Securities

Jonathan Haidt on American structural stupidity and the post-Babel world (Parts 1 & 2)

Description

We have a great new two-part “Securities” podcast that launched this morning with notable NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt, who co-wrote the book “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” and also co-founded the Heterodox Academy, recently wrote an extended essay in The Atlantic on “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” (which Josh summarized in a nice tweet thread).

In part one, we walk through Haidt’s Tower of Babel metaphor and why Americans can’t talk to one another; the travails of free speech; and why social media is creating “structural stupidity” in America. Then in part two, we explore what the range of potential solutions are, including how social media products can reduce trollish amplification as well as how founders and CEOs can change their corporate cultures to enhance the growth of their Gen Z employees.

Transcript

This is a human-generated transcript, however, it has not been verified for accuracy.

Part 1: Jonathan Haidt on American structural stupidity and the post-Babel world (Part 1)

Chris Gates:
Three, two, one.

Danny Crichton:
Hello, and welcome to Securities by Lux Capital, a podcast and newsletter that explores science, technology, finance and the human condition. I'm your host, Danny Crichton, and joining me is Josh Wolfe. Josh, how are you doing?

Josh Wolfe:
I'm doing especially well today.

Danny Crichton:
So joining the two of us today is a very special guest. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU's Stern School of Business, and the author most recently of The Coddling of the American Mind, How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation For Failure, which he co-wrote with George Lukianoff. He's the author of two other notable books, and was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In addition to his writing and teaching, he has co-founded a number of organizations including the Heterodox Academy. John, welcome to the show.

Jonathan Haidt:
Thanks so much Danny and Josh.

Danny Crichton:
I want to start with a recent essay you wrote in the May issue of The Atlantic entitled, provocatively enough, Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Has Been Uniquely Stupid. Which begs the question, why have the past 10 years of American life been uniquely stupid?

Jonathan Haidt:
So we've all read dozens of articles or at least seen the headlines of social media's destroying everything. So I've had the sense that things have gone haywire since about 2014 when my friend Greg Lukianoff came to me and said, "John, things are going haywire in a weird way on campus." I've been trying to figure out what changed, what's different?

And as a social psychologist, what I've come to see, what I've come to believe is that social media is different from everything else that came before, in that it's not just about how information moves, it's actually changed social relationships and the degree to which we're afraid of each other. And it's the ability to attack people, shame them, call them names anytime, anywhere, no context, no accountability.

It's this low level intimidation that has made many people go quiet or be afraid of saying what they're thinking. And when we lose dissent, when you have an organization or a group, a classroom, a company in which suddenly people are afraid to challenge the prevailing wisdom or the dominant view, then you get what I call in the essay, structural stupidity. Americans aren't getting stupider, but if you put a bunch of us together in a university or anywhere else, we have become stupider because we're afraid to speak up and challenge. There.

Josh Wolfe:
There's this German philosopher, you're going to remember who it is and I forget, but the idea of the spiral of silence.

Jonathan Haidt:
Exactly. This is an incredibly powerful concept. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, I think is how you pronounce it. She was a West German political scientist. What she argued, this is such a cool idea, it's that our minds have what she called a quasi statistical organ in them to measure public opinion. We're really sensitive to what do people around here think? And after somebody got an award or something or you watch a movie and you kind of want to get a sense before you criticize it or praise it, what is the general prevailing opinion? So we're really good at that. We've been good at that for a million years.

Josh Wolfe:
Socially sampling the people around us and the moors and the sentiment.

Jonathan Haidt:
That's right. We're trying to get a sense of it. And so, she was talking about how mass media, this is right in the 1970s, how mass media can change things and distort it and whatever you think the edge of public opinion is, if the people on the edge, let's say the moderates, let's say you're in a politically radical time, and the moderates, they say things that you can say, but they're right on the edge. And if somebody attacks them and then they go silent, well, now actually everyone's quasi statistical organ actually now picks up that the range of permissible opinion is further to the extreme than it was.

Well, now you've got a new set of moderates and now if somebody attacks them, they go silent, or maybe they just go silent because they've picked up that they're over the edge now. And before you know it, you have this spiral where over the course of let's say a cycle is a week or two back then, over the course of several cycles or a few months maybe opinion compresses.

Well, now add in social media where it's not a cycle of weeks or months. It can be a cycle of hours or days at most. And so, you can get very, very rapid movements where some opinion, which was perfectly legitimate one day, is a justification for being fired just a little while later.

Josh Wolfe:
Now, one of the things that we see in markets is the phenomenon of bubbles and busts. Just like in environmental ecosystems, those things happen because there is a proverbial diversity breakdown. Everybody is going to one side or the other. And in this case, it may be that there is the existence of differing views, but some of them are muted or socially suppressed.

And then, you get just a tipping point of a diversity breakdown of everybody believing something or thinking that if they were to say something that was in disbelief of that, that they would be socially shunned or stigmatized or punished in some way. Okay. So this piece that you published, which it is first of all, the longest piece that I think the vast majority of the people that I know have read in the longest time. And it is the one that is the most widely recommended. I mean 10,000 words?

Jonathan Haidt:
8000.

Josh Wolfe:
8000 words. See, there I go. Just over exaggerating. And-

Jonathan Haidt:
It felt like 10,000. It was only eight.

Josh Wolfe:
But it was magnificent in the diagnosis. And obviously, it wasn't one silver bullet, but the confluence of many factors that seem to be converging at this unique moment in time. I remember a piece of yours going back 2014, '15, '16, '17, you'll have to tell me when. When you started diagnosing the microaggressions on campus, and I think this was right around the time of Nicholas Christakis and some of the social moors that were happening around Halloween up at, was it Yale or-

Jonathan Haidt:
Yale.

Josh Wolfe:
Yeah. So to walk us through that element of the microaggressions, and then how that and some of the other factors formed the foundational basis for your piece.

Jonathan Haidt:
So the piece you're thinking of is the original article, The Coddling of the American Mind, which Greg Lukianoff and I wrote. It came out in the Atlantic in August of 2015. And what that was about was that it was a kind of a new moral culture that emerged on campus in 2014, and it was not there in 2012. It was an incredibly sudden shift.

I've been a professor since 1995, I love being a professor, I love academic gatherings where you're around smart people who are often they'll come up with provocative ideas. From about maybe 380 BC until about 2013, it was actually good to be provocative. We were supposed to provoke. That's what Socrates did. Sometimes people would get upset, but by and large, if you're the people up on the Acropolis or just outside Athens, the academy it was called, they would drink and laugh and talk and argue. It's great fun.

Josh Wolfe:
The university was the safe space.

Jonathan Haidt:
That's right. It was a safe space to try out ideas. And the idea was if you say something and I punch you in the face, well, I'm out. That's such a violation. But if you say something and I argue back and say, "I think you're wrong. Here is why." Well, that's the basic game and it's fun. And so, we had that my whole career up until 2014. All of a sudden, there were students, it was a small number of students who were suddenly saying, "If you disagree with me on this, if you say this, if you quote this, if you bring in this speaker, this is not just something that I will argue against. In fact, I won't argue against it. This is an act of aggression. This is an act of hatred. This is dangerous. This is violence."

And we couldn't understand it. And the first person who diagnosed it was Greg, because Greg had been treated for depression. Greg had a suicidal depression in 2007, which he's talked about and he wrote about in our book. And when he was released from the hospital, thank God, he, at the last minute, he called 911. They talked him into committing himself.

When he was released from the hospital, he saw a psychiatrist and he learned cognitive behavioral therapy where you learn to identify about 15 different distortions. And one of them is labeling. Someone says something and you say, "Well, oh, I'm a loser, or I'm an idiot Just like you're an idiot." This is label. This is not an argument. This is just applying labels. And it's something that people who are anxious or depressed do.

Well, all of a sudden on campus, some students started saying, "Well, that's fascist. You're a fascist or you're a this or that." No arguments, just labeling. And so, that all came in all of a sudden around 2014. It was not there in 2012.

Josh Wolfe:
And I'm curious because why 2014? I mean why not 2012? I mean most social phenomenon when I think of psychology are slow building. They change over time, but this seems to be so sudden. What would trigger that?

Jonathan Haidt:
Yeah. So let's get to the heart of the article, because that's the really interesting thing that I learned from writing an earlier article with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, who actually knows something about technology unlike me. So the way to understand it is to go back to the early days of the internet when everything was boundless possibility and it was magic and it was fun.

And so, you get the early social media platforms, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, they come out around 2003, 2004, totally non-toxic. You put up your posts, you link to other people's posts. The newsfeed comes in, now that's where things begin to get more toxic, because now it's not about your bar mitzvah, it's about the stupid thing that somebody said, and can you believe this? And the big change that we trace out is that in 2009, the like button and the retweet button are new.

And this gives us a much more viral, the platforms have a lot more information now about engagement. The retweet button in particular is like fire. I mean if one person is angry about something and they send it to their 500 followers and they each have 500 followers before you know it, you've got millions of people.

2009, the dynamics really changes. But the world doesn't go insane in 2009. It takes a while for these to roll out to multiple platforms, all devices, web, Android, iPhone, takes a couple years. The norms have to change. Twitter used to be a nice place in its early years. The norms change gradually, more aggressive people come in to use it. And a couple things I learned, something I learned after the article was published was threaded comments. I didn't know about this.

Facebook introduced threaded comments in 2013. And so, before then, if Barack Obama posts something and he has whatever, 30 million followers, and some nobody says you're a Muslim, you're a fascist, whatever, if someone says something, fine, they said that in the comments and it gets washed away with other comments.

But after threaded comments, Facebook says, "Do you want to reply to this?" And before you know it, you can have a fight over nothing. And the more outrageous you say, and the more outrageous your comment, the more likely you are to get noticed. So I think it's kind of building and building, and then 2013 threaded comments adds on. For whatever reason, I've been, since the article, I've been collecting people's stories about when everything went crazy and everything points to 2014.

It's really cool. The first event, the first global event is Justine Sacco in December of 2013. This is the woman who tweeted, it wasn't a racist joke, it was a joke about white privilege.

Josh Wolfe:
Oh, she boards the-

Jonathan Haidt:
She boards a plane in London, flies to Johannesburg, and by the time she lands, she's fired. I mean she's fired the next day, but there's a global outrage against her by the time she lands. So that could not have happened in 2008. You have to have this hyper viral platform. So that's December of 20 13.
In 20 14, this is exactly when Greg comes to talk to me to say, "John, weird stuff is happening on campus. All of a sudden, these attacks, these cancellations, this weird stuff is happening."

Josh Wolfe:
And Greg is a prime advocate for free speech in the First Amendment.

Jonathan Haidt:
That's right. Greg is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education. He's a constitutional lawyer. He's a generally left of center person who's been fighting for free speech rights for students since around 2001.

Josh Wolfe:
And free speech obviously is critical to everything. I mean in markets they function because you have somebody that is long or somebody that is short, they have the right to express that view. In the public sphere, the ability to express a view. In science, the ability to come up with some crazy idea, conjecture, and to criticize that idea is how we ultimately get progress. So he's an advocate as I think many of us are for free speech in pretty much all domains.

Jonathan Haidt:
Well, that's right. Although I think it's important to clarify that as free speech has insanely become a controversial topic in the United States of America, many people seem to think free speech means you can say anything anywhere, including racial slurs or obscenities. That's not what it means. As I understand it, of course, we don't want the government putting people in jail for what they say, but the speech norms that we need on campus are not that anyone can say anything at any time on campus.

Our purpose is to find truth. Our purpose is to learn methods of scholarship, debate, discovery that lead us to a better understanding of the world and each other. And so, the norms we need are not that anyone can say anything at any time. It's if someone says something, you absolutely must protect the right to challenge it. People have to be free to challenge each other. That's the essential thing we need on campus.

And that's what... It's not that there was ever a golden age when nobody was afraid of making a fool of themselves. Of course, you have to, you don't want to make a fool of yourself, but if you have a good faith objection to something a classmate said, you should be able to say it in a seminar class. And that began to go underground around 2014, 2015.

As one woman told... Deb Mashek, our previous executive director, a student at Harvey Mudd College, she said, "My motto is silence is safer." Now that is a horrible motto for a college student, but that began... That wasn't true in 2012, but that became more common after 2015.

Josh Wolfe:
What is the solve for that asymmetry? Because on the one hand, you are democratizing and giving people power to report things that are... But what is the solve for that?

Jonathan Haidt:
Well, there is no solve. We'd have to dig a lot deeper in this conversation and get into an economy of prestige and what people are doing for reputation. We'd have to talk about the need for norms. And one of the main arguments I made in the essay, there's no longer a possibility of sharing an overarching narrative or an overarching set of norms.

And actually, if I could just introduce the babble metaphor now that'll help our discussion here. So the key, the other key idea other than structural stupidity, that was the central idea. But I opened the article with the best metaphor that I have found to explain what the hell is going on. I've been wondering since 2014, it just felt like God changed a parameter of the physical universe. He doubled the size of the electron or the speed of light or something went weird into around 2014.

And the best metaphor I found is the biblical story of Babel in Genesis 11, I believe it is. It's a very short story. And everybody kind of has the idea that, "Oh, yeah, people built a tower and then God knocked it over to punish them." But actually God doesn't actually knock over the tower. What he actually does is he's offended by the hubris of humanity. And he says, "Let us go down and confuse their language so that they may not understand one another." And then, he scatters them abroad on the face of the earth.

But in all of the medieval paintings, it actually shows the tower falling over. So I opened this story with asking readers to imagine, what would it be like if here we are, we're like 10 generations removed from Noah, people were almost wiped out but in 10 generations we built this incredible tower. I mean imagine ancient people with a tower to the heavens, what awe, what sense of pride you would have.

And then, one day, boom, it's all knocked over. And not only that, you can't even talk to the person next to you. You cannot understand them. What a sense of loss. That's what I was trying to convey with that metaphor. And then, I say, "Well, actually, I think we know what it would be like to live in Babel on the day after its distraction, because that's actually what it's like to be an American in 2022.

Josh Wolfe:
Symbolically, you noted that at that same time, Google Translate came on, which is this great technological marvel. Imagine by Douglas Adams as Babel fish, this idea that anybody could speak another language. And so, technology seemed to be taking us to this utopian vision of being able to understand each other, and then perversely and quickly around this time, it does the exact inverse.
You have this line, we are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We're cut off from one another and from the past.

Jonathan Haidt:
Yes. From the past too. That's right. Yeah. So to put this into a timeline, because it does fit very well into a perfect narrative arc. And a narrative arc, it has to either be down for a long time, then you go up or it has to be up, and then you go down. And so, this narrative arc is it goes up and up and up from 1989, follow the Berlin Wall, the internet. Oh, everything's amazing.

2011 is the peak year, and I want to really bring listeners back to that incredible year. It began in January with the Arab Spring. And we thought, "Finally, finally, democracy swept across Eastern Europe and China's making progress and it's going to open up. And now finally, the Arab world is going to taste the fruits of democracy and openness and what dictator could possibly keep it, keep their people down anymore if the people are connected by Facebook and Twitter? How could you do that? And who could keep out the internet? That good luck China, you'll never keep out the internet."

So that's what we thought in 2011. And as I was writing it, someone pointed out, I forget who pointed out, that fact you just gave me that. That's the year that Google Translate becomes widely available. And so, the symbolism is just gorgeous. That 2011 is the year that humanity rebuilt the tower.

And that incredible year ends with Occupy Wall Street in September, which goes global. So the whole year is a year about how technology allows people to take down dictators. It allows ordinary people to protest about income inequality. This is going to be the greatest gift to democracy ever. That's 2011. Facebook goes public in 2012. Mark Zuckerberg talks about how we can now, we have tools to rewire all of our institutions.

Now I'm a nonpartisan, centrist. I've learned a lot from listening to conservatives, libertarians, progressives. The thing I've learned from conservatives going back to Edmund Burke is you shouldn't knock everything down without thinking about it. It's kind of hard to build things and you should be careful before you rewire institutions that you do not understand.

And what happened instead was Facebook and Twitter and other platforms gave everyone the power to tear down. Here I'm drawing on Martin Gurri in his fantastic book, The Revolt of the Public. Distributed Networks are great for tearing down, but they're not good for building or governing. That's a paraphrase.

After 2011, 2012, the world really gets going. It really changes. And what would happen if you pulled down all your institutions? You can't have a society without institutions. It's chaos. It's an anomie. It's the post-Babel world. And that's where we are today.

Danny Crichton:
In part two of our conversation with John Haidt, we talk about potential solutions the tech industry can make to ameliorate the damage from this post-Babel world.

Part 2: Jonathan Haidt on how tech can change social media and save democracy (Part 2)

Danny Crichton:
Three, two, one. Hello and welcome to Securities by Lux Capital. I'm your host, Danny Crichton. This is the second and final part of our discussion with Jonathan Haidt on his recent Atlantic article and forthcoming book on what he has dubbed the post Babel world. In part one, we discussed Haidt's theory of America's structural stupidity, which has been driven by the pervasive use of toxic social media, and how the Tower of Babel is a metaphor for why Americans can no longer talk to one another. In this second part, we discuss potential solutions to the problem. I'm joined by Josh Wolfe and Josh, let's kick it off.

Josh Wolfe:
So when we think about fixes for this, part of this is diagnosing what seems to be in part a generational issue, that a lot of this is coming from what you call the coddling of the American mind, that people were, for whatever reason, kept indoors, void of conflict, void of confrontation. I mean, when I grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn, which was maybe not your average place, I grew up in a screaming household, the Jewish screaming household, and lots of conflict and lots of confrontation. And you learn to develop a thick skin and focus on what matters. There is something with this younger generation, and I hate to sound like a, okay boomer, but there is something that is palpably different.

Jonathan Haidt:
Yes. So yes, it's two separate problems that connect. A lot of what we've been talking about here is being done by Gen X and baby boomers on Twitter and Facebook as well. So all of us, not all of us, but within all the generations, people are behaving badly because of this. But there is a special problem that's been caused to Gen Z, that is anyone born after 1996 or so. And that is that they suddenly have much higher rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide. And I've never seen graphs like this. The graphs are fairly flat in the early two thousands, up until about 2010, 2011, 2012. Sometime in that three year period, you get hockey sticks, you get these sharp upward curves, and the increases are not small. It's not 10 to 20%, it's 50 to 150%, and they're often bigger for girls.

Something happened to the mental health of America's kids and it makes them fragile and anxious. And this is part of what we saw on campus. At the same time, Greg was saying, weird things are happening, every counseling center in America was saying, we're flooded, we don't have enough therapists. All of a sudden, it wasn't like this in 2012, but by 2015, every appointment was booked. They could not find enough therapists because we had a wave of depressed, anxious young people.

And when people are anxious and depressed, they look out at the world and they don't see things as opportunities, they see things as threats. So if a professor says something, if a speaker's coming to campus, if a book is assigned, it's not an opportunity, it's a threat. And that's when, again, the academic world really changed. And then a few years later, Greg and I published our article in 2015, a lot of people said, "Oh, come on, it's just college students. They'll grow out of it. They can't do this in the real world." I'm just saying corporate America has largely accommodated them, just as we accommodated them in universities and just as we've been accommodating kids.

Josh Wolfe:
And so you had this cohort graduate, and I remember talking to you years ago, and you had a hypothesis that it was possible that these people, this group-

Jonathan Haidt:
Our kids.

Josh Wolfe:
... our kids, were going to go from college graduates at 22 to entering the workforce and take this sensibility with them.

Jonathan Haidt:
Yes, that's right.

Josh Wolfe:
And that it would start in some of the most frequent hiring employers, the media and marketing roles, newspapers and TV, and then go into corporate and the investing world, which is something that I think has been observable.

Jonathan Haidt:
Yes, that's right. So Greg and I published the book in 2018. We had to stop writing in the spring of 2018. And I wanted us to have a chapter on what happens when this comes into the corporate world. I teach in a business school, and I'd begun hearing stories in 2018, but we only had a few anecdotes. And so we decided, okay, we don't have enough for a chapter. So we closed up the book, we submitted the manuscript, and then beginning, really in fall of 2018, you suddenly start hearing a lot more stories about generational conflicts, about how young workers, "Oh, I'm anxious. I don't want to come into work tomorrow. I can't make this deadline." Just expecting accommodations, just a much greater sense of threat in the workplace and a much greater willingness to take the activism that they did in college into a company. When you graduated from college, everything's been about you. Everyone's investing in you, and you have to make the transition to saying, "Okay, now I'm an employee. I have to generate value for my employer. It's not all about me."

In any case, we've seen an explosion of exactly the same kinds of conflict we had on campus from 2015 to 2018, since 2018 have been very, very widespread in the corporate world, especially Slack seems to be the preferred medium by which a lot of these conflicts play out. I teach at Stern and in the business and society program, we're all fans of stakeholder capitalism. We think Milton Friedman's original article about the social responsibility of businesses is to increase its profits. Like no, you have to think about all your other stakeholders. Well, the business roundtable in 2019 renounced the Friedman doctrine and said, "Actually, yes, business should be thinking about all the stakeholders." Well, that happened in 2019, just in time for the complete, total, all-encompassing, constant war among stakeholders. And so now the business world is a mess. Not in all industries, as you say, it's especially the industries that are hiring from elite schools, the industries that are more in the creative zone, anything to do with the arts or media and a lot of tech, not all of tech, but a lot of tech companies.

Josh Wolfe:
Part of me wonders if there's any correlation with the incredible bull market run we've had, an economic run we've had for the past 10 or 15 years. And that if and as there's a downturn, do some of these trends exacerbate because stress is going to be higher? Or do they abate and does the pendulum swing the other way? And I'm talking, almost conflating a little bit, some of the Gen Z sense of entitlement. I had posted something on Twitter recounting a story of a friend who had an interview with a younger person, and that person showed up at 10:06 and they checked with the front desk. What time did they check in? Maybe they were late, maybe they texted, maybe they called or whatever. No. Or sorry, they showed up at 10:08 and they checked in with the front desk at 10:05.

I said, "How was this person?" They said, "Amazing." I said, "Are you hiring them?" They said, not a chance, because they felt very strongly that somebody that's interviewing for an important, high paying job should show up on time. The response on Twitter, half the people who typically skewed older were like, "Of course, 15 minutes early, you're on time, on time, you're late and 15 minutes late, you're fired." The other half were like, "My God, this candidate dodged a bullet. What kind of oppressive to horrible person are they going to be working for?"

And I just wonder, and I've been sort of provocatively saying that in the next six months or nine months, by the fall of this year, you're going to see kids under 30 in suits and ties back in Midtown, trying to signal conformity and that they're gainfully employed. So I wonder if some of this would abate if in self-interest, suddenly the economy, we hit a recession, stocks are down, and some of the young people that are acting very entitled suddenly are like, "Oh, okay, actually, maybe I have to conform."

Jonathan Haidt:
I think that is possible. Also, let's be clear that what we see, our perceptions are shaped by who is speaking up on social media, and that is never representative of the larger population. And so what I've found from the beginning is that most members of Gen Z, most students, I've spoken at a lot of schools, a lot of high schools, most of them are curious. They want to be exposed to a wide variety of ideas. It's a small number who have embraced this kind of activism, which is about slandering and slurring and attacking other people. And so most students are afraid of speaking up because they're afraid of a small number of their fellow students. Many of us professors are walking on eggshells, and we're cautious in what we teach because we're afraid of a small number of students. Most of them are lovely, most of them are curious. So I don't want to say that most of them feel entitled in the way that you were talking about, but I would say that they've been under socialized, and they've been under socialized for several reasons.

One is that first of all, Gen Z is much less likely to have ever had a job than the millennials or any previous generation. They simply didn't have summer jobs as much. And part of that is that college has gotten more competitive. And so American families, middle class families and above, it's the point of childhood to get you into an Ivy League school and we're the pit crew. And no, don't waste your time working for a boss, do this internship, which will look better. So they literally have had less life experience. They've had less mentoring. And I think it's very important that you work for a boss who goes hard on you. That's what I want for my son this summer. He's 15 and he wants it too. He wants to just have a regular job, not an internship.

So will things turn around? Gen Z, the surveys show that Gen Z is very concerned about economic stability. Understandably, they've been raised in a ... Since the global financial crisis, they're anxious. So I think many of them will. Yes, I think we will see many of them trying to get with the program. Now here's my advice, especially if there are a lot of people listening to this who have their own companies or are in the tech world. What I have found is that Gen Z is totally not in denial. They're not defensive. They know they have problems. They want to grow. They want to learn. And if you have the concept of antifragility, then everything goes smoothly.

Josh Wolfe:
And this is Taleb's idea. But let's explain that. What is antifragility?

Jonathan Haidt:
Yeah. So Nassim Taleb, who wrote the Black Swan, he writes this wonderful book called Antifragile. And he points out that there are certain things that are fragile. Like glass is fragile, so you don't let kids play, babies play with glass. We give them plastic. Plastic is resilient. But if you drop a cup, it doesn't get better. And what he was interested in is what's the name for systems where if you drop them, they get better. And he was thinking, for example, of the banking system. He wrote this, he was thinking about this before the crash. If a system hasn't been stressed, it gets weak. But if it has been stressed, it adapts and it gets strong.

Josh Wolfe:
And that's true, whether it's forest fires or muscles in the body.

Jonathan Haidt:
Exactly. And of course the immune system. Now we're all so familiar with the immune system being antifragile. And if we protect our kids from dirt and germs, we actually make them weak. They have to be exposed to dirt and germs. This is why peanut allergies have exploded, it's because we started protecting kids from peanuts in the 1990s. So once you have the concept of antifragility and you explain that, and everyone in Gen Z gets it right away and everyone gets it right away, and if you were to say to people, say to your new hires who have been on social media their whole lives, they haven't had summer jobs, they've been overprotected their whole lives. They're soft. They're inexperienced. It's not their fault. There's no reason to be angry.

And you say to them, "I really want you to succeed in this job, and that's why I'm going to give you hard feedback. If I think you did something wrong, I'm going to tell you. I'm not doing it because I'm mad at you. I'm doing it because I want you to grow." If you make clear the point of antifragility and growth, a lot of them really get it and love it and want it. So I haven't yet found a company that really has figured out how to incorporate Gen Z and is doing well. But then again, the pandemic has confused us all. We don't know what's happening yet, but I think we're now at a time where we can really see, what do you do to incorporate your workers who are under 25?

Josh Wolfe:
I'm really caught by that peanut analogy because denying exposure exacerbates sensitivity. And that's true of peanuts. And that's true of difficult conversations and difficult situations.

Jonathan Haidt:
That's right. So Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler did research on, I think it was the Framingham heart study database, this large database of health outcomes in New England in the eighties or nineties I think. I'm not sure when it was. At any rate, they have a wonderful book called Connected. And they show that if you take up smoking, your friends are more likely to take up smoking, but so are your friends' friends. And so are your friends' friends' friends. Now it's hard to believe, but they do find third level, third order effect.

Josh Wolfe:
And I think it was the same thing with obesity. Yep.

Jonathan Haidt:
Exactly. Same with obesity. But here's the thing relevant for us now, same with happiness and sadness, same with emotions. And it's more contagious from girls, from women I should say, than from men. When a man is depressed, it doesn't make other people depressed because men don't talk about it. Whereas if a woman is depressed, she's more likely to talk about it. And so that'll spread more.

And so what we see then is that when all the kids got onto social media ... Around 2011 to 2013 is the period when American kids go from mostly not having a smartphone to now. Now it's like you have to have one and everyone's got one, so when they all have these devices in their pockets, the boys go especially for YouTube and video games, the girls go for the visual platforms. They go for Instagram and Tumblr and Pinterest. Those are the three that are mostly female. And so the girls are now spreading ideas and emotions and you get extraordinary contagion among the girls, whereas boys are playing video games and watching videos, you don't get that kind of contagion. And I think this is why the curves, the mental health curves for girls, the rates of anxiety and depression just skyrocket. I mean, it's like dum de dum de dum, no change, no change, no change, 2013, boom. I've never seen anything like it.

Josh Wolfe:
I still am thinking about how technology amplifies everything. It's amplifying our voices right now, broadcasting. It's amplifying the ability to see something, visualize it. And as you are noting very crisply that it amplifies emotions. And I'm still trying to grasp for how technology can be a helpful, productive, constructive salve for that.

Jonathan Haidt:
Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about that because, right, because it seems whatever product is out there, someone can find a way to make it faster, easier or bigger, like effect. But is there the same kind of evolution for better? Why can't there be platforms that give us better social interactions?

Josh Wolfe:
I mean, even if you take this technology, I will call it, of CBT and DBT and Marsha Linehan, and I mean, it's an amazing set of tactics, as you noted from the early stoics, and incorporated into modern clinical psychology and psychiatry. I wonder if there's something that's a layer on the information that we get that could detect when there's something that is being labeled, or to just raise to our awareness so as to give us that little pause, just like the framers of the Constitution wanted.

Jonathan Haidt:
Yeah. Yeah. No, I see where you're going with that, but I think that-

Josh Wolfe:
You are not optimistic.

Jonathan Haidt:
No, I'm not. Because it's like we could give people calorie counts and we can tell them this Big Mac has this ingredient and therefore you shouldn't have it or something. But if what's operating is not the rational thought about what I want, but a deeper set of motives about just the lust for fat and sugar and salt, it's very hard to have our rational mind go up against that, especially when you're a kid.

Josh Wolfe:
Just to be provocative in the ideas of constructive ideas and criticism, you noted in your piece that social media, essentially bad, especially social media based on advertising. And then you sort of half jokingly, when I retweeted it and it helped [inaudible 00:15:11]

Jonathan Haidt:
Oh yeah, that's right. You had [inaudible 00:15:11]

Josh Wolfe:
You were like, "Okay, not all social media is bad."

Jonathan Haidt:
Yeah.

Josh Wolfe:
I'm thinking about the fact that lots of people had body image issues and people were talking about this around magazines. You had all these supermodels that were not representative of the average male or female. And I'm thinking about how our natural propensity for sugar and fat in our evolutionary ancestral environment when it was scarce, and now it's abundant and we are drinking lots of sugar. And at the same time, you have all of these people who are fitness nuts today, and there's a social contagion around the people that are involved in CrossFit and Instagram.

So there holds this glimmer, the sliver of hope that maybe there can be positive contagion with good things. And so if we can do that physically, where people seem to me to be more fit than ever, that maybe there's a mental fitness that people can broadcast in the same way that you're getting status today for being a provocateur, that somehow ... Okay, you sit with Danny Kahneman and he loves saying that he's wrong because he views that as the archetype of a great scientist. Somebody that admits that they're wrong and changes their mind. And so he feels that he actually gains not loses status by doing that. I'm wondering if there's a way that we could amplify and create a social contagion where the people that are rewarded and celebrated are the ones that can refrain from the angry reactions [inaudible 00:16:32]

Jonathan Haidt:
I see what you're saying. Okay, this sounds promising. Now I would note that Danny Kahneman is an academic and within the world of professors, going all the way back to Socrates, who in a sense boasted that he didn't know anything. Within the norms of our closed community, yes, you gain status by saying you don't know. It may be harder to do that in the general public. But what you were saying, it actually made me think there are a lot of things we've faced as a society like alcohol, marijuana, there are all sort of things we've faced. It took us a long time to adapt. And when I was in high school in the seventies and eighties, a lot of kids died in drunk driving. I mean, it was a major cause of death was car accidents from alcohol. And now it's not, it's way down. We learned how to adapt to that. It took a while.

Josh Wolfe:
Is that because shame worked? Does shame still work? Did we shame people? Because I remember Mothers Against Drunk Driving, don't drink and drive. You had these campaigns. But it became socially taboo that if you did that, people were going to scoff at you and look down on you, not celebrate you.

Jonathan Haidt:
Yeah. That may be. I'd want to see an historian's account of how exactly did the norms change, because ultimately the norms change and it was sort of a national change. And in the same way right now, social media is so new and everyone's gone for it or most people have gone for it. And it may be the case that in 20 years we will have worked out a way to live with it, without having it do so much damage to kids. Now going with the Mothers Against Drunk Driving, I mean they raised the age to 21. When I was in high school, it was 18, and as long as you looked 15, you could go into a bar with a fake ID and say ... And I had a fake ID. It said City College of Arts and Crafts. I bought it in Coney Island, actually.

Josh Wolfe:
My hometown.

Jonathan Haidt:
I bought it in Coney Island for a dollar. And I filled it on a typewriter. And people would see it, they'd laugh. So yes, there may be a future in which we adapt to it. Now, my concern is that one, the political chaos and the generational damage may be so severe that even though in theory we could figure out a better way to be, we might get tripped up. We might not be able to get there. And two, it used to be possible to change norms nationally. And that's the pre Babel world. After the Tower of Babel has fallen, I don't think it's possible to have anything that most people really will believe or embrace.

Josh Wolfe:
Your next book ...

Jonathan Haidt:
Is called Life After Babel: Adapting to a world we may never again share.

Josh Wolfe:
John, what are the reforms that you have contemplated could actually fix this problem, particularly with social media?

Jonathan Haidt:
So at the end of the article, I say it's going to be really hard to reimagine democracy for the digital age, but if we're going to do it, there's going to be three categories that we've got to do, three sort of buckets of reform. The first is we've got to harden our democratic and epistemic institutions. Epistemic just means those that generate knowledge like universities, journalism. The second is we have to make social media less toxic to those institutions. And the third is we have to prepare the next generation to live in this crazy and probably much more violent democracy.

Josh Wolfe:
Let's take the second one.

Jonathan Haidt:
Okay. Yeah, I think that's one of most relevance I think to your audience. So in this second one, what I proposed is, first, let me be clear, please, everyone stop talking about content moderation. Please stop it. Please stop it. I'm so sick of it. It's not that important. And there's no solution because the left wants more of it and the right wants less of it. And so we're not going to get a bipartisan compromise. And that's not where the action is. The problem on social media is not that somebody can post some crazy terrible conspiracy theory. They've been doing that for hundreds of years. The John Birch Society was doing that. There's all kinds of places you can do that. But before 2009, that thing couldn't go viral to millions of people within a few days. It's the architecture that is made it so that the more obnoxious you are and the more outrageous your statement, the further it goes. That's the problem. It's not content moderation. It's the dynamics and the virality.

So there's two sets of reforms that I think are really powerful. One is look at who is posting. Now, you can't walk up to a bank and say, here's a bag of money. Open an account for John Q. Smith.

Josh Wolfe:
Anonymity.

Jonathan Haidt:
Anonymity. Yeah. You can't. Banks have know your customer laws. And I think large platforms, not small ones, not everything, but at least a large platform, which has enormous effects on our democracy. A large platform should have a know your customer rule, where it doesn't mean that you have to show your driver's license to Facebook. But before ... So let's say, let's suppose anyone can open an account just to view, to see what other people are saying. But if you want to have the right to post content, you have to get verified as a human being who's old enough to use the platform.

And you maybe show your identity as well. Of course you can always post anonymously, but you have to get verified. And so suppose you get kicked over to a third party. There's actually a bunch of companies that now do age and identity authentication. There are a lot of ways of doing it. But you get kicked over to another company or a nonprofit and they do whatever, whether it be through identification, whether it be through biometrics, whether it be through a network of trust using blockchain. There's all kinds of clever ways to do it.

They then pass back to Facebook, yes, approved. This person is a real person who's over 18 or whatever age you want to set. That would eliminate almost all of the bots right away. And that would also control some of the trolls, even though many trolls use their real names. If there's even that little level of accountability, people will not be quite as much of a jerk. And basically, look, when Elon, when it looked like he was going to buy Twitter, he was saying authenticate all humans. So Elon's already most of the way there. So that would be huge if we had a authentication.

And then the other one, another one that I was just talking about with Reid Hoffman a couple weeks ago, I've always been thinking, right now the incentives are the more of an asshole you are, the more successful you are. But what if we reverse that? What if say, what if you have Facebook and Twitter code your degree of aggression. And so if all you do is attack people, if all you do is use obscenity and exclamation points, you get a five on a one to five scale, you as a user, you're coded as five. And everybody who opens an account, your filter is set by default to four. So I will see everybody who's one to four, but I won't see anyone who's a five and they can't see me. They can say what they want. I'm not telling them they can't say something, but why should my public square be full of assholes? If I want to eliminate the fives, I should be able to do that.

Josh Wolfe:
Which is a great idea, because whether that's a restaurant or an Uber driver, you typically want a highly rated person.

Jonathan Haidt:
Exactly, that's right. That's right. So if we simply did that, now, of course you could lower it. You could set your filter to three or two or what, you could set it for whatever you want. Now all of a sudden the incentive is don't be a complete asshole. If you're a complete asshole, fewer people will see you. I think that would be completely transformative. So I raised this with Reid and he liked it, so he and I have been talking about it. What do you think guys think? Would that work?

Josh Wolfe:
I think it's very clever. I think the rating systems have worked in all kinds of content for signaling to people that are producing content what works. And so Netflix obviously has their algorithms to see when people are watching. And then when more people are watching, they try to dial up that kind of content. You would think that if there was a feedback mechanism for a speaker or writer, et cetera, where they were getting more feedback that said, yes, you're getting a bigger audience because of that, it would increase their provision of that kind of content. I guess you still would get, although it would be siloed to, as you were saying before, the sort of 20 percent fringe on both sides, or maybe the two percent fringe-

Jonathan Haidt:
Yeah, the two percent.

Josh Wolfe:
... of that fringe, that you're going to get the firebrand, bombastic, sensationalist. But the audience that wants that will self-select for it and dial up their meter to five and go into the echo chamber. And then you have to find a way to make sure that they can't share that information. That's the thing is-

Jonathan Haidt:
Share what?

Josh Wolfe:
Meaning if you become the firebrand and you're just the asshole, and I say, no, I don't want to hear from the assholes, but you've got a five rating and I'm not ... But then if I put my rating filter up to five, now I'm getting your content. There has to be a filter on my ability to share a five with the rest of the world.

Jonathan Haidt:
Oh, I see. Although of course, if you share that content, then that might impact your rating. And let's be clear, and actually your example of a firebrand is an important one. I hadn't thought of that. Somebody who is righteously, indignant, indignant about racism or global warming, we want to make sure that this doesn't pick up that. It has to basically pick up trollishness. And so to the extent that we can define trollishness, and actually that's what AI is great for, you don't have to have a formal definition. It's just if you can identify though one to three percent of people who are like this, and you want to be sure to distinguish it from somebody who is just angry about or I mean certainly the Old Testament prophets in the later books of the Hebrew Bible, we don't want to keep them out.

Josh Wolfe:
The passionate versus the outright mean-

Danny Crichton:
The jerk.

Jonathan Haidt:
Exactly. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Josh Wolfe:
I think that's very clever. I like that one.

Jonathan Haidt:
Okay, so even if that itself doesn't work, the tech community is so creative, and if I simply put it out there like, "You know what, we have to find ways to make these platforms less toxic to our democratic and epistemic institutions. I just gave you an example with the one to five rating. Can y'all do better? Can you come up with something other? Please go at it."

Josh Wolfe:
It really comes down to incentives, because as a friend of ours says, social media inherently good, social media based on advertising inherently bad. And it's really about the incentives for the engagement, and as you've noted, to get the evocative emotional response. But if there was a counter system, whether it was a regulatory one or a consumer led campaign to self-regulate some of this content, I think it would be a great benevolent thing.

Jonathan Haidt:
From your mouth to God's ears, as my grandmother used to say.

Danny Crichton:
Or Zuck's.

Jonathan Haidt:
Yes, to Zuck's ears.

Danny Crichton:
Thanks John. It was great to be with you.

Jonathan Haidt:
Thank you, Josh. Thank you, Danny.

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