00:47:03.420 OK, stand by.

00:47:04.400 John's staying with us.

00:47:05.280 And don't forget, folks, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel

00:47:08.940 111 every weekday at noon east, the full video show and clips by subscribing to

00:47:12.440 our YouTube channel, YouTube dot com slash Megan Kelly.

00:47:15.220 So, yeah, this has been a debate on the on the right in particular for a long time now

00:47:22.100 since cancel culture really sort of took over how to fight back, you know what to do.

00:47:25.860 And I think for a long time that the effort was to say, stop it, stop it.

00:47:30.280 And on the on the right, too.

00:47:31.560 That's what the Harper's letter was about, right, saying just just stop it.

00:47:34.800 That was mostly liberal saying, yeah, we hate Trump.

00:47:38.440 Yeah.

00:47:38.840 We don't we don't like Trump.

00:47:40.080 This isn't about loving Trump.

00:47:41.540 But this is about being truly liberal in the in the genuine sense of that word and allowing

00:47:46.580 free speech, a principle you've been fighting for your entire academic career.

00:47:50.280 And it's not working.

00:47:51.780 So I think that that has led a lot of folks in this battle, left or right, to say, all

00:47:58.660 right, what would work?

00:48:00.120 And I've come around to the belief of cancel them, cancel them all, cancel Chrissy Teigen,

00:48:06.060 cancel all of them.

00:48:07.860 Now, I realize, depending on the institution that they're at, that may not be realistic.

00:48:12.380 Joy Reid should have been canceled a long, long time ago, given her views.

00:48:15.820 But she won't be.

00:48:17.160 But at least you can get some skin in the game.

00:48:19.620 I guarantee you this Princeton president has got something in his past he doesn't want

00:48:23.920 coming out.

00:48:24.500 And the only thing preventing it from coming out is journalists and people who are anti

00:48:30.660 cancel culture from taking out their own microscopes and magnifying glasses and taking a hard look.

00:48:37.060 So the more you punish people for being this cruel, the less likely they are to dip a toe

00:48:45.660 into those waters.

00:48:46.520 OK, so during the break, during that nine minute break, I thought about what it is.

00:48:52.360 I appreciate you pushing back on me.

00:48:54.400 But I was saying, wait, you know, this is just going to escalate things.

00:48:57.240 And I realized what my concern is.

00:49:00.140 So I've been studying polarization since about 2004.

00:49:03.860 And the path we're on is towards catastrophic failure as a country.

00:49:07.740 If we don't change what we're doing, the American experiment set up by our founding fathers who

00:49:13.500 understood our liability to faction, factionalism, fighting, it wasn't clear that this experiment

00:49:19.180 would work.

00:49:19.960 Now, it's worked very well on and off, extremely well.

00:49:23.480 And now it's not working.

00:49:25.020 We are headed.

00:49:26.500 If we keep going this way, we are headed towards catastrophic failure.

00:49:29.480 And so if you think about this is like a fight taking place on a ship or on a ship, the ship

00:49:36.080 has been damaged.

00:49:37.260 There's water coming into the hull.

00:49:39.060 We've got the crew is divided into the red team and the blue team.

00:49:42.120 And the red team and blue team are fighting.

00:49:44.260 And what you're saying is, look, the blue team has been really unfair.

00:49:47.600 It's time that the red team fought back using blue team's methods.

00:49:50.720 And there's a certain wisdom in that.

00:49:52.420 But we can see where this is going to go.

00:49:54.120 There's no way either side can win.

00:49:55.420 So we just keep doing this until in five or 10 years, the ship sinks.

00:49:59.300 That's what I'm trying to avoid.

00:50:00.920 And that's why the last quarter of my article was not about how one side can win, because

00:50:05.420 neither side can win.

00:50:06.440 The last quarter was, what are the structural changes?

00:50:09.620 What are the changes to in Congress, changes to how we do elections, changes to social media?

00:50:15.180 What are the changes we could do that would return us just to levels of hatred we had back

00:50:19.260 in maybe 2008?

00:50:20.760 If we could go back to those levels of hatred, then I think we can make it as a country.

00:50:24.380 But on our current path, we're in huge trouble.

00:50:28.880 So what I'm saying is, we need to think about structural reforms so that we can actually

00:50:33.320 sometimes, in some places, talk to each other and even work together sometimes.

00:50:37.560 Fair enough.

00:50:38.220 I get that.

00:50:38.780 But I see it more as like, and I see, I understand your point of it's holes in the boat either

00:50:43.360 way you do it.

00:50:43.940 And that means the boat sinks.

00:50:45.220 I see it more like there's generals up on the left and there's generals up on the right

00:50:49.000 at the front of the boat, admirals, I guess, sailing it.

00:50:52.200 And the left keeps taking out only one side's admirals.

00:50:57.000 They just keep continuing to take down admiral after admiral after admiral who they think

00:51:01.940 are on the opposite side.

00:51:02.920 And the red team keeps looking at them saying, please stop doing that.

00:51:06.180 That's not good for the boat.

00:51:07.480 We're not going to make it if you get rid of all this brain trust up at the front.

00:51:11.180 And the left just has the middle finger up.

00:51:14.180 And finally, the right says, we're going to hurt some of your generals or your admirals.

00:51:17.560 They're going too.

00:51:18.660 And finally, the hope is that the offensive side will realize, well, this is stupid.

00:51:23.740 We can't survive without our leaders and stop the firing.

00:51:26.080 And you think that's going to happen?

00:51:27.640 Well, it's a shift in tactics.

00:51:29.500 It's worth trying.

00:51:30.760 Reaching out across the aisle and saying, please don't.

00:51:33.780 I mean, look, what difference did the Harper's letter make?

00:51:36.380 Nothing.

00:51:36.940 They were mocked.

00:51:37.540 Everybody on that was like, and I love I love Thomas Chatterton Williams, and I thought

00:51:41.120 it was a noble idea.

00:51:42.480 It's just you can't reason with these people.

00:51:46.060 OK, but what but there's no point at which the other side, whichever side it is, is going

00:51:52.700 to realize, oops, we're wrong.

00:51:54.660 We need to be more realistic.

00:51:55.860 Like, that's just not going to happen.

00:51:58.340 Why can't we destroy them?

00:51:59.920 Why can't we make them afraid?

00:52:01.340 Why can't we make them have skin in the game?

00:52:03.340 Like, no, no, I just mean, I just mean, think about it.

00:52:06.560 This this president of Princeton, if he really thought that I was going to devote the resources

00:52:10.000 of my entire team over the next month to digging up dirt on him, which I 100 percent could and

00:52:14.440 maybe will do, I think he'd be a little scared.

00:52:17.780 I think he would.

00:52:18.780 And I think if I found something, if I found some young woman he slept with, this is made

00:52:22.460 up.

00:52:22.660 I don't have any information that happened.

00:52:25.200 He'd be scared shitless that I was going to turn around.

00:52:27.400 I was going to do it to him.

00:52:28.180 And then maybe the next university president would hesitate a little before they decided

00:52:32.640 to use a human failing for which someone has already been held accountable against him

00:52:37.900 to punish him for his divergent viewpoint on a separate matter.

00:52:42.280 Oh, OK.

00:52:43.240 You're talking about a kind of counterforce which would have an effect.

00:52:46.700 Here's a better way to do counterforce.

00:52:48.360 In fact, there's an organization co-founded originally by some Princeton professors called

00:52:53.720 the Academic Freedom Alliance, AFA.

00:52:57.820 And what they do is in cases where, in fact, Jonathan Katz and Robbie George are founding

00:53:05.260 members of this.

00:53:06.000 I'm one of the founding members as well.

00:53:08.160 What the Academic Freedom Alliance does is it sends a letter to universities saying, if

00:53:12.480 you go ahead with this, we've got lawyers.

00:53:14.400 And this has been FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, also does similar work.

00:53:18.740 So I think that kind of pressure, I think, is a positive way of doing something which

00:53:23.800 is within professional norms.

00:53:27.000 I think the politics of personal destruction, I do understand if they do it, then why can't

00:53:31.820 we do it?

00:53:32.460 I understand that.

00:53:34.220 But I think that way lies just continual escalation and the death of our country.

00:53:38.960 So I'm doing everything I can to think of how do we change the venue?

00:53:42.460 How do we change the incentives?

00:53:43.600 How do we change things so that people don't do this on either side?

00:53:46.660 That's the challenge, I think, that we have as a country for the next 10 years.

00:53:50.120 Well, and you do have real proposals.

00:53:52.760 I mean, I should say that to the audience.

00:53:54.040 You actually have, very condensed, a three-point plan that might at least help.

00:53:59.920 I guess I am feeling right now, just given being in the news and covering this so much,

00:54:04.100 it's just the constant indignity of what they do to people.

00:54:07.020 Like one of those Braveheart warriors, you know, with the face paint and like no underpants

00:54:11.460 and running and killing.

00:54:16.620 Yeah.

00:54:17.400 No, that's right.

00:54:18.160 Look, when you're repeatedly attacked and viciously attacked, yeah, you're not gonna, you know,

00:54:23.540 the strategy is not, oh, you know, let's make peace.

00:54:26.440 No.

00:54:26.860 But I'm trying to break us.

00:54:27.780 I'm trying to break us out of the binary of, and it's like, look at it this way.

00:54:31.660 Like, we used to talk in various venues.

00:54:35.640 We used to communicate in various ways.

00:54:37.840 Members of Congress would talk to each other.

00:54:39.860 Now, if you change the venue, you put in cameras.

00:54:42.800 Now, they're not talking to each other.

00:54:44.340 They're talking at the camera.

00:54:45.940 And in the same way, people used to talk to each other.

00:54:49.160 They could call on the telephone.

00:54:50.540 They could talk at work.

00:54:52.320 But with social media, what it's done is it said, here, why don't you guys fight it out

00:54:55.940 in the comments under a tweet or something?

00:54:58.000 And it's almost as if they said, hey, we're a venue, we're a platform for people to talk

00:55:04.320 to each other in the middle of the Roman Colosseum.

00:55:06.920 All conversations are going to take place with an audience that wants blood.

00:55:10.920 The audience is cheering for blood.

00:55:13.180 And so when Facebook developed threaded comments, this was 2013, they said, it's not enough that,

00:55:20.120 you know, President Obama posts something and people can yell and scream at him in the

00:55:24.700 comments.

00:55:25.500 That's not enough.

00:55:26.240 We want people to yell and scream at each other in the comments.

00:55:30.200 And so anybody types anything, you can now respond to them and people can respond to you.

00:55:34.700 And it's endless fighting.

00:55:36.480 Why?

00:55:37.140 Why do we have this?

00:55:38.400 Well, I understand Facebook wanted to increase engagement and it worked.

00:55:42.660 What I'm saying is as long as our entire environment pushes us to fight with each other and be mad

00:55:47.940 at each other and be drowning in outrage stories, there is no way out of this.

00:55:52.260 We have to find a way to break this dynamic to get out of the Roman Colosseum.

00:55:56.240 Mm hmm.

00:55:57.720 No, I mean, it makes perfect sense.

00:55:59.600 It's do you stand by that understanding, though, because you're in academia.

00:56:03.700 So your world has been completely saturated with this for I mean, it's it's up to the gills.

00:56:08.920 Not every industry is quite that bad.

00:56:11.040 And I do believe that these and you make the great case that sort of this the loudest members

00:56:16.320 of cancel culture have an have a disproportionate voice.

00:56:19.720 But I think the vast majority, as you also say, of the country is not with them.

00:56:23.720 They don't they don't really put political differences aside.

00:56:26.400 I think the people who are pro cancel culture are a small minority with a very big voice.

00:56:32.660 So why can't we destroy them?

00:56:34.280 Why can't the society survive if we just destroy them?

00:56:38.140 Because the rest of us, the vast majority of us aren't for that stuff.

00:56:42.440 I've said this so many times on my show.

00:56:44.440 And then we can go once we destroy them, then we can go.

00:56:47.540 We can argue about abortion and the Florida law and all.

00:56:50.580 We can do all the old fashioned arguing we used to do over politics, but this is where

00:56:55.860 metaphors can either illuminate or lead us astray.

00:56:59.180 And as the linguist George Lakoff said long ago in a brilliant book called Metaphors We

00:57:03.420 Live By, we think about argument using the metaphor of war.

00:57:06.600 And you just did that.

00:57:07.680 Why can't we destroy them?

00:57:09.220 Now, if we literally mean, why can't we destroy them?

00:57:11.860 What you mean is either kill them or lock them up or cut out their tongues or sometimes

00:57:16.940 that they can't talk.

00:57:18.040 I mean, hurt them so they will stop doing this.

00:57:21.120 Wait a second.

00:57:21.800 If you hurt people, are they going to stop doing it?

00:57:24.540 There's no, again, there's no way to win a culture war.

00:57:26.880 Look at Disney.

00:57:28.620 Well, yes, you can get, you can, you can have victories.

00:57:32.540 You can have Pyrrhic victories.

00:57:34.060 And this is something that the left has a lot of.

00:57:36.360 The left has a lot of, so a Pyrrhic victory is from a story in ancient Greece where a general,

00:57:40.800 I believe is, you know, he wins the battle, but he loses so many men that he ultimately

00:57:44.920 loses the war.

00:57:45.700 And so I think what we're seeing is, you know, my argument is that while the, I think the

00:57:52.900 Republican Party has in many ways gone off the deep end more than the Democratic Party,

00:57:57.200 but the cultural left has gone off the deep end much more than the cultural right.

00:58:00.660 That's the asymmetry I wrote about.

00:58:01.900 And that's what you're talking about is you've got all these institutions where the left is

00:58:05.800 doing all these things.

00:58:06.680 And what I'm arguing is that we need to, you can't beat something with nothing and you

00:58:14.080 can't shut people up by hurting them.

00:58:16.220 What we need, I think, is a much clearer notion.

00:58:18.920 We've got to all start talking about professional responsibility, a sense of duty, a sense of what

00:58:25.160 are you here for?

00:58:25.800 What is your job?

00:58:26.520 And if you're a university, your job is to, as a faculty member, it's to do research and

00:58:32.360 find the truth.

00:58:33.780 And as a teacher, it's to educate and bring up students.

00:58:37.300 If you're a journalist, again, it's to find the truth, but using very different methods.

00:58:41.020 So each institution has a telos, is the Greek word for end or purpose.

00:58:45.920 I think we're not going to end the culture war just by silencing our opponents.

00:58:50.360 We've got to build something positive instead.

00:58:52.480 We have to develop, the middle 80% of us, if we can develop a notion of basically, do

00:58:56.640 your job.

00:58:57.600 We live in a diverse world.

00:58:58.960 We live in a world with people who have different views.

00:59:01.180 Yeah, well, I had a comedian on the show not long ago.

00:59:03.520 I think it was Ryan Long who said, if everybody could just do their job instead of feeling the

00:59:09.540 need to cross lanes and judge and comment on everybody else's job, we'd be a lot better

00:59:14.460 off.

00:59:14.700 But let me turn the camera back on you because you've been fighting for these principles

00:59:20.560 for a long, long time.

00:59:22.280 You've been living them.

00:59:23.280 I mean, I was so impressed at the number of organizations that you're a part of that I

00:59:26.720 love, you know, Heterodox Academy and FIRE and all, we'll get to the Leck Rowe project

00:59:32.600 about children and so on, but it's not working.

00:59:35.720 I mean, academia has been lost.

00:59:38.320 And so what makes you think there's hope for it?

00:59:41.120 So you're right that it has not been working so far.

00:59:45.740 It is true that the concerns that Greg Lukianoff and I had in 2014, 2015 have spread far beyond

00:59:52.420 the university.

00:59:53.580 The universities have bought into a certain mindset that has brought them away from their

00:59:58.140 core mission.

00:59:59.420 So if we were to just say, okay, this is it.

01:00:01.920 This is, let's evaluate where we are now.

01:00:03.240 I'd have to say the trends have been against us.

01:00:06.780 But here's a reason for hope.

01:00:09.760 When I wrote the Atlantic article that came out six weeks ago today, actually, I was expecting

01:00:16.040 to get attacked from the left and the right and nobody attacked me at all.

01:00:19.340 In fact, hundreds of people wrote me, just regular people just wrote me thank you notes

01:00:23.500 saying, thank you.

01:00:24.920 I'm completely exhausted.

01:00:26.480 What is happening to our country?

01:00:27.760 I think what we're seeing is we had sort of mounting insanity throughout the 2010s.

01:00:33.140 The pendulum kept swinging and swinging and swinging, and there was no sign it was going

01:00:36.040 to swing back.

01:00:37.200 And then, of course, after George Floyd and that year of COVID, things went even further

01:00:41.080 and a lot of schools implemented like Ibram Kendi style programs.

01:00:44.520 They had very bad results, generally.

01:00:46.240 A lot of things backfired.

01:00:47.880 And I think what we're seeing now is that most people are recognizing this is crazy.

01:00:51.820 This is just completely crazy what's happening to us.

01:00:53.740 Um, so I, I am perceiving, like, look at, for example, the New York Times, the New York

01:00:58.440 Times dared to publish an op-ed, uh, an editorial praising free speech.

01:01:02.980 Now they were attacked widely for it.

01:01:05.080 Uh, you know, isn't that just speech for racists?

01:01:07.220 Um, but they did it.

01:01:08.480 And I, we're seeing this more and more that the leaders of organizations who are generally

01:01:12.820 true liberals, that is they're on the left and they believe in free speech and freedom

01:01:16.880 of association.

01:01:17.920 Um, they've been intimidated, uh, uh, uh, and, and pushed around.

01:01:22.180 But I think we're beginning to see more of them stand up.

01:01:24.620 Uh, we're seeing corporations that Netflix announcing, you know what, if you can't work

01:01:28.360 on a project that doesn't share your values, maybe you shouldn't work here.

01:01:31.860 I think we're going to see in the next few months, a lot of companies, a lot of companies

01:01:35.180 taking that line.

01:01:36.380 Yeah.

01:01:36.560 That was great to see.

01:01:37.640 I felt so heartened by that.

01:01:39.020 And, and you know what, frankly, it's just like, it's what Sirius, for example, XM has already

01:01:42.940 been living.

01:01:43.540 You know, Sirius has got lefties on, on its lineup.

01:01:46.520 It's got righties.

01:01:47.380 It's got people who are somewhere in between.

01:01:49.160 Um, that's the principle of the organization, you know, let, let more conversations happen.

01:01:55.800 There's a huge marketplace for ideas here and you can go to the ones that you agree with.

01:01:59.740 You can go to the ones you disagree with, but that's the American way.

01:02:03.020 They, they never lost sight of that.

01:02:05.080 Netflix did.

01:02:06.060 And I think it took the Dave Chappelle crisis to remind them of their core mission and of

01:02:11.380 what American people want.

01:02:12.860 They don't want Netflix to be just this woke corporation.

01:02:15.780 That's shoving social messages down our throats that all align with one worldview.

01:02:20.100 That's not a winning business model.

01:02:21.860 I think they're, they're starting to get that.

01:02:25.240 That's right.

01:02:25.960 The American people ultimately have a good sense.

01:02:28.080 And while it seems as though everything has been moving in one direction since around 2014,

01:02:32.600 um, I do think that now, and, and here it's incumbent on people to stand up for principles,

01:02:38.040 to stand up for the professional responsibilities, but to do it in a way that doesn't just trigger

01:02:42.380 more outrage.

01:02:43.120 This is my fear that the dynamics of polarization and of culture are, Hey, I'm so mad at you.

01:02:48.380 I'm going to hit you hard.

01:02:49.080 And then you get mad.

01:02:49.760 You hit me hard.

01:02:50.840 Um, breaking out of the cycle, carrying ourselves with more dignity, more civility, still standing

01:02:56.460 up for principles.

01:02:57.440 I think in the long run, um, I think this is the way to go.

01:03:01.920 I'm not seeding that point.

01:03:03.300 I still think I could be wrong.

01:03:05.280 I've got the brave heart based pain on when it comes to those canceled culture warriors and

01:03:09.160 woke university presidents who are casting judgment on everybody.

01:03:11.760 But I'm open-minded as always to, to the possibility that I may be the wrong one.

01:03:16.360 Can we spend one minute on Trump?

01:03:17.960 Cause I want to get into solutions and what you actually think might help.

01:03:20.600 And there's a, there's an interesting law on the books.

01:03:22.620 Well, not on the books, but being proposed in California that might help with the kid

01:03:26.960 internet stuff that we can talk about too.

01:03:29.100 Um, it's the first time I've ever seen a law in California that I think I might get behind.

01:03:32.660 Um, but I do think Trump is interesting because there's a line, um, from your article that

01:03:37.360 says you talking about how you date sort of the, the crisis, uh, peaking to the years

01:03:42.820 between 2011 and 2015, a year marked by the great awakening on the left and the ascendancy

01:03:46.740 of Donald Trump on the right.

01:03:47.960 Then you write, Trump did not destroy the tower, meaning the tower of Babel, as we've

01:03:52.180 discussed, he merely exploited its fall.

01:03:54.320 Then you add, he was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post Babel era

01:04:00.080 in which outrage is the key to virality.

01:04:03.660 So good.

01:04:04.400 Uh, stage performance crushes competence.

01:04:08.100 Uh, I really related to that.

01:04:10.540 And then you say, and in which Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country

01:04:13.700 and so on.

01:04:14.700 That's it.

01:04:15.420 That was like, as a politician, forget his policies as a politician.

01:04:19.820 That was the thing he got before anybody else got it.

01:04:24.820 That's right.

01:04:25.900 Yes.

01:04:26.380 Um, because in the, in the mass media age where there, there was some sort of professionalism

01:04:31.920 in politics and journalism, you can question how good it was, but you know, if someone said

01:04:35.880 something atrocious, that could be the end of their campaign.

01:04:38.100 There were certain principles and rules and processes that we understood from what you might

01:04:42.140 call the pre Babel era when it was possible for a narrative to emerge about Jimmy Carter

01:04:47.600 or Paul Tsongas or whatever candidate, you know, um, um, there was a shared narrative that

01:04:53.440 could emerge, but Trump wasn't paying attention to any of that.

01:04:57.760 He was there tweeting.

01:04:59.260 Um, he was there saying outrageous things.

01:05:01.380 And I think if he had run four or eight years previously, I don't think he could possibly

01:05:05.440 have gotten the nomination.

01:05:07.040 Um, he just happened to come in at this time when everything was shredded.

01:05:11.740 There is no overarching narrative.

01:05:13.900 Um, there's wide distrust in institutions and we have such high, it's called negative partisanship.

01:05:19.780 That is Americans since the early 20, uh, since the early 2000s, we don't vote for the

01:05:24.600 candidate we want.

01:05:25.560 We vote against the candidate we hate.

01:05:27.900 And so Trump was perfect for that dynamic.

01:05:30.300 Um, Trump benefited from it.

01:05:32.240 Now, the fact that some of the, some similar things happen in Canada and the UK, certainly

01:05:36.100 the universities are identical in Canada and UK, the teen mental health crisis is identical

01:05:40.220 and they didn't have Trump.

01:05:42.000 Uh, now I do think that Trump made our politics much more coarse.

01:05:44.860 I think he greatly amplified, uh, uh, polarization.

01:05:47.840 I think he certainly drove people on the left insane, making them say and do things that

01:05:51.640 then, uh, you know, they attack people on the right with extra passion.

01:05:54.920 And that's how our culture war got so much more heated.

01:05:57.320 We're much more polarized than any Western democracy.

01:05:59.540 And that's partly why we're in such trouble now.

01:06:02.140 Hmm.

01:06:03.440 Uh, I don't, I mean, I can't disagree with any of that.

01:06:05.380 I think he, um, he saw the seam in the story and got himself in there and then totally

01:06:09.380 exploited it.

01:06:10.460 Uh, and it's why nothing could touch him.

01:06:12.400 You know, he called it the fifth Avenue rule that he could shoot somebody at fifth Avenue and

01:06:16.100 wouldn't lose any supporters, but you saw it happen time and time again with his, his, the

01:06:19.640 crazy things that emerged about him or from him during the campaign that didn't, didn't

01:06:23.540 touch him.

01:06:24.340 Uh, but I think that's interesting.

01:06:25.560 I do.

01:06:25.960 It, it concerns me that all the future politicians are going to think they have to do all the

01:06:29.940 same stuff that I would argue.

01:06:31.780 Yes.

01:06:32.120 Maybe it got Trump elected.

01:06:33.240 Yes.

01:06:33.460 It telegraphed to the base that he didn't care what the old party thought or did, but if

01:06:39.540 it continues, it scares me about what we're going to get on an ongoing basis in

01:06:44.160 the white house, cause at least Trump did wind up having some good policies, at least

01:06:47.580 from my standpoint.

01:06:48.820 Um, I don't know whether the next guy will, or whether he'll just be skilled at dividing

01:06:52.600 us, fighting back, flipping the middle finger and, you know, getting himself in the office.

01:06:59.700 Yeah.

01:07:00.280 Yeah.

01:07:00.680 I agree with that.

01:07:02.520 Um, that, and that's, what's appealing about somebody like a Glenn Youngkin, right?

01:07:05.320 He seems like his little fleece sweater vest seems unthreatening though.

01:07:08.480 We'll see.

01:07:09.560 You never know.

01:07:10.560 I can't judge the book by its cover.

01:07:12.460 Okay.

01:07:12.900 So let's go back to, um, social media because one thing we didn't talk about was Instagram

01:07:18.500 and how in particular, this is a pernicious force.

01:07:22.480 I mean, we, Twitter, we know Facebook, we know Instagram has been outed by many, including

01:07:26.920 the, the whistleblower and, and you've written a long piece on this too, about how, just how

01:07:32.400 bad it's gotten.

01:07:33.040 Cause it's not just, wow, they're really divisive.

01:07:35.600 Wow.

01:07:36.040 They're really undermining institutions and faith of America, Americans in each other.

01:07:42.320 And in their country, it's, they're actually seriously causing mental health problems that

01:07:47.840 may be fatal.

01:07:48.780 That actually may be fatal in a lot of cases with young girls in particular.

01:07:53.240 It's not to put it all on Instagram.

01:07:54.840 You know, I like to believe I'm raising healthy children that Instagram, there's only so much

01:07:58.820 damage you could do, but, um, I'm sure that's what most of the families believe.

01:08:04.080 So can you spend a minute on them?

01:08:06.320 Sure.

01:08:06.900 Um, so first I'd encourage listeners and viewers to go to, uh, I just created a page where I

01:08:11.860 put all of my top resources for social media.

01:08:13.880 So if you go to jonathanheit.com slash social media, all one word, um, I've put there my

01:08:20.140 Atlantic articles.

01:08:20.980 I gave a testimony in front of a Senate committee two weeks ago where I, I created a document

01:08:25.180 laid out.

01:08:25.680 What exactly does the data say?

01:08:27.540 What's the evidence that social media is a cause of this problem?

01:08:31.020 And so what the evidence shows clearly is that rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm

01:08:36.080 and suicide were relatively flat, um, in the early two thousands.

01:08:40.460 And then around 2010 to 2012, there are very sharp upturns in all of those graphs, especially

01:08:46.080 for girls.

01:08:47.140 Um, uh, suicide is certainly for both, but self-harm is primarily for girls.

01:08:50.860 And it starts very suddenly around 2012.

01:08:53.280 Um, and, and so that certainly points to social media as the cause, but the question is correlation

01:08:58.680 doesn't prove causation.

01:09:00.140 There've been a lot of previous moral panics over television and video games that turned

01:09:04.200 out not to have really been, uh, been correct.

01:09:06.760 Um, so I've been focusing on gathering all the academic research together to get a sense

01:09:11.220 of what's the evidence.

01:09:12.300 And it turns out the evidence is a lot of correlational studies that kids who use it more, especially

01:09:16.320 heavy users are two to three times more likely to develop depression or anxiety

01:09:20.760 disorders.

01:09:21.380 So there's correlational evidence.

01:09:22.740 There's experimental evidence.

01:09:24.080 When you randomly assign people to either use more or less, uh, social media accounts,

01:09:28.320 you generally see either, uh, uh, you know, a downturn or an upturn in their, in their mental

01:09:32.760 health.

01:09:33.400 And there's eyewitness testimony.

01:09:35.040 Ask any group of girls and their studies have done this.

01:09:37.380 Why do you know, why do you think that, uh, depression is rising?

01:09:40.440 They'll say it's social media.

01:09:41.580 So if you have all these sources of evidence, um, I think it is pretty clear that social media

01:09:47.180 and particularly Instagram is bad for girls' health.

01:09:49.620 The thing to really keep in mind is it's not just being on a screen.

01:09:53.260 It's especially, I believe I can't prove this part, but I think the most active ingredient

01:09:56.640 is when a girl puts a photo of herself up and waits for strangers or even friends, just

01:10:02.360 for people to judge her and comment on her.

01:10:05.000 There's new evidence that, that when girls do this during puberty, when you're going through

01:10:09.520 puberty, 11 to 13, that's when there's maximum damage.

01:10:12.460 So what I'm proposing in my article is we've, the age of internet adulthood was set to 13

01:10:17.940 crazily back in like 1997.

01:10:19.660 I think it was, that's way too low.

01:10:21.980 Um, it needs to be 16 and needs to be in four 16 or 18, but we can't have kids, especially

01:10:26.240 girls going through puberty, self-conscious, so uncomfortable in their bodies, putting

01:10:32.160 photos out there waiting for validation.

01:10:33.700 And then what if someone else gets more validation?

01:10:35.480 What if someone, your friend is more beautiful than you because of filters or whatever?

01:10:39.360 So, uh, I think the evidence that these visual media, especially Instagram is harmful for

01:10:43.440 girls' mental health is now pretty compelling.

01:10:46.240 So how would that be put into practice?

01:10:49.880 Like I mentioned, the California has got a law right now, uh, that would crack down on

01:10:53.640 the social media.

01:10:54.300 It's being proposed that would crack down on the social media companies with respect to

01:10:58.420 children and would make it tougher for them to do to them what they do to us in terms of

01:11:02.920 the addictive nature, uh, tracking them everywhere.

01:11:06.660 Um, things like autoplay where the next video just comes up and, you know, makes you want to

01:11:11.100 click on it.

01:11:11.940 Uh, notifications past a certain time of night.

01:11:14.740 I mean, those all make sense, but how would it work?

01:11:17.600 So when you, when a 13 year old gets an iPad, you as the parent would have to program in

01:11:22.420 this third, this device belongs to a 13 year old.

01:11:26.220 Hello, not a grownup and just that information, or you'd have to, as a parent, like type in

01:11:31.980 the restrictions you want it.

01:11:32.980 Cause we already have some restrictions we can put on.

01:11:34.940 Yeah, no, it has to be that the default is that kids can't get on until 16.

01:11:39.380 And so the way it needs, there are a lot of schemes to do this.

01:11:42.060 So, um, so for example, you know, what if you could, if anybody could go to Twitter or

01:11:47.960 Facebook or one of these, any of these sites, and it, suppose you could open an account,

01:11:52.320 um, uh, um, suppose you can open an account, um, but you have to get verified by, to show

01:11:59.480 that you're old enough to be using the platform, especially if you want to post, that's the most

01:12:02.520 damaging thing.

01:12:03.160 And 10 years ago, it was like, well, how are we going to know?

01:12:06.220 Like, how can you possibly know that the kid is, is, you know, is 16?

01:12:09.180 Like, are they going to have to show the driver's license?

01:12:10.960 But now there's all kinds of companies that figured out how to do this.

01:12:14.300 So the banking industry, gambling industry, there's all kinds of companies that figured

01:12:17.860 out how do we verify identity?

01:12:20.160 How do we verify age in ways that are not taking your driver's license and giving it to

01:12:24.980 Facebook?

01:12:25.960 So the industry is very creative.

01:12:27.020 There are lots of ways to do this.

01:12:28.700 Um, and what I'm arguing is that the only reason I, I don't know if your kids are on

01:12:33.820 yet, you're 12 year old, but both of my kids, when they entered sixth grade, they said, daddy,

01:12:38.020 can I have an Instagram account?

01:12:39.140 Everyone, or at least my, my, my, my son did, uh, you know, everyone has an Instagram account.

01:12:43.840 Um, and the only reason everyone has one is because everyone said to their parents, mom,

01:12:48.500 can I have an Instagram account?

01:12:49.240 Cause everyone has one.

01:12:50.040 We're all caught in a trap.

01:12:50.980 And that's the central idea of that, of the documentary, the social dilemma.

01:12:55.240 So we've got to break the trap.

01:12:57.020 Um, and so as long as we can keep most kids off until 16, even if a few are able to sneak

01:13:01.460 on, that doesn't matter because that won't put pressure on everyone to be on.

01:13:05.220 We've got to break that social trap.

01:13:06.980 Yeah, no, I, I took the road less traveled on this one and I said, no, I mean, my kids

01:13:13.620 are still young, but my 12 year old now he has a phone and just a phone and there's

01:13:18.880 no, there's no social media for him and there won't be for any of my children.

01:13:21.820 And you know, my, I hadn't even considered 16 as an opener.

01:13:25.840 I was thinking, enjoy college and good luck, but certainly no time before then, because

01:13:31.720 I, it's just too damaging.

01:13:33.660 I just don't see the upside.

01:13:34.740 Now, if we get to the point where every single kid in the class is on some social media app,

01:13:38.920 I guess we'd have to reassess it.

01:13:40.560 I mean, I had one guest come on and say the thing that's really, that's you really want

01:13:43.900 to avoid is do not let Snapchat or Facebook or Twitter or one of these become the main

01:13:50.160 place where they text because these apps are not dumb.

01:13:54.280 So Snapchat has the ability now to create group chats and group texts so that they go

01:13:58.600 through the app to do all their party planning and so on.

01:14:01.700 And that's the absolute worst thing you could do.

01:14:03.640 So that would be a hard line.

01:14:04.820 But right now, John, I'm kind of in a good place because I'm a public figure and I basically

01:14:08.340 told them, you know, do you like eating?

01:14:10.480 Because you won't be able to if you go on those websites and post something stupid.

01:14:15.900 And, you know, that's, they kind of accepted that.

01:14:19.500 Yeah.

01:14:19.860 So I can offer some advice to all the parents out there.

01:14:23.760 So the first is please go to letgrow.org.

01:14:26.980 It's an organization that I co-founded with Lenore Skenazy, a wonderful woman who wrote this

01:14:31.480 brilliant book, Free Range Kids, about how to give your kids a childhood where they'll

01:14:35.240 develop autonomy.

01:14:36.220 They'll learn how to take care of themselves and how to have conflict and cooperation.

01:14:40.480 So at letgrow.org, we've got lots of ideas, lots of suggestions.

01:14:44.320 What I can add as a social psychologist is we can each put controls on our own kid, but

01:14:49.320 our kids, when they're teenagers, what matters most to them, of course, is their friends,

01:14:53.860 what other kids think of them in their grade.

01:14:56.020 That's what matters most to them.

01:14:57.860 And so if you're the, if your kid is the only one who's not on, that will be painful.

01:15:01.320 That kid will be excluded.

01:15:02.520 Now in the long run, maybe that's good, but it will certainly be painful along the way.

01:15:05.340 Far better is if you can really make an effort to find some other parents, find some other

01:15:10.460 parents that share your idea, especially parents close enough where your kid can walk back and

01:15:15.680 forth.

01:15:15.960 They can walk to each other's homes.

01:15:17.960 So there's all kinds of ideas in Let Grow.

01:15:20.160 There's all kinds of ideas on my website, jonathanhyte.com slash social media.

01:15:24.780 This is a social dilemma and we have to work together to break it.

01:15:28.080 There's limited, it's hard for us as individual parents to keep our kids away from these platforms.

01:15:33.720 We have to try.

01:15:35.680 It's so hard, you know, I mean, I can definitely see a situation where somebody says, you know,

01:15:40.680 they're all, they're all drinking or they're all smoking pot, you know, or they're all vaping.

01:15:46.760 And, you know, if your kid's the only one, he's not going to get invited in which I'd be

01:15:50.520 like, too bad, you know?

01:15:52.680 So social media is different though, because it's basic communication.

01:15:56.060 It's the way you set up a party.

01:15:57.540 It's the way you set up a play date.

01:15:59.240 I mean, it really can be exclusionary if they don't, if they're all on one app and your

01:16:03.980 kid's not on it.

01:16:05.300 But I also plan on, on being like a little inspector Clouseau if they ever, I mean, I

01:16:09.900 am going to spy on everything and get ahead of problems because I do think, I don't really

01:16:16.100 believe in trust when it comes to your teenage kids and social media.

01:16:19.260 I believe in spying on them.

01:16:21.280 Am I wrong, John?

01:16:22.200 Well, yeah.

01:16:23.460 But this, but this is the difficulty is that at what point do they learn to, to moderate

01:16:27.620 themselves now these platforms are so powerful.

01:16:30.780 The law of the law of the reinforcement is so powerful that yet, if you don't do any

01:16:35.840 monitoring, your kids are likely to lie.

01:16:37.880 Look, we all, they all learn to lie.

01:16:39.640 Whenever you open the account, you just lie about your age.

01:16:41.520 They all learn that.

01:16:43.000 So what is the lesson we're teaching them?

01:16:45.180 We, I agree with you.

01:16:46.360 You have to monitor it, especially, especially early on, especially when they're going through

01:16:49.500 puberty, you know, 11, 12, 13, 14 kids must not be on, on social media, especially

01:16:54.320 on Instagram.

01:16:54.920 Um, but at a certain point before they go to college, you have to give it the more autonomy.

01:16:59.880 Um, my son, uh, knew that he couldn't have an Instagram account in middle school, but

01:17:03.760 he's very responsible, very conscientious.

01:17:06.340 Uh, when he joined the track team in 10th grade, uh, now he's, he's with a group of friends.

01:17:11.040 He just went ahead and opened an Instagram account by himself.

01:17:13.100 Didn't ask me for permission, but that was appropriate in my family.

01:17:16.120 Uh, cause he's really, he's really earned it.

01:17:18.020 Um, and so I don't spy on my son.

01:17:20.220 Um, I, you know, I do trust him and, uh, you know, maybe he'll betray that trust, but

01:17:24.520 you have to, of course, you have to go with what your kid is like and what the situation

01:17:28.600 is.

01:17:28.880 But, you know, we have to, the job of a parent is to work him or herself out of a job.

01:17:33.680 Um, that's something Greg and I say in our book and, uh, we, it's, it's hard with social

01:17:37.880 media if we have to try.

01:17:39.380 I know my God, I'm in denial about that facts.

01:17:41.700 Mine are still relatively young and it is painful to think about, but, uh, I know you

01:17:46.660 are right.

01:17:47.020 I want to talk a little bit about that, about the, um, sort of the, the approach that you,

01:17:52.320 that you were speaking of in the, in the Lekero project, because I'm, I'm a big believer

01:17:55.840 in it and the total lack of autonomy for children today is a massive problem and it's feeding

01:17:59.780 into this.

01:18:00.420 Uh, we'll pick it up there with John height after this quick break.

01:18:03.280 Don't miss a moment.

01:18:04.740 Don't go away.

01:18:09.840 John, the, the three proposals that you have among, among others, but the three to sort

01:18:14.140 of address some of these issues, the, the catastrophic fall of the tower of Babel include

01:18:20.620 harden our democratic institutions, reform social media and prepare the next generation.

01:18:29.180 So let's go through those.

01:18:31.060 Um, what do you mean by harden our democratic institutions?

01:18:33.740 Um, so, um, the, the key to a healthy democracy is having good institutions.

01:18:39.320 This is what distinguishes.

01:18:41.220 And if you go around the world, those places settled by great Britain tend to have more

01:18:44.820 stable democracy than those places settled by Spain, uh, for example.

01:18:48.680 Um, and so, especially now that we're going through rapidly rising political polarization

01:18:54.500 and cross-party hatred, and we're seeing some beginnings of political violence, which is

01:18:58.300 very frightening.

01:18:58.760 Um, we have to make sure that our democratic institutions are trusted and trustworthy and

01:19:04.560 that they can function even if things get a lot worse in terms of cross-partisan hatred.

01:19:08.960 And so, for example, I'm so disheartened by what has happened with the Supreme Court in

01:19:13.940 terms of, as I see it, I'm a, I'm a nonpartisan centrist as I see it, what Mitch McConnell did

01:19:19.800 in, in denying Obama a Supreme Court nomination, I think was, uh, it was a hardball baseball move

01:19:25.920 that I think damaged legitimacy and the, and the respect of the institution.

01:19:29.060 That was very bad for the Supreme Court for the country.

01:19:31.020 Um, and now where we are is, uh, you know, many people on the left are not going to trust

01:19:35.780 the Supreme Court.

01:19:36.420 They don't think the current makeup is what it should be.

01:19:38.700 Anyway, whatever you think about it, my point is just that it should not be as much of a

01:19:43.800 partisan game to get the timing.

01:19:45.100 The fact that we're picking judges based on, you know, how old they are.

01:19:49.600 No, just an 18 year old term.

01:19:51.600 A lot of people have talked about this.

01:19:52.880 Everyone should have an 18 year term.

01:19:54.540 Every president gets an appointment every two years, things like that.

01:19:58.060 If we do that, that just regularizes the process.

01:20:01.280 Now the process, of course, there's always politics in the process, but it's not, we're

01:20:05.640 not fighting to the death because so much is at stake over each, over each appointment.

01:20:09.440 So it's, you know, and gerrymandering of electoral districts, there's just a lot of things we

01:20:13.620 can do so that, you know, you want the Yankees and the Red Sox to have a good baseball game.

01:20:17.460 You don't want, say the Yankees to get to control all of the rules or the Red, I mean, or

01:20:21.180 the Red Sox, that'd be insane.

01:20:22.420 We've got to fix the game and then we can have the two teams play, play ball.

01:20:26.540 Yeah, it's hard to find nonpartisans to oversee something like elections.

01:20:31.500 I know that's one of your things, like make sure we have somebody we have in a position

01:20:34.460 of trust to oversee the fairness of elections.

01:20:36.640 It's hard to find nonpartisans right now.

01:20:38.480 It's like the secretary of state.

01:20:39.660 That's always a partisan person and they tend to, you know, push it for whatever side they're

01:20:45.120 aligned with.

01:20:45.980 But I don't know, like a few people, the people who are truly nonpartisan don't get

01:20:50.700 involved in government.

01:20:52.320 True, but it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be that every person is nonpartisan.

01:20:55.820 Suppose you had a commission to draw electoral districts in your state and the rule is you

01:21:01.720 go for generally compact, you know, you can't have long stringy districts, generally compact.

01:21:07.140 Now you have some people on the left, some people on the right, but they're not far left

01:21:10.380 or right.

01:21:11.120 And of course they're partisans, but they also, they live in the same town.

01:21:15.320 Maybe they're, you know, they have a lot in common.

01:21:18.400 They can work it out just as the jury works things out.

01:21:21.060 So there are ways to do this.

01:21:22.480 And our present system is a mess.

01:21:25.260 I'll add it just as an asterisk.

01:21:26.860 I think that as much as I agreed as a legal matter with Citizens United, I do think it

01:21:31.080 opened up such a floodgate of corporate cash into campaigns that it made individual politicians

01:21:36.820 beholden to like one donor instead of feeling any need to work across the aisle.

01:21:41.880 And so I don't know exactly the reform that's going to solve that.

01:21:45.220 But just because it's constitutional doesn't mean it's good.

01:21:49.440 And it's something we might take a hard look at.

01:21:52.480 That's the right way to think about this.

01:21:54.180 Think about it like if you love America, if you think that America is and has been and

01:21:58.620 should be a beacon to the world about self-governance, that we can govern ourselves.

01:22:02.920 We don't, you know, authoritarians, they can do certain big things well, but in the long

01:22:07.180 run, they fail.

01:22:08.200 We have to succeed.

01:22:09.320 If you want, if you want the American experiment to succeed, you've got to think about the rules

01:22:12.680 of the game and whatever it takes.

01:22:15.480 So, you know, we want people running for office to be responsive to their constituents.

01:22:21.120 We want them to have a long-term view.

01:22:23.080 The more they're incentivized to pay attention just to a few rich donors or just to their

01:22:27.220 partisan extremes, the worst system of government we have and the more China ultimately wins.

01:22:33.360 But I mean, as I say that, and I, you know, I said how I feel, but I hear the left saying,

01:22:38.380 you know, hate speech isn't free speech all the time.

01:22:40.720 You know, they said that literally our pal Michael Knowles just caused a controversy

01:22:45.160 on some college campus recently.

01:22:47.460 They said he's anti-LGBTQ.

01:22:49.420 He's not, he doesn't really believe in affirming gender pronouns and all that.

01:22:53.940 And they said, oh, no, we believe in free speech, but we just, but hate speech is not

01:22:57.420 free speech, which of course it is.

01:22:59.100 It's literally free speech.

01:23:00.640 And it's the reason the first amendment was created and all that.

01:23:03.520 So they want to burn down the first amendment in the constitution.

01:23:05.740 I don't want to do that.

01:23:06.860 You know, I just can see the consequence of why free speech laws are often ones that

01:23:11.060 may not be absolutely perfect for the, for the union.

01:23:14.140 Right.

01:23:14.720 Okay.

01:23:15.180 So let's move on to the second bucket of reforms, which is reform social media to make it less

01:23:19.120 toxic.

01:23:19.820 Now, whenever you say reform social media or regulate, people think what we're talking

01:23:24.720 about is the government's going to decide who gets to speak.

01:23:27.600 The government's going to decide what content is legal.

01:23:30.300 No, no, no.

01:23:32.040 Content moderation is a, is an issue.

01:23:34.000 And that's what almost everyone talks about, but what got us into this mess, isn't that

01:23:39.240 some people can post crazy conspiracy theories.

01:23:41.640 They could always do that back before the internet.

01:23:43.580 They could do that.

01:23:44.660 What got us into this mess is that, is that now since 2009, the more outrageous something

01:23:49.800 is, the more likely it is to spread.

01:23:51.580 It's a change in the dynamics of the platforms.

01:23:54.160 That's what has really, that's what knocked over the tower of Babel.

01:23:56.920 That's what's doing us in.

01:23:57.940 So in this bucket of reforms to social media, um, uh, it's things like, um, just, uh, reforming

01:24:06.360 the, doing things that things don't go viral so quickly.

01:24:09.760 So one of the most important things we could do is actually verify, um, verify identity.

01:24:15.280 It doesn't mean you have to post with your real name.

01:24:16.960 You can still post anonymously, but if you want to post content, banks have no, your customer

01:24:24.200 laws.

01:24:24.480 You can't just open an account with any bank and give a fake name.

01:24:26.740 You have to show who you are.

01:24:27.860 And I think it should be the same on, on at least the large platforms, the ones that really

01:24:31.980 have an effect on our democracy.

01:24:33.920 Um, you can open an account.

01:24:35.420 You can, uh, uh, you can see what's going on.

01:24:37.500 No problem.

01:24:37.940 But if you want to reap the advantages of these viral dynamics on a platform that has a special

01:24:43.420 protection from section two 30, the platform has a minimum obligation to verify that you're

01:24:48.060 a human being and not a Russian agent or a Russian bot that you're old enough to be

01:24:51.400 using the platform.

01:24:52.180 And actually Elon Musk tweeted this.

01:24:53.940 He said, authenticate all humans.

01:24:55.160 So whether we're just authenticating that you're a human, whether authenticating that

01:24:58.600 you're a human, you're old enough, but a few things like this, that would knock out

01:25:01.380 almost all the bots and it would reduce some of the really nasty behavior.

01:25:05.040 Now, who wants to be in a place where you say something and you just attacked by, by,

01:25:09.240 you know, thousands of, uh, thousands of accounts.

01:25:11.940 We need to make these platforms.

01:25:13.740 If this, if they're going to be important to our democracy, we need to make them places

01:25:16.720 that we feel aren't afraid to speak up.

01:25:18.340 So that's the second bucket of reforms.

01:25:20.800 Yeah.

01:25:20.920 And there's a second layer of what do we do to protect our children?

01:25:23.180 We talked about that, uh, on, in terms of online.

01:25:25.900 Um, then the third is very interesting and I, I love it and it's a cause near and dear to

01:25:30.140 my heart.

01:25:30.860 Prepare the next generation.

01:25:32.000 And this relates to the let grow project.

01:25:34.920 Um, your, your position is, and I share it entirely.

01:25:39.040 Treating kids as fragile makes them so.

01:25:42.040 That's right.

01:25:43.580 That's right.

01:25:44.100 So we are anti-fragile.

01:25:46.040 This is a wonderful notion from Nassim Taleb, uh, you know, glass is fragile.

01:25:50.300 If you drop it, it breaks.

01:25:52.020 Plastic is resilient, but there are certain things where if you drop them, they get stronger

01:25:56.820 and kids are like that.

01:25:58.820 Obviously I'm not saying physically drop your kids, but the point is if you protect your

01:26:02.460 kids, like if you protect their immune systems, they don't encounter bacteria, you're not helping

01:26:06.520 them.

01:26:06.900 You're actually crippling the development of their immune system.

01:26:09.720 And if you protect your kids that nobody ever teases them, nobody ever insults them.

01:26:13.060 They have no conflicts.

01:26:14.160 You're crippling their emotional development.

01:26:16.480 So, um, we have to prepare them for a world in which a lot of people don't share their

01:26:20.300 opinions and sometimes they'll criticize them.

01:26:23.180 And that used to happen on the playground.

01:26:24.820 Now we got concerned about bullying and of course their bullying is a real thing, especially

01:26:29.860 when it goes on for multiple days, it ruins a kid's life.

01:26:32.420 So we have, it's a fine line between preventing bullying and preventing conflict.

01:26:36.480 We have to allow unsupervised conflict.

01:26:38.660 We have to, kids have to have a lot of unsupervised experience.

01:26:41.040 Um, and you know, what we did in, in, in 2010 or so is they're supposed to have a lot of

01:26:45.780 experience, but we put them on experience blockers.

01:26:47.460 So this here, this is an experience blocker.

01:26:49.300 Once you, you know, once you have it, um, you know, once you, once your kid is, uh, is,

01:26:54.060 is on an experience blocker, they're not going to have the normal sorts of conflicts.

01:26:57.580 They're going to have, um, they're going to, everything's going to be immediate through

01:27:00.460 the phone.

01:27:01.420 So, um, so we have to attend to child development.

01:27:03.920 We have to give them a lot more unsupervised experience.

01:27:05.680 That's what let grow is, is all about.

01:27:08.100 I love that.

01:27:08.940 I'm ready to get down in 2010.

01:27:10.260 We put them on experience blockers.

01:27:11.840 That's exactly right.

01:27:12.640 Forget puberty blockers.

01:27:14.020 We have our kids on experience blockers and it's the phone that you have right in your

01:27:17.280 hand that you let your kid use or the one you gave him or her.

01:27:20.280 Um, this is so important to me.

01:27:22.280 Okay.

01:27:22.580 So both of these two and three in terms of your reforms are getting at one of my questions

01:27:29.340 here, which is, and it relates to the entire discussion we've had over these two hours.

01:27:32.480 The, the means to kill somebody socially can very much be found in social media.

01:27:41.220 You know, the Twitter mob piles on with the retweets and so on.

01:27:45.140 And they, they take somebody down, they cancel somebody that ruined somebody's life.

01:27:48.200 The means to kill is very much embedded in social media, but, but the desire to kill,

01:27:54.120 is it new?

01:27:56.380 Was that always there?

01:27:57.680 Was it latent and sitting there?

01:27:59.720 And we just finally found the means to, you know, express it or is the desire to kill

01:28:05.980 amongst this younger set in particular related to the things we're talking about?

01:28:11.880 If we get our kids, you know, quote prepared, and if we don't treat them as fragile and if

01:28:17.420 we expose them to different ideas and if we do all the things, are they going to be less

01:28:22.400 likely to want to use the social media for evil and, and cruelty in this way?

01:28:27.260 Yeah.

01:28:28.260 Well, I think if they're mentally healthy, um, uh, I think they will be stronger and kinder.

01:28:35.160 And I think if you are, uh, anxious, insecure, and fragile, you're more likely to seek solace

01:28:40.560 and comfort in a, in a mob, in a movement, in a group.

01:28:43.500 Um, and when that group engages in something, you're going to want to fit in with that group.

01:28:47.480 You're not going to have the guts to stand up against it.

01:28:50.060 Um, so I think for so many reasons, look, our kids' mental health is plummeting and this

01:28:54.480 is a, this is a humanitarian crisis.

01:28:56.060 This is a national crisis.

01:28:57.540 The surgeon general recently put out an advisory basically saying we have mental health, uh,

01:29:02.260 epidemic in this, in this country for teenagers.

01:29:05.020 Um, so I can't say that if we give kids normal childhoods and we let them have conflicts and

01:29:10.300 experiences on the playground, let them make teams, let them enforce rules, you know, that's

01:29:14.280 going to certainly be good for their mental health and their development.

01:29:16.400 And I can't say that's going to keep them from being nasty on social media.

01:29:19.920 In fact, look, you know, you and I know a lot of the people attacking us, almost all

01:29:23.300 of them are adults.

01:29:24.020 They had normal childhoods.

01:29:25.580 Um, so preparing them for adulthood alone, isn't going to stop the viral dynamics.

01:29:30.600 That's why I keep focusing on the architecture.

01:29:32.960 It's not about content moderation.

01:29:34.600 It's not about saying, oh, you can't say that.

01:29:36.100 You're not allowed to say that.

01:29:37.120 That's, that's a dead end.

01:29:38.280 We're never going to agree on that.

01:29:39.440 We can't, it's very difficult to find, find truth.

01:29:41.520 What is true in a, in a, in a tweet or a post.

01:29:43.900 Um, but we can change the dynamics so that, so that, uh, at present, the nastier you are,

01:29:51.500 the more outrageous you are, the more successful you are.

01:29:54.580 Now that's, I get it.

01:29:56.020 It's the same way you wouldn't go to a kid who's mentally struggling and say, you know,

01:30:02.180 with sort of a, a, a layout in front of him, here are all the ways available to ending

01:30:07.200 your life.

01:30:07.660 No, no same human would ever present that to a kid who is struggling.

01:30:11.560 And the same way we shouldn't have social media companies sort of presenting to them

01:30:15.680 the panoply of ways that their mental fragility can be exploited and used against others and

01:30:23.240 sort of used for, for nefarious purposes.

01:30:25.780 I want to say this, you, this is from the let it let grow project.

01:30:29.400 Uh, as far as your mission, we reject the idea that kids are in constant physical emotion

01:30:34.680 or psychological danger from creeps, kidnapping, germs, grades, flashes, frustration, failure,

01:30:39.100 baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men, disappointing playdates, and, or the perils of a non-organic

01:30:44.180 grape.

01:30:45.960 Somehow our culture has become obsessed with kids' fragility and it's lost sight of their

01:30:50.920 innate resilience.

01:30:53.060 Let grow believes today's kids are smarter and stronger than our culture gives them credit

01:30:57.380 for, um, I, I love this.

01:31:00.020 I completely agree with this.

01:31:01.320 And I think, what is it?

01:31:02.920 How does it manifest?

01:31:03.920 What should people do today?

01:31:05.220 Cause there's one thing later where you talk about, tell your kid, I've got a homework

01:31:08.760 assignment for you.

01:31:09.880 You go home and you do something new on your own, climb a tree, run an errand, make a meal.

01:31:16.720 Uh, but so realistically, you know, how does the parent, cause I think most parents who

01:31:20.300 are like you or like I am, they're not, they don't need to be told this, but the people

01:31:23.860 who are holding on a little, who think maybe I am the helicopter parent.

01:31:26.580 Maybe I'm not preparing my kid.

01:31:28.360 What, what are realistic steps they can take to sort of reel back?

01:31:34.120 So once you recognize that your kid has to learn how to do things on her own, uh, that's

01:31:38.780 your job as a parent.

01:31:40.100 Now you can say, okay, well, let's, let's talk about the things that you could do on your

01:31:43.820 own.

01:31:44.000 And if you've never walked, you know, if you're six or seven, you've never walked the

01:31:46.380 dog on your own, would you like to?

01:31:48.440 Um, so if you sit down with your kid and you say, you know, what are some things that

01:31:52.100 you think you can do?

01:31:53.020 Do you think, would you, you know, do you think you can go to the store and get milk for

01:31:55.680 us?

01:31:56.340 Um, you know, you'll find that the kid actually wants to do things.

01:31:59.340 Now, what we suggest at let grow is do this in elementary school and get your elementary

01:32:04.260 school to do it.

01:32:04.920 So all the kids are doing.

01:32:06.840 Um, and if all the kids are, uh, coming up with something to do with their, you know,

01:32:11.060 at home, an errand, make dinner for us, whatever it is.

01:32:14.360 It's, it's an amazing thing that happens when the kid does this.

01:32:17.780 Um, they are so they're bursting with pride and then they do it.

01:32:21.880 They want to do it again.

01:32:23.020 Uh, so when my daughter was, uh, was six, uh, we had her bring me lunch here in New York

01:32:28.820 city.

01:32:29.020 She had across a somewhat busy street.

01:32:31.300 Um, and, uh, I was terrified and you know, my wife sent her off and I was waiting at the

01:32:36.380 office and I actually kind of like snuck around the corner to see.

01:32:39.600 But the point is, when she got to, when she got to my office, she was just bursting and

01:32:44.520 it was the most beautiful, beautiful thing.

01:32:46.260 And a few experiences like that.

01:32:47.940 And kids realize, you know what?

01:32:48.980 I can do things.

01:32:50.340 Whereas the way we're raising kids is to believe you can't do anything.

01:32:53.860 Everything's too hard.

01:32:54.620 Everything's too dangerous.

01:32:55.800 So I'll do it for you.

01:32:57.240 And that's the way to raise a kid who becomes depressed, anxious, fragile, and even suicidal.

01:33:01.760 And as you point out, let them play free play with kids of all ages, where there's a,

01:33:05.760 there's a social system where you get clipped, you know, before you get too out of

01:33:09.580 line at usually at proportionate levels and you learn, you learn by taking little risks

01:33:14.580 and having them either rewarded or punished appropriately, or sometimes inappropriately,

01:33:17.840 but like you learn.

01:33:18.920 And I love the distinction you drew between that experience and chronic bullying, which

01:33:23.260 is much different.

01:33:24.040 And you do need to step in on completely agree with all of that.

01:33:27.540 My God, this has been a great, great discussion.

01:33:29.560 I'm thrilled to meet you.

01:33:30.840 I absolutely loved your book and I can't wait.

01:33:32.620 What's the, the next one's coming out in 23, which is too long.

01:33:35.480 What's it called?

01:33:36.200 Because it's, it's all about Tower of Babel.

01:33:38.180 Yes.

01:33:38.840 Yeah.

01:33:39.260 The title is life after Babel adapting to a world we can no longer share.

01:33:44.760 It's about how we live in a world in which there are no shared narratives where this,

01:33:48.480 this kind of chaos is going to be with us forever.

01:33:50.260 As far as I know, it's for the rest of our lives.

01:33:52.500 So how do we make the best of it?

01:33:53.480 And I think we can.

01:33:54.500 Well, I will.

01:33:54.920 I a hundred percent would love to have you on, uh, when you release it to help promote

01:33:58.060 it.

01:33:58.280 And in between then and now I'm going to be working on taking down the president of Princeton.

01:34:02.660 Just kidding.

01:34:03.340 Just kidding.

01:34:03.840 John, what a pleasure.

01:34:06.780 Thanks for sharing your wit and intellect with us.

01:34:09.340 We appreciate it.

01:34:09.840 Thank you, Megan.

01:34:10.320 What a pleasure to be talking with you.

01:34:12.140 That was an in-depth discussion.

01:34:13.520 Really enjoyed it.

01:34:13.960 We're all talking about what, are we secretly helicopter parents?

01:34:16.340 Would we let our kids go get New York?

01:34:18.440 Anyway, don't miss it tomorrow.

01:34:19.680 We've got the guys from the fifth column and we'll talk to you then.

01:34:23.440 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show.

01:34:25.280 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - May 23, 2022

A Culture of Fear, Social Media Toxicity, and America's Descent Into Stupidity, with Jonathan Haidt ｜ Ep. 327

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