Sam Harris speaks with Jonathan Haidt about the maintenance of a healthy society. They discuss the problem of orthodoxy, the history of political polarization in the US, the breakdown of public conversation, remaining uncertainty about Covid-19, motivated reasoning, the 2020 election, the future prospects for Gen Z, the effect of social media on the mental health of girls, Jonathan's experience with psychedelics, positive psychology, loss of self, the experience of awe, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
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I am here with Jonathan Haidt.
Jon, thanks for joining me again.
My pleasure, Sam.
So we're planning to do a two-part conversation here, starting with the topic that has been omnipresent and on everybody's mind for now some months, which is the COVID-19 pandemic.
And, you know, I wanted to talk to you about that just because of, you know, your expertise in social psychology and the way in which it's informing, or should be informing, our view of political polarization, the fraying of societies, concerns about social cohesion,
And everything that is a kind of knock-on effect of the, or a potential knock-on effect of the immediate concern here, which is epidemiological and economic.
And so we'll dive into that.
And then in the second half, I thought we could talk about our mutual interest in self-transcendence and the nature of consciousness and the kinds of methods people have used, and you and I have both used, to explore that terrain—psychedelics and meditation being two.
So this will be kind of a two-chapter conversation, and I'm looking forward to it.
But before we begin, John, just perhaps summarize your background briefly in terms of your intellectual life as it relates to psychology and politics, perhaps.
Yeah, so I think in a lot of ways, I started out on a very similar path to you.
I was a philosophy major in college, and I wanted to understand the meaning of life.
And then I went to graduate school in psychology, and I shifted over to social psychology and morality and emotion.
And I began studying how morality varies across cultures.
But as the American culture war heated up, I shifted over to looking at left right as being like different cultures.
So I started studying political polarization back in 2004.
And boy, is that a stock whose value has risen.
I mean, it's just reached insane valuations right now.
So that's what I've been studying.
And during so I actually got into it in part to help the Democrats win.
I was so upset that the Democrats in 2000 2004, just had no idea how to talk about morality.
But as I began to write the righteous mind, I really started reading conservative ideas and intellectuals and discovering that there are actually a lot of ideas out there that I didn't know.
And it's very valuable to hear other sides.
I kind of stepped out from being on a team.
And I, and since then, I've really just been trying to help everyone understand across the divide.
And I'm extremely alarmed about our democracy and its health.
So that's what I've been working on for the last 10 or 15 years, especially is how do we help people understand all the different moral matrices that they live in?
And thereby turn down some of the anger and make it possible to have pragmatic solutions of the sort that a democracy should be able to reach.
Yeah, you were one of the earliest people on some of these points.
You might have been the first person to signal just how dysfunctional the ivory tower's view of the political landscape has been.
I mean, so it's just natural within the academy to have a level of political bias that is, you know, just would be starkly dysfunctional anywhere else, which guarantees an echo chamber effect.
And you were, you know, very early on talking about how a lack of diversity of ideas was really socially and intellectually problematic.
And so you started the Heterodox Academy to shine more light on that.
Do you want to say something about that?
Yeah, sure, because it's very well connected to what we'll be talking about today.
So once I stepped out of the matrix and stopped being a member of a team fighting the other team, And, you know, just started being just a social scientist trying to figure out what the hell's going on.
I started noticing not just that we lean left.
That isn't a problem.
A field can function even if it leans, you know, two or three, if you've got two or three times as many people on the left as the right, that's not a problem.
And it wouldn't be a problem to reverse either.
We don't need balance.
What we need is a complete absence of orthodoxy.
So orthodoxy, you know, means that if you dissent, you will be punished.
And, you know, that's fine if your goal is cohesion.
You know, if you're an army marching into battle, maybe that's fine.
But if you're scientists seeking the truth, you know, anybody who's read John Stuart Mill knows he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
So that's what alarmed me.
As soon as I started looking at the polarization in the country, I saw it happening in my own field of psychology and saw it happening in most of the social sciences and humanities.
And I could see orthodoxy, I could see bad social science thinking, and I started getting alarmed by it.
I gave a talk in 2011 on how this was a problem for social psychology.
And to my field's credit, I didn't suffer.
Nobody, you know, I wasn't kicked out, people didn't get angry at me.
People generally agreed it's a problem, but it's been hard to really change things.
And that's what Heterodox Academy is trying to do.
Well, it was a problem way back then, but in 2016, the reckoning really seemed to happen, because what we witnessed there was a country divided along seams we had seen before, this heartland revulsion against the coasts and against the cosmopolitanism and elitism, or perceived elitism, of big cities and their liberal inhabitants.
And Trump managed to magnify that divide to a degree that I still think we're trying to grapple with what happened there and try not to repeat the same psychological experiment over the next six months.
And then I should also say that now the pandemic has somehow, you know, if it were possible to amplify that dynamic, it has.
So how are you viewing the current moment and what this quasi-quarantine has done to further expose this intellectual and tribal schism in the country?
Yeah.
So to understand where we are, you have to go back at least to the, well, let's go all the way back to the 1950s and 60s when America was pretty unpolarized.
The post-war world was an unusually, historically it was quite unusual, the mid-20th century and having very low levels of polarization.
There were liberal Republicans, there were conservative Democrats.
And for a variety of reasons, in the 70s, and especially in the 80s, we began to see almost like, you know, tectonic plates moving around, we began to have one party that had psychological progressives, and one party that had psychological conservatives.
So before then, things were all scrambled.
And, you know, rural people were often Democrats, and the Democrats were the party of the working man.
There was a lot of Mixing and matching.
And there was the possibility of bipartisan legislation.
A lot of legislation was bipartisan back then, but for a variety of reasons, we start getting sorting into types of people who are sorting by values.
I think Ronald Reagan put together a coalition that was not just economic pro-business.
It was also with the Christians and religious right and family values.
And this is much more dangerous because if you have coalitions based on interests, well, you can make deals.
You can trade off.
But when you have coalitions based on personality types that share values, well, now the other side is evil.
They are bad people.
And as the parties increasingly then became more purified in terms of density, that is, if it's, you know, if there's a lot of people per square mile, it votes Democrat.
And if there's a few people per square mile, it votes Republican.
And also very alarmingly by race, as the Republican Party is becoming more of the party of white people.
This these splits are very dangerous.
So I'm extremely alarmed.
I was extremely alarmed even back around 2010 2012.
And it is so much worse now.
And then there's the media environment, we can get into that later, perhaps, but changes in social media between 2009 and 2011, gave us much more of an outrage machine, adding on to cable TV, which has been causing problems for a while as well.
So it was really the table was really set for an election in which reality had Little grip on a lot of people and passions, anger, fury, gripped a lot of people.
I mean, it's basically straight out of the Federalist Papers where Madison writes about faction and the human tendency to faction.
If we hate the other side so much, we don't care about the common good.
And there was a lot of anger in the 2016 election.
Had there not been so much anger, had we not been so polarized, there's no way Donald Trump could have gotten elected.
So I think everyone needs to think whatever side you're on, if you care about the country, We need to figure out what do we do about this?
How can we how can we turn things down in the future?
Yeah, and the information piece is crucial here.
The fact that people can so successfully silo themselves and pre-stigmatize other sources of information or messages that they don't want to hear.
I mean, there's a level of confirmation bias and just allergy to data that doesn't fit your narrative, and conspiracy thinking that doesn't even recognize that it's conspiracy thinking.
In terms of just the public conversation we're having with one another and failing to have, there's something unrecognizable about this.
I don't know if that's just some kind of delusion that I've acquired based on it being delivered through new channels like social media, or if it's some recency effect, or if I'm just getting older.
To some degree, it's even ramped up in the context of this pandemic, where I see otherwise very smart, rational people, i.e.
not the usual tinfoil hat crowd, succumbing to degrees of motivated reasoning that, without apology and without apparent bandwidth to check themselves ever, and proving completely unsusceptible to argument, it's just Yeah.
Like there are no universally trusted sources of information that can resolve disagreements at this point, it seems.
Well, that's right, because you have to see people not as creatures seeking information, but as social creatures enmeshed in games of competition or war or conflict.
And when we're not, when the conflict level is low, and you put us in the right circumstances and institutions, We actually can find the truth.
And that's the magic of a university.
That's the magic of science.
But imagine a scientific field in which suddenly, let's take all the normal dynamics of science, and then let's put a lot of money in so that there's a huge amount of money riding on whether you get this discovery or patent.
Well, that would corrupt things.
And of course, that has happened to some degree in medicine in some areas.
In the social sciences, money doesn't play much of a role, but politics does.
And so you get as as tribal passions, and, you know, hatred of the other political party rises, you get the same kind of corrupting dynamic there.
So I do think it is a theme of the 2010s.
And I suppose of the 2020s, that it is actually getting harder to find the truth than it was 20 or 30 years ago, I believe, that is, despite the eat, we have obviously some kinds of Facts and truth are just fantastically easy.
I'm very grateful for Google and the Internet.
Obviously, many things are getting better.
But anything that is politically or morally tagged so that one side wants to believe and the other doesn't, in some ways, it is now harder to find the truth than it used to be.
At least that's what I'm coming to see.
In my own field in psychology, we've had this replication crisis.
And so this is a different mechanism.
We used to think that, you know, when I was in grad school, we learned that correlational studies are not very reliable, but experiments, wow, that's the gold standard.
You know, if it's a random assignment, double blind, you know, boy, that tells you what caused what.
But now we're finding that even a lot of our experiments don't replicate.
And so I think the attitude we have to take into the 2020s is a lot more humility.
We simply don't know what the truth is, no matter how fervently we believe we do.
And I imagine you're quite familiar with that kind of a mindset and issues of faith, but it infects all of us.
And I'm hopeful that this virus, this pandemic has humbled everyone because we were pretty much all wrong about a lot of things.
We're still wrong about most things or many things, probably.
Yeah, this has been an interesting ordeal of epistemology, really, this pandemic, because we've been dealing with patently unreliable information, you know, rumors leaking out of China, and then the overt attempt to suppress those rumors or a message against them by a communist regime that has every reason to worry about the perception of it in the world.
And then all of the tribal spin given to that circumstance by our own politics.
We have a completely deranged president who is concerned about the stock market and its effect on his chances of re-election.
We have a personality cult amplifying every one of his errant ideas.
But then we have just all these different vested interests and people without much political partisanship exposed to very different or likely very different outcomes with respect to the single variable of deciding to lock down society, right?
So you have people whose businesses can still be maintained once we lock things down, and Some of them even improve, right?
And then you have people for whom every aspect of economic life is going to grind to a halt, and these people may, on either side of this divide, they may be equally reasonable and equally respectful of science, and yet you can see the consequences of your economic concerns trimming down your ability to think clearly about what the data is suggesting at any time point.
It's been very interesting to witness, and I continue to believe that At every point along the way, you know, even when we, the truth is we still don't know how lethal this disease is.
That's right.
But we, at every point along the way, it has been prudent to try to stop the spread of the contagion, to spare our healthcare system, because we could see what was happening in Italy and other countries, and to use the time we were thereby gaining for ourselves
to ramp up testing and our ability to trace and isolate cases and to understand the virus and obviously develop therapeutics and ultimately a vaccine.
Now, we have proven surprisingly inept at using the time well, and that's something we have to figure out how to improve and understand, you know, going forward.
But it has always seemed prudent, even given the Absolutely predictable economic costs to err on the side of caution here because at every point along the way this has seemed considerably worse than the flu.
I mean the analogies to the flu have always seemed inaccurate.
And the question is, how much worse is this than the flu?
And reasonable people can debate that.
So for instance, there are very prominent people who are making claims like hospitals are coding more or less every conceivable death as a COVID death.
So the mortality statistics are completely fake right now.
Whether this is, I'm sure that that's happened in a few places, but this is either a very dangerous conspiracy theory or something we have to get to the bottom of immediately.
And it's very hard to tell, right?
I mean, you can't figure this out in two hours.
And who would you trust to put this claim to rest or not?
The New York Times isn't good enough, apparently.
So, I don't know how you think about how we move forward in this space where there are very few trusted gatekeepers of information, and the disparity between believing one thing and believing its antithesis is enormous.
That's right.
So, I'll go with you on your analysis on the first few weeks or month or two of this, which is That as long as we didn't know much about this thing, we didn't know what the death rate was, it could be 3%, 6%.
And for God's sakes, our doctors didn't even have masks.
So I think there was no, there was really no dispute that we had to do lockdowns.
At first, we just didn't know what was going on.
And we could not deal with it.
We had no idea where the high watermark would be.
You know, and I'm sitting here in Manhattan, where everything is peaceful, and the streets are quiet.
but it was pandemonium in the hospitals, and we had no idea how high the wave of death was going to crest.
And I think to their credit, Americans actually really did accept that.
I mean, Americans really did.
I was surprised that I think in those first weeks, we actually did get, obviously not like they did in China or other places using a lot more force, but Americans did go along with it.
And the surveys still show that most people support that.
But once we got through that first wave with enormous economic cost, which is also a personal cost.
Now, I think there are at least real alternative views that need to be discussed.
And if we had some sort of a reasonable, rational media system, a reasonable democracy with reasonable discourse norms, we could actually do it.
What I mean is, especially say the Sweden model, it is at least reasonable to say, okay, you know, they're doing it differently in different countries.
Well, let's look, how does it work?
You know, do they do they get immunity faster?
So as long as there was so much unknown, it actually would be really important to listen to the other side to listen to critics.
And that's the way that that's the way that we all get smarter is by having our confirmation biases challenged.
So I'm a big fan of that.
Now, unfortunately, we live in this crazy funhouse madhouse in which, as you said, there are national interests trying to distort things.
There are Russian operatives trying to use rumors to divide us.
We have a president who, when George W. Bush gave a call for us to come together, it was a beautiful call from a former president and for Trump to attack him on the spot.
That, to me, was one of the several just horrible low points of this whole thing.
It also just shows us how far from normal politics we've wandered because, you know, here we have a current Republican president vilifying a previous Republican president.
Who's making nothing more than a call for national unity and a transcendence of partisanship, and the current president can't even transcend his own thin-skinned concern.
That's right.
I know.
When that happened, I didn't get angry at all.
I was laughing.
It's like, oh my, this cannot be happening.
This cannot be happening.
So now we are so far beyond, we're just so deep into the absurd.
And so yeah, that's what we have to figure out.
Let me just put one, one distinction on the table is most Americans are pretty reasonable.
Most Americans are not that polarized.
You have to distinguish between the average and the sort of the dynamics of the system.
And so let's take just to take one example on a college campus, most students are pretty reasonable, but we've been, because of social media and other things, you know, the people who will use social media or mount protests can have a disproportionate voice.
Same thing in a democracy.
There's wonderful work by a group called More in Common, A British organization that surveyed America, they've done really wonderful work on studying polarization in the United States.
They find that Americans fall into about seven different groups based on their political attitudes.
And four of the groups, which is a large majority, they call the exhausted majority.
And these are people who are quite reasonable.
Two of the groups are on the left, one is centrists, one is people who are just disengaged.
So most Americans, you know, you can't Blame most Americans.
But because of the nature of social media, the nature of Congress, the nature of cable news, various people have megaphones that are pursuing either commercial interests or ideological interests.
And so you get absurdities.
Well, like Fox News saying, you know, that Remdesivir is bad and chloroquine is good.
And this is after the scientific studies have come out showing the reverse.
So what I'm saying is don't give up on Americans, but it's almost time to give up on the system or the network that we have.
And by give up on, I don't mean that there's no hope.
I just mean like, man, we can't just go back to normal.
We got to dig deep, figure out what's wrong and fix this so that this becomes the bottoming out that 2020 becomes, you know, the worst year in a long time.
And, uh, and it's something changes by the end of this decade.
How do you view the next, let's say, six months?
So the next six months is overshadowed entirely by the 2020 presidential election, right?
It's just going to be politics all the time.
When it's not pandemic, it'll be politics.
And We obviously don't know how much the economy is going to unravel in the meantime, but it seems like it's poised to unravel to an impressive degree.
I mean, we're certainly flirting with a real depression, if joblessness numbers are any indication.
And, again, the most hopeful predictions for a vaccine, which is really the only thing that will fully reset our circumstance with respect to public health, nothing arrives before, you know, something like, it would be a miracle if it arrived in January, right?
And even that is, very few people are imagining that it's sooner than a year from now.
And again, we've got to remind ourselves of how amazing that would be.
I think the fastest vaccine we've ever developed was four years for the mumps, and the average is 15 years.
One year would be a massive breakthrough.
And let's say we improve on that, and we get a vaccine by January.
Still, we have this period where not just our country, but the entire world has been pitched into a circumstance of real uncertainty, financially, economically, and I think as a result, politically.
How are you viewing the next six months?
There's just so many concerns on the table.
How do we even have a safe election?
If we can't vote by mail, how do we get people to actually vote?
What are you thinking about for the next six months?
So, you know, I completely agree that it's going to be all pandemic and Trump all the time with just sideshows over Biden and and other things here and there.
So there's no chance of the fever breaking until until after the election.
I'm certainly hoping that Trump is not is not reelected.
I think that, you know, as many people said, oh, well, you know, there are adults in the room the first year or two.
There were many good people in government.
And I think there are not so many of them at the upper level anymore.
So the point is that the craziness we've seen in the last year or two, it would get even worse.
So I think that if Trump is reelected, I think the damage to our democracy and our reputation in the world, our standing in the world, I'm terrified to think what would happen if Biden wins, or there could be some route in which he's not the nominee, or who knows what's going to happen.
But if if Biden wins, it would be great if we had a bold and inspiring leader.
And I, you know, I'm not expecting that Biden will rise to that level.
But, you know, who knows?
There is, of course, there's a chance for for a reset of a lot of things.
It's very hard to predict how things would play out.
The one the one thing I would question what you said is you say nobody is predicting a vaccine for a very long time.
Yes, that's true.
But, you know, this is one of those things, like we've been told a lot of things about what, about the virus, like don't wear masks and, you know, wash your hands for 20 seconds.
And it turns out a lot of that was either wrong or at least not based on evidence.
It is true that experts tell us it's likely to be a long time.
And you're right that no vaccine has ever been invented that quickly.
But, you know, there's a hundred, I just saw on the news the other day, there's a hundred vaccines that are in development and three or four of them are going into clinical trials now.
And of course, we're not, there's no way we're going to follow the old protocol where we, inoculate a lot of people and wait a year to see how many got sick.
No, we're going to do challenge trials.
People are going to volunteer like crazy to be infected with the virus to see if they have the immunity.
So I just raised this as just one example of how a lot of things that are put forth as facts about this, you have to at least actively look and say, okay, is this really a fact?
Do we really know this?
And you know, under what scenarios might this not come true?
And of course, if suppose one of these, you know, there's one just starting at NYU, just I saw it on the news on Friday, they're injecting, well, they're giving the vaccine to people this week, and then they'll start exposing them or some of them, I think, I'm not sure what the plan is exactly, but they'll have an answer within a couple months.
And so let's just suppose it works.
Well, that would really change everything.
And in a way that I think obviously could greatly benefit Trump.
What I'm hoping, you know, presidents, leaders often get a bump.
Because of a crisis, Trump got hardly any.
But, you know, it's the incompetence, which is what I'm hoping will turn off the middle of the country.
It's the it's the bumbling incompetence that I think is likely to be powerful for a lot of people who are not part of his base.
But if somehow, you know, if there's a scientific breakthrough and the vaccine comes quickly, a lot of people will say, see, it's just like Trump said, it'll just magically go away.
So, you know, I just think we can't it's very hard to game out how things are going to play out both scientifically and economically.
Yeah, yeah.
I would place a bet on what seems to be the pervasive incompetence at the moment.
I mean, just because even if we had a vaccine today that we knew worked, we have to roll that out to, you know, in our case, 350 million people.
And our struggle to even get testing going is instructive.
You know, so you just imagine having to produce the vials of vaccine, and if this is an injectable, right, as opposed to something that you can inhale.
Yeah.
It's daunting.
Yeah, but look, it could be invented in China.
We're all assuming that it's going to be invented by Americans, but there's a lot going on in Europe and Israel and China.
Then all the more reason to worry that we're not first in line to get it, right?
That's right.
Well, so I don't know how in the weeds you've gotten with Trump supporters.
I've commented on this in several places, and the thing about the Trump phenomenon that has been most mystifying to me is that among his supporters, and not even people who are unsophisticated, even people who I'm surprised to even discover they did support him at all, what I find that is truly mystifying and really just confounds any effort to have a reasonable conversation about politics
is a total unwillingness to admit that there's anything consequentially wrong with him.
Yeah.
That his lack of understanding of complex issues, that his cluster, his dishonesty, that any of this is in any way negative, right?
What I feel like I meet in trying to convince Trump supporters of anything It's just an absolute stonewalling on points that just seem objectively true, and my noticing them is not at all a sign of my own partisanship.
Just to say that Trump lies more than is normal.
in a politician.
That is as objectively true as the Pythagorean theorem.
There's just no possibility of debating that.
And yet even that will not be conceded.
Or if conceded, there'll be some assertion that it just doesn't matter.
All politicians lie, is the mantra you will reliably hear at that juncture in the conversation.
And there's something like a hundred points like that.
It's hard to understand what is at the root of it because This is not an ordinary form of tribalism.
This is not like members of, you know, the Christian right who are Christian fundamentalists and they have a whole worldview organized around their, you know, having grown up evangelical or whatever, and now they're voting for whoever it is, George Bush, because he's on their side and he's going to put in the right conservative judges and block abortion.
It's not part of a whole system of belief like that.
It's just In many cases, the only thing that seems to be organizing it ideologically is a revulsion at the status quo, you know, that was repudiated in the 2016 election.
The business as usual that Hillary Clinton represented We don't want any more of that, and also we probably don't want to pay any more in taxes.
And you get those two variables clattering around a person's brain, and it has summed to something like a cultic unwillingness to admit the obvious just across the board whenever the conversation turns to Trump.
Yes, so let me give you a handy little psychological tool that can explain this.
So there's a wonderful term, there's research by Tom Gilovich at Cornell, who studied motivated reasoning.
And I got this little formula from him.
He says, when we want to believe something, we don't look at the evidence and say, is the evidence mostly on the side that I want to believe?
We just say, can I believe it?
Do I have permission to believe it?
Meaning, can I find one example, one argument, one piece of evidence?
And if I can, I'm done.
I stopped thinking because if someone challenges me, I can point to this piece of evidence.
Whereas if you don't want to believe something, you say, must I believe it?
Am I forced to believe it?
So I've had the same experience as you.
I have several, you know, I communicate with a lot of people on the left and the right, and I have some very smart correspondents who are Trump supporters.
And I've had that exact debate with him about whether there's something wrong with him.
And, you know, the psychologists, the psychiatrists say the most likely, most likely diagnosis is narcissistic personality disorder.
He makes everything about him.
And you and I think that that's as objective a fact as the sun rises in the east, that he does that more than other people.
But once you understand that everybody's asking, not is it true, but must I believe it?
Well, the answer is always no.
There's almost nothing that you have to believe.
Certainly not anything about politics or anything that can't be measured exactly precisely and with no, no, you know, questioning about what the rules are.
So you and I can point to, well, look at the fact checkers, they find, you know, 10,000 errors.
Well, you know, the Trump supporters will simply point out that the fact that those fact checkers work for the, you know, the, the Washington Post or, or Snopes or other places that have known left wing biases, and they're right.
So it's very hard to get at the truth.
And, you know, I think, of course, there is a truth.
But when Trump supporters ask, must I believe it?
The answer is always no.
And one of the best ways to get a little bit more humility here and calm down the anger a little bit is to say, just always turn it around and say, is there some different issue on which my side is just as obtuse?
And, you know, I think people on the right would point out that, well, you know, people on the left, pretty much anything about race and gender and LGBT and immigration.
I mean, there's all these issues.
But as you know, I spend a lot of time hammering the left for its epistemological vices as well.
So I get it from both sides.
Yet, I mean, when you just look at the way in which we have shed influence in the world in the last few years, where we have just by turns terrified our allies and gratified our actual adversaries.
It's just, it's mind-boggling that you have something like 40% of American society that sees absolutely no problem with this.
I mean, worse, they see this as some form of progress.
Yeah.
Okay, so here's the metaphor that's helped me understand the otherwise just unfathomable state of our country now.
So I began to feel around 2014, 2015, that something was deeply wrong.
Like, like something has changed about the universe.
And I played with this, I just had this uncomfortable feeling for a couple of years.
And finally, like a year or two ago, I started working this metaphor into my talks.
Suppose that suppose that God one day, just doubled the gravitational constant.
So you know, in our universe, there's like 25 physical constants, the mass of an electron, things like that.
And if God just said one day, let's just double the gravitational constant just for fun, like everything would go totally haywire in the physical world.
And, you know, planets would move in their orbits and planes would come out of the sky and it would just be, you know, bizarre and disastrous.
And I think that what happened is basically that, but in the social world, and that is, you know, connectivity is generally good, but we're now hyper connected.
That's changing a basic parameter of the universe.
We're so connected.
But it's more than that.
It's not just, you know, like, oh, we're, you know, because giving us telephones and email, I mean, we've been getting more and more connected for centuries, and that's generally been a good thing.
It's the nature of the connectivity.
It's connectivity in which we are communicating, not privately, but in front of an audience, and the audience rates the communication.
So this, I think, is what social media has done to us.
That is, when Facebook and MySpace came out, it was just You know, look, here's my page.
Here are all my friends.
Here are the bands I like.
You know, there's some showing off, but it wasn't toxic, and it was not bad for democracy.
I have an article in The Atlantic last November with Tobias Rose Stockwell, where we show how, beginning in 2009, when Facebook added the like button, and then Twitter copied it, and Twitter added the retweet button, and Facebook copied it, and then they both algorithmized their news feeds much more.
So between 2009 and 2012, the nature of human connectivity changed radically in ways that I think are very, very bad for democracy.
That is, it wasn't just that we could now talk to each other privately for free.
It's that a lot more of our conversation was now in public being rated, which means it was inauthentic, often dishonest, and with a lot more intimidation.
You know, I hate Twitter, I hate going on Twitter.
I'm also fascinated by it.
And I, you know, I, it's like opening a garbage can and watching rats and cockroaches fighting, and there's something fascinating about it.
But things really changed after 2012.
And the Russians noticed it, and they've been trying to mess with our democracy for 50 years.
In 2014 is when they realized, hey, there's this great outrage machine that the Americans have built for us.
And it's we don't have to go over there, we don't have to fly agents over to mess them up, we can just sit here in St.
Petersburg to do it.
So you know, I think that, you know, I hear your incomprehension, I hear your, you know, your frustration, things are terribly wrong.
And we could blame We could blame those Trump supporters.
We could say they must be insane.
They must be badly motivated.
But that's not likely to be true.
They're likely to be normal human beings.
And so I think we have to look elsewhere.
That's why I'm so mystified because, you know, the people I have in my personal life who are Trump supporters, I know to be, you know, smart and well-intentioned and It's just that they're completely aloof with respect to all of the downsides of his personality and what, to my eye, are the obvious risks being magnified by those downsides.
Yeah, what an amazing species we are that we can believe such obviously false things!
I think I think there's some people who've done some work on that.
Yeah.
So, yeah, no, I agree that the style of communication and it's created an information space where it really is just total war all the time.
That's right.
Information in terms.
That's right.
Yeah.
And that's no way.
Yeah.
And I don't think our democracy can survive that.
I think that if things keep going the way they're going, our country is going to fail catastrophically.
I'm not predicting that it will, because I don't think things will keep on going the way they're going.
But the trends are really bad, and they've been really bad for at least 10 years, more than that even.
So what would you change?
I mean, if you could actually get Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg and other people to just take your advice, what would you change?
So yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of systems I'd change, including, you know, elections and Congress and all that.
But if we're going to focus on social media, Tobias and I offered a couple of suggestions.
The most important one, the most important single thing that we think needs to change is there has to be some kind of identity verification for our major platforms.
We're not saying that you have to post with your real name.
We understand that there's often a need to use an avatar or a fake name.
But if democracy is moving into a virtual public square, if what's fundamental to our democracy is how we engage with each other, And we're no longer doing that in newspapers and real public squares.
We're now doing it on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, places like that.
I think these places have an obligation to create a kind of public square that, that fosters some sort of understanding, some sort of working out, and that really cracks down on intimidation.
It is stunning to me that you can make death threats, rape threats, racist rants.
You can say anything you want.
And the worst that'll happen to you is, you know, eventually your account will be closed down and then you could just make 10 others with no verification.
And the Russians figured this out long ago and a lot of Americans do it too.
So if we're serious about having a democracy that has a public square and that public square happens on these platforms, I think there has to be at least enough skin in the game that, or accountability, that when people open an account on, on Facebook or Twitter, Instagram, or any of the major platforms, Let's suppose it worked like this.
The platform would send them out to some other entity.
Maybe it's a non-government entity.
It's a non-profit.
The internet has a number of those.
And that entity just verifies that you are a real person associated with a country and that you are over 18 or not.
If you're under 18, there might be another cutoff like 13.
Because right now, any 11 year old can get on any platform that she wants to.
And that's a whole nother set of issues we can talk about mental health effects on girls, and all kinds of other effects on teenagers.
But I think that's the most important thing is that we have to reduce trolling intimidation.
You know, I don't want to go into a public square where anybody can like, you know, you know, hit me over the head or throw acid my face and run away laughing.
And there's nothing I can do about it.
That's number one.
Yeah, so is there a tension between that and our broader concern about free speech?
I mean, obviously these are private platforms and they can regulate speech however they want, but given that they're essentially becoming internet infrastructure, And they are becoming a kind of public square for which there's no alternative.
The erring on the side of just basically defaulting to the Constitution has seemed tempting.
How do you think about free speech concerns?
Sure.
So I would hate to live in a country in which if somebody espoused an opinion that somebody else or the government didn't like, that that person could be arrested or punished.
So to me, that's the core of free speech.
There are no thought crimes.
There are no speech crimes other than Obviously, intimidation threats, there are certain categories that are not constitutionally protected.
So I would not want, I don't want a solution in which platforms have to look at what you say and judge each thing you say.
What I'd rather is that it's not focused on the thing you say, it's focused on the features of the space.
And so if, as long as we allow anonymous trolls in, well, Do you have a constitutional right to say whatever you want without anyone knowing who you are?
I don't think so.
Do you have a right to reach millions of people?
No, you have a right to say what you want without being punished.
But as is sometimes said, freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach.
The platforms are under no obligation to let you reach millions of people with claims that chloroquine is a miracle cure.
That's not free speech.
So I think these platforms, they're not individuals talking in the public square, and they're not newspapers.
They're somewhere in between.
And our law doesn't quite account for that yet.
But I think just as we have a lot of responsibilities placed on newspapers and magazines, I think we need some sort of in-between thing for these platforms.
And that means, no, you can't just open 100 accounts and say whatever you want all day long and attack people without anyone knowing who you are.
Right.
So now, what are your thoughts about the 2020 election and, you know, now the concern about the Biden campaign and his viability?
Really on two fronts.
I mean, so that we have the Tara Reid allegations, and surrounding those we have this Fairly credible charge of hypocrisy against the left because, you know, we're on the left.
We're all about me too and believe all women but then the inconvenient woman shows up making fairly shocking claims about the
only candidate standing between us and four more years of Trump, and what we see is either a massive disinclination to even hear the allegations, and once that becomes untenable, what we've now seen is an analysis of the allegations that does, frankly, suggest a kind of double standard, where we
We could go hard against Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated for the Supreme Court based on more or less nothing but the fairly dim memory of one person.
And we're in a similar situation here and behaving rather differently.
I mean, the way I reconcile this, you know, is just that I think Trump is so dangerous.
I think four more years of him would be so awful for many of the reasons you And I do think there's something especially awful about doubling down on Trump for a second term.
I mean, what that says about our country.
That's right.
It would validate that it wasn't a fluke.
We really meant it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We know exactly what we're buying here and we're going to buy it again for four more years.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just, I don't know how American standing recovers.
I mean, we literally have to have the Messiah come for 2024 to reboot But so given that, you know, I honestly don't care what is true here.
I mean, it's like I can own that he might have done something absolutely awful, which should in a normal world disqualify him for the presidency.
I don't feel like I know that.
I don't feel like I don't know that.
I just feel that whoever Joe Biden is or has been, he's better than Trump.
Yeah.
Just his facade of professionalism as a normal politician and a normally empathic person is so much better than what Trump manages to muster as a person that there's really nothing to decide here.
For me, that seems to skirt hypocrisy.
I'm not inclined to treat Tara Reade's allegations differently than Blossie Ford's, if that's the apt comparison.
It's just that the context is so different that, in this case, they don't matter.
I consider this a political emergency that only has one adequate resolution, which is somebody other than Trump becomes president.
Yeah, so without getting into the details, I have not been following the story closely enough to have a view about what might have actually happened.
But the key thing that I would want us to focus on here, if you're asking about the implications for the election, is enthusiasm, passion, things like that.
So Trump won the election.
He didn't in 2016, not because people loved him and wanted him.
But because we have negative partisanship in this country that is since 2004.
We vote more political scientists tell us that, you know, the the strategy for president used to always be you run to the outside to get your party's nomination.
And then because America is a fairly moderate country, you have to run to the center to get them to win the general.
And in 2004, Karl Rove correctly calculated that the center had shrunk so much that the key was turnout.
And so they went with gay marriage to try to inflame the evangelicals, and it worked.
They got higher turnout on the right.
So since then, that has been more of a winning strategy and negative partisanship.
Voting against what you don't want is more powerful than voting for what you do want.
And that, I think, explains how Donald Trump was able to win In 2016, when it seems as though he didn't even want to win.
He made no preparations for it.
He didn't spend any of his own money.
He didn't campaign that hard.
So he, you know, Hillary Clinton ran a terrible campaign and against someone who wasn't trying to win and was a complete mess and had no ground game and didn't play by the the normal rules.
And even though she won the popular vote, he still did win by the recognized rules of the game.
So and that's because Her people were not passionate.
And, you know, the tone in your voice just before, when you were saying why, of course, you're going to vote for Biden, was similar to what a lot of people were saying about Hillary.
Obviously, they were very different issues, but people weren't passionate about her.
But they would say, well, yeah, but I mean, but she's better than the alternative.
So that is how Trump won.
He should have lost in a landslide, but he didn't.
My fear is that while Biden is not an inspiring candidate, I do believe the people have known him for a long time who say that He's a fundamentally decent man.
That doesn't mean that he didn't do something inappropriate with a young woman in the Senate.
I have no idea.
But there was not a lot of enthusiasm for him before.
People generally like him.
Democrats, I think, were okay with him, but a lot of groups were not.
And the big question was, will the people who wanted Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, will they come back to vote for him in the fall?
And now you add in this, which is going to alienate a lot of people, particularly women and particularly young women for whom these issues are much more salient these days.
So I'm extremely concerned about the fall election, because I think the Democrats, you know, the Republicans, I was I was fully expecting the Democrats to win no matter who the nominee was, unless it was Sanders, I was expecting the Democrats were going to win because of the passion issue.
But now, I don't know.
I don't know what's going to happen.
And if Biden is not, if a number of constituencies are not enthusiastic, they're not going to turn out, especially if there are still risks to turning out, and especially if mail-in voting is not easy and universal.
For God's sakes, it's, you know, during a pandemic, of course, we should all be voting by mail, or by internet, or by other remote methods.
But everything's so politicized, and there's so much incompetence that that may not happen.
So I don't know what is going to happen, and it's another reason for alarm.
What about the perception, this is the second thing that's dogging Biden, the perception of his senescence, essentially.
I mean, he's obviously lost a step with respect to his speech and memory.
And again, we're in an environment where There is an asymmetry here with respect to the way his glitches play to the average audience and the way Trump's glitches play.
I mean, Trump is a producer of word salad much, if not most of the time, and yet it doesn't make him seem old.
That's just more Trump, right?
It's like he's got the energy of a 20-year-old on Adderall.
Yeah.
So he's full of life and he's just chaos, whereas every single glitch, every hiccup in his speech for Biden, you're holding your breath hoping he can get to the end of the sentence.
Yeah.
The optics are so different.
It's surprising.
I mean, this is the other thing that worries me.
No, that's right.
This is why I was not a fan of Joe Biden.
I mean, I like him personally as a person.
I agree with you.
He's, you know, he's a reasonable person.
But he was, you know, he ran for president twice before he was a bad candidate.
And he was not he's not a good campaigner.
He's not eloquent.
And, you know, as a psychologist, what I can add is that the research on cognitive aging is just stunning.
People are at their peak in terms of fluency and speed in their 20s.
And then it's kind of downhill, downhill from there.
Until you get to your 50s or 60s, and then this downward slope accelerates.
So in your 70s, it really accelerates.
So most 70 year olds are still doing okay on cognitive tests, although they're not nearly as sharp as they used to be.
But as you go beyond 70, by the time you get to 80, most 80 year olds are not doing so well.
Obviously, you know, some are.
But if Biden was not a good candidate long ago, when his brain was much younger, I think it's, you know, there's not much reason to think that he's going to be much better now.
And I think we're seeing the signs of that.
So as you say, it's also the issue of vitality and that matters in politics.
People want a vigorous leader, not one who seems frail or scattered.
So for a lot of reasons, you know, I think that obviously most or many Democrats wish they had perfect candidate.
Many Democrats think that there were better candidates.
And with the, with the Tara Reid allegations, now the, you know, the candidacy is even weaker.
So my God, is this a drama?
I mean, just when you think it can't get more insane, it gets more insane.
So who do you think he should pick for his VP?
That I don't know.
I've not given any thought to.
I imagine that he committed to—well, I don't know why, but he committed to picking a woman, I suppose, knowing that these allegations were coming.
So once he's done that, I don't have—so I'm not a political prognosticator.
I can't read the horse race politics.
I don't have a view on that.
Part of your analysis of what social media has done to us and the new kind of balkanization of our epistemology, you've spent some time focusing on the young, I mean, you know, Gen Z and below.
I mean, now we're soon dealing with a cohort of people for whom social media is as common a fact of the world as water, which is to say there's never been a time where they were without it.
We're also having a younger generation that seems destined to graduate into an economic environment that is just as objectively punishing as any in our lifetime.
I mean, when you think of what it'll be like to be looking for a job in six months, Plus we reboot here in some way that just is, ushers in a renaissance of a sort that will be fundamentally surprising.
It's hard to see how we escape a fairly dismal economy for a good long while.
How do you think about the cohort you're currently teaching as undergraduates?
What's the near future hold?
Yeah, so paradoxically it could be, it could end up in the long run being good for them.
That is, you know, clearly it's going to be devastating to their economic Prospects in the near term and research on previous generations that graduate into bad economies shows that it does hurt their earnings for the rest of their life on average.
So I'm not saying this is good overall, but the trajectory, the outlook for Gen Z was horrific.
It was terrible.
Their rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide have been spiking upwards since 2012, roughly, especially for, well, suicide is up for both, both genders, but depression, anxiety is especially up for girls.
And so Greg Lukianoff and I wrote this book, The Coddling of the American Mind, and we think the two major causes, there are many, but the two major causes are the vast overprotection, the safetyism that we put on kids in the 90s, we stopped letting them play outside, we told them the world was dangerous, we let them just play with devices inside, and the normal risk-taking, the normal adventures, the normal testing the limits of your physical abilities, and that we denied them beginning in the 90s and early 2000s.
And so this, we think, is the major reason why Gen Z is coming out so much more fragile and depressed and anxious than the millennials were.
So we're talking about kids born 1996 and later.
The other factor, we believe, is too early exposure to social media.
And here, I actually have some news to report, brand new news.
The long-running debate over screen time, I think, is actually nearing a resolution.
That is, in the coddling of the American mind, Greg and I focused on social media.
That's what we thought was worst.
But we did sometimes refer to screen time or that parents should limit screen time.
And some other researchers pushed back on us and said, no, look, you know, here's our evidence is that the amount of hours spent on screens isn't related to mental illness.
And then Gene Twenge and I reanalyzed data and are basically able to show that consistently, if you look at almost all the datasets, that show no overall effect of all screen time?
Well, if you dig in, and you say, okay, not all screens, including TV, but rather just social media, and not all kids, but just girls, then you consistently find a relationship between heavy social media use and depression and anxiety.
And it shows up in lots of data sets, lots of different studies, and experiments back this up that when people go off of social media, they tend to get happier.
So anyway, all I'm saying is, I don't think parents need to freak out about screens per se if what they're concerned about is depression, anxiety, but they should still look out if what they care about is that their kids actually do other things like go outside or learn to climb trees or go out with their friends in person, which of course will happen again someday, but not this year.
Yeah, well, so what do you do with the fact that now a concern about the dangers, even invisible dangers, out in the world seems all too warranted, right?
So now we have a cohort of kids.
I mean, I've got two daughters, 6 and 11, who are now quarantined and having a fairly unusual experience.
I mean, happily, our limitations on screen time have been impressively relaxed, so they're enjoying that.
But tell me about social media.
Is your 11-year-old on Instagram?
No.
No, no, no.
I'm going to be as conservative as can be achieved on that front.
But there are elements of it that are starting to leak into her experience now just because the classroom is on Zoom and they have common projects where they're commenting on each other's work.
They're texting, and so there's communication in front of an audience happening, you know, a fair amount.
And how that differs from social media really is just that it's not open to the rest of society.
It's just her among her friends.
But even there, it just seems to me like a whole new module has been installed in her brain, which is Her attention is being captured by somebody else's response to something she put out there, and that has many of the features that would concern one with social media.
Yeah, that's right.
So to the extent that screens foster direct face-to-face interaction, talking on the phone by FaceTime, that's all great.
There's no problem at all there.
I actually bought my son an Xbox when this all hit.
He'd wanted one for a long time.
The research doesn't seem to show that it's related to anxiety depression, although it is very addictive and it does tend to fill up all the available time.
So he has three hours a day on Xbox, but it's great that he, you know, he's really playing it with his friends.
So to the extent that these devices facilitate real direct interactions, that's great.
But yes, as you say, the problem is a lot of these are indirect interactions where people are rating and commenting, and that seems to be especially hard on girls.
So I think this is so this could get worse.
But here's where I think things could get reset.
There is actually danger out there now because of the virus.
They're not that much for kids.
But it's a physical thing.
Whereas what what we were getting to before this hit was emotional safety.
We were treating kids that as though they were so fragile, that if they were exposed to bad news, that they would somehow be damaged.
And what I'm hoping is that this this pandemic We'll reset some of our safetyism and move us away from sort of the trivial things we've been looking at, the effort to protect kids' self-esteem, the effort to protect them from words and ideas.
So having more adversity in your childhood could end up being beneficial.
And this is the idea of anti-fragility, which is really central to our book.
The word was coined by Nassim Taleb.
You know, lots of people have many views about him.
But I'll just say that that idea, but that idea, I think that idea is a good one.
I should say he has views about many people, too.
Yes, I've noticed.
But so I just want I don't want to miss this one point.
So but what you just said suggests to me there's another trap to fall in here, which is if I'm trying to curate, just go back to where what you just asked me with respect to my allowing my daughter the social media experience.
I mean, one, the impulse there is to protect her from the onslaught of negative or, you know, destabilizing or anxiety-producing information that I don't want her to have.
And it seems to me there are two potential pitfalls there.
Just this is another form of coddling, right?
I'm trying to protect her from something that she should develop the tools to just assimilate, or one could say that.
And then there's just this other feature, which I think is natural to worry about, which is if all of her friends are on Instagram and she's the one who isn't, well then there's just a social exclusion penalty that you would imagine a young teen would pay.
That's right.
Yeah.
So to take your first point, It does seem as though I might be contradicting myself.
I'm saying that in general, kids should be exposed to adversity, they should learn from experience, and you should let them make mistakes.
Yes, in general, that is true.
But there are certain things such as, let's say, alcohol, heroin, prostitution, gambling, where we say, you know what, my 11 year old is not ready for that, you know, maybe when she's 16, 18, or well, obviously not prostitution.
But the point is that there are certain things that an adolescent brain is just not not ready for.
And what I found from speaking with a lot of middle school and high school kids, is I asked them, all right, so you know, how many of you have been shamed on social media?
Okay, all hands go up.
And I say now, how many of you think that being shamed on social media toughens you?
That is, You go through it and you say, you know what?
I don't care what people think of me.
You know, I've been shamed so many times.
I don't care anymore.
No hands go up.
How many of you think it makes you more cautious, more fearful?
You double check and triple check yourself.
You're not authentic.
Most hands go up.
So there's something about public shaming and exposure That is especially unhealthy for middle school kids and especially for girls.
So I'm not saying, you know, it's a losing battle to keep it out of high school.
But look, the minimum age you have to be 13 to get an account.
But by fifth or sixth grade, most of the girls have it in many schools.
And that is something that I'm really trying to change.
As long as there is now evidence that social media is particularly bad for girls.
No, the millennials weren't harmed by it.
They didn't get this until they were in their 20s.
But I suspect that middle school is the place to focus.
I think we really need to try to get social media out of middle school.
And that would solve your second question.
Because yes, if it's only your kid, you know, when I kept my son off of video games, he did feel excluded because the other boys were all on it all day long.
So it has to be done systemically.
And that's why I think middle school is the place to focus.
If anybody's listening to this with any influence over middle school, try to get a school wide policy that discourages parents from letting their kids from discourages anyone from having a social media account until they get to high school.
Wait till they're 14 or so.
Wait till they're in high school.
But you know, middle school is so hard already, especially on girls.
So don't make it harder.
So now let's pivot to topics which, you know, on their face may seem impressively detached from our the current concerns, but not really.
I mean, I want to talk about Human well-being and experiences of the positive end of the spectrum of human psychology and how we conceptualize this terrain and this is, if anything, an interest in this has been heightened by our current circumstance because so many people have been forced into something that impressively resembles a kind of retreat, right?
I mean, people are experiencing solitude to a degree that is not normal for them.
And for most of us, there's been a forced reprioritization of values.
We have a vantage point from which to see how we've been living all these years and the kinds of things that have
Captivated our attention and much of that has been stripped away or at least shuffled to a degree that many people are experiencing even a silver lining to this quarantine because they're experiencing better time with their families in many cases or this heightened sense of uncertainty the sense that really anything can happen at any time and That's always been true, right?
But we live most of our lives as though we take a lot for granted, and taking those things for granted amounts to a kind of death denial and a sense of control that has never really been factual.
So there's a lot to motivate a conversation about things like meditation and psychedelics and what they can reveal about the nature of the self and experiences of self-transcendence.
So, let's dive into the deep end of the pool, John.
Perhaps to start, give me a sense of your background here.
I know you spent some time in India at some point, either in graduate school or as a postdoc, but remind me how you came to be interested in these topics.
Sure.
So, because I study morality, I've been interested in moral transformations.
You get that from religious experiences.
William James' book Varieties of Religious Experience is full of all these sudden moral rebirth from an encounter with God.
So I've always been interested in these self-transcended experiences and their capacity to change people's moral nature.
But actually, there's a very personal reason for it.
And I've been looking forward to talking about this with you, because you've been out on this for a long time, talking about psychedelics.
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