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

1. 0:00 – 1:25

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Jonathan Haidt, 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 critic who counts, he has not yet read the brilliant writing of Jonathan Haidt. I disagree with Jon 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 it flourish. It's up to us to figure out how we take the latter path. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jonathan Haidt.

2. 1:25 – 15:14

   Social media and mental health

   1. LFLex Fridman1:25

      So you've 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 o- if 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, uh, the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media?

   2. JHJonathan Haidt1:53

      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 lo- I studied in Brazil and India. Um, 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, um, and I began growing alarmed in the, in the early 2000s about how bad polarization was getting. And I began studying, um, the causes of polarization, you know, br- bringing moral psychology to bear on our political problems. Um, and I was originally gonna write a book to basically help the Democrats stop screwing up, because I could see that some of my re- my research showed people on the right understand, um, 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. Um, 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 it, 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, you know, I was on Twitter, I guess, like 2009, and, you know, ca- not much. Didn't think about it much. Um, and then, uh, so I'm going along as a social psychologist studying this, and then everything seems to kind of blow up in 2014, 2015 at universities. Uh, and that's when Greg Lukianoff came to me in May of 2014 and said, "Jon, 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 ideas about how we were teaching students to think in distorted ways, that led us to write The Coddling of the American Mind, which wasn't primarily about social media either. It was about, you know, this sort of, uh, rise of, of, of depression, anxiety. But after that, things got so much worse everywhere, and that's when I began to think like, "Whoa, something systemically has changed. Something has changed about the fabric of the social universe." And so ever since then, I've been focused on social media.

   3. LFLex Fridman4:54

      So w- 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 at play or the, the way parenting and education works to make, sort of emphasize anti-fragility of the human mind, uh, as it interacts with the social media platforms and-

   4. JHJonathan Haidt5:31

      Mm-hmm

   5. LFLex Fridman5:31

      ... yeah, the humans through the social. So all that beautiful mess-

   6. JHJonathan Haidt5:34

      Okay, that should, that should take us an hour or two to, to, to cover.

   7. LFLex Fridman5:36

      Or maybe a couple of years, yes. But so let's start, if it's okay, uh, you said you wanted to ch- challenge some of the things that Mark Zuckerberg has said in a conversation with me.

   8. JHJonathan Haidt5:46

      Yes.

   9. LFLex Fridman5:46

      Uh, what are some of the ideas he expressed that you disagree with?

   10. JHJonathan Haidt5:49

       Okay. There are two major areas that I study. Uh, one is what is happening with teen mental health. It, it fell off a cliff in 2013. It was very sudden. Um, and then the other is what is happening to our democratic and epistemic institutions. That means knowledge generating, like universities, journalism. Um, so, 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 teen mental health, and what's the evidence that social media's a contributor? And then the other area is what's happening to, uh, democracies, not just America, and what's the evidence that social media's a contributor to the dysfunction? So, well, I'm sure we'll get to that, 'cause that's what The Atlantic article is about. But if we focus first on what's happened to teen mental health. So before I read the quotes from Mark, I, I'd like to just give the overview. Um, uh, and it is this. There's a lot of data tracking adolescents. Um, there's self-reports of how depressed, anxious, lonely. Um, there's data on hospital admissions for self-harm. There's data on suicide. And all of these things, they bounce around somewhat, um, but they're relatively level in the early 2000s. And then all of a sudden, around, you know, around 2010 to 2013, depending on which statistic you're looking at, all of a sudden they begin to shoot upwards. Um, 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%, um, depending on which group you're looking at. Um, you know, suicide for preteen girls, thank- thankfully it's not very common, um, but it's two to three times more common now. Or by 2015 it had doubled. Between 2010 and 2015 it doubled. So something is going radically wrong in the world of American preteens. Uh, 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. Um, Australia and New Zealand are very similar, they're just after a little delay. So whatever we're looking for here... But, but yet it's not, it's not as clear, uh, in the Germanic countries. It's, uh, 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, um, that, and it started right around 2012, 2013. It wasn't gradual. Um, it hit girls hardest, and it hit preteen 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 have hit preteen girls the hardest. Um, there is no other explanation. The complexity here in 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 s- or in the '60s and '70s doesn't mean that that was the cause of the crime. So what I've done, um, and this is work with Jean Twenge, uh, who wrote the book iGen, is, um, because I was challenged, you know, when I, when Greg and I put out the book, the, uh, The Coddling of the American Mind, some researchers challenged us and said, "Oh, you don't know what you're talking about. You know, the correlations between social media use and, and mental health, they exist, but they're tiny. It's, it's, you know, like, a correlation coefficient of .03 or, you know, a beta of .05. You know, tiny little things." And one famous article said it's no bigger than the correlation of mental ba- of, uh, bad mental health and eating potatoes.

   11. LFLex Fridman9:09

       Mm-hmm.

   12. JHJonathan Haidt9:10

       Which it exists, but it's, like, it's so tiny it's zero, essentially. And that, that claim, that social media's 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. Um, but let me unpack why that's not true, and then we'll get to what Mark said. 'Cause what Mark basically said... Here, actually, I'll read it. I'll, you know, might-

   13. LFLex Fridman9:29

       And by the way

   14. JHJonathan Haidt9:29

       ... read the quote

   15. LFLex Fridman9:29

       ... just to pause real quick, uh, is you, you implied, but just, just to make it explicit, that the best explanation we have now is you're proposing is that a very particular aspect of social media is the, is the cause. Which is not just social media, but, uh, the t- the Like button and the Retweet. A certain mechanism of virality that, that was in-

   16. JHJonathan Haidt9:50

       Well, that's

   17. LFLex Fridman9:50

       ... invented. Or perhaps-

   18. JHJonathan Haidt9:51

       Yeah

   19. LFLex Fridman9:51

       ... some aspect of social media is the cause.

   20. JHJonathan Haidt9:53

       Okay, good idea. Let's be clear. Connecting people is good. I mean, overall, the more you connect people, the better.

   21. LFLex Fridman9:59

       Mm.

   22. JHJonathan Haidt10:00

       Giving people the telephone was an amazing step forward. Giving them free telephone, you know, free long distance is even better. Video is, I mean... So connecting people is good. I'm not a Luddite. Um, 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 e- 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, um, which seems to be incredibly harmful for teenagers, especially for young girls. 10 to 14 years old is where they're most vulnerable. Um, 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 gonna end up being, uh, having a lot of really bad effects, uh, 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-

   23. LFLex Fridman11:11

       Yeah

   24. JHJonathan Haidt11:11

       ... you know, a lot of, there's a lot of funny things on, on Twitter. I use Twitter because it's an amazing way to put out news, to put out when I write something. You know, y- you know, you and I, you know, use it to, to promote things. We f- we learn things quickly. Um-

   25. LFLex Fridman11:24

       Well, there's could be... Now, 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 sometimes mention what are the possible positive effects of social media in different ways.

   26. JHJonathan Haidt11:40

       Mm-hmm.

   27. LFLex Fridman11:40

       So, 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.

   28. JHJonathan Haidt11:51

       Mm-hmm.

   29. LFLex Fridman11:52

       To connect with people, to make me smile, a little bit of humor here and there. It, 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-

   30. JHJonathan Haidt12:08

       Mm-hmm
3. 15:14 – 24:51

   Mark Zuckerberg

   1. JHJonathan Haidt15:14

      Um, so now, okay, so let's look at the quote from, from Mark Zuckerberg. So, uh, at, uh, at 64, uh, minutes and 31 seconds on the video-

   2. LFLex Fridman15:24

      Yes

   3. JHJonathan Haidt15:24

      ... I time coded this. This is the-

   4. LFLex Fridman15:25

      This is excellent

   5. JHJonathan Haidt15:26

      ... this is the very helpful YouTube transcript.

   6. LFLex Fridman15:28

      Yeah.

   7. JHJonathan Haidt15:28

      YouTube's an amazing, uh, program. Um, you ask him about Frances Haugen. You give him a chance to respond. Uh, and here's the key thing. Um, uh, so he talks about what Frances Haugen 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 1 out of the 18."

   8. LFLex Fridman15:48

      Yeah.

   9. JHJonathan Haidt15:48

      Uh, and then he says, um, "I think an accurate characterization would've been that kids using Instagram," uh, or not kids, but teens, "is generally positive for their mental health." That's his claim, that You- T- that, uh, uh, Instagram is overall, taken as a whole, Instagram is positive for their mental health. That's what he says. Okay? Um, now, is it really? Is it really? Uh, so first, just a simple... Okay, now here what I'd like to do is turn my attention to another document that we'll make available.

   10. LFLex Fridman16:18

       Yeah.

   11. JHJonathan Haidt16:18

       Um, so I was invited to give s- uh, testimony before a Senate subcommittee two weeks ago, uh, 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, uh, they're the only ones who know. Like, the kid does this, and then over the next hours, the kid's depressed or happy. We can't know that, but-

   12. LFLex Fridman16:37

       Mm-hmm

   13. JHJonathan Haidt16:38

       ... but Facebook knows it. Um, so should they be compelled to, uh, to reveal the data? We need that.

   14. LFLex Fridman16:43

       So you raise just, uh, uh, 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 mixed results. And questions include things like, does social media make people more angry or effectively polarized?

   15. JHJonathan Haidt17:03

       Right. Wait, so that's the-

   16. LFLex Fridman17:04

       Does social-

   17. JHJonathan Haidt17:04

       ... that's the one that we're gonna get to. That's the one for democracy.

   18. LFLex Fridman17:07

       Yes, that's for democracy.

   19. JHJonathan Haidt17:08

       So, yeah. So I've, yeah, I've got three different Google Docs here, 'cause I found this is an amazing way, and thank God for Google Docs.

   20. LFLex Fridman17:13

       Yeah.

   21. JHJonathan Haidt17:13

       It's an amazing way to organize the research literature, and it's a collaborative review, meaning that... So o- on this one, Jean Twenge and I put up the first draft, and then we say, "Please, you know, comment. Add studies. Tell us what we missed." And it evolves in real time.

   22. LFLex Fridman17:25

       In any direction, the yes or the no.

   23. JHJonathan Haidt17:27

       Oh, yeah, we, we specifically encourage, 'cause I... Look, my, [laughs] the center of my research is that our gut feelings drive our reasoning. That's m- that was my dissertation. That was my early research. And so if Jean Twenge and I are committed to... But we're gonna obviously preferentially believe that these platforms are bad for kids, 'cause we said so in our books.

   24. LFLex Fridman17:44

       Mm-hmm.

   25. JHJonathan Haidt17:45

       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. So these documents evolve because critics then say, "No, you missed this," or they say, "You don't know what you're talking about." It's like, "Great. Say so. Tell us Um, so I put together this document, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna put links to everything on my website. If users, uh, users, sorry, if listeners, viewers go to jonathanhaidt.com/socialmedia, um, it's a new page I just created. I'll put everything together in one place there.

   26. LFLex Fridman18:15

       Right.

   27. JHJonathan Haidt18:15

       And we'll put those in the show notes.

   28. LFLex Fridman18:17

       Like links to this document and, a- and other things like it that we'll talk about.

   29. JHJonathan Haidt18:21

       That's right. Exactly.

   30. LFLex Fridman18:22

       Great.
4. 24:51 – 35:36

   Children's use of social media

   1. LFLex Fridman24:51

      how can you try to understand the studies, like the Google Docs you put together-

   2. JHJonathan Haidt24:56

      Mm-hmm

   3. LFLex Fridman24:56

      ... to try to make decisions that fix things? Is, uh, is, is, is there a stable science now that you can start to investigate? And, and also maybe, uh, 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, uh, transparent, should be provided. But currently, if it's not, all you have is maybe some leaks of internal data.

   4. JHJonathan Haidt25:22

      That's right. That's right.

   5. LFLex Fridman25:23

      Um, and we could talk about the potential. You have to be very sort of objective about the potential bias in those kinds of leaks. You want to-

   6. JHJonathan Haidt25:30

      Mm-hmm

   7. LFLex Fridman25:30

      ... it would be nice to have a, uh, non-leak data, like, like, um-

   8. JHJonathan Haidt25:35

      Yeah, it'd be nice to be able to actually have academic researchers able to access in de-individuated, de-identified form, um, the actual data on what kids are doing and how their mood changes and, and, you know, when people commit suicide, what was happening beforehand. It'd be great to know that. We have no idea.

   9. LFLex Fridman25:51

      So what, how do we begin to fix social media, would you say?

   10. JHJonathan Haidt25:55

       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 the re- most of the researchers, are thinking about this like, "Let's th- treat this like sugar." Um, you know, 'cause the data usually shows a little bit of social media use isn't correlated with harm, but a lot is. So, you know, think of it like sugar, and if kids have a lot of sugar, then it's bad. So how much is okay?

   11. LFLex Fridman26:32

       Right.

   12. JHJonathan Haidt26:32

       Um, 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, "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. Um, I'm a big fan of Lenore Skenazy, who wrote the book Free-Range Kids. If there are any parents listening to this, please buy Lenore's book, Free-Range Kids, and then go to letgrow.org. It's a, a nonprofit that, that Lenore and I started, uh, with Peter Gray and, and, um, uh, Daniel Shuchman to help change the laws and the norms around letting kids out to play. They need free play. So that's the, the big picture. They need free play. Uh, and we started stopping that in the '90s, that we reduced it. And then Gen Z, kids born in 1996, they're the first people in history to get on social media before puberty. Um, millennials didn't get it until they were in college. But Gen Z, they get it, 'cause y-you can lie. You just lie about your age. Um, they, so they really ge- 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, they decline, 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.

   13. LFLex Fridman28:10

       Yeah.

   14. JHJonathan Haidt28:10

       It's imagine, 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. We're s- 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 Orben and Andy Przybylski showing that the damage is greatest b- 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 gotta... Kids should simply not be allowed on these business models where you're the product. They should not be allowed on till you're 16. We need to raise the age and enforce it. That's the biggest thing.

   15. LFLex Fridman29:01

       So I think that's a really powerful solution, but [clears throat] it, um, it makes me wonder if there's other solutions, like controlling the virality of bullying. S-sort of if there's a way that's more productive to childhood-

   16. JHJonathan Haidt29:19

       Mm-hmm

   17. LFLex Fridman29:20

       ... 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, um, it's, it might be difficult to convince them to do so. Uh, [chuckles] and also for me, as an adult who grew up without social media, it, it... Social, social media is a source of joy, so I wonder if it's possible to design the mechanisms, both, um, challenge the ad-driven model, but actually just technically the recommender system, um, and how viral, how virality works on these platforms. If it's possible to design a platform that leads to growth, anti-fragility, but does not lead to depression-

   18. JHJonathan Haidt30:03

       Yeah

   19. LFLex Fridman30:03

       ... uh, self-harm, and suicide. That, like, finding that balance and making that as the objective function, not, not engagement-

   20. JHJonathan Haidt30:12

       Yeah

   21. LFLex Fridman30:12

       ... or, or, or something else.

   22. JHJonathan Haidt30:13

       Yeah. I don't think, 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."

   23. LFLex Fridman30:25

       Yeah.

   24. JHJonathan Haidt30:25

       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.

   25. LFLex Fridman30:33

       Right.

   26. JHJonathan Haidt30:33

       Uh, as a parent, it's very hard to stop your kid. Uh, I have stopped my kids from getting on Instagram, um, and that's caused some difficulties. But, um, but, um, they also have thanked me 'cause they see that it's stupid. They see that what the kids who are heavily on it, what they post, they see that the culture of it is, is stupid, as they say. So, um, 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. Uh, the more time they spend on their devices, the less they have free play. Uh, video games is a kind of play. I'm not saying that these things are all bad. Um, but, you know, 12 hours of video game play means you don't get any physical play. Um, so anyway.

   27. LFLex Fridman31:11

       And ultimately, physical play is the way, uh, to, to, to develop physical antifragility.

   28. JHJonathan Haidt31:17

       And especially social skills. Kids need huge amounts of conflict with no adult to me- to supervise or mediate, and that's what we rob them of. So anyway, that, we should pro- move on, 'cause I've, I, you know, I, I get really into the evidence here, because I think the story's actually quite clear now. Um, 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 .1 to .15, whether you call that a correlation coefficient or a beta. It's all in, uh, standardized beta. It's all in that s- sort, sort of range. Um, there's also experimental evidence. We collect, uh, true experiments with random assignment, and they mostly show an effect. Um, and there's, um, eyewitness testimony. Um, you know, the kids themselves. You talk to girls, and you poll them. "Do you think overall Instagram is good for your mental health or bad for it?" You're not gonna 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 there'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.

   29. LFLex Fridman32:21

       Do you think the recommendation is, as a parent, that teens should not use Instagram-

   30. JHJonathan Haidt32:29

       Yes
5. 35:36 – 51:42

   Social media and democracy

   1. LFLex Fridman35:37

      So l- 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 discourse?

   2. JHJonathan Haidt35:59

      Oh, yes. Oh, yes. So our brains are structured to be, uh, really good at approach and avoid. So we have circuits, the front left circuit, this is an oversimplification, 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, you know, kid in a candy store. And then the front right cortex has circuits specialized for withdrawal, fear, threat. And of course, students, you know, I'm a college professor, and most of us think about our college days like, you know, 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. I, you know, all these people. Um, now imagine if in 2013, all of a sudden, students are coming in with their front right cortex hyperactivated. Everything's a threat. Uh, 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, um, a, a large, diverse, secular liberal democracy in which people are most of the time in discover mode, and, you know, we have a problem. Hmm. Let's think how to solve it. And this is what de Tocqueville 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, let, the, you know, let's roll up our sleeves. Let's 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, is, is there something good about..." You're thinking, you know, "How is this dangerous? How is this a threat? How is this violence? How can I attack this? How can I..." You know? So, so if you imagine, you know, God up there with a little lever like, "Okay, let's, let's push everyone over into, you know, more into discover mode," and, and it's like joy breaks out, Age of Aquarius. All right. Now 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, um, 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 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. All, uh, uh, major, mainstream media is hugely influenced by Twitter. Um, so if we put everyone, if, 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 a, especially a, you know, or a, 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, you find ways that we can all get 60% of what we want. Uh, and that, that ends when everyone's anxious and angry.

   3. LFLex Fridman38:52

      So let's try to start to figure out who's to blame here. Is it the nature of social media? Is it the decision of, 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-

   4. JHJonathan Haidt39:16

      Mm-hmm

   5. LFLex Fridman39:16

      ... want to maximize drama in order to, uh, uh-

   6. JHJonathan Haidt39:20

      Yeah

   7. LFLex Fridman39:20

      ... drive clicks to their offsite-

   8. JHJonathan Haidt39:23

      Mm-hmm

   9. LFLex Fridman39:24

      ... uh, articles? Is it just human nature that loves drama, can't look away from an accident when you're driving by it? Is there, is there something to be said about-

   10. JHJonathan Haidt39:35

       Yeah

   11. LFLex Fridman39:35

       ... the reason I ask these questions is to see can we start to figure out what the solution would be, uh, for, to, to, uh, to alleviate, to deescalate the, the division?

   12. JHJonathan Haidt39:44

       Yeah. Not yet. Not yet. Let's first, we have to understand, um, you know, as, as we did on the teen mental health thing.

   13. LFLex Fridman39:51

       Yeah.

   14. JHJonathan Haidt39:51

       Okay, now let, let's lay out what is the problem, what's messing up-

   15. LFLex Fridman39:54

       Sure. Yes

   16. JHJonathan Haidt39:54

       ... our country, and then we'll ta- we can talk about solutions. So it's all the things you said interacting in an interesting way. Um, so human nature is tribal. We evolve for intergroup conflict. Um, we love war. Um, we, we, uh, the first time my buddies and I played paintball, I was 29, um, and we were 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, it's play war. So that's who we are. Um, it doesn't mean we're always tribal. 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, y- you want your country to, you want a society that has room for conflict, ideally over sports. Like, that's great. That's totally, it's not just harmless. It's actually good. Um, but otherwise, you want cooperation to generally prevail in the society. That's how you create prosperity and peace, and if you're gonna have a diverse democracy, you really better focus on cooperation, not on tribalism and division. Uh, and there's a wonderful book by Yascha Mounk called The Great Experiment that talks about the difficulty of diversity and democracy and, and, and what we need to do to, to get this right and to get the benefits of di- of diversity. So that's human nature. Um, now let's imagine that the technological environment makes it really easy for us to cooperate. Let's give everyone telephones and 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. Um, now instead of that, let's give them a technology that encourages them to fight. So early Facebook and Twitter were generally lovely places. Um, you know, people old enough to remember, like, they were fun. There was a lot of humor. Um, you didn't feel like you were gonna get your head blown off no matter what you said. Um, 2007, 2008, 2009, it was still fun. These were nice places mostly. And, like, almost all the platforms start off as nice places. Um, but, and this is the, the key thing in the, in the, in the article, in The Atlantic article on Babel, on After Babel.

   17. LFLex Fridman42:06

       The Atlantic article, by the way, is "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid." [laughs]

   18. JHJonathan Haidt42:12

       Yeah. My title in the magazine was After Babel, uh, Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share, is what I proposed, but they, they A/B tested-

   19. LFLex Fridman42:21

       Yeah

   20. JHJonathan Haidt42:21

       ... what's the title that gets the most clicks, and it was Why the Past 10 Years Have Been Uniquely Stupid.

   21. LFLex Fridman42:24

       So Babel, the Tower of Babel is, is a, um- There's a driving metaphor in the piece. So what, what, first of all, what is it? What's the Tower of Babel? What's, what's Babel?

   22. JHJonathan Haidt42:32

       Yeah.

   23. LFLex Fridman42:32

       What are we talking about?

   24. JHJonathan Haidt42:33

       Okay. So the Tower of Babel is a story in, you know, early in Genesis where the descendants of Noah are spreading out and repopulating the world, and they're on the Plain of Shinar, and they say, "Let us build us a city with a tower to make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered again." And, uh, 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 t- city and a tower, and to reach the heavens." And God is offended by the hubris of these people, um, acting again like gods. Um, 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 you know, many of us have seen images or, you know, movie drama- dramatizations where a great wind comes and the tower's knocked over and the people are left wandering amid the rubble, unable to talk to each other. So I've been grappling. I've been trying to say, "What the hell happened to our society?" You know, beginning in 2014, what the hell is happening to universities? And then it spread out from universities. It hit journalism, the arts, and, uh, now it's all over companies. Um, what the hell happened to us? And it wasn't until I reread the Babel story a couple years ago that I thought, "Whoa, this is it. This is the metaphor." Because, you know, I'd been thinking about tribalism and left-right battles and war, and it, and that's easy to think about. But Babel isn't like, you know, "And God said, 'Let half of the people hate the other half.'" No, it wasn't that. It's, God said, "Let us confuse their language, that they, none of them can understand each other ever again, or at least for a while." Um, so it's a story about fragmentation, and that's what's unique about our time. So, so Meta or Facebook wrote a rebuttal, um, to my article. They disputed what I said, uh, and one of their arguments was, "Oh, but you know, polarization goes back way before social media, and, you know, and it, um, it was happening in the '90s." And, and they're right. It does. And I should've, I, I did say that, but I should've 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, you know, Fox News, whatever you wanna point to about increasing polarization, it didn't make me afraid of my students, and that was new in around 2014, 2015. We started hearing, uh, getting articles, you know, "I'm a liberal professor and my liberal students frighten me." It was in Vox in 2015, and that was after Greg and I had turned in the draft of our, um, of our first draft of our Coddling article. Um, 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, a small number, um, a small number are adept at using social media to destroy anyone that they think they can get credit for destroying. And the bizarre thing is it's never, it's rarely about what ideas you express. It's usually about a word, like, "He used this word," um, or this, you know, "This was insensitive," or, you know, "I can link this word to that word." So it's, it's a, it's, they don't really engage with ideas and arguments. It's a real sort of gotcha, um, prosecu- almost like a, you know, it's like a, like a witch trial mindset. Um, so-

   25. LFLex Fridman45:48

       So the unique thing here is there's something about social media in those years that a small number of people can sort of be catalysts for this division. They can start the viral wave that leads to a division that's different than the-

   26. JHJonathan Haidt46:01

       Well, it's a-

   27. LFLex Fridman46:01

       ... kind of division we saw before

   28. JHJonathan Haidt46:02

       ... 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, 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 about how social media is polarizing us and destroying democracy. The heart of the article, um, is an analysis of what makes groups smart and what makes them stupid. And so, uh, because, as we said earlier, you know, my own research is on post hoc reasoning, just- post hoc 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, you know, with, with these other researchers, uh, over social media, you know, 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's what makes them 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 research that says otherwise, we're gonna destroy them. And if any academic even tweets a study contradicting what is the official word, we're gonna destroy them"? And that was the famous case of David Shor, who in the days after George Floyd was killed, and there were protests, and the question is, are these protests gonna be productive? Are they gonna backfire? Uh, now, most of them were peaceful, but some were violent, and he tweeted a study. He just simply tweeted a study, uh, done by an actual African American, I think, sociologist at Princeton, Omar Wasow. Um, and Wasow'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, uh, anti-Black, it w- 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.

   29. LFLex Fridman48:00

       Can I, uh, just on a small tangent there, uh, in that situation, because it happens time and time again, you highlight in your current work, but also in The Coddling of the 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.

   30. JHJonathan Haidt48:21

       So let's... It, yeah, it's all of them.
6. 51:42 – 1:08:13

   Elon Musk and Twitter

   1. LFLex Fridman51:43

      um, what's the importance of the role of Mr. Elon Musk in this? So, um, 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, on the influence, the positive and the negative possible consequences of this particular action?

   2. JHJonathan Haidt52:07

      So, you know, if he is gonna succeed in, if he's gonna be a, 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.

   3. LFLex Fridman52:16

      [laughs]

   4. JHJonathan Haidt52:17

      Um, so I have an overall positive view of him.

   5. LFLex Fridman52:19

      Yeah.

   6. JHJonathan Haidt52:19

      Now, where I'm concerned and where I'm critical is we're in the middle of a raging culture war, and this culture war is making our institutions stupid. It's making them fail. Um, this culture war I think could destroy our country. And by destroy, I mean we could descend into constant constitutional crises, a lot more violence. You know, not that we're gonna disappear, 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 Republican and the Democrats are the bad party, um, and, you know, as an individual citizen, he's entitled to his opinion, of course. But as an influential citizen, he should at least be thoughtful. Uh, and more importantly, companies n- need, companies need and I think would benefit from a Geneva Convention for the culture war in which... 'Cause they're all being, they're all being damaged by the culture war coming into the companies.

   7. LFLex Fridman53:22

      Mm-hmm.

   8. JHJonathan Haidt53:22

      What we need to get to, I hope, is a place where, um, companies do, they have, uh, 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.

   9. LFLex Fridman53:39

      Well, if I can read the exact tweet, 'cause part of the tweet I like. He said, "In the past, I voted Democrat because they were mostly the kind- the kindness party."

   10. JHJonathan Haidt53:50

       Mm-hmm.

   11. LFLex Fridman53:50

       "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 unfold." Okay. Uh, s-

   12. JHJonathan Haidt54:04

       Yeah, what do, what do you make of that? Like, what do you think he was thinking, that he came out so blatantly as a partisan?

   13. LFLex Fridman54:10

       Be- because he's probably communicating with the board, with the people inside Twitter, and he's clearly seeing 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-

   14. JHJonathan Haidt54:26

       Donald Trump, yeah

   15. LFLex Fridman54:26

       ... onto the platform a- 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, uh, in terms of- The left.

   16. JHJonathan Haidt54:42

       Mm-hmm.

   17. LFLex Fridman54:42

       Um, and in fact, w- from what I see, it seems like, um, the current operation of Twitter is, uh, the, the f- the, 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. [laughs]

   18. JHJonathan Haidt55:02

       Yeah.

   19. LFLex Fridman55:02

       And, and but, and then, but it's, it's, um, that's the source of the drama, and then the left gets very mad at, at the right-

   20. JHJonathan Haidt55:09

       Mm-hmm

   21. LFLex Fridman55:10

       ... that points out the ridiculousness, and there's this vicious kind of cycle.

   22. JHJonathan Haidt55:12

       Yeah, exactly. That's the polarization cycle. That's what, that's what we're in.

   23. LFLex Fridman55:15

       There's something that happened here that's, there's a shift where there's a decline, I would say, in both parties towards being shitty. [laughs]

   24. JHJonathan Haidt55:22

       Yeah. Okay, but look, whatever thing with the parties, that's not the issue.

   25. LFLex Fridman55:26

       Yeah.

   26. JHJonathan Haidt55:26

       The issue is, should the most important CEO in America, the CEO of some of our biggest and most important companies-

   27. LFLex Fridman55:32

       Exactly.

   28. JHJonathan Haidt55:32

       So let's, yeah, so let's imagine, let's imagine five years from now, like, two different worlds. In one world, the h- the, 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."

   29. LFLex Fridman55:46

       Yeah.

   30. JHJonathan Haidt55:47

       That's one world where everybody decla- everybody puts up a thing in their window. Everybody... It's, it's culture war everywhere, all the time, 24 hours a day. You, 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."
7. 1:08:13 – 1:14:12

   Anonymity on social media

   1. LFLex Fridman1:08:13

      And so there's been a lot of discussions about this, and we'll, I'll ask you some questions about this too. But [sighs] there is, the tension there is the power of a troll to ruin the party. [laughs]

   2. JHJonathan Haidt1:08:27

      Yeah, that's right.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:08:29

      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-

   4. JHJonathan Haidt1:08:41

      Mm-hmm

   5. LFLex Fridman1:08:41

      ... lots of disagreement, debate, all that kind of stuff, but fun. No, like, annoying person screaming, just not disagreeing, but just, like, spilling, like, the, the drinks all over the place. Um, yeah, all that kind of stuff. So, um, see, y- you're saying it's a step in the right direction to at least verify the humanness-

   6. JHJonathan Haidt1:09:04

      Mm-hmm

   7. LFLex Fridman1:09:05

      ... o- o- of, of a person while maintaining anonymity. But the, so that's one step, but the further step that's maybe doesn't go all the way because you can still figure out ways to create multiple accounts, and you can, you can-

   8. JHJonathan Haidt1:09:19

      But it's a lot harder. So actually there's, 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, uh, with Chris Bail, and then you go to section 11, Proposals for Improving Social Media-

   9. LFLex Fridman1:09:35

      Mm-hmm

   10. JHJonathan Haidt1:09:35

       ... um, so we're collecting there now, uh, uh, some of the ideas for how to do user authentication. Uh, and so one is World Coin. Uh, there's one, human-id.org. Um, this is a new organization created by, um, an NYU Stern student who just came into my office last week, uh, working with some other people. And what they do here is they have a method of identity verification, um, that, uh, is keyed to your phone. So you do have to have a phone number. Um, and of course you can buy seven different phone numbers if you want, but it's gonna be about $20 or $30 a month, so nobody's gonna buy 1,000 phones. Um, so yeah, you know, you can, uh, um, you don't have just one unique ID, but, uh, most people do, and nobody has 1,000. So just, there are just things like this that would make an enormous difference. So here's the way that I think about it. Um, 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.

   11. LFLex Fridman1:10:34

       Mm-hmm.

   12. JHJonathan Haidt1:10:34

       Um, okay, so that's the public square we have now. Not for most people, but as you said, just, you know, one troll can ruin it for everybody. If there's 1,000 of us in the public square and 10 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, um, is making our public square much worse. It's making our democracy much weaker, much more divided, much... It's, it's, it's bringing us down. Imagine if we changed the incentives. Imagine if the incentive was to be constructive. Um, and so this is an idea that I've been kicking around. I talked about it with Reid Hoffman last week, and he, he seemed to think it's, it's a good idea. Um, and it is, uh, it would be very easy to, um, rather than 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 obscenity and explanation, exclamation points. Um, AI could easily code nastiness or just aggression, hostility. And imagine if every user is rated on a one to five scale for that, um, and the default when you open an account on Twitter or Facebook, the f- default is four. You will see everybody who's a four and below. But you won't even see the people who are fives, and they don't get to see you. So they can say what they want, free speech. We're not censoring them. They can say what they want. Um, but if, but now there's actually an incentive to not be an asshole, 'cause the more of an asshole you are, the more people block you out. So imagine our country goes in two directions. In 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?

   13. LFLex Fridman1:12:14

       Yeah. I, I, well, this is because I'm an AI person, and I've very much, ever since I talked to Jack about the health of conversation, been looking at a lot of the machine learning models involved, and I believe that the nastiness classification is a difficult problem automatically.

   14. JHJonathan Haidt1:12:29

       I'm sure it is.

   15. LFLex Fridman1:12:29

       So I personally believe in, uh, crowdsourced nastiness labeling, but in an objective way-

   16. JHJonathan Haidt1:12:38

       Oh, okay

   17. LFLex Fridman1:12:38

       ... where it doesn't become m- viral mob cancellation-

   18. JHJonathan Haidt1:12:42

       Yeah

   19. LFLex Fridman1:12:42

       ... type of dynamics. Um, but more sort of objectively, is, is this a shitty... I-

   20. JHJonathan Haidt1:12:47

       Yeah

   21. LFLex Fridman1:12:47

       ... almost out of context, w- with only local context.

   22. JHJonathan Haidt1:12:51

       Mm-hmm.

   23. LFLex Fridman1:12:52

       Is this a shitty thing to say at this moment? Because here's the thing-

   24. JHJonathan Haidt1:12:55

       Well, wait, but no, but-

   25. LFLex Fridman1:12:55

       Yeah

   26. JHJonathan Haidt1:12:56

       ... we don't care about individual posts.

   27. LFLex Fridman1:12:57

       No, no, but-

   28. JHJonathan Haidt1:12:58

       It, it, all that matters is the average

   29. LFLex Fridman1:12:59

       ... the posts make the man.

   30. JHJonathan Haidt1:13:01

       They do, but, but, but the point is, as long as we're talking about averages here-
8. 1:14:12 – 1:21:06

   Misinformation

   1. LFLex Fridman1:14:13

      What do you think about this word, misinformation, that maybe-

   2. JHJonathan Haidt1:14:15

      Mm-hmm

   3. LFLex Fridman1:14:15

      ... connects to our two discussions now? So one is a discussion of social media and, uh, 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-

   4. JHJonathan Haidt1:14:42

      Mm-hmm

   5. LFLex Fridman1:14:42

      ... instead overused.

   6. JHJonathan Haidt1:14:45

      Yes.

   7. LFLex Fridman1:14:45

      Um, 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.

   8. JHJonathan Haidt1:15:00

      Yeah. So I think there is, um, there is a meaning of disinformation that is very useful and, and helpful, um, which is when you have a concerted campaign by Russian agents, um, to plant a story and spread it, and they've been doing that since the '50s or '40s even. Um-

   9. LFLex Fridman1:15:17

      That's what this podcast actually is, but you know.

   10. JHJonathan Haidt1:15:19

       Is what? [laughs]

   11. LFLex Fridman1:15:21

       It's a disinformation campaign by the Russians.

   12. JHJonathan Haidt1:15:22

       Yeah, you seem really Soviet to me, buddy. Um-

   13. LFLex Fridman1:15:25

       [laughs] It- it's subtle. [laughs] It's between the lines. Okay, I'm sorry. Yeah.

   14. JHJonathan Haidt1:15:29

       But, uh, um, so I think when, to the extent that there are campaigns, uh, by either foreign agents, uh, or, you know, just by the Republican or Democratic parties, there have been examples of that, um, uh, there are all kinds of concerted campaigns that are intending to, uh, to confuse or spread lies. Uh, this is the, the Soviet, the fire hose of falsehood tactic. So it's very useful for that. All the companies need to have pretty large staffs, I think, to deal with that, 'cause that will always be there, and that, um, is really bad for our country. Uh, so Renee DiResta, um, is, is just brilliant on this. I've, reading her work has really frightened me and, and opened my eyes about how easy it is to manipulate, um, to, uh, manipulate and, and spread misinformation, and especially, um, 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, you know, swastikas in synagogues to make, uh, you know, and they'd spray anti-Black slurs. They'd 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, um, you know, if you're on the right, then you're very conscious of the times when, well, you know, the left wouldn't let us even say, "Could COVID be from a lab?" Like, they would, like, y- you literally would get shut down for saying that. And it turns out, well, we don't know if it's true, uh, but there's at least a real likelihood that it is, and it certainly is something that should've been talked about. So I tend to stay away from any such discussions. Um, and the reason is twofold. One is because they're almost entirely partisan. It, it generally is each side thinks the, what the other side is saying is fa- is, is, is, um, uh, misinformation or disinformation, and they can prove certain examples. Um, so we're not gonna get anywhere on that. We certainly are never gonna get 60 votes in the Senate for anything, um, 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. Uh, and then the nature of who, uh, who is on the platform, you know, 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 gonna do a little more or a little less content moderation.

   15. LFLex Fridman1:17:40

       The true harm to society on average and over the long term is in the dynamics, is, uh, is fundamentally in the dynamics of social media, not in the subtle choices of content moderation, AKA censorship.

   16. JHJonathan Haidt1:17:55

       Exactly. Exactly. There've always been conspiracy theories. You know, The Turner Diaries is this book, uh, written in 1978. It, uh, it, it, it introduced the, the, the replacement theory to a lot of people. Um, 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, um, uh, white supremacist group. And that, um, so you know, the, the, the killer in Buffalo was well-acquainted with these ideas. They've, you know, they've been around. But, you know, this guy's from a small town. I forget where he's from. Um, you know, uh, but he was r- And he, as he says in his manifesto, um, he was entirely influenced by things he found online. He was not influenced by anyone he met in person. Um, ideas spread and communities can form, these, like, micro-communities can form with bizarre and twisted beliefs. Um, and this is, again, back to the, The Atlantic article. I've got this amazing quote from Martin Gurri. Let me just find it. But he, uh, Martin Gurri, he was a former CIA analyst, wrote this brilliant book, uh, called The Revolt of the Public, or, um... And he has this, um, great quote. He says, he talks about how, um, w- in the age of mass media, we were all, in a sense, looking at a mirror looking back at us. And it might've been a distorted mirror, but we had stories in common. We had facts in common. Um, it was mass media. And he describes how the flood of information with the internet, uh, is like a tsunami washing over us. It has all kinds of effects. And he says, this is in a comment in an interview on 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 yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another." And so, you know, we now see clearly there's the, there are, this little bubble of, of just bizarre, you know, nastiness. In which, you know, the killer in Christchurch, and the killer in Norway, and now in Buffalo, you know, they're all put into a community, and posts flow up within that community by a certain dynamic. Um, so we, we can never stamp those words or ideas out. The question is not, th- can we stop them from existing? The question is, what platforms, what are, what are the platforms by which they spread all over the world and into every little town, so that the 1% of whatever, whatever percentage of young men are vulnerable to this, that they, they get exposed to it. It's in the dynamics and the architecture.

   17. LFLex Fridman1:20:27

       It's a fascinating point to think about, 'cause we often d- debate and think about the, the content moderation, the censorship, the ideas of free speech. But you're saying, yes, that's important to talk about, but much more important is fixing the dynamics.

   18. JHJonathan Haidt1:20:43

       Yeah. That's right, 'cause everyone thinks if there's regulation, it means 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."

   19. LFLex Fridman1:20:55

       Mm-hmm.

   20. JHJonathan Haidt1:20:55

       You know, how much or how little do we, you know. But I don't even wanna talk about that, 'cause all the action is in the dynamics. That's the point of my article. It's the architecture changed, and our social world went insane.

   21. LFLex Fridman1:21:05

       So

9. 1:21:06 – 1:23:50

   Social media benefits

   1. LFLex Fridman1:21:06

      can you try to steel 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-

   2. JHJonathan Haidt1:21:18

      Mm-hmm

   3. LFLex Fridman1:21:18

      ... as Mark said, for teenagers, teenage girls.

   4. JHJonathan Haidt1:21:23

      Mm-hmm.

   5. LFLex Fridman1:21:23

      And for our democracy, yes, there's a lot of negative things, but that's s- slices of data. If you look at the whole, which is difficult to measure-

   6. JHJonathan Haidt1:21:32

      Mm-hmm

   7. LFLex Fridman1:21:33

      ... it's actually good for society, and it, to the degree that it's not good, it's getting better and better. Is it possible to steel man that point?

   8. JHJonathan Haidt1:21:40

      Yeah. Um, it's, it's hard, but I should be able to do it. Um, I n-

   9. LFLex Fridman1:21:44

      [laughs]

   10. JHJonathan Haidt1:21:44

       I need to put my money where my mouth is, and that's a good question. So on the mental health front, um, you know, the argument is usually, what the, the, what they say is, "Well, you know, for communities that are cut off, especially LGBTQ kids, they can find each other." Um, so it's, it's, it, it connects kids, especially kids who wouldn't find connection otherwise. Um, it exposes you to a range of ideas and content. Um, and it's fun. Um-

   11. LFLex Fridman1:22:15

       Is there, in the studies you looked at, is there inklings of, of data that's maybe early, uh, data that shows that there is positive effects in terms of self-report data, or how would you measure behavioral positive? Uh-

   12. JHJonathan Haidt1:22:28

       Yeah. Yeah

   13. LFLex Fridman1:22:28

       ... it's difficult.

   14. JHJonathan Haidt1:22:29

       Right. So, um, so if you look at how do you feel when you're on the platform-

   15. LFLex Fridman1:22:34

       Yeah

   16. JHJonathan Haidt1:22:34

       ... you get a mix of positive and negative. Uh, 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. Um, 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. Um, but some kids, uh, are f- are feeling inferior, uh, uh, cut off, um, uh, bullied. So, um, if we're saying, what's 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. Um, but what I'm trying to... Okay, so is that enough steel manning? Can I, uh-

   17. LFLex Fridman1:23:13

       Yeah, it's pretty, [laughs] that's pretty good. [laughs]

   18. JHJonathan Haidt1:23:15

       Okay.

   19. LFLex Fridman1:23:15

       You held your breath. [laughs]

   20. JHJonathan Haidt1:23:16

       [laughs] Yeah. Um, 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. Um, but am I glad that heroin came into my life? Am 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, you know, sitting on the bench shooting up during recess. So, um, 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

10. 1:23:50 – 1:30:22

    Political division on social media

    1. JHJonathan Haidt1:23:50

       changed childhood?"

    2. LFLex Fridman1:23:50

       Can you try to do the same for democracy?

    3. JHJonathan Haidt1:23:52

       Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, so we can go back to, uh, you know, what, what Mark said in 2012, um, when he was taking Facebook public. And, you know, 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. Um, dictators are pulled down. Now people say, you know, Facebook took them down. I mean, of course it was the citizens, the people themselves took down dictators, aided by Facebook and Twitter and tel- uh, I don't know if it was tel- uh, what, or texting. There were some other platforms they used. So th- the argument that Mark makes, um, in this letter to, uh, potential shareholders, investors, um, is, you know, we're at a turning point in history, uh, and, um, you know, w- social media is rewiring. We, 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, of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union, and then the internet comes in, and, you know, 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, um, all the way through 2011, um, 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 in a lot of areas. Martin Gurri talks about this. Um, so there certainly was a case to be made that, uh, Facebook in particular, but all these platforms, these were God's gift to 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 gonna be good for democracy. And then we can see what happened in the years after. Now, first of all, um, so in, uh, in Mark's response to you. So here, let me read from what he said when you interviewed him. He says, uh, "I think it's worth grounding this conversation in 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. Uh, but he asserts that, um, 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 Bail, you see there's seven different questions that can be addressed. And on one of them, which is, um, filter bubbles, the evidence is very mixed, and he 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.

    4. LFLex Fridman1:26:38

       He also draws a line between the United States versus the rest of the world.

    5. JHJonathan Haidt1:26:41

       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, uh, Matt, Matthew, uh, Genskow, um, uh, a- and a few other researchers. A very important article. We've got it in the, uh, in the political dysfunction, um, database.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:27:01

       And we should say that in this study there's, um, like I started 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: Does social media create echo chamber? These are fascinating, really important questions. Question three is: Does social media amplify posts that are more emotional, inflammatory, or false? Question four is: Does social media increase the probability of violence? Question five is: Does social media enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the US and other democracies? Question six: Does social media decrease trust? Seven is: Does social media strengthen populist-

    7. JHJonathan Haidt1:27:43

       Mm-hmm

    8. LFLex Fridman1:27:43

       ... movements? And then there's other, um, sections, as you mentioned.

    9. JHJonathan Haidt1:27:47

       Yeah. That's right. But if you, once you, once you operationalize it as seven different questions, um, you know, like, 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, uh, by Boxell, Genskow, and Shapiro, 2021, um, 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's going up a lot in the US but not in most other countries, well, maybe Facebook isn't responsible."

    10. LFLex Fridman1:28:28

        Hmm.

    11. JHJonathan Haidt1:28:28

        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 just, I've been emailing with the authors of, of this study, and they say there's not really enough data to do it statistically reliably 'cause there's only a few observations after 2012. But if you look at the graphs in their study, and they actually do provide, as they pointed out to me, they do provide a statistical test if you break the data at the year 2000. So actually, uh, polarization is going up pretty widely, um, if you just look after 2000, which is when the internet would be influential. Um, and if you look just after 2012, you have to just do it by eye. But if you do it, uh, 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. Uh, but my point is, Mark asserts, he points to one study, and he points to this over and over again. I have had two conversations with him. He pointed to this study both times. Um, um, he asserts that this study shows that polarization is up some places, down other places. It, there's no association.

    12. LFLex Fridman1:29:41

        Mm-hmm.

    13. JHJonathan Haidt1:29:41

        Um, but actually, uh, 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, it was rising in the '90s. But if you look around the world, um, by some measures it begins to drop in the late 2000s, around 20, 2007, 2008. Uh, by others, uh, it's in the early to mid, uh, 2010s. The point is, there is a, by many measures, there's a drop in the quality and the number of democracies on this planet that began in the 2010s. And so, um, yes, Mark can point to one study. But if you look in 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.

11. 1:30:22 – 1:36:14

    Future of social media

    1. LFLex Fridman1:30:22

       So you've provided, uh, um, the problem, several proposals for solutions. Do you think Mark, do you think Elon or whoever is at the head of Twitter, uh, would be able to implement these changes, or does there need to be a competitor social network to stump, uh, step up? What do you-

    2. JHJonathan Haidt1:30:40

       Yeah

    3. LFLex Fridman1:30:40

       If you were to predict the future, uh, now this is you giving sort of financial advice to me. No.

    4. JHJonathan Haidt1:30:46

       No, that, that I can't do.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:30:47

       If you're able to... Definitely not financial advice.

    6. JHJonathan Haidt1:30:48

       I, I can give you advice. Do the opposite of whatever I've done.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:30:50

       Okay, excellent. [laughs] But what do you think, uh, when, when, when we talk again in 10 years, uh, what do you think we'd be looking at if it's a better world?

    8. JHJonathan Haidt1:31:01

       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. It was set to 13 in COPPA in, like, 1997 or '96 or whatever that, or '98, whenever it was. Uh, 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, um... Actually, so look, at Instagram the age is 13, but they don't enforce it. And, 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 years when they, they were talking about rolling out Facebook for kids, 'cause 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-

    9. LFLex Fridman1:31:52

       So regulation-

    10. JHJonathan Haidt1:31:53

        Yes

    11. LFLex Fridman1:31:53

        ... is dealing with it.

    12. JHJonathan Haidt1:31:53

        Exactly. When you have a social dilemma, you know, like an, 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 regulation, so I think we have to raise the age. Um, the UK Parliament is way ahead of us. I think they're actually functional. The US Congress is not functional. Um, so the Parliament is, uh, implementing the, uh, 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, uh, be transparent and share what they're doing. There are some good bills out there. So I think that if the companies and the, and the users, if we're all stuck in a social dilemma, um, in which the incentives to the, uh, the incentives against doing the right thing are strong, we do need, 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, uh, which is from Senators Coons, Portman, and Klobuchar. This would force the platforms to just share information about what they're doing. Like, we can't even study what's happening without the information. So that I think is just common sense. Um, Senator Michael Bennet i-introduced the, uh, the Digital Platforms Commission Act of 2022, um, which would create a body tasked with actually regulating and, 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, um, severely damaging our, our political life. Um, so I think there's a lot of-- Oh, and then the, the, um, uh, the state of California is actually currently considering a version of the UK's, um, uh, 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 ten or eleven o'clock at night. Just things like that to make, uh, make, make platforms just less damaging. Uh, 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 wanna have different versions in different states or countries.

    13. LFLex Fridman1:34:08

        Yes.

    14. JHJonathan Haidt1:34:08

        So I think there actually is some hope, even if the US Congress is, is dysfunctional.

    15. LFLex Fridman1:34:12

        So there is, uh, 'cause I've been interacting with certain regulation that's hitting, uh, designed to hit Amazon, but it's hitting YouTube. YouTube folks have been talking to me, which is recommender systems. The algorithm has to be-

    16. JHJonathan Haidt1:34:24

        Mm-hmm

    17. LFLex Fridman1:34:24

        ... has to be public, I think, versus pri-private, which completely breaks. It's, uh, it's way too clumsy a regulation that where the unintended consequences break recommender systems, not for Amazon-

    18. JHJonathan Haidt1:34:37

        Yeah

    19. LFLex Fridman1:34:38

        ... but for other, um, for other platforms. That's just to say that government can sometimes be clumsy with the regulation.

    20. JHJonathan Haidt1:34:45

        Usually is. Yes.

    21. LFLex Fridman1:34:46

        And so my preference is the threat of regulation, uh, in a friendly way encourages-

    22. JHJonathan Haidt1:34:55

        Good behavior

    23. LFLex Fridman1:34:55

        ... you really shouldn't need it. You really shouldn't need it. M-my preference is great leaders lead the way in doing the right thing, and I actually, honestly, this, to our earlier kind of maybe my naive disagreement, that I think it's good business to do the right thing in the, in these spaces. So creating a product-

    24. JHJonathan Haidt1:35:13

        Sometimes it is. Sometimes it, it, sometimes it loses you most of your users.

    25. LFLex Fridman1:35:18

        Well, I think it's important because I've been thinking a lot about World War III recently. [laughs]

    26. JHJonathan Haidt1:35:23

        Yeah.

    27. LFLex Fridman1:35:23

        And, um, I-

    28. JHJonathan Haidt1:35:24

        Yeah

    29. LFLex Fridman1:35:24

        ... it's, it might be silly to say, but I think social media has a role in either creating World War III 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, over small-scale political issues, but literally, um, the survival of human civilization. So [laughs] there's a lot at stake here.

    30. JHJonathan Haidt1:36:04

        Yeah. I certainly agree with that. I would just say that I'm less concerned about World War III than I am about Civil War II. I think that's a more likely prospect.
12. 1:36:14 – 1:41:56

    Advice for young people

    1. LFLex Fridman1:36:14

       Can I ask for your wise, sage advice to young people? So advice number one is put down the phone, uh, don't use Instagram and, and social media. But, uh, to young people in high school and college, how to have a career or how to have a life they can be proud of.

    2. JHJonathan Haidt1:36:32

       Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'd be happy to, 'cause I, I teach a course at NYU, um, in the business school, uh, 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, uh, as a human being. But it, 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? Um, and the answer, um, to all three, uh, is, it's a number of things, but it's, you have to see yourself as this, like, 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 antifragile, and you're not gonna get strong unless you actually have setbacks and criticisms and, and fights. Um, so that's how you get stronger. Um, 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, uh, people that disagree with you. Uh, and this is why I co-founded Heterodox Academy, because we believe that, that, you know, faculty need to be in communities that have political diversity and viewpoint diversity, but so do students. Um, and it turns out students want this. The surveys show very clearly Gen Z has not turned against, um, 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, you know, if they say something wrong. So anyway, the point is, um, you're antifragile, 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. Um, put yourself in the other person's shoes. What's interesting to them? What do they want? Um, 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. Um, so there, there's a lot that you can do. I mean, I could say, you know, go read The Coddling of the American Mind.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:39:31

       Yes.

    4. JHJonathan Haidt1:39:31

       Um, I could say go read Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Um, but take charge of your life and your development, 'cause if you don't do it, then, uh, the, the older, older protective generation and your phone are gonna take charge of you.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:39:47

       So on antifragility and coddling the American mind, if I may read just a few lines from Chief Justice John Roberts-

    6. JHJonathan Haidt1:39:55

       Oh, yes. I love that guy

    7. LFLex Fridman1:39:55

       ... which I find 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 or 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 graduation [laughs] .

    8. JHJonathan Haidt1:41:15

       Yes, for his son's, his son's middle school graduation.

    9. LFLex Fridman1:41:17

       [laughs]

    10. JHJonathan Haidt1:41:18

        Yeah. That, that's what I was trying to say, only that's much more beautiful.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:41:21

        Yeah. And, uh, I think your work is really important, and it is beautiful, and, uh, it's bold and fearless, and it's a huge honor that you would sit with me. I'm a big fan. Thank you for spending your valuable time with me today, Jonathan. Thank you so much.

    12. JHJonathan Haidt1:41:33

        Thanks so much, Lex. What a pleasure.

    13. LFLex Fridman1:41:35

        Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jonathan Haidt. 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.

Episode duration: 1:42:05