Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
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This is honestly. Perhaps you've noticed that the thing that we call social media is in fact deeply antisocial. These platforms that were pitched as ways to unite us have instead done precisely the opposite. You can see it everywhere you look, in the rise of political polarization, in the mobs that form to call for people's jobs or to ruin their reputations.

And you can see it in the historical rise of distrust in just about everything, including the deep distrust and paranoia that we have about one another. A lot of people have tried to explain what exactly is happening here, how we got to this point. They blame Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey or the attention-stealing algorithms. Some have blamed capitalism, others human nature itself.

But the best explanation I have read to date was just published in The Atlantic by my guest today, Jonathan Haidt. You might know him best from his book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which he co-wrote with Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE. The book was about how new trends in parenting that were designed to protect children from negative experiences have instead set an entire generation up for failure.

John is a social psychology professor at NYU, and his work focuses on moral reasoning. He's also the founder of Heterodox Academy, an organization that advocates for viewpoint diversity on college campuses. This is a deep, long conversation that spans from how the like and share buttons on social media transformed how we use the internet to ultimately, as John argues, how social media makes us unfit for democracy. Stay with us.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. John, thank you so much for this latest story and for talking to me today.

Well, thanks so much for having me on, Barry. You have the best conversations going on all the aspects of our decline, our decay, our descent into Babel. So I'm really pleased to finally be able to talk about this with you. Okay, John, let's start with the metaphor that you use to frame the entire problem that we're here to discuss. And that's the Tower of Babel. Before we get into the metaphor of what that story represents, can you remind us what actually happens in the biblical version?

Yes, good. Let's go right to this source because we all know like, oh, yeah, you know, there was a tower and like God got angry and knocked it over or something like that. But if you read the story in Genesis, it's extremely short.

And really all it is, is the descendants of Noah, after the flood, they're fruitful, they multiply, they're heading out, they cross the plain of Shinar, and they decide to build a city for themselves there. And this city, they decide, will have a great tower to make a name for ourselves. It's not clear what the motivation is. Is it that they are afraid they'll be washed away again by another flood? We don't really know. But they build a city and they build a tower.

And God looks down and he is offended. And he says, look what these people are doing. And this is only the beginning of what they will do. He sees humanity becoming strong and rising up. And he says, look, they are one people and they have all one language. And this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they propose to do now will be impossible for them.

And here's the key line that links it to our time. He says, come, let us go down and confuse their language there so that they will not understand one another's speech. That's the key idea that when I reread that, I said, oh, my God, that is the metaphor. That is what has happened to us. It's not just, oh, the tower got knocked down. It's we now cannot understand each other and we may never again be able to understand each other.

So in the story, it's God coming down and saying, you know, let me confuse their language. God is the one doing the confusing. That's right. Who's doing our confusing? So if you trace it out, you know, so if this is the metaphorical story of the origin of human languages that were divided into languages and also metaphorically just into groups, into tribes. And so much of my own work has been on tribalism, on how we evolve for intergroup conflict and

But the thing about Babel is that it's not a story about tribalism or intergroup conflict. It's a story about fracturing and fragmenting. Everything gets broken up. And that means even within the teams.

And that's, I think, one of the hallmarks of these recent these last few years is that it's not just red versus blue. It's complete confusion and conflict within the left, also within the right, although it's more visible within the left. But it's within almost every institution, this internal contradiction, the fact that there's no governing metaphor, there's no agreed upon truth, there's no agreed upon telos or purpose there.

So it's that sense of confusion that I've been struggling to capture ever since Greg and I wrote our first Atlantic article on the calling of the American mind. It's felt like something is off with the universe. Something changed. And Babel is the best metaphor I've found to capture that. So the Tower of Babel, right, is this tale in a way about cooperation that was happening at a grand scale. God looking down at that cooperation and basically saying, okay,

It's confusing why God would think this, but let's leave the mystical question to the side. For someone else. Right. When humans cooperate, nothing's impossible for them. That's right. That's too God-like. They're like gods. Our version of the tower that reached up to the heavens is modern technology. It's made us vastly more prosperous than our forebears. We can edit our genes. We can send rovers to Mars and 100 million other examples that come to mind.

And the idea, right, in the early days of the internet was that through the internet, we were going to overcome all of the obstacles to human cooperation. Our geographic distances, the different languages that we speak, our wildly diverse cultures and our histories, right? The interconnectedness was going to fix everything. But that's not what happened. That's right. That's not what happened. So tell us...

sort of where you place the beginning of that shift. Because it's really a shift about the way that we understood the power of the internet and how we used it. That's right. So let me retell the story, starting with the great age of techno-optimism. Okay. So I'm a child of the Cold War. I first began thinking about the world in the 70s and, oh my God, the energy crisis and overpopulation and nuclear war and everything's going to be terrible.

But those of us who were sort of politically conscious at the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have to go back to that time and realize that this was the most miraculous thing. We never thought this could happen. And not only did it happen, but then liberal democracy was breaking out all over the world. And this is when Francis Fukuyama speculated that this could be the end of history, that if you just let all these countries get rich, they will follow the same path towards liberal democracy. And it wasn't just developments in Eastern Europe.

It was very much the young Internet and the idea that, you know, it's going to unlock cooperation, learning. You know, kids all over the world can learn programming, English, math, everything. Right. Like Levi's and Netscape are going to be available to everyone and it would change the world. That's right. You know, if a country has McDonald's, they won't go to war with another country with a McDonald's until, I guess, a few months ago, a month ago.

And so the 90s was this incredible age of optimism and technology, and especially the internet was a big part of it.

it. And if you think about it in terms of the story of Babel, where we were divided into tribes and nations that were at war and we couldn't understand each other, well, now the greatest technology for understanding each other at a distance comes in. Not only that, but we begin to actually get artificial translation. Google Translate, an interesting little note, Google Translate

becomes available on all phones by 2011. And 2011 is also the year that it begins with the Arab Spring. And so we think, oh, my God, Facebook can take down dictators. You know, what country, what dictator could keep out the Internet and who could face down their population if they're all connected on Facebook or other apps?

And that year ends with Occupy Wall Street. So people are really thinking, this is it. This is the dawning of the, not exactly the age of Aquarius, but an age of eternal possibility and cooperation. So if you wanted to say that humanity was divided for thousands of years, but that we came pretty darn close to rebuilding the tower so that we could all be one, and not that we'd all love each other, but that we could speak of a human community,

And I would say 2011 was the peak year, the pinnacle year of techno-democratic optimism. And then everything turns around. Where does the shift begin? When you think about the early days that many of us were on these platforms, thinking about Twitter and how fun it was for people that were on early Twitter because they were actually –

connecting with people. And some people found their best friends. I know someone who met their husband who slid into her DMs. I mean, there were tons of stories like that. But then as the platform grew and as people's personas on the platform grew, the way that they used it changed. It stopped being about connecting, as you write, and it started to be about something like performing.

That's right. That's the crucial change. And so we have to really distinguish between technology, which is great, and the internet, which is great, and iPhones, which are these amazing Swiss army knives. All of this stuff is wonderful. I want to put all those on one side.

Make it clear, I'm not a Luddite. I'm not saying this stuff is bad. The problem comes in with social media specifically, and not all social media. It's not bad to connect people. The bad part comes in when you get platforms that get tweaked and jiggered to enhance not just performance, but certain kinds of performance. That is what really turns everything around. And we can pinpoint the beginning of that in 2009.

I wrote an article in The Atlantic in 2019 with Tobias Rose Stockwell, who's writing a book now called The Outrage Machine. Going deeply into this, I'm no expert on the technology of social media. I'm just on Twitter myself. But Tobias, partnering with Tobias, I really learned a lot about the mechanics of this and the history of it.

And the key to the story is that in 2009, Facebook adds the like button and Twitter copies it. And Twitter adds the retweet button and Facebook copies it as the share button. And so in 2008, before this stuff, Facebook and all that, they were not particularly toxic. They were largely nice communities. You could put stuff up about what bands you liked or baby photos or whatever you want. And you could check out other people's pages.

And now Facebook and Twitter have huge amounts of information about engagement because people are clicking and clicking and clicking the like and the share button. So Facebook then implements, it begins algorithmizing the feed for whatever creates engagement. And as we now know, research later showed, that's primarily emotional content and especially anger. Anger is the most potent way to get people to click.

So where before it was just there was always some brand management, you know, look at me and these are the photos I've chosen very carefully. But those are the things you put up on your page when it becomes about this feed, which starts as a trickle and becomes, you know, Niagara Falls constantly. And people are just clicking, clicking, clicking. But for what? We're shaping our performance constantly.

And then what happens is as the norms become more about not just performance like here's what I think, but look how horrible this person is and dumping on people and joining in pylons. Now the cruelty comes out. And at this point, most people checkout.

So there's a lot of research in political science showing that most people are really turned off by the nastiness, the aggression and the cruelty. And they just go silent. They might lurk, they might watch, but they stop posting. So what's left is the most aggressive people. And what I came to realize as I was writing this current The Babel Atlantic article is that social media has not given everyone a voice. The people that it amplifies are the far left, the

the far right, trolls, and Russian intelligence agents. And their goal, all four of them have the goal of attacking people, stirring up distrust. So social media really changed the connections between people and their motivations for what they're doing online. So the story that I'm telling in the article is that things really began to change in 2009 with the technology, but the tone doesn't change on the platform right away.

That takes a couple of years before the norms really change. And that's 2014. For some reason, 2014 is when all hell breaks loose. That's when you get Gamergate, which is the first, you know, giant real coordinated mob thing. And that's also when the Russians really step up their deliberate attempts to foment division and hatred on both sides by inflaming anger on both sides.

that's when things begin to go crazy on campus. And that's when Greg Lukianoff comes to me and says, John, weird stuff is happening. Just to define the weird stuff, we're talking about total meltdowns among undergraduates at places like Yale for emails about Halloween costumes. That's right. We're talking about stories at places like Evergreen of professors getting hunted down with people with bats for disagreeing about...

campus racial politics. That's right. So all of that starts in 2014. And it's just a series of anecdotes. There was an article in, I think it was Vox, you know, I'm a liberal professor and my liberal students terrify me, something like that, about how professors at liberal arts colleges feel about

If they say anything, students are going to jump on them, report them. They start self-censoring. So this is when you get demands for trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggression training, cultural appropriation for wearing a shirt from another culture, things like that. That wasn't there in 2012. Anyone who graduated from an Ivy League school in 2012 didn't see this stuff.

But if you arrived in 2013 and you graduate in 2017, you had a front row seat on basically a complete cultural transformation of our elite schools. John, I want to get a little later to the sort of generational shift that you have been paying particular attention to. But let's go back for a minute to this question of viralization.

Which wasn't possible in the early days of Twitter and Facebook because the algorithm just wasn't there. And you explained that the possibility of virality just creates unbelievably different incentives for the user. I know, as someone who's gone viral in lots of negative ways and some positive ways, right? In lots of ways, yes. That's right. Yeah. So it's like what you explain is if you want to go viral on a place like Twitter for good reasons, you have...

much more incentive now to perform the thing that you believe your audience of other Twitterites sort of want to hear. And at the same time, you're incentivized to hide opinions that you know people won't like because you don't want to get piled on by the mob. Or as people on Twitter say, you know, you don't want to be the main character of the day. Now, a lot of people hear that

And say, and this was an argument I heard constantly at the New York Times, you're right, John. Those incentives do exist, but they're good.

And the reason they're good is because you should be hesitant to say something that's going to make people angry. And if you're worried, probably means that the thing you want to say is racist or sexist or bigoted or insensitive. Your fear essentially is grounded in something real. And the fact that you're hesitating is a good thing. Now tell me why that position matters.

in your view, is inaccurate or wrong. Yeah. So an interesting thing we learned from the COVID pandemic, I'd say, is that we have intuitions for an arithmetic world that fail us in an exponential world. You know, if people were looking at the spread of the virus early on, and they're saying, oh, you know, it's going slowly. But the people who understood it were freaking out. They're saying, no, you don't understand.

This is going exponential. And so it's not going to be twice as much in a month. It's going to be 200 times or whatever. Exponential dynamics are very different. We all learned about R0, R0 rather. The transmissibility of a virus, if it's 1.5, it'll spread. But if it's 9, it'll spread indescribably fast. So in the same way in the social media world,

We have intuitions from the pre-Babel world, which are sort of like arithmetic, where, you know, if I say something in a classroom or in a seminar class or among my colleagues and some people push back, well, you know, maybe they were right to push back and we have a discussion about it. And of course, you shouldn't say everything you think. And that might make sense in a world in which you're talking to, you know, 12 people or maybe even 30 people.

But something happens when anyone can object and that person's objection is as valid if it's one out of a thousand as if it had been one out of three. I used to teach at the University of Virginia and I taught a lecture class. I taught introductory psychology and I would really manipulate their emotions in ways to maximize their learning.

And so I would lead them through uncomfortable paradoxes, uncomfortable data, and then I would try to resolve it. I took chances. And even though it was uncomfortable and maybe even upsetting for a few minutes, but then I would resolve it. And by being able to do that, I think I was a skillful teacher. Now, in a class of 300, if there were a few people who were upset for 10 minutes,

That would be okay because by the end of the lecture, you know, it would be resolved. And even if three were still upset, it would be clear that what I was doing was pedagogically appropriate and I was at no risk of being fired. But things change when everyone has a smartphone and the number of the bias response team so that they can report me while they're in class. Wait, John, let's pause just for one second and give listeners a little more of a sense of your teaching background, where you've taught and how your experiences in the classroom have changed over time.

So I taught at the University of Virginia from 1995 to 2011. I taught Psych 101. I taught a big lecture class. I was a very provocative teacher. I would use emotions and surprise and even shock at certain findings and experiments because I could trust my students and they could trust me. And we all had the shared sense that we were there to learn about psychology. There was a shared sense of what we were doing.

Then I moved to NYU in 2012, and I teach at the Stern School of Business. And beginning in 2014, it wasn't like this before that, but beginning in 2014, I started getting reactions from students, either delivered to the dean or delivered on my teaching evaluations, or delivered on social media, or delivered to the bias response team. And end

Anything that you say that offends any one of the 300 people in class can become a big thing that leads to an investigation.

And so if you're not teaching to the average student and you're not held to a reasonable person standard, rather, the new standard is the most sensitive person. If you say anything that could offend the most sensitive person out of the 300 people in the auditorium, they have the right and they're encouraged to file a charge against you. There's a number in every bathroom telling them you can email, you can go online. Here's how you report a microaggression. Here's how you report an act of bias.

So if you're offended, here's what you do. And this is why so many of us felt suddenly we couldn't take chances. We couldn't trust our students. Most of them are lovely, but unless I can trust all 300 of the students in the auditorium,

it doesn't pay to take any chances because when it happens to you, when you get investigated, we all hear the stories. Some of the committees, the one at NYU is perfectly reasonable, but some of them are not reasonable. So you never know what's going to happen to you if a student files a complaint. And therefore, it's just not worth it.

Well, this has been a phenomenon that I've been reporting on and sort of commissioning stories about in all of sort of the realms of important institutions in American life. The law, publishing houses, obviously the news business, Hollywood, medical schools. And in a way, I feel crazy because I feel like I'm doing the same story over and over and over again because it's the same story everywhere.

And it seems to me that there are sort of three elements that have changed. One is what you just described, which is the kind of the weaponization of empathy, which is to say, even if 300 people are in the room and 299 are provoked in a positive way and challenged and got a tremendous amount from the lesson, if there's a single person that was offended, it's done for everyone.

The second thing is the kind of mushrooming in many of these institutions of HR, right? Human resources, which sounds like the most anodyned thing in the world, but has actually been made into an ideological weapon. And the third thing is that the room is no longer the room.

If you are in a classroom at NYU or anywhere else in the country, or a restaurant, I mean, literally anywhere, the room is the world now. That's right. Because everyone has a thing in their pocket that allows them to hold up a camera and make the thing rocket around the world in one second. And...

The kind of things that sources have been telling us who are in these institutions are wild. You know, I'm thinking, for example, of Nadine Strassen, who was the first woman to head the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union. She's a professor at New York Law School. And she said openly, I massively self-censor. I assume that every single thing that is said, every facial gesture is going to be recorded and potentially disseminated to the entire world.

I feel as if I'm operating in a panopticon. Another lawyer told us, I got into this job because I like to play the devil's advocate, but I can't do that anymore, he said. I have a family. There's a doctor who said to reporter Katie Herzog in a wonderful story we ran, chilling story, he's a doctor who immigrated to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union.

And he said, it's back to the USSR where you could only speak to the people you trust. People are afraid to speak honestly because they rightly fear that if they say the wrong thing or even something that's perceived as the wrong thing, they could lose their job.

They could lose their status. They could lose their reputation. And that, by the way, because of the new sort of laws of social contagion, it could hurt their entire family as well and not just them. Oh, that's right. That's exactly what has happened. But now let's return to the Babel metaphor and let's take off from this point because this is where I think my Atlantic essay adds something new or at least a new way to think about that.

Because the timing is exactly as you say. We, you know, on college campuses, we were the canaries in the coal mine because Gen Z first arrived on campus in 2013. And when Greg and I wrote our article, a lot of people said, oh, come on, you're just cherry picking a few, it's a few cases. When they go out into the real world, they can't do this anymore. They'll grow up.

And we said, well, we'll see. And Gen Z began graduating from college in 2017 or 2018. And as they went out into the corporate world, and especially as they started showing up in law schools and medical schools and advertising companies and Hollywood studios,

That's when everything begins to collapse in the same way. Now, of course, the election of Donald Trump complicates things because that really added fuel to the fire in late 2016. But the arrival of Gen Z in workplaces is why so many places seem to collapse in the same way over those next few years. Okay, but now here's the key. It's not that the leaders were crazy or stupid. It's that they were afraid.

And the reason they were afraid is because social media, and especially Twitter, more than any other platform,

Social media functioned effectively as if we had handed out dart guns to everybody. And so what made me think of this is there was an article in Wired a couple of years ago about the engineers who created the retweet button at Twitter. And one of them, Chris Wetherill, he said after they created the retweet button and he saw the first Twitter mobs forming and he saw the new dynamics when you when you increase the virality so greatly, he said,

You get these new dynamics that are incredibly nasty and mobbish and unjust. And he said, he thought to himself, we might have just handed a four-year-old a loaded weapon.

You know, he regretted it. He said it was a mistake. Twitter, he said, had been a nice place. And I remember when I first got on it, it was a nice platform. But when everyone has not just the possibility of going viral, but a motivation to do so, and most people don't want it. Most people don't want to shoot anybody. So they go quiet. And it's the people who like shooting people are the ones who, you know, who now are amplified. Yeah.

But if we think of it not as a gun, because a gun kills people, if you think of it as a dart gun, where, you know, if you get shot with a dart, like it would really hurt, like it would really, really hurt to be shot with a dart that, you know, punctures your skin and you have to pull the dart out of your arm. That would really hurt.

But what would it be like to be shot by 100 darts? So very quickly, almost as if you're a rat in a Skinner box, you know, if you have punishment delivered, painful punishment to your reputation delivered, potentially within minutes of you saying something, you get trained very, very quickly. And so this is what I've seen. I've talked to a lot of leaders in the academic world and some in the corporate world. And I've talked to journalists. They are liberals in a way that is recognizably part of the liberal tradition.

But the people shooting the darts are not liberals. They are what are called in the Hidden Tribes study, the progressive activists. You can say far left or far right if you want, but I think it's not just a question of how much you're on the left or how much you're on the right. It's a question of what you think you're doing. And if you're a liberal, you believe in process. You believe in due process. You believe in individual rights. But if you're an activist, and this is true on the far right as well,

you think you're fighting evil. And so the ends justify the means. And if we have to destroy innocent people, it doesn't matter. So this is the new dynamic that viralized social media brought to us is everyone is given a dart gun. Most people don't want to carry their dart guns on them. And the ones that do basically are getting paid by the dart. The more they shoot, the more prestige they get. And we all live in fear of them. The students, I ask this over and over again, are you afraid of your professors or the other students? It's always, the answer is always the other students.

You ask professors, it's always this small minority of students. As I'm hearing you describe the pain of the dart, I'm just literally having a physical reaction to it because I have been the recipient of the darts. Oh, yeah. And it's very much, I mean, it's embarrassing even to talk about. It is a physical response.

You know, I remember early on, just as I had joined the New York Times, I'd been a journalist for a long time. But now I was at a place that was just a much bigger platform. I was seeing all my colleagues use Twitter. I was learning how to use Twitter. I didn't know the conventions of it yet. And I was at like a Super Bowl party with my family who was in town. And I should have just been

enjoying their company and watching the game. And I found myself like literally transported to a different universe. I had sent a quote, bad tweet. Okay. And I just watched, you know, I was literally, I was sweating. I was red in the face. I felt like I felt in seventh grade when I got a bad haircut and I was a dork and I had not felt that way since I was a child. Um,

So when you say the thing about a four-year-old being handed a loaded weapon, I mean, it really felt like a schoolyard to me. So I've only gotten that a few times in a very small way, you know, from something that I tweeted or something that somebody tweeted about me. But it's incredibly upsetting and it affects you in a way that physical pain does not. Ancient cultures, they wrote a lot about this, you know, to have your reputation attacked is more painful than to have your body attacked.

to have your reputation savaged in ways that you cannot respond to. You can never reach the thousands or millions of people who are hearing this bad thing about you. You have no way to stand up for yourself.

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you had to take sleeping pills for the next few days. It was very hard to get to sleep because your anxiety was so high. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking of another example where I was, I mean, there's been a lot of family events where somehow the timing was very bad for me. I remember I sent out a kind of tweet about it.

an ice skater meant to praise her and oh yes I remember that one yeah remember immigrants immigrants that's right yes they get the job done that's right and John it was it was like I had but it was like I had the flu like I couldn't get out of bed right so I think you're right to point back to middle school because that's the last time

that we got completely overwhelmed, that had no sense of perspective and didn't know how to handle it. And then gradually we get out of adolescence, we get more mature and we feel like we understand the world. But this is what I mean by the pre-Babel world versus the post-Babel world.

you and I grew up and felt that we understood the world and that was the pre-Babel world. And everything changed once everyone was hyper-connected by this new method. It is not about connecting people, it's about performance. So it's a new world. And this is why our institutions are malfunctioning because the people leading them still think in pre-Babel ways. They

And so, you know, if there's one, you know, one tweet, what's the example of that? It was a gift shop in the UK at the Royal Academy or something. One person tweeted that an artist was transphobic because she had once said something about women. I can't remember what, you know, you know, the typical story, you know, a left-leaning feminist artist who said something about, about the definition of a woman. And so one person tweeted,

Oh, she's a transphobe. And so instantly the gift shop stopped selling this artist's work. Oh, my God. Once you've been darted once, you very quickly learn to respond like, OK, whatever you say, whatever you say. And that's why that's why it looks like a complete lack of courage, which it is a complete lack of courage by the leaders of all of our major institutions.

Yeah, there's an epidemic of cowardice. Later when we get to the solutions to this problem, I want to focus a little bit more on what people at the top of these companies can be doing. But one of the things that your story made me think about is the sort of frictionlessness between seeing something and responding to it. The unbelievable speed of these platforms and the way that you could post a tweet and go viral in minutes.

I had never really realized that speed itself was something that the framers of the Constitution were concerned about. And I'd love for you to explain it. Yeah, actually, right. This is great. Let's transition from just talking about how bad social media is, which everyone's heard forever. Let's really work out how it makes our politics incompatible with democracy.

So the founding fathers were really good social psychologists. They read everything they could about political theory, and they knew the history of democracies that have ever been as fire in their deaths as they've been brief in their lives or something like that from John Adams. So they knew that what they were doing didn't have a good track record.

And they thought long and hard about how to make a democracy that wouldn't collapse into passions and anger. Plato said, I believe democracy is the second worst form of government because it inevitably decays into tyranny because you get some demagogue coming along speaking to the people and democracy is ruled by the people.

So they thought about this and they came up with an interest. Madison noticed this interesting, I believe it was Madison in the Federalist Papers, this interesting idea that the huge size of the United States, you know, these 13 units spread out across the whole Atlantic seaboard.

actually could make the job easier. Because if there's some outrage or rumor or somebody tries to incite the people in Georgia, it could take several weeks for the news to get to Boston.

And they talked about how the passions would cool and there'd be time for deliberation. They understood that people are hotheaded. And the genius of the founders was to develop a mechanism that pits different views against each other to produce not just fighting, but actually a closer approximation to truth or good policy. And this is the core idea of one of the best books of the last 10 years, Jonathan Rauch's book, The Constitution of Knowledge.

So it's this very elaborate constitutional mechanism for harnessing our passions and our differences and our short-sightedness and argumentativeness and making something good out of it. And there's these amazing quotes. Everybody should read Federalist 10. It's one of the richest and most thought-provoking articles on political theory. It's so relevant to the present time. So this is the letter where Madison goes, he has his famous quotes about faction, that the death of democracy is faction, our tendency to divide ourselves into parties and

And he said, we're so inflamed with mutual animosity and we're much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for the common good. And so Madison designed our democracy, our constitution, I should say, to reduce the baleful influence of faction or tribalism, group hatred. But at the end of that paragraph, there's another line that I'd never heard quoted until I read the Federalist Papers, that paper myself, which

He talks about how quickly we get pulled into arguments over trivia. He says our factionalism is so strong, he says that, quote, where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.

Now, if that isn't the most perfect description of Twitter ever written, I don't know what is. So we have humans who are prone to hate each other and you give us any reason to fight and we will. And what does Twitter do? It's like a constant stream of reasons to hate each other. You know, I'm largely off Twitter now. I used to be on it. I'd check it several times a day.

But it got to be too much for me. It really got to me. And now I just, I do the minimum I have to. I promote people's ideas. I promote my talks. But now that I'm not on it on a daily basis, whenever I go back in and I look at my feed, I mean, it's like, you know, opening the top of a garbage can and you see the rats and the scorpions are just fighting each other. And it's just disgusting. It's sad to see your friends, some of your friends descending into this.

The point is that social media isn't just, you know, it doesn't just bring out the worst in us. I believe it makes us unfit for democracy. Let me say that again. I believe that the problems that the founding fathers dealt with as they designed a

an elaborate constitutional mechanism that worked in the pre-Babel era, I believe that those mechanisms no longer work in the post-Babel era. And so if we don't do something, if we don't change, I believe we are headed for disaster and political failure. You're saying that social media in its current form, and if we keep using it to the extent that we are, will mean the fall of our country. Is that what you're saying?

Yes, that is what I'm saying. It's incompatible with a stable and successful democracy. Yes. So why is that? For the person that's hearing that and thinking, you're crazy. I've never gone on Twitter. Like many people just use Facebook to post a baby picture or, you know, use Facebook marketplace to get an old couch and they've never even glanced at Twitter. So for those people who hear that,

In the same way that, let's go back to 2014, someone may have heard of Nicholas Christakis at Yale and thought, that's just crazy. That's just what's going on at Yale. It has nothing to do with me, ordinary American in my ordinary life. Convince us that the stakes are as high as you're saying they are and that they exist whether or not a person themselves is on these platforms. Sure. So the key word here, the central concept that doesn't get talked about enough is institutions. And

And what I mean by that is democracies generally have failed. But of course, there are a number that have been spectacularly successful for decades or even centuries. And there's a lot of scholarship on what makes democracies successful. And one of the best books is Why Nations Fail by Asimoglu and Robinson. And they show how

When you get institutions that limit power and that bring people in, especially you get British institutions tend to do that, you then can get a stable society where Adam Smith's invisible hand can work and people working for their own goals end up creating good things. But if you have extractive or exploitative institutions, as the Spanish largely set up, well, then you don't generally get a very successful and prosperous society.

You can't really have a democracy like ours if people don't trust the basic institutions. Now, what effect does social media have on institutions? And here I would recommend that people read Martin Goury's incredible book, The Revolt of the Public. He talks about the way that social media is so good at

at tearing things down. It is so easy, effortless to bring people together to rip something down, destroy it, tarnish its reputation, mobilize people to protest. It's very good at destroying, but it tends not to build things. And this is his analysis of 2011, this peak year of techno-democratic optimism. What came of it? What came of the Arab Spring? What came of Occupy Wall Street?

So you have people coming together to say, I hate this. Let's destroy it. Capitalism is bad. But they had no idea what to put in its place. And they certainly had no organization to do anything about it. So what I'm arguing here is that large societies, especially if they are demographically or ethnically or religiously diverse and they are not religious. So you have to look at what is what are the forces binding us together and what are the forces pulling us apart?

And so if you have a very large, diverse, secular democracy, it should fall apart unless you have a bunch of forces pulling it, keeping it in. So conflict with a foreign enemy, World War II followed by the Cold War was fantastic for us. Our media ecosystem in the post-war world, there were three networks. We all got the same news. We had a similar understanding of what was happening. That was fantastic for us.

But those advantages, if you will, have faded away. And our media environment has gone from a kind of a centripetal or centralizing three networks to, you know, micro, micro targeting. Everyone's on a different page. Everybody is everybody has a different view of reality. And Guri has this incredible metaphor. Actually, let me see if I can find it. This incredibly powerful quote about what it did to us.

He says, the digital revolution has shattered that mirror, by which he means the mirror of mass media, when we all had something reflected back to us about who we were on the evening news, let's say. The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass.

So the public isn't one thing. It's highly fragmented and it's basically mutually hostile. It's mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another. And that, to me, is a perfect description of what it would be like the day after the Tower of Babel was destroyed.

I completely agree with you that those institutions held us together and importantly, like held us in a shared reality about who we were, about what the country meant and so on. I will, I have no shortage of sort of conversations where people are nostalgic for like Walter Cronkite, but I guess you seem to be suggesting that the problem is that

the people that are criticizing the institutions don't really have a replacement, right? That they're really good, as Goury argues in that brilliant book, at tearing things down rather than suggesting reforms. But to me, that doesn't put the onus on where I think it really lies, which is what social media has done is given us access into the people and the class that runs many of these institutions and

And the reason that we are losing trust in them is we're seeing that they don't deserve our trust. We're seeing that the people that are running these things lie, or at the very least tell noble lies. I'm thinking here, obviously, of the CDC, that they pretend to be objective, but in fact, they're like nakedly partisan, and so on and so forth. We both are thinking of, I'm sure, a dozen different examples in our mind. So is the problem in your view the fact that

There were people now who now had a cudgel to sort of beat down the institutions. Or is the problem that this technology allowed the people running the institutions to reveal themselves and their hypocrisies and their flaws? So I think there are two issues here. One is, do we want scrutiny of our institutions or do we want them so well respected that they are untouchable?

And here, I think I would side with pretty much every journalist or every person who chose to go into journalism who thought, no, you know, I want to hold institutions to power and we need to we need to critique. And I fully agree with that. And of course, social media helps amplify investigative efforts.

There are some things that are torn down that deserve to be torn down. And I certainly share a lot of your feelings about the CDC and the way that various institutions handled COVID. Now, I personally think a lot of the bad COVID response was for precisely the reasons we're talking about, that COVID so quickly got made ideological by Trump and others, and

But once it became a Democrat-Republican thing, a left-right thing, then all the craziness, all the bad decision-making happens in part because people are afraid to challenge their side on COVID policies. But another, a different way of responding to your very interesting question is to say, we do need journalists and others to question and investigate and expose lies and fraud in our institutions.

But what would happen if we had a tidal wave of people investigating? And it's not like they're honest, careful investigators. It's basically mob investigation so that anyone can dig up anything. They found something said by somebody somewhere. You know, this is the process that Russian disinformation actually relies on. They'll place a story in some obscure Indian newspaper and then people cite it and then other people cite the thing that cites it.

So I think we can't survive a flood of everyone doing their own research and citing other people doing their own research. We can't survive in a world in which all our institutions get torn down at the same time. I think the reason this is hard to talk about is because you and I both know that we cannot live in a liberal democracy where there are not

newspapers that we can trust, universities that we can trust, public health authorities we can trust, a Supreme Court we can trust. Yeah, that's right. So we desperately want to uphold the fundamental trust in those institutions. But it's a really uncomfortable position because so many of those institutions have done things to really cause us to question them.

I agree with what you just said. Let me put on two caveats that might help resolve this puzzle. One is that the record of societies that tear down everything that is flawed is extremely poor, whereas the record of societies that try to fix things that are flawed is much better. The American Revolution was a much better revolution than the French or the Russian revolutions.

So the universities are not so rotten that they need to be torn down. There are some problems, and Greg and I have been writing about them, and we think we can fix them. And I founded Heterodox Academy with others because we love universities, and we think that they can be fixed. They don't need to be torn down. So that's the first thing is the revolutionary spirit has a horrible record of success. It has a much better record of killing lots and lots of people. So I don't like...

I don't like revolutions like that. I would prefer a progressive, meaning gradual change. Let's improve things. I'm a meliorist. That's the first thing. The second is I find...

that people seem to conflate social media with the internet. And they're so different. Actually, so here's a fun thought experiment that I'm just beginning to try out when I speak in front of audiences. Let's suppose it's the early 1990s. And I come to you and I have three magical boxes. And you can open one, two, or three of them or zero. And anytime you open a box, it's going to take 10 to 15 hours a week of your time.

So the first box I offer you says on it, internet. And if you open it, you get the internet. But you're going to spend 10 to 15 or 20 hours a week on it. And you'll get a lot of benefits from it. But, you know, it'll take a lot of time. What do you think? Would you open that box? Are you glad that we have the internet? Yes. So every time I do this, everyone, every, yep. Boy, are we glad we got that box. Thank God we opened it. We love it. Okay, here's the second box. It says on it, iPhone. If you open it, you get the most incredible Swiss Army knife.

It's this thing. It can do everything. It's your maps. It's your video recorder. It's a flashlight. Practically, it can open wine bottles. I mean, it's an amazing thing. But it's going to take another 10 to 15 hours a week on top of the internet. You're going to be doing a lot of stuff on it. What do you think? Would you open it? Are you glad that humanity opened that box? Yes.

Okay, so most people are glad we opened the iPhone box. Now here comes the third box. Now remember, we're up to 30 hours a week now on internet and iPhones. Now you have a third box, social media, Facebook and Twitter. Now it's going to take an extra 10 to 20 hours a week from you on top of what you're already spending.

and it's going to make you depressed and anxious, and it's going to occasionally lead to genocide, and it's going to create a massive doubling of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide among kids. And it has some benefits, I think. I'm not sure. What do you think? Would you open that box? Probably not. I mean, the other thing it's going to do is really encourage me to

see the absolute worst in people that I disagree with. That's right. And that's profound, actually. So suppose we had the internet and we had iPhones and we had blogs and we had FaceTime and Zoom and every possible way of communicating with each other. We just didn't have these platforms.

that use algorithms and various psychological tricks to get people to spend much more time than they want to on them, attacking other people and passing on stuff that is a questionable truth.

I think in such a world, we would have a lot more attention to the institutions. You would have a lot more, you know, journalists could find out things and they could publicize it on blogs. Independent people could have, you know, look, there was early in the 20s, you know, the 2000s, a lot of people had blogs that were really interesting. There was more scrutiny. There was more transparency. I think that got it about right. There was not enough transparency in the age of mass media when they were gatekeepers for journalism.

I think we got the right level of transparency in the early Internet days when there were blogs and you could get around gatekeepers. And I think everything went to hell once we got the hyper-viralized platforms, particularly Facebook and Twitter. And then, of course, for teenagers, Instagram and TikTok and a bunch of others. After the break, John explains his concept of structural stupidity and how arguing with people who disagree with you in good faith could save us from this mess. Stay with us.

I want to get into your idea of structural stupidity. Can you tell me what you mean by that? So, you know, beginning in 2015, you know, Greg and I wrote The Coddling, and then we watched all these universities doing these incredibly stupid things.

And we watched as they imposed all these policies that have either no empirical support or that backfire, you know, mandatory diversity training and, you know, ethnically homogeneous housing. There are all these things that are done. And, you know, we're universities like we should be research based. We should try to improve ourselves by doing things that we think will work. But that's not what we do. We do things that are pushed for by by activists.

And so a lot of these policies I thought are really stupid. And I watched as institution after institution would say things that betrayed their purpose, betrayed their clients, betrayed their professional ethos. And it's not because the people in them are stupid.

It's because something was wrong in the incentive structures and the pressures. And what I finally hit on with this article was the intimidation. It's all about the intimidation. So I'm a huge fan of John Stuart Mill. My favorite philosopher used to be David Hume back when I was doing my work on moral judgment.

But now that I'm focused on institutions, especially universities, and I co-founded Head Rocks Academy to try to promote viewpoint diversity. You know, we should have different viewpoints expressed in universities. I mean, I know this is obvious, but we're living in an age where basic things need to be reiterated. Why is it important to have viewpoint diversity?

Because our thinking is not designed to find the truth. Our thinking is designed to advance us socially. We're really good at confirmation bias. We have these high IQs, but we don't use them to find the truth. We don't look habitually on both sides of a question. We start with a hypothesis or a favored conclusion. And no matter how smart you are, you send your reasoning out. You say, go find me reasons why I'm right. You don't say,

Go out and do some research and find me reasons on both sides, then come back to me and report which side I should take. We don't do that. Even on things that don't matter, we start off with a hypothesis and we try to confirm it. We don't disconfirm it. And so because of the confirmation bias, the only known cure for confirmation bias is other people who don't share your confirmation bias.

And so if you talk only among people who share your views, you're not likely to find the truth. And here's the great insight. Other people who disconfirm our beliefs, it's like they're an extension of our brain. They're doing us a favor. The brain actually works sometimes by having opposing processes.

And so the idea that critics or that people who don't share your beliefs are going to argue with you, that they're really part of you. This is very much what an academic community is. This is what I love about being a professor is being part of a community that likes to argue in good faith. It's fun. But if one day we decided, you know what, anybody who takes the opposite of position X, we're going to shoot. We're just going to kill them.

You would get stupid really, really quickly. And that's what structural stupidity is. It's when you are committed to destroying your critics, you become stupid.

In fact, I just read with you just recently a profile of Putin. Like, how can he be so stupid? Like, how is, you know, we all thought he was so smart and he seems to be really screwing up in Ukraine. And in part, it's because in this, you know, in the Soviet system, which has carried over into the Russian system, in the Soviet system, you learn, don't question orders. You know, if you're told to do this, you do it. It's how Chernobyl happened. That's right. That's right. Yes.

So again, John Stuart Mill should be the patron saint of the 21st century. We have a really complicated world. We have a lot of factionalism and tribalism. And if we harness those differences, it can make us smarter. That's why we need viewpoint diversity. And what's happened is, even though institutions in the knowledge sector have always leaned left,

Universities were about three or four to one left to right throughout the 20th century, but that's okay. Three or four to one is fine. You don't need balance. What you need is the confidence that somebody in the room will say, oh, wait a second. Is that really true? So what exactly is the mechanism that's enshrining this structural stupidity?

It's the democratization of intimidation and that everyone was given a dark gun. It's the fact that our institutions have put in place mechanisms to encourage people to file charges against others. So we've sort of bought in and we bought ourselves, you know, Eastern Europe and the Stasi. We bought ourselves the dynamics of fear. Now it's petty fear. Nobody's being put in jail. Nobody's being killed. So I don't want to overstate it, but psychologically and structurally, the same stuff happens.

which is if you're on the fringe, if you're not in the center of expressed opinion, you go quiet because you're on thin ice. And if you go quiet, then the next people over who have slightly less extreme opinions, well, then they go quiet because the center of public opinion has shifted as far as they can tell. So this is exactly what Noelle Neumann, I forget her full name. There was an East German political, West German political scientist in the 70s wrote about the spiral of silence and how it plays out in communist countries.

And so we began seeing that. And that wasn't happening so much before Facebook and Twitter developed those enhanced virality features. I guess it's amazing to think about how, because I think about the metaphor of the Stasi a lot. It's like that you can have this kind of self-silencing and intimidation without there being presence of a gulag or an actual Stasi. That is how deeply social we are and how much we worship.

we want to fit in and not be smeared. Yeah. So I recently started, I would have to say investing in crypto, but there's no, it's just total speculation. Last year, I started speculating in crypto and learning about, you know, DeFi, decentralized finance.

And so what we're talking about here is decentralized totalitarianism. There is no cabal. There is no woke central where people decide, who are we going to destroy today? It's not at all like that. But by changing the dynamics and by decentralizing intimidations that everybody can intimidate anybody at any point with no accountability, no nuance, no even need to prove that you're saying something true.

Because anybody can shoot darts at any time. We have decentralized intimidation, decentralized fear. And so I guess totalitarianism is not the right word here, because that means everything is in service of an ideology.

Oh, well, okay. I guess maybe in some institutions actually is the right word, but only in some institutions, not across the country. The thing I think is helpful though about the word totalitarian is that it describes the way that everything is sort of pushed through a sieve, everything in life. There's nothing that falls outside of the realm of this ideology. Love, friendships, family, art, everything is put to that litmus test. Yeah.

Yeah, and Ibram Kendi being just the premier example of it. I mean, even, you know, the way he says, you know, everything. Oh, we should get the exact quote, but, you know. Here's the quote. So he says, there is no such thing as a non-racist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution, in every community, in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.

And so what that means is that if there's a if there's a dispute in a town in Iceland as to whether they want to install a water fountain or not, well, it's not anti-racist. So it's racist. That's a racist, racist policy.

So anyway, I mean, he is proposing a particular ideological view and he has every right to and it's an interesting one. But when that is taken, not as hypothesis, but when that is the policy, then I think it is, as you say, it is forcing everything into one, forcing everybody to look at everything, the complexity of the world through a single lens. Yeah.

I love this idea that to avoid structural stupidity, we need to put ourselves in adversarial situations. In a way, though, it sounds counterintuitive.

Because the problem, as we've been discussing in this conversation, is that we've gotten so adversarial that we've fought our way into literally living in different versions of reality. One in which, you know, Donald Trump won the 2020 election and Hillary Clinton eats babies. And the other one where people believe that police officers are lynching black people in the streets by the thousands. So help explain to me how this isn't a contradiction.

Oh, well, it's only a contradiction if you think that, oh, just find people who disagree with you and all will be well. Oh, yeah, I'm going to go onto Twitter and find someone, find some bot or some person, some troll to argue with me. And that's going to make me smart. No, of course not. And that's why institutions are vital here. That's what a university does. That's what a court does. That's what a jury does. That's what editors in a newsroom do. Yeah.

So we've developed over time, over centuries, liberal democracies have developed institutions that turn disagreement into truth. Twitter is not one of them. Twitter does the opposite. Twitter and Facebook spread distrust, hatred and falsehoods. Publishing and journals. So, you know, I'm in a debate with various researchers about whether social media is harmful or not.

I publish something, they publish a critique or they write reviews, and I've moderated my views. I've changed my mind, and I've certainly gotten a lot more subtle about my claims. Things are much more complicated because of that process. So that's why we need institutions like universities that put us into adversarial relationships that are not all-out war. They are limited engagement conflict. And it's about the mission, right? Yeah.

The reason for an adversarial system in a university whose mission is truth is to get to the truth. The goal is not to dunk on the other person by strawmanning what they're actually arguing or to smear their character. Exactly, exactly. So there's a lot of Jewish wisdom on this. I mean, there are a few religions that have really perfected the art of adversarial engagement. What's the name of Havruta? Is that the Hebrew word for a Torah study partner? Exactly.

So my rabbi, so I'm right. So I'm a, you know, my rabbi, Angela Bookdahl, I'm a member of Central Synagogue in New York City. And Angela had the most incredible sermon at Yom Kippur last year. So, you know, here I am, I'm studying John Stuart Mill. I co-published an edited version of Chapter Two of On Liberty.

And then Yom Kippur, you know, my rabbi gives this incredible sermon, which is straight out of John Stuart Mill. So she talks about how the Jewish tradition, you study Torah with a partner who challenges you, who you debate with, a Havruta. So it's not your enemy. It's not like you're fighting, but you need someone to question you and challenge you. And she says, so let's remember what our tradition teaches, not what to believe, but how we get to beliefs worth holding.

Questioning is sacred. Dissent is productive. If you start to debate, you may discover something that transcends the binary. You may discover a third opinion, and it will inevitably be wiser than either of the first two.

So difference is productive, but not automatically and always. It's productive when you are embedded in a community that shares values and that shares a basic respect for each other. And so there are ways, I think there are ways that we could have platforms for people to engage that are

that could be beneficial. And I do think that eventually we will find a form of democracy that benefits from the internet and from social media platforms. I think we're a long way from that. I don't think we're gonna find it in the next five or 10 years, but it certainly is possible in theory. It's just that what we have now puts us so far outside of the range of sustainable systems. I believe, I could well be wrong about this, but I think that's where we're headed.

You know, you have sort of made the argument, and before you, Durkheim, of course, more convincing than almost anyone that we human beings have a kind of God-shaped need inside of us. And that even if you take away religious traditions and churches and belief in the supernatural, something inside of us will insist on sort of erecting religious frameworks, on sort of separating the goodies and the baddies, right?

I'd love if you could explain the way that you're seeing that almost quasi-religious or post-religious dynamic playing out right now.

So yeah, I'm a Durkheimian. That means that I look at society first and foremost through what I learned from reading Emil Durkheim in graduate school. When I read his book, Suicide, it just completely blew my mind, rocked my world, changed my framework for thinking about everything. And what Durkheim taught is that we don't do religion in order to figure out the meaning of life. We don't do it to buffer us from the fear of death.

that it's really all about the group, the community, the congregation. And we do things in order to create that congregation. He said, we hear a voice, we feel the voice of conscience in us, and we label it God, but it's actually society. So I'm a naturalist, I'm a Jewish atheist, and I've had debates with Sam Harris about this because we're both naturalists. But I'm a naturalist who sees religion not as a bug that God put in, not as a virus that we need to extirpate,

But we evolved for it. And so the phrase from Pascal, the paraphrase, you know, the common paraphrase is, there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart. He didn't say that literally, but it's sort of, it's along those lines. And I've been very pleased that I get invited by a number of Christian groups and Christian schools because they see me as an atheist who is not hostile to religion. And when I speak to any Christian group, I always say that. I always say,

We have something in common. We all believe that there's a God-shaped hole in every human heart.

Now, we disagree on how it got there. You think it's there because God made us and we long for God. And I think it's there because we evolved in a certain way that had a long period of group ritual and group bonding that turned us into communal, hive-ish, group-ish creatures. But we can put that difference aside because we all agree that if that hole is not filled by something good, it's going to get filled with garbage.

And this is what's happening to a lot of kids today. And at that point, they're like applauded. They're like, oh, yes, yes, that's what we care about. We see what's happening to our kids. And we can disagree about how the whole got there while still seeing that people are easily seduced into cults and religious and political movements.

And here, I'm also a fan of Joe Henrich and many others who study cultural evolution. There are cultural products and cultural institutions that evolved over time, and those tend to be pretty good if they evolved over a long period of time, especially in the modern age with more liberal values.

And what we've seen happening in the last 10 or 15 years, as American religion has changed and the number of people who believe in God has plummeted, while the number who say spiritual but not religious has skyrocketed, it's the fastest growing category, especially for young people.

So if you say spiritual but not religious and you don't believe in God, what are you going to put in that hole? And for a lot of young people, it's environmental activism. It's various kinds of political activism. For some young men, it's this kind of horrible nihilism, which can lead to incels and neo-Nazis. They're ripe for recruitment by movements that promise meaning.

So that's yet another way where I think social media is able to spread memes and ideas and help people recruit in ways that I think end up filling that God-shaped hole with stuff that not only doesn't work, but makes the people, makes many of them do things that are really quite destructive to their communities. All right, John, let's go now from the problem, which is huge, to the ways that you think that we might solve it.

Where do we begin? So I think there are two really, really obvious places to begin. The first is identity authentication. Now, I don't mean that you should have to post under your real name. But what I mean is, you know, banks have know your customer laws. You can't banks can't just take bags of cash and open an account for somebody without knowing who they are. You have to know your customer.

And for small platforms, that's fine. I don't care if small platforms allow anonymous, you know, totally unvetted anonymous people to open accounts. But there are systemically important platforms, especially Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, a few others, that where, you know, in the early Internet, we certainly gave them the benefit of the doubt. And we actually thought they might be good for our country, good for democracy, right?

And now it's clear they're not. And by clear, I don't mean 100% all experts agree. They don't. There's still a lot of conflict in the research here, although I'm doing some of that research with Chris Bale. And we think the research literature now shows a strong net negative effect.

And therefore, I think there is a case to be made that large platforms should have to verify that you're a real person. Now, this is not a violation of freedom of speech because, you know, you can write anything you want anywhere. The issue is who gets to be amplified? Who gets the benefit of these viral dynamics? And what I and many others are beginning to think is

is that if you want to open up an account at, let's say, Facebook, not that you have to show Facebook your iris or your driver's license, but they would kick you over to a third party, either a private company or a nonprofit,

And there's an increasing number of ways out there to verify that you're a real person, not a bot, that you're over a certain age, that you are a citizen of a country. So you just have to get verified that you're a real person over 18 in a country. And once you do that, now go to it, go at it, do what you want. So that single change would reduce so much of the nastiness. It would roll back so much of the trolling because right now, you know, there's all these stories in Chris Bale's book and others,

You know, people who seem perfectly nice, but as soon as they have this fully anonymous identity, I mean, they're incredible racists. They're nasty, horrible. They just, they, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So that I think we're going to have to go to. You can still use a fake name when you post, but you have to at least be verified that you're a person. And then the other really big one is, I think that, you know, in America, we tend much more than Europe. We tend to give companies the benefit of the doubt. We tend towards more economic benefits.

freedom. We tend towards more liberty and we have a more dynamic commercial sector because of that. So that's all great. But I think that the major platforms, especially Facebook, have shown they do not deserve that trust. They have abused it time and time again. So this is just, you know, people should read books about Facebook. I mean, people who've, so many people who worked at Facebook or were on its board come out of there screaming like, oh my God, this place is horrible. This company is doing terrible things. I quit.

So Facebook has shown it does not deserve our trust. And just it needs to be regulated. That is, they need to live in constant fear of a regulator. Regulated how?

So either the FTC or the FCC, various existing government agencies should have oversight, whether it's communications or trade. For example, when they had to the extent that some of their practices harm consumers, well, that would be the FTC. That would be the Federal Trade Commission.

And so in Britain, for example, they are saying that since so many of your users, you know, something like, you know, 30 or 40% are under 18 on your platform, you know, you have a responsibility to create an environment that's conducive for children. And that's forced them to make some changes.

and how they target advertising and when they notify kids, like at 10 or 11 o'clock at night, can they still be pinging kids? So I think that I agree with my libertarian friends that the federal government is a terrible regulator and I don't want them micromanaging. And some of the bills introduced by Republicans are just plain stupid in the specificity. I don't want that. But I want the companies to fear that

That if they continue doing really bad things over and over again and lying and deceiving, that something will happen to them. They have to have the sense that there are consequences. And right now, they don't. A lot of the solutions that are coming from liberals and progressives seem to be along those lines, that the right way is we just kind of need better moderation. We need to make it a more safe environment and so on and so forth.

Then there's some solutions coming from libertarians or just from conservatives that are, I would say, more radical. For example, the idea that Clarence Thomas mentioned in a recent dissent where he talks about how companies like Facebook and others maybe are more akin to things like the electricity company or the railroad company, and they should be subjected to common carrier policies.

Yeah.

So let's imagine the full range of issues that we can and should talk about in order to make these platforms less toxic to democracy. Imagine like a giant canvas, a very large wall of your house. And then draw a circle that takes up like 10% of that, and let's call that content. And

And that's where all the argument is, is over content. And we're never going to succeed there because what the left and the right want is exactly opposite. That is, the left wants the platforms to shut down conspiracy thinking and right-wing stuff. And the right says, no, you should never shut us down.

So I don't even think about that. I'm not interested in that. One thing we learned from Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, is that even though Facebook is the best in the business at doing content moderation and that they do have thousands of people looking at things and they have all kinds of AI, they get only, I think she said something like, you know, 5% of what might count as hate speech and less than 1% of what might count as violence and intimidation. And I'm not sure if that's just in English, but she also told us that

They get a little bit of stuff in English and then some stuff maybe in French and Italian, and they get nothing in like 200 languages, nothing. They don't do anything. So what Facebook does to the world, if we're going to solve it through content moderation, if we could force them to do five times as good a job –

They do a little bit better, but it wouldn't change anything really. So I'm not interested in that. And it's hopeless. We're not going to pass any legislation there anyway. I'm interested in the dynamics. I'm interested in the architecture. That's what caused the problem. It's not that some people say things that are bad. It's that people say things that are inflammatory or bad or stupid or defamatory or whatever. And they can reach millions of people by tomorrow. That's the problem is the architecture.

The sorts of things that Francis Haugen recommends and that Tristan Harris at the Center for Humane Tech seem to think are the best are architectural features like, for example, the – so things that get shared and shared and shared through repeated chains, they're more likely than other posts to be conspiracy theories or to be false. People who invite thousands of people to join groups in a week tend to be about conspiracy theories and tend to have very low-quality stuff.

So it's those extremes. That's where the most virality is. And that's where the worst content is. So if we simply dial back the virality, you know, if you imagine if we could reduce the R naught of COVID from nine down to three, you know, even nine down to eight actually would be a gigantic improvement. So that's the sort of thing that I advocate, these architectural changes. Twitter, to its credit,

Has been doing a few. One recent one I just noticed is they allow you to say if you think a comment is not contributing, you can downvote it privately. And so that's a sort of a design change, which isn't it's not shutting down anyone's freedom of speech, but it is putting something of a penalty on the trolls and the assholes. Yeah, I guess the thing that makes me skeptical of solutions like that is that the people doing the moderating inside these companies are.

are exactly the Gen Z people who believe that hate speech is just to suggest that biology is real. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. So again, I think the whole, you know, arguing over content, that's what almost all the argument is. And that I think is hopeless. I'm not interested in it. I want to look at design changes. And that's why the kinds of these kinds of architectural changes are viewpoint neutral and language neutral. It doesn't matter who or what

believes what. We just want to reduce the virality of the platforms. And again, the more we can get back to using technology to communicate with each other rather than to perform publicly to try to enhance reputations, the better. So anything that reduces the extreme tails of the virality is going to be good. I guess I want to ask you how concerned you are about the fact that I think there's a very strong argument to be made that these platforms now constitute

the public square. This is the new soapbox. And right now, because of the people running them, or maybe arguably because of the small minority that's grabbed the microphone, that is a mirror of the group that has grabbed the microphone at Yale and the New York Times and other places, they believe that things that are observing reality, such as biological differences between men and women,

Does constitute hate speech and a person that expresses that should be banned does that not concern you as someone who cares so much about viewpoint diversity? So yes, it concerns me. What concerns me is not the belief people can believe whatever they want What concerns me is the intimidation?

And the fact that if you question that, your book could literally be taken down from Amazon. That was just stunning to me when, what's his name, the author of his book was taken down. Well, there was Ryan, there was Abigail Schreier. There have been so many, yes. That's right. So that's what concerns me. So if listeners take away one thing from this conversation, it should be the rise of cheap intimidation, the petty intimidation. That's what has messed up our systems. So I want to make these platforms less expensive.

Less useful as petty intimidation by small-minded people. And if we could do that, then we'd return to a world in which some people believe that it's hate speech to say those things about gender that you said, but someone who questions them will not be destroyed. They will not find their livelihood ruined and their children threatened. How do we move away from the way these social media companies empower the mobs? So they clearly are not going to do it on their own.

They need pressure. And the two main kinds of pressure that I think can be brought to bear are the threat of heavy handed, stupid legislation, because that's the only kind there is. I want to make them afraid of that so that they might actually take some proactive measures and lawsuits, which I hate and which are inefficient. But I think things are so bad. And especially when we get to the subject of preparing the next generation, right?

The damage to children is so enormous that I think giant lawsuits. Now, I've learned that you can't really have a class action lawsuit for technical reasons about showing causality. But I think that the platforms and especially Facebook, Facebook, I think, is the worst. And so, John, John, are you saying lawsuits like Facebook?

No.

On lawsuits, I think the only case where people that I know of, where people have a clear claim not based on what they saw – that's the thing. The Section 230 liability shield is not crazy. They shouldn't be held responsible necessarily for what people post –

What they need to be held responsible for is the dynamics, the architecture that they put in place, which hooks kids, keeps them on, pursues them before they're 13. So I think that there's now a clear, I think there's mounting evidence that Instagram in particular is responsible or is a major contributor to many, many suicides and to millions of cases of depression and anxiety. And I hope that those parents are able to sue and to drown Facebook in particular with lawsuits, you know,

Because that's the only thing I think that will make them actually take seriously that they've got to stop pursuing children. Interesting. Okay. This is, I feel like we could have a two hour conversation just about this because you could argue that the architecture, let's say of Twitter in this case, but it could be Facebook and of the algorithm and of all the things we've been talking about before, create the circumstance where I get libeled.

Because the thing is able to be shared so frictionlessly. Yeah, but when we look at the harms, I think that, you know, I don't know anything about libel and slander laws. I've learned a little bit about tort laws in regard to harm to children. And I think parents whose kids committed suicide soon after getting on Instagram, I think just the argument that you harmed my daughter is

and I can prove it is much better than someone ruined my reputation and you are responsible because you gave them the means to ruin my reputation. I just think that legal cases against them for slander and libel. They're harder. I don't know. You know, look, I haven't studied it. You know, I don't know. I'm not a lawyer here. So yeah, I have no opinion about that. Okay. Well, let's get to the last sort of bucket of solutions, which is preparing the next generation.

John, how do we prepare the next generation? So the gigantic surge in depression, anxiety, suicide, and self-harm that began right around 2012, nobody has a story or an explanation for what caused it. There's no clear culprit that is widely accepted. But the story that Greg and I told in The Caught in the American Mind was two factors, and I think they've held up very, very well.

And they are the loss of childhood play and too early entry into social media. And so we said that in our original article in 2015, when we had very little evidence, we were speculating.

And then we said it again with a lot more evidence in 2018 in our book. And now since the book came out, there's a lot more evidence on both counts. And so the way to think about this is all animals play, play as part of what mammals do in order to practice the skills of adulthood. And what human kids do is they do chasing games, they do conflict games like play fighting, and they do pretend games. And they need all of those.

And this is how you work out the skills that are necessary for democratic engagement. You have to learn how to come up with procedures, how to enforce them, how to be flexible and how to accept defeat.

And sometimes you think it was unfair, but you learn to go along with it. And what we've done when we stopped kids from playing outside in the 90s out of fear of abduction, ridiculous, bizarre, unfounded fears of abduction, was we basically, you know, it's like we gave them, you know, we deprived them of the vitamin that they most needed.

A metaphor I'm playing with maybe in the book is we gave them what you might call digital scurvy. You know, sure, you can play all, you know, you can play, you know, you can play on your screen, you can do all sorts of things on your screen, but we're not going to let you outside where you might actually run around and do a pickup soccer game because what if you get hurt or kidnapped? So you sit here and you play on your screen.

So kids need to play in order to develop basic adult competence and the ability to deal with conflict and teasing, things like that. And what we had with Gen Z was a generation coming in that had been so protected from teasing, also known as bullying in its reduced form. And when you lower the definition of bullying to include teasing or any kind of conflict or criticism, then you get kids who are fragile and who are easily offended.

This is a long-winded way of saying basically let kids play outside, again, with no adult supervision. They need a lot of that beginning at the age of seven or eight. So we have to redo childhood so that kids get training for democracy. There's some interesting writing on the importance of play for democracy. But that doesn't explain why everything went haywire beginning in 2013, like why the mental health crisis begins exactly in 2013, not 2010 or 2016.

And for that, I think the only explanation is that 2012 is roughly when a lot of kids, especially girls, began getting on Instagram. So in 2008, most teenagers were not on the social media platform every day. They didn't have an iPhone in 2008. But by 2013, they mostly did have iPhones or Androids, and they mostly were on these platforms every day.

And the boys went for YouTube and video games. The girls went for Instagram and Tumblr, more visual photographic media. And it seems to be the photographs of yourself going through puberty while posting photos of yourself and waiting for strangers to comment. There is no way you can tweak this to make it mentally healthy. This is devastating for girls in particular. This has to stop.

So I think we need to raise the age of internet adulthood. It was set to 13, very unwisely. It was going to be 16 in the original bill, the Childhood Online Privacy and Protection Act.

Lobbyists moved it down to 13 and there's no enforcement. So as long as the platforms say, you know, what year were you born? And then every kid says, oh, I was born in 1970 or whatever. They get on. And so that has to stop. It's now clear. It's now clear that going through puberty while posting photos of yourself is a really powerful way to make kids depressed, anxious and suicidal.

And we've got to stop that. And so we have to raise the age to 16 and hold the platforms liable for underage use. John, I guess I want to push back and suggest that maybe this is just a problem of culture.

There are schools in Los Angeles, and I was shocked to find this out, Orthodox Jewish schools, that say to parents, if you want your kid to go to this school, no problem. No phones allowed for the kids at all. So the dynamic in which you have seventh graders at a typical school saying to one another, I have a phone, I'm on Facebook, how are you not? That just goes away immediately.

Because it seems to me that the problem begins with kids comparing themselves to one another and then parents comparing themselves to other parents. And that's how they decide what's normal. And if you have one set of parents giving their kid the whole package, Instagram, whatever, at 11, all of a sudden you have a situation in which they're

It's basically the same thing that existed when I was in seventh grade, just on different terms. Back then it was, you know, a mini skirt or whatever. And now the thing that kids desperately need to have is the smartphone. And so I guess I'm wondering if you've thought about the question of how we create a culture, how we create a culture of parents who are willing to just, sorry to use the old dare motto, but just say no.

Social media is a trap. I've never met a parent who wanted their kid on Instagram. The only reason that we ever let our kids on is because they say, but mom, everyone else is on. If I'm not on, I'll be excluded. So I totally agree with the policy of no phones in school. Look, I think it's so important that kids walk to school and go off on their own after school. So I'm not against 11 and 12 year olds having phones, but

only if they're free range kids, only if they need it to go out on their own. So what I think needs to be done, we need research to test the proposition that if you take a school district with a lot of schools in it,

And in half of the middle schools, as soon as you show up at school, you put your phone in a locker and you don't get it back until the end of the day because you want the kids to have the phone in order to get home or to go to other people's houses or whatever. So I believe that this would have a huge effect, a very positive effect. And I think – I assume that's what the school you're talking about does, right? Is it that they have to put the phone away or they're not even –

that you will not get a phone for your child. It's much more extreme than what you're describing. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. And it's entirely good, you're saying? Yes. I'm saying I've sat at a dinner with kids from this school who can focus and be part of an adult conversation for four hours. And it's like, oh my God, I'm meeting kids from a different... It's incredible. And as someone like... You are so...

wise when it comes to studying the way that human beings, you know, are social creatures, how we basically have evolved, you know, not just with a God-shaped hole, but have evolved to want to please one another, to want to fit in with one another. How do we create sort of, and maybe it's a counterculture at first, but how do we create a culture where it's cool maybe not to participate in these things? Do you have any thoughts about that? Yeah.

That's a good idea. So first, let me totally agree with what you said then. I think that that policy can be done in a private school, especially a religious school. You couldn't do that in a public school. So yes, I wish we could. But barring that, I think the policy that could be done universally is a policy if you simply put your phone away in the locker. But yeah, if you could delay getting a phone until 13 or 14,

I think that would be that would be the best as for how we could change because right at the heart of all this is prestige. Kids are desperate for prestige. We all are. But kids, you know, they're not like that when they're three, four and five, but they get like that in late elementary school and especially middle school. So social media hits them right where they're most vulnerable, which is the desperate belief, the urge to believe that they matter, that that they have some status or standing or prestige.

How do you get it to be uncool to do that? So I think to the extent that people are online a lot seem kind of pathetic. If there was a way to, if there was a way that the cool kids were doing something else, like you'd have to give them an alternative form of prestige. And it's possible that this is such a devilish trap that there's no way out. I don't know, but that is a good way to think about it. How do we make it, or how could some communities of kids think,

think that the kids were constantly posting selfies. That it's lame. Yeah, they're insecure losers. I don't know. I wonder if the answer, in part at least, is to focus on teaching kids that investing in the people around them, investing in local life rather than strangers far away, is the right way to go. Yeah, that could be promising because I think the most thrilling thing for teens is to have a gang, to be part of a group.

And since they don't get to do that very much, we don't let them out of the house. You know, certainly when they're, you know, 10, 11, 12, 13, we don't let them out to just hang out with a group very much. So that would be cool if a town – so I do think we could have like free-range towns where kids –

Well, because the key thing is, you know, everyone's so afraid to let their kid out because if someone sees your kid in the park, you can get arrested or at least you can get put on, you know, investigation list and then you're under supervision. That's a nightmare. So one of the big activities we haven't let grow is we've gotten several states to change their laws. Colorado just was the most recent state to pass a reasonable childhood independence law or a free range kids law.

So if your kid is caught playing in a park without adult supervision, it is not considered to be child neglect unless there's other evidence of child neglect. So if there was ways to encourage kids to physically play together and hang out together. Now, the problem is once they have phones, they're going to be sitting there together on their phones, which is not always bad. When I look at my kids playing with other kids.

If they're interacting and joking about photographs that they're both editing or things, you know, that's what that's that's not necessarily bad. That may be OK. So I don't know. I think here we need experts on adolescents to come in on this. And we need to see if there are ways to have the kids spend more time physically interacting, not not through their phones. OK, John, final question.

On the surface, when we look at what's happening on Facebook or on Twitter, or frankly, the culture inside so many of our once great institutions, on the surface, that crisis looks like one of cruelty, right? It looks like an epidemic of cruelty. But if you go a little deeper, and as I think this conversation is brought out, what it really is, is an epidemic of conformity. And I wonder, as someone who's thought so much about what drives us as human beings,

If you can help me answer the question, how can we incentivize people to overcome that conformity and instead go to something like bravery or courage? So first, I agree that what is striking is the degree of cruelty and callousness.

But I would emphasize that what we see on social media is unrelated to averages. We have no idea what most people think. All we know is what gets presented. And that's a function of a very small number of people who do most of the tweeting, especially about politics and then the amplification that they get.

So we have to be careful about drawing any conclusion about what people are like or what people think or what the community believes from what we see, especially on Twitter, because there's not much of a relationship.

But you're right, I think, that what we see especially, very few people are cruel. What we do see, there was a lot of conformity and a lot of fear. And I plead guilty to it too. I self-censure like mad. I almost never say what I'm thinking. I just hold back. I never lie, but I often hold back. And so it's very hard to get people to stick their neck out when they think they don't have support.

And so I think the first thing is within institutions, I think it's vital to have support from above. It's vital for the leadership to say that I will support you if you're doing your job. I will support you when these things happen online and we're going to totally ignore them. And, you know, don't worry, you're not going to get investigated or fired or whatever. If there's some way to give support from above within institutions, I think that helps.

could enable more bravery. And here I care about it not so much as like bravery standing up against something on Twitter, but saying what you think is right or wrong within your institution. That's how you end structural stupidity. So that I think is the most important is within specific institutions, especially those tasked with finding truth. So especially the law and medicine. Those are two areas where you've written a lot about people on your blog have written about. Those are vitally important.

More generally for the rest of us, I think and I hope that if you use basic techniques of being reasonable and starting by saying what you think someone is right about or where you agree and then say what you think is wrong. You know, if everybody were to read Dale Carnegie, that would really help. Unfortunately, on Twitter, there isn't really enough space to do that, you know, to express two or three ideas and to get the nuance.

So I'm hopeful that people will abandon Twitter. That's unlikely unless some other platform comes along. But I'm also hopeful that over time, I think people are so exhausted by the nastiness that I think we will start to see more people actually getting recognition for being both brave and polite. That

That's what I hope, at least, that that combination is what most people long to see. Most people are very decent. Most people are not extremists. Most people are exhausted. And almost everybody hates being intimidated into silence.

So I think there is some real hope there that we'll have norm changes, almost like waking up from a bad dream here. I mean, things really got intense under Trump and then during COVID and after George Floyd was killed. I mean, there was intense, intense feelings and it was an era unlike anything since 1968. And so I think there is some hope that norms will improve.

John Haidt, as always, such a pleasure. Thanks for helping us navigate Life After Babel, which I understand is going to be the title of the book that you're writing based on the article that everyone should go and read right now. Well, thanks so much, Barry. It's a pleasure to be part of your community of conversations. Many thanks to Jonathan Haidt. Please go read his article in The Atlantic. It's called Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.

And thank you as always for listening. For more from us, please go check out and subscribe to our newsletter, Common Sense. And if you've got tips or guest suggestions, they're always welcome. Write us at tips at honestlypod.com. See you soon. Bye.