The Fracturing Of The Human Mind with Jonathan Haidt and Guests

[Music] welcome to another episode of conversations with coleman if you're hearing this then you're on the public feed which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements you can get access to the subscriber feed by going to colemanhughes.org and becoming a supporter this means you'll have access to episodes a week early you'll never hear ads and you'll get access to bonus q a episodes you can also support me by liking and subscribing on youtube and sharing the show with friends and family as always thank you so much for your support this episode is a recording of a live event that i did with jonathan height greg lukianov and ricky schlot jonathan height is a professor at the nyu stern school of business he's also the co-founder of heterodox academy which i once wrote a blog post for back when i was probably 21 years old and he's the author of many books including the happiness hypothesis the righteous mind and the coddling of the american mind with his co-author gregory lukianov greg is the president of fire which is the foundation for individual rights in education and probably the preeminent defender of free speech on college campuses he's also the producer of several documentaries about free speech and he's a trained lawyer ricky schlott is a columnist for the new york post a fellow at fire a contributor at reason magazine and the host of the lost debate podcast we all discuss what has changed since john and greg published the coddling of the american mind back in 2018 we talk about the effect of social media on political polarization and mental health we discussed john's recent viral atlantic essay called why the past 10 years of american life have been uniquely stupid and lots of other related topics unfortunately because of the constraints of the live event this is a shorter podcast than usual but i'm getting john back on the podcast very soon to have a full-length discussion about all this stuff so without further ado john height greg lucianoff and ricky schlott all right thank you guys so much for coming i'm really excited to talk to the three of you and i won't introduce you again since you were already introduced so let's just get right to it so it's been four years since the coddling of the american mind was published almost four years and my question and i really don't have an answer to this i'm curious what what both of you think and then we'll get to ricky in a moment have the problems you described in that book gotten worse better or stayed the same in the past four years okay well i'll i'll start um the the the progression has been very similar since 2015 when when greg came to me in 20 in may of 2015 uh 2014. came to may of 2014 said john this weird stuff is happening we met actually at jerry orstrom's apartment and this weird stuff is happening on campus and each told me his idea and i thought it was brilliant because i just began to see it at nyu as well students acting as though words and speakers and ideas are dangerous violent even and it was beyond our comprehension we couldn't understand it but greg had this diagnosis um anyway so we wrote up the article the colleague of the american mind and people said oh come on you're cherry-picking this is just a few examples from a few colleges this isn't anything real so that's august of 2015. five months later four months later at halloween boom everything blows up but people still say well okay okay so it's not cherry picking but it's just college and you know when they got to the real like they can't do this at goldman sachs they can't do this at google so you know it's just college college kids said well okay we'll we'll see and then boom as soon you know as they begin to graduate as as these trends go national and actually the exact same stuff has happened at the same time in canada and the uk as well so so it's always been this thing of we've been sort of ahead of the curve because because gen z were the canaries in the coal mine what i've been writing about is how social media has transformed social relations in ways that make it toxic to institutions and young people in particular it's dissolving everything but it first hit gen z and so the problems uh were first found on campus but they've been they're spreading out and out and out so when greg and i wrote a book greg came to me and said we've got to turn this into a book this problem just getting worse and worse when we wrote the book we were going to have a chapter on this problem in the corporate world but at the time it was just anecdotes this is 2017 like we're beginning to hear about this and the google memo and all kinds of stuff but we don't have data on it it's just anecdotes so we have to lock down the book it comes out in september of 2018 and then right then it's like boom everywhere in the corporate world so the answer is it's gotten worse in every dimension in every place we look and internationally yeah yeah the um what i've seen since 2020 um and i there were previous you know bad spots for freedom of speech on campus in in my experience um 2007 was really bad but that was all administrator driven 2015 was concerning because there was you know 100 campuses across the country where that included activists demanding that uh that student newspapers be shut down of course there was the kristakis event there was also dean spellman um you know being forced out like very uh you know kind of shocking incidents um and 2017 we saw violence for the first time but i have never seen anything as bad as as things got in 2020 um we went from you know a busier fire is a thousand case submissions we got 1500 during a time when 80 of campuses were closed we started actually tracking the number of professors getting in trouble um we're now almost at 600 professors uh targeted by usually students at this point to be fired or punished in some way of those 600 um and the 600 is since 2015 about 400 of those are just since 2020 about i'd say about three quarters of those the professor gets punished in some way about one-fifth of the time the professor gets fired that includes 30 tenured professors fired for what they said or what the or their research which up until 10 years ago as from my lawyer standpoint that was impossible and it's happening pretty regularly now and so it's amazing and and of course you have people throw up these arguments this isn't really happening cancel culture isn't real and they make arguments like oh but there's 6 000 schools this is a drop in the bucket and it's like no that there are about 600 schools that 80 percent of four-year students students attend but when you look at like my alma mater stanford um 20 you know with 20 attempts to get professors fired and that's not even counting students um so it's really uh it's it it's been the most disheartening two and a half years of my career okay let's get ricky in on this so before the podcast started we were talking about the fact that you read coddling of the american mind was it in 2015 when you had just enrolled it was in 2018 it was my the fall of my freshman year at nyu and i had just gotten to campus and in my orientation they they said here's your nyu id card on the back here's the the infirmary the emergency hotline and here's the bias report hotline and all of a sudden speakers are getting shouted down on campus i started hiding my thomas soul books and my dresser just in case anyone saw them and so i was i was in the city alone i was very concerned by what i was seeing socially and i felt very isolated and then i found this book and i was like wow i'm recognizing all the symptoms here and here are two experts that are really finding the root causes and i was just so blown away and so comforted by by this explanation and unfortunately as they're saying i've seen everything get worse and worse and worse but um they were obviously just so ahead of the curve in recognizing these trends so when i was at columbia my friend had a picture of reagan on his wall and if you went out on a date and the date went well and a girl wanted to come back he would turn the picture over [Laughter] and then if she wanted to go on a second date he would consider turning it up and by a third date he would say okay there's actually something here let's see how it goes no that's actually not a bad strategy for employment either so one question i have is between 2016 and 2020 it was very easy for people to dismiss the problems you're describing by saying okay you know all that sounds annoying and and dumb but we have a literal you know white supremacist fascist etc or or just authoritarian or dangerous lunatic in the white house isn't that the much bigger threat and that i think that made it difficult for people who care about this issue of free speech and and viewpoint diversity on campus to sort of fight for that issue because there was always this sort of clap back i'm curious to to what extent do you think trump exacerbated this problem or does it just is it totally independent of trump oh no i i think there are two accelerants so one of the things we talk about we we talk about six causal threads of why we think um the problems we're seeing on campus and with generation z happened um and social media in some ways it did create new phenomena but it also accelerated a lot of existing ones like polarization went much faster like a lot of these existing uh fissures it got a lot worse a lot quicker there were but there were two accelerants and the election of trump i mean it just it sped a lot of that polarization up a lot of the um a lot of the sort of paranoia got worse so i i do think that that the intensity of that of that administration really really made for a much crazier situation i would add that the same trends were happening in canada and the uk so trump was not necessary but trump did mask a lot of what was going on he made things a lot worse but he also masked a lot of what was going on as did kovid so for example so i was running head i found i co-founded head rocks academy in 2015 it was just a faculty initiative of social scientists studying what are the effects when we lose diversity and everyone's on the same team and my job was kind of fun until trump was elected all of a sudden all of a sudden i was so far out on thin ice because you know the goal was to convince you know center left or just or people are true liberals that you know what we actually need you know free speech viewpoint diversity and suddenly whatever i did it was platforming or facilitating fascists right-wingers trump racists so it became really scary and we had people quit right away people were afraid to be associated with us because in a you know i spent much my career studying tribalism and the us against them mindset we evolved for intergroup conflict we evolved for war and as soon as the war is declared uh you know there can be no nuance and there's beautiful writings from you know the ancient greeks about this um george orwell i just came across something from george orwell who says you know if you if you write about in the 30s you know if you write about the problems of british slums suddenly you're giving you know you're giving fuel to the nazis who is before the war started um and so you know so what are you to do and so it was so trump had that effect he made it very difficult for anyone on the left to actually take these problems seriously which i believe are leading to just uh you know fatal flaws or i'd say maybe lots of pyrrhic victories for the left that they're now suffering from can i ask you a question sure so ricky in terms of things that you saw among other other students that we we talked about in the book like what what what rang true in addition to what you've already said for people for yourself or other people you knew well i think cancel culture certainly i saw explode um in 2016 around the election when i was in high school and my boarding school it was every all the the eruption of the safe spaces the cancel culture the the trigger warnings you can't do so you can't hear oh yeah okay yeah um i would say in 2016 that was when i first saw the seeds of everything and then certainly i also um the social media chapter resonated with me enormously because i watched so many of my friends struggle with mental health and i could anecdotally um pretty much correlate social media use or certainly instagram use with how detrimental that seemed to be to them and the amount of self-harm that i saw among my friends and peers was staggering it was shocking and certainly i think that you guys were at the forefront of pointing out this is what's actually behind this trend and not a lot of people understood that yet and i think that that has just continued to ring true since yeah i mean so to prepare for this i remember this one thing that happened in my friend group in 2015 that i thought perfectly illustrated the problem that we're talking about it was 2015 and i was at that point mainly mainly a jazz musician tapped into the subculture of new york city jazz musicians my age and a friend of mine posted something on facebook posted a joke a little silly joke about how um you know ladies like a tenor saxophone player more than an alto saxophone player for for whatever uh it's just a silly little joke that showed yeah and it was like it was like a stick figure of an alto player with one girlfriend and a stick figure of a tenor player with like three girlfriends it was just like something silly and what followed was like a week-long armageddon end of the world style uh uh argument involving dozens and dozens of people posting dozens of times a day over whether or not this particular post was sexist and then and then it got into tangential issues is there sexism in the jazz community is there and it was like this you know i thought to myself five years before this there was no venue on which such a bitter bitter argument could take place and it bled over into the real world so now you see someone at the gig who you were on opposite sides of this facebook post about and you're thinking oh god she hates me dude do i hate her you know like and that to me was was in a microcosm sort of what's happened on social media with political issues yeah so i'd like to add on to because social media is it's more than an accelerant it doesn't just make trends go faster it transformed the nature of human relationships because it allowed everybody to attack everybody at any point and get points for it and so two things that i've learned just since i i finished writing this atlantic article like a month ago or five weeks ago two things i've learned just since then one somebody sent me something about the transformative role of tumblr i never thought about tumblr but apparently young women it was young women on the left were all on tumblr and so this particular ideology of safe spaces and trigger warnings all that really was nurtured on tumblr i can actually speak to that firsthand a little bit just not saying so when i was in in high school i i got a tumblr when i was 15 which which would have been maybe 2011 because a girl i liked was on tumblr okay so i got a tumbler so that i could be a part of her conversation with her and her friends and and what it i wasn't actually interested in it i i was interested in her but what i what i learned as an outsider that ended up spending a lot of time on there is that there was this whole culture of talking about mental health intersectional politics oppression and power the whole the whole nine that was billed as if it were were sort of healthy and and sort of telling you how to deal with mental health when in reality it was glorifying things like cutting and and all other sorts of behaviors where it was like you had more status on tumblr in so far as you could more credibly claim to be a cut a cut someone who cut themselves and dealt with depression and all these yeah were you i was like 12 i think when i was on tumblr because i wanted to reblog pretty pink pictures like that was just what was happening in my mind at the time but to your point it's absolutely filled with this self-harm content this depressive content and unfortunately in recent years i think we've seen a lot of that move on to tick tock now and there's self-diagnosis videos there's like this new trend of apparently girls getting tourette's like ticks just from the exposure and so that same culture that kind of incubated on tumblr is now moved into tiktok and is popping up in people's algorithms in an even more powerful way than it was back then yeah yeah oh sure okay so um so ever since so so uh you know i had weird stuff began happening at nyu for me in january of 2014 and then greg comes to talk to me uh and and you know when we write the article and then after it comes out i said everything blew up so i had a real feeling around then 2014 2014 to 2015 that something had changed in the fabric of space time like god had doubled the gravitational constant or something had just changed everywhere and i've been struggling to figure that out ever since then ever since 2014 at lunch with greg and the coddling was a piece of it we got some things wrong we thought college was causing it it wasn't it was making it worse but it wasn't causing it um so but that was our first attempt to work it out and i've made several other attempts and it's only after i reread the tower of babel story that i got the right metaphor at least a metaphor that really clicked and the in many of you everybody knows sort of what the tower you know it's about oh you know people build a tower and god knocks it over because they're too proud but the key line from the story that a lot of people forget is the line where god says let us go down and confound their language so that they will not understand one another and when i reread that a year or two ago i said oh my god that's it that's what's happened to us because i've been writing about tribalism i've been writing about the culture war since 2001 which is a you know binary left right like but no babel is about the fragmentation of everything it turns everybody against everybody and so a lot of our problems go back to you know cable tv and fox news and and various media outlets in the 90s that begins the fragmentation that can breed distrust and that can breed uh uh conspiracy theories but it doesn't turn us all against each other and it doesn't make us hate and fight everywhere all the time that's babel where we're all divided and so i was just trying to develop that metaphor and how in a sense we rebuilt the tower technology and then you know in the 90s you know the fall of the berlin wall and we can all be united and this is only the beginning of what we will do to quote the bible and and the peak year when we just about finished the tower rebuilding it this human accomplishment is 2011. when it's now clear it begins with the arab spring and it ends with occupy and this is the final triumph of democracy everyone has a voice what dictator can stand up to this this is also the year when google translate is now widely available on all phones so that literally the curse of babel the division of humans into multiple incoherent languages is ended in 2011. it's been downhill ever since that was the high point it's been downhill ever since with a sharp fall-off in 2014 so that's what the that's what the atlantic article is about and then i bring a lot of social psychology to explain why this is and merging with a lot of the technological history um uh to explain how it seemed like things were going so well and it really is almost a very literary situation we're living in like this story of triumph from the you know from 1989 to 2011 and then boom off a cliff and we're confused we don't know what the hell happened yeah i think about it kind of like all the world's a stage just the transformation of human dynamics when everybody is sort of playing to the cameras so to speak um when everybody has the ability to project out with what their reality is it turns into this uh non-stop reality show um that's and it's nasty and and um and unfortunately not brutish insured injured as uh as people can be when they actually forget about the inter and the interrelationship they care about that yeah all the world to seven billion stages the best way to learn anything is by doing it yourself learn interactively with brilliant fun hands-on lessons in math science and compsci interactive learning helps you learn six times more effectively than watching lecture videos brilliant has lots of great courses for all ability and knowledge levels so you'll always find something that interests you master all sorts of technical subjects with topics ranging from logic to pre-algebra to scientific thinking to data structures to cryptocurrency and much more instead of just memorizing 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brilliant.org cwc so one thread of this that i i'm very concerned about is the effect of instagram in particular maybe tick-tock to an extent [Music] on uh teenagers and tweens and in particular girls because of the ability to put these unrealistic filters on your face and your body and the constant feedback of putting your face and body out into the world and having the world judge you with a number of likes and the fact that it never turns out you know in america tick tock never turns off in china they have the the the i don't know what they call it wisdom to turn it off after a certain point so this is something i'm concerned about but there have also been studies that have found fairly small effect sizes when looking at the overall correlation so is this a case where there's a concentrated effect on a small subset of the population and how do you parse this research so let me start with the research and then i'd like to turn it over to ricky to talk about what's actually happening to the girls so many people have heard that the effect size of social media on mental health is small you might have heard it's no larger than that of eating potatoes or wearing eyeglasses because it comes from one study in 2019 that did a big big advanced statistical analysis on three large data sets and what they found was that the correlation between digital media use all screen time and one or two questions about mental health was equivalent to a correlation coefficient of about 0.03 which is trivial which is tiny but this is complete misunderstanding of the data because that was for digital media all screen time and in their own data um the effect for social media was more than twice as large and their own estimate was the lowest one of the lowest ever found they themselves in later studies find that well everybody else is finding it's more like a correlation of around 0.1 to 0.15 but that's for everybody all boy boys and girls and when you look at just girls it's higher so now we're up to 1.2 and that's about as high as public health effects get if you want to look at the effect of lead exposure on on adult iq it's around point one if you wanna look at smoking on cancer it's it's around that too so when you get a correlation of point two with some behavior and girl's mental health you would be completely insane to let your daughter do this and this same team that is the main debunking team they themselves published data two weeks ago finding that well when you look across the ages you know that we still think the effect is small but actually for girls 11 to 13 it's actually bigger so if you look at everybody in all devices it's small if you look at pre-pubescent girls girls going through puberty posting photos of themselves for strangers to rate and comment on there is no way to make this okay there is no way that this is not going to be devastating to an entire generation of girls that's the data talking what's the experience yeah absolutely i mean i think any woman in this room knows what it feels like to be a teenage girl and then to have this non-stop digital metric in your pocket that's always there it's like i feel like in the 90s it was the it was the magazine covers that are i unrealistic body images and they're always there and kids are scrolling through them as they're going to sleep and you know especially as a young woman who's developing and growing up and like developing a body to look at these like insanely altered and unrealistic images is hugely damaging and i've i personally i'm fortunate that i'm old enough that i was i think i was like 11 when i got onto instagram but that was before the days that was when it first came out and it was still dog photos and sunsets and what you're eating for lunch and then it got more and more sinister and i look at people just a few years younger than me who've been absolutely crippled by that and you know every every young woman is concerned with the social hierarchy and this is putting a direct numerical value on people it's it's hugely disturbing let me just add there's one there's an interesting new discovery that brings it back to a lot of our interest here with fire and heterodox academy and that is they're now two data sets that have looked at teenagers in which the teenagers say what their politics are whether you're on the right or the left and both have found it's girls on the left who they get depressed and anxious first in 2012 2013 before any other group and one study by pew uh it was the question was has a doctor or mental health professional told you that you have a mental disorder 56 of of gen z girls on the left say yes 56 no other group is some groups are half that but so something is going on and i think it's both the gender difference it's also girls are much more interconnected nick christopher's day old data shows this um emotions travel on networks of female friendships boys are more clueless and autistic they literally don't pick up each other's emotions but girls do and so girls don't just pick up each other's emotions they pick up each other's mental disorders they pick up each other's moods so girls are much more susceptible to contagion and girls on the left breathe they marinate in this victimhood culture at a time when the progress on on women's rights and women's practice is unbelievable the rights revolution was incredible and all of a sudden you get a subculture that won't believe that that thinks everything is oppression everything is terrible we'll be paid 50 you know we've paid 78 cents on the dollar they believe all these things and so i think part of what hit us on campus we didn't so great we had some suspicions about this but we didn't say it in the book because it was controversial we weren't sure dudes but now what and we're dudes too that's right yeah that's true that's true but the data that was hitting young women harder was just that's overwhelming so it's a huge sec there's an interest through interaction of age sex and politics and the group that is most hostile to free speech i'm afraid to say it but it is young women on the left when i when i give my you know talk on the book john and i have been doing this update we actually we tried to write it afterward for coddling the american mind and it ended up being 50 pages long um and it would have made the book you know more expensive and like and so we decided to break it up in chunks and we're introducing it on persuasion but how when i do the charts of how much worse suicide has gotten how much since even just since the book came out how much worse self-harm has gotten people being checked in for it but the one that i really like and i every time the slide comes up the spike in suicides for young women and young and also boys between the age of 10 and 14. yeah it's up more than 100 so one of the major themes of coddling that you said essentially prepared the grounds for all of these trends was that kids stopped playing outside uh sort of in the 90s more or less as opposed to you know my dad's generation would have just been way more would have had would have had to get social skills and learn to get around by themselves as a at a much earlier age than than mine and ricky ricky's generation so one question i have is if that's true what have you made of the effect of school closures because it would it would seem all of the stuff lenora skinesi is concerned about and that you've picked up on in your thesis it seems like school closures would make all of that worse in addition to do so have you connected those issues at all so it's great you asked that because we were here in the home of daniel shukman who came to talk to me um uh in like 2016 2017 about how the problem isn't just on campus it's kids coming into college already there's something wrong with them and we need to do something to to to prepare them for college and adulthood and i said well yes because they need to go out and play and we need to just get lenorous kenesis to be more effective and so daniel said okay let's do it and we we created we convinced her to to to uh to join us in creating let grow i introduced them okay okay yeah so um so uh so daniel is the chair of the board of let grow which advocates for advocates for letting kids out all mammals play we've covered we have a really fun chapter in our book all mammals play they need to play a lot they need to have a lot of experience varied experience they need to explore and get lost we have wayfinding skills navigational skills those can only get developed if you let kids out and navigate for themselves and so they need a lot of experience but what we do in america is we put them on experience blockers at around the age of nine or ten once you get a phone and a social media account that's it there's not going to be any other experience outside of that and so they're blocked from having normal experience their brain is not able to develop properly and then they come to college and we're surprised that they can't take somebody saying something that they disagree with um so so it so the reason why gen z's mental health fell off a cliff i think is a combination of play deprivation combined with too early exposure to social media what happened during kovid no more play of any kind because we're erroneously told that kids can't even touch each other because it'll be contagious that way even though it isn't so no more human contact oh but spend all day on your device so things were horrible before kovid and then we did exactly the two wrong things the two worst things we could have done even less play even more social media i held out a little bit of hope that the process of getting through something difficult and also being allowed potentially to be outside more often could actually lead to some some small set of younger people coming out feeling empowered but that that does not seem to be the overwhelming trend since we did these asinine things like um i mean my my kids stand public school um and we had a zoom meeting for two-year-olds like it was adorable um it was about as effective as a zoom meeting for two year olds and they kept on trying to to do the stuff it was all device focused and meanwhile you know like i was the parent who my kids are now four and six who went and like we need more free play time and i'm glad that that that you know lenore's wonderful project um uh legro is actually that's the one that actually there's been some real successes but unfortunately you know the opportunity of covid was squandered on screen time so i saw i remember several months ago i saw a story about kids that refused high school kids in new york that refused to go to class staged a kind of walkout over uh over a mask policy i think i think it was yeah and it it just struck me like i was trying to remember myself in high school and my friends in high school and what what it would mean for us to stage a walk out of class over a and sort of supposedly moralistic sentiment and i thought well obviously we'd be trolling to get out of class like we'd be like maybe one person would feel it genuinely and the rest of us would bandwagon that's not what it was and that's it's that it's very interesting to me that that wasn't what it was because i was thinking back to the snow day psychology we would all flush the toilet at 8 p.m the night before a snow storm begging to be so that's that's the frame through which the cynical perhaps frame through which i was looking at this but it seemed like it was actually a deeply felt you might call it a safetyist you talk about this term safetyism psychology amongst kids motives are mixed though and i do think that sometimes the fact that this is also a status game you know that people are playing against each other that it is a combination of deeply moralistic beliefs and by the way i actually get this extra benefit out of it but my son goes to brooklyn tech he he's a sophomore and this thing happened it was last fall i believe that this happened and my son says that there is a huge political and sex difference here so the so of course girls we know a lot of data shows that girls are more on the left than boys are at every age um girls are also more fearful than boys girls uh also have moralized mass mandates more than boys so once the mass pilot once new york city finally relaxed the mass policy for kids who are not at much danger from kovid my son said that he and a few other boys took off their masks no girls took off their masks and even now here we are months later the girls are not taking off their masks i believe that the mask walkout it was students especially girls who were horrified and angered and upset that they were gonna have to be exposed to people not wearing masks so it's not your generation's hope for a snow day it's a moralistic over-the-top fear of of other human beings faces and i would say that gen z and the kids in high school right now have been taught from a very young age to be politically active sometimes from like preschool level and you know my school was bussing kids to certain protests and they all had a similar ideological bent but you know there's good and there's bad and being activated at an early age but um well i think being being active in democracy and thinking that you're playing a role but unfortunately when it's coming from an institution and not from from yourself or from from your social circle then that is your important conclusion yeah absolutely you know sent out absolutely yeah i was an idiot at 16. oh and i was considered a pretty smart kid but i knew nothing yeah i knew nothing about the world yeah absolutely yeah and as a professor we're all supposed to cheer our students activism we're supposed to say it's so great that they're politically active they're activists but one thing i've come to see is that the is that the more you're in a community that's moralistic the more you suppress dissent and this is why free speech is so important the more you suppress dissent the more you are structurally stupid that's the key idea in my atlantic essay social media has not made us so stupid as individuals some people says it has but my focus is it's made our groups and institutions stupid because the people who get darted the people who get intimidated the people who get shot at are the moderates and the leaders yeah and so activist policies get pushed forward we all know they're bad we all know that you know the evidence shows they're going to backfire but nobody dare say anything so we keep doing so activists push institutions to change in ways that may be a pyrrhic victory but then when people go to vote they vote out the members of the san francisco school board well and also you end up with this epistemic crisis because like when you look at the things i'm seeing on campus um where you know professors are getting in trouble um for um writing an article that's cited by people they don't like um yeah you know and they withdraw like i've seen more insane stuff directly related um to scholarship and if you have an environment where you know the dorian abbott case was was you know a very typical case that we've seen i was actually kind of shocked at how much attention it got but this is a guy who wrote a criticism of sort of dei affirmative action hiring basically saying we should promote on merit and then he got disinvited from an unrelated speech on exoplanets at mit and i feel like not that anybody's really thinking this stuff through it's like so do you think the public is going to trust experts from this institution if they come to the uh position that seems to be okay on on campus basically like you have no reason to trust experts if you have a situation and this is how it makes it structurally stupid um just an additional way that essentially like why are you going to trust experts unless it's actually a statement against interest like the only time you're going to actually trust an expert is if they're saying something that's deeply unpopular on campus but those people have to come to fire to keep their jobs so i want to end this hopefully on a note of what we can do to fight these problems right so one line of solutions would say we have to change the algorithms that govern social media in ways that reduce their profit-seeking motives and perhaps make them in some ways less appealing to our demons and more appealing to our angels another line of solution would be we have to censor all the bad in misinformation uh and that seems to be a popular solution and and so i'm curious in your recent atlantic piece john you talk about how uh after the invention of the printing press obviously there was this you know bloody wars in which countless people died but we all look back on that as a temporary disruption that we had to get through in order to get to a new normal a new equilibrium that was actually probably better so what is that new equilibrium that we get to with social media and how do we get there so it certainly stands to reason that digital technology and social media could give us forms of democracy that are far better than we have now and that was the dream up to 2011. um taiwan is doing some very innovative things using using these technologies to bring more people in to give more people voice so it's possible but we don't know so there's a certain we're sort of stuck in a configuration now and there's a some other configuration that could theoretically be much better than we have now could we get there in 10 years or will it take us 100 we have no idea no idea um i don't think we're going to get there within 10 years um um and i think the the the trends that what we have to keep our eye on is the strength of our institutions which are fading quickly so i've been focused greg and i have been focused especially on universities now unfortunately because some other organizations that are supposed to be uh arguing for civil liberties have been uh falling down on the job we won't mention names necessarily but it seems like there is certainly a need for fire to expand its mission um but but there's only two pieces to this i've been totally focused on the structural piece it was structural change that got us into this so we need to change social media we need to harden our political institutions um that's what i've been focusing on but on my way up here i was listening to a podcast with one of our all of our heroes jonathan rauch who wrote the incredible but not yet so not just the you know the the um uh the the book in the 90s but um but but the constitution of knowledge one of the that will be one of the three best books of the to of this decade um and as this new podcast of of of him um with nelly foster i think it was and and he was saying you know sure we need structural changes but we have a lot of agency and there's a lot of room for courage because he says like they're not nine feet tall we are that most americans are sensible most americans whether on the right or the left believe in in liberty and and rights and decency um and we're all cowed into submission from fear and we've been cowering for a number of years but people begin to come out of the foxhole as trump proceeds into the distance as coveted recedes into the distance and as the george floyd protest received it to the distance i think there's a space opening up for people to say what the hell was that all about what happened to us and so i think this is the moment now when when people have to start standing up for each other for decency for truth um it's hard to do and don't try to do it on social media don't try to do it on twitter necessarily but talk to people privately um uh reach out to people not publicly and and you can actually win them over you can intervene on other people's behalf so listen to jonathan reggie you've got a great book to read the constitution of liberty constitution thank you customer of knowledge that's right a fantastic book so i'd love to hear especially from from ricky like are you know do you see signs of of your generation rejecting a lot of this stuff or are you the only one you know i think [Laughter] it's just i definitely exist in a microcosm in new york at nyu and then now colombia and so of course i think it's easy to see these voices and elite institutions just get amplified and and feel as though that is what my generation is in its entirety but i feel very hopeful in that my generation is twice as likely as the general electorate to be registered independents we're much more likely to say that our political party is not defining of who we are as a person and i think that's the result of you know the first election i remember in any advanced way is 2016. and so you know we all watched our thanksgiving tables get torn apart by politics and so why would we buy into this polarizing system and so i think that there is a plurality of young people who are quiet but who feel the way that i do and and hopefully we can continue to open up the culture to allow them to have a voice yeah oh and actually we haven't said this publicly but the heroes is good you know a place to do it um ricky schlott and i are planning to write a book we're originally um thinking about writing a follow-up to calling the american mind based on the fact that we actually have like someone who really had these experiences herself but we were watching the completely insane reaction to people um when the new york times wrote that cancel culture piece was perfectly reasonable it all the data points to this people are terrified of it like that like basically anything you can do to prove that it's there it's all there just people sort of wish it away so instead of writing you know taking years to write something ricky and i are uh are currently pitching a book that i would prefer to call the gaslighting of the american mind because i think that all of us know this is happening and i'm tired of and it's overwhelmingly elite saying this there's no problem to see here there's no cancel culture and really what's going on is strictly over in this other place so we're working on a book where we're trying to give some you know practical solutions and for and for once and for all say you really probably shouldn't be taking people's who say cancel culture isn't real you shouldn't really be taking them seriously anymore yeah well when you write that book you'll come back onto the podcast that'd be honored to discuss it amazing all right thank you so much for doing this if you appreciate the work i do the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website colemanhughes.org and to subscribe to my youtube channel so you'll never miss my new content as always thanks for your support [Music] you

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 60,463

Keywords: politics, news, politicalupdates, policies, currentaffairs, americanpolitics, thisisamerica, political, whiteamerica, society, highsociety, bluecollar, modernsociety, contemporary, culture music, blackmusic, blackhistory, hiphop, intellectualproperty, debate, intellect thoughts, opinion, voice, public intellectual, intellect, dialogue, discourse, interview, motivational, speech, answers, Tim Shenk, Coleman Hughes, arthouse, arttiktok, talkshow, talks

Id: dvUNcr2C41E

Length: 44min 26sec (2666 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2022