Jonathan Haidt argues in his Atlantic essay "After Babel" that social media architectures between 2009 and 2012 incentivized viral outrage via "dart guns," fragmenting American society by eroding trust and destroying shared stories. He warns that the middle 80% are trapped in a Skinner box of behavioral conditioning, risking democratic collapse within a decade unless moderate leaders restore reason. While advocating for delaying social media access until age 16 to foster self-reliance, Haidt remains cautiously hopeful that universities and businesses can rebuild the moral foundations necessary to prevent total societal disintegration. [Automatically generated summary]
These platforms have damaged our trust, degraded our belief in institutions, and eradicated our shared stories.
They are undermining the principles that raised America to the heights of civilization.
Today's guest recently tackled this in a new way with reality.
It was reality-based, an in-depth feature story for The Atlantic.
It was titled After Babel, Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.
In it, he uses the biblical story of the Tower of Babel as a metaphor for the fractured country we now inhabit.
He argues that we live in a post-Babel era and that social media is largely causing our collapse.
He's a social psychologist and a professor at the New York University.
He studies emotion, morality, and politics.
In his 2008 TED Talk about the moral roots of liberals and conservatives, after that went wild, he turned that TED Talk into a book called The Righteous Mind, which examines how politics and religion divide good people.
That book was so insightful, I made it required reading for my entire Blaze media team.
In 2018, he also co-authored the national bestseller, The Coddling of the American Mind, a smart, common-sense book about the major social distortions that are ruining college campuses and creating a generation of dysfunctional Americans.
He is a reasonable man, and he has become kind of a dinosaur in a way.
I mean, he's not that he's old, it's just nobody says these things anymore.
And he is troubled by the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.
To fight against this trend, he founded the Heterodox Academy, a nonpartisan, non-profit devoted to protecting diversity of thought on college campuses.
What a concept.
The idea that great minds don't always think alike, which I think should be the tagline of this podcast.
Today, welcome my guest, Jonathan Heid.
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sweatblock.com promo code beck or on amazon.com hey jonathan how are you sir Fine, Glenn.
Great to see you again.
It is good to talk to you.
You are, you're fascinating.
I heard you this week with Barry Weiss, and I was screaming at my iPad.
The Tower of Babel00:09:03
I'm like, no, Jonathan, this, you're missing a piece of, I think, of the Babel story.
Tell me, tell me.
Yeah, so.
You know more about it than I do.
Let's talk about Babel.
So first, let's start with your theory on fragmentation and that we're living in this post-Babel era.
Sure.
So I'm a professor at New York University.
I've been a professor since 1995.
I love being a professor.
I love universities.
But something got weird in 2014, 2015.
And many of your listeners and viewers will remember that year with the student protests and the safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, stuff we hadn't seen two years before.
Where did it come from?
And ever since then, I've been trying to figure out what on earth is happening.
Because it wasn't just universities.
It was a weirdness that spread.
It clearly spread throughout left-wing progressive spaces, but there was also a weirdening on the right, a real amplification of right-wing populist movements, not just in the U.S.
So it felt like something was really going strange about the universe that was affecting us all.
And I had a strong feeling that it was something to do with social media.
That seemed to be what was messing us up.
And I'd spent most of my career studying political polarization and tribalism like left versus right.
And you and I have talked about that in our previous meetings.
But what was weird over the last few years is that it wasn't just that the left hated the right more than before and vice versa.
It was that within the left, everyone was ripping everyone to shreds.
And within the right, things were nasty.
And so fragmentation is different from tribalism.
Fragmentation is where everything is coming apart.
And so when I don't remember when I reread the Babel story, but most people think they know the story.
I'm sure you can quote the key line, but us more secular people, we kind of know, yeah, people were so proud and God knocked over the tower.
That's the story, right?
But when you look at the story, it's a very short story.
And the key line is God, he doesn't actually knock over the tower.
What he does is he says, let us go down and confound their language so that they may not understand one another.
And when I reread that line, it was like a eureka moment because, yes, that is what has happened to us.
We literally cannot understand people that we're related to, that we work with.
They live in a different world.
We can't break through.
So that was the central metaphor for this essay that I wrote in The Atlantic last week.
So I love it.
And I think it's great, but I have been, the Tower of Babel story has bothered me for a long time.
And I keep feeling like it plays a real role here.
There's something to this story.
So when I heard you say that, I'm like, yes, yes.
However, if I may add a couple of things, because I want to talk to you about how these might change your thinking, if at all.
You know, the part of that story that bothered me the first time was when Nebuchadnezzar, the leader, says, you know, let's build a tower to reach the sky.
He doesn't say that.
He says, let us make bricks and build the tower to reach the sky.
And I have a rabbi friend, and I said, Rabbi, I've never heard a politician say that.
Hey, let's raise some taxes and we're going to do these things.
And then we're going to have this great tower.
They always talk about the tower.
They don't talk about this.
Yeah, that's right.
He said, because the oral tradition means bricks is equal to slaves.
Whenever the Bible talks about stones, each are unique.
And you build a stone wall, you put stones together.
And that means the uniqueness of people coming together and building something, okay?
Bricks, they're all the same.
So he said that it is the elite saying, look, these people are all interchangeable.
If we just make sure, if we treat them like bricks, treat them like slaves, or they're all the same.
We can do anything.
We can build this tower to the sky.
So he then also said that in the oral tradition, there are three faces of God that you always see.
And it's important to know which one is talking.
And this one is the merciful God.
If they can do this, they can do anything.
Let's confuse the language.
Now, I've always looked at this story and thought, our language is ones and zeros.
And with where we're going, I hope that God would come down before we destroy ourselves and confuse our ones and zeros.
But I was fascinated with your telling of it.
But does that information at all change the Tower of Babel's insight for you?
Let me just get this straight.
What you're saying is that there's a reading of the story where God does this to help us.
Yes.
That it's a good thing that he destroys the tower.
Yes.
He's trying to, I mean, in a really butchered sort of way here.
He's trying to say authoritarianism where everybody is exactly the same and the leadership just, you're dead, move on.
That has to be destroyed because if it's done like they were doing it then, man can't, these men can do anything.
Right.
That's interesting.
The idea that it was done for our benefit or as a way to stop us from being too proud.
I did a podcast with Russell Moore last week, and he suggested that there are two obvious motives.
I mean, the text is so short, it's so cryptic.
But he said the two motives that seem to come out from what we have is one is the hubris, the ambition we want to have its top in the tower.
And the other is fear, because the people, it's like, so that we would not be flooded again.
You know, these are the descendants of Noah.
They've just been flooded out.
And if we build a city with a tower, then we can run up into the tower if God sends another flood.
So it's fear.
And so if those are the motives, those two translate easily into social media because why do we do the things we do on social media?
We do it for reputation.
We want to boast and brag and put ourselves forward and be an influencer.
And that's the hubris.
And we do it.
We attack people out of fear.
We think they're going to destroy our way of life.
And we want to come together and attack them in this petty, degrading sort of way.
But your interpretation or your rabbi's friend interpretation is very interesting about the individualism and the interchangeability and the bricks when it comes to social media.
That's what it's doing to all of us.
It is demanding that everybody toe this line and say these things or they'll destroy you.
Well, now, hold on a second.
Here's the weird thing about social media.
It's not demanding that all people, 100% of people, say this thing.
It's demanding that the people that I can influence in my domain or bubble must say this thing.
So the language policing is not necessarily enforced.
It's not as though progressives and universities are saying you and your churches must use this language.
They're mostly harassing moderates on the left.
They're mostly harassing people who are in their institutions.
And this is one of the central ideas.
I would beg to differ that it's mostly, I would say it's pretty fair on our side, too.
Yeah, okay, okay.
But the key thing I wanted to get across in the article is that, of course, we've always had conflict.
We've always had a culture war, left, right, culture for a long time.
But what changed about social media is that it started, it wasn't so bad.
You put up pictures of your family, your dog, whatever.
It's when it's between 2009 and 2012, the dynamics of the platforms change.
And it's not about sharing photos with your friends.
It's now about commenting on things, on things that people said, and the retweet and the quote tweets.
It's much more about.
So the metaphor I use is it's as though everyone got a little dart gun.
And Twitter in particular, that's the worst of them.
It's like everyone has a little dart gun and you can shoot as many darts as you want at anyone you want.
And there's no accountability, no due process.
Say anything you want.
And most people are nice.
Most people don't want to destroy anybody.
But that there are four groups of people who took up those dart guns with great enthusiasm.
And I think they're mostly on the far left, the far right, trolls, that is individuals, mostly men, who are just jerks and just like to harass people.
And then Russian intelligence agents who really used it skillfully beginning in 2014 to make us hate each other.
And they messed with people on the left and the right to increase hate.
Forces That Divide Us00:15:33
So I think about it, honestly.
I mean, it's been crazy how I don't know if you know Alexander Dugan, but he was Alexander Dugan is a guy you should study because his influence with Putin has been significant in the past,
but he is also somebody who has got his fingers into the far right and is posing as a small T traditionalist, but he is a capital T traditionalist.
He's a dangerous man.
The guy looks like Russ Buten.
I can't believe it.
Oh, no.
No, he looks like, oh yeah.
You will love your journey on him.
I think he's one of the most dangerous men in the world.
Okay.
Thanks for thanks for giving me another rabbit hole to go down.
He's a philosopher.
This is uncanny.
Oh, yeah.
Wow.
Yeah, he's the guy who really developed the Ukraine strategy for Croatia.
He is very dangerous.
Very, very dangerous.
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We are divided.
We are at this place where we can't understand each other.
And Jonathan, I think you know me well enough to know that I may screw things up a lot, but I am actually trying to do the right thing.
I have tried.
I have tried.
You've changed your mind.
You've made apologies when you were wrong.
So yes, I mean, that's why I'm happy to be here talking with you.
Right.
But I've tried to use, you know, your tips and your language and the way to reach out.
There are very few people.
And especially now, it's getting much worse.
There is no reconciliation on the horizon.
And quite honestly, I don't know how to answer that.
I mean, in a Martin Luther King way, you have to reconcile because if you don't, there's no winner.
I mean, there's a winner and a loser.
And we can't have that.
So we have to reconcile.
But people are at the point where I can't live next to you if you really believe that there is no freedom of speech or difference of opinion.
And I have to toe that line.
I think I can't do it.
In fact, Glenn, let me ask you something.
Did you used to live in New Canaan, Connecticut?
Yeah, I did.
Yeah, my, because I believe, did you live near Ponus Ridge Road?
I lived on it, yeah.
On it, that's right, yeah, because my sister and brother-in-law lived there.
They lived there while you were there.
And I think they said that, did you leave because people were just nasty to you and harassing?
Was that part of why you left?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so, right.
So that's what's happening, is that the culture war has spilled out into all channels.
And this was even before, it was in 20, was it, under Trump, it became much more common for people to harass people in a restaurant.
You're in the Trump administration.
I'm not going to let you have your meal in peace.
But I guess they were doing that to you even long before then.
So yes, we ultimately will need to reconcile.
And it seems as if we're very far from that.
But let me make this distinction.
We can either look at individual Americans and we can think about what the average person wants or we can talk about what we're like, or we can look at our public life, which is not a reflection of the average American.
It's a reflection of various dynamics and pressures and incentives.
And what I have always found in all of my research on morality is that most people are very reasonable, nice.
If you talk to them in private, they're polite.
And they become jerks.
They become not nice when they're performing in front of others.
And so when you put them in the wrong sort of form.
So think about it this way.
Technology allows us to connect.
People have always wanted to connect.
It was amazing when humans got roads and the postal service and telephone and email.
These things all let us connect.
But the social media platforms, that's what I'm focused on.
This is not about the internet or technology.
This is about a few platforms that use a particular business model in which users are not the customers, they're the product, and they are supposed to perform to get other people to watch.
And so if you can imagine technology making it possible for us to have all these conversations, but all of a sudden we discover, I'm not talking to you privately over Facebook or Twitter or anything else.
We're actually performing in the center of the Roman Coliseum.
And the stands are full of people with their refreshments and their beer and their cheer.
And they want to see blood.
They want to see a fight.
And that's what changed in the 2010s.
That's my argument in this Atlantic essay, that when social media changed, it became much more about, they changed the architecture so things could go viral much more quickly with the retweet button, the like button, the share button.
And people were much more incentivized to attack others, to be outrageous.
That's when everything changed.
We were polarized before 2009, but in the 2010s, it was as though everyone got a dart gun and they were encouraged.
Shoot, shoot, shoot.
The more you shoot, the more points you'll get, the more followers you'll get.
And that's when I believe our institutions, our groups, became structurally stupid.
This is not about individual Americans being stupid.
We're not a stupid people.
But our institutions became stupider in the 2010s because most of us are afraid to say anything.
We're afraid to challenge the orthodoxy.
And that's what makes any group stupid.
You know, when I was at Fox, people said that, you know, I was just saying things for ratings, et cetera, et cetera.
And I tried to explain to people, look, I am a performer because my job is to, there's two sides to it, to drive eyeballs to the show and then give them a message, okay?
And I know how to, I know how to perform, so it's an exciting show.
It's a fun show, okay?
Yeah, it's always been fun to listen to you, even when I intensely disliked you politically back when I was younger.
I got to give you credit.
It's a lot more, it was fun to listen to.
Right.
So I know that, but I have worked a long time to get there.
And I know there are some people, and it almost happened to me, where, you know, you get to a place to maybe your ratings are starting to go down or you're whatever, and you know how to manipulate it, and you lose your soul once you do.
But in 2010, what happened was I used to have an audience.
Now my audience has an audience.
And so you've unleashed millions of people who now are struggling with the same thing that they used to accuse me or others of.
You don't really mean it.
You're just trying to get whatever.
Yeah.
And that's really what's happening.
I like it.
Yes, it is.
So let me introduce a psychology principle here that I think will expand on your metaphor, your insight.
So, you know, many of your listeners are parents, and we all know how hard it is to change our kids.
And my wife and I have tried to get our daughter to make her bed, and it's impossible.
And finally, my wife just gave up and she makes the bed.
And it's very hard to change your kids.
On the other hand, if you take a rat or a pigeon and you put them in a skinner box, that is a box where the scientists can press a button to instantly give them a reward or a punishment, you can train that pigeon to play ping pong, to play the piano.
If you can give rewards and punishments instantly, then you can train a creature very, very fast, even a rat or a pigeon.
And so what happened when your audience got an audience?
What happened when everyone got on social media?
Well, social media is a way in which you do something, like you post something.
And I don't know about you, even though I say how bad all this stuff is, I've been posting a bunch recently because of my Atlantic article, and I find myself checking.
I go back and I check five minutes later.
I see how many people liked it.
How many little food pellets did I get?
So it's incredibly powerful psychologically.
It's called, you know, it's behaviorist conditioning.
And so in the old days of mass media where you were the performer, you had a big audience.
It wasn't like that.
There's all kinds of interesting psychology and they shape you.
But that's part of what changed in the 2010s is suddenly all of us are in this little skinner box, our account on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram.
And strangers are reinforcing us or punishing us.
And guess what?
A lot of us get trained to do weird, weird things.
And that's part of the story of why everything went crazy in the 2010s.
So I know that you, I mean, you really believe in the moral foundations of a society, and they are all crumbling.
And it has happened before.
There's been two great awakenings, one in the 1750s and 60s, one in the 1840s and 50s.
And they have been led outside of the church because the church, you know, church is just like everything else.
It'll just go corrupt and it'll worry about its standing and its power and everything else.
So usually it starts from outside where people are like, hey, this is wrong.
And the churches usually start to attack those people, but it changed.
Martin Luther King did the same thing.
And we are hopefully headed towards a new awakening, but we are so close to losing all of our moral foundations.
I don't, I mean, I feel like we are really at the edge.
Yes, I think that's true, but let's go into that in a little more detail.
So I'm a psychologist who's very interested in both evolution and anthropology.
Evolution tells us how we're all the same, how we're all members of Homo sapiens, we all have human nature.
Anthropology tells us a lot about how we're different, how we have different norms and practices in different societies.
And humans evolved to live in small groups with lots of small gods and worshiping them, you know, with animistic practices and campfires and rhythmic music.
And there's a sort of a default or normal human pattern of spirituality and religion.
But after agriculture and the agricultural revolution and surpluses, we began living in much larger societies.
So that's just about seven to 10,000 years ago or, you know, five to ten thousand years ago.
We began living in larger societies.
And so the question is, how does a society hold itself together rather than splitting apart?
Because we didn't evolve to live in large groups.
But over time, we've evolved cultural institutions and religion is the preeminent one.
So again, I'm coming at this from the point of view, I'm a Jewish atheist.
I'm raised Jewish.
I'm a scientist.
I'm an atheist, but I have a lot of respect for religion, which I think is why I get invited to speak at Christian schools, because people are very tolerant about what I believe, as long as I don't show contempt for them, which I don't.
I mean, some researchers do on First Beach.
But that used to be what united us.
We could disagree, but still listen to each other and be decent to each other.
That's right.
Because what you need, as a human society grows, you have to look at what are the forces holding us together and what are the forces splitting us apart.
And traditionally, religion is religion and common language and a sense of shared blood.
We're all descended from the same ancestor.
So Jews, Abraham, were all the descendants of Abraham.
So these are the techniques.
These are the psychologically powerful things that hold a society together.
And as you get more diversity, for example, now diversity brings many benefits for creativity, for trade, economics, but cultural diversity, religious diversity, and linguistic diversity, those are like centrifugal forces that pull things out.
And you have to have other forces pulling things in.
So you said the moral foundations are crumbling.
I would translate that into a social science language more like there are binding forces and there are dividing forces.
And in the post-World War II world, boy, those binding forces were really strong.
We just fought a war against fascism.
And then we pivoted into the Cold War.
We had enemies.
We had life-or-death struggles.
We had one dominant culture.
It was the WASP culture, which was actually pretty tolerant.
You know, my grandparents, Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, they were allowed to come, to be themselves, they assimilated, their kids became Americans.
So there was a lot of things pulling us together with a sense of commonality.
Part of what is crumbling is the sense that we have a shared story, the sense we have anything that holds us together, the sense that our founding institutions are good.
Every culture or many cultures worship their ancestors.
And part of the American religion is you worship the founding fathers, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence.
We have our holy documents.
That's all fading away.
There's less respect, less trust.
So the things that hold us together are what are loosening.
And social media has just accelerated that to an extraordinary degree.
Anyway, that was a bit scattered.
But yes, I do want to encourage your listeners to think about the things that have been holding us together and the things that are driving us apart.
And right now, we're out of balance.
Way out of balance.
Why We Are Out of Balance00:16:57
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You know, you say we're in a post-Babel era.
And what scares me about the interviews I've heard you give here recently is I've always thought of you as a guy who, one of the good guys, trying to bring people together, trying just to speak the truth, and an optimist.
And I haven't heard, you know, the screaming optimism from you lately.
I mean, I think you said recently that, gosh, where was it?
I just wrote it down just a second ago, but you basically are saying, you know, we're coming to an end here of democracy.
Okay, let me elaborate on that.
By temperament, yes, I'm generally optimistic.
And for a long time, I believed the, there's some wonderful books.
Steve Pinker has a book on the better angles of our nature.
I love it.
There's Matt Ridley's book, The Rational Optimists.
You know, people have always thought society is falling apart, and yet, you know, prosperity rises, health increases, rights increase.
So I've long been a believer in that theory that there are temporary setbacks, but the long-term trajectory of humanity is very good.
In the last three or four years, I'm much more doubtful.
I'm much more pessimistic.
And what I would say is: if we don't make these big changes, if we continue on the path we're going on, then I believe we will fail as a country within, it's hard to say a number, but within 10 years, I think we will have high levels of political dysfunction.
There will be more political violence, there'll be less trust.
And our young generation, which is already really messed up, they're going to be the ones running the show.
So if we don't make major changes, then yes, I think we will fail as a country.
That doesn't mean civil war necessarily, but it means more like I think there are many Latin American countries, many countries around the world, have tried to enact democracy with weak institutions.
And I think we will become like them.
But there's a big if there.
That's if we don't do anything.
If we just continue fighting each other.
All right.
So then what are the things we have to do to cure that?
I mean, honestly, Jonathan, I've wanted to call you so many times and go, Jonathan, can you just, can you spend a weekend with me and just tell me what to do?
Because I mean, there are millions of people that want to solve this.
We just don't know what to do.
That's right.
So actually, I am actually a lot more optimistic now than I was when I wrote the article.
And that was just last month that I wrote it.
And here's why.
You know, once I realized it's not that we're all going crazy, we're not.
It's that there are four groups that are super empowered by viral social media.
And they are, as I said, the far right, the far left, trolls, and Russian agents or other intelligence agents that are trying to split us.
Then there's the middle 80% of the country.
There's most of us.
The middle 80% is very reasonable.
And so the fact that I published this article and I'm not getting attacked, in fact, nobody's disagreeing with it.
People seem to be saying, like, I'm totally exhausted.
Oh, my God.
Yes, this article at least explains what the hell's going on.
Why are we all exhausted?
Why have we all been attacked by strangers for no reason?
So I'm actually encouraged because we're on a ship that is sinking.
We're on a ship that is taking on water.
It can be repaired.
It's not destined to sink.
But if we don't do anything, it will sink.
And we don't know what to do because all we see is the sailors are just fighting each other.
The crew is just fighting each other.
And we're the passengers, and we're saying, what do we do?
And I think now there's a dawning realization that the ship is sinking.
The people who are supposed to be running it are just too busy fighting each other.
So we, the passengers, have to actually take action.
The middle 80% has to stand up.
And what that means, actually let me run this by because I haven't said this anywhere else.
Let me see if this makes sense.
What this means is because our leaders are so intimidated by their extreme wings.
If you're a president of a university, you're intimidated by the young woke left.
If you're a moderate Republican politician, you're getting death threats from people on the right.
So I think what this means is the leaders and the more moderate people have to stand up to their wings.
University presidents have to stand up and say, you know, no, no, this university is devoted to the pursuit of truth.
We're not here to fight for racial justice or any sort of social justice.
You do that on your own time.
That's great.
We hope we'll give you the tools.
But we have a job to do, and our job is the pursuit of truth and the passing on of the best that has been said and thought.
So if we have a dawning realization that the ship is sinking, but the great majority of us don't want it to sink, we want to fix this ship.
We want to fix the game, then I think there are some reforms that can be done.
So first, let me just check with you.
Do you agree with that analysis that the more moderates and responsible people, the leaders of the institutions, they have to stand up to their extremes?
Or do you think symmetry here?
No, no, no.
There's a perspective here that you may not have that I could help enhance this a little bit or at least pose the question to you.
I think you're right.
There has to be, there are no, where's the church hill?
Where's the church hill of business?
Where's the church hill of universities?
Where's the church hill of parties?
You know what I mean?
They're scarce.
And they have to stand up.
But I will tell you that I feel like the right, you know, not the far fringe.
The regular person, and I think, I don't know, but I know when I go to my farming community, I talk to Democrats and they're the same way that I am.
Just can we not just live together?
Okay.
Yes.
And that has to be led.
But the people on the right feel like we have been cast as wanting to kill people because we disagreed, you know, wanting to starve children to death.
All of these things.
We're racist, we're angry, we're white, all of this stuff.
That until you start to see leadership, and I think you are one of these.
Bogozian is one.
You know, others like this, Barry Weiss is one, where they stand up and go, you know what?
I'm not a conservative, but this is nuts.
Yeah, that's right.
We can rally if we see that.
But until conservatives start to see people on the left going, okay, You Marxists that want to burn the entire thing to the ground, you got to stop.
Until we see that, I don't think we'll have the trust.
Does that make sense to you?
Okay, it sure does.
But I think this is where the asymmetry lies, because people on each side point to the extremes of the other with justification.
But there's an interesting asymmetry.
So what I said in the article is that the problem on the left is not the Democratic Party per se, because the Democratic Party per se is actually, it's usually the moderates who win.
It's not the extreme wing is not in charge.
They have voice, they're involved, but they're not dominating the Democratic Party.
They are dominating the institutions, as you say.
So people on the right are correct in pointing out the nastiness, the instant, you know, they will instantly call you racist for anything.
So they're right.
People on the right are correct in saying the things you said.
But, you know, you've got to take the plank out of your own eye before you can point out the splinter in your neighbor's eye.
What I argue in the essay is that the asymmetry is that normal conservatives are not doing this to liberals, but the Republican Party, I believe, has gone off the deep end under Trump.
The party of Mitt Romney was at least a responsible center-right party.
Now, here, I'm sure many of your listeners will have strong reactions against this.
But it seems to me as someone in the middle, what I'm saying is the cultural left is a huge problem because it's warping institutions.
But on the right, it's not the cultural right, it's the Republican Party.
And the fact that they couldn't even stand up after the January 6th insurrection and say that we should study this or say that this is something wrong.
Many of us did.
Okay, and what happened?
Please tell me, what happens to more moderate Republicans who stood up and on the January 6th thing, until the Biden administration started going on this massive witch hunt and saying it was the worst thing that has happened since the Civil War.
I mean, let's go back to the 90s where the left blew the Capitol up, blew part of the Senate up.
It has happened before.
And quite honestly, I don't, I was disgusted by it.
And quite honestly, I was disgusted that the president, I was at home going, where's the president?
Where's the president?
And then when he did something on the phone online, I was like, that's not what a president does.
Most people that I know felt exactly the same way.
Most, if not all, fell that way, felt that way that I know.
However, once it became a tool, it stopped being about Donald Trump and started to be about the 90 million people that voted for him.
You lost it.
You know, it's just the left was like, what are you doing?
You didn't go after the people who were burning cities, and you're going after this group that most of us don't relate to at all.
Yeah.
Okay.
But so here, here we're going down the path of normal moral psychology.
And you see this in your kids.
You know, if your kid does something wrong, the standard response is, well, but he did it.
He did it.
I know, I know.
Or he did something else.
And so everyone's complaints about the other side are legitimate, are justified.
And the only way we're going to get out of that is by totally breaking out of that dynamic.
But wait, wait, wait, wait.
So wait, wait.
Help me out with this part then.
Because I think, because you remember, I was not for Donald Trump when he ran the first time.
Not for him.
That's for him.
Yeah, that's right.
And took a bad beating for it.
For his policies.
Don't like the tweets and all of that crap that comes with it.
Yes.
Really despicable January 6th, yada, yada.
Even though, you know, I thought there was foul play, but I couldn't prove it.
So nobody could prove it.
I kept saying, if you got something, show it.
If you don't, shut up.
You know, you don't have anything, right?
So when you look at that, but I have learned what people see in Donald Trump is, you know, you said at the very beginning of this that you started to see people rise up all around the world, the right and everything else.
There's one thing that they have in common because I've watched this as well.
Hong Kong, France, Brexit, Canada, here in the United States, it's happening all over the world.
And what they all have in common is they feel as though their government is not listening to them and demeaning them and the things that they believe in.
And so they will follow people who say, I listen to you.
I listen to you.
And that's what Donald Trump has in spades to the people who voted for him.
They're like, at least somebody is valuing my opinion and my values.
Yeah.
No, I think you're right.
I think that's a good analysis.
I'm focused on the social media aspect, but there's an economic aspect here, which is what you just put your finger on, that the left used to be related to labor.
It was the party of the working man.
It was related, you know, so and the Republican Party used to be the party of the rich country club business people.
And what's happened, not just in the US, exactly the same thing in the UK and in France and in all the Western democracies, is as the highly educated people, the knowledge workers, the journalists, the professors, since they've come to be the center of the left party, whether it's labor in the UK or Democrats here.
They live in Paris and New York.
I mean, Paris, London, New York, San Francisco.
They refer contemptuously to the flyover zone, flyover country.
They do treat most people with contempt.
They have no connection to the working man.
And so, yes, this has been a glow.
The changing economics of globalization, education, knowledge, work, all this stuff has changed the left-right, the nature of the left-right conflict in our countries.
And I agree, the left does treat the right with contempt.
Well, no, wait, That's why they don't win elections now.
Right, but I think there's a difference.
I think the split is, because I talk to Democrats, and we may not agree on every policy, but we agree on direction and principles.
Not everybody.
I'm not talking about the political class.
I'm talking about the regular people.
Yeah.
Okay.
And when you really look at it, it's really becoming the ruling class all over the world.
This group of elites that really look down their nose at everybody else and then everybody else.
I mean, I think, I mean, I'm finding strange bedfellows all the time that we don't agree on policy.
Okay.
So how would you go about, because I agree with you that there is this rise of the elites and bad elite, I mean, if you have good elites, and those are the ones that got us through World War II, that was Churchill.
If you have good elites with a sense of service, you need elites to run a country.
And if we have this more meritocratic elite where they feel they're elite because they did so well on the SAT that they got into the top schools and they've got to the top schools.
The meritocracy elite is great.
Yeah.
If it's true merit as opposed to test taking.
Yes, yes.
So I agree with you that a part of our problem is that we don't have elites with a sense of service.
We have elites who think that they deserved the elite status.
I mean, you have Elon Musk.
I disagree with Elon Musk on so much, I'm sure.
But man, I would have vision.
I love him because he sees past all this crap and like, this is crap.
Risks of Elites Without Service00:06:24
Let's go here.
He's the only Mars.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
That's the problem too, the lack of vision.
So, but let me kick this back to you.
I put this out as I put this out as we need to somehow mobilize the middle 80%, the reasonable people.
And it's not like we need to tear things down.
It's we need to restore reason to our institutions.
We need to have our schools need to focus on education.
The CDC needs to focus on health.
We have to keep political concerns out of things.
We need a Geneva convention for the culture wars that people don't assault you at a picnic in New Canaan or in a restaurant in Washington.
How do you think we can get there?
You said before, the left has to stop doing this to the right.
That's not going to stop.
And as long as there's Twitter, as long as anyone has done anything, you're going to find out about it.
So how do you think we can get out of this?
So it requires, just like you said, I think leadership in positions, all positions, leadership, you're standing up at the PTA and you're speaking to your school board with respect and lead that way.
And then just follow the system and it's happening all over the country.
You become the school board member.
And then somebody else has to stand up and be courageous around you if you start to go corrupt.
We have to have them in all levels, people who just really, truly want to fix the problem and use common sense.
But I really don't think, Jonathan, and this is new for me, I really don't think you'll do it until you reduce the size of the government.
It is absolutely corrupt.
You have to get the power back closer to the people.
This won't work in probably any other country but ours if we still understand it.
But I'm not sure the next generation understands capitalism, understands hard work, has the courage to be an entrepreneur.
I don't know if they have that.
No, I'm afraid they don't.
Because one of the hallmarks of Gen Z is that they're anxious, they're fearful, they're risk averse, because we never let them practice risk-taking.
So actually, if I could just steer our conversation just for a moment, I want to come back to what you just said, but a big piece of this and a big reason for my pessimism is that we've messed up Gen Z in two ways.
What we've done to them is kids need to be out playing, especially between age 7 and 12.
That's when all the children's stories take place.
You know, the kid goes out on an adventure without parents.
That's the crucial period of cultural learning for human children.
They need to have unsupervised free play.
And what we did is we said, instead of that, we think you'll get kidnapped if we let you out, which doesn't happen.
So we're not going to let you out.
Oh, and instead, we're going to give you a phone and an iPad, and you can just be on that.
And that basically blocks all the experience that they need to grow.
So for everybody listening to this, think about your community.
Think about what age kids are let out.
Think about when you were let out.
And I've done this all over the country.
It used to be six to eight.
It was first, second, or third grade.
By third grade, everyone's out playing with no adult supervision.
That's the normal human thing.
And that's true in other countries I've been to.
All of a sudden in the 90s, we stop that.
We freak out about child abduction, even though there are almost zero children abducted other than by the non-custodial parents.
We freak out about it, in part because of cable TV freakouts.
And we overprotect our kids so they don't learn the virtues that you're talking about.
How do you learn to be a leader?
How do you learn to resolve conflicts?
It's with unsupervised free play, team competition with no referee.
You have to supervise yourselves.
So kids need to have a lot more free play and a lot less time on their devices.
They should not be on social media in particular until after puberty, until I think 16 is the minimum age.
I'm not telling your listeners to just get your kid off right away because that could isolate them, but work in your community.
This is the thing.
Work on your community so that there's a place where kids play or you and your kids' friends, families all agree kids should be out or over at each other's homes playing outside.
So we've got to change what we're doing to kids.
More free play, less time on phones.
I urge your listeners to go to letgrow.org.
It's an organization I co-founded with Lenore Skinese, who wrote the book Free Range Kids.
So that's just a little, this is an area.
Look, this is a totally nonpartisan issue.
This is one where we really can work together.
And actually, four states have already passed laws legalizing outdoor play.
Sounds like a crazy thing to say, but in most states, if your kid is caught playing outside, they could be taken.
Child protective services.
It's insane.
Completely insane.
So Colorado was the most recent one to pass a bill.
Utah was the first.
So wherever you are listening to this, go to letgrow.org and look at our page on legislation.
Find out if your state has a reasonable childhood independence law, because we have to give our kids reasonable independence to develop those virtues that you're talking about.
Virtues that conservatives in particular are eloquent about.
Self-reliance.
Don't blame others.
Take responsibility.
Learn to share.
Work it out yourself.
These are the things kids learn in play.
So we have to do that.
We have to keep them off social media until 16.
And then the next generation will be a little more able to take risks.
We've deprived them of the chance to learn how to calibrate risk.
So anyway, that's just building off what you said about the importance of leaders who are willing to take reasonable risks.
Jonathan, I know you've got a tight time schedule.
So do I.
I would love to do this again early and often.
You are a rare mind and a rare voice in today's world.
Okay.
Well, thank you, Glenn.
I love talking with you.
I love the way you think about things.
You'll change your position when you think the facts have changed.