Lex Fridman Podcast - #291 – Jonathan Haidt: The Case Against Social Media

Episode Date: June 4, 2022

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU and author of The Coddling of the American Mind, The Righteous Mind, and The Happiness Hypothesis. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Uncruise: https://uncruise.com/pages/lex - Notion: https://notion.com/startups to get up to $1000 off team plan - Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off premium - Magic Spoon: https://magicspoon.com/lex and use code LEX to get $5 off - Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get special savings EPISODE LINKS: Jonathan's Twitter: https://twitter.com/JonHaidt Jonathan's Website: https://jonathanhaidt.com Documents & Articles: 1. Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vVAtMCQnz8WVxtSNQev_e1cGmY9rnY96ecYuAj6C548/edit 2. Teen Mental Health Testimony: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Haidt%20Testimony.pdf 3. The Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/ Books: 1. The Coddling of the American Mind (book): https://amzn.to/3MW4HqL 2. The Righteous Mind (book): https://amzn.to/3to0tkj 3. The Happiness Hypothesis (book): https://amzn.to/3Mb1xP2 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (07:57) - Social media and mental health (21:45) - Mark Zuckerberg (31:23) - Children's use of social media (42:08) - Social media and democracy (58:14) - Elon Musk and Twitter (1:14:45) - Anonymity on social media (1:20:44) - Misinformation (1:27:38) - Social media benefits (1:30:22) - Political division on social media (1:36:54) - Future of social media (1:42:46) - Advice for young people

The following is a conversation with Jonathan Height, social psychologist at NYU and critic of the negative effects of social media on the human mind and human civilization. He gives a respectful but hard-hitting response to my conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, and together, him and I try to figure out how we can do better, how we can lessen the amount of depression and division in the world. He has brilliantly discussed these topics in his writing, including in his book The Coddling of the American Mind, and in his recent long article in the Atlantic titled Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.

When Teddy Roosevelt said in his famous speech that it is not the critical counts, he has not yet read the brilliant writing of Jonathan Height. I disagree with John on some of the details of his analysis and ideas, but both his criticism and our disagreement is essential if we are to build better and better technologies that connect us. Social media has both the power to destroy our society and to help with flourish. It's up to us to figure out how we take the latter path. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description as the best way to support this podcast.

We got uncruased for adventure, notion for startups, blinkist for nonfiction, magic for snacks, and 8 sleep for sweet sweet naps. Choose wise them my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. No ads in the middle. I hate those. I try to make these ad reads interesting, but if you skipped them, please to check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by uncrews adventures. Small ships, cruises, sailing to Alaska, Mexico, Costa Rica, Hawaii, and so on. You can go hiking, kayaking, whale watching, and seeing the northern lights. well-watching and seeing the northern lights. There's something not just humbling but somehow revealing about who we are what we're doing here when you look at

nature. There's something about the calmness, the quiet of water stretching out to the horizon. There's something about trees as far as that I can see that reminds you what this is all about and somehow it's impossible to put into words. That's why it's great to take little journeys like this. You can say $500 on Alaskan adventures through June for bookings made within 30 days of departure. Go to uncruased.com slash pages slash wex. This show is also brought to you by Notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool.

It combines note taking, document sharing, wikis, project management, and much, much, much more into one space that's simple, powerful and beautifully designed. Obviously, I've been using the ocean for a long time now. What I really need to say is all the cool kids have been telling me for a long time about notion. I'm originally, if I might admit, an EMAX person, so a lot of the, in terms of an IDE perspective, what I use for programming is still EMAX,

but much, much less so. I use the more optimized tools for the job for note-taking, specifically notion is just far above anything else I've used. It's an incredible tool. And it's also good for the work, the company setting, the startup setting, and they're running a special offer for startups. You can get up to a thousand dollars off the team plan to give you a sense that's almost

a year of free notion for a team of 10 good and notion.com slash startups. This show is also brought to you by Blinkist. My favorite app for learning new things, Blinkist takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down to just 15 minutes you can read or listen to. Yeah, and actually the rise and fall, the third rite, unfortunately, is not on there. There's not many books about Hitler or Stalin on there, perhaps for a good reason. But the best, I would say, nonfiction books are all on there. So you're talking about sapiens, meditations by Marcus Aurelius that goes on and on.

I use it for all kinds of reasons. So one, of course, is to review the books I've already read, two is to select the books I want to read in the future. And three, perhaps most powerful ways, books that I just don't have time to read but are culturally and intellectually important. This life is about hard choices. And for the books you don't choose, sometimes Blinkus can save your ass. As a listener, you can get a free seven day trial and 25% off of a Blinkus Premium membership at Blinkus.com slash flex.

This episode is also brought to you by an old and favorite sponsor of this podcast. My fellow travelers on this journey of the podcast is Magic Spoon. Something beautiful that this podcast was originally and still sponsored by Serial. And that connects to my sort of teen years when Serial was such a source of joy, but it was also a source of gigantic amount of sugar. But that's not the case with Magic Spoon, which is why it's awesome. It's low carb, keto

friendly, zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, only 4 net grams of carbs, 140 calories in these serving, and it's freaking delicious. My favorite flavor is cocoa. They have a bunch of other ones, peanut butter is pretty good too. They have a hundred percent tap in as guarantee, so if you don't like it, they refund it. Nothing else in life, I would say, has a 100% happen as guarantee. So maybe she'll look to magic spoon to get such guarantees about happiness. Because the rest of life is full of suffering friends. Save $5 off your order. If you go to magic spoon.com slash likes and use code, likes this episode is also brought to you by 8th sleep and it's pod pro mattress. There are very few things I enjoy as much as a good nap. Even more than sleep sometimes,

a good nap, like 20 minutes. I'll sometimes actually drink coffee right before, take the nap, and I wake up refreshed in a way that I don't feel refreshed in any other condition. There's something magical about this power nap. And I am raised, take on the day, even if it's like 11 p.m. at night. And then I ruined my whole sleep schedule, but that doesn't matter, because happiness is what matters.

And the best way to achieve happiness is a nap on an eight-sleep mattress, or eight-sleep pod pro cover on top of a mattress. They have said Pod Pro cover that you can just add to your own mattress, you can get theirs too up to you, you can do all this at 8-Sleep.com slash Lex and you can save $200 to check out from the Pod Pro cover. 8-Sleep currently 8th sleep currently ships within the United States of A, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Enjoy your sleep, enjoy your nap friends. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Jonathan Height. height. So you have been thinking about the human mind for quite a long time. You wrote the happiness hypothesis, the righteous mind, the coddling of the American mind. And today you're thinking, you're writing a lot about social media and about democracy. So perhaps it's okay. Let's go through the thread that connects all of that work. How do we get from the very beginning to today with the good, the bad and the ugly of social media? beginning to today with the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media. So I'm a social psychologist, which means I study how we think about other people and

how people affect our thinking. And in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, I picked the topic of moral psychology and I studied how morality varied across countries. I studied in Brazil and India. And in the 90s, I began, this was like, I got my PhD in 1992. And in that decade was really when the American culture war kind of really began to blow up. And I began to notice that left and right in this country were becoming like separate countries. And you could use the tools of cultural psychology to study this split, this moral battle between left and right.

So I started doing that and I began growing alarmed in the in the early 2000s about how bad polarization was getting and I began studying the causes of polarization, you know, bringing moral psychology to bear on our political problems. And I was originally going to write a book to basically help the Democrats stop screwing up because I could see that some of my research showed people on the right understand people on the left, they know what they think. You can't grow up in America without knowing what progressives think. But here I grew up generally on the left and I had no idea what conservatives thought until I went and sought it out and started reading conservative things like national review. So originally I wanted to actually help the Democrats to understand moral psychology so

they could stop losing to George W. Bush, and I got a contract to write the righteous mind. And once I started writing and I committed to understanding conservatives by reading the best writings not the worst, and I discovered, you know what, you don't understand anything until you look from multiple perspectives. And I discovered there are a lot of great social science ideas in the conservative intellectual tradition. And so, and I also began to see, you know what, America's actually in real trouble. And this is like 2008-2009. Things are really, we're coming apart here. So I began to really focus my research on helping left and right understand each other and helping our democratic institutions to work better.

Okay, so all this is before I had any interest in social media. I was on Twitter, I guess, like 2009, and not much. I didn't think about it much. And then some going along as a social psychologist studying this. And then everything seems to kind of blow up in 2014-2015 at universities. And that's when Greg Lukyanov came to me in May of 2014 and said, John, weird stuff is happening. Students are freaking out about a speaker coming to campus that they don't have to go

see. And they're saying it's dangerous. It's violence. Like, what is going on? And so anyway, Greg's idea is about how we were teaching students to think in distorted ways that led us to write the Carling the American Mine, which wasn't primarily about social media either. It was about this sort of a rise of depression, anxiety. But after that, things got so much worse everywhere. That's when I began to think like, well, something

systemically has changed. Something has changed about the fabric of the social universe. Ever since then, I've been focused on social media. So we're going to try to sneak up to the problems and the solutions at hand from different directions. I have a lot of questions whether it's fundamentally the nature of social media that's the problem. It's the decisions of various human beings that lead the social media companies that's the problem. Is there still some component that's highlighted in the coddling of the American mind, that's the individual psychology of play, or the way parenting and education works to make, sort of, emphasize anti-fragility of the human mind as it interacts with the social media platforms, the human

through the social media. So all that beautiful message. That should take us an hour to cover. Or maybe a couple of years, yes. But so let's start if it's okay. You said you wanted to challenge some of the things that Mark Zuckerberg has said in a conversation with me. What are some of the ideas he expressed

that you disagree with? There are two major areas that I study. One is what is happening with teen mental health. It fell off a cliff in 2013. It was very sudden. And then the other is what is happening to our democratic and epistemic institutions. That means knowledge generating, like the university's journalism. So my main areas of research, where I'm collecting the empirical research and trying to make sense of it, is what's happened to mental health and what's the evidence that social media is a contributor, and then the other areas, what's happening to democracies, not just America, and what's the evidence

that social media is a contributor to the dysfunction. So I'm sure we'll get to that because that's what the Atlantic article is about. But if we focus first on what's happened to teen mental health. But if we focus first on what's happened to teen mental health. So before I read the quotes from Mark, I'd like to just give the overview. And it is this. There's a lot of data tracking adolescents. They're self-reports of how depressed, anxious, lonely. There's data on hospital admissions for self-harm. There's data on suicide.

And all of these things, they bounce around somewhat, but they're relatively level in the early 2000s. And then all of a sudden, around 2010 to 2013, depending on which statistic you're looking at, all of a sudden, they begin to shoot upwards. More so for girls in some cases, but on the whole, it's like up for both sexes, it's just that boys have lower levels of anxiety and depression. So the curve is not quite as dramatic. But what we see is not small increases. It's not like, oh, 10%, 20%. No, the increases are between 50 and 150%. Depending on which group you're looking at,

suicide for preteen girls, thankfully, it's not very common. But it's two to three times more common now, or by 2015, it had doubled between 2010 and 2015, it doubled. So something was going radically wrong in the world of American preteens. And what we, so as I've been studying it, I found, first of all, it's not just America, it's identical in Canada and the UK, Australia, New Zealand, are very similar, they're just after a little delay. So whatever we're looking for here, but yet it's not as clear

in the Germanic countries, it's in continental Europe, it's a little different, and we can get into that when we talk about childhood. But something's happening in many countries that started right around 2012, 2013. It wasn't gradual. It hit girls hardest, and it hit pre-teen girls the hardest. So what could it be? Nobody has come up with another explanation. Nobody. It wasn't the financial crisis that wouldn't

it hit preteen girls the hardest. There is no other explanation. The complexity here and the data is of course, as everyone knows, correlation doesn't prove causation. The fact that television viewing was going up in the 50s and 60s and 70s doesn't mean that that was the cause of the crime. So what I've done, and this is Ruk with Gene Twangy, who wrote the book I Gen, is because I was challenged, when Greg and I put out the book, of the Codling of the American Mind,

some researchers challenged us and said, oh, you don't know what you're talking about. The correlations between social media use and mental health, they exist, but they're like, oh, you don't know what you're talking about. The correlations between social media use and mental health, they exist, but they're tiny. It's like a correlation coefficient of 0.03 or a beta of 0.05. Tiny little things, and one famous article said, it's no bigger than the correlation of bad mental health and eating potatoes, which exists, but it's so tiny, it's zero essentially.

And that claim, that social media is no more harmful than eating potatoes or wearing eyeglasses. It was a very catchy claim, and it's caught on, and I keep hearing that. But let me unpack why that's not true, and then we'll get to what Mark said, because what Mark basically said, here I'll actually read it. I'll write it in my mind.

Just a positive real quick, is you implied, but this is made explicit that the best explanation we have now as you're proposing is that a very particular aspect of social media is the cause, which is not just social media, but the like button and the retweet, a certain mechanism of virality that that was invented or perhaps some aspect of social media is the cause. Okay, good idea. Let's be clear. Connecting people is good. I mean overall the more you connect people the better. Giving people the telephone was an amazing step forward giving them free telephone, you know free long distances even better video is. So connecting people is good. I'm not a Luddite.

And social media at least the idea of users posting things like that happens on LinkedIn, and it's great. It can serve all kinds of needs. What I'm talking about here is not the internet. It's not technology. It's not smartphones. And it's not even all social media. It's a particular business model in which people are incentivized to create content. And that content is what brings other people on. And the people on there are the product which is sold to advertisers. It's that particular business model

which Facebook pioneered, which seems to be incredibly harmful for teenagers, especially for young girls, 10 to 14 years old is where they're most vulnerable. And it seems to be particularly harmful for democratic institutions because it leads to all kinds of anger, conflict, and the destruction of any shared narrative.

So that's what we're talking about. We're talking about Facebook, Twitter. I don't have any data on TikTok. I suspect it's going to end up having a lot really bad effects because the teens are on it so much. And to be really clear since we're doing the nuance now in this section, lots of good stuff happens. I've, you know, a lot of, there's a lot of funny things on Twitter.

I use Twitter because it's an amazing way to put out news, to put out when I write something, you know, you and I, you know, use it to promote things. We learn things quickly. Well, there's could be, you know, this is harder to measure and we'll probably, or I'll try to mention it because so much of our conversation will be about rigorous criticism. I'll try to mention it because so much of our conversation will be about rigorous criticism.

I'll try to sometimes mention what are the possible positive effects of social media in different ways. For example, in the way I've been using Twitter, not the promotion or any of that kind of stuff, it makes me feel less lonely to connect with people to make me smile a little bit of humor here and there. And that at scale is a very interesting effect being connected across the globe, especially during times of COVID and so on. It's very difficult to measure that. So we kind of have to consider that and be honest.

There is a trade-off. We have to be honest about the positive and the negative and sometimes we're not sufficiently positive or in a rigorous scientific way about them. We're not rigorous in a scientific way about the negative and that's what we're trying to do here. And so that brings us to the Mark Zuckerberg email. Okay, but wait, let me just pick up on the issue of trade-offs because it might think like, well, how much of this do we need? If we have too much, it's bad.

No, that's a one-dimensional conceptualization. This is a multi-dimensional issue. And a lot of people seem to think like, oh, what we have done without social media is on COVID, like we would have been sitting there alone in our homes. Yeah, if all we had was, you know, texting, telephone, zoom, Skype, multiplayer video games, WhatsApp, all sorts of ways of communicating with each other.

Oh, and there's blogs and the rest of the internet. Yeah, we would have been fine. Did we really need the hyperviral platforms of Facebook and Twitter? Now, those did help certain things get out faster, and that did help science Twitter sometimes, but it also led to huge explosions of misinformation and the polarization of our politics to such an extent that a third of the country didn't believe what the medical establishment was saying. And we'll get into this. The medical establishment sometimes was playing political games that made them less credible.

So on net, it's not clear to me. If you've got the internet, smartphones, blogs, all of that stuff, it's not clear to me. If you've got the internet, smartphones, blogs, all of that stuff, it's not clear to me that adding in this particular business model of Facebook Twitter took talk. That really adds a lot more. One interesting one we'll also talk about is YouTube. I think it's easier to talk about Twitter and Facebook. YouTube is another complex beast that's very hard to, because YouTube has many things, it's a content platform, but it also has a recommendation system.

That's, let's focus our discussion on perhaps Twitter and Facebook, but you do in this large document that you're putting together on social media, called social media and political, this function, collaborative review with Chris Bale, that includes, I believe, papers on YouTube as well. It does, but yeah, again, just to finish up with the nuance, yeah, YouTube is really complicated because I can't imagine life without YouTube, it's incredibly useful, it does a lot of good things.

It also obviously helps to radicalize terrorist groups and murderers, so I think about YouTube the way I think about the internet in general, and I don't know enough to really comment on YouTube. So, I have been focused, and it's also interesting. One thing we know is, teen social life changed radically between about 2010 and 2012. Before 2010, they weren't mostly on every day because they didn't have smartphones yet. By 2012 to 2014, that's the area in which they almost all get smartphones and they become daily users of the growth.

So the girls go to Instagram and Tumblr, they go to the visual ones, the boys go to YouTube and video games. Those don't seem to be as harmful to mental health or even harmful at all. It's really Tumblr, Instagram particularly. That seem to really have done in girls' mental health. So now, okay, so let's look at the quote from Mark Zuckerberg. So at 64 minutes and 31 seconds on the video, I decoded this, this is the very helpful YouTube transcript,

it's an amazing program. You asked him about Francis Hagen, you give him a chance to respond. And here's the key thing. So he talks about what Francis Hagen said. He said, no, but that's mischaracterized. Actually, on most measures, the kids are doing better when they're on Instagram. It's just on one out of the 18. And then he says, I think an accurate characterization would have been the kids using Instagram, or not kids, but teens, is generally positive for their mental health.

That's his claim. That you to that Instagram is overall taken as a whole. Instagram is positive for their mental health. That's what he says. Okay. Now, is it really? Is it really? So first, just a simple, okay, now here, what I'd like to do is turn my attention to another document that will make available. So I was invited to give testimony before a Senate subcommittee two weeks ago where they were considering the platform accountability act should we force the platforms to actually tell us what our kids are doing. Like, we have no idea other than self-report, we have no idea. You know, only ones who know the kid does this and then over the next hours the kids depressed are happy. We can't know that, but Facebook knows it. So should they be compelled to reveal the data? We need

that. You raised just to give people a little bit of context. And this document is brilliantly structured with questions, studies that indicate that the answer to a question is yes, indicate that the answer to a question is no, and then mix results and questions include things like the social media make people more angry or effectively polarized. Right. That's the one that we're going to get to. That's the one for democracy.

Yes, that's the democracy. So I've got three different Google Docs here because I found this is an amazing way and thank God for Google Doc. It's an amazing way to organize the research literature and it's a collaborative review meaning that so on this one Gene Twenge and I put up the first draft and we say please, you know comment had studies tell us what we missed and it evolves in real time in Any direction the yes or the no yeah, we we specifically coach because I look My the center of my research is that our gut feeling is driver reasoning.

That was my dissertation, that was my early research. And so if Gene Twengi and I are committed to, but we're gonna obviously preferentially believe that these platforms are bad for kids because we said so in our books. So we have confirmation bias. And I'm a devotee of John Stuart Mill, the only cure for confirmation bias

is other people who have a different confirmation bias. These documents evolve because critics then say, no, you missed this or they say, you don't know what you're talking about, say, great, say so, tell us. I put together this document and I'm going to put links to everything on my website, if listeners, viewers, go to JonathanHeight.com, slash social media. It's a new page I just created. I'll put everything together in one place there.

And we'll put those in the show notes. Like links to this document and other things like it, that's right. Exactly. So yeah, so the thing I want to call attention now is this document, this document here, with the title, Teen Mental Health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause.

So Ben Sass and Chris Coons are on the Judiciary Committee. They had a subcommittee hearing on Nate Priscilla's bill, platform accountability transparency act, so they asked me to testify on, what do we know, what's going on with the team mental health. And so what I did was I put together everything I know with plenty of graphs to make these points. That first, what do we know about the crisis? Well, that the crisis is specific to mood disorders,

not everything else. It's not just self-report, it's also behavioral data because suicide and self-harm go skyrocketing after 2010. The increases are very large and the crisis is gendered and it's hit many countries. So I go through the data on that. So we have a pretty clear characterization and nobody's disputed me on this on this part.

So can we just pause real quick? Just so for people who are not aware. So self-report, just how you kind of collect data and this kind of thing. Sure. You have us, self-report is survey, you ask people, how anxious are you these days? Yeah. How many hours a week do you use social media? That kind of stuff. You do, it's maybe, you can collect larger amounts of data that way because you can ask a large number of people that kind of question. But then there's, I forget the term you used, but more, so non-self report data. Behavioral data. Behavioral data, sorry. Where you actually have self harmharm and suicide numbers.

Exactly. There are a lot of graphs like this. This is from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The federal government and also Pew and Gallup, there are a lot of organizations that have been collecting survey data for decades. This is a gold mine. What you see on these graphs, over and over again, is relatively straight lines up until around 2010 or 2012 and on the X axis We have time years going from 2004 to 2020 on the Y axis is the percent of US teens who had a major depression in the last year That's right. So when this data started coming out around so gene twang's book iGen 2017 a lot of people say oh She you know, she doesn't know what she's talking about. This is just self-report like Gen Z

They're just really comfortable talking about this. This is a good thing. This isn't a real epidemic. And literally the day before my book with Greg was published, the day before, there was a psychiatrist in New York Times who had an op-ed saying, relax. Smartphones are not ruining your kid's brain. And he said it's just self-report. It's just that they're giving higher rates as more diagnosis, but underlying this no change.

No. It's just that they're giving higher rates there's more diagnosis, but underlying this no change. No, because these, it's theoretically possible, but all we have to do is look at the hospitalization data for self-harm and suicide, and we see the exact same trends. We see also a very sudden big rise around between 2009 and 2012, you have an elbow, and then it goes up, up, up. So that is not self-report.

Those are actual kids admitted to hospitals for cutting themselves. So we have a catastrophe. And this was all true before COVID. COVID made things worse, but we have to realize, COVID's going away, kids are back in school, or back in school, but we're not going to go back to where we were because this problem is not caused

by COVID. What is it caused by? Well, just again, to just go through the point, then I'll stop. I just feel like I just want to get out the data to show that it's wrong. So first point, correlational studies consistently show a link. They almost all do, but it's not big. It equivalent to a correlation coefficient around point one, typically. That's the first point. The second point is that the correlation is actually much larger than for eating potatoes. So that famous line wasn't about social media

use. That was about digital media use. That included watching Netflix, doing homework on everything. And so what they did is they looked at all screen use, and then they said, this is correlated with self-reports of depression anxiety. Like, you know, .03, it's tiny. And, well, they said that clearly in the paper, but the media has reported it as social media, is .03 or tiny. And that's just not true. What I found digging into it, you don't know this

until you look at the, there's more than 100 studies in the Google Doc. Once you dig in what you see is, okay, you see a tiny correlation. What happens if we zoom in on just social media? It always gets bigger, often a lot bigger, two or three times bigger. What happens if we zoom in on girls and social media? It always gets bigger, often a lot bigger. And so what I think we can conclude, in fact, one of the authors of the potato studies

herself concludes. Amy Orman says, I have a quote from here, she reviewed a lot of studies and she herself said that, quote, the associations between social media use and well-being, therefore range from about R equals 0.15 to R equals 0.10. So that's the range we're talking about. And that's for boys and girls together. And a lot of research, including hers and mine, show that girls, it's higher. So for girls, we're talking about correlations around 0.15 to 0.2. I believe Gene Twengian, I found it's about 0.2 or 0.22.

Now this might sound like on our keen social science debate, but people have to understand, public health correlations are almost never above 0.2. So the correlation of childhood exposure to lead and adult IQ, very serious problem, that's point O nine. Like the world's messy and our measurements are messy. And so if you find a consistent correlation of point one five, like you would never let your kid do that thing, that actually is dangerous. And it can explain when you multiply it over tens of millions of kids spending

you know years of their lives, you actually can't explain the mental health epidemic just from social media use. Well, and then there's questions. By the way, this is really good to learn because I quit potatoes and it had no And so Russian that was a big sacrifice They're quite literal actually because I'm mostly eating keto these days, but that's that's funny that they're actually literally called the potato studies. Okay, but given this, and there's a lot of fascinating data here, there's also a discussion of how to fix it. What are the aspects that if fixed would start to reverse some of these trends? So if we just linger on the set of the Mark Zuckerberg

statements. So first of all, do you think Mark is aware of some of these studies? So if you put yourself in the shoes of Mark Zuckerberg and the executives that Facebook and Twitter, how can you try to understand the studies, like the Google Docs, you put together to try to make decisions that fix things. Is there a stable science now that you can start to investigate? And also maybe if you can comment

on the depth of data that's available because ultimately, this is something you argue that the data should be more transparent, should be provided. But currently, if it's not, all you have is maybe some leaks of internal data. That's right. And we could talk about the potential. You have to be very sort of objective about the potential bias and those kinds of leaks.

You want to, it would be nice to have a non- leak data. Like, like, uh. Yeah, it'd be nice to be able to actually have academic researchers able to access and de-individuated, de-identified form, the actual data on what kids are doing and how their mood changes and, you know, when people commit suicide, what was happening before,

and it'd be great to know that. We have no idea. So, how do we begin to fix social media, would you say? Okay, so here's the most important thing to understand. In the social sciences, you know, we say, is social media harmful to kids? That's a broad question. You can't answer that directly. You have to have much more specific questions. You have to operationalize it and have a theory of how it's harming kids. And so almost all of the research is done on what's called the dose response model. That is, everybody, including most of the researchers, are thinking about

this. Like, let's treat it this like sugar. You know, because the data usually shows a little bit of social media use isn't correlated with harm, but a lot is. So, you know, I think about like sugar, and if kids have a lot of sugar, then it's bad. So how much is okay? But social media is not like sugar at all. It's not a dose response thing. It's a complete rewiring of childhood. So we evolved as a species in which kids play in mixed age groups. They learn the skills of adulthood. They're always playing and working and learning and doing errands. That's normal childhood. That's how you develop your brain. That's how you become a mature adult until the 1990s. In the 1990s, we dropped all that. We said that's normal childhood. That's how you develop your brain. That's how you become a mature adult, until the 1990s.

In the 1990s, we dropped all that. We said it's too dangerous. If we let you outside, you'll be kidnapped. So we completely, we began rewiring childhood in the 90s before social media. And that's a big part of the story. I'm a big fan of Lenore Skenezy who wrote the book Free Range Kids.

If there are any parents listening to this, please buy Lenore's book Free Free Range Kids, and then go to letgrow.org. It's a nonprofit that Lenore and I started with Peter Gray and Daniel Shookman to help change the laws and the norms around letting kids out to play. They need free play. So that's the big picture they need free play. And we started stopping that in the 90s that we reduced it. And then Gen Z, kids point in 1996, they're the first people in history to get on social media before puberty. Millennials didn't get it until they were in college.

But Gen Z, they get it, because you can lie, you just lie by your age. So they really began to get on around 2009, 2010, and boom, two years later, they're depressed. It's not because they ate too much sugar necessarily. It's because even normal social interactions that kids had in the early 2000s, largely, well, they declined because now everything's through the phone.

And that's what I'm trying to get across, that it's not just a dose response thing. It's imagine one middle school, where everyone has an Instagram account, and it's not just a dose response thing. Imagine one middle school where everyone has an Instagram account and it's constant drama, everyone's constantly checking and posting and worrying and imagine going through puberty that way. Versus Imagine there was a policy, no phones in school, you have to check them in a locker, no one can have an Instagram account, all the parents are on board.

Parents only let their kids have Instagram because the kid says everyone else has it. And that's, we're stuck in a social dilemma, we're stuck in a trap. board, parents only let their kids have Instagram because the kid says everyone else has it. And that's, we're stuck in a social dilemma, we're stuck in a trap. So what's the solution? Keep kids off until they're done with puberty. There's a new study actually by Amy Orbyn and Andy Shabielski showing that the damage is greatest for girls between 11 and 13. So there is no way to make it safe for preteens or even 13, 14 year olds.

We've got kids should simply not be allowed on these business models where you're the product. They should not be allowed until you're 16. We need to raise the agent and force it. That's the biggest thing. So I think that's a really powerful solution. But it makes me wonder if there's other solutions like controlling the virality of bullying. So sort of if there's a way that's more productive to childhood to use social media. So of

course one thing is putting your phone down, but first of all from a perspective of social media companies, it might be difficult to convince them to do so. And also, for me, as an adult who grew up with all social media, social media is a source of joy. So I wonder if it's possible to design the mechanisms, both challenge the adraver model, but actually just technically the recommender system and how viral, how virality works on these platforms.

If it's possible to design a platform that leads to growth and to fragility, but does not lead to depression, self harm and suicide, like finding that balance and making that as the objective function, not engagement. Yeah. Or something else. I don't think that can be done for kids.

So I am very reluctant to tell adults what to do. I have a lot of libertarian friends, and I would lose their friendship if I started saying, oh, it's bad for adults, and we should stop adults from using it. But by the same token, I'm very reluctant to have Facebook and Instagram tell my kids what to do without me even knowing, or without me having any ability to control it. As a parent, it's very hard to stop your kid. I have stopped my kids from

getting on Instagram, and that's called some difficulties, but they also have thanked me because they see that it's stupid. They see that what the kids are heavily on it, but they post. They see that the culture of it is stupid, as they say. So, I don't think there's a way to make it healthy for kids. I think there's one thing which is healthy for kids which is free play. We already robbed them of most of it in the 90s. The more time they spend on their devices, the less they have free play. Video games is a kind of play. I'm not saying that these things are all bad, but you know, 12 hours of video game play means you don't get any physical play. So, Dr. Mouli, physical play is the way

to develop physical and fragility. And especially social skills, kids need huge amounts of conflict with no adult to meet to supervisor mediate, and that's what we rob them up. So anyway, we should move on, because I get really into the evidence here, because I think the story is actually quite clear now. There was a lot of ambiguity. There are conflicting studies, but when you look at it all together, the correlational studies are pretty clear and the effect sizes are coming in around 0.1 to 0.15, whether you call

that a correlation coefficient or a beta. It's all in the standardized beta. It's all in that sort of range. There's also experimental evidence. We collect true experiments with random assignment and they mostly show an effect. And there's eyewitness testimony, you know, with the kids themselves, you talk to girls and you pull them. Do you think overall Instagram is good for your mental health or bad for you're not going

to find a group saying, Oh, it's wonderful. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Mark, you're right. It's mostly good. No, the girls themselves say, this is the major reason. And I've got studies in the Google doc where they've been surveys What do you think is causing the is causing depression anxiety and the number one thing they say is social media? So there's multiple strands of evidence. Do you think the recommendation is as a parent

That teens should not use Instagram. Yes, yes, that's ultimately maybe in the long term There's no way to make it safe safe. It's unsafe at any speed. I mean, it might be very difficult to make it safe. And then the short term, while we don't know how to make it safe, put down the phone. Well, hold on a second, play with other kids via a platform like Roblox or multiplayer video games, that's great. I have no beef with that. You focus on bullying before. That's one of five or seven different avenues of harm. The main one I think, which does in the girls, is not being bullied. It's living a life where you're thinking all the time about posting because once a

girl starts posting. So it's bad enough that they're scrolling through. And this is everyone comments on this. You're scrolling through and everyone's life looks better starts posting so it's bad enough that they're scrolling through and this is everyone comments on this You're scrolling through and everyone's life looks better than yours because it's fake and all that you see are the ones The algorithm picked that were the night anyway, so the scrolling I think is bad for the girls But I'm beginning to see I can't prove this but I'm beginning to see from talking to girls from seeing how it's used is once you start posting That takes over your mind and now you're basically no longer present, because even if you're only spending five or six hours a day

on Instagram, you're always thinking about it. And when you're in class, you're thinking about how are people responding to the post that I made between classes? I mean, I do it. I tried to stay off Twitter for a while, but now I've got this big article, I'm tweeting about it, and I can't help it.

I check 20 times a day, I'll check. Like, what are people saying? What are people saying? This is terrible. And I'm a 58 year old man. Imagine being a 12 year old girl, going through puberty. It's self-conscious about how you look. And I see some young women, I see some professional young women.

Women in their 20s and 30s, were putting up sexy photos of themselves. Like, and this is so sad. so sad, don't be doing this. Yeah, see, the thing where I disagree a little bit is, I agree with you in the short term, but in the long term, I feel it's the responsibility of social media, not in some kind of ethical way, not just in an ethical way, but it'll actually be good for the product or for the company to maximize the long-term happiness and well-being of the person. So not just engagement. But the person

is not the customer. So the thing is not to make them happy, it's to keep them on. That's the way it is currently, without driven. If we can get this model as you're saying, I'd be all for it. And I think that's the way to make much more money. So like a subscription model, where the money comes from paying? It's not... That would work, wouldn't it? That would help. So subscription definitely would help, but I'm not sure it's so much...

I mean, a lot of people say it's about the source of money, but I just think it's about the fundamental mission of the product. If you want people to really love a thing, I think that thing should maximize your long-term well-being. It should. In theory, in morality land, it should. I don't think it's just morality land. I think in business land too. But that's maybe a discussion for another day. We're studying the reality of the way things currently are, and they are as they are as the studies are highlighting. So let us go then in from the land of mental health for young people to the land of democracy. By the way, in these big umbrella areas, is there a connection, is there a correlation between the mental health of a human

mind and the division of our political discussion? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. So our brains are structured to be really good at approach and avoid. So we have circuits. The front left circuit is over simplification, but there's some truth to it. There's what's called the behavioral activation system front-left cortex. It's all about approach, opportunity,

kid in a candy store. And then the front-right cortex has circuits specialized for withdrawal, fear, threat. And of course, students, I'm a college professor. And most of us think about our college days. Yeah, we were anxious at times, but it was fun. And it was like, I can take all these courses, I can do all these clubs, all these people. Now imagine if in 2013, all of a sudden, students are coming in

with their front-right cortex hyperactivated, everything's a threat. Everything is dangerous. There's not enough to go around. So the front-right cortex puts us into what's called defend mode as opposed to discover mode. Now let's move up to adults. Imagine a large diverse secular liberal democracy in which people are most of the time in discover mode and we have a problem. Let's think how to solve it. This is what De Toqueville said about Americans. Like, there's a problem.

We get together. We figure out how to solve it. And he said, whereas in England and France, people would wait for the king to do it. But here, like, you know, it's roller-priced, they'd do it. That's the can-do mindset. That's front-left cortex discover mode. If you have a national shift of people

spending more time in defend mode, now you, so everything that comes up, whatever anyone says, you're not looking like, oh, there's something good about you thinking, you know, how was this dangerous? How was this a threat? How was this violence? How can I attack this? How can I, you know, so, so if you imagine about you thinking, how was this dangerous? How was this a threat? How was this violence? How can I attack this?

How can I, you know, so if you imagine, you know, God up there with a little lever, like, okay, let's push everyone over into, you know, more into discover mode. And it's like joy breaks out, age of Aquarius. All right, let's shift them back into, let's put everyone in defend mode. And I can't think of a better way to put people

in defend mode than to have them spend some time on partisan or political Twitter, where it's just a stream of horror stories, including videos about how horrible the other side is. And it's not just that they're bad people. It's that if they win this election, then we lose our country, or then it's catastrophe. So Twitter, and again, we're not saying all of Twitter, you know, most people aren't on Twitter and people that are mostly not talking about politics. But the ones that are on, talking about politics are flooding us with stuff.

All the journalists see it. Mainstream media is hugely influenced by Twitter. So if we put everyone, if there's more sort of anxiety, sense of threat, this colors everything. And then you're not, you know, the great thing about about a democracy and especially a, you know, or a legislature that has some diversity in it is that the art of politics is that you can grow the pie and then divide it. You don't just fight zero sum. You you find ways that we can all get 60% of what we want. And that ends when everyone's anxious and angry. So, let's try to start to figure out who's the blame here. Is it the nature of social media? Is it the decision of the people at the heads of social media companies that they're

making in the detailed engineering designs of the algorithm? Is it the users of social media that drive narratives like you mentioned journalists that want to maximize drama in order to drive clicks to their off-site articles. Is it just human nature that loves drama? I can't look away from an accident when you're driving by it. Is there something to be said about? The reason I asked these questions is to see, can we start to figure out what the solution would be to alleviate, to de-escalate the pain?

Yeah, not yet. Let's first, we have to understand, as we did on the team mental health thing, let's lay out what is the problem, what's messing up our country, and we'll tell we can talk about solutions? So it's all the things you said interacting in an interesting way. So human nature is tribal. We evolved for intergroup conflict. We love war. We the first time my buddies and I played paintball. I was 29 and

we're divided into teams with strangers to shoot guns at each other and kill each other. And we all, afterwards it was like, oh my God, that was incredible. Like it really felt like we'd opened a room in our hearts that had never been opened. But as men, you know, testosterone changes our brains and our bodies and activates the war stuff,

like we've got war stuff. And that's why boys like certain team sports, it's play war. So that's who we are. It doesn't mean we're always trived. It doesn't mean we're always wanting to fight. We're also really good at making peace and cooperation and finding deals. We're good at trade and exchange. So you know, you want your country to, you want a society that has room for conflict,

ideally, over sports. Like that's great. That's. That's totally not just harmless. It's actually good. But otherwise, you want cooperation to generally prevail in the society. That's how you create prosperity and peace. And if you're going to have a diverse democracy, you really better focus on cooperation, not on tribalism and division. And there's a wonderful book by Yasha Monk called The Great Experiment that talks about the difficulty of diversity and democracy. And what we need to do to get this right and to get the benefits of diversity.

So that's human nature. Now let's imagine that the technological environment makes it really easy for us to cooperate. Let's give everyone telephones in the postal service. Let's give them email. Like, wow, you know, we can do all these things together with people far away. It's amazing. Now instead of that, let's give them a technology that encourages them to fight. So early Facebook and Twitter were generally lovely places. You know, people old enough to remember like they were fun. There's a lot of humor. You didn't feel like you're going to get your head blown off no matter what you said.

You didn't feel like you're going to get your head blown off no matter what you said. 2007, 2008, 2009, it was still fun. These were nice places mostly. And like almost all the platforms start off as nice places. But and this is the the key thing in the in the article, the Atlantic article on Babel, on after Babel. The Atlantic article, by the way, is why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid. Yeah. My title in the magazine was after Babel, adapting to a world we can no longer share. That's what I proposed, but they they they be tested. What's the title? It gets the most clicks and it was why the past 10 years have been used to. So Babel, the tower Babel is a driving metaphor in the piece. So what first of all, what is it was the tower Babel? What's was Babel?

What do we talk about? Okay. So So the tower battle is a story in early in Genesis where the descendants of Noah are spreading out and repopulating the world and they're on the plane of Shinar and they say, let us build us a city with a tower to make a name for ourselves. Let's we be scattered again. And so it's a very short story. There's not a lot in it, but it looks like they're saying, you know, we don't want God to flood us again. Let's build a city and a tower and to reach the heavens. And God is offended by the hubris of these people, acting again like gods. And he says, here's the key line, he says, let us go down and confuse their language

so that they may not understand one another. So in the story, he doesn't literally knock the tower over, but many of us have seen images or movie dramatizations where a great weight in the comes and the towers knocked over and the people are left wandering amid the rubble, unable to talk to each other. So I've been grappling, I'm trying to say, what the hell happened to our society beginning in 2014, what the hell is happening to universities? And then it spread out from universities,

it hit journalism, the arts, and now it's all over companies. What the hell happened to us? And it wasn't until I reread the Babel story, a couple of years ago that I thought, whoa, this is it, this is the metaphor. Because, you know, I've been thinking about tribalism and left-right battles and war, and that's easy to think about. But Babel isn't like, and God said, let half of the people hate the

other half. No, it wasn't that. God said, let us confuse their language, that they, none of them, can understand each other ever again, or at least for a while. So it's a story about fragmentation, or at least for a while. So it's a story about fragmentation. And that's what's unique about our time. So so meta or Facebook wrote a rebuttal to my article. They disputed what I said. And one of their arguments was, oh, but you know, polarization goes back way before social media and you know, and it was happening in the 90s and they're right. It does. I did say that, but I should have said it more clearly with more examples. But here's the new thing. Even though left and right were beginning to hate each other more, we weren't afraid of the person next to us.

We weren't afraid of each other. Cable TV, Fox News, whatever you want to point to about increasing polarization, it didn't make me afraid of my students. That was new in around 2014, 2015. We started hearing, getting articles, you know, I'm a liberal professor and my liberal students frightened me. It was in Vox in 2015.

And that was after Greg and I had turned in the draft of our, of our first draft of our coddling article. And surveys show over and over again, students are not, as afraid of their professors, they're actually afraid of other students. Most students are lovely. It's not like the whole generation has lost their minds. What happens is a small number, a small number, are adapted using social media to destroy anyone that they think they can get credit for destroying.

And the bizarre thing is it's rarely about what ideas you express. It's usually about a word, like he used this word, or this, you know, this was insensitive, or, you know, I can link this word to that word. So it's, it's, it's, it's, they don't have been engaged with ideas and arguments. It's a real sort of gotcha, prosecuting, I'm just like, oh, you know, it's like a, like a witch trial mindset. So, so the unique thing here, there's something about social media in those years that a small number of people can sort of be catalyst for this division. They can start the viral wave that leads to a division that's different than the kind of division we saw before. It's a little different than a viral wave. Once you get some people who can who can use social media to intimidate, you get a sudden phase shift, you get a big change in

the dynamics of groups. And that's the heart of the article. This isn't just another article that has social media is polarizing us in destroying democracy. The heart of the article is an analysis of what makes groups smart and what makes them stupid. And so because, as we said earlier, my own research is on post-talk reasoning, just post-talk justification rationalization. The only cure for that is other people who don't share your biases. And so if you have an academic debate, as like the one I'm having with these other researchers over social media, I write something, they write something, I have to take account of their arguments and they have to take account of mine.

When the academic world works, it's because it puts us together in ways that things cancel out. That's what makes universities smart. It makes some generators of knowledge. Unless we stop dissent. What if we say on these topics, there can be no dissent. And if anyone says otherwise, if any academic comes up with a research that says otherwise, we're going to destroy them. And if any academic even tweets a study contradicting what is the official word. We're going to destroy them.

That was the famous case of David Shore, who in the days after George Floyd was killed, and there were protests. The question is, are these protests going to be productive? Are they going to backfire? Now most of them were peaceful, but some were violent. He tweeted a study. He just simply tweeted a study done by an African-American, I think sociologist at Princeton, Omar Wasau. And Wasau's study showed that when you look back at the 60s, you see that where there were violent protests, it tended to backfire. Peaceful protests tend to work.

And so he simply tweeted that study. And there was a Twitter mob after him. This was insensitive. This was anti-black. I think he was accused of, and he was fired within a day or two. So this is the kind of dynamic. This is not caused by cable TV. This is not caused. This is something new. Can I just on a small tangent there?

In that situation, because it happens time and time again, you highlight in your current work, but also in the coddling of their American mind, is the blame on the mob, the mechanisms that enables the mob or the people that do the firing, the administration does the firing. Yeah, it's all of them. Well, can I sometimes feel that we don't put enough blame on the people that do the firing, which is that feels like in the long arc of human history, that is the place for courage and for ideals, right? That's where it stops. That's where

the book stops. So if there's going to be new mechanisms for mobs and all that kind of stuff, there's going to be tribalism. But the end of the day, that's what it means to be a leader is to stop, stop the mob at the door. But I'm a social psychologist, which means I look at the social forces that work on people. And if you show me a situation in which 95% of the people behave one way, and it's a way that we find surprising and shameful, I'm not going to say, wow, 95% of the people are shameful. I'm going to say, wow, what a powerful situation. We've got to change that situation.

So that's what I think is happening here because there are hardly any in the first few years, you know, it's began around 2018, 2019, it really answers the corporate world. There are hardly any leaders who stood up against it, but I've talked to a lot and it's always the same thing. You have these, you know, you know, people in their, usually they're 50s or 60s, generally they're progressive or on the left. They're accused of things by their young employees. They don't have the vocabulary to stand up to it

and they give in very quickly. And because it happens over and over again, and there's only a few examples of university presidents who said like, no, we're not gonna stop this talk just because you're freaking out. No, we're not going to fire this professor because he wrote a paper that you don't like. There are so few examples. I have to include that the situational forces are so strong. Now, I think we are seeing a reversal in the last few weeks or months. A clear sign of that is that the New York Times actually came out with an editorial

from the editorial board saying that free speech is important. Now that's amazing that the Times have the guts to stand up for free speech because, you know, they're the people, well, what's been happening with the Times is that they've allowed Twitter to become the editorial board, Twitter has control over the New York Times and the New York Times literally will change papers.

I have an essay in Politico with with Nadine Strauss and Steve Pinker and Pamela Presky on how the New York Times retracted and changed an editorial by Brett Stevens and they did it in a sneaky way and they lied about it and they did this out of fear because he mentioned IQ. He mentioned IQ and Jews. And then he went on to say, probably isn't a genetic thing, it's probably cultured, but he mentioned it.

And the New York Times, I mean, they were really cowardly. Now, I think they, from what I hear, they know that they were cowardly. They know that they should not have fired James Bennett. They know that they gave into the mob. And that's why they're now poking their head up above the parapet and they're saying, oh, we think that free speech is important.

And then, of course, they got their heads blown off because, you know, Twitter reacted like, how dare you say this? Are you saying racist speeches? Okay. But they didn't back down. They didn't retract it. They didn't apologize for defending free speech. So I think the times might be coming back.

Gasky opinion on something here. What in terms of the times coming back in terms of Twitter being the editorial board for the prestigious journalistic organizations, what's the importance of the role of Mr. Elon Musk in this? So, you know, it's all fun and games, but here's a human who tweets about

the importance of freedom of speech and buys Twitter. What are your thoughts on the influence, the positive and the negative possible consequences of this particular action? So, you know, if he is gonna succeed, and if he's gonna be one of the major reasons why we decarbonize quickly and why we get to Mars, then I'm willing to cut him a lot of slack. So I have an overall positive view of him.

Now where I'm concerned and where I'm critical is where in the middle of a raging culture war. And this culture war is making our institutions stupid, it's making them fail. This culture where I think could destroy our country. And by destroy, I mean, we could descend into constant constitutional crises, a lot more violence, not that we're gonna disappear and not that we're gonna kill each other,

but I think there will be a lot more violence. So, we're in the middle of this raging culture war, it's possibly turning to violence. You need to not add fuel to the fire. And the fact that he declared that he's gonna be a Republican and the Democrats are the bad party. And as an individual citizen, he's entitled to his opinion, of course, but as an influential

citizen, he should at least be thoughtful. And more importantly, companies need companies need, and I think would benefit from a Geneva Convention for the culture war in which, because they're all being damaged by the culture we're coming to the companies. What we need to get to, I hope, is a place where companies do, they have strong ethical obligations about the effects that they cause, about how they treat their employees about their supply chain. They have strong ethical obligations. But they should not be weighing in on culture war issues. Well, if I can read exact week as part of the tweet I like, he said in the past, I voted Democrat because they were mostly the kind, the kindness party.

But they have become the party of division and hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. And then he finishes with now watch their dirty tricks campaign against me on fold. Okay. What do you make of that? Like, what do you think he was thinking that he came out so blatantly as a partisan? Because he's probably communicating with the board, blatantly as a partisan. He because he's probably communicating with the board, with the people inside Twitter, and he's clearly seen the lean. And he's responding to that lean. He's, he's also opening the door to the, to the,

a potential bringing back, um, the former president onto the platform and also bringing back, which he's probably looking at the numbers of the people who are behind truth, social, saying that, okay, it seems that there's a strong lean in Twitter in terms of the left. In fact, from what I see, it seems like the current operation of Twitter is the extremes of the left get outraged by something, and the extremes of the right point out how the left is ridiculous. Like, that seems to be the mechanism. And that's the source of the drama, and then the left gets very mad at the right that points out the ridiculousness,

and there's this vicious cycle. That's the polarization cycle. That's what we're in. There's something that happened here that's there's a shift where there's a decline, I would say, in board parties towards being shitty. Okay, but look, what everything with the parties, that's not the issue. The issue is should the most important CEO in America, the CEO of some of our biggest and most important companies. So let's imagine five years from now, two different worlds. In one world, the CEO of every Fortune 500 company has said, I'm a Republican because I hate those douchebags or I'm a Democrat because I hate those Nazi racists. That's one world where everybody puts up a thing in their window, everybody, it's

culture everywhere all the time, 24 hours a day. You pick a doctor based on whether he's red or blue, everything is culture war. That's one possible future, which we're headed towards. The other is we say, you know what? Political conflict should be confined to political spaces. There is a room for protest, but you don't go protesting at people's private homes.

You don't go threatening their children. You don't go doxing them. We have to have channels that are not culture war all the time When you go shopping when you go to a restaurant, you shouldn't be the elder and screamed at When you buy a product you should be able to buy products from an excellent company. You shouldn't have to always think What's the CEO? What is the I mean what an insane world, but that's where heading so I think that Elon did a really bad thing in And in launching that tweet that was I, really throwing fuel on a fire and setting a norm in which businesses are going to get even more politicized than they are.

And you're saying specifically the problem was that he picked the side. As the head of, yes, as the CEO, as a head of several major companies, of, you know, of course, we can find out what his views are. You know, it's not like it's, I mean, actually, with him, it's maybe hard to know, but it's not that a CEO can't be a partisan or have views, but to publicly declare it in that way in such a really insulting way, this is throwing a few on the fire and it's setting a precedent that corporations

are major players in the culture world. I'm trying to reverse that. We've got to pull back from that. Let me play devil's advocate here. So because I've got a chance to interact with quite a few CEOs, there is also a value for authenticity. So I'm guessing this was written while sitting on the toilet. And I could see in a day from now saying, LOL just kidding, there's a human, there's a lightness, there's a chaos element, and that's the chaos is not,

that's not what we need right now. We don't need more chaos. Well, yes, there's a balance here. The chaos isn't engineered chaos, it's really authentically who he is. And I would like to say that there's, I agree with that. That's a trade-offoff because if you become a politician

so there's a tradeoff between in this case maybe authenticity and civility maybe like being calculating About the impact you have with your words versus just being yourself. And I'm not sure Calculating is also a slippery slope. Both are slippery slopes. You have to be careful. So when we have conversations in a vacuum and we just say like, what should a person do? Those are very hard. But our world is actually structured into domains and institutions. And if it's just like, oh, you know, talking here among our friends, like we should be authentic. Sure. But the CEO of a company has fiduciary

duties, legal fiduciary duties to the company. He owes loyalty to the company. And if he is using the company for his own political gain or other purposes or social standing, that's a violation of his fiduciary duty to the company. Now there's debate among scholars whether you fiduciary duties to the shareholders. I don't think it's the shareholders. I think many legal experts say it's the company's legal person. You have duties to the company, employees, oh, a duty to the company. So he's got those duties. And I think he, you know, you can say he's being authentic, but he's also violating those

duties. So it's not necessarily he's violating a law by doing it, but he certainly is shredding any notion of professional ethics around leadership of a company in the modern age. I think you have to take it in the full context because you see that he's not being a political player. He's just saying quit being douchey. Supposed to see you afford says, you know what? Let's pick a group. I shouldn't do a racial group because that would be different.

Let's just say, you know what? Left handed people are douchebags. I hate them. Why would you say that? Like, I'm afraid I would have left handed people. What you said now is not either funny or like-hearted because I hate them. It wasn't funny. I'm not picking on you.

I'm saying that statement. Words matter. There is a lightness to the statement in the full context. If you look at the timeline of the man, there's ridiculous memes and there's non-stop jokes that my big problem with the CO4 is there's never any of that. Not only is there any of that, there's not a celebration of the beauty of the engineering of the different products. It's all political speak channel through multiple meetings of PR.

There's levels upon levels upon levels where you think that it's really not authentic. And there you're actually by being polite, by being civil, you're actually playing politics, because all of your actual political decision making is done in the back channels. That's obvious. Here's a human being, being authentic and actually struggling with some of the ideas of having fun with it. I think this lightness represents the kind of positivity that we should be striving for.

It's funny to say that because you're looking at these statements and they seem negative, but in the full context of social media, I don't know if they are. But look at what you just said in the full context. You're taking his tweets in context. You know, who doesn't do that? Twitter. Like, that's the Twitter. Well, that's the fun of the problem you're talking about.

Twitter is there is no context. Everything is taken in the maximum possible way. There is no context. Oh, you're saying? So, this is not like, yes, I wish we did take people in context. I wish we lived in that world, but now that we have Twitter and Facebook, we don't live in that world anymore. So, you're saying it is a bit of a responsibility for people with a large platform to consider

the fact that there is the fundamental mechanism of Twitter where people don't give you the benefit of the doubt. Well, I don't want to hang it on large platform because then that's what a lot of people say. Well, you know, she shouldn't say that because she has large platform and she should say things that agree with my politics. I don't want to hang it on large platform. I want to hang it on CEO of a company. CEOs of a company have duties and responsibilities. And Scott Galleroy, I think, is very clear about this. He criticized Elon a lot as being a really bad role model

for young men, young men need role models. And he is a very appealing attractive role model. So I agree with you, but in terms of being a role model, I think I don't want to put a responsibility on people, but yeah, so you could be a much, much better role model. There's, I mean, to insult sitting centers by calling them old. I mean, that's, you know, yeah, I won't do both side ism of like, well, those senators can be assholes too.

But that's fair enough. Respond intelligently as I tweeted to unintelligent treatment. Yes. Yes. So the reason I like and he's not a friend, the reason I like Elon is because of the engineering because of the work he does. I admire him enormously for that. But what I admire on the Twitter side is the authenticity because I've been a little bit jaded and worn out by people who have built up walls.

People in a position of power, the CEOs and the politicians who built up walls and you don't see the real person. That's one of the reasons I love long form podcasting, especially if you talk more than 10 minutes, it's hard to have a wall up and all kind of crumbles away. So I don't know, but yes, yes, you're right. That is a step backwards to say, at least to me the biggest problem is the pick sides, to say, I'm not going to vote this way or that way. That's um, that like leave that to the politicians. You have you have

much like the importance of social media is far bigger than the bickering, the short term, bigger, than any more political party. It's a platform where we make progress, where we develop ideas through sort of rigorous discourse, all those kinds of things. So, okay, so here's an idea about social media, developed through social media from Elon, which is, everyone freaks out

because they think either, always gonna do less content moderations. The left is freaking out because they think either, you know, he's going to do less content moderations. The left is freaking out because they want more content moderation. The right is celebrating because they think the people doing the content moderation are on the left. But there was a one, I think it was a tweet where he said that three things he was going to do to make it better and was I would defeat the bots or something. But he said, authenticate all humans. And this is a hugely important statement. And it's pretty powerful that this guy

can put three words in a tweet. And actually, I think this could change the world. Even if the bid fails, the fact that Elon said that, that he thinks we need to authenticate all humans is huge because now we're talking about solutions here. What can we do to make social media a better place for democracy? A place that actually makes democracy better? As Tristan Harris has pointed out,

social media and digital technology, the Chinese are using it really skillfully to make a better authoritarian nation. And by better, I don't mean morally better, I mean like more stable, successful. Whereas we're using it to make ourselves weaker, more fragmented, and more insane. So we're on the way down, we're using it to make ourselves weaker, more fragmented, and more insane. So we're on the way down, we're in big trouble.

And all the argument is about content moderation. And what we learned from Francis Hagen is that what, 5% or 10% of what they might call hate speech gets caught, 1% of violence intimidation, content moderation, even if we do a lot more of it, isn't going to make a big difference. All the powers in the dynamics change us to the architecture. And as I said in my Atlantic article, what are the forms that would matter for social media? And the number one thing I said, the number one thing I believe is user authentication or user verification.

And people freak out and they say, like, you know, oh, but we need anonymous. It's like, yeah, fine. You can be anonymous. But what I think needs to be done is anyone can open an account on Twitter, Facebook, whatever, as long as you're over 16, and that's another piece. Once you're 16 or 18, at a certain age, you can be treated like an adult,

you can open an account, and you can look, you can read, and you can make up whatever fake name you want. But if you want to post, if you want the viral amplification on a company that has section to 30 protection from lawsuits, which is a very special privilege, I understand the need for it, but it's an incredibly powerful privilege to protect them from lawsuits. If you want to be able to post on platforms that as we'll get to in the Google Doc, there's a lot of evidence that they are undermining and damaging democracy. Then the company has this minimal, minimal responsibility has to meet. Banks have no your customer loss. You can't just walk up to

a bank with a bag of money that you stole and say, here, deposit this from you. My name's John Smith. You have to actually show who you are. And the bank isn't going to announce who you are publicly, but you have to, if they're going to do business with you, they need to know you're a real person, not a criminal. And so there's a lot of schemes for how to do this. There's multiple levels. People don't seem to understand this. Level zero of authentication is nothing. That's what we have now. Level one, this might be what Elon meant, authentic it all humans, meaning you have to at least pass a capture, some test to show you not a bot. There's no identity, there's nothing just something that you know, it's a constant cat

and mouth struggle between bots and you know, so we try to just filter out pure bots. The next level up, there are a variety of schemes that allow you to authenticate identity in ways that are not traceable or kept. So, whether you show an ID, whether you use biometric, whether you have something on the blockchain that establishes identity, whether it's linked to a phone, whatever it is, there are multiple schemes now that companies have figured out for how to do this.

And so, if you did that, then in order to get an account where you have posting privileges on Facebook or Twitter or Tidok or whatever, you have to at least do that. And if you do that, now the other people are real humans too. And suddenly our public squares are a lot nicer because you don't have bots swarming around. This would also cut down on trolls. You still have trolls who use the real name, but this would just make it a little scarier for trolls. Some men turn into complete assholes. They can be very polite in real life,

but some men, as soon as they have the anonymity, they start using racial slurs, they're horrible. One troll can ruin thousands of people's day. You know, I'm somebody who believes in free speech. And so there's been a lot of discussions about this, I'm somebody who believes in free speech. And so there's been a lot of discussions about this and we'll ask you some questions about this too. But there is the tension there is the power of a troll to ruin the party.

Yeah, that's right. So like this idea of free speech, boy, do you have to also consider if you wanna have a private party and enjoy your time challenging, lots of disagreement, debate, all that kind of stuff with fun, no annoying person screaming, just not disagreeing, but just like spilling like the drinks all over the place.

Yeah, all that kind of stuff. So, see, you're saying it's a step in the right direction to at least verify the humanness of a person while maintaining anonymity. But so that's one step, but the further step that maybe doesn't go all the way because you can still figure out ways to create multiple accounts and you can do. But it's a lot harder. So actually, there's a lot of ways to do this. There's a lot of creativity out there about solving this problem. So if you go to the social media and political dysfunction, Google Doc that I created with Chris Bale, and then you go to section 11, proposals for improving social media. So we're collecting there now some of the ideas

for how to do user authentication. And so one is WorldCoin, there's one, Human-ID.org. This is a new organization created by an NYU Stern student who just came into my office last week, working with some other people. And what they do here is they have a method of identity verification that is keyed to your phone. So you do have to have a phone number. And of course, you can buy seven different phone numbers if you want, but it's going to be about $20 or $30 a month. So nobody's going to buy 1,000 phones. So yeah, you know, you can, you don't have

just one unique ID, but most people do, and nobody has a thousand. So just, there's just things like this that would make an enormous difference. So here's the way that I think about it. Imagine a public square in which the incentives are to be an asshole, that the more you kick people in the shins and spit on them and throw things at them, the more people applaud you. Okay, so that's the public square we have now. Not for most people, but as you said, just one troll can ruin it for everybody. If there's a thousand of us in the public square, and ten are incentivized to, you know, kick us and throw shit at us, like it's no fun to be in that public square. So right now, I think Twitter in particular, is making our public square much worse.

It's making our democracy much weaker, much more divided, much, it's bringing us down. Imagine if we changed the incentives. Imagine if the incentive was to be constructive. And so this is an idea that I've been kicking around. I talked about with Reid Hoffman last week, and he seemed to think it's a good idea. And it is, it would be very easy to rather

trying to focus on posts, what post is fake or whatever. Focus on users, what users are incredibly aggressive. And so people just use a lot of obstinate and exclamation points. AI could easily code nastiness or just aggression, hostility. And imagine if every user is rated on a one to five scale for that, and the default when you open an account on Twitter, Facebook, the default is four. You will see everybody who's a four and below, but you won't even

see the people or fives and they don't get to see you. So they can say what they want, re-speech. We're not censoring them. They can say what they want. But if, now there's actually an incentive to not be an asshole because the more of an asshole you are the more people block you out. So imagine our country goes into directions and one things continue to deteriorate and we have no way to have a public square in which we could actually talk about things. And in the other we actually try to disincentivize being an asshole and encourage being constructive. What do you think? Well, this is because I'm an AI person and I very much ever since I talked to Jack about the health of conversation, but looking at a lot of the machine learning models involved, and I believe that the nastiness classification is a difficult problem, automatically.

I'm sure it is. So I personally believe in crowdsource nest in a labeling, but in an objective way, it doesn't become viral mob cancellation type of dynamics, but more sort of objectively, is this a shady, almost out of context, with only local context? Is this a shady thing to say at this moment? Because here's

the thing. Well, wait, no, but we don't care about individual posts. No, but it's, it's, well, all that matters is the average. The posts make the man. They do, but the point is, as long as we're talking about averages here, one person has a misclassified post, it doesn't matter. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. So, but you need to classify posts in order to build up the average. That's that's what I mean. And so I really like that idea. What up the high level idea of incentivizing people to be less shitty. Yeah, because that's what we have that incentive in real life. Yeah, that's right.

It's actually really painful to be in it. A full mass haul, I think, in physical reality. And it should be, it should be also pain to be an asshole on the internet. And there could be different mechanisms for that. I wish AI was there, machine learning models there. It just aren't yet. But how about, how about, we have, so one track is we have AI machine learning models, and they render a verdict.

Another class is crowdsourcing, you get, and then, and then whenever the two disagree, you have, you know, staff at Twitter, whatever, you know, they look at it, and then whenever the two disagree, you have staff at Twitter or whatever they look at, and they say, what's going on here? That way, you can refine both the AI and you can refine whatever the algorithms are for the crowdsourcing. Of course, that can be gameed and people can all say, hey, let's all rate this guy. He's really aggressive.

You wouldn't want to rely on one single track, but if you have two tracks, I think you could do it. What do you think about this word misinformation that maybe connects to our two discussions now? So one is the discussion of social media and democracy. And then the other is the coddling of the American mind. I've seen the word misinformation misused or used as a bullying word like racism and so on which are

important concepts to identify but they're nevertheless Instead overused. Yes. Does that worry you because that seems to be the mechanism from inside Twitter from inside Facebook to Label information you don't like, versus information that's actually fundamentally harmful to society. Yeah. So I think there is a meeting of disinformation that is very useful and helpful, which is when you have a concerted campaign by Russian agents to plant a story and spread it. And they've been doing that since the 50s or 40s, even.

That's what this podcast actually is. Is what? All right. It's a disinformation. Yeah, you see really Soviet to me, buddy. It fits subtle. It's between the lines. Okay, I'm sorry.

Yeah. So I think to the extent that there are campaigns by either foreign agents or just by the Republican or Democratic parties, there have been examples of that. There are all kinds of concerted campaigns that are intending to confuse or spread lies. This is the Soviet, the firehose of falsehood tactic. It's very useful for that. All the companies need to have pretty large staffs, I think, to deal with that because that will always be there.

And that is really bad for our country. So Renee Duresta is just brilliant on this. I've reading her work as really frightened me and opened my eyes about how easy it is to manipulate and spread misinformation and especially polarization. The Russians have been trying for the since the 50s to they would come to America and they would do hate crimes. They would spray swastikos and synagogues to make, you know, and they spray anti-black slurs.

They try to make Americans feel that they're as divided as possible. Most of the debate nowadays, however, is not that. It seems to be people are talking about what the other side is saying. So, if you're on the right, then you're very conscious of the times when, well, the left wouldn't let us even say could COVID be from a lab. You literally would get shut down for saying that and it turns out, well, we don't know if it's true,

but there's at least a real likelihood that it isn't. It's certainly something that should have been talked about. So I tend to stay away from any such discussions. And the reason is twofold. One is because they're almost entirely partisan. It generally is each side, what the other side is saying is misinformation or disinformation and they can prove certain examples.

So we're not going to get anywhere on that. We're certainly never going to get 60 votes in the Senate for anything about that. I don't think content moderation is nearly as important as people think. It has to be done and it can be improved. Almost all the action is in the dynamics, the architecture, the virality.

And then the nature of who is on the platform, unverified people, and how much amplification they get, that's what we should be looking at rather than wasting so much of our breath Who is on the platform, unverified people, and how much amplification they get? That's what we should be looking at, rather than wasting so much of our breath on whether we're going to do a little more or a little less content moderation. So the true harm to society on average and over the long term is in the dynamics. It's fundamentally in the dynamics of social media, not in the subtle choices of content moderation, aka censorship.

Exactly. There've always been conspiracy theories. The Turner Diaries is this book written in 1978. It introduced the replacement theory to a lot of people. Timothy McVeigh had it on him when he was captured in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing. It's a kind of a Bible of that that fringe violent racist white supremacist group. And that, so, you know, the killer in Buffalo was well acquainted with these ideas. They've been around, but, you know, this guy's from a small town. I forget where he's from. But he was, and he says in a manifesto, he was entirely influenced by things he found online. He was not influenced by anyone he met in person. Ideas spread and communities conform, these like micro communities, conform with bizarre

and twisted beliefs. And this is again, back to the Atlantic article. I've got this amazing quote from Martin Goury. I mean, just find it. But he Martin Guruy, he was a former CIA analyst, wrote this brilliant book called The Revolt of the Public. And he has this great quote. He says he talks about how in the age of mass media, we were all in a sense looking at a mirror, looking back back at us And it might have been a distorted mirror, but we had stories in common. We had facts in common It was mass media and he describes how the flood of information with the internet

Is like a tsunami washing over it has all kinds of effects and he says This is in a comment in an interview in Vox, he says, the digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn't one thing, it's highly fragmented, and it's basically mutually hostile. It's mostly people yell at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another. And so, we now see clearly,

there's this little bubble of just bizarre nastiness in which the killer in Christ church and the killer in Norway and now in Buffalo, they're all put into a community and post flow up within that community by a certain dynamic. So we can never stamp those words or ideas out. The question is not, can we stop there from existing? The question is, what platforms, what are the platforms by which they spread all over the world and into every little town so that the 1% of whatever percentage of young men

are vulnerable to this, that they get exposed to it, it's an endenemic architecture. It's a fascinating point to think about because we often debate and think about the content moderation, the censorship that is a free speech, but you're saying yes, that's important to talk about, but much more important is fixing the dynamics. That's right because everyone thinks if there's regulation I mean censorship, at least people on the right think regulation equals censorship and I'm trying to say no No, that's only if all we talk about is content moderation. Well, then yes, that is the framework, you know, how much or how little do we, you know, but I don't even want to talk about that because all the action is in the dynamics. That's the point of my article. It's the architecture change and our social world went insane.

So, can you try to steal, man, the other side? So the people that might say that social media is good for society overall, both in the dimension of mental health as Mark said for teenage, jerse teenage girls. And for our democracy, yes, there's a lot of negative things, but that's slices of data. If you look at the whole, which is difficult to measure, it's actually good for society. And to the degree that it's not good, it's getting better and better. Is it possible to steal me on their point? Yeah. It's hard, but I should be able to do it. I need to put my money where my mouth is, and that's a good question. So in the mental health front, you know, the argument is usually what they say is,

well, you know, for communities that are cut off, especially LGBTQ kids, they can find each other. So it's, it connects kids, especially kids who wouldn't find connection otherwise. It exposes you to a range of ideas and content. And it's fun. Is there in the studies you look at, is there inklings of data that maybe early data that shows that there's positive effects in terms of self-report data, or how would you measure behavioral positive? Is difficult. Right. So, so if you look at how do you feel when you're on the platform, you get a mix of positive

and negative, and people say they feel supported. And this is what Mark was referring to when he said, you know, there was like 18 criteria and on most it was positive and on some it was negative. So, if you look at how do you feel while you're using the platform, a lot, you know, look, most kids enjoy it, They're having fun. But some kids are feeling inferior, cut off, bullied. So if we're saying what the average experience on the platform, that might actually be positive. If we just measured the hedonics,

like how much fun versus fear is there, it could well be positive. But what I'm trying to, okay, so is that enough steel manning? Can I, yeah, that's pretty good. That's pretty'm trying to, okay, so is that enough steel manning? Can I, yes? That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Okay, you held your breath.

Yeah. But what I'm trying to point out is, this isn't a dose response sugar thing. Like how do you feel while you're consuming heroin? Like while I'm consuming heroin, I feel great. But I'm I glad that heroin came into my life. I'm I glad that everyone in my seventh grade class is on heroin. Like, no, I'm not. Like, I wish that people weren't on heroin

and they could play on the playground. But instead, they're just sitting on the bench, shooting up during recess. So when you look at it as an emergent phenomena that changed childhood, now it doesn't matter what are the feelings while you're actually using it. We need to zoom out and say, how has this changed childhood? Can you try to do the same for democracy?

Yeah. So we can go back to what Mark said in 2012 when he was taking Facebook public, and this is the wake of the Arab Spring. I think people really have to remember what an extraordinary year 2011 was. It starts with the Arab Spring. Dictators are pulled down. Now people say Facebook took them down. I mean, of course, it was the citizen, the people themselves took down dictators aided by Facebook and Twitter. And I don't know if it's tele,

or texting, there was some other platforms they used. So the argument that Mark makes in this letter to potential shareholders and investors is we're at a turning point in history and, you know, social media is rewiring. We're giving people the tools to rewire their institutions. So this all sounds great. Like, this is the democratic dream.

And what I write about in the essay is the period of techno democratic optimism, which began in the early 90s with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union, and then the internet comes in, and people, I mean, people my age remember how extraordinary it was, how much fun it was, I mean, the sense that this was the dawning of a new age, and there was so much optimism. And so this optimism runs all the way from the early 90s, all the way through 2011, with the Arab Spring,

and of course, that year ends with Occupy Wall Street. And there were also big protest movements in Israel and Spain and a lot of areas. Martin Goury talks about this. So there certainly was a case to be made that Facebook in particular, but all these platforms, these were God's gift democracy. What dictator could possibly keep out the internet? What dictator could stand up to people connected on these digital media platforms? So, that's the strong case that this is going to be good for democracy.

And then we can see what happened in the years after. Now, first of all, so in Mark's response to you, so here, let me read from what he said when you interviewed him. He says, I think it's worth grounding this conversation and the actual research that has been done on this, which by and large finds that social media is not a large driver of polarization. He says that.

Then he says, most academic studies that I've seen actually show that social media use is correlated with lower polarization. That's a factual claim that he makes, which is not true. But he asserts that study, well, actually, wait, it's tricky because he says the studies he has seen. So I can't, so it might be that the studies he has seen say that, but if you go to the Google Doc with Chris Bale, you see there's seven different questions that can be addressed, and on one of them, which is

filter bubbles, the evidence is very mixed, and you might be right that Facebook overall doesn't contribute to filter bubbles. But on the other six, the evidence is very mixed and you might be right that Facebook overall doesn't contribute to filter bubbles But on the other six the evidence is pretty strongly on the yes side. It is a cause He also draws a line between the United States versus the rest of the world right and there's one thing true about that Which is that polarization has been rising much faster in the US than in any other major country So he's right about that so we're talking about an article by Matt Matthew Genskau And a few other researchers. It's a very important article. We've got it in the political dysfunction database.

And we should say that in this study, there's like a starter to say, there's a lot of fascinating questions that are it's organized by whether studies indicate yes or no. Question one is, does social media make people more angry or effectively polarized. Question two is the social media create echo chamber. These are fascinating, really important questions. Question three is the social media amplify posts that are more emotional and flammatory or false. Question four is the social media increase the probability of violence.

Question five is the social media enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the US and other democracies. Question six, the social media decreased trust. Seven is the social media strengthened populist movements and then there's other sections as you mentioned. Yeah, that's right. But if you once you once you operationalize it as seven different questions, so one is about polarization, and there are measures of that, the degree to which people say they hate the other side.

And so in this study by Baxel against Cowan Shapiro 2021, they looked at all the measures of polarization, they could find going back to the 1970s for about 20 different countries. And they show plots, you have these nice plots with red lines showing that in some countries it's going up, like the United States especially, in some countries it's going down and in some countries it's pretty flat. And so Mark says, well, you know, if, if polarization is going up a lot in the US but not in

most other countries, well, maybe Facebook isn't responsible. But so much depends on how you operationalize things. Are we interested in the straight line regression line going back to the 70s? And if so, well then he's right in what he says. But that's not the argument. The argument isn't that, you know, it's been rising and falling since the 70s. The argument is it's been rising and falling since 2012 or so. And for that, now I just spoke with, I've been emailing with the authors of this study

and they say there's not really enough data to do it statistically reliably And for that, now I just spoke with, I've been emailing with the authors of the study, and they say there's not really enough data to do it statistically reliably because there's only a few observations after 2012. But if you look at the graphs in their study, and they actually do provide, they point it out to me, they do provide a statistical test if you break the data at the year 2000. So actually, a polarization is going up pretty widely if you just look after 2000, which is when the internet would be influential. And if you look just after 2012, you have to just do it by eye. But if you do it on their graphs by eye,

you see that actually a number of countries do see a sudden sharp upturn. Not all, not all by any means. But my point is, Mark asserts, he points to one study and he points this over and over again. I have had two conversations with him. He pointed this study both times He asserts that this study shows that polarization is up some places down other places. There's no association But actually we have another section in the Google Doc where we review all the data on the decline of democracy and the high point of Democracy of course was rising in the 90s But if you look around the world by some measures it begins to drop in the late 2000s, around 2007, 2008, by others, it's early to mid 2010s.

The point is, there is a, by many measures, there is a drop in the quality and the number of democracies on this planet that began in the 2010s. And so, yes, Mark can point to one study, but if you look on the Google Doc, there are a lot of other studies that point the other way. And especially about whether things are getting more polarized or less, more polarized,

not in all countries, but in a lot. So you've provided the problem, several proposals for solutions. Do you think Mark, do you think Elon or whoever is at the head of Twitter would be able to implement these changes or does there need to be a competitor, social network, to step up? If you were to predict the future, no, this is you giving financial advice to me. No, I'm not. I can't definitely not. I can give you advice. Do the opposite of whatever I've done. Okay, excellent. But what do you think when we talk again in 10 years, what do you think

would be looking at if it's a better world? Yeah. So you have to look at each, the dynamics of each change that needs to be made. And you have to look at it systemically. And so the biggest change for teen mental health, I think, is to raise the age from 13, was set to 13 in Kappa in like 1997 or six or whatever that was, whatever it was. It was set to 13 with no enforcement. I think it needs to go to 16 or 18 with enforcement. Now, there's no way that Facebook can say, actually, so look, Instagram, the age is 13, but they don't enforce it.

And they're under pressure to not enforce it because if they did enforce it, then all the kids would just go to TikTok, which they're doing anyway. But if we go back a couple of years, when they were talking about rolling out Facebook for kids, because they need to get those kids, they need to get kids under 13. There's a business imperative to hook them early

and keep them. So I don't expect Facebook to act on its own accord and do the right thing because then they- The regulation is doing that. Exactly exactly when you have a social dilemma You know like what economists call like a prisoner's dilemma or a social dilemma is you know generalized to multiple people and when you have a social dilemma Each player can't opt out because they're gonna lose you have to have central regulations So I think we have to raise the age the UK Parliament is way ahead of us. I think they're actually functional. The US Congress is not functional. So the Parliament is implementing the age-appropriate design code that may put pressure on the platforms globally to change certain. So anyway, my point

is we have to have regulation to force them to be transparent and share what they're doing. There are some good bills out there. So I think that if the companies and the users are all stuck in a social dilemma in which the incentives to, the incentives against doing the right thing are strong, we do need regulation on certain matters. And again, it's not about content moderation who gets to say what,

but it's things like the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, which is from Stenators Coons,emain, and Clobuchar. This would force the platforms to just share information at what they're doing. We can't even study what's happening without the information. So that, I think, is just common sense. Senator Michael Bennett introduced the Digital Platform's

Commission Act of 2022, which would create a body task with actually regulating and having oversight. Right now, the US government doesn't have a body. I mean, the FTC can do certain things. We have things about antitrust, but we don't have a body that can oversee or understand these things that are transforming everything and possibly severely damaging our political life. So I think there's a lot of, oh, and then the state of California is actually currently considering a version of the UK's the age-appropriate design code, which would force the companies

to do some simple things, like not be sending alerts and notifications to children at 10 or 11 o'clock at night, just things like that to make platforms just less damaging. So I think there's an essential role for regulation, and I think if the US Congress is too paralyzed by politics, if the UK and the EU and the state of California and the state, a few other states, if they enact legislation, the platforms don't want to have different versions

in different states or countries. So I think there actually is some hope, even if the US Congress is dysfunctional. So there is, because I've been interactive with certain regulation that's hitting a design to hit Amazon, but it's hitting YouTube. YouTube folks have been talking to me, which is recommender systems. The algorithm has to be public, I think, versus private, which completely breaks. It's way too clumsy of regulation

that were the unintended consequences break recommender systems, not for Amazon, but for other platforms. That's just to say that governing can sometimes be clumsy with a regulation. Usually it's. And so my preference is the threat of regulation. In a friendly way encourages.

You really should need it. You really shouldn't need it. My preference is great leaders lead the way in doing the right thing. And I actually honestly, to our earlier kind of, maybe my naive disagreement that I think it's good business to do the right thing in these spaces. So maybe a problem. Sometimes it is, sometimes it loses you most of your users.

Well, I think it's important because I've been thinking a lot about World War 3 recently. Yeah. And it might be silly to say, but I think social media has a role in either creating World War 3 or avoiding World War III. It seems like so much of wars throughout history have been started through very fast escalation. And it feels like just looking at our recent history, social media is the mechanism for escalation.

And so it's really important to get this right, not just for the mental health of young people, not just for the polarization of bickering over a small scale, politically issues, but literally the survival of human civilization. So this is a lot of stake here. Yeah. And I certainly agree with that. I would just say that I'm less concerned about world where three than I am about civil war two.

I think that's a more likely prospect. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can I ask for your wise sage advice to young people? So advice number one is put down the phone. Don't use Instagram and social media. But to young people in high school and college, I don't have a career or how to have a life that can be proud of? Yeah, I'd be happy to because I teach a course at NYU in the business school called Work Wisdom and Happiness. And the course is, you know, it's advice on how to have a happy, you know, a successful career as a human being.

But the course has evolved that it's now about three things. How to get stronger, smarter, and more sociable. If you can do those three things, then you will be more successful at work and in love and friendships. And if you are more successful in work, love, and friendships, then you will be happier. You will be as happy as you can be, in fact. So the question is, how do you become smarter, stronger, and happier?

And the answer to all three is, it's a number of things, but it's you have to see yourself as this complex adaptive system. You've got this complicated mind that needs a lot of experience to wire itself up. And the most important part of that experience is that you don't grow when you are with your attachment figure. You don't grow when you're safe, you have an attachment figure to make you feel confident to go out and explore the world. In that world, you will face threats, you will face fear, and sometimes you'll come running back. But you have to keep doing it because over time, you then develop the strength to stay out there and to conquer it. That's normal human childhood. That's what we blocked in the 1990s in this country.

So young people have to get themselves the childhood, and this is all the way through adolescence and young adulthood. They have to get themselves the experience that older generations are blocking them from, out of fear, and that their phones are blocking them from, out of just, you know, hijacking almost all the inputs into their life and almost all the minutes of their day. So go out there, put yourself out in experiences. You are anti-fragile and you're not going to get strong unless you actually have setbacks and criticisms and fights. That's how you get stronger.

And then there's an analogy in how you get smarter, which is you have to expose yourself to other ideas, to ideas that people that criticize you, people that disagree with you. And this is why I co-founded Header Redox Academy because we believe that that, but we know, faculty need to be in communities that have political diversity and viewpoint diversity, but so do students. And it turns out, students want this. The surveys show very clearly, Gen Z is not turned against viewpoint diversity, most of them want it, but they're just afraid of the small number that will sort of shoot darts at them if they say something wrong. So anyway, the point is, you're anti-fragile.

And so you have to realize that to get stronger, you have to realize to get smarter. And then the key to becoming more sociable is very simple. It's just always looking at through the other person's point of view. Don't be so focused on what you want and what you're afraid of. Put yourself in the other person's shoes, what's interesting to them, what do they want. And if you develop the skill of looking at it from their point of view, you'll be a better conversation partner, you'll be a better life partner. So there's a lot that you can do. I mean, I could say, you know, go read the Kotlin in the American mind. I could say go read Dale Carnegie had a wind friends and influence people. But take charge

of your life and your development, because if you don't do it, then the older, older protective generation and your phone are going to take charge of you. So on antifragility and coddling, the American mind, if I may read just a few lines from Chief Justice John Roberts, which I found is really beautiful. So it's not just about viewpoint diversity, but it's real struggle, absurd, unfair struggle that seems to be formative to the human mind. He says, from time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal,

because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time, so that you don't take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck again, from time to time, so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then your opponent will gloat over your failure.

It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you'll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others. And I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things are not, they're going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not, will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes. He read that in a middle school graduate. Yes, for his son's, his son's middle school graduation. That's what I was trying to say, only that's much more beautiful. Yeah, and I think your work

is really important, and it is beautiful, and it's bold and fearless, and it's a huge honor to you. It was with me. I'm a big fan. Thank you for spending your valuable time with me today, John. Thank you so much. Thanks so with me. I'm a big fan. Thank you for spending your valuable time with me today John. Thank you so much. Thanks so much Lex. What a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jonathan Height. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Jung.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. you