Jonathan Haidt warns that smartphones and social media—like TikTok’s algorithm—worsened teen depression by 30% (2010–2021), replacing free play with addictive, isolating screen time. He critiques "minor attracted person" normalization and identitarianism’s rise post-2015, fueling tribalism and cancel culture while platforms amplify extremists. Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT’s ideological biases expose systemic failures, eroding trust in academia and media amid polarization, where anti-Semitic rhetoric is protected but conservative dissent isn’t. The solution? Delay smartphones until high school, ban social media under 16, and demand structural reforms before tech reshapes cognition—like Neuralink—without safeguards. [Automatically generated summary]
The same problems that you talked about when you were here last that I've referenced many times since on the podcast have only exacerbated, unfortunately.
And that's why you wrote this, The Anxious Generation.
And it could not be more true how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
I think it was only their preconceived notions that were keeping them from admitting it before or at least looking at it before.
Or maybe they don't have children.
You know, it could be that.
I think a lot of older people, particularly boomers, they're a little bit disconnected from it because they're not, unless they're addicted to Twitter, you know, they're not engaging in this stuff.
But part of the message of the book is that social media and the things kids are doing on screens are not really like TV. They're much, much worse for development.
Because when we were watching TV, I'm a little older than you.
I was born in 1963. So I grew up watching a lot of TV. Maybe an hour or two a day, weekdays, and then two or three hours on the weekends.
But it was a bigger screen.
You're watching with your sisters or with your friends.
You're arguing about things.
You're eating.
So it's actually pretty social.
But now kids are spending...
The latest survey Gallup finds that it's about five hours a day just on social media.
Just social media, including TikTok and Instagram.
And when you add in all the other screen-based stuff, it's like nine hours a day.
And that's not social.
It's private on your little screen.
You're not communicating with others.
So in all these ways, the new way that kids are digital is really not like what we had when we were watching TV. It's also an extraordinary amount of wasted resources.
And so that's the concept of opportunity cost is this great term that economists have, which is the cost of, you know, if you buy something, you know, if you invest, you know, an hour of your time and $100 to do something, how much does it cost?
Well, you know, $100, but you could use that $100 and that hour for something else.
So what are the things you gave up?
And when screen time goes up to, now it's about nine hours a day in the United States.
So, in 2019, when I was last here with you, my book, The Coddling of the American Mind, had just come out.
And back then, people were beginning to sense that, you know, this internet, the phones, the social media that we were all so amazed by, you know, there was a very positive feeling about all this stuff in the early part, you know, like in the 2000s.
Sentiment was beginning to turn, but there was a big academic debate because when you look at studies that look at how, you know, do kids who spend a lot of time on screens, do they come out more depressed?
The answer is yes, but the correlation is not very big.
So there was a big argument among researchers, and that's when I got into this around 2019, really getting into that debate.
And I think that Gene Twenge and I really had good data showing, you know, there is an issue here.
And then COVID came, and that confused everything.
Because, you know, basically when I was on with you last time, 2019, I was saying, you know, what kids most need is less time on their devices and more time outside playing unsupervised.
Let them be out unsupervised.
That's what we needed, 2019. COVID comes in, boom, exactly the opposite.
What do kids get?
No more time unsupervised.
You can't even go out.
I mean, in New York City, they locked up the playgrounds.
They locked up the tennis courts.
It was insane.
No time outside with your friends.
Oh, spend your whole day on screens.
So that made everything worse.
But people thought, oh, yeah, the kids are really messed up now from COVID. But they were wrong.
COVID was terrible for a lot of kids.
When you look at the mental health trends over the last 20 years, COVID was a blip.
Actually, you know what?
I've actually got some charts.
If you don't mind, I'd like to actually show these.
So, I don't know what your kids think about social media and whether they think it's a good thing or a bad thing, but we are hopeful that members of Gen Z are going to start, and they are starting to advocate that, you know what, this is messing us up.
So this is the graph that I showed last time I was on.
What it shows, because I know most of your listeners are probably just listening to the audio, it shows that from 2005 to 2010, the rates of depression in girls was about 12% of American girls had a major depressive episode in the last year.
And for boys, it was about 4% to 5%.
And it's flat.
There's no change.
Then all of a sudden, around 2012-2013, the numbers start rising, especially for girls.
And it goes all the way up to 20% for girls.
So that was a huge rise, and that's what I showed you last time.
So what happens is a lot of things change around 2011, 2012. 2010 is when you get the front-facing iPhone.
It's when Instagram is founded.
It's when kids are getting high-speed data plans.
So my argument in the book is that we had a complete rewiring of childhood between 2010 and 2015. In 2010, most of the kids had flip phones.
They didn't have Instagram.
They didn't have high-speed data.
So they would use their flip phones to get together with each other.
They'd communicate with each other.
By 2015, about 80%, 70%, 80% have a smartphone.
Most of them have high-speed data, unlimited plan, Instagram accounts.
And this really messes up the girls.
So that's what I think happened between 2010 and 2015. TikTok becomes popular only really more 18, 19, 20. And it's so new, we don't have good data on just TikTok.
But I suspect that that sort of extra acceleration might be due to TikTok.
Let's separate the national security issue from the mental health issue.
I have a lot of libertarian friends.
I have a lot of libertarian sympathies.
I would be uncomfortable about the government banning a company or a product because it's harmful to children.
I personally think we should just have age verification.
We should not have kids on certain things.
But if it was just a question of, you know, this is really bad for children, let's ban it.
Like, no, I don't think I would support that.
But TikTok is different because it is a Chinese-owned company.
And as many of your listeners will know, China, it says in whatever, it doesn't have a constitution, I don't think.
But by law, every Chinese company must do what the Chinese Communist Party tells it to do.
And that's what's so scary.
Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, they might have similar effects to TikTok, but the Chinese government can literally tell ByteDance to change what kids are seeing.
And they do that in China.
They tell them in China, you have to have this kind of content and not that kind of content.
There was an incredible episode of—you had Tristan Harris on.
Tristan Harris has this amazing podcast episode where they go into the national security risks, and they show that the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, TikTok in Russia changed radically.
Like, the government was on—like, you know, TikTok was on it.
Like, yep, we're going to do what Putin wants us to do.
So the idea that the most influential—the most influential platform on American children, The idea that that must do what the Communist Party tells it to do at a time when we have mounting tension with China and the possibility of a war.
I mean, as Tristan says, imagine if in the 1960s, the Soviet Union owned and controlled PBS, ABC, NBC, and all the kids' programs.
We would never have allowed that.
So I hope, listeners, I really strongly support this bill.
I think Representative Mike Gallagher, I think, was one of the ones proposing it, or at least certainly advocating for this issue.
I hope people will not see it as a TikTok ban, but they'll see it as an urgent national security move to force ByteTance to sell to a non-Chinese owner.
So a lot of it seems to have to do with the data question.
Facebook pioneered this model in which the person using the product is not really the customer.
They don't pay the money.
They're the product.
The user is the product, not the customer.
And they give them data.
And the data can be used for all sorts of purposes, especially marketing and advertising.
And so TikTok has enormous amounts of data, and they can get all psychological on it because they know exactly how long you hesitated, how much you liked certain kinds of videos.
You know, many people have written articles on how TikTok seems to have known they were gay before they did, that sort of thing.
So TikTok has extraordinary amounts of data on most Americans, certainly most young Americans.
And they say, oh, but, you know, we don't share, like, it's in a server over here in Singapore, I don't know where, but, you know, it's not in China.
You know, oh, come on, come on.
You know, there's no way it could possibly be the case that the data is really separated and not available to the Chinese Communist Party.
I don't know whether the motivation behind the bill, I don't know whether it's that the Chinese would have some access to data on American citizens or whether what most alarmed me when I heard the Tristan Harris podcast was the ease of influencing American kids to be pro this or pro that on any political issue.
Well, it's very obvious with many things with TikTok.
Trans stuff, and there's a lot of different things that they're encouraging.
And people that are opposed to that are being banned, which is also very odd.
Specifically, like, female athletes.
We had Riley Gaines, who was the female athlete that competed against Leah Thomas.
And she has said that biologically male athletes should not be able to compete with biologically female athletes because they have a significant advantage.
And she was banned from TikTok just for saying that.
So this relates to the larger issue that we talked about last time and that I hope we'll continue to talk about today.
which is that social media has brought us into an environment in which anyone has the ability to really harm anyone else.
There's an extraordinary amount of intimidation available via social media.
And so this has led the leaders of all kinds of organizations to run scared.
Greg Lukianoff and I saw this in universities.
Why don't the university president stand up to the protesters who are shouting down visiting speakers?
Isn't there a grown-up in the room?
And then we saw it in journalism, newspapers and editors who wouldn't stand up for journalistic principles.
And so I think what has happened here is that social media allows whoever is angriest and can mobilize most force to threaten, to harass, to surround, to mob anyone.
And when people are afraid to say something, that's when you get the crazy distortions that we saw on campus or that Riley Gaines was seeing, too, just that people are afraid to speak up.
And in a democracy, in a large, secular, diverse democracy, we have to be able to talk about things.
And so that's part of why we're in such a mess now is I've argued.
That it's when social media became super viral after 2009, 2010. You get the like button, the retweet button.
Social media wasn't really bad or harmful before.
It wasn't terribly harmful before then.
But by 2012, 2013, it had really become as though everyone had a dart gun.
Everybody could shoot everyone.
And that's when we began sort of like teaching on eggshells in universities because our students could really do a lot of damage if we said one word they didn't like.
And it's not just the students, which is really disturbing.
We've talked about this before.
There was an FBI security specialist who estimated that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of the Twitter accounts were bots, which is very strange because that means that they're mobilizing specifically to try to push different narratives.
So if you think of, you know, people say, well, you know, now Twitter is the public square or things like that.
It's not a public square.
It's more like the Roman Colosseum.
It's more like a place where people say things and the fans in the stands are hoping to see blood.
To move our discussions onto platforms like that, that can be manipulated, that anyone—it doesn't have to be a foreign intelligence service.
It could be anybody who wants to influence anything in this country or anywhere in the world— They can, you know, for very little money, they can hire someone to create thousands, millions of bots.
And so we're living in this sort of funhouse world where everything is weird mirrors and it's very hard to figure out what the hell is going on.
So, when we're talking about the democracy problems and the, you know, manipulation of politics or anything else, those are really, really hard.
I have a few ideas of what would help and we're not going to do them because, you know, all of them are like the left likes and the right doesn't or vice versa.
Oh, things like, you know, like identity authentication.
If large platforms had something like know your customer laws, That is, you know, if you want to open an account on Facebook or on X, you have to at least prove that you're a person.
And I think you should be able to have to prove that you're a person in a particular country, I think over a certain age.
You prove those to the platform, not directly, you go through a third party.
So even if it's hacked, they wouldn't know anything about you.
You establish that you're a real person and then you're cleared.
Go ahead.
You open your account.
You don't have to use your real name.
If we did that, that would eliminate the bots.
That would make it much harder to influence.
That would make us have much better platforms for democracy.
Well, the platforms can certainly require whatever they want for membership.
Right now, they are legally required to ask you if you're over 13. If you're 13 or over, they ask it, and then they accept whatever you say, and that's it.
You're in.
So those rules could be changed, and they could be required to do more.
And they're based most in the United States, but their users are all around the world.
So one of the things that people are nervous about when it comes to authentication is that if you could do that, then you could target individuals that wouldn't be allowed to be anonymous.
So you eliminate the possibility of whistleblowers.
It doesn't mean that you have to post under your real name.
And even if you want ultra-high security, you could just have dissidents in repressive countries.
They could just communicate by secure channels with a journalist who posts for them.
So I understand the concern, and there are values to having anonymity.
But I think what we're seeing now is that the craziness, the way it's affecting, it's making it harder for democracies to be good, vibrant democracies.
And it's making it easier for authoritarian countries like China to be powerful and effective authoritarian countries.
So I think we have to start weighing the pluses and minuses of the costs and benefits here.
You're saying even if American companies did this, the Chinese could still get around it.
Yeah, that's true.
You're never going to have a perfect system.
But right now, it's just so easy and cheap and free to have massive influence on anything you want.
But the larger question here was, you asked me, what can we do?
And what I'm saying is, there are some things like identity authentication that I think would help, but yes, there are implementation problems.
There's all kinds of political questions.
So my basic point is, man, those problems, I don't know that we can solve, but we can do better.
Oh, and I should point out, a lot of these have to do with the basic architecture of the web.
When we move from web one, which was put up information, it's amazing, you can see things from everywhere.
To Web 2, which was directly interactive, now you can buy things, you can post stuff, and it's the Web 2 that gave us these business models that have led to the exploitation of children and everyone else.
And I'm part of a group, Project Liberty, if you go to projectliberty.io, that's trying to have a better Web 3, where people will own their own data more clearly.
As the architecture changes, it opens us up to new possibilities and risks.
So there are some hopes for a better internet coming down the pike.
Actually, I just wanted to put all this stuff out there about democracy to say this is really hard, but when we talk about kids and mental health, this is actually amazingly doable.
We could do this in a year or two, and the trick, the key to solving this whole problem with kids is to understand what's called a collective action problem.
So there are certain things where, you know, like if you have a bunch of fishermen and they realized, oh, we're overfishing the lake, let's reduce our catch.
And if one person does that and no one else does, well, then he just loses money.
But if everyone does it, well then actually you can solve the problem and everyone can do fine.
With social media, what we see over and over again is kids are on it because everyone else is.
And parents are giving their kids a phone in sixth grade because the kid says everyone else has one and I'm left out.
And over and over again, you see this.
When you ask kids, you know, how would you feel if I took your Instagram or TikTok away?
Oh, I'd hate that.
I hate that.
But then you say, well, what if it was taken away from everyone?
What if no one had it?
And they almost always say, that would be great.
There's an academic article that showed this with college students.
I did it as a test with my students at NYU. And a review of the book of The Anxious Generation in the Times of London The UK Times.
The woman ended by asking her 16-year-old, would you have liked there to be a social media ban until you were 16?
I think the daughter was like 18 at the time.
This was last month.
And the daughter says, would everyone else be off it too?
And she says yes.
And then the daughter says...
Yeah, I would have rather liked that.
And so you have this consumer product that the people using it, they don't see value in it.
They're using it because everyone else is.
And there's evidence suggesting it's messing up their mental health.
So anyway, this is a solvable problem if we act together.
I'm not counting on the social media companies or Congress.
I'm assuming we'll never get help from either one.
Now, I hope I'm wrong about Congress.
But as a social psychologist, I'm trying to point out, you know, we can actually solve this ourselves.
And so the simplest one is this.
So I propose four norms.
If we can enact these four norms ourselves as parents and working with schools, we can largely solve the problem.
We can certainly reduce rates of mental illness a lot.
The first norm is the simplest.
No smartphone before high school.
Now people say, oh my god, but my kid needs a phone.
Sure, give him a flip phone.
Millennials had flip phones, and they were fine.
Flip phones did not harm millennials' mental health.
They're good for communication.
You text, you call, that's it.
So the first rule is no smartphones before high school.
And as long as a third of the parents do this, well, then the rest of the parents are free to say when their kid says, Mom, you know, I need a smartphone.
You know, some other kids have one.
Then you can say, well, no, here's a flip phone.
You'll be with the kids who don't have one.
Oh, and by the way, you're also going to get a lot more freedom to hang out with the other kids.
So we don't need everybody, but we need to break the feeling that everyone has to have one because everyone else has one.
Just when we look right now, kids with married parents are trying harder to keep the kids off.
These things are good babysitting devices in the sense that the kids are off doing their thing.
You don't have to think about them.
So it is true that this would not be adopted universally at first.
But I think we could still develop a norm that it's just not appropriate for children to have a smartphone.
They should have flip phones.
And I think that any community that wants to do this, because what I find over and over again is that most parents are really concerned about this.
And this is across social classes.
Most parents are seeing the problems.
And so I don't have to convince parents to change their minds about something.
What I'm trying to do with the book is show them here are four norms that are pretty easy to do if others are doing them, and these are going to make your kids happier, less mentally ill.
Yeah, like I said, it sounds like a good suggestion.
I just don't imagine that with the momentum that social media has today and the ubiquitous use that kids are going to give it up.
They're not going to want to give it up.
I think there's a lot of kids that have had problems that if you talk to them alone and you say, wouldn't it be better if social media didn't exist, if they've been bullied or what have you, they'd say yes.
Well, you know, you may be right, but I'm encouraged because whenever I speak to Gen Z audiences, and, you know, I've spoken to middle schools, high schools, college audiences, I always ask, you know, do you think I got this wrong or do you think this is a correct description of what's happening?
They agree.
They're not in denial.
They see the phones are messing them up.
They see that social media is messing up the girls especially.
So, you know, even in middle school, certainly high school, the kids actually agree that this is a problem.
And so if it was offered to them, you know what, let's do the other three norms.
All right, so the first is no smartphone before high school.
Second is no social media until 16. That one's going to be a little harder to do.
But the big platforms like Instagram, where you're posting and the whole world is seeing and strangers are contacting you, I think the age is currently 13 and it's not enforced.
I think that needs to go up to 16. Here, it would be nice if Congress would raise the age to 16 and make the companies enforce it.
But even if they don't, Parents, as long as many other parents are doing it, me, I as a parent, you know, my kids are 14 and 17, as long as many other parents are saying 16 is the age, then it's very easy for me to say that also.
So I've published articles in The Atlantic and on my substack, afterbabble.com, bringing together the research.
When kids have a phone in their pocket in school, they're going to be texting.
Because if anyone is texting during the day, during the school day, they all have to check because they don't want to be out of the loop.
They don't want to be the one who doesn't know.
So, when kids started bringing smartphones into school instead of flip phones, academic achievement actually went down.
Kids are stupider today than they were 15 years ago.
I mean stupider meaning measuring their academic progress.
After 50 years of improvement, it turns around after 2012. And this is true in the US and internationally.
So there's just no reason why kids should have the phone on them.
They should come in in the morning, put it in a phone locker or a yonder pouch, go about their day, and guess what?
The schools that have tried it, after a week or two, everyone loves it.
The kids are like, oh, wow, we actually talk in between classes.
We have five minutes in the hallway, we actually talk.
And you hear laughter, whereas right now in a lot of schools, it's just zombies looking at their phones in between as they're walking from class to class.
This is my concern, is that this is just the beginning of this integration that we have with devices and that the social media model and it's been immensely profitable and incredibly addictive and there's a massive, massive amount of capital that's invested in keeping us locked into these things.
So let me just draw a very, very sharp, bright line between adults and children.
I'm very reluctant to tell adults what to do.
If adults want to spend their time on an addictive substance or device or gambling, I'm reluctant to tell them that they can't.
So when we're talking about adults, I think where this is going is, well, where it's gone so far is everything that you might want becomes available instantly and for free with no effort.
And so in some ways that's a life of convenience, but in other ways it's messing us up and it's making us weaker.
So, you know, you want sexual satisfaction?
Okay, here you go, free porn.
And it gets better and better and more and more intense.
You want a girlfriend or boyfriend who you can customize?
You have that already.
Advances in robotics are such that it's just a matter of time before AI girlfriends are put into these incredible female bodies that you can customize.
So I think the adult world, for young adults especially, is going to get really, really messed up.
And again, I'm not saying we need to ban it now.
But what I'm saying is, for God's sakes, don't let this be 11-year-old children's lives.
Let's at least keep children separate from all this craziness until their brains develop, and then they can jump into the whirlpool and the tornado.
But the fact that our 11-year-old girls are now shopping at Sephora for anti-wrinkle cream or, you know, all sorts of expensive skin treatments, this is complete insanity.
So let's at least protect the kids until they're through puberty.
One way to think about this is let's look at junk food, which became very popular after the Second World War.
You know, the manufacturing of food became very good.
There were science labs.
At Frito-Lay, they studied the exact degree of tensile strength that a chip should have before it snaps.
And, you know, how do you make this?
What's the perfect crunch?
So they designed the foods to be as addictive as possible.
And in the 70s and 80s, Americans switched over to a lot of junk food and we became obese, like a huge increase in obesity.
And that kept going on for a few decades.
As I understand it, obesity has finally turned around a little bit.
And many people are still eating huge amounts of junk food, but at least some people are beginning to say, you know what, I'm going to resist that deep evolutionary programming for fat and sugar.
The companies played to that, they hijacked those desires, and they got us hooked on junk food.
But after 50 years, we're making some progress in pushing back and having healthier snacks and eating less.
I'm just assuming that this is an issue that we dealt with as a society and we didn't know what we were doing at first and we got hooked and the efforts to educate people and to develop healthier alternatives.
So again, I should have looked at the data before I came here.
So do you think it's just people recognizing that they're developing health issues and they're taking steps to discipline themselves and mitigate some of these issues?
Or is there some sort of information push that's leading them in that direction?
Yeah, that I don't know because it's not my field.
But I would say that that is a probably necessary precondition, like understanding the problem and developing people a desire to change it.
And then it's hard to change.
You know, I love chips.
I love chocolate.
I love ice cream.
It's hard to change.
But over time, a society adapts.
And now the question is...
Will we adapt to social media?
Because the desire for sugar and fat and salt is very deep.
The desire for others to think well of us, to hold us in esteem, I would say is just as deep and much more pervasive.
It's much stronger, I would say.
And so because, you know, as adults, we're very concerned.
You know, like when I put out a tweet, you know, I know all this stuff.
I know how terrible this is for me to check.
I'm busy.
I've got things to do.
But I'll go back and I'll check how the tweet is doing 30 seconds later.
And then I'll chat again five minutes later.
So it's hard for me to resist that.
What are people saying about the thing that I just said?
But the question is, will we adapt to it in some way so that we begin, as with junk food, we're still going to be consuming junk food, but maybe we'll keep a lid on it.
I don't know.
I don't know.
But what I can say with not confidence, but what I think is the case, is as long as our kids...
Are going through puberty on social media and video games, and they're not developing executive control, I do not think they will be able to keep a handle on this as adults.
I think your strategy is very wise and for this reason.
When social media began, you would put something up and then people could comment on it.
Okay, that goes until about 2013, 2014. I think it's 2013 when Facebook introduces threaded comments.
So now you put something up, someone says some horrific, nasty, you know, racist, whatever thing in your comment thread, and now everyone can reply to that comment.
And people can reply to that.
So you get basically everyone fighting with each other In the comment thread.
And what social media is good for is putting out information quickly.
I'm a professor.
I'm a researcher.
I am engaged in various academic disputes and debates.
And Twitter is amazing for finding current articles, for finding what people are talking about.
So the function of putting information out is great, but the function of putting something out and then watching everyone fight Right.
That's powering this whole thing that you cannot fight against and that we are moving in a direction as a society with the implementation of new, more sophisticated technology that's going to make it even more difficult unless you completely opt out.
And some people are going to opt out, but it's going to be like my 600-pound life.
People that are realizing, oh my god, what have I done?
I've ruined my body.
I've ruined my life.
How do I slowly get back to a normal state?
And it's going to take a tremendous amount of effort.
Think about the amount of effort.
The amount of focus that people have on comments and things, if you're addicted, if you're currently deep into it right now, where you're tweeting constantly.
There's people that I follow that I know they're tweeting 12 hours a day.
Yeah, that's the real fear of something like Neuralink or whatever.
If they can figure out a Neuralink that doesn't require surgery, if they can figure out something that does that without surgery, the advantage of having that in a competitive sense in terms of business and And technology and industry.
It's going to be massive and it's going to be so difficult to get people to not do that, that it's going to be like phones.
I mean, I remember when I moved to Los Angeles in 1994, I bought a Motorola StarTAC and I was like, look at me.
It was actually connected to my car in 1989. And it was very advantageous.
My friend Bill Bluenreich, who owns the Comedy Connection, he owns the Wilbur Theater now in Boston.
And I got a lot of gigs from him because he could call me when someone canceled.
Someone got sick and they said, hey, can you get the Dartmouth at 10 p.m.?
I'm like, fuck yeah.
And so I got gigs from that.
We joke about it to this day that I was like the first guy that he knew that had a cell phone.
It was a huge advantage.
And I remember when I had one in 94, I was like, this is great.
I can call my friends.
I don't even have to be home.
There were so many positives to it.
And it gave you an advantage.
It gave you an advantage.
You didn't have to be home.
If there was a business thing that I had to deal with, there was something going on with my career, I could deal with it on the phone at Starbucks or wherever I was.
My fear is that this is going to be that times a million.
It's going to be you have to have it in order to compete.
Just like you kind of have to have an email today.
And I think the word human is a very good word to put on the table here.
Some things seem human or inhuman.
And when you simply connect people, you know, Mark Zuckerberg sometimes says, how could it be wrong to give more people more voice?
If you're simply connecting people, making it easier for them to contact each other, you know, I think that's mostly going to have good effects.
And that happened with the telephone.
You know, we all got telephones and we could do all sorts of things.
We could coordinate with our friends.
Telephones are great.
But when it became not technology making it easier for this guy to reach you or me to communicate with you, But rather, it's a way to put things out to try to gain prestige for me in front of thousands or maybe millions of people.
Now it changes all of our incentives.
It changes the game we're playing.
You know, what games are we playing as we go about our day?
And the more people are playing the game of I'm struggling to get influence in an influence economy where everyone else is on these seven platforms.
So I have to be too or they have an advantage over me.
That is the way that things have been rewired already.
Already we're there.
Now, you're raising the possibility that the next step is more hardware-based, that it's going into our bodies, and I think that is likely to happen.
And so I hope what we'll do now, and I hope my book, The Anxious Generation, will sort of promote a pause.
Let's think where we are.
Let's think what we've done.
Let's look at what has happened.
When our kids got on phones and social media, we thought, oh, this could be amazing.
Like, they can connect.
They can form communities.
It's going to be great.
And now it's clear, no, it's been horrible.
It's been really, really terrible.
As soon as they got on, their mental health suffered.
You know, they might feel like they have a community, but it's much worse than what it replaces.
So I think what we're seeing is the sort of the techno-optimists, the sort of the futurists who say, oh, it's going to be amazing.
You know, we'll have Neuralink.
We'll have all this technology.
We'll be able to do everything.
Like, here's where we have to heed, I think, the warnings of the ancients, of religious authorities, of those who warn us that we are leaving our humanity and we're stepping into an unknown zone where, so far, the initial verdict is horrible.
So, if we keep going without putting on some brakes, yeah, I think we're going to a horrible place.
So my fear, my genuine fear, is the rewiring of the mind in a way that can enhance dopamine, enhance serotonin, and do things that can genuinely make you feel better.
There's a lot of issues that come along with those, and yet there's an immense profit in making sure that people take those and stay on those.
My fear is that if you can do something that allows people to have their mind function, have their brain, their endocrine system, have all these things function at a higher level, then everyone is going to do it.
You would not want to just be natural and depressed if you could just put on this little headset and feel fantastic.
And maybe it could be a solution to so many of our society issues.
Maybe bullying would cease to exist if everyone had an increase in dopamine.
It sounds silly, but if dopamine increased by...
Look, if you have an entire society that's essentially on a low dose of MDMA, You're not going to have nearly as much anger and frustration.
You also are not going to have as much blues.
You're not going to have as many sad songs that people love.
You're not going to have the kind of literature that people write when they feel like shit.
It's unfortunate, but also as a whole, as a society, it probably would be an overall net positive if people did not want to engage in bullying, did not want to engage in violence, did not want to engage in theft, were more charitable, more benevolent.
And if you look at things in that direction, that's my concern is that the rewiring of the mind, what we're essentially seeing right now is a rewiring of a mind that we didn't anticipate it.
It has negative consequences.
We thought about it in a positive way.
Oh, this is going to be great.
We're all going to be connected.
How would it be bad that people could have more voices, like Zuckerberg says.
Right, right.
My fear is that it's going to just change what it means to be a human being and my genuine feels that this is inevitable and that as technology scales upward this is unavoidable.
And while I'm not optimistic about the next 10 years, I share your vision of what's coming.
But I'm not resigned to it.
People always say to me, I go around saying, we need to do these four norms, we can do them.
And people say, oh, that ship has sailed.
Like, you know, the train's left the station.
You know, but if a ship has sailed and we know that, you know, it's going to sink, we can actually call it back.
I've been on airplanes where it leaves the jetway, and then they call it back because they discover a safety issue.
So we are headed that way, I agree.
But I think we humans are an amazingly adaptable species.
I think we can figure this out, and there are definitely pathways to a future that's much better.
These technologies could, in theory, give us the best democracy ever, where people really do have the right kind of voice.
It's not just the extremes who are super empowered, as it is now.
So, you know, we're at a point in space and time, let's say, right now, and I can imagine a future that's really fantastic, but how do we get there?
And are we able to get there?
Is there a path?
Or is it like, you know, there's no path from A to B? So I don't know, but I think we sure as hell have to try.
And the first thing we have to do is not be resigned and just say, oh, well, the world's going to hell.
What are you going to do about it?
It's too big.
So let's start, I have a proposal, let's start with the one area that we can all agree on, which is our kids.
It's the most amazing thing.
In Congress, you can't, you know, any issue, if the right likes it, the left won't, and vice versa.
Except for this one.
This is the only thing in Washington that's really bipartisan.
The senators and congressmen have kids, they see it.
So let's test the proposition that all is lost and we're helpless.
Let's test that proposition.
And let's test it in the place where we're most likely to succeed, which is rolling back the phone-based childhood and replacing it with a more play-based childhood.
Oh, so actually, I said there are four norms.
We talked about three.
So if you don't mind, I'll put in the fourth norm now.
No smartphone before high school, no social media till 16, phone-free schools.
Okay, but if you take away the phones and you don't give kids back each other and playtime and independence, what are they going to do?
You're going to keep them at home all day long without screens?
So the fourth norm is more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.
And this is a thing that you and I talked about last time.
I think we actually had a small disagreement.
I'm a big fan of Lenore Skenazy, the woman who wrote Free Range Kids.
She and I co-founded an organization called Let Grow.
Parents, please go to letgrow.org.
All kinds of ideas for how to help your kid have more independence, which makes them more mature, which makes them less fragile.
So this fourth norm, this is the harder one.
This is the one that we have to really overcome our fears of letting our kids out.
And so actually, let me ask you, I think our disagreement last time was, I talked about this, and I said letting kids go for sleepovers and spend more time with other kids and unsupervised.
And then you said, I think you said, no, I'm not letting my kid go to sleepovers because I don't trust the other families.
And I study the roots of it evolutionarily, historically, and child development.
What is our moral sense?
And there are different moralities, and in some ways that's good, and left and right push against each other.
So I'm very open to different moralities.
But when a group makes something sacred, and they say, this is the most important thing, and nothing else matters other than this...
Then they can kind of go insane and they kind of lose touch with reality.
And I think, you know, again, I don't know the history of this particular movement, that horrible term, but there is a certain kind of morality which is all about, you know, oppression and victimhood.
And once you, you know, someone, I guess, somewhere said, oh, you know, men who are attracted to boys or, you know, little girls are being, you know, are victims, I don't know what.
Some, in some little eddy of weird morality, someone put that forward as a new victim class, because we've been trying to address victimhood all over the place.
Once someone puts that up as a new victim class, and you have to do that, you have to change the terms.
This is very Orwellian.
You change the terms, and then some others who share this morality, which is focused on not making anyone feel marginalized, not allowing any labels that will slander someone or make them look bad, I think people who approach children for sexual goals, I'm very happy to have them slandered and labeled and separated.
But I suspect that some people, once they lock this in as a group that's being marginalized, they say, well, we have to defend them.
And we don't think about what the hell we're actually saying.
It seems that this is something that with people that only exist in sort of an academic space where it's almost like An intellectual exercise in understanding oppression.
Before we go any further with this particular topic, I would want to point out one of the problems that our social media world has given us, which is Somewhere in all of the academy and all the universities, some philosopher, let's say, proposed that term or raised an idea.
So this has been going on for thousands of years.
Someone in a conversation proposes a provocative idea.
What if we think about this as a minor attracted person?
They put that idea out, and then other people say, no, that's really stupid, and it doesn't catch on, because this is not an idea that's going to catch on, even in the academy.
But I think where we are now is, I'm guessing, someone proposed this, somebody else got wind of it, posted it online, and now you're going to have a whole media ecosystem going crazy about this terrible idea.
So maybe can you look up a minor attracted person?
Is this just like a thing that was from one academic talk?
So that brings us to the issue of identitarianism, which I think is a useful term for us these days.
I think a lot of what's happened on campus is the move to focus on identity as the primary analytical lens in a number of disciplines, not in most disciplines, but in a lot of the humanities, the studies departments.
So putting identity first and then ranking identities and saying some identities are good, some are bad— This really activates our ancient tribalism.
And I think that the liberal tradition, going back hundreds of years, is really an attempt to push back against that and to create an environment in which we can all get along.
And so, as I see it from inside the academy, we've always been interested in identity.
It's an important topic.
There's a lot of research on it going back many decades.
But something happened in 2015 on campus that really elevated identitarianism into the dominant paradigm, not dominant in that most people believed it, but dominant in the sense that if you go against it, you're going to be destroyed socially.
And that's what cancel culture is.
That's what Greg Lukianoff and Ricky Schlott, their new book, The Canceling of the American Mind, is about.
So, yes, it's the people who are putting identity first, and that's sort of their religion and their morality.
I mean, they're welcome to live in the United States, but when they get influence in universities or in school boards, yeah, bad stuff will happen.
This is, again, a really important point about how our society has changed.
Those of us from the 20th century still think in terms of public opinion, like, do most people believe this, or do most people not believe it?
And most people are sane.
Most people are not at all crazy.
Most people are pretty reasonable.
And I think what's happened since social media became much more viral in 2009-2010 is that the extremes are now much more powerful and they're able to intimidate the moderates on their side.
So on the right, sort of the center-right, what I call true conservatives, or like Berkey and Edmund Burke conservatives, You know, they get shot and they get excluded and there's not many of them in Congress anymore.
And on the left, you have the far left, the identitarian left, you know, shooting darts into, you know, people like me, into anybody who is, you know, anybody who questions.
So they shoot their moderates.
And what you have is even though most people are still moderate and reasonable, our public discourse is dominated by the far right, the far left, and all these crazy fringe, you know, I mean, it can be, you know, neo-Nazis on one side and then these, you know, identitarians defending minor attracted people on the other side.
So don't lose faith in humanity.
Recognize that we've moved into this weird, weird world because of social media in which it's hard to see reality and in which people are afraid to speak up.
And so we get warped ideas rising to dominance, even though very few people believe them.
I really do believe that this is being amplified, whether it's by foreign governments or by special interest groups or by whoever it is is trying to push these specific narratives.
And this can bring us right back to TikTok and the national security threat.
So Vladimir Putin was a KGB agent in the 20th century.
And the KGB going back, I think it was in the 50s, they had some sort of a meeting or something where they decided that they were going to take, I think it's called active measures.
They were going to try to mess up American democracy.
And they'd spray paint racial slurs.
They'd put swastikas on synagogues.
They saw that we're a multi-ethnic democracy.
We're making a lot of progress towards tolerance.
And the Russians, the Soviets, were trying to put a stop to that and make us hate each other.
So they were doing that back since the 1950s.
And it was expensive.
They had to fly people over or they had to try to win people over.
You couldn't scale the operation.
But that's the tradition that Vladimir Putin comes from.
Now, the Soviet Union falls in 1991. I think he's in Berlin.
I can't remember where he was, but he was very influenced by this and the humiliation of the Soviet Union.
And so he rises to power again in the 21st century.
Do you think he suddenly no longer wants to mess with American democracy?
Did he suddenly drop that desire?
We basically handed them the tools.
We said, okay, you can open as many Facebook accounts as you want, Twitter accounts.
Open as many as you want.
There's no identity authentication.
There's no age verification.
Create bots all you want and have them mess with us.
And Renee DiResta has a book coming out soon.
She really did amazing work to get to the bottom of this.
You know, they started running tests in 2013. They created accounts on all these platforms long before, but they started running tests.
Could they get Americans to believe that an explosion had occurred at a refinery plant in Louisiana?
Yes, they made it all up and people believed it.
Could they get Americans to believe some extreme BLM post that was completely outrageous?
Yes.
And same thing to enrage people on the left.
So we know that the Russians are messing with us.
We know that the Russians know our weak point.
And by Russians, again, I don't mean the Russian people.
Have you seen Yuri Bezmenov give a speech about the ideological subversion?
And he did this in the 1980s.
I think it was 84. And he was talking about how the work is already done.
And that is just a matter of these generations now going into the workforce with Marxist ideas and with all this ideological subversion that the Soviet Union has injected into the universities.
That's a good point because that – That brings us to the big difference between democracies and autocracies.
Back in the 1930s, when the West was in economic collapse, and it was the Soviet Union and then the Italian fascists and then Hitler, the German fascists, They were making rapid economic progress.
And the criticism of democracy has always been, it's chaotic.
There's no good leadership.
They can't plan ahead.
And that's all true.
But why did we triumph in the 20th century over all these other models?
Because democracy gives us a degree of dynamism.
Where we can do things in a distributed way.
We have people just figuring stuff out.
We have an incredibly creative economy and business sector.
And so democracies have this incredible ability to be generative, creative, regenerative.
Unless you mess with their basic operating system and say, let's take this environment in which people talk to each other, share ideas, take each other's ideas, compete, try to get a better company.
Let's take that and let's change the way people talk so that it's not about sharing information.
It's about making them spend all day long, nine hours a day, competing for prestige on social media platforms and in a way that empowers everyone to complain all the time.
This, I think, really saps the dynamism.
I think this social media, what I'm suggesting, I haven't thought this through, but I'm suggesting is that whatever the magic ingredient that made democracy so triumphant in the 20th century, Western liberal democracy, American style democracy, whatever made it so triumphant is being sapped and reduced by the rapid rewiring of our society onto social media.
Oh, it's just, you know, in the academic world, if you say anything about any DEI-related policy, you know, you'll be called racist or sexist or homophobic or something.
And if you – so I was always on the left.
I was always a Democrat.
Now I'm nothing.
I'm an extremely alarmed, patriotic American citizen who sees my country going to hell.
But I sort of started my career in political psychology.
So my original work was on how morality varies across cultures.
I did my dissertation research in Brazil, and then I did some work in India.
And it was only in the 90s that our culture were heated up and I began to see that left and right were like different countries.
We had different economics textbook, different American history, different US constitution.
It was like different worlds.
And I began actually trying to help the left stop losing elections like in 2000, 2004. As a Democrat, I thought I could use my research in moral psychology to help the Democrats understand American morality, which they were not understanding.
Al Gore and John Kerry, I thought, did a very bad job.
So I've all along been sort of critical of the left, originally from within the left.
And that's a pretty good way to get a bunch of darts shot at you.
Nothing terrible ever really happened to me.
I don't want to, you know, lots of people have been truly canceled, you know, shamed, lost their jobs, considered suicide.
So nothing like that has ever happened to me.
But, you know, when there's some minor thing on, you know, people take a line out of one of your talks.
They put it up online with a commentary about what an awful person you are.
Thousands of people comment on it or like it or retweet it.
It hurts.
It's frightening in a way like nothing else I've ever known.
It was one of the major disputes when Elon bought Twitter.
I mean, one of the things that's come out of Elon buying Twitter, and thank God he did, as much as people want to talk about the negative aspects, which are real, which I've seen racism and hate go up on Twitter.
I've seen it being...
Openly discussed, which is very disturbing.
But what we did find out is that the government was involved in this, that the federal government was interfering with people's ability to use these platforms for speech.
So that's why I never talk about content moderation.
I'm not interested in it.
There has to be some, but most people focus on the content and they think if we can clean up the content or change the content or, you know, in those Senate hearings we saw a couple months ago, you know, just, you know, if we can reduce the amount of, you know, suicide promoting or self-harm promoting content that our kids are seeing, then all will be well.
Like, no, it's not primarily about the content.
I agree with you that the government was influencing these platforms to suppress views that they thought were wrong and some of which turned out to be right.
I'm a big fan of my friend Greg Lukianoff, who runs the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
So I think we shouldn't be thinking about social media like, well, how do we keep the wrong stuff off and only have it have the right stuff?
I think almost only about architecture.
How is this platform designed?
And can we improve it in ways that are content neutral?
Can we improve it in ways that aren't going to advantage the left or the right, but are going to make it more truth-seeking?
And so Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, when she came out, She had all kinds of ideas about settings, things that Facebook could have done to reduce the incredible power of the extremes.
The farthest right, 3%, the farthest left, 3%, and then a bunch of just random weirdos who just post a lot.
They have extraordinary influence.
And that's not about a left-right thing.
That's about, do we want an information ecosystem that super-duper empowers the extremes and silences the middle 80%?
Hell no!
So that's the kind of regulation that I favor, focusing on making these platforms less explosive and more useful.
So Twitter only went to algorithms, I think, in 2017. So before then, you know, people who tweet a lot, you know, People talk a lot about algorithms as though that's the cause of the whole problem.
And they're not the cause of the problem, but man, are they amplifiers.
And I think that's what you're saying.
They're just super-duper amplifiers on whatever craziness would be there even without them.
And so that certainly is shaping what we receive, what our children receive.
And so this is some of the stuff that I think, again, we have to really protect our children from.
To have a company able to micro-target their exact desires, even when they don't know what their desires are, It's a degree of control and influence over children in particular that I think they should just be protected from.
You know, if you look up a book, it's going to suggest some other books you might be interested in.
And it's pretty darn good.
Like, yeah, you're right.
I would be interested in that.
So no, I would never say, oh, we can't have algorithms.
I mean, that would just be a Luddite sort of move to make.
You know, I think, again, as a social psychologist who studies morality, I just see everything going up in flames.
So here's a metaphor that I sometimes use.
Suppose you're the California Department of Parks, and you have 100 years of experience fighting forest fires.
You know everything about the wind, the humidity, you know, what season.
You've got it down to a science, and you're doing the best you can to keep forest fires under control.
And then one day, God decides to just mess with the world and changes the atmosphere from 20% oxygen to 80% oxygen.
And if we suddenly were in a world where 80% of the atmosphere was oxygen, everything would go up in flames.
Every electronic device would be burning right now.
So that's kind of what happened after 2009, 2010. That's kind of what happened once we switched over to be about...
So I would say the retweet button.
That move to virality, that I think is even more guilty of causing the problems even than algorithms.
I don't know that it's necessarily one versus the other, but that's the way I see it, that we're in a world where the technology is so quick to ramp up whatever will most engage us, and that's mostly emotions such as anger.
So yeah, that's why it feels like everything's burning.
It seems like it's ramping up and it seems like they've gotten more efficient at the use of algorithms and all these different methods like retweeting and reposting and different things that sort of accentuate what people are upset about and what people get riled up about.
Well, what's very bizarre that we're seeing with the initial implementation of it, specifically with Google's version of it, is that it's ideologically captured.
So, no, I'm glad we have a chance to talk about this because I'm really horrified by what Google did in introducing Gemini.
And just to give a little background here, so I'm sure many of your listeners know, Google Gemini was programmed to answer in ways that basically, you know, the most extreme DEI officer would demand that people speak.
And so, you know, if you ask for a picture of the Founding Fathers, they're multiracial or all black.
The first is that Google must be an unbelievably stupid company.
Like, did nobody test this before they released it to the public?
And obviously, Google is not a stupid company, which leads me to my next conclusion, which is if Google did such a stupid, stupid thing, so disgraced its product that it's banking so much on—I mean, it depends a lot on the success of Gemini— And now they've alienated half the country right away.
On the first day, practically, they alienated them.
They couldn't be that stupid.
I think what's happening to them is what happened to us in universities, which is what I've called structural stupidity.
So you have very smart people.
But if anyone...
questions a DEI-related policy on campus, they would get attacked.
And that's what most of the early blow-ups were.
I think you probably had Brett Weinstein on here.
That's what Erika Christakis at Yale and Nicholas Christakis at Yale.
If people wrote these thoughtful, caring memos about opposing a policy, There would be a conflagration, they'd be attacked, and they would sometimes lose their jobs.
So that's what happened to us in universities in 2015 to usher in our now nine years of insanity, which I think might be ending.
I think last fall was so humiliating for higher ed that I think we might be at a turning point.
But my point is for Google.
I suspect that Google was suffering from an extreme case of structural stupidity because surely a lot of those engineers could see that this is terrible.
This is a massive violation of the truth and part of Google's brand is truth and trust.
So I suspect they were just afraid to say anything.
And that's why Google made this colossal blunder of introducing woke AI at a time when we desperately need to trust our institutions that are related to knowledge.
And Google was trusted, and now they've lost a lot of it.
With DEI and with the universities and the education system, it just seemed like you had to apply that to artificial intelligence because you're essentially, you're giving artificial intelligence these protocols.
You're giving it these parameters in which it can address things.
And if you're doing it through that lens, this is the inevitable result of that.
But if you say DEI, if you apply that to everything across the board and don't make exceptions in terms of historical accuracy, the founding fathers of America being all black...
Is that I could see AI seeming to lean left, even if it wasn't programmed to lean left.
That might just be the data input that it takes.
But to get black Nazis, you need somebody had a program in those commands.
Somebody had to consciously say, you know, anything about representation is going to, everything's going to look like a banditon.
No, it's not even like a banditon.
Benetton ads had much more diversity in the 1980s and 90s.
So no, I would agree that the Gemini case, clearly someone deliberately programmed in all kinds of rules that, yeah, they seem to come from a DEI manual just without much thinking.
Magnificent Seven adds $350 billion on Gemini's reported iPhone deal.
So, because Google has implemented AI into their phones, specifically Samsung, Samsung's new Galaxy S24 Ultra, It has a bunch of pretty fantastic AI features, one of them being real-time translation, your ability to summarize web pages instantaneously, summarizing notes, bullet points, very helpful features.
So because of that, another one is your ability to circle any image and it automatically will search that image for you.
Like, what is that?
Circle it, boom.
The Samsung phone will immediately give you a result and tell you what it is.
So very, very helpful.
But now there becomes, this is something that Apple has to compete with.
So Apple's decided to try to implement AI, but it has to outsource.
I guess the point that I'd like to add on, which I hope will be useful for people, is part of what we're seeing across our institutions is a loss of professional responsibility, a loss of people doing their jobs.
And I don't mean base-level employees.
I mean leadership.
Institutions have important roles to play.
Companies have missions.
Universities must be completely committed to the truth, research, discovery.
Journalists must be committed also to the truth and methods to find the truth.
And what we've seen in the 2010s especially is many of these institutions being led away from their mission, their purpose, towards the political agenda of one side or another.
And so I think this is what we're seeing.
And if we're going to make it through this difficult period, we need some way to find the truth.
And the more we've gone into the Internet age, the harder it is to find the truth.
Like, we just look like, you know, something's incredible.
Like, we just say, you know, hey, look this up, and we got it.
But on anything contested, it's just very hard to find the truth.
And so that's why I'm especially disappointed in Google.
I always loved Google.
I thought it was an incredible company.
And for them to so explicitly say, you know, our mission is political.
Yeah, it is disturbing when a large company decides their mission is political.
Like, to which side?
To who?
Is it the truth?
Is that your main politics?
Or is it you decide that one side is good overall, net positive, the other side is net negative, and whatever you can do to subvert that other side is valuable?
And so that's a mindset in which the ends justify the means.
And so part of the genius of American liberal democracy was to calm down those tribal sentiments to the point where we could live together, we could celebrate diversity in its real forms, we could get the benefits of diversity.
And that was all possible when we didn't feel that the other side was an existential risk to the country, that if the other side gets in, it's going to be the end.
And that's a very powerful image.
And that's an image that helped Donald Trump win.
There was an essay, what's it, by Michael Anton, I think, called The Flight 93 Election.
You know, if you're on Flight 93 being hijacked to crash into Congress and, you know, if you do nothing, you're going to crash into Congress, you'll do anything.
And so he framed it as a sort of a Hail Mary pass that, you know, patriotic Americans were supposed to vote for Donald Trump.
That mindset of the ends justify the means, the situation is so dire that even violence, even violence is justified.
That is really frightening.
And that's my concern, is that we could be headed that way.
We have not had much political violence.
There's been an uptick, but very little compared to, say, 1968 to 73. That period was much more violent.
Some hopeful will avoid that.
But once you say the ends justify the means, and we can cheat, we can lie, we can subvert the company's purpose because the end we're fighting for is so noble, well, the other side's going to do the same thing.
And before you know it, your culture war becomes a real war.
See if you can find that, Jamie, because it's actually important to highlight how...
Not just inaccurate, but just deceptive the media was in their depiction of what he said and that they are taking this quote out of context and trying to say that there's going to be a civil war if he doesn't get elected, which is not what he was talking about at all.
See, pull it up.
Because it's so disturbing that they would – first of all, they would think that they could get away with it in this day and age with all the scrutiny and all the – with social media and all the independent journalists that exist now, which is one of the more interesting things about the demise of corporate media, the demise in trust.
Trust in corporate media is at an all-time low and so this has led to a rise in true independent journalists.
The real ones out there, the Matt Taibbi's, the Glenn Greenwall's, the people that are actually just trying to say, what is really going on and what are the influences behind these things and why are these things happening?
If you're listening, President Xi, and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal.
Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now, And you think you're going to get that, you're going to not hire Americans, and you're going to sell the cars to us?
No.
We're going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you're not going to be able to sell those cars.
If I get elected, Now, if I don't get elected, it's gonna be a bloodbath for the whole...
That's gonna be the least of it.
It's gonna be a bloodbath for the country.
That'll be the least of it.
If this election, if this election isn't won, I'm not sure that you'll ever have another election in this country.
Does that make sense?
I don't think you're going to have another election in this country if we don't win this election.
I don't think you're going to have another election, or certainly not an election that's meaningful.
And we better get out or we better...
I actually say that the date, remember this, November 5th, I believe it's going to be the most important date in the history of our country.
The aside was him making one of these typical asides about how important he is.
Joe, I think we're not going to settle this.
Look, I do agree that the media as a progressive left-leaning institution like universities has violated its duty many times to the truth and thereby lost the trust of much of the country.
Most of the people who work in these industries, I think, are wonderful and are trying to do a good job.
But the net effect, and this is my point about structural stupidity, During our culture war, institutions that have had very little viewpoint diversity have been subject to hijacking by those with a political agenda.
So I agree with you about that, although I disagree with you about what that comment from Donald Trump meant.
It sounded to me like it was not taken out of context.
What I'm saying is that most people are reasonable wherever you go, but in the social media age, it's no longer about what most people are like.
It's about how much power do the extremists have because anyone now has the power to hijack, threaten, intimidate.
So that's my concern.
And that means it's actually more easily fixable because if it would be one thing, if 90% of journalists were rabid left-wingers who didn't give a damn about journalistic integrity, and that's just not true.
Most of the journalists I've met are really good journalists.
They really care about sourcing and accuracy.
And it's the same with professors.
Many people, especially those who listen to conservative sources, might think that professors are mostly tenured radicals who care more about Marxism than about educating their kids.
That's just not true.
What is true is that the minority that have extreme views now have a much bigger platform.
And the people who go through it, I mean, it's really, it's incredibly painful.
They have to take sleeping pills at night.
They sometimes contemplate suicide and in one case committed suicide that I know of.
So yes, that's exactly the problem.
That's what I think the effect of not the original social media platforms like MySpace or early Facebook, but of the hyperviral ones that we got in the 2010s.
And the result of that, in terms of people terrified about people attacking them, is what you get when you got those people from Penn, from Harvard.
We're talking about this rampant anti-Semitism on campus where people were actively calling for the death of Jews, saying that this does not constitute harassment unless it's actionable.
What is that like as a person when, you know, you are an academic and you are a professor, when you see that from these, especially from somewhere like Harvard?
So, yes, I'm a professor at NYU. I was at UVA for 16 years.
I love being a professor.
I love universities.
I'm also Jewish.
And I can understand the argument that those presidents were making.
The argument was a very narrow technical argument about whether students should be allowed to say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
And so I understand why it would have been reasonable for them to say, well, we're not going to punish students for saying that.
That is political speech that's protected under the First Amendment.
So I understand the point that they were making.
But they were such screaming hypocrites in making that point because—and this is what the Cotley and the American Mind was all about—how did it happen that, you know, if a professor or administrator writes a single word that a student objects to and calls racist, suddenly this person is out of a job.
Like, really?
Like, you're going to fire someone or let someone be tormented and fired because they said something?
That someone interpreted it in a certain way.
And that led us to be super hyper crazy sensitive about every word we say, because you never know when it'll explode and cause a scandal.
And so for the presidents to say, oh yeah, you know, anything anyone ever said between 2015 and yesterday would be punished if anyone was bothered by it.
But from the river to the sea, oh yeah, sure, that's constitutionally protected.
Maybe on the First Amendment, legally, you can't be arrested for it.
But for God's sakes, on a university campus where you're trying to make everyone feel included, you can't even comment on Not just about the calls for genocide, you know, but about the actual events on October 7th.
So that, I think, is what really brought higher ed to really a nadir, a low point in public esteem, like literally a low point in public esteem.
And so I'm actually, you know, so last semester was the worst one ever for higher education.
Data from Gallup and Pew show that the public, higher ed used to have an incredible brand, global brand, we were the best, everyone wanted to come here, scientific innovation, all the top academics were here in the United States.
And in 2015, people on the left had a very high opinion of higher ed, and actually people on the right had a moderately high opinion of it.
And then since 2015, it's dropped, not just among people on the right, but among centrists and moderates as well.
So higher ed really lost the trust of most of the country.
And I was running an organization called Heterodox Academies.
I started it with some other social scientists that advocates for viewpoint diversity.
And that's why I was kind of a target sometimes, because here I am saying, we need viewpoint diversity.
We need some conservatives, some libertarians.
We need to not all be on the same side politically.
So I think we hit a low point in the fall in such a way that I'm actually optimistic that things are going to change.
Because I've been concerned about these issues in universities, the culture issues, since 2014-2015 when Greg Lukianoff and I wrote our first Atlantic article titled The Coddling of the American Mind.
And every year it's gotten worse and worse and worse.
There's never been a turnaround until last year.
And as with The Emperor's New Clothes, you know, people can see that something is stupid and crazy and wrong, but they won't say anything.
But then when somebody does, then everybody can speak.
And I'm feeling finally, for the first time since 2015, I'm feeling that people sort of understand, you know what, wait, that was crazy what happened to us.
That was crazy.
People were saying crazy stuff.
Let's put our head above the parapet.
Let's like start sometimes saying maybe that is not right.
So I think that things are actually going to turn around.
Maybe not at the Ivies, although there are movements of faculty there saying, no, let's return to academic values, the pursuit of truth.
So I think what I'm hoping, what I think is likely to happen, is we're going to see a split in the academic world.
That is, there are already schools like Arizona State University.
There are schools that already have basically said no to all the crazy stuff, and they're focusing on educating their students.
And I think we're going to see more students going that way.
The University of Chicago is another model.
So I think there are a few schools that departed while almost all the other schools went in the same direction.
But I think now that's going to change and it can change actually pretty quickly because most of the university presidents don't like this stuff.
I've spoken to many of them.
All the crazy politics, the activist students, it made their job very difficult.
So I'm actually hopeful that we are starting to see some university presidents standing up and saying, you know, it's not okay to shout down every conservative speaker.
Like, no, we're not going to allow that.
So we'll see a year from now, if I come back on a year or two, we'll see.
But I think things are actually beginning to get better for the first time since 2015. Well, I hope you're correct.
That's so important what you just said and I think that if those programs gain momentum and that people recognize that it's really beneficial to all to have these ideas debated.
If you truly believe that opposing ideas to your ideology are evil, you should be able to debate those.
And the only way to do that is to have someone to have the ability to express themselves.
And for you to counter those points that they make.
And this is what many commentators on the left have been pointing out since 2015. Van Jones has an amazing talk.
He's a progressive, democratic, well-connected, smart person.
And he's been pointing out, there's a great talk he gave at the University of Chicago, I have a quote on this in the Coddling the American Mind, where he talks about the move to protect students from bad feelings, the move to protect them for emotional safety, is really bad for the students.
But then his talk goes on and he says, this is actually really bad for the Democrats.
It's really bad for young activists to drown out opposition, to not listen to the arguments, to not get stronger.
A lot of what's happened on campus, I think, is what you might call a pyrrhic victory.
A pyrrhic victory is one where you won the battle, but that made you lose the war.
I think when your side is able to wipe out opposition, it might feel like a victory at first, But it's ultimately going to weaken you.
And, you know, the same thing is going on in the far right.
I mean, there's a lot more fear and really bad consequences for people who dissent on the right, too.
But if we're talking about universities, that's more an issue of what's been happening on the left.
First of all, I mean, there are lots of religious universities, Christian universities that don't have this problem.
There are, let's see, there are large state schools tend to have much less of it because, again, most people are reasonable.
The great majority of faculty want to do their research, teach their classes.
They don't want to get involved in this stuff.
The problem is especially severe.
For some reason, the Ivy League schools, that's what's really surprising.
I thought it was just like, well, the elite schools.
No, it's actually the Ivies are the place where the worst anti-Semitic actual, you know, threats and intimidation and even some violence are happening or threats of violence are happening.
Something about the Ivies makes them more extreme.
So most of the shout-downs, most, you know, Greg Lukianoff and FIRE, they've really been tracking this for a long time.
Most of the shout-downs happen in the Northeast and along the West Coast and then around Chicago.
That's where most of the really nasty stuff happens.
This is not happening at the great majority of American universities.
It's not happening at top schools in the South.
It's not happening at top schools in the Southwest.
So it is in part where it is.
And then I think also the Ivy League is full of really rich kids.
The statistic a number of years ago that the top schools have more people from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%.
So there's a real concentration, especially in the Ivies, of rich kids who don't need to worry as much about getting a job and have the bandwidth to devote themselves to politics while they're students.
It's just, I just fear for the children that come out of that too, these young people that come out of that, that have these distorted perspectives that have to kind of rewire their view of the world once they get out.
It's almost like taking someone from a cult and trying to just delete the indoctrination.
And it's almost impossible to do that, especially if most of what's coming in is coming in from TikTok, not from your parents or your friends or your teachers.
Back to the problem.
Back to the problem, that's right.
So again, back to the question of the TikTok ban.
The issue here is not, should we ban TikTok?
The issue is, should American law require a divestiture of TikTok from a Chinese corporation that is beholden to the CCP? That's the question.
You know, it's hard, like, because boys and girls, they think a little differently.
It's awkward.
There are always mistakes.
They need to be practicing.
But instead, they're exposed to this diet of just horrible, horrible stuff.
And the girls see it too.
The girls are not on as much, but they're all exposed to it.
And so, you know, we now see that many more members of Gen Z, they don't want to get married.
They don't want to have children.
They're not having as much sex.
I kind of understand it.
You know, if that's what you think this sex stuff is, when you're an 11-year-old and you see this stuff, you're not going to be like, ooh, I want that to happen to me.
And once again, I'm not going to tell adults what they should do with their spare time.
But for God's sakes, I am going to try to tell companies that they can't just have access to my kids from the age of 9 or 10 and do what they want with them.
So, you know, I don't know the details of the Texas law.
But I think we've got to do something to age-gate pornography.
I just can't see...
I mean, yes, there's a libertarian argument on the other side that, oh, we should never require identification from anyone for anything.
Well, if that's the way you're going to go, no restrictions, then either we have to keep kids off the internet, which is insane.
We can't keep them off of the entire internet.
Or we have to say, you know what?
Maybe some companies should be held liable.
Maybe Congress was wrong to grant them blanket immunity from lawsuits for what they're doing to our kids.
So my friend Dave Cicerelli is a great artist in New York City.
He designed the cover for the book.
And he and I had a plan for some, like, guerrilla art campaign with posters, you know, linking, you know, Instagram to cigarettes, that sort of thing, a couple years ago.
So Dave had the idea to really go big.
And so Dave has built a 12-foot-tall milk carton of the thing you just showed, a 12-foot-tall milk carton.
It's going to be on the National Mall in Washington this Friday.
If you're in D.C., check it out.
It's coming to New York City, the northeast corner of Union Square.
I'll be there on March 25th and 26th.
I'll be there on the 25th.
We're starting a national movement.
There are lots of organizations that are joining us here, but we're starting a national movement to get parents, to encourage parents, to work together.
Because as I said, we can escape this if we work together.
It doesn't have to be all of us.
But if a lot of us say, we're not going to give our kids smartphones until 14, we're not going to let them open an Instagram or TikTok account until they're 16, we're going to ask our schools to go phone-free, and we're going to give our kids a lot more independence of the sort that we had in a much more dangerous world.
If we do those four norms, we really can turn that around.
And I'm confident we are at the tipping point right now.
Even a few months, even by July and August, or let's say by September, when school starts again in the fall, I think there's going to be a different vibe about phones and the roles of technology in kids' lives.
Well, I hope you're right, Jonathan, and I really appreciate you, and I really appreciate you writing this and spending so much time on this and thinking about it so thoroughly.
The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.