The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220523_a-culture-of-fear-social-media-toxicity-and-americ

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May 23, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show

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20220523_a-culture-of-fear-social-media-toxicity-and-americ

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Why American Life Got Stupid 00:03:01
	Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	Hi, I'm Megyn Kelly.
	Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
	Here's the question for you on a Monday morning.
	Are we living through a uniquely stupid time in American history?
	Have you woken up recently and said to yourself, how the hell did we get like this?
	What happened to the America of 10 years ago?
	What's going on?
	Why can't we talk to each other?
	Why does everyone hate each other?
	Why is there no more truth?
	Well, we've got some answers for you today, and they're great.
	They're so insightful.
	I've really enjoyed preparing for today's interview.
	Here with us today to explain our societal lapse in intelligence, among other problems, is social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business, Jonathan Height.
	Jonathan is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, and the absolutely brilliant and just game-changing The Coddling of the American Mind, which he co-wrote with Greg Lukiyanov, who's also been on the show earlier talking about what's happening on universities and his work to sort of document it and fight for free speech.
	Now, Jonathan's latest Atlantic column from April is called Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid and man did it get everyone talking because of its brilliant insights.
	His mission is to use research on moral psychology to help people understand each other and to help important social institutions work better.
	So you can sense his frustration, because those things are not going so well right now.
	Fiken.
	Start din egen bedrift.
	Jonathan, welcome to the program.
	Thanks so much, Megan.
	What a pleasure to be talking with you.
	Oh, the pleasure is entirely mine.
	Cannot wait to tap into your wealth of intellectual resources.
	So let's start with, because I love the coddling of the American Mind.
The Coddling of the Mind 00:09:42
	It just had such great insights and it covered a lot of stuff that I'd been covering on the news for the previous 10 years because I lived it.
	And when I think about your latest round of research, I think about the birth of my children.
	I had a son in 2009.
	I had a daughter in 2011.
	And then I had a son in 2013.
	And so that's the timeframe during which we lost our collective ever-loving minds as a country.
	Right.
	So like that's going to sort of the mark of their arrival corresponds with the time where our society just went nuts.
	It went nuts.
	And I know that we've felt it.
	I know the listeners to this show and the viewers have felt it, but perhaps not diagnosed.
	How did it happen?
	How?
	All the stuff that, you know, Greg's been working against on college campuses and that led you guys to write the coddling, all of that.
	It's so far beyond what it was when you looked at it.
	It's out of the frying pan and into the fire.
	Things have exploded.
	It's gotten so much worse.
	And I know we all know that, but why and how can it be stopped?
	Because you can't arrest it unless you understand it.
	That's where your latest round of research and writing and your next book come in.
	So let's start there on weirdly, the Tower of Babel.
	Okay, explain that, what that is and why that's your focus.
	Sure.
	So I've been, so I've been a professor since 1995 and I love being a professor.
	I love universities.
	And it just seemed like all of a sudden in 2014, something changed.
	Something changed like in the fabric of space-time and weird stuff started happening.
	And I saw some of that on campus here at NYU.
	And then Greg Lukianov came to talk to me.
	We'd met through a mutual friend in May of 2014.
	And he said, John, weird stuff is happening.
	And he had a theory as to why.
	Well, it turns out our theory was partially was actually partially wrong.
	We thought universities were causing this to happen.
	And now we know, no, this was a much bigger thing happening that affected Gen Z.
	It affected kids born after 1996.
	So your kids, my kids, my daughter is 12.
	My son is 15.
	So I've been trying since 2014 to figure out what on earth happened.
	Why did so many things change in such weird and strange ways?
	And I've always been looking for metaphors.
	I think we need metaphors to understand anything complicated, anything that we don't doesn't sort of fit easily into our minds.
	And it was when I went back and reread the Babel story.
	It's a short little story in Genesis.
	And it's that the descendants of Noah are spreading out across the plain of Shinar and they decide to build a city with a tower to reach unto heaven.
	And God thinks this is hebristic.
	Well, there are a variety of theories I've heard as to why God didn't like this.
	But in any case, God, he doesn't actually physically destroy the tower.
	What the text says, and this is a key line, he says, let us go down and confuse their language so that they may not understand one another.
	And so I reread that.
	I found that story again a couple of years ago.
	I thought, oh my God, that's it.
	That's what happened to us.
	Because it's not just a story about tribalism, like left versus right.
	That's been getting worse since the 1990s.
	It's a story about how everything has come apart.
	And if you have a group of people that are entirely on the left or entirely on the right, they're going to fight and find ways to fragment internally.
	So something changed.
	It feels like everything is crumbling since the early 2010s.
	And in the metaphor is the new God social media or the devil or the whatever you want to call it.
	It's not a force for good.
	It's not a force for good.
	And so what I, you know, I think, look, we've all seen dozens of articles about how social media is destroying everything and destroying kids.
	And I think why my article is a little different is that I'm a social psychologist.
	And I wasn't just saying, you know, it's bad and here's and here's why.
	I was, I was really trying to dig into what exactly is it that it did to social relations?
	What is it?
	What did it do to communication?
	And so the story, I think the best way in is to put it in a narrative form, where once upon a time, we had this incredible time of optimism in the 1990s.
	Those of us old enough to remember the 1990s when the end of the Cold War and new technology and America even had a surplus in its debt for the first time in a long time.
	It was this amazing time of techno-democratic optimism.
	We thought that we defeated the Soviets.
	We defeated all the authoritarians.
	It's going to be liberal democracy from here on in.
	And then when social media comes in in the early days, 2004 or so, people think this is going to be a great force for democracy.
	This is going to democratize power and voice.
	And in 2011, that year, that amazing year, begins with the Arab Spring, where Facebook and a few other platforms helped the people of Egypt and Tunisia.
	It helped them to bring down those Arab dictators.
	And we thought democracy is going to break out in the Arab world.
	And that year ends with Occupy Wall Street.
	And once again, populist movement.
	Now, this is more of a left-wing populist movement, but the people have power.
	So it was a time of enormous optimism about the power of this technology to help democracy.
	But then after that, everything turns around.
	And now democracy is on the back foot, as they say in Britain.
	And authoritarians, I know you had Tristan Harris on your show.
	Tristan points out that China is using this technology to make themselves better authoritarians, as it were.
	And it's making us worse Democrats, worse at democracy.
	So what I was trying to show is that the central problem with social media is that it doesn't actually make us communicate.
	It doesn't, you know, we can communicate with text and Zoom and phone calls.
	There's all kinds of ways to really talk to someone authentically.
	But when you put something out on social media, you're performing.
	And then you wait to see what everyone says about it.
	And so it's this incentive that makes us want to perform at others to impress still others, often strangers.
	That's what warps everything.
	And that's what encourages us, encourages us to just fight among ourselves constantly.
	And we can't have a democracy if we're just fighting among ourselves all the time.
	The founding fathers knew that.
	I remember all the good press about social media back in 2011 during the Arab Spring, which also had a different ending than the one that we were hoping for when that broke.
	But to me, it's almost like, you know, you go out on the date with the person and on the first date, the person sweeps you off of your feet and they're utterly charming and they're beautiful and they're smart and you're thinking, oh my God, this is wonderful.
	And then you flash forward a few years.
	This is our relationship with social media as well.
	And the person's become a stalker.
	The person's extremely controlling.
	The person can't let go of you or your time.
	The person's made you less happy, right?
	Like this is the 30,000 foot zoom out on what's happened between us and social media.
	And by us, I mean our society, our world that goes beyond America, as you do a good job of pointing out every time you get back to, is it just American girls that are deeply depressed?
	It's not.
	If you look at other societies, all these things are spiking in sort of the Western world.
	And the beginning, the onset of it is always linked back to right-wing social media.
	It's not even just the creation of the iPhone in 2007.
	It's the birth and explosion of social media, which was the game changer.
	I want to, this is from your article.
	You write, something went terribly wrong very suddenly.
	We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language, back to the Babel comment, or recognize the same truth.
	We are cut off from one another and from the past.
	So I was feeling this just last week or recognize the same truth.
	You know, in the wake of the terrible Buffalo shooting, look what the country did, right?
	You must have been watching this, John.
	Like half the country went to, this is all to be blamed on the right, on the political right.
	I mean, there was literally an article in Rolling Stone saying that the shooting was a mainstream Republican type of ideology at work.
	And then, you know, the right looking at it and seeing something very different and being, I think, outraged that anybody tried to blame it on a political party as opposed to radicalization by a guy who was drawn to the internet and wasn't doing well emotionally and mentally and so on.
	But it really is at the point where it's just two totally different truths.
	You know, like if you watched MSNBC last week, you would have thought you are an evil person if you are a registered Republican.
	You are hashtag part of the problem of massive white supremacy and mass shootings in America.
	And you would have felt something very different had you turned into Fox News or any other more conservative digital media, right?
	And you could do that on any given week of the year.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Well, so the first thing to keep in mind as we go through this is that most Americans are actually pretty reasonable.
	Most Americans don't want to attack anyone, destroy the reputation.
	Most Americans are sick and tired of what's going on.
	Part of what social media did is it changed who has voice, as it were, because it's always the case.
	It's always the case that the people on the far right and far left are going to be more passionate.
	Whoever's more passionate is going to talk more.
	So they're always going to have more voice, more representation than the people in the middle.
	But when social media becomes very widely used, and this is really around 2011, 2012 is when most people now have a smartphone and now they can be on it every day, 10, 20, 50 times a day.
	When social media becomes widely used and it becomes much more viralized, which we'll talk about in a moment, I hope, the extremes are going to have much more voice.
	And the middle 80% of the country, like we just keep our head down.
	We don't want to be in the shooting war.
Social Capital and Shared Stories 00:04:14
	And so it looks as though we all hate each other.
	It looks as though all there is out there is extremists.
	That's not true.
	That's part of the hall of mirrors that social media does to us.
	Our minds, we evolved to have a really, we really care what public opinion is.
	We want to size up.
	What are people thinking?
	And in a small community, you can actually tell, you know, what people are thinking just by the look on their face as people are talking.
	But in the social media world, we have no idea what people are thinking.
	All we know is what people are tweeting or posting on Instagram, whatever it is.
	And that's never representative of public opinion.
	It really isn't.
	That's part of what happened to us.
	Yeah, so let's go through it because you take on the three major forces that bind successful democracies together.
	And you make the case that social media has undermined all three in America and beyond.
	Number one, social capital, which you describe as extensive social networks with high level of trust.
	Two is strong institutions.
	Three is shared stories.
	Those get much more interesting as we get into the details.
	So the first one, social capital, extensive social networks with high levels of trust.
	What does that mean?
	So social capital is one of the most common terms in the social sciences and refers to the fact that if you have two companies and one has a lot of financial capital, you know, money that they can invest, if everything else is equal, that company is going to outperform the one with less financial capital.
	Similarly, if you have two companies or sports teams or towns or nations, identical in all respects, except one, people really trust each other.
	I don't have to monitor, like if we're having an election, I don't think that you're going to cheat and steal.
	We trust each other.
	That country is going to be much more successful than one with low trust.
	We've seen this throughout the 20th century.
	That was part of the problem with communism.
	The communist countries, everyone knows everyone is lying and there's no trust.
	So America used to have very high trust up until the 60s or early 70s, equivalent to many of the of the most successful European countries.
	But we've been on a downward slide.
	And so if you lose trust, if you lose social capital, now that brings us to the next issue, which is strong or shared institutions, institutions that we trust.
	A dictatorship is based on the strength of the ruler and the army and his ability to intimidate everyone into obedience.
	A democracy such as ours or a republic or whatever you want to call it, but if the founding fathers didn't want a king or a monarch, they believed in government of the people by the people.
	And so they create, they took, we were lucky to inherit good British institutions and then we improved them.
	And those have lasted us well.
	Obviously, they've performed badly at certain points.
	But on a world historical scale, American institutions work very, very well.
	And now they're malfunctioning.
	We trust them less in part because they are less trustworthy, but also in part because we are just saturated, saturated with stories about their failures.
	Some of those stories are true, some are false.
	So if we don't trust each other, if we don't trust our institutions, including even our courts, our legislatures, our public schools, if we don't trust them, it's going to be very hard to have a country.
	We could actually fail as a country.
	The third is the shared stories.
	Yeah, shared stories.
	Go ahead.
	Yeah, the third is shared stories.
	So the secret to binding people together, you know, in my writing, I'm very interested in evolution.
	I look at how other species get cooperation, and it's almost always because they're siblings.
	Bees are the quintessential example.
	You can have, you know, millions of bees or ants cooperating because they're all sisters.
	Humans can cooperate at the level of millions too, but we're not siblings.
	We do it because we have shared stories.
	We have a common understanding of what we're doing.
	We make something sacred.
	It can be a God.
	It can be the Declaration of Independence.
	It can be a physical place.
	We make something sacred, then we circle around it and we worship something together or we hold it as sacred together.
	We can cooperate.
	And America got a big boost from World War II and the Cold War.
	We had a real story of who we were, why we were fighting for good.
	We had really good, clear, evil enemies in the 20th century.
	So that really bound us together.
Childhood in an Operant Machine 00:07:21
	Social media gives us all our own story.
	Everyone has their own little fragment of a story.
	It's almost impossible to knit it together into a common story.
	And identity politics has given people a new thing to latch on to.
	That deep and more fragmentation.
	Yeah, the American story and our history and pride and country, which is problematic.
	It is definitely problematic.
	And I know you've been raising the flag on that for a long time.
	So you write that back to the performance issue, because I think it's important what happens on social media and why it's been so pernicious, that it's no longer about coming up through middle school and high school and making a verbal error that your friends give you a little brush back on.
	It's about complete fear about what's going to happen to you on social media or actually making a misstep and being absolutely ruined at a young age.
	And at the same time, it's about posting the perfect selfie on Instagram as opposed to just spending time with your friends and laughing and swimming in the pool and riding your bike around the neighborhood and all that stuff that actually formed true human bonding.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	And so I think what we have to do is think here about what is a normal healthy childhood.
	And in human societies around the world, by the age of around seven, kids are given responsibilities.
	They're not being supervised closely by adults.
	They can bring the cattle down to the river or whatever it is.
	They can certainly walk to the store and buy a quart of milk.
	And that was true all the way up into the 1990s.
	Kids had sort of normal human childhoods.
	But in the 1990s, America in particular, we freaked out about child abduction.
	And this, I think, is partly the saturation of cable TV and full-time, you know, 24-hour news stations.
	They focus on stories.
	For whatever reason, the 1990s, just as the crime wave was ending, really, I mean, crime rates were way down, drunk driving was way down.
	There'd never been a safer time to raise kids or let them out outside.
	Just at that time, we decide it's too dangerous.
	And we say, no, you can't go outside unsupervised.
	We also say after school, no, don't go out and play with your friends.
	You have to be a soccer practice or guitar practice or whatever it is.
	We basically took away childhood.
	And when kids don't get to practice those skills, as you were saying, you say something, you make a mistake, you learn.
	Kids have to make thousands of mistakes and the consequences need to be very small so that they learn.
	Imagine if you were trying to teach kids how to do the balance beam and they go out in the balance beam, but every time they fall, they're going to fall 30 feet into a pit of alligators or something.
	Well, whatever, they're going to get really, really hurt.
	Pretty quickly, they just wouldn't go out on the balance beam.
	They're not going to learn.
	So social media has made the consequences of a mistake so high, you never know if you could rise to even international infamy.
	You know, we see clips of kids doing or saying stupid things.
	So I think social media didn't take away childhood.
	We sort of did that before social media came.
	And then social media comes in when kids are heavily supervised.
	The only place they can get away from adults is actually on, well, video games, which are not as harmful, but also social media platforms.
	And I think it completely distorts normal childhood learning.
	It deprives them of the repeated experiences of trying something and failing or succeeding that they need to grow up.
	Yeah, no, it's truly that.
	I mean, when I have play dates at my house with kids, I don't let them go on their phones.
	I'm like, put your phones down.
	That's not it.
	You're not here for that.
	And my kids aren't on social media and nor will they be until they're old enough to overrule me.
	But I just find it so dangerous.
	And I understand now it's not necessarily the phone.
	It's the social media that's the problem.
	And I think if more parents understood that, they'd relax a little.
	You can still get Johnny the phone because what I hear from all my friends is, I need to pick him up.
	The other day he missed his ride and he called me and I'm not willing to give that up.
	And you don't have to.
	Johnny can have the cell phone.
	Johnny can play video games and he can text with his friends.
	You know, there's just, there'll be limits, I think, in terms of the time, the time that that phone is open and available.
	But Johnny does not need to be on Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok and YouTube and all these other forums that are really potentially dangerous, A, but also B, have really pernicious societal effects and effects on him.
	I mean, and we'll get to the suicide rates and the depression rates and so on.
	So it's like this is not in Johnny's best interest and not in society's best interest.
	Okay, so, but the performance aspect, can you speak to that?
	Because that's something I think we see a lot as grown-ups, grown-ups.
	You can tell I have kids.
	Whenever you've heard adults as grown-ups, it means you have children.
	We see that as adults, but it's very present and in the face of teens.
	That's right.
	So if you wanted to train a seal to balance a ball on its nose, you would not explain the thing to the seal.
	You would not wait until the seal does it to give the seal a fish.
	You reward any progress towards the behavior you want.
	Same thing with training a dog.
	And this is called operant conditioning in behaviorism and psychology.
	Operant conditioning is incredibly powerful.
	And if you could reinforce your kids within three seconds of them doing a behavior, you could get your kids making their beds every morning within a week.
	So operant condition is very, very powerful.
	Now, what happened all of a sudden when kids got phones with touchscreens around 2009 to 2012?
	You know, the iPhone comes out 2007, but it's expensive.
	Very few kids have one.
	Around 2012, 2013, that's when kids' lives switched from mostly not being on social media every day to having a phone and having most experience come through the phone.
	And that phone is the most powerful operant conditioning machine ever invented.
	What's the first word you're saying before conditioning?
	Oh, operant.
	There are two kinds of conditioning.
	Pavlovian conditioning, which is like gets your autonomic immune system going, like Pavlog's dogs would salivate when they heard a bell.
	But the way you train a circus animal is called operant condition.
	You give them a small reward right away.
	Very, very powerful.
	Now, all of us who have kids, we try to get our kids to sit up at the table.
	We try to get them to eat well.
	We try to get them to write thank you notes.
	We want to. affect the influence.
	We want to influence our kids.
	It's very hard because we don't have a little shock box like shock necklace around their neck.
	We can't do operant conditioning to like train them like a circus animal.
	But Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all these other platforms do.
	And so what we've essentially done is we've given our kids an incredibly powerful operant conditioning machine.
	And the people giving them rewards are total strangers, total strangers.
	We've given over the training of our children to total strangers.
	And this, I think, is a big reason why Gen Z is in terrible shape.
	It's not a gradual change from the millennials to Gen Z.
	It's very, very sudden, right around birth year 1996.
	Kids born in 19, let's say kids born in 1998 are much worse off, much more fragile, much more depressed and anxious than, say, kids born in 1993 or 94.
	That's the end of the millennial generation.
	And so part of it is we've taken away childhood in its place.
	We've given them this training machine, which is sick, which is inhuman.
Algorithms That Outrage Us 00:08:19
	Oh my gosh.
	And there's so much to delve into when it comes to the children and how they use these platforms and what it does to them.
	But just to take a quick step back, because you were talking about tribalism, really, because you were talking about who really has the microphone when we go online, you know, and it affects our children and it affects us.
	Who are we listening to?
	And we've heard, you know, I'm more center right, but we talk about how the left wing controls media and the left wing certainly controls most social media.
	We'll see what happens with Elon.
	But at Twitter right now, it's a very leftist site and it's dominated for the most part by leftists, but really just by partisans, by hard partisans.
	And that's indicative of most of social media, which people fail to factor in.
	I always get a great reminder of this, John, when I go to visit my two close friends in the Midwest.
	One lives in Chicago, one lives outside of Detroit.
	Two girlfriends I met many years ago.
	And you go to the Midwest and sometimes you just get reminded, even though I know it's happening there too, of like normal people, not like crazy New York hard partisans where I spend most of my time.
	And you write about what's the name of the study?
	Oh, the Hidden Tribes study that really actually proved this and proved who it is we are listening to, whether we realize it or not when we go on these platforms.
	Yeah, that's right.
	So the Hidden Tribes study was an outfit from the UK.
	They did great research in Europe.
	They did an amazing study here in America.
	They interviewed, I forget how many thousands of people in 2017.
	And they, by doing various...
	8,000 Americans, 8,000 Americans 2017.
	This is from your article.
	And they found about seven clusters of people who gave similar kinds of answers to each other.
	And it turns out that the one on the far right, they call the devoted conservatives, that's where you'd find Trump's hardcore support.
	And they're very different psychologically from what I think they're called the traditional conservatives, I think it is, who are more like the conservative intellectual tradition, like Edmund Burke, Thomas Sowell.
	They're cautious, they're prudent, they believe in the importance of structures.
	And the far right group is more radical.
	They kind of want to burn things down.
	So there's a kind of a, they're not conservative.
	They're certainly not liberal.
	So there is a group on the far right.
	Now there's a corresponding group on the far left, which is also not liberal.
	Those are called the progressive activists.
	And those are the ones who have taken equality, quality of outcome as their central good.
	That's what's sacred to them.
	And it's easier to achieve equality by tearing down the top than it is by pulling up the bottom.
	So they tend to focus, and this is true across eras, radical egalitarian movements tend to focus on pulling down the top.
	So these two groups are, in my opinion, of course, there are reasons for them having the views that they have, but the net effect on democracy, if they're powerful, is they want to pull things down.
	They want to destroy.
	They're not builders.
	They're critics.
	Now, you need critics on each side.
	You do need critics.
	I'm all about viewpoint diversity.
	But what social media did was it took, let's say, the Republican coalition that Ronald Reagan had built, in which you had the business conservatives, you had the Christian conservatives, and there were always people who are more prone, well, psychologically more prone to authoritarianism.
	They were all part of a group, but the far right group didn't have as much influence.
	All of a sudden, social media, they have much more influence and they're able to intimidate and basically push out a lot of the moderates.
	On the left, as you say, it's the media.
	On the left, what I argued in my paper in the Atlantic essay is that the Democratic Party still has a healthy debate between the far left and the more moderate left.
	The party itself has not lost that ability to debate.
	The problem on the left, I believe, is that the left largely controls the epistemic institutions, that is the institutions that generate knowledge.
	So universities, journalism, media, the museums and the arts, a lot of areas.
	When you get homogeneity and social media, something happens, which is the extremes now have power to really intimidate the moderates.
	And so they go quiet.
	And so what we're left with is rather than just having a country where most of us are fairly moderate, reasonable, and we have these extremes, now the extremes are so powerful that the rest of us just really go quiet.
	And that's when you visit your friends in the Midwest.
	They're not out there tweeting their outrage about this and that.
	Exactly right.
	Never.
	I mean, there was an interesting David Brooks piece in the Times.
	I don't know if you saw this recently talking about how he thinks there really is still room for liberals who aren't pro-cancel culture and pro-demonization of the other side.
	And, you know, he often wonders whether there's still room, but he still thinks there's still room for said people.
	But I mean, I know this firsthand from being somebody who's more right-leaning, but has immersed herself for the past 20, 30 years in very left-leaning communities only.
	You know, like I live with them.
	I know them.
	They're my friends.
	They're my neighbors.
	They're lovely.
	They're not hard partisans for the most part.
	And they don't want to mess with anybody else's life.
	But you go online and you see a very different version and it leads to hate and more tribalism and intolerance on your own part.
	And you really, it's something you have to actively work to fight against.
	And I do think if I lived in a more red community, I'd be more subject to that narrative because I wouldn't be surrounded all the time by people who are liberal and who are absolutely lovely and don't subscribe to any of this nonsense.
	Yeah, no, I think that's right.
	I'm very cautious about using the word liberal because in America, we use the word liberal to mean left and it shouldn't mean left.
	We can talk about progressives and conservatives.
	We can talk about the far left and the far right.
	I reserve the word liberal to a person who believes in the liberal tradition, that is freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, economic freedom.
	We don't want to be telling people how to speak, how to dress, how to live their lives.
	We want to make room for people.
	That's the liberal tradition.
	And in Europe, they speak about right liberals and left liberals.
	So the problem, I think, on our left is no longer liberal.
	Our right is no longer liberal or conservative.
	And but to your point about, depending on where you are, if you're in a partisan community, you are just deluged with evidence that the other side is horrible.
	And you'll see videos of people saying horrible, horrible things.
	And people on your site can list all the sins of the other side, but you tend to have no idea that an equally strong case is being made on the other side, where they are deluged by horrible things that your co-partisans have said.
	So, you know, it's, you know, why do you complain about the speck in your neighbor's eye when you cannot see the plank in your own?
	And it continues.
	Jesus says, first take the plank out of your own eye.
	First, look at yourself, look at your side.
	Only once you understand that problem.
	Now let's talk about the other team.
	And that's one of the things Tristan Harris was talking about, about how the social media companies have made it almost impossible.
	If you're relying on them on your Facebook feed, on your Twitter feed for actual information about what's happening in America, good luck because your feed has been totally manipulated to feed you only the things that will outrage you for the most part.
	You write about this as well.
	They want to make you upset.
	They want to make you angry.
	Cable news, same.
	And they are not in the business of delivering to you the truth, what is actually happening, a broader picture of America in the news.
	They're trying to upset you.
	All right, let me pause it there, John, and squeeze in a quick break.
	That's a good place to come back on.
	Mobile John Haidt, the one and only, right after this.
	It's not news now that they're trying to upset us on social media.
	I think most people have heard that at least once or twice.
Performing for Likes and Virality 00:02:53
	But you sort of link it to you've got the development of the ability to like something on Facebook and retweet something on Twitter and then share something on Facebook.
	And all of this sort of builds to the place where you write the newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves.
	And the volume of outrage is shocking.
	It's been shocking.
	Yes.
	So if we go back to when these platforms were new, there was MySpace and Friendster and Facebook around 2003, 2004.
	They were just like, you know, bulletin boards.
	I've got my bulletin board.
	Here, look at these photos.
	Here's who I am.
	And I can link to yours.
	Totally not toxic.
	The early technology was actually, and I hope people remember this, like in the 90s, the early internet, it was so exciting.
	And, you know, there were pockets of toxicity, but there was a real positivity around a lot of it.
	We were exploring this new space.
	So from 2003 or four to about 2009, social media is not particularly toxic.
	It's not particularly bad for democracy.
	And then what happens in 2009 is Facebook innovates.
	They say, you know, because they're all about finding out engagement.
	They want to target advertisements to people.
	So they give you a like button, a button you can click to say, I like this.
	And that way you're generating a lot of data for them about what you like.
	And then they develop algorithms that can maximize the degree to which you're going to like something.
	Now, there's not necessarily anything nefarious about this.
	What's wrong with giving you more of what you like?
	But the net effect is that it's much more addictive because now you're getting reinforced more often.
	And you're strategically liking things, which is kind of you're performing.
	You're doing a little performance.
	Like you think, should I like this?
	Should I not like this?
	Even more damaging, I'd say, is the retweet button that Twitter develops.
	And then Facebook copies it with the share button.
	So Twitter develops the retweet button.
	click on something, not just to say, I like it, but you can now forward it to, let's say, you have 500 followers, you forward it to your 500 followers.
	And if it's really outrageous, they might forward it to each of their 500 followers.
	And very quickly, you can get to millions and millions of people.
	So 2009 is the year that social media changes radically.
	Before 2009, you couldn't go viral very easily, but by 2010, you can.
	And now the game is on who can win, who can go viral.
	So now the platforms are shaping us.
	We're all learning how do you, what should I say?
	How should I say it to maximally increase my clicks, my likes, my retweets, my follower count.
	So it's really then that it gets becomes much more hyper-viralized.
	You know, we all understand from COVID what happens when a virus is much more transmissible.
	Boy, it can spread very quickly.
The New Culture of Outrage 00:14:26
	So that's what I argue in the piece.
	Those small architectural changes, that's why everything went haywire in the 2010s.
	It wasn't like this.
	It wasn't like this in 2008, 2009.
	There were still much greater possibilities of co-partisanship, of people working together in Washington.
	We didn't feel like we were all attacking each other all the time.
	It's true.
	So you say really between 2011 and 2015 was the apex of the problem.
	And I think that's interesting because I think a lot of people, when they look at the collapse of, or the, I don't want to say our society has collapsed, but it certainly isn't in good health.
	It's on the road.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's on the road.
	And I think a lot of people look back, especially on the left, and they say, it was Trump, Trump.
	And I did a long documentary with PBS a couple of years ago where they actually took an open-minded look at Trump.
	And I made the case that there were a lot of very divisive things that happened during the Obama presidency that set us on the road to this divisiveness we're feeling now and tribalism.
	But it didn't look at social media.
	It was just about politics.
	This is a much more persuasive case.
	It's society-wide.
	There are a lot of people in the country who are not political at all, who are on their phones, as you point out, 50 to 100 times a day.
	So this is a much bigger elephant in the room.
	And you make the case that it was between 2011 and 2015, so pre-Trump, that things really reached the height of awfulness or the pernicious effects really sort of reached.
	I don't know, it was their apex and then they kind of stayed there.
	But explain why you picked those dates and what you mean by those, by picking those four years.
	So on campus, it was 2014 when this stuff first started.
	Anyone who graduated from college in 2012 didn't see the speeches, violence, the cancel culture, the fear of speaking up.
	And in 2015, so Greg and I write our article, The Coddling the American Mind, that comes out in August of 2015.
	And then at Halloween 2015 with the Christakis affair at Yale and the students protesting about Halloween costume guidance.
	So things blow up on campus in 2015, really, 2014, 2015.
	And only recently have I discovered how many other things were happening around 2014, because it's only then that we can get global cancellation.
	So many listeners will remember the story of Justine Sacco, a woman who was flying to South Africa.
	She tweeted a joke in somewhat poor taste, but it wasn't racist.
	It was actually a joke about white privilege.
	So she tweets this joke, gets on her plane, lands in South Africa, and there's a global outrage around her, and she's fired the next day.
	So that happened in December of 2013.
	That could not have happened in 2008.
	There was no way to have a global, you know, global mob around this woman in 2008.
	So that's December 2013.
	In early 2014, Brendan Eich is promoted to CEO of Netscape.
	And someone discovers that he gave $1,000 to a group in California that was opposed to a bill, a proposition about gay marriage.
	And so he is fired or let go within two weeks.
	This sort of global, the ability to create a Twitter mob wasn't there before the retweet button.
	And so we get a lot of things happening in 2014, 2015.
	There's a new culture of outrage.
	And so, the argument that I made in the paper in the Atlantic essay is that it's as though, with these hyper-viralized platforms, it's as though they gave out a billion dart guns.
	Everyone in the world gets a dart gun and with unlimited darts, and you get to shoot anyone you want.
	It's not going to kill them, but it'll shame them, it'll hurt them emotionally, relationships, it'll hurt their reputation.
	And the net effect of everyone having a dart gun is most people don't want to shoot anyone.
	That's the middle 80% of the country.
	They just put them down.
	I don't want to attack anyone.
	But the people on the extremes are psyched about being able to shoot not just their enemies across the aisle, but the moderates on their own side.
	And so we now have a communication environment, which is much more characterized by walking on eggshells.
	That's the phrase everyone uses.
	I feel like I'm walking on eggshells.
	And if you're walking on eggshells, you can't trust the people around you.
	You have to self-censor.
	You can't be creative.
	You can't be funny.
	There used to be a lot of humor in the academy.
	It was, you know, students love to laugh, professors love to tell jokes, but all of that goes away when we're all afraid that if anyone takes offense, they've got a dart gun that got a website to report me.
	So that's why I argue that this isn't just about polarization left-right.
	This is about we're afraid of the person next to us or the person, the unknown person on a social media platform.
	And that is new.
	That really comes to fruition in 2014.
	My God, and it's so very much still happening.
	I mean, I saw you, you tweeted something on this.
	I think you retweeted a Jonathan Turley article, but I tweeted about this just recently today as well about what's happening to this Princeton professor.
	It's horrible.
	It's horrible.
	There's a Princeton professor who's now pushing to fire this professor, Joshua Katz.
	He's a classics professor, which you're already not allowed to be because you study a bunch of old white guys.
	And that's his first sin.
	And now the president of Princeton is calling on the university to fire this tenured professor.
	Why?
	What did the guy do?
	What was his hideous sin?
	You know what he did?
	In 2006, he had a consensual affair with a student for which he's already been punished.
	They already turfed him off campus for a year where he was suspended for a year.
	He paid the penalty.
	You know, I mean, and now in a court of law, double jeopardy would have attached.
	You can't go back and relitigate it, but they are.
	They're trying to get back into it and open back up the case.
	Why?
	Because he wrote an article critical of the reforms some of the black faculty members are asking for at Princeton, like more sabbatical than their white colleagues and I think additional pay.
	I'm trying to look for what they were, but I mean, they were, it was obviously like favoritism based on race.
	He said he objected to faculty of color receiving special course relief and summer salary and an extra semester of sabbatical and criticized, quote, extra perks for no reason other than pigmentation.
	And he also criticized something called the Black Justice League, which was active for two years on campus.
	He called it a local terrorist organization that made life miserable for many, including many Black students who didn't agree with its members' demands.
	And because it seems very clear, because of that letter, they're now trying to meet to him right out of Princeton.
	We covered what happened to Roland Fry or something very similar at Harvard, which is still ongoing.
	These are professional assassinations.
	So they have good reason to fear the dart.
	Yeah, that's right.
	So I mean, you know, the case is complicated.
	I don't know the, I don't know the details, but I think what is clear is that whatever, whatever behaviors he did on campus, he was investigated for.
	He did have affairs with students over time.
	So I can't comment on any of that.
	I don't know.
	But what was clear to me was that The investigation was restarted and pushed to the point of firing him only because he wrote an article in Quillette that offended many on campus.
	And I think we see the same dynamics here that we saw in the Dorian Abbott case.
	So, Dorian Abbott, a physicist at University of Chicago, he wrote an essay in Newsweek criticizing race-based affirmative action, criticizing certain aspects of DEI, agreeing with certain goals, but being critical of the main thrust of DEI programs.
	Now, that's part of what a democracy is.
	That's certainly something that a professor should be able to write about.
	And he was invited to give a very prestigious lecture at MIT.
	And some, I don't know if it was students or administrators were upset that we're going to give an honor to this guy who wrote this article that we think that we that we that offends us.
	And so they put pressure on the MIT administration to uninvite him because of an article he wrote in Newsweek.
	And so I think it's the same sort of thing here.
	It's not that Princeton wants to do this as far as I know.
	Again, I don't know the details of a complicated case, but I'm pretty confident that pressure is being put on the administration by students, I suppose primarily.
	Pressure is being put on, and we've seen this over and over again.
	When pressure is put on by pressure groups, the administration almost always caves and they use the same kind of language.
	So that's why I think the principle here is if you say something that offends, if you say something that violates the sacred values of a powerful group on campus, then if they can't get you for what you said, they do what's called grievance archaeology.
	That is, you dig up everything, you go back through all their tweets, you find something that you can get them for.
	And that is illiberal.
	That's part of due process is there's got to be a process to adjudicate bad behavior.
	We follow the process.
	If you're found guilty, you receive your punishment, and then that's it.
	We're done.
	And so, again, I don't know the details, but it seems as though Princeton is behaving this way because of internal pressure groups rather than, I mean, you know, I suppose if they could go back and investigate every single professor, they would find out.
	I hope somebody goes back right now and investigates the president of the university.
	This is me speaking.
	Christopher Eisegruber, who is the one calling on the university board to fire Professor Katz, go back.
	I'm urging the online people to go back.
	Go do an investigation on him.
	I guarantee you he's had some affair with some student or he's crossed a method line.
	These people are not pure.
	These are judgers.
	They're not pure.
	It's right.
	No one is.
	That's what you learn in Catholicism.
	That's one benefit I had growing up.
	You know, you have to be quick to forgive.
	You know, who among us has?
	Slow to judge, quick to forgive.
	That's right.
	Yes.
	And so this is, you want to play this game?
	Let's play.
	Let's go.
	Look, I'm in.
	If these are the rules we have to play by, then let's play by them because these people like woke CEOs and woke college presidents need to be taught a lesson that you come for me and I will sick the anti-woke mob on you.
	You did not leave a lead a perfect life.
	It's the only terms they're going to understand.
	I can certainly understand the need for counter force.
	I can certainly understand turning the tables, hoist on your own guitar, all of that.
	But I've been studying the culture war for a long time.
	I study political polarization.
	And, you know, in a military war, you can apply such force that you literally kill your enemy and can take their territory.
	But in a culture war, you can't do that.
	In a culture war, the harder you attack your enemy, the stronger he gets.
	The only thing you can do is you can either give them more ammunition by doing, giving more anecdotes, more terrible things that people on your side have said.
	You can give them more ammunition or less ammunition.
	I'm not sure there's a lot of people.
	Look what happened with Disney and DeSantis, right?
	Disney's lost billions of dollars in stock value.
	All corporations are now, they're not coming and commenting on abortion suddenly.
	And Disney's gone quiet on its woke agenda for the past few weeks.
	Why?
	because they took a terrible hit for speaking out about this and they got in a war that didn't really serve them well down in Florida.
	I don't agree with you on this point.
	I mean, I know you're brilliant.
	You've studied this way more than I have, but I've lived it and I've been through it personally and I can tell you fighting back works.
	Okay.
	Now let's talk about it because I really am not sure I'm right here.
	In fact, I think what I have here is just an insight, not an overall strategy.
	And you're right that Disney was under, Disney was under pressure, let's say from left-wing groups.
	And so they moved to the left.
	And then it's only if there's counterpressure that they'll move back.
	So there is a need for counterforce.
	I think it was a quote from Margaret Thatcher during the Balkan War.
	I can't find it, but I remember hearing it when I was young.
	The problem is not whether we should use force in Bosnia.
	The problem is that force is being used by one side overwhelmingly every day.
	The question is will there be counter force?
	That is the question of arming the Bosnians against the Serbs.
	So by analogy here, I do understand the need for pushback.
	But here's what really alarms me.
	Each time we have an escalation of the culture war, a new strategy is brought in, which is an escalation of weaponry.
	And so what we're now seeing, which really alarms me, is things like the Texas abortion law.
	And I think the Florida, the law we're talking about here, I believe they have provisions by which anyone can bring a lawsuit against a citizen, a teacher, a doctor.
	This is a huge escalation in the culture war.
	This means that now people doing their job have to worry that they could suddenly be sued by a bunch of activists on the other side, even if they've done nothing wrong.
	That's certainly true.
	In the case of the Texas law, I don't know about the Florida one.
	I'm going to have to check.
	I don't remember seeing a personal liability provision in that way.
	But let me stand you by.
	I'll do a quick break.
	And then I want to talk to you about this.
	This is interesting strategy and what serves the community and what doesn't.
	And then we've got to talk about Trump because I think your observations on how he was the first one to understand the Tower of Babel had fallen and how to work that is very, very fascinating.
	Okay, stand by.
	John's staying with us.
	And don't forget, folks, you can find the Megan Kelly Show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.
	the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megan Kelly.
	So yeah, this has been a debate on the right in particular for a long time now since cancel culture really sort of took over how to fight back, you know, what to do.
	And I think for a long time, the effort was to say, stop it, stop it.
	And on the right, too, that's what the Harper's letter was about, right?
	Saying, just stop it.
	That was mostly liberals saying, we hate Trump.
	Yeah, we don't like Trump.
	This isn't about loving Trump.
	But this is about being truly liberal in the genuine sense of that word and allowing free speech, a principle you've been fighting for your entire academic career.
	And it's not working.
	So I think that has led a lot of folks in this battle, left or right, to say, all right, what would work?
Fighting Back Against Cancel Culture 00:15:15
	And I've come around to the belief of cancel them, cancel them all, cancel Chrissy Teigen, cancel all of them.
	Now, I realize, depending on the institution that they're at, that may not be realistic.
	Joy Reed should have been canceled a long, long time ago, given her views, but she won't be.
	But at least you can get some skin in the game.
	I guarantee you, this Princeton president has got something in his past he doesn't want coming out.
	And the only thing preventing it from coming out is journalists and people who are anti-cancel culture from taking out their own microscopes and magnifying glasses and taking a hard look.
	So the more you punish people for being this cruel, the less likely they are to dip a toe into those waters.
	Okay, so during the break, during that nine minute break, I thought about what it is.
	I appreciate you pushing back on me.
	I was saying, wait, you know, this is just going to escalate things.
	And I realized what my concern is.
	So I've been studying polarization since 2004, and the path we're on is towards catastrophic failure as a country.
	If we don't change what we're doing, the American experiment set up by our founding fathers who understood our liability to faction, factionalism, fighting.
	It wasn't clear that this experiment would work.
	Now it's worked very well on and off, extremely well.
	And now it's not working.
	We are headed, if we keep going this way, we are headed towards catastrophic failure.
	And so if you think about this is like a fight taking place on a ship or on a ship, the ship has been damaged.
	There's water coming into the hull.
	We've got the crew is divided into the red team and the blue team.
	And the red team and blue team are fighting.
	And what you're saying is, look, the blue team has been really unfair.
	It's time that the red team fought back using the blue team's methods.
	And there's a certain wisdom in that.
	But we can see where this is going to go.
	There's no way either side can win.
	So we just keep doing this until in five or 10 years, the ship sinks.
	That's what I'm trying to avoid.
	And that's why the last quarter of my article was not about how one side can win because neither side can win.
	The last quarter was, what are the structural changes?
	What are the changes to in Congress, changes to how we do elections, changes to social media?
	What are the changes we could do that would return us just to levels of hatred we had back in maybe 2008?
	If we could go back to those levels of hatred, then I think we can make it as a country.
	But on our current path, on our current path, we're in huge trouble.
	So what I'm saying is we need to think about structural reforms so that we can actually sometimes, in some places, talk to each other and even work together sometimes.
	Fair enough.
	I get that.
	But I see it more as like, and I see, I understand your point of there, it's holes in the boat either way you do it.
	And that means the boat sinks.
	I see it more like there's, you know, there's generals up on the left and there's generals up on the right at the front of the boat, admirals, I guess, sailing it.
	And the left keeps taking out only one side's admirals.
	They just keep continuing to take down admiral after admiral after admiral who they think are on the opposite side.
	And the red team keeps looking at them saying, please stop doing that.
	That's not good for the boat.
	We're not going to make it if you get rid of all this brain trust up at the front.
	And the left just has the middle finger up.
	And finally, the right says, we're going to hurt some of your generals or your admirals.
	They're going to.
	And finally, the hope is that the offensive side will realize, well, this is stupid.
	We can't survive without our leaders and stop.
	Stop.
	Well, it's a shift in tactics.
	It's worth trying.
	Reaching out across the aisle and saying, please don't.
	I mean, look, what difference did the Harper's letter make?
	Nothing.
	They were mocked.
	Everybody on that.
	It was like, and I love, I love Thomas Chatterton Williams and I thought it was a noble idea.
	It's just you can't reason with these people.
	Okay.
	But there's no point at which the other side, whichever side it is, is going to realize, oops, we're wrong.
	We need to be more realistic.
	Like that's just not going to happen.
	But why can't we destroy them?
	Why can't we make them afraid?
	Why can't we make them have skin in the game?
	No, no, I just mean like, I just mean, think about it.
	This, this president of Princeton, if he really thought that I was going to devote the resources of my entire team over the next month to digging up dirt on him, which I 100% could and maybe will do, I think he'd be a little scared.
	I think he would.
	And I think if I found something, if I found some young woman he slept with, this is made up.
	I don't have any information that happened.
	He'd be scared shitless that I was going to turn around.
	I was going to do it to him.
	And then maybe the next university president would hesitate a little before they decided to use a human failing for which someone has already been held accountable against him to punish him for his divergent viewpoint on a separate matter.
	Okay, you're talking about a kind of counterforce which would have an effect.
	Here's a better way to do counterforce.
	In fact, there's an organization co-founded originally by some Princeton professors called the Academic Freedom Alliance, AFA.
	And what they do is in cases where, in fact, Jonathan Katz and Robbie George are founding members of this.
	I'm one of the founding members as well.
	What the Academic Freedom Alliance does is it sends a letter to universities saying, if you go ahead with this, we've got lawyers.
	And this then FHIR, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, also does similar work.
	So I think that kind of pressure, I think, is a positive way of doing something which is within professional norms.
	I think the politics of personal destruction, I do understand if they do it, then why can't we do it?
	I understand that.
	But I think that way lies just continual escalation and the death of our country.
	So I'm doing everything I can to think of how do we change the venue?
	How do we change the incentives?
	How do we change things so that people don't do this on either side?
	That's the challenge I think that we have as a country for the next 10 years.
	Well, and you do have real proposals.
	I mean, I should say that to the audience.
	You actually have very condensed, a three-point plan that might at least help.
	I guess I am feeling right now, just given being in the news and covering this so much and just the constant indignity of what they do to people, like one of those brave heart warriors, you know, with the face paint and like no underpants and running, killing.
	Yeah.
	No, that's right.
	Look, when you're repeatedly attacked and viciously attacked, yeah, you're not going to, you know, the strategy is not, oh, you know, let's make peace.
	No.
	But I'm trying to break us.
	I'm trying to break us out of the binary of and think, it's like, look at it this way.
	We used to, we used to talk in various venues.
	We used to communicate in various ways.
	Members of Congress would talk to each other.
	Now, if you change the venue, you put in cameras.
	Now they're not talking to each other.
	They're talking at the camera.
	And in the same way, people used to talk to each other.
	They could call on the telephone.
	They could talk at work.
	But with social media, what it's done is it said, here, why don't you guys fight it out in the comments under a tweet or something?
	And it's almost as if they said, hey, we're a venue.
	We're a platform for people to talk to each other in the middle of the Roman Coliseum.
	All conversations are going to take place with an audience that wants blood.
	The audience is cheering for blood.
	And so when Facebook developed threaded comments, this was 2013, they said, it's not enough that President Obama posts something and people can yell and scream at him in the comments.
	That's not enough.
	We want people to yell and scream at each other in the comments.
	And so anybody types anything, you can now respond to them and people can respond to you.
	And it's endless fighting.
	Why?
	Why do we have this?
	Well, I understand Facebook wanted to increase engagement and it worked.
	What I'm saying is as long as our entire environment pushes us to fight with each other and be mad at each other and be drowning in outrage stories, there is no way out of this.
	We have to find a way to break this dynamic to get out of the Roman Coliseum.
	No, I mean, it makes perfect sense.
	Do you stand by that understanding, though?
	Because you're in academia.
	So your world has been completely saturated with this for, I mean, it's up to the gills.
	Not every industry is quite that bad.
	And I do believe that these, and you make the great case that sort of this, the loudest members of cancel culture have a disproportionate voice.
	But I think the vast majority, as you also say, of the country is not with them.
	They don't, they don't really, putting political differences aside, I think the people who are pro-cancel culture are a small minority with a very big voice.
	So why can't we destroy them?
	Why can't the society survive if we just destroy them?
	Because the rest of us, the vast majority of us, aren't for that stuff.
	I've said this so many times on my show.
	And then we can go, once we destroy them, then we can go, we can argue about abortion and the Florida law and all, we can do all the old-fashioned arguing we used to do over politics.
	But this is where metaphors can either illuminate or lead us astray.
	And as the linguist George Lakoff said long ago in a brilliant book called Metaphors We Live By, we think about argument using the metaphor of war and you just did that.
	Why can't we destroy them?
	Now, if we literally mean why can't we destroy them, what you mean is either kill them or lock them up or cut out their tongues or sometimes that they can't talk.
	I mean hurt them so they will stop doing this.
	Wait a second.
	If you hurt people, are they going to stop doing it?
	There's no, again, there's no way to win a culture war.
	So yes, you can put, well, yes, you can get, you can, you can have victories, you can have pyrrhic victories.
	And this is something that the left has a lot of.
	The left has a lot of, so a pyrrhic victory is from a story in ancient Greece where a general, I believe, is, you know, he wins the battle, but he loses so many men that he ultimately loses the war.
	And so I think what we're seeing is, you know, my argument is that while the, I think the Republican Party has in many ways gone off the deep end more than the Democratic Party, but the cultural left has gone off the deep end much more than the cultural right.
	That's the asymmetry I wrote about.
	And that's what you're talking about is you've got all these institutions where the left is doing all these things.
	And what I'm arguing is that we need to, you can't beat something with nothing and you can't shut people up by hurting them.
	What we need, I think, is a much clearer notion.
	We've got to all start talking about professional responsibility, a sense of duty, a sense of what are you here for?
	What is your job?
	And if you're a university, your job is to, as a faculty member, it's to do research and find the truth.
	And as a teacher, it's to educate and bring up students.
	If you're a journalist, again, it's to find the truth, but using very different methods.
	So each institution has a telos is the Greek word for end or purpose.
	I think we're not going to end the culture war just by silencing our opponents.
	We've got to build something positive instead.
	We have to develop, the middle 80% of us, if we can develop a notion of basically do your job, we live in a diverse world.
	We live in a world with just your job.
	Yeah.
	Well, I had a comedian on the show not long ago.
	I think it was Ryan Long who said, if people, if everybody could just do their job, instead of feeling the need to cross lanes and judge and comment on everybody else's job, we'd be a lot better off.
	But let me turn the camera back on you because you've been fighting for these principles for a long, long time.
	You've been living them.
	I mean, I was so impressed at the number of organizations that you're a part of that I love.
	You know, Heterodox Academy and Fire and all, we'll get to the Leck Row Project about children and so on.
	But it's not working.
	I mean, academia has been lost.
	And so what makes you think there's hope for it?
	So you're right that it has not been working so far.
	It is true that the concerns that Greg Lukianov and I had in 2014, 2015 have spread far beyond the university.
	The universities have bought into a certain mindset that has brought them away from their core mission.
	So if we were to just say, okay, this is it, this is, let's evaluate where we are now, I'd have to say the trends have been against us.
	But here's a reason for hope.
	When I wrote the Atlantic article, it came out six weeks ago today, actually, I was expecting to get attacked from the left and the right, and nobody attacked me at all.
	In fact, hundreds of people wrote me, just regular people just wrote me thank you notes saying, thank you.
	I'm completely exhausted.
	What is happening to our country?
	I think what we're seeing is we had sort of mounting insanity throughout the 2010s.
	The pendulum kept swinging and swinging and swinging, and there was no sign it was going to swing back.
	And then, of course, after George Floyd and that year of COVID, you know, things went even further.
	And a lot of schools implemented like Abram Kendi style programs.
	They had very bad results generally.
	A lot of things backfired.
	And I think what we're seeing now is that most people are recognizing this is crazy.
	This is just completely crazy.
	What's happening to us?
	So I am perceiving, like, look at, for example, the New York Times, the New York Times dared to publish an editorial praising free speech.
	Now, they were attacked widely for it.
	You know, isn't that just speech for racists?
	But they did it.
	And we're seeing this more and more, that the leaders of organizations who are generally true liberals, that is, they're on the left and they believe in free speech and freedom of association.
	They've been intimidated and pushed around.
	But I think we're beginning to see more of them stand up.
	We're seeing corporations, Netflix, announcing, you know what?
	If you can't work on a project that doesn't share your values, maybe you shouldn't work here.
	I think we're going to see in the next few months a lot of companies, a lot of companies taking that line.
	Yeah, that was great to see.
	I felt so heartened by that.
	And you know what?
	Frankly, it's just like, it's what Sirius, for example, XM has already been living.
	You know, Sirius has got lefties on its lineup.
	It's got righties.
	It's got people who are somewhere in between.
	That's the principle of the organization.
	You know, let more conversations happen.
	There's a huge marketplace for ideas here.
	And you can go to the ones that you agree with.
	You can go to the ones you disagree with.
	But that's the American way.
	They never lost sight of that.
	Netflix did.
	And I think it took the Dave Chappelle crisis to remind them of their core mission and of what American people want.
	They don't want Netflix to be just this woke corporation that's shoving social messages down our throats that all align with one worldview.
	That's not a winning business model.
	I think they're starting to get that.
	That's right.
	The American people ultimately have good sense.
	And while it seems as though everything has been moving in one direction since around 2014, I do think that now, and here it's incumbent on people to stand up for principles, to stand up for the professional responsibilities, but to do it in a way that doesn't just trigger more outrage.
	This is my fear, that the dynamics of polarization and of a culture war are, hey, I'm so mad at you.
	I'm going to hit you hard.
	And then you get mad, you hit me hard.
	Breaking out of the cycle, carrying ourselves with more dignity, more civility, still standing up for principles.
	I think in the long run, I think this is the way to go.
	I'm not ceding that point.
	I still think it's wrong.
	I've got the brave heart-based pain on when it comes to those cancel culture warriors and woke university presidents who are casting judgment on everybody.
	But I'm open-minded, as always, to the possibility that I may be the wrong one.
Trump and Coarse Politics 00:03:08
	Can we spend one minute on Trump?
	Because I want to get into solutions and what you actually think might help.
	And there's an interesting law on the books, well, not on the books, but being proposed in California that might help with the kid internet stuff that we can talk about too.
	It's the first time I've ever seen a law in California that I think I might get behind.
	But I do think Trump is interesting because there's a line from your article that says, you talking about how you date sort of the crisis peaking to the years between 2011 and 2015, a year marked by the great awakening on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right.
	Then you write, Trump did not destroy the tower, meaning the Tower of Babel, as we've discussed.
	He merely exploited its fall.
	Then you add, he was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era in which outrage is the key to virality.
	So good.
	Stage performance crushes competence.
	I really related to that.
	And then you say, and in which Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country and so on.
	That's it.
	That was like, as a politician, forget his policies.
	As a politician, that was the thing he got before anybody else got it.
	That's right.
	Yes.
	Because in the mass media age, where there was some sort of professionalism in politics and journalism, you can question how good it was.
	But if someone said something atrocious, that could be the end of their campaign.
	There were certain principles and rules and processes that we understood from what you might call the pre-Babel era, when it was possible for a narrative to emerge about Jimmy Carter or Paul Tsangis or whatever candidate.
	There was a shared narrative that could emerge.
	But Trump wasn't paying attention to any of that.
	He was there tweeting.
	He was there saying outrageous things.
	And I think if he had run four or eight years previously, I don't think he could possibly have gotten the nomination.
	He just happened to come in at this time when everything was shredded.
	There is no overarching narrative.
	There's wide distrust in institutions.
	And we have such high, it's called negative partisanship.
	That is, Americans since the early 20, since the early 2000s, we don't vote for the candidate we want.
	We vote against the candidate we hate.
	And so Trump was perfect for that dynamic.
	Trump benefited from it.
	Now, the fact that some similar things happen in Canada and the UK, certainly the universities are identical in Canada and the UK.
	The teen mental health crisis is identical.
	And they didn't have Trump.
	Now, I do think that Trump made our politics much more coarse.
	I think he greatly amplified polarization.
	I think he certainly drove people on the left insane, making them say and do things.
	But then, you know, they attacked people on the right with extra passion.
	And that's how our culture war got so much more heated.
	We're much more polarized than any Western democracy.
	And that's partly why we're in such trouble now.
	I don't, I mean, I can't disagree with any of that.
	I think he saw the seam in the story and got himself in there and then totally exploited it.
	And it's why nothing could touch him.
	You know, he called it the Fifth Avenue rule that he could shoot somebody at Fifth Avenue and he wouldn't lose any supporters.
	But you saw it happen time and time again with his crazy things that emerged about him or from him during the campaign that didn't touch him.
The Teen Mental Health Crisis 00:12:05
	But I think that's interesting.
	And I do, it concerns me that all the future politicians are going to think they have to do all the same stuff that I would argue, yes, maybe it got Trump elected.
	Yes, it telegraphed to the base that he didn't care what the whole party thought or did.
	But if it continues, it scares me about what we're going to get on an ongoing basis in the White House.
	Because at least Trump did wind up having some good policies, at least from my standpoint.
	I don't know whether the next guy will or whether he'll just be skilled at dividing us, fighting back, flipping the middle finger, and getting himself in the office.
	Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.
	And that's what's appealing about somebody like a Glenn Youngkin, right?
	He seems like his little fleece sweater vest seems unthreatening, though we'll see.
	You never know.
	I can't judge the book by its cover.
	Okay, so let's go back to social media because one thing we didn't talk about was Instagram and how in particular, this is a pernicious force.
	I mean, Twitter, we know, Facebook, we know, Instagram has been outed by many, including the whistleblower.
	And you've written a long piece on this too, about how just how bad it's gotten.
	Because it's not just, wow, they're really divisive.
	Wow, they're really undermining institutions and faith of America, Americans in each other and in their country.
	They're actually seriously causing mental health problems that may be fatal, that actually may be fatal in a lot of cases with young girls in particular.
	It's not to put it all on Instagram.
	You know, I like to believe I'm raising healthy children, that Instagram, there's only so much damage it could do.
	But I'm sure that's what most of the families believe.
	So can you spend a minute on them?
	Sure.
	So first, I'd encourage listeners and viewers to go to, I just created a page where I put all of my top resources for social media.
	So if you go to jonathanheight.com slash social media, all one word, I've put there my Atlantic articles.
	I gave a testimony in front of a Senate committee two weeks ago where I created a document.
	It laid out what exactly does the data say.
	What's the evidence that social media is a cause of this problem?
	And so what the evidence shows clearly is that rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide were relatively flat in the early 2000s.
	And then around 2010 to 2012, there are very sharp upturns in all of those graphs, especially for girls.
	Suicide is certainly for both, but self-harm is primarily for girls.
	And it starts very suddenly around 2012.
	And so that certainly points to social media as the cause.
	But the question is, correlation doesn't prove causation.
	There have been a lot of previous moral panics over television and video games that turned out not to have really been correct.
	So I've been focusing on gathering all the academic research together to get a sense of what's the evidence.
	And it turns out the evidence is a lot of correlational studies that kids who use it more, especially heavy users, are two to three times more likely to develop depression or anxiety disorders.
	So there's correlational evidence.
	There's experimental evidence.
	When you randomly assign people to either use more or less of social media accounts, you generally see either a downturn or an upturn in their mental health.
	And there's eyewitness testimony.
	Ask any group of girls and their studies have done this.
	Why do you think that depression is rising?
	And they'll say it's social media.
	So if you have all these sources of evidence, I think it is pretty clear that social media, and particularly Instagram, is bad for girls' health.
	The thing to really keep in mind is it's not just being on a screen.
	It's especially, I believe I can't prove this part, but I think the most active ingredient is when a girl puts a photo of herself up and waits for strangers or even friends, just for people to judge her and comment on her.
	There's new evidence that when girls do this during puberty, when you're going through puberty, 11 to 13, that's when there's maximum damage.
	So what I'm proposing in my article is the age of internet adulthood was set to 13 crazily back in like 1997, I think it was.
	That's way too low.
	It needs to be 16 and it needs to be in four, 16 or 18.
	But we can't have kids, especially girls, going through puberty, self-conscious, so uncomfortable in their bodies, putting photos out there, waiting for validation.
	And then what if someone else gets more validation?
	What if someone, your friend, is more beautiful than you because of filters or whatever?
	So I think the evidence that these visual media, especially Instagram, is harmful for girls' mental health is now pretty compelling.
	So how would that be put into practice?
	Like I mentioned, the California's got a law right now that would crack down on the social media.
	It's being proposed.
	That would crack down on the social media companies with respect to children and would make it tougher for them to do to them what they do to us in terms of the addictive nature, tracking them everywhere, things like autoplay where the next video just comes up and makes you want to click on it, notifications past a certain time of night.
	I mean, those all make sense.
	But how would it work?
	So when a 13-year-old gets an iPad, you as the parent would have to program in this device belongs to a 13-year-old.
	Hello, not a grown-up.
	And just that information, or you'd have to, as a parent, like type in the restrictions you wanted, because we already have some restrictions we can put on.
	Yeah.
	No, it has to be that the default is that kids can't get on until 16.
	And so the way it needs, there are a lot of schemes to do this.
	So for example, what if you could, if anybody could go to Twitter or Facebook or one of these, any of these sites, and suppose you could open an account, suppose you can open an account, but you have to get verified to show that you're old enough to be using the platform, especially if you want to post.
	That's the most damaging thing.
	And 10 years ago, it was like, well, how are we going to know?
	Like, how could you possibly know that the kid is 16?
	Like, are they going to have to show the driver's license?
	But now there's all kinds of companies that figured out how to do this.
	So the banking industry, gambling industry, there's all kinds of companies that figured out how do we verify identity?
	How do we verify age in ways that are not taking your driver's license and giving it to Facebook?
	So the industry is very creative.
	There are lots of ways to do this.
	And what I'm arguing is that the only reason, I don't know if your kids are on yet, you're a 12-year-old, but both of my kids, when they entered sixth grade, they said, Daddy, can I have an Instagram account?
	Everyone, or at least, well, my son did.
	Everyone has an Instagram account.
	And the only reason everyone has one is because everyone said to their parents, Mom, can I have an Instagram account?
	Because everyone has one.
	We're all caught in a trap.
	And that's the central idea of the documentary, The Social Dilemma.
	So we've got to break the trap.
	And so as long as we can keep most kids off until 16, even if a few are able to sneak on, that doesn't matter because that won't put pressure on everyone to be on.
	We've got to break that social trap.
	Yeah, no, I took the road less traveled on this one.
	And have you?
	I said, no.
	I mean, my kids are still young, but my 12-year-old now, he has a phone and just a phone.
	And there's no social media for him and there won't be for any of my children.
	And, you know, my, I hadn't even considered 16 as an opener.
	I was thinking, enjoy college and good luck, but certainly no time before then because it's just too damaging.
	I just don't see the upside.
	Now, if we get to the point where every single kid in the class is on some social media app, I guess we'd have to reassess it.
	I mean, I had one guest come on and say the thing that's really that's you really want to avoid is do not let snapchat or Facebook or Twitter or one of these become the main place where they text because these apps are not dumb.
	So Snapchat has the ability now to create group chats and group texts so that they go through the app to do all their party planning and so on.
	And that's the absolute worst thing you could do.
	So that would be a hard line.
	But right now, John, I'm kind of in a good place because I'm a public figure.
	And I basically told them, you know, do you like eating?
	Because you won't be able to if you go on those websites and post something stupid.
	And, you know, that's they kind of accepted that.
	Yeah.
	So I can offer some advice to all the parents out there.
	So the first is please go to letgrow.org.
	It's a, it's an organization that I co-founded with Lenore Skinese, a wonderful woman who wrote this brilliant book, Free Range Kids, about how to give your kids a childhood where they'll develop autonomy.
	They'll learn how to take care of themselves and how to have conflict and cooperation.
	So at letgrow.org, we've got lots of ideas, lots of suggestions.
	What I can add as a social psychologist is we can each put controls on our own kid, but our kids, when they're teenagers, what matters most to them, of course, is their friends, what other kids think of them in their grade.
	That's what matters most to them.
	And so if your kid is the only one who's not on, that will be painful.
	That kid will be excluded.
	Now, in the long run, maybe that's good, but it will certainly be painful along the way.
	Far better is if you can really make an effort to find some other parents, find some other parents that share your idea, especially parents close enough where your kid can walk back and forth.
	They can walk to each other's homes.
	So there's all kinds of ideas and let grow.
	There's all kinds of ideas on my website, jonathanhight.com/slash social media.
	This is a social dilemma, and we have to work together to break it.
	There's limited, it's hard for us as individual parents to keep our kids away from these platforms.
	So we have to try.
	It's so hard.
	You know, I mean, I can definitely see a situation where somebody says, you know, they're all drinking or they're all smoking pot, you know, or they're all vaping.
	And, you know, if your kid's the only one, he's not going to get invited, in which I'd be like, too bad, you know?
	So social media is different though, because it's basic communication.
	It's the way you set up a party.
	It's the way you set up a play date.
	It really can be exclusionary if they don't, if they're all on one app and your kid's not on it.
	But I also plan on being like a little inspector clousau if they ever.
	I mean, I am going to spy on everything and get ahead of problems because I do think I don't really believe in trust when it comes to your teenage kids and social media.
	I believe in spying on them.
	Am I wrong, Josh?
	Well, yeah.
	But this is the difficulty: is that at what point do they learn to moderate themselves?
	Now, these platforms are so powerful.
	The lure of the lure of the reinforcement is so powerful that, yeah, if you don't do any monitoring, your kids are likely to lie.
	Look, they all learn to lie whenever you open an account.
	You just lie about your age.
	They all learn that.
	So, what is the lesson we're teaching them?
	I agree with you.
	You have to monitor it, especially early on, especially when they're going through puberty, 11, 12, 13, 14.
	Kids must not be on social media, especially on Instagram.
	But at a certain point before they go to college, you have to give them more autonomy.
	My son knew that he couldn't have an Instagram account in middle school, but he's very responsible, very conscientious.
	When he joined the track team in 10th grade, now he's with a group of friends.
	He just went ahead and opened an Instagram account by himself, didn't ask me for permission, but that was appropriate in my family because he's really earned it.
	And so I don't spy on my son.
	I do trust him.
	And maybe he'll betray that trust, but you have to, of course, look, you have to go with what your kid is like and what the situation is.
	But we have to, the job of a parent is to work him or herself out of a job.
	That's something Greg and I say in our book.
	And it's hard with social media, but we have to try.
	I know.
	My God, I'm in denial about that fact because mine are still relatively young and it's painful to think about, but I know you are right.
	I want to talk a little bit about that, about the sort of the approach that you were speaking of in the Leckero project, because I'm a big believer in it and the total lack of autonomy for children today is a massive problem.
	And it's feeding into this.
	We'll pick it up there with John Height after this quick break.
	Don't miss a moment.
	Don't go away.
Reforming Democratic Institutions 00:05:56
	Got for Juden.
	Got for Lungbuka.
	Go so many, John.
	The three proposals that you have, among others, but the three to sort of address some of these issues, the catastrophic fall of the Tower of Babel, include harden our democratic institutions, reform social media, and prepare the next generation.
	So let's go through those.
	What do you mean by harden our democratic institutions?
	So the key to a healthy democracy is having good institutions.
	This is what distinguishes, if you go around the world, those places settled by Great Britain tend to have more stable democracy than those places settled by Spain, for example.
	And so, especially now that we're going through rapidly rising political polarization and cross-party hatred, and we're seeing some beginnings of political violence, which is very frightening, we have to make sure that our democratic institutions are trusted and trustworthy and that they can function even if things get a lot worse in terms of cross-partisan hatred.
	And so, for example, I'm so disheartened by what has happened with the Supreme Court in terms of, as I see it, I'm a nonpartisan centrist.
	As I see it, what Mitch McConnell did in denying Obama a Supreme Court nomination, I think, was a hardball baseball move that I think damaged the legitimacy and the respect for the institution.
	That was very bad at the Supreme Court for the country.
	And now where we are is, you know, many people on the left are not going to trust the Supreme Court.
	They don't think the current makeup is what it should be.
	Anyway, whatever you think about it, my point is just that it should not be as much of a partisan game to get the timing.
	The fact that we're picking judges based on how old they are.
	No, just an 18-year-old term.
	A lot of people have talked about this.
	Everyone should have an 18-year term.
	Every president gets an appointment every two years.
	Things like that.
	If we do that, that just regularizes the process.
	Now the process, of course, there's always politics in the process, but it's not, we're not fighting to the death because so much is at stake over each over each appointment.
	So it's, you know, and gerrymandering of electoral districts.
	There's just a lot of things we can do so that, you know, you want the Yankees and the Red Sox to have a good baseball game.
	You don't want, say, the Yankees to get to control all of the rules or the Red Sox.
	That'd be insane.
	We've got to fix the game and then we can have the two teams play play ball.
	Yeah.
	It's hard to find nonpartisans to oversee something like elections.
	I know that's one of your things, like make sure we have somebody we have in a position of trust to oversee the fairness of elections.
	It's hard to find nonpartisans.
	Right now it's like the Secretary of State and that's always a partisan person and they tend to push it for whatever side they're aligned with.
	But I don't know, like few people, the people who are truly nonpartisan don't get involved in government.
	True, but it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be that every person is nonpartisan.
	Suppose you had a commission to draw electoral districts in your state and the rule is you go for generally compact, you know, you can't have long stringy districts.
	Generally compact.
	Now you have some people on the left, some people on the right, but they're not far left or right.
	And of course they're partisans, but they also, they live in the same town.
	Maybe they're, you know, they have a lot in common.
	They can work it out just as the jury works things out.
	So there are ways to do this.
	And our present system is a mess.
	I'll add just as an asterisk, I think that as much as I agreed as a legal matter with Citizens United, I do think it opened up such a floodgate of corporate cash into campaigns that it made individual politicians beholden to like one donor instead of feeling any need to work across the aisle.
	And so I don't know exactly the reform that's going to solve that, but just because it's constitutional doesn't mean it's good and it's something we might take a hard look at.
	That's the right way to think about this.
	Think about it like if you love America, if you think that America is and has been and should be a beacon to the world about self-governance, that we can govern ourselves.
	We don't, you know, authoritarians, they can do certain big things well, but in the long run, they fail.
	We have to succeed.
	If you want the American experiment to succeed, you've got to think about the rules of the game.
	And whatever it takes, so we want people running for office to be responsive to their constituents.
	We want them to have a long-term view.
	The more they're incentivized to pay attention just to a few rich donors or just to their partisan extremes, the worse system of government we have and the more China ultimately wins.
	But I mean, as I say that, and I, I, you know, I said how I feel, but I hear the left saying, you know, hate speech isn't free speech all the time.
	You know, they said that literally, our, our pal Michael Knowles just caused a controversy on some con on some college campus recently.
	They said he's anti-LGBTQ.
	He's not, he doesn't really believe in affirming gender pronouns and all that.
	And they said, oh, no, we believe in free speech, but we just, but hate speech is not free speech, which of course it is.
	It's literally free speech and it's the reason the First Amendment was created and all that.
	So they want to burn down the First Amendment in the Constitution.
	I don't want to do that.
	You know, I just can see the consequence of why free speech laws are often ones that may not be absolutely perfect for the union.
	Okay.
	So let's move on to the second bucket of reforms, which is reform social media to make it less toxic.
	Now, whenever you say reform social media or regulate, people think what we're talking about is the government's going to decide who gets to speak.
	The government's going to decide what content is legal.
	No, no, no.
	Content moderation is an issue, and that's what almost everyone talks about.
	But what got us into this mess isn't that some people can post crazy conspiracy theories.
	They could always do that.
	Back before the internet, they could do that.
	What got us into this mess is that now, since 2009, the more outrageous something is, the more likely it is to spread.
	It's a change in the dynamics of the platforms.
	That's what has really, that's what knocked over the Tower of Babel.
Regulating Platforms Without Censorship 00:08:42
	That's what's doing us in.
	So in this bucket, of reforms to social media, it's things like just reforming the doing things so that things don't go viral so quickly.
	So one of the most important things we could do is actually verify, verify identity.
	It doesn't mean you have to post with your real name.
	You can still post anonymously.
	But if you want to post content, banks have know your customer laws.
	You can't just open an account with any bank and give a fake name.
	You have to show who you are.
	And I think it should be the same on at least the large platforms, the ones that really have an effect on our democracy.
	You can open an account, you can see what's going on, no problem.
	But if you want to reap the advantages of these viral dynamics on a platform that has a special protection from Section 230, the platform has a minimum obligation to verify that you're a human being, you're not a Russian agent or a Russian bot, that you're old enough to be using the platform.
	And actually, Elon Musk tweeted this.
	He said, authenticate all humans.
	So whether we're just authenticating that you're human, whether authenticating that you're a human, you're old enough, but a few things like this, that would knock out almost all the bots.
	And it would reduce some of the really nasty behavior.
	Now, who wants to be in a place where you say something and you're just attacked by thousands of accounts?
	We need to make these platforms, if they're going to be important to our democracy, we need to make them places where people aren't afraid to speak up.
	So that's the second bucket of reforms.
	Yeah, and there's a second layer of what do we do to protect our children.
	We talked about that in terms of online.
	Then the third is very interesting, and I love it, and it's a cause near and dear to my heart.
	Prepare the next generation.
	And this relates to the Let Gro project.
	Your position is, and I share it entirely, treating kids as fragile makes them so.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	So we are anti-fragile.
	This is a wonderful notion from Nassim Taleb.
	You know, glass is fragile.
	If you drop it, it breaks.
	Plastic is resilient.
	But there are certain things where if you drop them, they get stronger.
	And kids are like that.
	Obviously, I'm not saying physically drop your kids, but the point is, if you protect your kids, like if you protect their immune system so they don't encounter bacteria, you're not helping them.
	You're actually crippling the development of their immune system.
	And if you protect your kids, that nobody ever teases them, nobody ever insults them, they have no conflicts, you're crippling their emotional development.
	So we have to prepare them for a world in which a lot of people don't share their opinions.
	And sometimes they'll criticize them.
	And that used to happen on the playground.
	Now, we got concerned about bullying.
	And of course, bullying is a real thing, especially when it goes on for multiple days.
	It ruins a kid's life.
	So it's a fine line between preventing bullying and preventing conflict.
	We have to allow unsupervised conflict.
	Kids have to have a lot of unsupervised experience.
	And what we did in 2010 or so is they're supposed to have a lot of experience, but we put them on experience blockers.
	So this here, this is an experience blocker.
	Once you have it, once your kid is on an experience blocker, they're not going to have the normal sorts of conflicts.
	They're going to have, everything's going to be media through the phone.
	So we have to attend to child development.
	We have to give them a lot more unsupervised experience.
	That's what Let Gro is all about.
	I love that.
	I'm writing it down.
	In 2010, we put them on experience blockers.
	That's exactly right.
	Forget puberty blockers.
	We have our kids on experience blockers and it's the phone that you have right in your hand that you let your kid use or the one you gave him or her.
	This is so important to me.
	Okay, so both of these two and three in terms of your reforms are getting at one of my questions here, which is, and it relates to the entire discussion we've had over these two hours.
	The means to kill somebody socially can very much be found in social media.
	You know, the Twitter mob piles on with the retweets and so on, and they take somebody down, they cancel somebody, they ruin somebody's life.
	The means to kill is very much embedded in social media.
	But the desire to kill, is it new?
	Was that always there?
	Was it latent and sitting there?
	And we just finally found the means to express it?
	Or is the desire to kill amongst this younger set in particular related to the things we're talking about?
	If we get our kids, you know, quote, prepared, and if we don't treat them as fragile, and if we expose them to different ideas, and if we do all the things, are they going to be less likely to want to use the social media for evil and cruelty in this way?
	Yeah.
	Well, I think if they're mentally healthy, I think they will be stronger and kinder.
	And I think if you are anxious, insecure, and fragile, you're more likely to seek solace and comfort in a mob, in a movement, in a group.
	And when that group engages in something, you're going to want to fit in with that group.
	You're not going to have the guts to stand up against it.
	So I think for so many reasons, look, our kids' mental health is plummeting.
	And this is a humanitarian crisis.
	This is a national crisis.
	The surgeon general recently put out an advisory basically saying we have a mental health epidemic in this country for teenagers.
	So I can't say that if we give kids normal childhoods and we let them have conflicts and experiences on the playground, let them make teams, let them enforce rules, that's going to certainly be good for their mental health and their development.
	I can't say that's going to keep them from being nasty on social media.
	In fact, look, you and I know a lot of the people attacking us, almost all of them are adults.
	They had normal childhoods.
	So preparing them for adulthood alone isn't going to stop the viral dynamics.
	That's why I keep focusing on the architecture.
	It's not about content moderation.
	It's not about saying, oh, you can't say that.
	You're not allowed to say that.
	That's a dead end.
	We're never going to agree on that.
	It's very difficult to find truth, what is true in a tweet or a post.
	But we can change the dynamics so that at present, the nastier you are, the more outrageous you are, the more successful you are.
	Now that's the same way you wouldn't go to a kid who's mentally struggling and say, you know, with sort of a layout in front of him, here are all the ways available to ending your life.
	No sane human would ever present that to a kid who is struggling.
	And the same way, we shouldn't have social media companies sort of presenting to them the panoply of ways that their mental fragility can be exploited and used against others and sort of used for nefarious purposes.
	I want to say this.
	This is from the Lecro project as far as your mission.
	We reject the idea that kids are in constant physical, emotional, or psychological danger from creeps, kidnapping, germs, grades, flashes, frustration, failure, baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men, disappointing play dates, and or the perils of a non-organic grape.
	Somehow our culture has become obsessed with kids' fragility and it's lost sight of their innate resilience.
	Let Gro believes today's kids are smarter and stronger than our culture gives them credit for.
	I love this.
	I completely agree with this.
	And I think, what is it?
	How does it manifest?
	What should people do today?
	Because there's one thing later where you talk about tell your kid, I've got a homework assignment for you.
	You go home and you do something new on your own.
	Climb a tree, run an errand, make a meal.
	But so, realistically, you know, how does the parent, because I think most parents who are like you, who are like I am, they don't need to be told this.
	But the people who are holding on a little, who think maybe I am the helicopter parent, maybe I'm not preparing my kid, what are realistic steps they can take to sort of reel back?
	So, once you recognize that your kid has to learn how to do things on her own, that's your job as a parent.
	Now you can say, okay, well, let's talk about the things you could do on your own.
	And if you've never walked, you know, if you're six or seven, you never walk the dog on your own.
	Would you like to?
	So if you sit down with your kid and you say, you know, what are some things that you think you can do?
	Do you think, would you, you know, do you think you can go to the store and get milk for us?
	You know, you'll find that the kid actually wants to do things.
	Now, what we suggest at Let Grow is do this in elementary school, get your elementary school to do it.
	It's like all the kids are doing it.
	And if all the kids are coming up with something to do with their, you know, at home, an errand, make dinner for us, whatever it is, it's an amazing thing that happens when the kid does this.
	They are so, they're bursting with pride.
	And then they do it.
	They want to do it again.
	So when my daughter was six, we had her bring me lunch here in New York City.
	She had to cross a somewhat busy street.
	And I was terrified.
	And, you know, my wife sent her off, and I was waiting at the office.
	And I actually kind of like snuck around the corner to see.
Kids, Pride, and Social Media 00:02:17
	But the point is, of course, when she got to my office, she was just bursting.
	I mean, it was the most beautiful, beautiful thing.
	And a few experiences like that, and the kids realize, you know what?
	I can do things.
	Whereas the way we're raising kids is to believe you can't do anything.
	Everything's too hard.
	Everything's too dangerous.
	So I'll do it for you.
	And that's the way to raise a kid who becomes depressed, anxious, fragile, and even suicidal.
	And as you point out, let them play free play with kids of all ages where there's a social system where you get clipped, you know, before you get too out of line at usually at proportionate levels.
	And you learn.
	You learn by taking little risks and having them either rewarded or punished appropriately or sometimes inappropriately, but like you learn.
	And I love the distinction you drew between that experience and chronic bullying, which is much different.
	And you do need to step in on.
	Completely agree with all of that.
	My God, this has been a great, great discussion.
	I'm thrilled to meet you.
	I absolutely loved your book and I can't wait.
	What's the next one's coming out in 23, which is too long?
	What's it called?
	Because it's all about Tower of Babel, yes?
	Yeah, the title is Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.
	It's about how we live in a world in which there are no shared narratives, where this kind of chaos is going to be with us forever, as far as I know, at least for the rest of our lives.
	So how do we make the best of it?
	And I think we can.
	Well, I 100% would love to have you on when you release it to help promote it.
	And in between then and now, I'm going to be working on taking down the president of Princeton.
	Just kidding, just kidding.
	John, what a pleasure.
	Thanks for sharing your wit and intellect with us.
	We appreciate it.
	Thank you, Megan.
	What a pleasure to be talking with you.
	That was an in-depth discussion.
	Really enjoyed it.
	We're all talking about what are we secretly helicopter parents?
	Would we let our kids go get New York?
	Anyway, don't miss tomorrow.
	We've got the guys from the fifth column and we'll talk to you then.
	Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
	All the sparrows

Chapters

00:00:50 Why American Life Got Stupid
00:03:52 The Coddling of the Mind
00:13:34 Social Capital and Shared Stories
00:17:49 Childhood in an Operant Machine
00:25:10 Algorithms That Outrage Us
00:33:29 Performing for Likes and Virality
00:36:23 The New Culture of Outrage
00:50:50 Fighting Back Against Cancel Culture
01:06:06 Trump and Coarse Politics
01:09:14 The Teen Mental Health Crisis
01:21:20 Reforming Democratic Institutions
01:27:17 Regulating Platforms Without Censorship
01:35:59 Kids, Pride, and Social Media